TFW Life Gives You Three Homes At Once

20 Jul, 2026

狡兔三窟 jiǎo tù sān kū ("a crafty hare has three burrows")

-- Feng Xuan, advisor to the prime minister of Qi¹

We have the rare experience of having 3 places to lay our head at the same time.

One is our prior apartment, where our lease finishes at end of month. Two is our new apartment, where our lease begins mid-month. And three is our relatives' home, where our kid gets to hang out with cousins over summer break.

Moving can be expensive.

I've experienced some corporate moves. One time, we used the same white-glove moving service that the Queen uses for her artwork. Bro put my cardboard document boxes inside bigger cardboard boxes, which protected them!

On our own dime, we've used moving companies that advertise on Google. The movers have been mostly Balkan Slavs: Montenegrins, Serbs, Croats. Strong, efficient, work well in teams. Maybe 1 in 3 speaks English, while the others kinda glare at you and try to smoke cigarettes whenever they can. The leader is always of indeterminate age, you can't tell if he's 25 or 35. And one dude is always weathered, with rope-like muscles, looks 55 but he's probably 42.

During the pandemic, we found very can-do Chinese movers on xiaohongshu. They have the same insurance, but cost about 1/3 because they don't spend much on advertising or capital².

Chinese movers tend to be smaller, ~10% shorter and more than 10kg lighter. They're just as capable of shifting things, often with better use of tools. They exude a stress-inducing time urgency that comes from growing up in East Asia rather than Eastern Europe. They communicate in long bursts of short, fast words, rather than with grunts spaced out over longer time frames.

One innovation I admire: with the more corporate moving companies, they demand you to provide an inventory of all your items, which provides a baseline for liability and pricing. With the Chinese companies, they ask you to upload photos/videos of your stuff. The movers use common sense and take everything you ask to fit in the truck. They charge almost entirely for time/labor, rather than volume/mass. Asking about furniture inventory upfront is about ensuring they send the right-sized vehicle, rather than a la carte pricing.

It's just less of a concern that a box might go missing. And an even bigger headache, culturally, if a piece of furniture gets nicked. Like, I know with an English-speaking rep I can get mostly compensated for damage. With a Chinese agent, I probably expect half that amount, and only after a lot of unpleasant head-wagging and hand-wringing. IDK YMMV.

Because people are risk-averse, the market charges more than the expected value to avoid individual bad outcomes. Almost all entities that can self-insure, seek to do it.

If you move 10 times in your life, you almost certainly suffer an uncomfortable loss at least once, but probably come out ahead overall.

Whether that loss happens when you're young and energetic and relatively poor, or when you're old and tired and have expensive stuff, is random. It's also independent of whether you already had losses. In math terms, the sampling is i.i.d. ³

Addendum

The actual story behind 狡兔三窟 contains elements of the sublime. This mfer was sent to collect debts for his lord, but instead of doing so, he burned all the loan contracts in return for future goodwill.

The lesson goes beyond diversifaction, decentralization, robustness and long-tail or future risk management.

It echoes another story I heard recently, how in the first century St. Thomas⁴ travelled to India, where the ruler gave him a pile of gold to build a magnificent palace, but he gave the gold to the poor and built the palace in heaven.

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