Not that we weren't warned. On a recent Friday I'd noticed a sign all in Chinese save for Web site address shenzhenpower.com pasted on my Shenzhen apartment's elevators and lobby walls and asked my girlfriend what it said.

"Oh,'' she said. It was in the same casual, matter-of-fact tone she uses for news that her mother is coming to-morrow to visit for two months and, by the way, our gas is about to be shut off because we owe 1,811 yuan (HK$1,701) to the gas company for five months of unpaid bills we haven't seen because the key to our mailbox is lost and the landlady won't give us a new one.

"It says we won't have any power from 6am until 9pm on Saturday.''

"Saturday? Tomorrow? Why?''

"It doesn't say.''

It's not exactly front-page news that much of the mainland has been struggling under power shortages this summer due to strained coal supplies and high temperatures (that is, when floods aren't drowning hundreds of school-children and other unfortunates) and rolling black and brownouts have been in effect. I chalked it up to one apart-ment's sacrifice; either that or just "routine maintenance'' that would keep us without air-conditioning, refrigeration, lights and home entertainment for 15 hours on a weekend.

"We'll be in hell here,'' I said, imagining going just 15 minutes without air-con in 35 degrees Celsius, 85 percent humidity, with no Neil Young or Simpsons DVDs. "We're going to have to stock up on candles and a flashlight or two.''

She shrugged and agreed, though she seemed mostly to be taking a cue from her visiting mother. Stoic is the word. Her mother is a former Red Guard who went several years without schooling and supervised adult care while she helped heap mob abuse on intellectuals and teachers before being sent to feed pigs in a rural province. As such, she seems to take the long view in such matters.

A trip to several stores gained us exactly two candles and no flashlights. The whole flashlight concept, in fact, seemed to be either a quaint mystery or perhaps a work in progress, though one shopkeeper rustled up a handful of blue and red glow-sticks, which I declined. As for Styrofoam coolers and ice blocks to store perishables during the impending fridge meltdown? Let's just say that incredulous hilarity ensued on the part of the shopkeepers.

I awoke at 6.20am Saturday bathed in sweat and fumbled for the AC control, which wasn't working and - shaking away a dream that had me comfortably trapped in a Colorado snowbank - slowly realized that a hideous long, hot day and evening was in store.

At about 8.30, after stuffing what I could into the fridge's rapidly thawing freezer compartment and tossing out the rest of our perishables I heard screams, wails and emphatic thumps outside the oven that was our apartment.

My girlfriend's mother sat unmoving and unmoved, reading a Chinese old folks magazine, something like Modern Maturity: The Retired Party Cadre Edition and her daughter perked up only slightly.

"Someone's in trouble,'' I said, use-lessly wiping my brow. It was like trying to stop a full-on garden hose with a feather. "It sounds like the elevator is stuck.''

Indeed, though the notice assured us that elevator power would be spared, that apparently wasn't the case.

Cries of the trapped, doomed and damned echoed from Dante's fourth circle of hell several floors below ours. That horrific soundtrack continued for another 25 minutes or so as my girl-friend and her mother pretended to be absorbed in studiously peeling fruit and I hid in the shower under a stream of tepid water.

Finally the elevator groaned loudly into action and after drying off I de-clared that we'd better evacuate ourselves before having to hoof it down 17 floors and back again.

Mom elected to stoically stay behind, but my girlfriend and I hit the streets with no plan except to find as much air-conditioning as possible for the next 12 hours or so.

It was not easy initially as most malls in Shenzhen don't open until 10.30am, though after an expensive and blissfully air-conditioned cab ride we found the doors open at Shenzhen's only ice rink. Neither one of us skate but I had a brainstorm.

"Here's some more yuan,'' I said. "You shop. I'll stand next to the ice and scout for the the next Michelle Kwan.''

Which I did for almost 90 minutes until she returned with a plea to help narrow down her selections.

How many outfits can one person watch another try on while feigning intense interest? Twenty minutes? I may be the master, based on my nearly three-hour feat, not counting food court time at Happy Bread!

By then the clock had crawled to near mid-afternoon and we'd exhausted one mall's possibilities.

"Do you want to go to Book City?'' she asked, mentioning Shenzhen's largest banal bookstore. Because it's state-owned, the English selections amount to language primers, dictionaries and pirate editions of Hillary Clinton's autobiography and truncated versions of Moby Dick, Mark Twain and Jane Austen. Still it offered brief relief, while - bingo! - a new movieplex showing a melancholy Chinese-language flick, Shanghai Dreams, bought us another two hours.

"Too bad about the boyfriend raping her and then getting shot,'' I opined as we left. "But at least the weather was cool in that movie. Loved the snow and rain scenes. Can we watch it again?''

No such luck. We were short of funds and it was nearing dinnertime. With much trepidation we returned to the Amityville Horror Shenzen Luxury Complex where the elevators were miraculously still working and entered an apartment that felt like a foundry.

Inside the ex-Red Guard mother sat unruffled and sweatless, with steaming plates of rice, stir-fried vegetables, pork bits and scrambled eggs she'd liberated from the by-now room temperature freezer and cooked, despite the threat from the gas company.

Not exactly the cooling chef's salad, iced tea and gazpacho I'd dreamed of, but not bad.

Later, as I oozed sweat on to the soggy New Yorker I was trying to read by candlelight and counting the seconds until 9pm, I noticed she was still quiet and seemingly content reading her magazine while my girlfriend - hot, but not exactly bothered - chatted on and off with her.

After all, I mused, what's a few hours without power to someone who spent their Wonder Years feeding intell-ectuals to the pigs?