Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [21]
Dan had left us to tend to his duties as a Titan of the Orient, leaving me to walk around Beijing with Meow Meow. As we walked, clouds of filth swirled through the city’s canyons, obscuring the massive new high-rises. Cranes peeked through the smog, appearing to levitate. I suddenly had an inkling of what a post-strike nuclear winter might look like. Some people had taken to wearing surgeon’s masks. This seemed completely inadequate to me; I yearned for scuba gear. Meanwhile, my head hurt. My eyes itched. I coughed, and while I hadn’t picked up the locals’ colorful habit of hawking and spitting phlegm, I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if the contents of my lungs had blackened to the color of coal.
I couldn’t begin to guess at the number of pollutants swishing through the air. But among all the colorfully named toxins, many are what really smart people call particulate matter. In the United States, anything more than 50 micrograms of particulates per cubic meter of air is considered unsafe, leading authorities to issue red alerts advising children and elderly people to remain inside. In Beijing, the average particulate matter swirling through the air on any given day is 141. For a foreigner, even for someone accustomed to the haze of Sacramento, this is unimaginably foul.
“It’s very interesting air you have here in Beijing,” I noted to Meow Meow. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it before.”
“Yes. It is very dirty. More bad today because of dust storms last week.”
“Dust storms?” This only seemed to heighten the End Times atmosphere.
“Yes, every spring we get dust storms. You can still see the sand.”
It was true. Beijing remained coated in a fine layer of sand. This, too, was unexpected for me. When I had envisioned Beijing, I didn’t think it would be particularly green, but I certainly didn’t expect it to be quite so brown. Then again, this too is a new problem for China. More than a quarter of China is a desert, and sadly for the people of Beijing, the Gobi Desert is coming for them. Not more than fifty miles from the center of Beijing, great sand dunes are moving inexorably toward the city. Forty years ago, sandstorms were rarely seen here, but today, they are a seasonal event. Every year, the shachenbo, or dust-cloud tempest, deposits more than a million tons of sand on Beijing, and some scientists believe that within the next couple of decades Beijing will be swallowed by the Gobi Desert.
“So you’ve got hideous pollution compounded by dust storms,” I observed.
“Los Angeles is polluted too,” noted Meow Meow.
I nearly blurted out, Thanks to China, but, of course, that wasn’t entirely true. We’re pretty good at pollution too. We didn’t just hand over the title of world’s greatest polluter, we made China earn it. Indeed, somehow, inexplicably, we’ve even made owning an SUV seem like a patriotic thing to do. Nevertheless, the refrain Los Angeles is polluted too is something I would come to hear often in China, as if the swirling clouds of toxins that churn through Beijing are merely the unavoidable cost of development. But I’ve seen polluted cities before. I’ve been to Mexico City. I’ve trampled through the soot-stained streets of Katowice, a grim city in industrial Poland. And I’ve spent more time than I cared to in Los Angeles. And I can state with some confidence that none of these places have air quite so vile as Beijing’s.
“Do you want to walk or catch taxi?” Meow Meow asked.
I wanted to walk. I figured that the quicker I became accustomed to the pollution of Beijing, the quicker my headache would recede. Perhaps my eyes would stop itching too. And possibly my lungs might stop wheezing as if I’d just chain-smoked three packs of Marlboro Reds. So I wanted to walk through Beijing. For health reasons.
Once upon a