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“I’m having the swan,” Jack decided.

“I’m leaning toward the pig fnuckle.”

“You know,” Jack observed. “This is different. China is different.”

“Yes,” I told him, “it is.”

The next day, we again found ourselves strolling alongside the Pearl River. The opposite bank was lost in a shroud of toxicity.

“It’s…apocalyptic,” Jack observed, not without a little awe.

“Exactly,” I said. “There really is no other word.”

We’d been discussing the air in Guangzhou, because it simply could not be ignored. It was worse then Shanghai. It was worse than Qingdao. It was worse even than Beijing. The air in Guangzhou is brown. No, not brown. Yellow. No, not yellow. The air in Guangzhou is sick. It is unwell. The air has been poisoned and now the air is noxious. Today, the average life expectancy for a traffic cop in Guangzhou is forty-three. And remarkably, it’s not Chinese drivers that kill them (at least not directly). But their fumes do. Ninety percent of those traffic cops still among the living have lung infections. And it’s not going to get better anytime soon. There are 10 million people in Guangzhou and every year they buy 150,000 new cars. This boggled the mind.

Jack lit up a cigarette. “You know what I get from smoking around here? I get clean smoke.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Those are Chinese cigarettes.”

We had an hour to kill before we met Jack’s contact in Guangzhou, and so we ambled to Lucy’s Café, a restaurant that catered to Shamian Island’s typical visitor. We joined the multitudes of American couples with their Chinese babies and listened to “Sweet Home Alabama” wafting from the jukebox.

Jack pondered the menu. “I’m having the hamburger.”

“You don’t want to do that.”

“Why?”

“There is much in China that I don’t understand. But this I know. You do not want to order the hamburger.”

“I’m ordering the burger.”

“You’ll be sorry.”

When it arrived, we spent a long while marveling at this alleged hamburger. We began with the bread. There are four regional schools of cooking in China and hamburger buns don’t figure prominently in any of them. Having heard that hamburgers involve bread, the chef had included a spongy slice of Wonder Bread. But what was really breathtaking to behold was the meat. We had never seen meat quite so gray. Nor was the texture recognizable to us. And the smell? It was the sort of odor that would cause even a coyote to flee.

“I’ve never seen meat that looked like this,” Jack observed. “Or smelled like this.”

“Perhaps it’s cat.”

Is this where the unsold cats ended up, we wondered? Is this where cat vendors dispose of the really gnarly cats, the ones that not even a cat-craving Chinese customer would eat? Very possibly, I speculated. Everyone in this restaurant was a Westerner. They wanted hamburgers, I imagined the chef thinking. A cow was expensive. But cats are cheap. We’ll give them cat-burgers. They’re laowais with undeveloped taste buds. Ground-up cow on bread is their most celebrated dish; ketchup their most famous sauce. So we’ll give them cat-burgers.

Next to us, a young Dutch couple asked if they could borrow our Lonely Planet guidebook. I spoke my mother tongue with them. Geert and Lois were from Utrecht and they’d spent nearly a year traveling through South and Central America, Australia, New Zealand, Laos, Cambodia, and points in between. They were hardy travelers, had seen the world, had climbed mountains and endured hardships.

“Have you been to the market across the river?” Jack asked them. His plate had remained untouched. “It’s pretty interesting.”

“No, we don’t go there,” Geert said. “I have an uncle who works here as a lawyer. He told us that whatever you do, do not go to that market. That market is where SARS began.”

It’s a remarkable thing watching the blood drain from someone’s face. “You said come to China, so I come to China,” Jack stuttered. “And what do we do on my first day here? We go to the market where SARS began! And now because I