On smoggy Beijing days when we are stuck inside due to poor air quality, one word keeps running through my mind. The word is "shame". As in, what a shame, what a waste. This is a great city. Very vibrant. It has a completely different culture for us to explore. Tons and tons of stuff to do. Pretty much every type of food you can imagine. Lots of parks, lots of cultural stuff. Beautiful mountains just outside the city where you can hike and explore. Acrobat shows, ancient palaces and temples, crazy and chaotic streets. We have lots of cool culture, but you can also easily get pretty much any grocery item you want. It REALLY can be a great place to live. Except for the pollution. If there is no wind a-blowing here, the pollution settles over the city. It then sits there until it rains, snows or becomes windy. I've coped with air pollution before. I mean, I'm from Dallas, right? I definitely haven't been living my life in pristine pastoral air quality. I also lived for a year in Naples, Italy, which is a pretty polluted place as well. That said, I've never ever seen air pollution like this. You can literally see, smell and taste it. When I tell you it is polluted -- unless you have lived here or are currently living here -- you probably can't truly imagine how bad air pollution can be. A gorgeous, "good" air quality day here is about the same as the smoggiest day ever in Los Angeles. And, after a couple of months here, you really do start to go with the flow most days. It is what it is. You try to limit your childrens' outdoor activities on really bad days, perhaps you thrown a pollution mask on. You avoid jogging outdoors and try not to exert yourself much at all since you do not want to vigorously breathe in all of the tiny nasty particles that cause cancer and lung infections.
I've been thinking about this blog post for quite some time. Right now, it is spring and very windy here. That means lots of blue sky days. It is warming up quickly here and I can get outdoors more to explore. I've biked more here in the past month than in the past 25 years. My rambling explorations help to give me some more perspective on what is around us and how to get there. I've found my world for the past several months is pretty compound-specific. We do venture outside the bubble on weekends, but most weekdays I am limited to where I can walk, bike or tuk-tuk. It was also really cold and smoggy through most of February and the early parts of March.
We were lucky enough to hang out with my cousin and her family and one of Chris' former colleagues while they visited Beijing in March. Playing tourist definitely gave me a deeper appreciation of all of the cool stuff the city has to offer. I would go to the Great Wall and climb about every weekend if I could. The kids all loved the palpable energy we encountered in Beijing parks where folks gather to fly kites, practice tai-chi, exercise on the crazy-looking equipment, play drums and sing. In fact, it definitely made Chris and I wonder (oh, for the thousandth time or so) if we should have lived downtown instead of in the 'burbs. I won't dwell on that thought too much since that ship has sailed. I've unpacked, hung stuff on the walls, enrolled kids in the school out here -- we are staying here in the bubble. BUT, we plan to take the kids into the city as much as possible. Despite the difficulty of traveling there as a family of 5.
Anyways, my ramblings aside, my main point is that it is a real shame that environmental regulation is clearly not something that has ever been a government priority here in China. The fast pace of growth here is really amazing to watch. New buildings seem to rise up overnight all through the city while old ones disappear. Incomes and wages are growing by leaps and bounds even for the folks toward the bottom of society. Lung cancer rates have also skyrocketed. In Beijing alone, lung cancer rates have increased by 60 percent over the last decade while the smoking rate has stayed the same. My fellow Americans back home who scoff at the EPA and other regulatory agencies might like to come here for a few weeks for a first-hand look at what occurs when business is allowed to do what they will without any serious regulation. There are currently dead pigs in the water supply in Shanghai and record-high levels of bad air quality days all across China. Nobody drinks the tap water here if they can afford not to and nobody feeds their children and infants Chinese formula or dairy.
I do think that we Americans can get quite complacent about these various "nuisance" regulatory agencies primarily because, for the most part, they do a pretty darn good job. Our government tries to protect us as much as they can even while we live here in China. Our homes and work places have lots of air filters. We drink bottled water. The government issues recommendations on what foods we should and should not eat. A huge deal of the shame and waste of it all is felt by the Chinese people. People who won't just be here for 2 or 3 years. People who have to live with the pollution and the food quality issues on a long-term basis. Who can't afford bottled water and air filters. Shame, yes. Absolutely. And I can tell you that they are really, really sick of it.
Here is a picture of Beijing on a clear day. Lovely, huh? See the mountains. That is a rare sight indeed.
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