The air quality here has
been so poor recently that it’s headline news around the world. Beijing’s pollution over the weekend was
literally off the scales. Shanghai
has been suffering from some nasty air too; I woke up on Saturday morning
barely able to see the skyscrapers just a few blocks away from us through the
hazy smog. When we went out, even
inside a grocery store deep within a mall, I could feel my nose burning. Needless to say, our apartment’s air
filters have been cranked to full capacity 24 hours a day for the past
week. I shudder to think about our
electric bill, but it seems like the least serious of the potential consequences.
This morning I awoke to a
very dry nose and scratchy throat.
A friend on the phone asked if I had a cold, because I sounded congested
and gravelly. My Chinese tutor also
apparently noticed my symptoms during our lesson. At the end, he told me he was going to teach me a
buzzword. He wrote out:
中国咳
Pronounced “zhongguo ke”, these characters translate as “China cough”. The phrase started as the “Beijing
cough”, and was used almost exclusively regarding foreigners who developed sore
throats while living there. But
now, as pollution is rampant throughout the country and even born-and-raised
urban Chinese are developing uncomfortable symptoms, the phrase has become
ubiquitous.
Today I won't get into the politics of censorship, and how the government has always tightly controlled air quality monitoring. How they issued stern warnings to the United States, whose local consulates began their own testing and publishing of air quality metrics last year. How I've noticed some recent signs of admittance of a problem, including the local government issuing notices to schools to halt outdoor exercises during heavy pollution periods. How I'm hopeful that we will witness a shift in policy during our time as residents of China. How I believe the conversion from coverup to cleanup is inevitable, if not imminent.
No, for today, I'll just enjoy another
afternoon indoors…
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