Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation by J. Maarten Troost Page B

People’s Liberation Army had slaughtered hundreds, possibly more than a thousand, of unarmed kids just yards from where we sat, and yet that recent tragedy had already been obliterated from memory.
    Dan smiled. “There’s reality, and there’s Chinese reality. They’re different.”
    We started to talk about traveling in China. I had a loose plan to slowly make my way south, but nothing firm. I wondered about crime. I had noticed that many of Beijing’s taxi drivers sat encased within a protective cage. Was crime a problem?
    “Yes,” Meow Meow said.
    “Well,” Dan interjected. “It’s nothing like the U.S. I feel a lot safer here than I do in D.C. But it’s probably a little worse here now than it was ten years ago. My business partner’s girlfriend—she’s English—had her backpack stolen at the Beijing train station. She reported it to the police. Twenty-four hours later, they tracked her down at her hotel in Shanghai and told her that they had found her backpack and not to worry—they had already executed the thief.”
    “Do you believe that?” I asked Meow Meow.
    “Yes,” she said matter-of-factly.
    It was odd having this conversation. Here we were, embraced by the familiar and unchanging confines of a Starbucks, deep inside a shopping mall that would not be out of place in suburban Chicago, and yet we inhabited an alternate world where massacres didn’t happen and thieves were disposed of for good. My cognitive dissonance was throbbing mightily.
     

     
    And so, too, was my head. I had, of course, read that China is a little polluted. It’s just one of those things you know about China, along with the fact that it has more than a billion people. You know they use chopsticks. They have an expansive view of what constitutes food. And the country is a little polluted. I had no expectations that my wanderings through China’s cities would be accompanied by crisp, clean air. I knew it would be a trifle smoggy. But in no way was I ready for the swirling filth that constitutes air in Beijing. It was, frankly, apocalyptic.
    Living in Sacramento, I had grown familiar with air pollution. Now and then, on a cool winter day, I’d catch a glimpse of the High Sierras and I’d be reminded that we lived awfully close to the mountains. Indeed, the Sierra foothills roll into the suburbs of Sacramento. Mostly, however, this mountain range remained hidden behind the nasty haze that blights life in the Central Valley of California. For a while, I blamed the people of San Francisco, blithely gallivanting about their fine city while sending us their air pollution, which became trapped behind the Sierras and above us. But, as studies on the Sierra snowpack confirmed, more than a third of the air pollution affecting California originates in China. When one considers that China is more than 4,000 miles from California, one would be forgiven for concluding that they have an awful lot of pollution. And they do. In their race to be number one, the Chinese have already eclipsed the United States in one significant area. Today, China leads the world in carbon emissions.
    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