Say, where did that building go?

And here’s a graph of the air quality levels since I got here. You can see where it rained. The data is from the Chinese version of the PRC Ministry of Environmental Protection website.

Beijing air today: 176. The buildings I had mentally marked from the window earlier as being the farthest I could see are just barely visible today. I’ll take a comparison picture of the can-opener building this afternoon when I walk to the gym.

Among any number of other issues, China is not know for its healthy environment. Polluted air, polluted water, lack of water, increasing car ownership, functionally unregulated industry — you name it and there’s probably a damning news article about its manifestation in China somewhere.

I had been living in the Emerald City, in a blue-green state, where recycling is matter of fact and if you can’t see the tops of the skyscrapers downtown, it is raining. Now I’m in Beijing, and buildings are obscured by pollution regularly. On Saturday, Beijing checked in at 72 on the Air Pollution Index. Last weekend it rained for two days and has been fairly windy, so the particulate matter has been knocked down, and the smog blown away. This morning, though, the wind has died down and the haze is closing in again.

72. What does the number mean, exactly? The API is calculated from reports on air quality from different stations around the city and the region, and considers levels of inhalable particulates, sulfur dioxide and nitrous dioxide, plus carbon monoxide and ozone in miligrams per cubic meter. The World Health Organization considers 50 to be a safe number. For Beijing, an API number below 100 makes it a ‘Blue Sky Day,’ and it isn’t until 101 that the State Environmental Protection Agency recommends that “the cardiac and respiratory system patients should reduce strength draining and outdoor activities.” Up to 200 is still only “light pollution.” With a sandstorm, the API can reportedly go to 300 or higher, as it did in mid-March, before we arrived. Or, in December, 2006, it was over 500.

Beijing has a target number of ‘Blue Sky Days,’ 70% in 2008. To meet the targets, there is a multi-layered approach: nearly the entire taxi fleet has been replaced with Hyundai Elantras, the city’s environmental agency has been encouraging drivers to give up one day of driving a month, factories have shut down (more will be shut down in July, and remain out until the Olympics are done), and monitoring stations in the places with consistently bad air ratings have been taken offline (or not?). Maybe it is simplest, and cynicalest, to simply consider the number an indicator of how likely you are to get cancer, or have decreased life expectancy due to prolonged exposure. Though, really, who am I to comment? Is criticizing China’s environment racist? I think I’d place myself alongside James Fallows, on that one.

When we visited the Great Wall last weekend, the haze was very much in evidence. On the way back, I asked Alex’s colleague, who had very kindly taken us out there, what his opinion was on the environmental problems, and the more recent moves to rein in industry and improve environmental quality. His answer was simple — the Communists might not be very good, but they don’t want to kill everyone, so therefore they will take real action on the environmental problems. This seemed logical, and I hope it is true. The same fellow, though, is soon to be a father, and asked Alex to buy some cans of baby formula while he was in San Francisco, as he is mistrustful of the domestic options.

For myself, I don’t think there’s any way to get around the large portion of responsibility that the West should bear, in regards to the Chinese environment. Though the domestic factors are not small, a lot of the pollution is industrial in origin. And everyone knows what Chinese industry produces — cheap goods for Western markets. They make all the things we used to produce domestically, until we devised our own environmental regulations, and our own workers started requiring health plans and such. So we outsourced our environmental problems, and cleaned up our own environment, but at the cost of other places on the globe.

That’s my Great White Guilt.

In consideration of all the above — green lifestyle in the US, awareness of environmental issues here (and I didn’t even go into water), and Great White Guilt, one of the things I think about here is how to live best and greenest. The most concrete thing I can think of is taking fewer, shorter showers. And the grocery store (really a French chain, soon to be boycotted in relation to the Olympic torch debacle) has an understated campaign about reusable bags, so Alex got one of those.

But how to balance other aspects? Is it better to eat street food (little infrastructure involved in its preparation, but probably contains all the tasty things from the air and street) or restaurant food (bought and cooked in bulk, but eaten with disposable chopsticks?) or to cook and eat at home (my US solution, but I have a limited kitchen, and a limited ability to identify or find necessary ingredients)? Better to walk, or to bike, or to take a taxi (is the air inside a taxi somewhat filtered, compared to outside? is it supporting the local economy?) Is it better to buy food from the grocery store, with some presumable quality control, or to buy it on the street and practice language skills? Should I let Alex try to take his button-up work shirts to a dry-cleaner, or should one of us figure out how to iron them? Is there any way to recycle bottles? Does someone down the line pick through the hotel trash and glean out the reusable bits? What about composting? What can I say or do when I see people littering in the streets? Do the air filter masks that many people on the street wear have a positive health benefit?

What can one foreign white girl do in a city of nearly 18 million?

I spent some time today reading ‘Oracle Bones,’ one of the books on China that Alex read, enjoyed, respected, and handed to me. The author was first a Peace Corps Volunteer, teaching English in a province, and then slowly clawed his way into a successful journalism career. (I say ‘clawed’ because both of my parents were journalists at one time, and I have no romantic illusions about the lucrative or steady qualities of the work.) Starting out in a province and being the main source of English language for those around you, I think must be an awfully good way to learn a lot of language in a hurry. It’s pretty much how I learned Finnish — by being in the middle of it all the time.

I will have to try harder to learn Mandarin, though, as my daily life is easily removed from the surroundings. I am working through the same English-language channels, on the internet, as I would be at home in Seattle. I am listening to my usual mish-mash of English, Russian, and occasionally Spanish, music while I work.

Today I looked out the window, from my position on the tenth floor (which is really the ninth — floors four and fourteen are skipped in the numbering, because the word for ‘four’ also sounds like the word for ‘death’) and saw the image of a crane at a nearby construction site reflected in the windows of the high rise building across the street. There is another building between me and the construction; the only way I could see it was in the reflection. The crane-image moved liquidly across the glass, surrounded by blue sky, the China Mobile offices behind the windows tinted and obscured. A bundle of something was let down, the cables swaying, rippling on the glass like a heat mirage. The body of the crane swiveled and glided through the reflected the sky.

Several stories down, on the street level, the wind whipped back and forth a few flags in front of the China Mobile building, a blue one with the company logo, a white one I could only see part of, and the gold-spangled, red flag of the People’s Republic of China. The red silk crumpled sinuously, now hugging the flag pole tightly, now leaping away with a visible snap, displaying its stars.

That’s what I saw, watching from my English-language bubble, floating along the surface of this great sea of Chinese language and culture. I have quite a bit of Mandarin to learn before I can stick my head completely underwater.

Yesterday I took the subway towards the center city, and got off at the northeastern corner, near the embassy district. I saw the Russian embassy, and several stores with Russian signs. I wound my way south and east and eventually got to one of the big shopping streets, Wangfujing, quite close to Tian’anmen Square and the Forbidden City. The only thing I bought was some street food — fried dough balls so sticky on the inside that at first I thought they had banana inside.

In an offshoot of the alley with food, I also walked through an alley full of stalls hawking things for tourists — chopsticks, fans, bronze figurines, opera masks, geisha dolls, teacups, saddam husein playing cards. In Russia, the same places sold matryoshka dolls painted with everything from traditional female faces to US presidents, to Simpsons characters, fur hats, lacquer boxes, and any amount of chachki emblazoned with Soviet insignia. There I could bargain with the sellers, chat them up; here the hawkers plucked at my sleeve and addressed me in rudimentary English: “Lay-dee! Looka looka!”

In Chinese, there are no syllables ending in hard consonants – k, p, t, d. Thus the sellers implore you to looka and buy a mapa, a booka, a postacard, which are invariably gooda. When I visited last year, one the phrases Alex taught me on my first day, when we visited Tian’anmen Square, was ‘bu yao’ — don’t want. It’s a useful one in that part of town, where foreign and domestic tourists alike are lured by the promise of spectacular cultural relics.

My strategy is the same here as it would be at home in Seattle, or anywhere. I keep walking, I act as if I didn’t hear, as if they were talking to someone else. More as an exercise than anything, I wandered through a store selling chopsticks and studiously ignored the salesgirl who stood attentively at my shoulder the whole time, waiting for me to show particular interest in anything. A couple times I nearly laughed out loud, as she literally followed me step for step. I kept waiting for her to say something, to try to sell me on a set, so I could use one of the phrases I do know — “wo kan-kan.” I’m looking with the connotation of ‘I’m thinking about it, but have not decided.’

I did get to use it later, in a bookstore, where I was approached by a salesgirl while looking through the ‘Chinese learning texts for foreign devils’ section. When I didn’t respond to her Mandarin queries, she held up a book and asked in English, ‘You want to learn Chinese?’ ‘Wo kan-kan,’ didn’t make her go away, though, it set off another round of Mandarin address, forcing me to come up with an additional phrase: ‘Bu mai, kan-kan.’ Not buying, just looking. On a different floor, though, I did buy an exercise book to practice writing characters in, and a thing of note paper to make flashcards with. I have plenty of studying to do!

Odd items of clothing seen today:

1) A girl wearing a sequined hat that in the US would say ‘HOT’ or ‘Princess’ or some such, but here said ‘Rape’.

2) A guy with a tshirt that said ‘Surfer dreams are wet’

Yesterday afternoon I finally kicked myself out the door at about two in the afternoon, and headed west, toward the mountains and the green patch of the map marked Haidian Park, not far from our place.

A new direction is always exciting, and I hadn’t gone too far when I found a spectacle — a crew of men removing trees in a narrow street. This was a four-story tree, with a guy in a leather harness clinging to the top and using a handsaw to saw off boughs. I stayed and took pictures, deciding it was curious enough that I shouldn’t worry about being a random laowai with a camera. When all the limbs were off, the man in the tree shimmied down ten feet and they sent him up a chainsaw on a rope, and he cut off the top section. Below, a group of men on a rope pulled so it landed in an appropriate spot in the street. The same for a second section, which shook the ground as it hit. The guy came down the rest of the way and had a smoke while some of the others were cutting the logs into sections. It seemed they only had one chainsaw amongst the group — there were maybe half a dozen men — and they were in no great hurry to get to the last twenty feet of tree still standing, so I kept going.

I came upon a canal, empty despite the recent rain, followed it up, then continued west on what turned out to be the fourth ring road, a large highway, where I was going against traffic and didn’t seem to be getting any closer to a way into the park, though I could see fenced in greenery. Eventually I came to an entrance — for a gold course. I turned back and went up a smaller road, again following a fence and despairing of a way in. This time, though, I was rewarded after a bit with a sign saying ENTRANCE, and a very obvious entrance next to it, with a young uniformed fellow standing at attention.

I had no idea if there was an entrance fee, and I also no idea how to ask, but I didn’t see anything obvious saying you needed to pay, so I put on my best impassive laowai who knows exactly where to go face and walked in, ignoring the guard completely. He didn’t say anything, and I discovered a large and lovely park worth the effort of finding it (which really was minimal, so I didn’t get lost of anything).

After I walked around for a while, I was approached by two teenage boys, one of whom asked me something. I gave him a blank look, and he said “picture?”, gesturing with his cell phone. So I let his friend take a picture of us standing next to each other.

This happened last year in Harbin — people finding me so odd and exotic looking that they wanted their photo with me. I imagine it is like when you drive across the country in the US, and you take your picture next to a giant egg, or a statue of James Dean, or with the really big fish you caught, except in this case the remarkable object comes to you.

Or maybe this guy will try to tell his friends he has a laowai girlfriend — see, photographic evidence! Or maybe, the way that all Asians look very much alike to Westerners, perhaps they think I look like some particular white female celebrity. Who knows? In both cases — and I’m sure there will be others — there has been no conversation, no small talk, “Are you American?”, just the photo, and goodbye.