Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

by Andrew Blackwell

  Mrs. Han wants to know again why you’re not married, Cecily said.

  They had asked a dozen times. They couldn’t have known that I spent most of my free time asking myself the same thing. I realized, though, that this was an opportunity for me to answer at least one of their questions honestly.

  “Tell them that I was going to get married, but the woman changed her mind,” I said to Cecily.

  She translated.

  They say that’s terrible, Cecily said. That it’s really embarrassing. But that I shouldn’t tell you they said so.

  “Do they have any advice on how to find a good wife?” I asked.

  Mr. Han nodded. Choose someone who loves you, he said. It doesn’t matter if you love her. Just make sure she loves you.

  I couldn’t decide if this was horrible advice or profound. “Shouldn’t we both love each other?” I asked.

  Choose someone who loves you and who takes care of you, advised Mrs. Han. Don’t just choose someone who you love. And if there are things you don’t like about the person, you’ll come to see past those things and love her eventually.

  They told us their love story. Mr. Han had pestered his wife-to-be to give him rides to work on her scooter. They had written a long series of love letters. Mrs. Han said she still had the letters he had sent her.

  Cecily asked Mr. Han if he still had the letters Mrs. Han had sent him in reply. He shook his head, and his wife rolled her eyes. Men aren’t romantic, she said. They don’t keep that stuff.

  Mr. Han was smiling. He pointed at his chest. I keep them in here, he said. I keep them in here. And everybody laughed.

  We stood to go, waving to Mr. Han’s brother-in-law, who was working his way through the last few boards of Lang’s mountain from the other day. Lang and his sister were at school, because in Guiyu that’s what jawas do on weekdays.

  In the foyer, I drew a lungful of frying circuit board. It reminded me of something Mr. Han had told me earlier. I had asked him if he thought the work was unhealthy for him and his family.

  We know it’s a dirty business, he had said. We know it’s a health risk. You have to give something to get something.

  As we left, he was standing in the foyer of the workshop, contemplating two bales of motherboards that had just arrived. The next batch. He had slashed them open at the side, spilling fresh, untouched circuitry onto the floor.

  At the Beijing airport, the sun peered through a thick scrim of haze. Several years before, in preparation for the Olympics, the Chinese government had gone to extreme lengths to reduce the city’s famous smog. Anything for a coming-out party. If this was reduced smog, though, it was still pretty impressive. I had noticed the haze days earlier as well, on our way through the airport to Guiyu.

  “Is that the famous Beijing haze?” I’d asked Cecily.

  She looked out the window. “I think it’s just because it’s going to snow later today,” she said. “The forecast is for snow.”

  Pre-snow haze?

  “I think so,” she said.

  “No, Cecily,” I said, laying down some ground rules. “It’s pollution, okay?”

  Now, on our way back, she abandoned the snow excuse. Instead, she mentioned that fog was in the forecast.

  “There has been fog for three days,” she said.

  “Smog,” I said.

  “Fog.”

  “Smog.”

  “Fog.”

  She was an uncompromising negotiator. But later in the evening, after we retired to our hotel rooms, she sent me a text message to tell me that, on television, the news was that it had been the most polluted day of the year so far. I win, Cecily.

  Night. Beside the highway, the squat, flaring glow of a refinery floated by, bladerunner-like in the haze. We watched from the pitch-darkness of Liu’s cab.

  The most polluted city in the world. The beams of oncoming headlights writhed in the heavy air. We were driving to Linfen. Through the city’s outskirts and onto a broad multilane highway, an empty avenue of streetlights, the smog unbelievably thick. We passed a carved sign: WELCOME TO LINFEN. With perfect timing, a truck piled high with coal came onto the road in front of us. A chunk of coal skittered loose and obliterated itself against the roadway, joining the stains that marked the passage of previous coal trucks.

  Linfen is a coal town, and legendarily dirty. In fact, hardly anybody outside China has ever heard of the place, unless they’ve heard of its pollution. That was the only reason I had heard of it, and the only reason you’re hearing about it now. Linfen sits at the heart of China’s coal country, in Shanxi Province. But to visit Linfen is not merely to travel to another time, to remember how industry used to dominate the landscape around American and European cities. Linfen is also a convenient symbol of what China is doing to the global environment—the same thing we’ve been doing for a hundred years.

  Let’s run some numbers. China’s consumption of coal doubled in the decade leading up to 2010, to more than three billion tons. That’s nearly half the world’s annual supply. About three-quarters of China’s electricity comes from coal, and as the country’s electrical needs have skyrocketed, so has coal-fired power generation. China is not only far and away the world’s biggest consumer of coal but is also its biggest consumer of energy, and its biggest emitter of carbon dioxide. And even though China is fast becoming a world leader in renewable energy, like wind and solar, it is coal that has powered the nation’s precipitous rise.

  This matters. The coal gets burned over there, but the carbon dioxide goes everywhere. So if, by some miracle, the West manages to stop screwing over the global climate—well, we probably won’t. Regardless, China has picked up where we haven’t left off.

  The most polluted city in the world. We were downtown now. There was dust everywhere, thick on the cars, thick in the air, coating the buildings. Finally, I thought. Someplace really grim. A polluted place that isn’t nice. A place I can point to and say, Yes. It’s even worse than you imagine.

  Cars swam past in the murk as we parked and headed into the hotel. In the lobby, the staff seemed to have lost our reservation, seemed in fact surprised that anyone would want to stay in their hotel for an entire night. A dwarf stood by the desk, looking me up and down with a sneer of disbelief.

  I shuffled upstairs to my room, past the hall attendants, who insisted on taking my key and opening the room. It seemed less a point of hospitality than a security procedure. My room smelled faintly of cigarette smoke and urine, and I went to sleep grateful, having at last found what I came for.

  The next day, though, the spell was broken.

  Preferring something less redolent of gambling and low-rent organized crime, we changed quarters, moving to the Honglou, a nice hotel near the university and in sight of Linfen’s drum tower. After dropping our bags, we went to check out the city.

  If you’re counting drum towers, the one in Linfen is supposed to be the second tallest in China, at 150-some feet. At the base of the tower, a worker was sweeping the sidewalk, pushing a carpet of beige powder as he went. I noticed again that everything in Linfen was dusty. A brown film coated cars that had been parked outside for even a single day. In the lobby of the Honglou, a woman had pushed a dust mop back and forth over the wide marble floor, Sisyphean and smooth.

  We climbed the tower’s dusty stairs. Inside, we stared up at the ornate wooden vault of the ceiling. Drum towers and bell towers used to be important features of Chinese cities, timepieces to mark the day’s passage. But that’s all over now. Besides, when exactly would you drum the sunset in Linfen? When the sun disappears behind the smog? Or sometime later, when you assume it has reached the horizon?

  From the balcony, we looked onto the hue and drone of the traffic circle that surrounded the tower. To the south, down the crowded boulevard of Drum Tower Street, we could see only a few blocks before the traffic faded away into the haze. It was like a thick mist lay on the city—but there was nothing misty in this mist, nothing damp or fresh.

&nbs
p; At this moment, though, something began to dawn on me. I was having that feeling. That good feeling. The sensation of having woken up in an interesting new place. Oh, no, I thought. Not again.

  Was Linfen really all that bad? True, its smog was the smoggiest smog I had ever seen. Smog to irritate your throat. Smog to keep you coughing through the night.

  Still. I pointed my camera down Drum Tower Street. If I zoomed in all the way and took a photo where the buildings dissolved into the murk, Linfen appeared oppressive, unbearable. But if I zoomed all the way out, Linfen looked like…just another place.

  Later, I showed the zoomed-out photo to my friend James, to show him how, at a visceral level, Linfen wasn’t so horrifying. He looked at me archly and said that, to him, it still looked pretty terrible. His amateur meteorologist side kicked in: he estimated the visibility in the photo at a quarter mile. The same as in a heavy snowstorm.

  So don’t let me tell you it’s not bad. It’s bad. It’s really bad. Chronic respiratory disease and even lung cancer must stalk the city’s boulevards and alleyways. Schoolchildren surely contend with lungs seized by asthma. And doubtless, Linfen is symbolic ground zero for what the human race is about, these days. But when I looked down on the city from the drum tower, I saw not only smog but also cars and buses, and the KFC, and people going about their lives.

  I put it out of my mind. We went down the stairs and crossed the street to check out the large civic plaza that faced the tower. Drum Tower Square, as I choose to call it, was festooned with decorations for Spring Festival. Festooned is the only word. Large mutant rabbits made of wire and fabric loomed over us. It was the Year of the Rabbit, and although Spring Festival—that’s what they call Chinese New Year in China—had already ended, that didn’t save us from being leered at by cartoon bunny rabbits everywhere we went.

  The main problem with the plaza was its heartwarming display of healthy civic life. People gathered here and there in small crowds, singing old Communist anthems with obvious nostalgia. Passersby came together in circles around street musicians. In the back of the plaza, an ad hoc dance hall had been set up, complete with amplified music. Couples twirled through an unorthodox rumba. One pair glided across the stones of the plaza with eerie smoothness, the woman’s long black hair swinging over the purple velvet of her overcoat.

  The dance music, too, was an old propaganda song, Cecily told me. The Communist Party saved the people, went the lyrics. The dearest people of all are the communist soldiers.

  “People don’t really take this music seriously anymore,” she said.

  At its southern edge, the improvised ballroom came up against another dance area, where a rank of about a hundred people, mostly elderly, were proposing a variation on the electric slide. They beamed with carefree amusement as they danced. Who were these happy citizens?

  And above all, where was Sad Coal Man?

  Who is Sad Coal Man? Search Google Images for “Linfen,” and you’ll see him. Nobody gives his name, of course, so I just think of him as Sad Coal Man, and if there is an iconic image of Linfen, he is it. (The silver medal goes to Sad Coal Man’s older brother, Man on Bike with Face Mask.)

  Sad Coal Man’s lot is to stand forlornly by the side of the road, forever staring into the distance over our left shoulder. Sad Coal Man is young and wears a dirty brown jacket over a dirty brown sweater, with a dirty black shirt underneath. Sad Coal Man’s face and neck are covered with coal dust and his brow is furrowed. When reproduced at a small image size, he looks like he’s squinting, almost in pain. Larger versions reveal more subtle emotions. His eyes are clouded not with pain but uncertainty, with doubt for the future. Sad Coal Man is so sad he looks like he might cry. But he can’t. His heart has been hardened beyond tears by a lifetime lived in the world’s most polluted city. Sad Coal Man also needs a haircut.

  Never mind the blue sky in the corner of the photograph, over his shoulder. With Sad Coal Man as evidence, you can draw only one conclusion: Linfen is a hellhole, a place bereft of human dignity, where people don’t even know how to wash, because there’s no point. His expression and appearance are calibrated to bring out our condescension. It’s so terrible they have to live that way.

  When I look at him now, though, I see something else in his face. Awkwardness. Someone has told him, Stand here. We’re going to take a picture of you. Don’t look at the camera. I’m willing to bet that Sad Coal Man wasn’t thinking about the plight of Linfen when they took his picture. He was probably thinking, I wish they’d let me wash my face first.

  But Sad Coal Man was nowhere to be seen in Drum Tower Square. Maybe he was up in the mountains, mining. Maybe we’d find him later, and ask him what he was thinking in that picture, and whether he was friends with the Crying Indian from those anti-littering ads of the 1970s.

  The square had more to show us. On the other side of the semi-electric slide, people were playing hacky sack. In this part of the world they use a weighted, feathery shuttlecock, but the moves are the same: the inside kick, the outside kick, the chest check, the behind-the-back. The only difference is that in Linfen—perhaps in all of China, I don’t know—hacky sack is not just a game for young men, but for people of all ages. Best of all were the grandmothers hacking it up like they were between classes at Hampshire College.

  Nudging toys and rabbit-shaped balloons out of the way, we ducked in front of a row of vendors. There was writing on the ground. Half a dozen men were practicing calligraphy, using long brushes to paint water on the stones of the plaza.

  That was the last straw. The civic charm offensive was complete. To grow old within walking distance of Drum Tower Square seemed like a blessing, if you had the lungs for it. Here, in the smog capital of the universe, I was reminded that there was more than one kind of health.

  Sometimes I despair at the prospect of growing old in my own country. In the United States, seniors are supposed to keep to the house, or at least stick to the park benches. You don’t exactly see them playing Frisbee in Central Park. In Linfen, though, citizens old and young come to exercise in the public square, and sing old songs, and play hacky sack. They dance, they slide electrically, they watch their kids or grandkids ride plastic tricycles around like lunatics. They write poems in water on the flagstones, and watch them evaporate. This place was pretty great.

  Don’t worry. I’m not debunking anything. We’re still ruining the world, and Linfen is still polluted as hell. The reason I find myself beating the same thematic horse on every continent isn’t that the polluted places of the world aren’t polluted. It’s that I love them. I love the ruined places for all the ways they aren’t ruined. Does somebody live there? Does somebody work there? Does somebody miss it when they leave? Those places are still just places. But when we read horror stories about them at home in our cozy green armchairs, we turn them into something else, into stages on which our worst fears can play out.

  We also hold up these poster children—Linfen, Port Arthur, Chernobyl—to tell ourselves that the problems are over there. And we’d like to keep it that way. We’d like to keep a tidy bubble for ourselves, and draw a line around some trees, and declare no farther. That here, at least, inside this boundary, nature survives. As long as there is Yellowstone, we’ll have a little something for what ails us. What a joke. So much of our environmental consciousness is just aesthetics, a simple idea of what counts as beautiful. But that love of beauty has a cost. It becomes a force for disengagement. Linfen is too foul to care about. Port Arthur is too gross.

  So I love the ruined places. And sure, I love the pure ones, too. But I hate the idea that there’s any difference. And I wish more people thought gross was beautiful. Because if it isn’t, then I’m not sure why we should care about a world with so much grossness in it.

  One calligrapher finished painting a broad grid of beautifully rendered characters, and several of his fellows began a jocular critique of his work. An aging man with a dark green jacket and a bad comb-over saw us watching, and stepped fo
rward.

  His name was Mr. Ma, and he wanted to know if I could understand the conversation we were listening to. Cecily told him I couldn’t.

  But foreigners are smarter than Chinese, he told us, not even half joking. He had heard a foreigner speak Chinese once, and had concluded that it must be very easy for foreigners to learn it. He thought I must understand it, too.

  Disbelief that I didn’t understand Chinese had been a running theme. In Guiyu, Mrs. Han had asked Cecily about it more than once. He can’t understand us? At all?

  A retired prison guard, Mr. Ma had lived in the Linfen area all his life. The city had expanded over the years, he said, but it hadn’t changed much. Had I noticed the air?

  I had.

  It’s haze and coal, he said.

  Yes indeed, I said.

  He addressed Cecily. Be open-minded about dating foreigners, he told her. It’s okay for Chinese and Americans to marry now.

  Cecily rolled her eyes. I think. I couldn’t really tell, as I was busy with my own eye roll. To his credit, though, Mr. Ma also told Cecily that she had done right to focus on her career and education.

  Take care of him, he told her, as we parted ways. He’s a guest in our country.

  Linfen has a number of decent attractions besides the smog. From Drum Tower Square, you can take a nice run through the grounds of Shanxi Normal University and out to the riverfront, which reminded me a bit of Hudson River Park, in Manhattan. There were no skate parks or beach volleyball courts, but there was a mini-golf emporium, closed for the winter.

  Spreading east from the river is the Hua Gate area, a wide pedestrian arcade in the style of the National Mall, lined with temples and buildings. Of these, only the Yao Temple is supposedly original, the site of one of the earliest Chinese dynasties, dating back millennia. But it’s hard to know what’s real. Across the arcade from the Yao Temple is a scaled-down replica of the Forbidden City’s famous Meridian Gate. The fakey vibe only increases down the sidewalk, where there’s a replica Temple of Heaven, distinguishable from the Beijing original not only because it is much smaller but because it has a haunted house inside.