Dust storms: There is a yellowing glaze between me and the house beyond mine

I just realized that I haven't even talked about the pollution here on this blog yet.

From my window, everything is glazed over with dust. Most of it is on the glass, but the color outside is drab too.

Let's just put it this way, normally when you step outside the gates of our campus, you can see the mountains that are about a 20 minute bike-ride away. Today you can see nothing but a grayish-yellow white. Heck, you can barely see the flaming, ugly steel mill that is about a 5 minute bike-ride away.

There's no wind today, not the way it was a couple days ago, when even all the street vendors packed up and went home early because the blowing of the sand was so severe that you couldn't walk straight into the wind without being blinded. We came back home from dinner tasting the a thin layer of sand on our lips, and I had to stand in front of the mirror for a minute just dusting the sand out of the corners of my eyes and eye lashes.

In our house, dust came through the cracks in our windows and doors and coated our floors, tables, chairs and beds with a thin layer. (Not that this is anything unusual--leave our house uncleaned for a week and it will also accumulate a clear layer of sand, soot, and coal dust mixture. But that layer is accumulated in a day with a dust storm.)

They call these phenomenon "dust storms." They happen a lot in the spring when the wind starts to blow, and the soil of Inner Mongolia other northern provinces (including Shanxi) is literally blown off the ground and into the air. South Korea and Japan both blame China for the yellow dust that blows into their countries too.

My Chinese teacher, a professor of about 30 years, said that when he was a child in Taigu, he only remembers one or two sandstorms in the whole of his young childhood. He said that it must have been unusual, because he remembers, as a young boy, being amazed at one rare time, when, during the day time, the sun looked green because of all the dust blowing in front of it. But now, he explained, they are very common in the spring. This is probably as a combination of the destruction of grasslands and forests in Northern China. After over 4000 of years of human habitation, the area is finally a desert.

Not to say the sand storms are the only cause of pollution in Shanxi. Shanxi is known for it's coal mining, and industry. Taiyuan, the capital of our province, used to be one of the 20 most polluted cities in the world in 2007. And although it has cleaned up its act a bit, now, the most polluted city in the world according to some sources is Lingfen, about 200 km away from our little town.

When I first came to this province I was amazed at the number of people I saw with disabilities of some sort. I couldn't figure out if it was because America just has fewer people and so the likelihood of seeing someone a disability is less, or because there were actually more people with disabilities in China. However, it turns out it is not just a Chinese phenomenon, this is a phenomenon especially unique to Shanxi. Shanxi's rate of birth defects is 6 times higher than China's national average. Now whether this mainly of poor healthcare or pollution is debatable. But I would argue it is certainly some combination of the two.

It's strange to live in a place where this much pollution is normal. I, myself have almost become used to a grey haze over everything. Although, like the locals here, am relieved when the putrid smell permeating the campus is that of the local specialty vinegar rather than that of burning trash or strange fumes from the hazy air. I tend to believe that if the sky directly above me is a little blue, even if I can't quite make out the horizon, I am safe to go for a run outside. In fact, many of my students have told me the campus air is much better than the air outside because there are many trees on campus. (Interesting logic when the campus walls are about 10 feet high.) But these days, the basketball courts and the two tracks on campus, normally filled with people, are pretty empty. Dust storms are not taken lightly here. And the cold in our throats and noses that we blamed each other for spreading may turn out to be just a reaction to the air...