-Kristen

The past few nights I’ve woken up feeling trapped and dirty.  Trapped because I am here on MIT’s good name, and, living in this high school’s nice apartment which we gratefully recieved from a man that praises Mao and wants us back everyday by 10 pm.  Dirty because my skin literally itches, whether from physical irritation or psychology, where the street wastewater has splashed up onto my leg.  My bed, and the armchairs in this apartment are plush but blackened.  It’s not that I can’t stand dirtiness.  I live in a college dorm for God’s sake and I’d dig around in the soil any day, but this dirt feels different.  It’s from the smoke, oil, and other chemicals that permeate through everything here.  Maybe I’m a dirt-phobe for the first time in my life, but  I highly doubt I’m over-reacting to the opaque-green Dian Chi (post coming soon) or the pollution complaints I hear from passersby everyday.     There’s so much going against any real environmental protection actions here.  Lucrative, influential industries and government corruption are themselves well-rooted beyond my comprehension, but that’s not the only thing.  There are just SO. MANY. PEOPLE. here.  Too many mouths to feed, bodies to cloth and cure, beings to shelter, entertain, yoke.  1.3 billion and growing—what the hell can you do?  Gah my abilities to contrive some idealistic path for this country are fried.  Sure, the economy is booming, the students are so bright, and many people we have met  have been so kind.  But I can’t help but perceive a sense of doom.   To explain why I use this rather dramatic word, I’d say it’s on the human life scale where the vast majority of these 1.3 billion will stay pinned to their livelihoods in storage unit-sized shops, coal-burning huts, decaying taxis crawling through roads of smoke and escaped gasoline.  But it’s also on a national scale: a resolution for the environmental disaster here seems distant from the viewpoint of anyone that has a sense of the corruption and importance of fast-as-possible economic growth in China, but the severity of the pollution does not hit until you’ve seen it and felt it.  A taxi driver here told me that his dream would be to send his daughter to the US.  There might be poverty and pollution in the US too, but there are also second chances, flexibility, opportunity.  Whether or not that is true, in China, he said, if you make a mistake, you are forever pinned to your fate.  If you step out of line, you will be forced back in or be punished. I’m not sure whether his hacking throat sounds were a result of car exhaust or cigarette smoking, but the noise is ubiquitous throughout the city.  Similarly, I’m not sure if he is happy with his life as a taxi driver, but he certainly has legitimate complaints, like how he does not have enough money or power to get his daughter out of the country, and how the pollution here sucks, complaints just like the other millions of lower and middle class inhabitants in this city have.  I could easily spend this summer being polite, teaching some English, and staying within the tangible limits of a communist school, because it seems that is what I have been funded to come here to do.  But is there anything solid I can do for the people here?  That’s why Kristen’s writing struck me.  Besides exactly summarizing my feeling here in one word, it reminds me that there is should always be something small I can do.  For now, I guess I can learn as much as I can from this trip, listening to anyone who’s willing to talk freely and visiting environmental institutes and treatment plants,  then go back to do some serious thinking.  Where there are problems there are also possibilities.  I guess that the shear magnitude of problems here has been daunting at first.  Let’s hope it’s uphill from here.