It’s awfully uncomfortable in Shanghai once December rolls around. The air temperature drops to the forties, sometimes into the thirties, but the humidity stays high so the cold just seems to penetrate everything. Since there’s little heating in most places, you never really get warm or shake the chill. The only time I can feel comfortably warm is if I’m in a new office building or five-star hotel that is frequented by foreigners and has “normal” heat or by staying in the hot shower in my apartment.
When I was in the States this past summer, I bought one of those new Titanium jackets from Columbia in anticipation of the cold. Its pretty good, but I still need to layer up. One of my students noticed it (Chinese are particularly fond of Columbia stuff because its expensive), and told me that their ads in China show guys wearing only their underwear and one of those jackets in the winter. No fu*kin’ way. Not in Shanghai.
So things are bad enough, but the Chinese love to leave doors and windows open – even when they have their heaters running – which drives me nuts. Sometimes, China is like a Monty Python skit where everything appears quite normal except for one important detail that gets changed to make the whole situation ridiculous.
I’ve asked several Chinese about the contradiction of being energy and environmentally conscious (and they are – every light bulb in the country is florescent or led), while running heaters with doors and windows wide open. Some of these individuals include physics and chemistry teachers with PhDs and other smart people.
Almost all of them tell me they need the clean, fresh air from outside to help their health. They seem oblivious to the undisputed fact that the air in China, particularly in the cities is the unhealthiest on the planet and would probably be improved by being run multiple time through the filters on every heater and air conditioner they use. If there is any whiff of anything in the air in a room, undetectable to me entirely – all the windows get popped open with the heaters running still. Even for cooking aromas. It’s nuts.
I’ve stepped a couple of people through the logic of their ways and some possible conflicts in the reasoning behind open air heating and cooling (same practice duplicates in the summertime), and they look at me like I’ve got three heads. Fact-based logic, presented step-by-step loses every time to the rote learning-without-thinking that influences so much of the country.
The Chinese government finally agreed to changing their air-monitoring methods to measure pollution particles 2.5 microns or smaller which had been causing a huge disparity between clean air reports issued by Chinese municipalities and those issued by foreign Embassies who had instrumentation on their rooftops – including the U.S. The Chinese were blithely reporting a beautiful day to be outside while the more sensitive equipment was measuring air quality that could kill. Things take time here.
There are quite a few street vendors around that cut-to-fit sell leather belts. They’re not hand-tooled or particularly special like you’d find at craft shows; just leather belts in black and a few shades of brown. I’m not sure if its the population growth or what that keeps these places in business, but I am sure it’s not coming from any growth in girth.
The reason I know that is because Chinese guys, not big-waist-ed to begin with, wear belts that wrap almost a third of the way around their waist after the buckle – like they either lost half their weight or are expecting to gain half again and want to be prepared. I’ve not counted carefully out of respect, but my guess is that most belts people wear here have six to eight extra holes in them and the coinciding length. Why?
China is a place that wastes very, very little (except for copious amounts of heat and the energy to generate it), and they recycle everything to the degree that an empty cardboard box is a scarce sight. An empty beverage bottle is scooped up by a recycling entrepreneur before it can hit the ground. I have no idea why leather isn’t conserved a little more, there are shoe guys that fix shoes you and I would toss – even sneakers. Maybe it’s the pigs. Chinese consume a lot of pork.
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