China vs US: Black fuzz and civility

It has been two months since I left China, and I’ve received several e-mails from friends asking about my new life. I’ve experienced the usual culture shock – some of which I’ve described here – but my overall cycling life has been fantastic. All of the riding I’ve done so far has been in the Kansas City area (on the Kansas side) and Ann Arbor in southeastern Michigan. Here are the things I like:

Clean Air - It’s great to come home from a long ride and not feel like I’ve just emerged from a coal mine, with a sweaty layer of soot stuck to my face. It’s wonderful not to cough up a pound of lung butter on a ride. I’m still blown away by the amazing blue skies I’ve been seeing in the U.S. The beauty often overwhelms me so much that I have to pull off to the side of the road and just stare at the robin-egg blue sky. I know it sounds sappy and New Agey but it’s true. I still shudder when I  think of the toxic air I had been breathing the past six years in Guangzhou and Hong Kong.

Shortly after I moved to Ann Arbor, I took my personal computer to a shop to get a part upgraded. It was the PC that I kept on a small desk in a nook in my dining room in Guangzhou. Waffles & Steel was born on the machine. Anyway, the computer store technician opened up the processor and said, “Dude, was this thing really working?” I looked inside and was horrified to see that it was covered in dusty black fuzz. The stuff was close to choking the PC’s cooling fan. It was all over the motherboard. Like an idiot, I forgot to take a picture or collect a sample. Now I’m wondering if my lungs are coated with the black fuzz! It might be psychological, but it feels like I’m recovering faster from hard rides. I don’t feel like I ran a marathon while chain smoking unfiltered cigarettes.

Civility - In China, the drivers all seemed to be competing to see who could screw me over the worst. Cyclists had no rights. We were on the road because we were willing to be killed by a car or cement truck. Drivers could (and would) cut us off at will. They would harass us  by honking at us constantly. It was on the roads where the ruthless, selfish, dog-eat-dog side of contempory Chinese society was really on display. So far, during my rides in Kansas and Michigan, I’ve felt like drivers are competing to see who can be the nicest to me. Last month, I was dead tired near the end of a three-hour ride in the blistering early afternoon heat. I was cooling down, just spinning out the lactic acid in my legs a few kilometers from my parents’ home. I was climbing a hill at a casual pace when a lady in an SUV stopped at a stop sign at an intersection at the top of the incline. She was ready to turn into my path until she saw me. Although the driver was about 200 meters from me and had plenty of time to make her turn, she sat there waiting for me to crest the hill. I gestured to her to go ahead but she sat there smiling. So I had to get out of the saddle and sprint to the top of the hill so she wouldn’t have to wait too long. She nearly killed me with kindness. On another ride, I was on a country road with a bunch of rolling hills. I began to sense there were several cars behind me but they weren’t passing. I did a quick shoulder check and saw a huge black pickup truck with a gun rack. I started to worry that maybe the driver was a redneck who was getting ready to mess with me. But I looked back again and saw there were 3-4 cars driving slowly behind the pickup truck. I realized that they were just waiting to get over the hills so that they had a safe section of road to pass me. In China, the truck would roar up to me, honking its horn until I pulled off to the side. Or the cars would just gamble, take their chances passing me on a blind uphill and hope they wouldn’t have a head-on collision with vehicles coming over the hill. Just one more example. On Saturday, I pulled up to an intersection with a green light. A car caught me just before the intersection and was a half-car length in front of me when it signaled it was turning right. The driver then stopped and waited for me to go past before making the turn. In China, if a car was a millimeter in front of you, the driver felt he had the right to turn into your path and cut you off. During the past two months, I’ve only had three bad experiences – all of which were minor. Last week, a guy in an old beat-up Chevy came racing up to me from behind, honking his horn like an idiot. It kind of made me feel at home.

To be continued…

Breathing: Guangzhou’s ‘headache gray’ skies

“Headache gray” is the best way to describe Guangzhou’s skies on most days.  The description comes from the R.E.M. song “Daysleeper.” One of the most common questions people ask me about my cycling here is whether I worry about breathing in all the smog. I really don’t. I try not to worry about things that are beyond my control. I also tell myself that I won’t be living here forever, and I’ve promised myself that my next move will be to a place with clean air. But I often feel guilty exposing my kids’ young lungs to the filth.

This is what the skies looked like last weekend. If you got rid of the haze, you would be able to see the lattice design that runs up Guangzhou’s new iconic TV tower – the world’s tallest. But because of the smog, you can barely see the tower. It looks like a shadow that has been Photoshopped into the image. Sometimes it looks like a twister in the far distance.

It’s hard to find reliable air quality readings. I don’t trust the numbers that appear in the state-run media. In Beijing, the U.S. Embassy does its own daily air quality tests and distributes the numbers via Twitter. The Chinese authorities probably aren’t happy about that. I’ve grown so used to the foul air that I don’t notice it much. The only time it really bothers me is when a weather system blows in that seems to push down the smog on the city. After a long ride, my eyes will sting, as if some noxious chemical got trapped between my contact lens and my eyeball.

When the global financial crisis began hitting China with full force in 2008, there was a wave of factory closures in this part of the country, known as the Pearl River Delta – the “world’s factory floor” because of the industrial density. During the downturn, we noticed a dramatic improvement in the air. Blue skies were much more common. There was certainly an upside to the economic downside.