Take on the Chinese Air

Whenever you get to China you are in for a shock Some of it is cultural, some of it is psychological and some of it is environmental But when you go to China twice a year for 5 years the shock is different When i got upstairs at the Shangri La and peeked out the window it no longer shocked me. Everyday that you stare out onto basically any Chinese City you look at a cloud of fog...smog. There is no sun, there is no blue and there are no white clouds. The entire city is covered in a perpetual gray fog which feels like it ages you by just staring at it. As much as we are told that te Chinese and their 1.4 billion are coming, it seems that for now they are stuck in a prison of their own growth. The money flows into the major cities but the smaller ones do not seem much happier tan 10 years ago. For all the promise if upward mobility from their industrial revolution it begs the question whether they are any better off. Quality of life is supposedly better and if that can be measured by Burberry and Louise Vuiton then I guess there is improvement. But who the hell can afford a $900 handbag here? The average worker is still living in a stagnated world even if their wages increase I have to think happiness for the average chinaman is low although maybe there is little to compare it to. They work backbreaking labor intensive jobs, in horrid conditions for minimal pay, they don't enjoy the 'finer things' and although their economy continues to grow at a feverous pace their country is taken a beating. The ponds are polluted, the rivers are toxic, the trees are brown and the air is thick with smog. Honestly for all the jokes about it being hard to deterimine the age of an Asian, here the issue is that the ones that are 30 look like try are 50. It s as if they smoked three packs per day -which they do.
How could you expect to be happy when you don't shower, live in filth and you never see the sun.

Sent from my iPhone