As an American expat in China, James Fallow wondered “how much long-term damage foreigners do themselves” by living in “smoky, urban China.” He decided to find out.
He asked doctors and public-health experts what they thought of how expats fare in China, where, according to World Bank estimates, 750,000 people die prematurely each year just from air pollution. “Alarming upsurges in birth defects and cancer rates are reported even in the state-controlled press,” notes Fallow, in his “How I Survived China” in the November issue of The Atlantic.
The air quality is so bad, writes Fallow, that he and his wife joked with friends that now was the time to take up smoking, since their lungs would never know the difference.
A foreign-trained doctor in Beijing told Fallow, “Just using your eyes, you know this can’t be good for anybody.” Fallow continues,
Another way to know this is via a clandestine air-quality station that the U.S. Embassy has built in Beijing. The Chinese government does not report, and may not even measure, what other countries consider the most dangerous form of air pollution: PM2.5, the smallest particulate matter, tiny enough to work its way deep into the alveoli. Instead, Chinese reports cover only the grosser PM10 particulates, which are less dangerous but more unsightly, because they make the air dark and turn your handkerchief black if you blow your nose. (Spitting on the street: routine in China. Blowing your nose into a handkerchief: something no cultured person would do.) These unauthorized PM2.5 readings, sent out on a Twitter stream (BeijingAir), show the pollution in Beijing routinely to be in the “Very Unhealthy” or “Hazardous” range, not seen in U.S. cities in decades.
Other doctors and fellow expats told him, “you get over it” (bouncing back once they return to more healthy settings), and that he should “worry about something else.” A Chinese doctor told Fallow, “I tell my patients, the most important ‘medical’ step you can take is to put on a seat belt in a car, wear a helmet on a bike, and run for your life in crosswalks.”
But Fallows ends on a high note, quoting a Western-trained doctor pointing out that China “is an exciting place. It’s a historic time. People seem to feel alive.”
“That made sense when I heard it,” writes Fallow. “In China I had felt terrible, but alive…and that makes me say that foreigners who want to go should not be deterred.”
Photo: atlasnetwork.org
