I’m about halfway through Lost on Planet China by J. Maarten Troost. I’ll write a full review when I’m done, but I just finished reading the part about his experience in Guangzhou, and I can’t help but be a little honked off that he called my hometown “an urban cesspool”.
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Hey, I’ll freely admit that I could be just a tad biased about Guangzhou, given I spent the first 10 years of my life there. And one can’t expect a laowai traveling by himself who doesn’t speak more than a sliver of mandarin to see the city that the people who live there do, but his main complaint really left me kind of befuddled. Tops among his gripes about the city is the air pollution. Troost writes about the air in Guangzhou:
It was worse even than Beijing. The air in Guangzhou is brown. No, not brown. Yellow. No, not yellow. The air in Guangzhou is sick. It is unwell.
I’ll be the first to say that the air in Guangzhou ain’t exactly clean, but yellow? Sick? That’s not what I remember, both from when I lived there and when we visited last year, or according to these expats who live there. When we visited China last year, the sky in Beijing was surprisingly blue, given all the reports we had heard about bad air there. The air in Guangzhou was ok and nowhere near as bad as the air in Xi’an, which literally burned our throats.
Here are some pictures we took last year of that “yellow”, “sick” air in Guangzhou:
To be fair, you can see some of the pollution in these early-morning photos:
Still, as the first couple photos show, it’s nowhere near the apocalyptic sky that Troost makes it out to be.
Call my city an “urban cesspool”? Grrrr!!
