China Odyssey
Posted by Yang Chu
It’s the 14th day of my 28-day trip backpacking around China to help seek out, investigate, and report on sources of water pollution. I’m in a village in Bengbu, trying not to breathe as factories around
me belch black smoke into the air. With me is Zhouxiang and Zhangjun, Executive Director and Operations Director of Green Anhui, respectively. Next to us a group of local construction workers are in the middle of re-plastering the walls on someone’s decrepit looking house.
It’s not too long ago that I was locked up in a fancy resort in Beijing, drafting talking points memos for needy VIP types at a green energy conference for international policymakers. Now I’m squelching through the mud in my new post as an NGO capacity builder, a shift in career I pursued because work in the foundation world proved to be too sterile for my hands-on nature. Zhangjun shivers in the collared shirt and sweater vest combo he wears as a throwback to his recent micro-lending days. The two of us are both new to the grassroots environmental NGO scene, and still entertain very vague expectations: field visits, tight budgets, interesting work, what else?
Zhouxiang had a conversation going with the construction workers, and now shouts brazenly at one of them: “So how many people die in your village every year?” Zhangjun and I turn away snickering, embarrassed by Zhouxiang’s display of tactlessness in an area of China where any mention of mortality is considered indecent. The smiles soon drop from our faces and we stare at each other in mute horror as the worker replies without missing a beat: “always more than thirty, and every single one from cancer. Are you reporters? Please, expose those factories, save our village!”
I think back to the 1st day of my trip, when I stuffed my suitcase full of pantsuits and prepared a list of all the politicians I intended to meet; the 7th day, when a woman in Harbin showed me how vibration from the factory next door could crack the walls of her house; the 10th day, when I followed the Biliu River all the way north to find Dalian’s main water source clogged with rotting carcasses and chemical byproducts; and now on the 14th day: entire villages dying of cancer because in Bengbu the factories are law, are King, are God.
Tomorrow, the 15th day, a woman will fall 10 stories onto the sidewalk in front of me as I walk up to enter a building in Wuhu. Her blood will expand in a neat pool around her head while I watch. Periodically she’ll twitch, and a crowd will gather and twitch with her, until the ambulance finally takes her away to an uncertain end.
It’s almost comical, the expectations I started with of what it means to promote equitable development in China; vague and whimsical expectations that soon shattered against the stark face of a morbid reality. How fitting that to discover this I should undertake a journey across the full spectrum of environmental engagement, an odyssey that shows me what it is to be innocent, to be exploited, to fall sick, to die. Now I know that the career I’ve chosen is more than a game, more than a job. It’s an age-old struggle – for dignity, for progress, for survival – and it belongs to us all.
Tags: China, community partners, rivers, Water
