About 5 years ago, during my last year in Istanbul, I was living in a lovely old flat in Osmanbey, a neighbourhood at that time populated by old man bars, Armenians, artsy types who couldn’t afford to live in Beyoglu, and very small scale industry. The building next door, above the plumbing and wiring shop, was a mini textile factory.
One night, the mini textile factory caught fire.
I figured this out when I smelled the acrid burning polyester fumes seeping in from under the closed bedroom door. I opened the door to find my cat, Lola, looking rather perplexed on the other side, grey-furred from the smoke and coughing daintily.
The living room and hallway were filled with nasty toxic smoke, and out the front windows, out in the street, the air was opaque. At some point fire engines gingerly made their way down our impossibly narrow, hilly backstreet (technically a sokak, or lane). We bundled Lola into her carrier and were halfway out the door and down the winding staircase when the awful woman upstairs told us to calm down and go back to bed. Everything was fine. Just a little fire. Nothing to see here. Bloody foreigners.
The crazy thing is, we did go back in. It was 3am. We were exhausted. We opened the balcony door next to the bed for ventilation and let Lola sleep in the mostly unpolluted bedroom. It took her days to properly clean her fur and she had a chronic sniffle for weeks.
These days, Shanghai isn’t being much kinder to our pulmonary well being.
Here’s a Tweet I sent on Monday, gleaned from the US consulate’s air quality reading that afternoon.
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koangirl HOLY CRAP! “@CGShanghaiAir: 10-22-2012 15:00; PM2.5; 269.0; 319; Hazardous (at 24-hour exposure at this level)” 12-10-22 6:03 PM |
Hazardous.
They noted it so calmly.
It reminded me of the one from Beijing last year, where the US embassy there sent out a series of increasingly appalling hourly readings, culminating in one that read: “Crazy Bad”. Apparently, the particulate matter had reached a level so high that the folks who had written the program probably thought it could never actually reach that level so they were safe in writing whatever they wanted. I presume the next threat level would have been, “Good Grapes, Batman!” or perhaps, “Pack Your Bags”.
After our Monday afternoon dose of hazardous life-giving air, I noted several other pockets of local evil: opening our bathroom door at night emits a puff of chemically acrid air from the open window; walking past the supermarket on Yongjia lu last night, there was a 50 meter stretch where the air was suddenly about 67.3% horrifically toxic, bringing back very sharp memories of the textile fire in Istanbul.
Did I ever mention that I’m asthmatic? Not severely, but enough to need an inhaler from time to time.
I wonder then, why I indulge in self sabotage by living in absolutely dreadful cities, as far as my lungs are concerned.
In London, for 3 years I had chronic nose and throat issues. When I ran off to Ghana for a month in the middle of my London sojourn, I was horrified to discover that I was sweating grey, sneezing grey, coughing up grey for about a week after arriving.
In Kayseri, in Central Anatolia, they burned soft coal in winter. By springtime, my books were covered in a rather substantial layer of crunchy, black dust, and my hanging tapestries, when taken down months later after a 2 year stay, left a dark grey outline on my walls.
In Istanbul, I had chronic lung and eye issues culminating in 1. a corneal ulcer that nearly left me blind in one eye, and 2. a few cases of serious bronchitis and one case of pneumonia. Both situations involved doctors telling me that if I really did want to get better, I needed to leave Istanbul.
So I did, after 6 years.
And moved to Shanghai, where the water made my hair fall out and my skin go rashy, where my asthma got so bad one summer that I sucked my dad’s loaner-inhaler dry, where sometimes we can’t even see out of our 16th floor windows because the air is opaque white.
We now have a filter attached to the shower hose so my hair no longer falls out and my skin isn’t sore to the touch. I take my dad’s home-made organic kelp capsules to deal with the heavy metals I inevitably ingest. We keep the windows in the flat shut all the time, except the bathroom (for ventilation, as mildew is brutal here) and kitchen balcony (because the gas pipe comes out there and we don’t want to die). Still, the air seeps in, the toxic, sticky dust settles on everything, and I keep my inhaler by my bedside.
I wonder, sometimes, why I do this.
I mean, this month I’m doing a 30 day detox because I felt tired and sluggish and heavy after a way too intense September (30 days of work, eased by after work beer and chocolate and eating out because we were too tired to cook, followed by a week of indulgence in Hong Kong). No booze, no sugar, no dairy, no grains- all because, in theory, I want to feel healthier. And I do. I feel a lot better, though after long days at work, a glass of wine would be lovely. But I’m still doing it, temptation aside, because I want to treat myself better than I have in the past. I want to undo some of the damage done.
Which makes me stop and think about why I put up with air deemed hazardous, veggies that are anything but organic, tap water that is unfit for drinking and bottled water that has been through dozens of potability scandals since we moved here, and daily food contamination scandals.
For goodness sake, I grew up in the forest, drinking amazingly lovely well water, eating fruits and veggies my parents grew in our garden, eating the eggs of chickens I fed and watered myself, and generally living an objectively sane and sensible life.
The crazy thing is, I like it here. I have my mops, my lovely access to fabulous Chinese food, my fascinating little neighbourhood, my quite-engaging job.
I also liked London, Kayseri and Istanbul, even though they were all killing me slowly in their own special ways. I’m trying very hard to reconcile my compulsive fondness for living in toxic places that just happen to be really quite interesting.
I seriously hope I don’t regret my life choices when I’m 60 and my blood is composed of 58% heavy metals and my lungs are crunchy with particulate matter.
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