On a recent morning in Arizona, my two young sons padded out into their grandparents’ garden to marvel at the flowers of a hedgehog cactus. The spectacular pink and yellow blossoms of this particular plant burst open once a year and last for only a day.
The boys seemed a bit like those flowers. We were on a lung-clearing holiday from the pollution belt of eastern China, where we live, and after a winter spent blanketed in gray smog, they flourished in the bright sunshine and crystalline desert air. At one point that morning, my 5-year-old son looked up at the half-moon still hanging above a distant mountain range. “Grandpa,” he said, “is the sky here always so blue?”
My wife and I are writers based in China, and our sons have spent most of their lives there. One of the first words they learned in Chinese was “wuran,” or “pollution.” Growing up in Beijing, they developed a disconcerting knack for guessing the air-quality index, a measurement of tiny particulates in the air. China now produces more pollutants than any other nation on earth, and 66 of the country’s 74 largest cities still fall far short of the government’s air-pollution standards. Beijing, our home until last autumn, rates among the worst.
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