The Smell of Burning Coal

Check out this video about "the dirtiest city in the world." The images in the video from Linfen, China are so familiar to me and remind me most of my two trips to Fugu, China to stay with a friend and her family.

The gray skies, the trash everywhere, the cars... what sticks with me most, though, is the smell of burning coal. As I watched that video sitting in my living room, I had one of those strange experiences where I smelled burning coal as if I were in my friend's home in Fugu by their furnace. And that isn't the first time that has happened to me. When I first returned home from China, sometimes I would wake up in my dorm room and completely forget where I was. And then I would smell burning coal. I wasn't actually smelling it, of course, but I was remembering the entire experience of waking up in a strange world- one of pollution and gray skies and trash and cars- and smelling burning coal.

And yet, the people of Linfen- and Fugu and Lanzhou and the thousands of other polluted cities in China and around the world, still lead happy and normal lives.