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8/4/13 9:06 AMLife in a Toxic Country - NYTimes.com

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August 3, 2013

Life in a Toxic Country By EDWARD WONG

BEIJING — I RECENTLY found myself hauling a bag filled with 12 boxes of milk powder and a

cardboard container with two sets of air filters through San Francisco International Airport. I was

heading to my home in Beijing at the end of a work trip, bringing back what have become two of

the most sought-after items among parents here, and which were desperately needed in my own

household.

China is the world’s second largest economy, but the enormous costs of its growth are becoming

apparent. Residents of its boom cities and a growing number of rural regions question the safety of

the air they breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat. It is as if they were living in the

Chinese equivalent of the Chernobyl or Fukushima nuclear disaster areas.

Before this assignment, I spent three and a half years reporting in Iraq, where foreign

correspondents talked endlessly of the variety of ways in which one could die — car bombs,

firefights, being abducted and then beheaded. I survived those threats, only now to find myself

wondering: Is China doing irreparable harm to me and my family?

The environmental hazards here are legion, and the consequences might not manifest themselves

for years or even decades. The risks are magnified for young children. Expatriate workers

confronted with the decision of whether to live in Beijing weigh these factors, perhaps more than at

any time in recent decades. But for now, a correspondent’s job in China is still rewarding, and so I

am toughing it out a while longer. So is my wife, Tini, who has worked for more than a dozen years

as a journalist in Asia and has studied Chinese. That means we are subjecting our 9-month-old

daughter to the same risks that are striking fear into residents of cities across northern China, and

grappling with the guilt of doing so.

Like them, we take precautions. Here in Beijing, high-tech air purifiers are as coveted as luxury

sedans. Soon after I was posted to Beijing, in 2008, I set up a couple of European-made air

purifiers used by previous correspondents. In early April, I took out one of the filters for the first

time to check it: the layer of dust was as thick as moss on a forest floor. It nauseated me. I ordered

two new sets of filters to be picked up in San Francisco; those products are much cheaper in the

United States. My colleague Amy told me that during the Lunar New Year in February, a family

8/4/13 9:06 AMLife in a Toxic Country - NYTimes.com

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friend brought over a 35-pound purifier from California for her husband, a Chinese-American who

had been posted to the Beijing office of a large American technology company. Before getting the

purifier, the husband had considered moving to Suzhou, a smaller city lined with canals, because

he could no longer tolerate the pollution in Beijing.

Every morning, when I roll out of bed, I check an app on my cellphone that tells me the air quality

index as measured by the United States Embassy, whose monitoring device is near my home. I

want to see whether I need to turn on the purifiers and whether my wife and I can take our

daughter outside.

Most days, she ends up housebound. Statistics released Wednesday by the Ministry of

Environmental Protection revealed that air quality in Beijing was deemed unsafe for more than 60

percent of the days in the first half of 2013. The national average was also dismal: it failed to meet

the safety standard in nearly half the days of the same six-month period. The environment

minister, Zhou Shengxian, told People’s Daily, the Communist Party mouthpiece, that “China’s air

quality is grim, and the amount of pollution emissions far exceeds the environment’s capacity.”

I want my daughter to grow up appreciating the outdoors — sunsets and birdcalls and the smell of

grass or the shape of clouds. That will be impossible if we live for many more years in Beijing. Even

with my adult-size lungs, I limit my time outdoors. Though I ran on the banks of the Tigris River

while in Baghdad and competed in two marathons before moving to China, I am hesitant about

doing long-distance training for that kind of race here.

One thing I refuse to forgo is biking, even if it means greater exposure to hazardous air than

commuting by car or subway. Given the horrendous traffic here — itself a major contributor to the

pollution — I go to the office and restaurants and my courtyard home in Beijing’s alleys on two

wheels. This winter, I bought a British-made face mask after levels of fine particulate matter hit a

record high in January in some areas — 40 times the exposure limit recommended by the World

Health Organization. Foreigners called it the “airpocalypse,” and a growing number are leaving

China because of the smog or demanding hardship pay from their employers.

One American doctor here has procured a mask for his infant son. My mask of sleek black fabric

and plastic knobs makes me look like an Asian Darth Vader. Better that, though, than losing years

of my life.

THIS spring, new data released from the 2010 Global Burden of Disease Study, first published in

The Lancet, revealed that China’s outdoor pollution contributed to 1.2 million premature deaths in

8/4/13 9:06 AMLife in a Toxic Country - NYTimes.com

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2010, or 40 percent of the worldwide total. Another study, published by a prominent American

science journal in July, found that northern Chinese lived five fewer years on average than their

southern counterparts because of the widespread use of coal in the north.

Cancer rates are surging in China, and even the state news media are examining the relation

between that and air pollution. Meanwhile, studies both in and outside of China have shown that

children with prenatal exposure to high levels of air pollutants exhibit signs of slower mental

development and of behavior disorders. Research from Los Angeles shows that children in polluted

environments are also at risk for permanent lung damage.

In northern China, shades of gray distinguish one day from another. My wife and I sometimes

choose our vacation destinations based on how much blue we can expect to see — thus a recent trip

to Tuscany and the Amalfi Coast. I will never take such skies for granted again. “We still can’t get

over how blue the skies are here,” the wife of an American diplomat told me over dinner in

Georgetown more than half a year after the couple had moved back to Washington from Beijing.

Food safety is the other issue weighing on us. We have heard the stories of rat meat being passed

off as lamb at hotpot restaurants, cooking oil being recycled and crops being grown in soil polluted

by heavy metals or wastewater from factories. The food catastrophe that most frightened both

Chinese and foreign parents was the milk scandal of 2008, in which six babies died and at least

300,000 children fell ill after drinking milk products tainted with melamine, a toxic chemical.

Since then, many parents of newborns have gone to great lengths to bring into China foreign-made

infant milk powder when it is needed to supplement breast-feeding.

Months after my trip back from San Francisco, my wife and I realized that our supply of formula

was dwindling. We sent e-mails to friends we thought might be traveling soon to China, asking for

volunteers to be “mules.” Our friend Alexa flew in from New York this week with two boxes of

powder. We have two other friends who promise to bring more this summer.

I recently spoke to a woman in Beijing, Zhao Jun, who pays Chinese students and housewives

living in Europe to mail her cans of Cow & Gate, a British brand. “We’re constantly worried, so we

want to find a good brand from overseas with a long history,” she said.

So widespread is the phenomenon of Chinese buying milk powder abroad that it has led to

shortages in at least a half-dozen countries. Hong Kong has even cracked down on what customs

officials call “syndicates” smuggling foreign-made powder to mainland China.

The anxieties do not end with milk. Our daughter has begun eating solids, so that means many

8/4/13 9:06 AMLife in a Toxic Country - NYTimes.com

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more questions for us about how we source our food. Do we continue buying fruits and vegetables

from the small shops in the alleys around our home? Do we buy from more expensive stores aimed

at foreigners and wealthier Chinese? Do we buy from local organic farms? Last weekend, I went

with a friend to visit a village home an hour’s drive northeast of Beijing. He and his wife wanted to

lease it as a weekend house, but I was more interested in gauging whether I could use the garden to

grow our own vegetables. Some people I know here have done that.

“It’s so difficult to protect yourself on the food issue,” said Li Bo, a proponent of communal

gardening and a board member of Friends of Nature, an environmental advocacy group. “I never

thought I would become a vegetarian. Then in 2011, I said enough of meat, after so many examples

of wrongdoing in animal husbandry.”

Each day that passes in Beijing makes it harder to discern the fine line between paranoia and

precaution. Six years ago, when I was back in my hometown Alexandria, Va., to pack for my move

to China, my mother handed me several tubes of toothpaste. She had read stories that summer of

toxic toothpaste made in China. I felt as if I was going off to college for my freshman year all over

again. I put the tubes back in my parents’ bathroom. When I go home these days, my mother still

on occasion gives me toothpaste to bring back to Beijing, and I no longer hesitate to pack it in my

bag.

Edward Wong is a correspondent in China for The New York Times.

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