The Forecast for Today: Death from Above!

Mother Nature must show up drunk at China’s doorstep, or she’s on some pills or something. Beijing is said to have year-round weather, but I never knew there were more than four seasons until I flew across the Pacific. To the usual line up of Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter, add the new seasons: Boggle, Pixiwood, Chicago and Mars.

And also, Mother Nature, make sure that no season changes in full confidence. Have it meander and second-guess itself for several months before it finally decides to take the leap and flux. This is the Beijing experience.

Beijing air pollution is no secret. Every home-countried laowai has read about it in articles about the Olympics. Yet once in a while it rains or gusts or both, and the skies become blue for a day or two. A week into my hutong experience (I roughed it in a siheyuanr for 2 months, like a camping trip), the weather decided to pull a bigger trick.

I had just walked out the door for a job interview. I jaunted through the courtyard to the front door without noticing the weather, but then arriving in the long alleyway, I noticed a reddish tint to the air in front of me. I looked up. Red sand whirled and swirled over my head and I was forced to close my eyes before they were assaulted by the hurling demon particles.

I nabbed a taxi to the nearest subway station, hopping out across the street. Charging for the subway entrance, I looked up again at the sky, which now had reddened further and resembled a sight one might see when walking on Mars. Switching trains to the line-13 monorail, I peered out the window at various construction sites outside the second ring freeway in northwest Beijing. Cranes were obscured by the red haze now and sand beat against the windows of the train. We exited into the terminal, and I descended the stairs and hopped into a taxi waiting conveniently (as always) outside. I coughed as I showed the text message of my destination to the driver. “Is this a sandstorm?” I asked, as he drove past the first blurred intersection.

“This is not a sandstorm! Sandstorms are intense! This is just some sand raining down,” the taxi driver hollered back at me. He explained that a real Beijing sandstorm was hard little rocks of sand that could injure a man, while this was just annoying red dust. The taxi stopped after a few more blocks. I thanked him for his enlightening remarks and darted from the cab.

I made it into the doors of the office building and took the elevator up. The office where I was to be interviewed had a glass wall facing the outside. Outside was pure brownish red. It seemed exactly as if I was in an oxygen dome in the movie Total Recall. The interview went smoothly and I was offered the job (part-time) immediately. It was teaching English in random houses around Beijing; anything from one child at his home, to 15 kids in class, to a businessman at my place, to a bunch of fashion designers in an office. Anything goes. I commented on the weather as I left. “It happens every spring” assured the interviewer.

The next day it rained a dirty black rain all day. Then it dried up. And suddenly it was clear and sunny out. I hypothesized that the red dust cloud from Mars had stuck to all the pollutants, and then was washed to the floor by the raindrops, and the duel effect ended up clearing the sky. The blotchy mess all over the ground afterward was another matter. I called this next season Boggle.

A few days later summer hit hard, but then fluctuated back to winter the following day, then summer again. Finally, in a fluster, the trees decided to react. At first I thought it was snowing, but then I remembered how hot and sweaty I felt. I grabbed one of the thousands of white flakes lazily descending through the air and rolled it around on my fingers. It was like cotton.

Now, I’ve seen trees shed feathery seeds before, but it was nothing like this onslaught of white puff balls raining down upon us. It was as thick as a hailstorm and stretched for miles in every direction. At first I was careful to breathe through my nose so as not to inhale one of those sizable balls of fluff, but the next day Beijing was still swarming with them, and while talking to a friend I got lost in the moment of jovial conversation and sucked one of the little pixies into my windpipe. This caused me to fall to my knees choking, while my Australian associate laughed at me.

Then came the wind. Forget Chicago, Beijing can turn into a city windy enough to garner itself the name twofold. It beats on your windows harder than a firework on Chinese New Year. It can turn a fifty cent Chinese umbrella into a trumpet in less than a nanosecond. And it can blow all the nastiness from the other three alien seasons into the next municipality. Chinese Mother Nature (complete with single long eyebrow-hair and chin mole) decided she was done with playtime and swept the area. Finally, summer appeared to gather enough courage to reveal itself in full.