The other day I was walking along the river, taking note of all the sewers that drain into it.  It is always difficult to ascertain the significance and function of infrastructure in urban environments, but effluent running down a spillway into a river and around a toilet paper island 40 yards long is fairly comprehensible.  While at first this looks like pollution with a special kind of impunity, it makes me think about the importance of 'visibility' when it comes to human impact on the environment.  There are fields full of food crops abutting the river, just inches from these waste pipes.  Shifting my position by two feet could result in either a picture of 'environmental disaster', or an idyllic vision of 'locally grown organic produce', to use the American nomenclature.

Later I was walking through a narrow maze of small concrete roads lined with brick buildings.  They seemed like houses but every now and then there would be a car repair shop, indicated by a roll down gate and a sign with automotive imagery.  Also in the middle of this maze was some kind of factory, with large pipes connecting buildings and running elevated above the road, which occasionally turned to dirt, and then back into concrete.  The strange thing is that in this neighborhood there was not one person that I could detect.  China is reputed to be full of people, but I have noticed that there are lots of places that seem to be totally devoid of humanity.  The atmosphere was turning gray, maybe implying rain, and as the buildings drew closer together I felt uneasy.  At the entrance to a house I saw a wallet.  It was lying perfectly centered on a path that led from an open gate around a corner to what I figured was a doorway.  I picked up the wallet.  It was black and shiny and oddly unused looking.  Inside were hundreds of Yuan, credit cards, and some keys.  Already feeling apprehensive, I thought about what I should do with this situation.  I thought at first that the wallet must belong to someone inside the building, and that it would be a fun 'China adventure' to traipse up to the door and proffer the recovered item, after which I would be invited in for a celebratory stew or fireworks display.  Then I considered my profound lack of language skills, and the possibility that a lao wai trespassing with a handful of someone else's property could lead to decidedly non-celebratory events.  I hesitated, thinking that it was actually a lot of money, and that around here someone would sorely miss it if it disappeared.  I put it back down, but farther along the path toward the door, trying to shield it from view from the street.  This is something I would never do back in New York, of course.  But I won't say here what I would do back in New York.  Later I regretted not having the gumption to traipse.

On Sunday, 25 April, we had dinner with "Breeze" and "Jake".  They brought us a bag of peanuts and dried salted rabbit from Jake's girlfriend's mom.  Paradoxically, I gave them some BPL mission patches.  None of us immediately made use of our gifts.  I met these two the last time we came to China.  They are 'communications engineering' students, which as a category means something like 'other'.  Breeze taught himself English from watching movies.  He also taught himself Japanese, and was teaching himself to draw.  I have been helping him since then via email with some basic advice for his drawing, and I suppose he is practicing his English on me.

When Chinese students learn English, they are given a western name by their teacher.  Sometimes people don't really look like a 'Hildebrand' or a 'Coco', but mostly they prefer to use these names with us.  I have noticed some of the names change and one Chinese student will have no idea what another's English name might be, even though they are friends.  Breeze named himself, which I guess is legal, but I haven't met anyone else that chose the name they had.

The last time we came, I was invited to visit Breeze and his friends at their dormitory.  The concrete buildings have elaborate facades.  However, the entrances and vestibules are unadorned tile lit by a single fluorescent bulb which is on a timer.  The rooms look to be about 15 feet square, and around 9 feet high.  They have one set of windows and one fluorescent light.  The bathroom has a shower with a squat toilet.  The bathroom also seems to function as a closet.  The two walls adjacent to the window wall are lined with bunk beds.  There are six kids to each room.  Under two of the bunks are crammed desks, with about two feet of linear space per kid for their study materials and requisite pictures of basketball heros.  There is no air conditioning.  There are 18,000 students at this university.

My appearance in the room was probably a disruption of their studies, but when I came in, each person was playing a video game on a laptop in his two foot domain under the beds.  I was told that the foreign teachers never visit students in their dorms, as they are too busy.  The students are eager to speak English and practice, and the teachers may be overwhelmed with requests.  However, it can probably be easy to forget the conditions the students live in.  Unless one is a language major, English classes stop after the second year.  Apologizing for their rusty English, they explained that Chinese students may only take classes that pertain to the program for their major- there are no electives.  That's why they end up teaching themselves things like Japanese and drawing.  One starts to get the sense that these kids have to make decisions early on that are irreversible.  I'm happy to let them practice on me while I am here because essentially it's on their dime.  

It takes about 13 hours to get to Beijing from New York.  Once in China, we transferred to a 1.25 hour flight to Zhengzhou.  Luckily they only lost one bag.  Unluckily it was the one that contained all my painting stuff.  Luckily they brought it to me the next day.

All of China is one time zone, for the sake of Centrality.  The time difference is 12 hours, so one has to invert one's schedule.  Someone said it takes a day for every hour of time zone change to get over jet lag.  That calculation is obviously too simple to be right, but it took us longer than our last trip to China to get up to speed.  After 5 days I was getting up at 5 am, which is good enough.  By 10 p.m. we are catatonic.

China has a smell.  China smells like coal, and burnt sugar, with a hint of sewage.  This isn't altogether disagreeable, but it is unsettling.  It smells neither man made, nor natural.  The odor suggests aging- it smells like inevitability.

Our last visit to China doesn't differ from this one as far as the clarity of the air is concerned.  When we arrived in Beijing in 2008 I was amazed by the miasma.  Convinced it was pollution, I became perplexed when we went to the countryside and the haze was equally dense.  The photo above for instance was taken at around 10 a.m.  Eventually we figured out that the sky is seen through a semi-permanent blanket of fine dust blown eastward from the Gobi desert.  The air is very dry as a consequence and all light diffused.  It's as if there was another environment suspended over the rice paddies and fields- a kind of ghost desert.  One's head floats in this sterile, desiccated environment, while one's feet negotiate a dense agricultural compound of cultivated land and human byproducts.  I was surprised that no one ever commented about the haze, but I have come to find that people here don't editorialize much about self evident, or irreversible conditions.  Obviously I'm not used to that!

In BPL's unending quest for the trappings of legitimacy, it has issued a Recall.  But this is not like Recalls issued by corporate giants for products like unstoppable or unstartable automobiles, plasticy dog food, or leaded teething devices.  Its not even a Recall proper.  BPL announces its first Precall.

Our Systems Sustainability for New Aerospacey Products (SSNAP) Division has been analyzing the marketing value of product recalls.  We estimate that the Legitimacy Index Exception (LIE) is increased when products are publicly exposed as faulty, poorly designed, dangerous, or fraudulent.  Companies see increased growth, especially after a good media lambasting.

As all BPL products are somewhat inefficiently hand made and developed by our single employee, there is much to recommend them for this marketing strategy.  But rather than spend a lot of time and money on shipping things out, recalling them and then shipping them out again, which is really the harmful part of any recall, we will PRE-RECALL our unshipped (and even as - yet unproduced or unimagined)  merchandise.  This means that BPL Products already have the legitimizing stamp of RECALLED when you, dear aerospace consumer, receive them.  Thus, you can bask in the 'improved' condition of your Stereo Viewer, or Pocket Protector, or A7LB Space Suit, when you first remove it from its shipping carton.  BPL believes that its Precall system will soon become an industry standard. We have already effected improvements on several of our product lines equalling two to four Recalls of any of our competitors.  Our goal is to offer the best Recall Experience in the Aerospace field.