“People don’t really take this music seriously anymore,” she said.
At its southern edge, the improvised ballroom came up against another dance area, where a rank of about a hundred people, mostly elderly, were proposing a variation on the electric slide. They beamed with carefree amusement as they danced. Who were these happy citizens?
And above all, where was Sad Coal Man?
Who is Sad Coal Man? Search Google Images for “Linfen,” and you’ll see him. Nobody gives his name, of course, so I just think of him as Sad Coal Man, and if there is an iconic image of Linfen, he is it. (The silver medal goes to Sad Coal Man’s older brother, Man on Bike with Face Mask.)
Sad Coal Man’s lot is to stand forlornly by the side of the road, forever staring into the distance over our left shoulder. Sad Coal Man is young and wears a dirty brown jacket over a dirty brown sweater, with a dirty black shirt underneath. Sad Coal Man’s face and neck are covered with coal dust and his brow is furrowed. When reproduced at a small image size, he looks like he’s squinting, almost in pain. Larger versions reveal more subtle emotions. His eyes are clouded not with pain but uncertainty, with doubt for the future. Sad Coal Man is so sad he looks like he might cry. But he can’t. His heart has been hardened beyond tears by a lifetime lived in the world’s most polluted city. Sad Coal Man also needs a haircut.
Never mind the blue sky in the corner of the photograph, over his shoulder. With Sad Coal Man as evidence, you can draw only one conclusion: Linfen is a hellhole, a place bereft of human dignity, where people don’t even know how to wash, because there’s no point. His expression and appearance are calibrated to bring out our condescension.
When I look at him now, though, I see something else in his face. Awkwardness. Someone has told him,
But Sad Coal Man was nowhere to be seen in Drum Tower Square. Maybe he was up in the mountains, mining. Maybe we’d find him later, and ask him what he was thinking in that picture, and whether he was friends with the Crying Indian from those anti-littering ads of the 1970s.
The square had more to show us. On the other side of the semi-electric slide, people were playing hacky sack. In this part of the world they use a weighted, feathery shuttlecock, but the moves are the same: the inside kick, the outside kick, the chest check, the behind-the-back. The only difference is that in Linfen—perhaps in all of China, I don’t know—hacky sack is not just a game for young men, but for people of all ages. Best of all were the grandmothers hacking it up like they were between classes at Hampshire College.
Nudging toys and rabbit-shaped balloons out of the way, we ducked in front of a row of vendors. There was writing on the ground. Half a dozen men were practicing calligraphy, using long brushes to paint water on the stones of the plaza.
That was the last straw. The civic charm offensive was complete. To grow old within walking distance of Drum Tower Square seemed like a blessing, if you had the lungs for it. Here, in the smog capital of the universe, I was reminded that there was more than one kind of health.
Sometimes I despair at the prospect of growing old in my own country. In the United States, seniors are supposed to keep to the house, or at least stick to the park benches. You don’t exactly see them playing Frisbee in Central Park. In Linfen, though, citizens old and young come to exercise in the public square, and sing old songs, and play hacky sack. They dance, they slide electrically, they watch their kids or grandkids ride plastic tricycles around like lunatics. They write poems in water on the flagstones, and watch them evaporate. This place was pretty great.
Don’t worry. I’m not debunking anything. We’re still ruining the world, and Linfen is still polluted as hell. The reason I find myself beating the same thematic horse on every continent isn’t that the polluted places of the world aren’t polluted. It’s that I love them. I love the ruined places for all the ways they aren’t ruined. Does somebody live there? Does somebody work there? Does somebody miss it when they leave? Those places are still just places. But when we read horror stories about them at home in our cozy green armchairs, we turn them into something else, into stages on which our worst fears can play out.
We also hold up these poster children—Linfen, Port Arthur, Chernobyl—to tell ourselves that the problems are
So I love the ruined places. And sure, I love the pure ones, too. But I hate the idea that there’s any difference. And I wish more people thought gross was beautiful. Because if it isn’t, then I’m not sure why we should care about a world with so much grossness in it.
One calligrapher finished painting a broad grid of beautifully rendered characters, and several of his fellows began a jocular critique of his work. An aging man with a dark green jacket and a bad comb-over saw us watching, and stepped forward.
His name was Mr. Ma, and he wanted to know if I could understand the conversation we were listening to. Cecily told him I couldn’t.
But foreigners are smarter than Chinese, he told us, not even half joking. He had heard a foreigner speak Chinese once, and had concluded that it must be very easy for foreigners to learn it. He thought I must understand it, too.
Disbelief that I didn’t understand Chinese had been a running theme. In Guiyu, Mrs. Han had asked Cecily about it more than once. He can’t understand us?
A retired prison guard, Mr. Ma had lived in the Linfen area all his life. The city had expanded over the years, he said, but it hadn’t changed much. Had I noticed the air?
I had.
It’s haze and coal, he said.
Yes indeed, I said.
He addressed Cecily. Be open-minded about dating foreigners, he told her. It’s okay for Chinese and Americans to marry now.
Cecily rolled her eyes. I think. I couldn’t really tell, as I was busy with my own eye roll. To his credit, though, Mr. Ma also told Cecily that she had done right to focus on her career and education.
Take care of him, he told her, as we parted ways. He’s a guest in our country.
Linfen has a number of decent attractions besides the smog. From Drum Tower Square, you can take a nice run through the grounds of Shanxi Normal University and out to the riverfront, which reminded me a bit of Hudson River Park, in Manhattan. There were no skate parks or beach volleyball courts, but there was a mini-golf emporium, closed for the winter.
Spreading east from the river is the Hua Gate area, a wide pedestrian arcade in the style of the National Mall, lined with temples and buildings. Of these, only the Yao Temple is supposedly original, the site of one of the earliest Chinese dynasties, dating back millennia. But it’s hard to know what’s real. Across the arcade from the Yao Temple is a scaled-down replica of the Forbidden City’s famous Meridian Gate. The fakey vibe only increases down the sidewalk, where there’s a replica Temple of Heaven, distinguishable from the Beijing original not only because it is much smaller but because it has a haunted house inside.
From a cart, we bought two
Next to us was a large sign with a picture of the Hua Gate, a sort of oversize Arc de Triomphe. ONE OF THE FIFTY MOST WORTHY PLACES FOR FOREIGNERS TO VISIT, the sign read. NATIONAL AAAA TOURISM SCENERY.
Good enough for me. We started toward the far end of the mall, passing carnival games and rides, hangers- on from a Spring Festival installation that gave the whole place a Coney Island feel. We stopped for a bit to explore
