Chapter 3

三

I landed in Shanghai, stayed my first couple days there, doing the tourist thing.

I was awed by the metropolis, its varied architecture, dazzling skyline, and endless cultural, historical attractions. It was like a larger, more crowded, more lit up, more neon, more exotic and more futuristic version of New York City.

However, my school and its surroundings were a far cry from Shanghai’s towering, glass-plated buildings, Lamborghinis, and grandeur.

As I rode in the carriage of a bullet train, I was amazed at how fast the train traveled. It was as if it glided supersonically, flying over the tracks, was propelling like a bullet shot towards its destination.

However, gazing out the window, I was dismayed as the sky got darker and grayer the further we got from Shanghai, and noticed that the people looked poorer, darker and grayer, sullener too...

Henan province is widely ridiculed in China as a backwater, similar to how West Virginia is viewed by most of America. However, more recently Henan has also been known for its factories and pollution, its smoggy skies of gray. The air quality reaching its abysmal apex in the bleak days of fall and winter when the pollutants leave the air with a flavor like a mouthful of car exhaust.

Having done very little traveling outside Florida and the Caribbean, arriving in Henan in fall and not seeing the sun, at all, was tough to handle, and I was experiencing seasonal affective disorder lethargy almost immediately, the initial elation of being in China subsiding quickly...

Nongzhou, the city nearest my school, was dreary, almost as crowded as Shanghai, but lacking much in the way of culture, only having restaurants, KTVs, clothing stores, phone stores, grocery stores, and mostly vacant shopping malls. The buildings were drab, identical, rectangular, strangely empty edifices contrasting bizarrely to the place’s overpopulation.

Driving out of the city, en route to the college, I looked out the taxi’s windows, studied the barren environs, its farms, factories, square blocks of dead apartment buildings. Along the way I saw scattered clumps of withered old men, cigarettes dangling from their mouths, the men seated on plastic stools, selling fruit and vegetables from baskets alongside the road.

I saw several active and abandoned construction sites and occasional small hills, many of which appeared to have been mined; the hills had large chunks missing, open dirt wounds on their tops and sides. Alongside the mountains were winding rivers of the most curious shades of brown or green. The highways we drove on were in pristine condition, however, newer looking than I would think...

The college’s campus was vast, had green trees, flower bushes everywhere, many state-of-the-art square, curvy glass buildings, but, like the city, the campus was also mostly empty, much of it still under construction. Along the campus’s perimeter were active factories and empty, hollowed out buildings, half-built office buildings and a colossally large petrochemical plant, a dark metallic superstructure, with twin smokestacks billowing steady upward streams.

It was depressing, the surroundings. Looked like a bomb had hit it.

But the air, the polluted air was even worse and had lived up to its infamous reputation.

I swear, the air not only burned my lungs and throat, but also ate at my mind.

Since I’d arrived in China, even in Shanghai, even after the jet lag had worn off, I’d had cognitive issues, trouble thinking straight.

And once I got to the school, after hearing of the ghosts, my first night on campus, at that pickup basketball game by the cafeteria, ever since then, I’d been plagued by insomnia, and, what’s worse, when I did manage to sleep, I started to have wild, weird and terrifying dreams. Nightmares like I’d never had before.