Death Penalty for a Ghost in China
Copyright© 2020 by Kim Cancer
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.
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