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Posts Tagged ‘travel writing’

China Dispatch vol. 3 #7: I come from the Land of the Ice and Snow…

Science doesn’t have all the answers. Take cold, for example. If I’m remembering high school chemistry, then high school physics, then college chemistry and college physics right, “cold” (or “heat” for that matter) essentially refers to the amount of energy something has. If an object (using the term object loosely here, so it refers to places, people, drinks, etc.) is “hot” it’s more energetic, all those little molocules jumping around and bouncing off one another like animals in one of the dance numbers in The Lion King; if that same thing is cold there’s less energy, molocules, atoms, whatever moving more slowly, then more slowly still, until finally at absolute zero they freeze into lock-step. And then it’s possible, a friend of mine told me once, to get into *negative* temperatures, but I didn’t quite understand what he was talking about then — no doubt due to an obstinate and bullheaded refusal of mine to associate temperature with anything other than, well, *temperature*, hot and cold and all that, which may be old-fashioned but is nevertheless a reflex of mine — and I’m not going to attempt to explain it now.

(Though, parenthetically, if anyone does know or would like to take a second try at explaining to me what a negative temperature might be, I promise to be more flexible.)

Anyway! The point of all this babble is to say that the commonly-held impression of cold is wrong, as I know! Or, if not wrong, then at least incomplete. China, oddly enough for a country that burns like a somewhat congenial if polluted furnace from May to August,
has a way of showing one kinds of cold one didn’t quite think existed. There’s cold as in my house in southern Anhui province, wet and just above freezing, which wouldn’t be a problem save that there’s a shortage of indoor heating in Anhui, or at least indoor heating that doesn’t excoriate you and squeeze every ounce of moisture from your tortured flesh. So when the cold creeps in through layers of coat and sweater and long underwear and so forth, it doesn’t leave. Ever. Like the spiders on your ceiling and the field mice who creep around your window at night looking for ways to sneak in, it becomes a constant companion.
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