Bikingchina’s Weblog

Note from Steven: Billy is totally lying about the toilet. I forgot to add that at the end, and I would hate for people to think that we really pooped in the workers’ wells.

In the beginning of Bleak House, Charles Dickens describes London during the industrial revolution as, “Fog everywhere. Fog up the river where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.”

This description of London in the 1800s is China today, where the country is going through its own industrial revolution. As we bike through the cities and surrounding countryside, it is clear that we are traveling during a historic period in China’s development.

But it is clear that China still has a long way to go. It is easy to read in history textbooks that the United States and Europe went through similar transformations, but when you’re actually biking through it, the reality is much worse. Since the day we have arrived in China, we haven’t actually seen the sun—it almost feels like the country is blanketed by this giant shroud of pollution. Craig said it best when he described the landscape of China as a post-apocalyptic wasteland. All we need is Billy to bike in a leather jacket and experience a few explosions along the road and we’d be living a pre-crazy Mel Gibson’s life.

Most of the cities we are going through are factory towns and a few miles outside of every city, we inevitably bike past huge manufacturing plants spewing untold amounts of pollutants into the air. Today, as we were traveling, there was a tiny trickle of a stream on the right side of the road. Trash and dark, murky water was flowing down this stream, and I remember thinking to myself how dirty it looked.

A few minutes later, we saw three boys playing in the stream. I had no idea what they were doing, but they were knee deep in this foul mud. It reminded me of my own childhood, where I used to build little rivers in the mud, except here, the water and mud they were playing in were much more dangerous. In my classroom this year, I remember having a discussion with my students about the medical problems that occurred after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima—seeing sights such as the ones in China make me wonder the same thing about what medical problems will emerge once this industrial boom ends.

**

While the majority of this trip is spent biking across China, there is an even more important goal at work here—and that is to raise awareness of the plight of orphans in China. Before I arrived, the extent of my knowledge was that the orphans in China were disproportionately girls and children with special needs—there is still a stigma attached to both in Chinese society.

On our third day of this trip, we had the opportunity to visit our first orphanage, located in Tianjin. Tianjin is the third largest municipality in China, after Shanghai and Beijing. It has approximately 10.2 million people (by comparison, New York City only has 8.2 million). Like most of China, the scale of the city is enormous—skyscrapers stretched across the city to the point where none of them seemed that impressive. It was only when you stepped into a typical building and saw 30 floors on the elevators and realized that Memphis doesn’t have a single building that tall that you get a sense of just how large the city is.

When we arrived at the orphanage to volunteer, I was struck by the conditions and the children. Before I arrived, I had mentally prepared myself for third-world conditions, like something from a scene in The Kite Runner, but instead, I found a modern facility that was fully staffed, well-funded, and most importantly, the kids seemed well-loved.

The Tianjin orphanage we volunteered at had approximately 700 orphans, ranging from newborns to college students. Every orphan at the center had been diagnosed with special needs, but as I learned later, the severity of the needs vary widely. We saw some children suffering from cerebral palsy and were confined to wheelchairs, while other kids appeared completely normal and healthy except for a cleft lip or mild learning disabilities.

There was also one child who was clearly the favorite among the staff in the orphanage. He was placed in a section reserved for the most extreme cases, which was confusing, because he looked like a healthy, happy toddler.

The sub-director of the orphanage saw our confused looks. We couldn’t understand what he was doing here amongst these other children who had serious medical conditions.

She explained: Even though this boy looked completely healthy, he was actually in the direst condition out of all of them. He had a type of congenital heart disease and as he grew older, his heart wouldn’t be able to keep up. He only had a little while longer to live.

When I looked at him again, I noticed that his lips and hands had a bluish color.

She said that the orphanage had taken the child to the best hospital in Tianjin, but they didn’t have the ability to treat him. They would have tried to take him to a country like the United States, but it was too dangerous for him to fly. Looking at him, seeing him play and laugh with the other children and staff, I couldn’t believe that he was dying.

But there was also a lot of hope in the orphanage.

The children there were beautiful. We had the opportunity to lead a small class of elementary school students at the orphanage, where I met a girl named Ella during art class who was drawing a picture. Ella decided she wanted to draw a picture for us, and the three of us helped her set up the scene and pick out colors. The entire experience reminded me of my job back in the United States and my own students back in Forrest City.

When we left the orphanage, I realized that I had heard a lot about the problems with orphanages in China—and there is some merit to these problems. Of those 700 children, most of them were considered “unadoptable” because of their special needs status. But new partnerships with foreign organizations and organizational reform are slowly making their way into the orphanages.

In many cases, I felt so hopeless there as a volunteer but unable to do anything to really help the children. At the same time, the caring staff and happy, intellectually stimulated children also inspired a lot of hope. While we were there for only one day to help, the staff members we met work there every day to help change the lives of those children.

**

Knee update: I hurt my knee after the first day of biking and tried to bike on the injured knee for another 50 miles on the second day. As a result, I got a pretty painful case of patellar tendonitis, which has severely limited the range of motion in my knee, and I got sharp, stabbing pains any time I bent or extended my knee. I tried riding on it for the third day, but it was too painful, so I bought a motorized bike to follow Billy and Craig. It’s kind of lame, because I really want to be riding with them, but this was the most logical solution to the problem rather than risking further injury to the knee. After staying off of it for a solid five days, I am pleased to report that my range of motion has fully returned and the pain is at an all-time low. I am REALLY looking forward to biking again once we hit Nanjing.