Close your eyes.

Wait, don’t do that. Keep them open. Keep reading. I want to try and describe a place.

Ears popping on the descent, I realize dully that the ‘clouds’ I see outside the airplane window aren’t clouds at all, but rather a jaundiced, sulfuric fog.

Oh gods. Smog.

The plane only breaks through this miasma some fifty feet above the runway and, boom, we’ve landed. As we taxi to the gate, I gape out the window. I can only see about 100 yards, the length of a football field.

I had heard about the smog and pollution in China, remembered the talk before the Beijing Olympics, but live and in vivo, it is really shocking. What a first impression!

After clearing customs I find my brother, big and tall and beaming, and together we walk towards the train that will take us into the center of Beijing. The platform is half-covered by a magnificent steel and glass curved awning a hundred feet above us. But it is open on the sides and subject to the breeze, and it can’t keep the smog out.

I can taste it. It coats the inside of my mouth, slightly sour and metallic, and I am almost instantly queasy. Is it the overnight flight jet lag no sleep, or is it the air?

I will learn later that breathing in Beijing, at best, is like being a pack-a-day smoker. The air is noxious, packed with particulates that flat out damages lungs. I won’t talk too much about the hacking cough that my sister acquires after our short stay, or the phlegmy spitting that every Chinese person–be they old, young, male, female, ugly, or attractive–does every chance they get, BUT the proof is in the pudding.

The smog is like a hacking yellow welcome mat. Hey westerners! This here? This ain’t what yer used to.

Welcome to China.