Cup of Cha
This is China

Don’t read too much into the title. This is not about the overheating economy, but literally the heating systems in Chinese buildings. There are two designs, and neither works out all that well.

Winter in China is one of the weirder things you can experience. In the south, central heating is banned by law as a way to curb energy usage. As a result, people with enough money use dual functioning air conditioner units. For most people, though, this is an unnecessary expense, and they simply layer up clothing, even when inside, making people look like bundled babies, long underwear, and all.

In contrast, in the north, where the winters are bitterly cold, buildings frequently overheat, creating an atmosphere that causes everyone to feel tired and disoriented. The blanket of indoor heat does not kick in until a specific day each year (November 1^st, I believe), but once it does, my apartment and office are like a hazy bizarro world. To make things worse, the way many buildings are designed, even when all the windows are open and it is freezing out, it’s still toasty (roasty) inside. Of course in Beijing the air is always dry, and extreme overheating only exacerbates this, forcing people to choose between having a humidifier in every room, or having the inside of their noses dry to a crisp. I prefer the former.

Neither overheating, nor having a freezing apartment is an appealing option, but I’ll take the warmth over the cold over the long haul. When you live south of the Yangtze River you have this odd contradiction where the temperatures are never that cold, but your body can never warm up. In most places it rarely goes below freezing, but it feels cold all the time. Bone chillingly cold. That’s because, with no central heating, apartments are often colder than outside. You never warm up. The entire winter you feel like you’re walking outside in a late November chill.

You might think that it is nice to talk a walk in late fall, but you would not want to live that way. A friend of mine taught in Hangzhou in the mid 90s. Each day his hair used to freeze while he was teaching after coming in from the city’s perpetual drizzle. His students constantly looked cold and had trouble concentrating in class.

When I was in Sichuan five years ago, students would scatter whenever I entered a room to teach. It turned out that they would study in the classrooms, showing up as soon as they woke up, to get out of the bitter cold that enveloped every other part of their lives. The classrooms themselves were not heated, so the kids wore heavy coats as they studied, but the critical mass of bodies would make the room warm and sticky. It was not pleasant, oftening smell like sweat, but it was a much better option than sitting in a freezing dorm room.

Even middle class apartments are not immune to the winter chill of poor heating. When I visited some friends their home was so cold that I left all of my outerwear on while we ate dinner. Wool hat and all. At night their guest room was even colder, and I went to sleep fully dressed with half a dozen blankets piled on top of my chilled body. I would even put blankets over my head so that I would not wake up in discomfort. The only part of my body that would peak out from the warmth of the bed was my nose so that I could breathe in the cold, fresh air.

And with each breath, my big laowai nose would get colder and colder. But my body stayed warm, until the moment I left my little cocoon and headed into the freezing apartment beyond.

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