China smells

Petter Hessler wrote in River Town that, at first, China was just sounds to him. He described the sounds of freighter ships passing through the Yantgze River channel locks at Fuling, the sound of the 24-7 Peking Opera station inevitably blaring out of some cabbie's stick-shift, King Long jalopy and the sound of sandaled feet padding up the mountains of stairs in the river town.  

If Peter Hessler's river town was sounds, mine just smells.

The Haihe River,  called the "Mother River of Tianjin" by locals, dissects the city and surrounds my campus. Walking over the bridge that leads out to a six-lane thoroughfare, I pass through clouds of algae plume/seaweed vapor, the sulfur smell of underground sewers and exhaust from the perpetually congested Weijin Lu. 

During the afternoon, the river attracts grandfathers who fish while their grandchildren are in school. The old men smell like mold; it is a warm climate with some sweaty days and older men seem to wear a uniform of dress slacks pulled up to the naval and stretched out white, tank-top undershirts. Washing clothes is not done as frequently here because almost all clothes are line dried (dryers are considered selfish wastes of electricity). Chinese people also don't use deodorant because, as a Chinese friend told me in Shanghai, "Only white people sweat."

There are sporadic clouds of cigarette smoke, but not as many as Western media encouraged me to expect. Women rarely smoke because, like drinking, smoking is improper for ladies. Most men, like the one in this picture, smoke a pack a day.

With far fewer street vendors than Shanghai, Weijin Lu mostly smells warm, like sweet tofu, cooked in cylindrical, steel drums and sold underneath the overpass. It's here that young Chinese teenagers roll out blankets of faux jade and amber jewelry.  The smell here is more a feeling of dinginess because these hard-working people live in a city where the dirty air leaves dust behind.

Peter Hessler may have had a romantic depiction of pleasant sounds, but I enjoy every one of the unpleasant smells in Tianjin. Tianjin is often called a real Chinese city, a working city, and the smells are comforting in their Earthiness.