Friday, December 6, 2013

Some poratka like it dry





My friend's younger daughter’s asthma has flared up this last week.  It’s a terrible cough she gets.  His wife took her to the Doctor who was apparently a gentleman from Hungary.  The esteemed Dr. would also appear to be something of a linguist and he decided to communicate the diagnosis with my friend's wife in Chinese rather than English that his daughter’s affliction was caused by dust mites.  But his wife wasn’t sure if the word he’d spoken was the “dust mite” she had in her mind.  She needed to check.  She was asked her why the Hungarian Doctor didn’t just speak English, at this international hospital.  She’d replied dryly that she’d had enough experience with foreigners like her husband who get easily frustrated when a Chinese person won’t submit and speak Chinese with them.  My doppelgänger chum was guilty there, certainly.

Assuming the offending beasts are indeed dust mites and their wastey bits, and not just particulate matter in the shitty Beijing air then they'll need to have to figure out how to get rid of them.  I’m surprised that they are flourishing in his house.  I had a look at Wiki and they are, of course, rotund, ugly things, that you wouldn’t want to meet in a magnified setting.  But they flourish in moist environments, and don’t do well where it is dry.  What on earth are they doing in Beijing?  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_dust_mite



This explains something, perhaps.  When he lived in Hong Kong five years ago, his daughter’s asthma was bad.  When they moved to “polluted” Beijing it suddenly got better.  Counterintuitive, I couldn’t quite figure that out.  Perhaps their moist apartment in Pok Fu Lam was perfect environment to cultivate dust mites.  Or should I say cultivate “poratka” which is “dust mite” in Hungarian.  But why was their presence suddenly felt so strongly this week?  It certainly didn’t get any more moist up here in Beijing.  Perhaps it is poratka molting season 

Whatever they’re doing, the mighty DMs go about it and apparently roughly one out of five people develop allergies.  The body confuses the otherwise benign allergen produced by the poratka as being harmful and goes overboard manufacturing antibodies that cause inflammation, and mucus and all the horrible coughing my friend heard as his daughter walked down the stairs and before he gave her the inhaler.   So I guess he'll need to toss the pillows, double up on the vacuuming regimen and make sure the next lot of pillows aren’t feather based.  

We’re heading out to get a Christmas tree later on today.  This has to be the weekend for it.  We have a massive Christmas tree stand that we bought in Hong Kong downstairs, but we never use it. “Gee John, why would that be?”  I’ll tell you.  In China trees are bought as though they were houseplants.  They come live, in a large bucket complete with forty pounds of soil.   One can only imagine the confused jumble of roots inside that have nowhere to go.  Trees here aren’t cheap.  I could probably drive an hour to the country and cut something down or buy bucketed tree somewhere for US $10.00, or less.  But in the burbs here, they know we’re coming and they charge $80 to $100.00 for something that isn’t a malformed tragedy.  The odd thing is, regardless of how they look, they don’t smell the least bit sprucey.  The tree smells like wet wood.  If you take the pine needles and rub them in your hand and hold them up to your nose, they still smell again, like wet wood. 

Needless to say, a seven-foot tall tree in a bucket with the requisite amount of soil is a heavy beast.  They pack them up on a three-wheeled cart and bike them over and two or three guys lift it in for the final 20 foot dash from the door to the hearth.  Every year you imagine that you will “save” the tree when Christmas is done, and somehow plant it outside.  Misplaced, this hope is bit of a铁树开花[1]  It never works.  The ground is frozen solid, like concrete and so there is no hope of digging anything.  More importantly the tree has just spent three weeks under watered and then over watered and then under watered again in the dry heat of the home.  This environment, while not fatal to poratka is the kiss of death for potted conifers.  So there is little difference if we cut the tree down or pretend to keep it alive, the result is the same.





I have a random swing mix and Duke Ellington’s Nut Cracker Suite came on in the car last night.  That will be some perfect, elegant tree decorating music for this afternoon.  I’ll feel like I’m on Central Park West somewhere.  We’ll go grab that lonely box of ornaments and lights downstairs and get to work making the tree that won’t smell like a Christmas tree, look like one. 




[1] tiěshùkāihuā:  lit. the iron tree blooms (idiom) / a highly improbable or extremely rare occurrence

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