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.
[1]
tiěshùkāihuā: lit. the iron tree blooms
(idiom) / a highly improbable or extremely rare occurrence
No comments:
Post a Comment