Don’t Cry, Tai Lake

up as a result of the ‘economic success.’ All they care about is this particular moment while they are here. They don’t care about what might happen in ten years, or even one year after they leave Wuxi. Last year, the former mayor was promoted to a ministerial position in Beijing because he presided over a revenue increase for three years in a row. All the officials know this only too well. And that’s not even to mention all the ‘red envelopes’ that they receive from businesspeople.”
    “But there must be some government agency in charge of taking care of the situation.”
    “Sure, there’s a city environmental office, but it exists only for appearance’s sake. Some of the factories are equipped with wastewater processing facilities, but they generally choose not to operate those facilities. The cost of doing so would wipe out their profits. So they have the facilities for the sake of appearances, but continue to dump waste into the lake in spite of the worsening crisis. From time to time, when the central government in Beijing issues some red-letterheaded documents, the local environmental office may put up a show of checking pollution levels, but it informs those companies beforehand. So before they arrive, the waste treatment facilities start operating, and the sample they take will then be up to the government standard.”
    Talking, they crossed an old stone bridge in the shape of a crescent moon, which looked to be in bad repair, and skirted along the bank where willow tree limbs hung like a curtain.
    “I’m no expert,” he said deliberately. “But I’ve seen green algae in other lakes, I think. Even in the tiny pond in the Old City God’s Temple Market in Shanghai. Of course, never anything so serious as here.”
    “Let me tell you something. The water in Tai Lake contains two hundred times more harmful material than the national standard, and even the Wuxi disease control center can’t deny that figure,” she said, taking a drink from her bottle. “Of course, there’s more than a single cause. In addition to the industrial pollution, sewage treatment measures also lag far behind the social and economic development of the Yangtze River delta. In the early nineties, the annual industrial sewage entering the lake was estimated at 540 million tons, and household sewage at 320 million tons. But nowadays, the total sewage is more than 5.3 billion tons. Only thirty percent of the household sewage is treated before being dumped into the lake.”
    “Wow, you keep all of those figures in your head?” With an apologetic smile, he asked, “Do you mind if I smoke? I need to digest those figures. This is a serious problem for China.”
    “Go ahead,” she said, noticing that he took out a soft pack of China , one of the most expensive brands. Then she realized that she must sound like a research report. “Sorry for the lecture. I forget you’re on vacation.”
    Perhaps it wasn’t just a subject that she was passionate about; talking about it also gave her a sense of self-justification. She was unpopular at the company, where people took her as something of a Cassandra figure, and that morning she almost became a murder suspect.
    “No, you don’t have to apologize. On the contrary, I’m grateful for your conversation—or your lecture, if you want to call it that. It’s something I could never have learned from the official publications. It’s really shocking.”
    She couldn’t help noting the look of serious attention on his face, bookish yet sincere. She hadn’t had an attentive audience like Chen before. Nor one where she didn’t have to worry about the consequences of talking openly. He wasn’t local, and would probably be gone in a week.
    “Your work is truly important, Shanshan,” he said in earnest.
    “I’m a nobody in the company. No one cares about what I say. If anything, it only marks me as a troublemaker.”
    “Because of your work?”
    “It was naïve of me to take the job so seriously. I was hired for the sake of appearances, which I found out after I started work. All my research was put into a newsletter available only to the company executives. I doubt whether they ever read it, or whether they did anything about it if they did read it. Time and again, I felt obliged to speak out against Liu’s business decisions, like shutting down the waste treatment facility or fabricating the reports being sent to the agencies. But what difference did it make?” She