In general, I like the rain in the Beijing. In summer it cools the city a bit, and heaven knows, Beijing needs all the moisture it can get. Rainstorms often clear some of the pollution out of the air, which is also nice.

What rainstorms don't do is clean the city. If I had to describe Beijing in a just a few adjectives, "dusty" would be right up there near the top of the list. Between the construction, steadily disintegrating roads and three thousand miles of desert starting just on the back side of Fragrant Hill Park, there is plenty of dust to go around.

The rain always seems to bring more dust. I know; it's counterintuitive. You'd expect the rain to rinse the dust away, but it doesn't work that way. Beijing doesn't actually get raindrops so much as it gets mud drops. Proof of this can be seen in the fact that people have to chisel their way into their cars after a rainstorm. It's a little like those home fossil discover kits that you used to be able to buy, where you could "discover" your own little dinosaur collection, except in the grown-up version you "discover" an Audi A6. In Beijing you carry an umbrella not so much because you don't want to get wet as because you don't want to comb the grit out of your hair afterward. Plus the acid tends to fade your shirts.

Beijing also has poor drainage. This seems remarkable considering the parched state of the city. You'd figure water would simply soak into the ground instantaneously. Which, perhaps it would if the ground wasn't entirely paved over. Unfortunately, there just aren't enough pot holes and drains to go around, and muddy water tends to pool in driveways, dips in the sidewalk, along gutters, in those same pot holes, and pretty much any other slight depression it can find.

Beijingers have got remarkably creative at dealing this, and any old scrap of cardboard or plywood and any handy brick or cinder block is likely to be pressed into duty as a makeshift bridge or stepping-stone. Ninety-year old grandmothers in Beijing can hop like gazelles from brick to brick with perfect accuracy, a talent honed by a lifetime of avoiding mudpuddles.

I have been described as many things over the years, but "gazelle-like" is not one of them. In fact, klutziness is probably one of my defining attributes. Despite my desire to be remembered as a guy who moves with feline grace and barely restrained power, I am much more likely to be remembered as the guy who did a header over your coffee table at a party, took out a floor-lamp on the way down and killed the dog. So, mincy little stepping stones are a problem for me and my size twelve planks. The walk from my apartment to the subway is a particularly nasty stretch of sidewalk and driveways, exacerbated by heavy roadwork and a huge patch of exposed mud where a lively corner restaurant was recently demolished to make way for, um, a huge patch of exposed mud. So walking from home to the subway or back in the rain is like a slog through the jungle. You really want boots and puttees to keep the leeches out. But I wear a suit and dress shoes.

Thank god there is a place near my local supermarket that will buff my shoes until they look like new for 10 kuai. I used to polish them myself, but, in fact, I lose money on that compared to what these guys charge (and how good the results are). Dry cleaning my suits, on the other hand, is a little more expensive. But it is impossible --impossible-- to walk from the subway to my apartment or back in the rain, and not have a spattering of muddy, little spots all up and down my trousers. If my tailor in Singapore could see what Beijing is doing the suits he lovingly crafts for me, he'd weep. If, that is, he wasn't a stoic, ethnic Chinese guy who can probably 吃苦 with the best of them. Plus, of course, he's always thrilled when I ask for a new suit.

I'm not the only one who has this problem. This morning, as I shuffled to work with the masses, we were all bound together by the muddy spatterings on our legs. The girl in front of me had made the mistake of wearing nearly white jeans that were just long enough to drag in the mud. The backs of her legs would have looked appropriate hanging behind the rear wheels of a Range Rover. Another poor soul had worn flip-flops, which become tiny little mud catapults in these conditions. With a good flap he could coat his own ass with mud.

The other problem with walking to work in the rain is the umbrellas. With the amount of usable sidewalk space limited by the puddles and construction, the normal sidewalk throngs are packed into an even tighter space. When everyone opens an umbrella, the situation becomes volatile. People get hung up on each other, they tip their rain drippings onto each other, and the normal Beijing pedestrian tendency to be only faintly aware of surrounding people, vehicles, woks full of hot oil and open flames is exacerbated. This is particularly worrying for me. I am taller than the average Chinese person, and the rib points of most umbrellas are at exactly my eye level.

So I'm going to spray my trousers with Scotch-guard water repellent and start wearing safety glasses on my morning walks, at least during the rainy season. With my 15 kuai umbrella, which is powder blue with the words "feel great!" silkscreened on it dozens of times, I figure I won't look weird at all.


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