Free A Death in China by Carl Hiaasen, William D Montalbano Page B

leaving the museum, or whether he walked back to the hotel or had been driven. What he remembered with clarity was sitting on the bed, staring out the hotel window, puzzling, and the lie—and wondering why.
    If you were a man in your sixties with serious heart trouble, would you go to China, where tourism is rigorous and health facilities are primitive by American standards? Perhaps, if it was to see a long-lost brother.
    But, if you did go, would you remember those life-giving pills that you had to take two or three times a day “for the next forty years”? Of course. And if you took them with you, would you take them for the entire trip and a reserve supply, just in case? Again, yes.
    And there logic exploded. Stratton had examined David Wang’s effects with care. The only medication he had found was an unopened bottle of Excedrin.

CHAPTER 7
    Grass, like nearly everything else in China, is subject to political interpretation. Historically, the Chinese have taken a dim view of grass. In Peking’s parks, the dirt is swept daily since cleanliness is prized, but gardeners relentlessly uproot any tuft of grass. Grass breeds disease, generations of Chinese have been taught. Additionally, Communist doctrine teaches that grass is decadent since it is usually associated with leisured classes and generates exploitation—one man hiring another to cut it.
    In the pragmatic years, though, when the town fathers of Peking were allowed to gaze at their city without ideological blinders, they recoiled at what they saw. Peking, capital and presumed showcase of the most populous nation on earth, was a mess—overcrowded, disorganized, dreadfully polluted.
    An emerging generation of Chinese environmentalists has sought to repair the wreckage by planting trees and, yes, grass. But history does not die without a fight. So it is that on some weeks students at Chinese elementary schools can hear a lecture one day from an earnest ecologist on the virtues of grass and another from a functionary of public health on the merits of its destruction.
    Tom Stratton, amused by the ongoing struggle between tradition and modernization, had early on spotted a fresh plot of grass on the shoulder of a new highway overpass near his hotel.
    It was on this hard-won and possibly temporary bit of green that he sat cross-legged in the heat of a summer’s afternoon to read David Wang’s journal.
    august 10.
    Peking overwhelms me, and it is only my second day. Walking the streets, I realized how cluttered and musty my memories have become. As a child, I visited this city a dozen times, and for all these years, I have carried visions of its history and art, visions of brilliant colors and vibrant people.
    Yet that is not what I have found so far. What has struck me, instead, has been the crush of masses of people—all seemingly in a hurry and all almost faceless amid the brownness of the city. Each block seems to have at least one noisy factory. Brick chimneys spew so much filthy smoke that hundreds of Chinese customarily wear surgical masks, called koujiao, to protect their throats and lungs from infection. For a city with so few automobiles and trucks, I have never seen, or breathed, such foul air.
    I suppose that this is one of the prices that the government has chosen to pay for industrialization, and I must admit that I have seen several great technological accomplishments. This morning, for example, I made a trip to the Grand Canal, which stretches eleven hundred miles to Hangchow. It is the longest man-made waterway in the world and many Chinese believe that it is more of a masterpiece than even the Great Wall.
    During my childhood, however, the Grand Canal never was fully utilized because it had become blocked with silt and impossible to navigate at many key ports. My father told me it had been that way all during his life; my grandfather, too, could not remember the Grand Canal in its prime.
    Yet, I learned, under the Communists the canal has been