We are not talking about a hypothetical effect here. The Asian
cloud has been integrated into the daily life of a region that is home to
60 percent of the world’s six billion people. For John Hayes, a British
resident of Bangkok, the ever-present choking pollution finally forced
him to uproot his family and return to England. In a Guardian story
entitled “Life under the Asian Brown Cloud,” Hayes wrote about the
“two-stroke motorcycles spluttering burnt oil, 10-wheel trucks convert-
ing inferior, adulterated and cheap diesel into dense black clouds, and
nice shiny imported limousines spewing out more fumes.” The jour-
ney to Hayes’s children’s playground, only a mile away, could take an
hour of lurching through traffic and smoke. The kids, he says, visited
the hospital “at least once a month with allergies that caused irritation
to the eyes and nose, or with the vicious effects of a tropical common
cold. This usually meant not just a runny nose, but a high fever accom-
panied by aches and pains. The sense of helplessness that any parent
experiences when their child is sick is exacerbated by the severity of the
symptoms.”
Writing from Bangkok for Melbourne, Australia’s The Age, Alex
Spillius reports that a dinner party in Asia “almost invariably produces
a round of pollution stories: the friends whose children developed
chronic asthma in Delhi; the horrors of heavy industrial waste in
Beijing; the filth in the sea off the beaches near Bangkok. But anybody
who endured the 1997 haze in Kuala Lumpur or Singapore generally
wins the raconteur’s first prize.”
Spillius further states that “the smog caused by forest and planta-
tion fires in Indonesia was so intense that visibility was reduced to
meters, schools were closed and children ordered to stay indoors. The
populations of whole cities wore protection masks... And still the fires
continue to blight Southeast Asia each year.” In early 2000, some
twelve hundred forest fires were detected in Sumatra and Borneo,
sending pollution levels soaring in Indonesia and neighboring
Singapore. The fire-borne haze became worse in 2001, when residents
of Singapore and Malaysia were forced to don respirators. In central
Kuala Lumpur, smoke obscured the hills around the capital. In south-
ern Thailand, residents of five provinces were urged to stay inside or
wear face masks.
86 Jim Motavalli