When it rains, steam rises from solar panels...

You can see them all from the window of my 5^th floor apartment—large, heaving and tin-rusted solar panels connected to water tanks on the roofs of each building. On days when the sun actually shines, they cast a blinding metallic glint into my bedroom. But on most days the sun doesn’t actually shine—it just reflects off of and mushes through the vale of grime and haze that sulks over Wuhan.

Harper Lee has a line in To Kill A Mockingbird—something about it being so hot that summer that the men’s starched collars had wilted by 9 in the morning. Amy Tan has a line in The Bonesetter’s Daughter that Wuhan was a city “so hot that most people would rather bathe in a vat of boiling oil than live there.”

Yeah—it’s a little like that.

Like most hells on earth, it’s not so much the heat, but the humidity. It’s all sticky and muggy and mucky—the moment you leave the apartment your clothes and hair are clinging to your damp skin. We teach in buildings with only the luxury of ceiling fans—so you must yell over their humming drone through the class, pausing only to chug water and wipe your brow. You take a deep breath and even that hot air only makes you feel sluggish or moody or morbidly obese.

In the market the men roll their shirt hems up—like the little girls in America pretending to be Britney or Christina or whoever it is this year—they take the bottoms of their shirts and roll them tightly up and up, exposing their paunchy midriffs. The students are wearing basketball shorts and sleeveless jerseys and it seems that sweatband/headbands are back in style.

For a while it wasn’t actually that bad. Perhaps after the worst winter in 50 years, we also had a nice spring. For the past month or so, I’ve slept with the windows open and cool breezes wafting through the rooms. On some days I turned on the fan—but that was all that I needed. I kept saying (stupidly) that I wanted to avoid using the air conditioner so that I could acclimate to the heat.

And for a while it worked. The same coolness that turned my apartment into a frigid icebox of frozen despair in the winter actually became an asset—the cold cement floors on my bare feet in the mornings reminded me of crossing a river or creek on flat smooth stones barely submerged in the rushing water. The aerodynamics and drafts of the apartment allowed the wind to rush through and through all the rooms—keeping it fresh and pleasant. I woke up each morning with something of a smile (on the mornings when I could sleep in).

But then God flipped the thermostat to “miserably oppressive” and it’s been downhill ever since.

Day after day passes with the humidity dripping from you and everything and everyone—and day after day you look at the sky thinking that surely all this moisture that we’re gathering in our lungs like pneumonia with each breath will gather into clouds and rain—RAIN!!!—Why won’t it rain????

And finally you fall on your bed half-naked and give up and set the air conditioner at the lowest settings and aim the fan directly on you and think about getting up for a cool drink but decide that it would force you to leave the proximity of the fan so you stay there on the bed with your feet dangling off the sides because you don’t even have the willpower to take off your shoes. You lie there and wonder if you will ever feel cool or fresh or content again. You lie there and breathe in and out and wonder how much more you weigh with this oppressive heat forcing all the gravity of the world down on you. You lie there and suddenly realize that the birds have stopped singing and it’s awfully quiet. And the next thing that you hear is the steam.

It’s the hulking, antiquated, industrially ugly solar panels on the roof beside you. We use them to heat our water—only in the worst days of winter do we ever turn on the electric water heaters—the panels do that work instead. You learn what to look for on the digital temperature gauge in the kitchen—50 degrees Celsius is hot enough for a shower—anything below and you’d better go electric. In the summer, the water gets hot enough to scald instantly—the gauge has recorded as high as 110 C before (230 F).

So you hear the hissing before anything else. Opening the curtain—there it is, steam rising softly from the panels, the raindrops hissing and sputtering on the surface. It goes on for only about 45 seconds, I guess—this ethereal scene of steam and mist and sprinkle and hiss--before the downpour unleashes the buckets that have gathered in the troposphere for days and days and months.

The rain today lasted for about 30 minutes. 30 minutes and then it was gone. The buckets of water create a cool breeze—so you sit by the open window and watch all your Chinese neighbors poke their heads out the window—one mother brings her baby and lets him stick is hand out in the rain until he gets tired and falls asleep on her shoulder, one older woman is drinking her tea and staring down through the leaves at a bicycle. You eat fresh fruit that you now must keep in the refrigerator all day because it will go bad otherwise, and you play some music and wash your face and feet and say your prayers and breathe deeply. For 30 minutes. Maybe an hour, if you’re lucky.

Then the Wuhan summer returns—which is not so much a summer as it is a sauna—and you wait out the days till the flight home.