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Shanghai, China
January 22

Numbers

No one knows how many people there are in China. The official estimate
is 1.3 billion, which is believable because every time we look out the
window of our tiny apartment to the street below, there are people. My
wife Bonnie observed this after she flew in with a fresh frame of
reference from the woods of Maine to join our 10-year-old son Jack and
me. In Shanghai, people are always everywhere. Walking. Bicycling.
Jogging. Careening around in cars.

People waving their arms. People walking backwards. Old men hanging
bird cages in trees. Women watering greengardens planted between a
wall and a sidewalk. College girls with umbrellas. Children with school
uniforms laughing. People on the corner talking - Chinese people are out
of the cradle endlessly talking.

According to the accounts of China Daily, between 14 million and 20
million people live in Shanghai, no one knows for sure because every
day people flood in from the countryside searching for work. In Beijing
there are 14 million or 15 million people. In Guangzhou there may be 13
million. A lot of medium-size cities of around 6 million people, few
Americans have ever heard of, like Quanzhou, Chengdu, Zhengzhou,
Xian and Lanzhou. When we visited Xiamen last month, it had the
coziness of a small American city, like Portland, Maine, where 70,000
or so people live - in the city of Xiamen there are 1 million people.

Punch line: Most Chinese live in the country. Around 400 million are in
the cities, which implies, by arithmetic, that around 900 million live in
the country. Off the record a couple of diplomats told me there are
almost certainly more than 1.3 billion people in China. If I'm not
mistaken, I've seen at least 1.3 billion people from my kitchen window.
They flow continuously. A humming sound which must be the sound of
their voices fills Shanghai even late at night.
_______________________________________________________

Shanghai
January 29

Practical matters

Jack and I stand at the window sometimes and just watch flows of
people. They meander endlessly on foot and bike along Zhengsu Road,
coming onto this narrow sidestreet from the nearby main drags, Siping
Road and Handan Road, and disappear into other sidestreets, Guoshun
Road, Guoda Road and Guofu Road, and dozens of others we've never
seen in our own neighborhood.

Jack wonders how much a billion is. So do I, and truthfully there is no
way to tell because it is a number that bends down and vanishes over
the horizon of your mind.

How much is a billion? How much is a million? Say you had $1 million
on the day Christ was born, and you spent $1,000 a day (no interest
accruing). How long would your million dollars last? A million is a
thousand thousand - 1,000,000 - so it would take a thousand days to
spend your $1 million. A thousand days is about 2¾ years - 2.735 years
to be exact. Your million dollars would last not quite three years.

Now, if you had a billion dollars on the day Christ was born, and you
spent $1,000 a day, how long would your money last? A billion is a
thousand million - 1,000,000,000 - so it would take a thousand times a
thousand days to spend a billion dollars. That is, it would take 2,735
years. At a thousand dollars a day, you would still have about
one-fourth of the money left.
_______________________________________________________

Shanghai
February 6

Impractical matters

How many Chinese are born every day, and how many die is a matter of
great perplexity to social engineers and great mystery to others, as
Annie Dillard deconcluded in her unsettling book For the Time Being.
And whether there are 1.3 billion or 1.5 billion Chinese is so
unfathomable a problem that it may not make any real difference even if
it was solved. After all, there are a billion people in India too. Maybe
there are 6 billion on Earth, no one knows for sure, it's too large and
uncertain a number to wrap your mind around. Billions of human
beings. Billions of stories.

Where do they come from, and where do they go? This obvious question
leaps instantly and harmlessly out of the realm of science and statistics,
and into the discredited realm of metaphysics, a branch of philosophy
dealing with unseen worlds. Gung-fu tzu, known by his Euromoniker
"Confucius," declined to speculate on the unseen. Chinese are practical
people.

Metaphysics tends to wash over into religion. It is seen as more or less
theoretical, describing what appear in intuition and (subsequently)
logic to be the unseen structures of the universe. Religion is more or
less experiential, describing what appears in both moral and spiritual
feelings to be the meaning or reality of the universe. In the age of
science, metaphysics is pure speculation, and therefore discredited; and
religion is a poison - the "opiate of the masses," which is a way of saying

religion is no more or less than a sociopolitical-economic tool for
controlling large numbers of people. Certainly there's a good case to be
made that in both Europe and China popes and emperors used people's
religious beliefs to personal and political advantage.

The whole idea of "heaven" becomes seriously clouded by misuses of
religion and misunderstandings of metaphysics. As a religious or
metaphysical idea, heaven is a fantastic relic of the past, like an obscene
stone figure from ancient Central America. The nearest meaningful use
we make of the word "heaven" appears when stargazers refer to the sky
as "the heavens," a harmless cliché, like the cute, fat, disturbingly
grotesque face of a copy of a Mayan figurine on your coffee table. Actual
heaven is billions of light-years from the everyday routines in the living
room.

Instead of heaven, we have in scientific parlance "cosmology," which is
the study of the constituents of the universe. The universe is made up of
the visible objects, or the unseen but mathematically verifiable
energies, of the Earth and sky. Much of the cosmos science describes
also lurks beyond the horizon of everyday routines. Who can
understand the difference between a lepton and a muon? What do we
make of the chemistry teacher who informs us that electrons are not
actually circling around atomic nuclei, even though he has just
explained in detail how they do that?

Where do electrons come from, and where do they go? No one knows. I
once read that it's estimated about 1072 atomic and subatomic particles
are in existence at any given moment in the universe. This is a number
with 72 zeroes in it. The number "1 billion" has nine zeroes in it and is
already too big to think of. The Chinese speak of a million by saying a
hundred ten thousand. In my sleep zeroes flow endlessly across the sky
toward the sea-blue horizon, and most go out of sight.

Cosmologists figure 96 percent of the material universe has not been
seen.
_______________________________________________________

Troy, Maine
Summer

Heaven

Every time I look up it begins again. The night air is thick with starlight,
the pine and fir steeples point to white sprays in the sky.

Thousands of stars needle light directly at me, and in late summer the
number multiplies because it is not just a spray but a thickness of stars
between Sagittarius and Scorpio, like a flow of milk, in Greek gala. The
suns encountered there number in the tens of millions at least, so many
they are unresolvable by the eye. The whole galaxy has at least 100
billion stars.

In Shanghai, clouded by the glow of green and orange light, the number
of visible stars even on clear nights was fewer than dozens. The more
layers of illumination we cast up there, the emptier the night sky seems.

The Unnameable

Even by yourself in the moist night air of the country, how many stars
do you not see? It is not a nameable number. Here on our edge of the
Milky Way, the view to the farther wing is obscured by the galactic
center, near Sagittarius, where 200 or so globular clusters of ten
thousand or a million stars each circle the star-packed core. Beyond
them, unseen, are billions and billions more stars circling in the same
gravitational groove as us.

Astronomers report also that the light of many millions of stars within
view is too dim to reach us. And by all calculations, untold millions or
possibly billions of planets orbit the stars in this neighborhood. And
there are galaxies beyond our galaxy. In the northern hemisphere we
do not see the Magellanic Clouds, smaller clumps of 10 billion or 20
billion stars each. But in dark northern skies, the untelescoped eye can
discern a faint wash of light in the constellation Andromeda which is a
galaxy that may be a mirror image of our own, of 400 billion stars or
maybe a trillion. This galaxy, known to stargazers professional and
amateur as M31, is about 2.2 million light-years distant - meaning it
takes a photon of light leaping from a star there and traveling roughly
186,000 miles per second, 2.2 million years to spark silently in the
retina of your eye.

If the Milky Way has around 100 billion stars (some astronomers think
it may have 750 billion), and M31 has around 400 billion stars, that's at
least 500 billion stars, plus the Magellanic Clouds. But that's just in this
neighborhood, the way the White Mountains of western Maine are only
the nearby rises among all the Earth's high, rugged mountains, counting
those powerful peaks in Colorado, and the holy Chungnang Mountains of
central China, and the Himalayas, not to mention the thousands of
Kilimanjaros unknown to me who lives on the edge of the Dixmont Hills.

In a Hubble telescope photo, a galaxy singled out for study in the
constellation Leo may be so huge it ripples the skin on the back of your
neck, but also in the photo like background noise are tens or dozens or
maybe hundreds of light swirls which themselves are galaxies farther on
in space-time. Not thousands, but billions of galaxies - astronomers
figure there might be 80 billion to 120 billion, each with billions of stars
or more. Galaxies stretch like splashing drops to the depths and
breadths of the intergalactic space that has been seen through
instruments.