Breakable Bones

After being in China for four weeks, the people in Macau struck me as a sturdy lot, certainly far sturdier than the many people in Shenzhen whose frames are so slight they could easily break. Their ancestors’ near starvation for hundreds of years etched famine in their descendants’ bones. Shenzhen is a city of migrants; nearly everyone is from someplace else. Even that genetic mix combined with Shenzhen’s status as a special economic zone for the past thirty years and second richest city in China hasn’t fattened up the general population.