- August in Nanjing defies expectations: extreme heat replaces mild warmth, disrupting normalcy and comfort.
- Nanjing’s summer is unbearably hot, surpassing other global hotspots with its intense, humid 38°C (feels like 48°C).
- Winter in Nanjing offers little relief, as indoor heating makes it feel hotter than summer, creating a paradoxical climate.
- The essay reflects on Nanjing’s heat as a metaphor for global stress, climate change, and life’s relentless pressures.
Arriving in August in a new city in the Northern Hemisphere should be a well-judged exercise: quieter, as most holidays are over; the weather should be warm, the delectable sighings of early autumn beginning to peak through some cooler days.
It should. But Nanjing decides, like a spoilt middle child throwing a tantrum, like a violent spark creeping up on dry grass, that a normal and happy summer is not for enjoyment.
For it is safe to say that arriving in Nanjing in August is HOT.
For those who have never experienced a summer in a furnace city, let me again repeat, without any elaboration or tautological exaggeration or hyperbolic imagination, that Nanjing is Hot; Nanjing is Scorching, it is Boiling, it is Sizzling and Blazing and Sweltering; it is Fiery and Burning and Boiling and Torrid.
Reflecting on this heat over this winter, I wonder if it is just a warped nostalgia taking hold in my mind, trying to recall the baking of one’s soul; surely I embellish. Indeed, it was not that unpleasant my cognitive dissonance argues. Perhaps I am like Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, wistfully reflecting that “Somehow, it was hotter then”. Yet, like a sizzling nightmare, I have no doubt the heat will return as a destroyer of our comfortable worlds.
Because Nanjing in Summer is Hot.
We are fairly well-travelled and have experienced a fair amount of hot summers. We have sweltered through the humidity of a Durban and New York and a Caribbean Coast and a Russian Summer; humidity that clings and claws at your pores. We have been to Death Valley and Kruger National Park and the Namibian desert; all dry, all scorching, all around the 40 Celsius mark.
And yet, they never came close to the heavy heat of a Nanjing Summer. A 38 humid heat (real-feel of 48) where a 100-metre walk destroys any vestige of what is normal.
Any outside activity becomes, to echo Gatsby, a reality where “in this heat, every extra gesture feels like an affront to the common store of life”.
This heat means that if one could enter Nanjing into Greek mythology, Helios would be the name with which our stifling myths and legends concur. Nanjing personified would be standing inside a stuffy bar, steamily dragging on a cigarette with a smouldering intensity, feverish eyes promising both passion and peril, leaving delirium and desire in their wake.
Once again: Nanjing in Summer is Hot.
And what does Nanjing offer in the way of refreshing oneself amid this kiln? Nanjing offers Heat. Hot beer. Hot Water. Hot Pots. There is a romanticist elegy waiting to be written about heroically surviving a Nanjing summer walk and finally arriving at an oasis of a restaurant, gasping for something to drink, and having warm beer served to remind you that, like life, one should never expect comfort in this level of heat.
To be fair, there is a Winter to provide respite. And this winter should be cold. And yes, indeed, experiencing my first Nanjing Winter, I have seen these gleams of cold—my thin South African blood has struggled on walks and duties outside in the frigidness; my multiple, and multiplying, clothing layers are a source of amusement to those born in lands where snow is their right.
However, this cold is survivable. It is, actually, more than survivable because, to reiterate a point, Nanjing is Hot. Part of the irony of Nanjing’s heat is that getting cold can almost feel impossible.
It is as if the latent summer heat does not actually disappear, but instead seems to seep into every air-conditioner and radiator and underfloor heating, waiting for an opportunity to expel its feverish breath once more.
Because Winter in Nanjing is Hot.
Dare I say that, at times, Winter is hotter than the summer, as you struggle to cool down in any indoor place. Entering a building after a brisk walk makes one feel attacked; you will be roasted alive. Everywhere, no thermostat is set at a pleasant temperature (let’s say, 22) but on a ‘Nanjing Summer Max’. While you sweat and struggle in your thermals and beanie, a Didi trip reminds you there is such a thing as too much hot air. Double glazed windows that don’t open; malls and trains that forget one needs to breathe; a clothing heat, a clanging heat; jackets and jerseys and jumpers over arms and carried around echoing the irony that it is all-day-hot as the snow approaches outside.
Nanjing is Hot. I Should, therefore, want to highlight that the best metaphors write themselves and allow a mixing of idioms and anecdotes and some hyperbolic resonances to the everyday figurative language that life can buy.
I Should want to mention how, when Shakespeare wrote of “hot days” leading to “mad blood stirring”, we can all picture the moment: tempers up, anger swelling, and sweat drenching.
I Should, accordingly, begin to mention the global situation we find ourselves in; how we are indeed, living in a world of growing heat, beyond the vestiges of the temperature we live.
The growing scorch of wars and rumours of wars drive in some way the despair and loneliness epidemic of worry and stress, making us frogs slowly seeing ourselves boiling alive.
I Should write of the fires plaguing so much of the world, the climate growing hotter and hotter, which ties in with the fury of the modern world’s driving-fire for success.
I Should metaphorically speak of Nanjing; the paradoxical mix with this coldness echoing the story of history emerging amid modern globalisation. A hot high-speed train running parallel to glacial Ancient tombs; forgotten iced artefacts over 3000 years old, available to touch with a hot hand.
I Should segue to my previous article about how the life of fastness drives the heat within oneself. We Should discuss how this heat leads to the deeper, hotter questions we ask: are we good enough; do we have enough time? This questioning heat rises metaphorically, and in what we experience, we all eventually look upwards to see eternal flame.
I Should.
I Should be querying these questions, forging these links, and starting these sparks of discussion.
But Nanjing is Hot. And all the above “Shoulds” require energy; and energy means work; and work means sweat; and sweat reminds me that Nanjing is Hot.
So today I Shan’t; instead, I will just quietly close my laptop, wander in hope of an oasis of cold and try my best to find an icy beer.
