It’s actually not that bad when it’s still grey. You can’t taste it yet, there’s hardly a scent and everything just looks slightly out of focus or a little bit smudged. Yellow or brown is when you need to bust out your smog mask.

During the summer in Chengdu, you barely notice it as long as you keep your eyes off the horizon. You kind of just let the lush greenery and the warm sunshine fool you into thinking the air is clean. Once in a while, you’ll notice it and think to yourself, “Huh, the sky isn’t supposed to be that color.”

But like I said, grey is still okay. Yo, that was good. Chengdu Municipal Government, hit me up if you need a copywriter for your propaganda slogans!

In the winter though, when China burns coal to stay warm, the smog develops a yellow and brown undertone to it, like the sepia filter on Instagram. When the Air Quality Index (AQI) gets above 300, it thickens until it’s almost opaque and hangs in the air like fog. At that point, you can look directly at the sun without squinting.

On days like that, you won’t see a human face outside. Just shrouded black-haired figures walking anxiously past you in the yellow haze and an occasional a pair of uncovered eyes. But that’ll most likely be because they’re fixing their fogged up smog glasses. Yeah, you read that right. People wear orange-tinted protective glasses to prevent PM 2.5 particles from irritating their eyes and so they can see what’s in front of them when they ride their scooters and e-bikes.

Once I saw a woman wearing a full gas mask that was connected to a portable air purifier attached to her arm. When I stopped her to show it to me, a small crowd formed around us. Everyone wanted to know where they could buy one.

I refused to wear one myself until I discovered the taste of smog in the beginning of last winter. I had just left the office, walked through the underground tunnel to the metro station, rode the train to my stop, all without taking a step outside. When I finally took that first step outside, my world violently shifted.

I never thought I could feel claustrophobic outside until that moment. The sky was more brown than yellow and had completely blocked out the sun. I tried to take deep breaths to calm myself down, but that only made it worse. The humidity in the Chengdu air had mixed with the smog to form a filthy mist and I began coughing after swallowing several deep breaths. It felt and tasted like I was in a steam room of cigarette smoke.

After that, I bought an air purifier and a mask, started hanging my laundry inside my apartment, drank hot water daily to loosen up the phlegm in my throat and learned how to hock a loogie like a pro. I planned my days around safe zones, indoor areas where I knew there was an air purifier, which basically just meant my apartment, office buildings, malls and my friends’ apartments.

My girlfriend, who had already experience one Chengdu winter, told me she liked to tell herself it was just fog. I tried it and for a while, I thought I had a good grip on things. But then I didn’t see or feel the sun for a whole day, then another and another, until it had been two weeks before I saw it again.

During that “smog wave,” the AQI averaged over 300 for two weeks, nearly ten times what is considered safe. To put that in perspective, that’s double the AQI recording in the Bay Area during the Northern California wildfires a couple weeks ago. At its worst, the wildfires in Napa recorded an AQI of 404, which is "beyond index" according to NPR. The worst day I experienced in Chengdu, the AQI topped out at 400. In China, "beyond index" means readings in the 600s and 700s.

Most expats, if they have the means and the time, can take a smogcation to the mountains or go on an early visa run to Hong Kong. But for most Chinese people, life simply has to go on. Children play outside against grey, yellow and brown skies, facemasks turn black after your scooter ride to work and you wait until the next blue-sky day.