After enduring smoke-choked Beijing, I’m reliving the experience in Canada

opinion

Aerial crew work on the Dryden Creek Wildfire, just north of Squamish, B.C. in June, 2025.

Joanna Chiu is a B.C-based journalist, author of China Unbound and managing partner of Nüora Global Advisors.

Each morning, I peer outside, bracing for smoke. For weeks, I’ve kept all the windows in my B.C. home shut, air purifiers droning day and night.

A heavy haze over the weekend brought that familiar pit-of-the-stomach dread – another raging wildfire, maybe even an evacuation alert. But it was just clouds and much-needed rain. Opening the windows, the cool breeze felt like a revelation, and I realized how tense I had been.

I spent five years as a journalist in Beijing, where the smog was often so dense that I thought I could scoop it from the sky. On most days of the year, industr