The view from my balcony was like a scene from a horror movie

It has been four months since I moved to Shenyang from Shanghai and I was still getting used to Shenyang’s winter. One day, I woke up and was horrified to realise that I couldn’t see anything outside my windows. I was living on the 16th floor and I couldn’t see the nearby buildings or the roads below. It actually looked like a scene from a horror movie. It turned out that Shenyang didn’t have frequent smog issues like Beijing except once or twice during the winters when the government turned on the centralised heating, which was powered by coal. This was something new that I had to start getting used to for the next 4-5 years in Shenyang.