Portrait of an LBX

Spring is here, the flowers are blooming, and LBXes and everyone else are heading to Beijing's parks to enjoy the pleasant weather before it becomes unbearably hot. Of course, parents are still bundling their kids up like it's mid-winter. Taken in Ritan (Temple of the Sun) Park.

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There are thousands of these little hole-in-the-wall restaurants all over Shanghai, each with an almost identical blue sign adorned at the bottom with Arabic for what I must assume says, “Lanzhou Pulled Noodles” like the much larger Chinese right above it. There are so many, and they’re so similar, that I thought for sure they must be franchised.

“No, our sign is not like brands in the mall,” says Ma Feng, my newest noodle-making buddy says as he points to Cloud Nine mall –  one of the most ungodly big behemoths of commercial culture in Shanghai – across the narrow but extraordinarily busy street from the twenty by thirty foot hole in the wall noodle restaurant. He then explained to me two mysteries about the enterprise I hadn’t understood until today.

First, every single Lanzhou Pulled Noodles in Shanghai is owned by Muslim Chinese – called Hui (pronounced hway) in Mandarin Chinese – from Qinghai (pronounced ching-high) province abutted against Tibet way out West. One reason that’s odd is that Lanzhou is a province away from Qinghai in Gansu. The other reason is that Qinghai is like a cross between Texas and Wyoming – gigantic in size but mostly desolate and very thinly populated. My man, Mr. Ma, told me that it’s more of a style of noodle than a geographic nomenclature, and that the Hui have been pushing into developed Qinghai from Lanzhou, which itself supports tons of Hui, for a long time. As for the noodles, I’m not a big fan, but Ma Feng told me his white hat and sari-clad brethren wrangle down noodles thrice daily. Small wonder they all have the ever-rosy cheeks of malnourishment.

Second, as Ma Feng indicated, there’s a strange understanding between all the owners that they’ll use the same sign and restaurant name everywhere as long as they don’t come too close to one another. God knows what he meant by “too close” since I can get to three of them within 15 minutes walking from my apartment. Given their profound proliferation, I’d imagine “too close” means you can’t walk out of one Lanzhou Pulled Noodles and see another Lanzhou Pulled Noodles across the street – a rule that Starbucks egregiously flouted about a block away from Ma Feng’s restaurant.

Probably the most interesting revelation I made from the whole conversation was the way that Muslim families from Qinghai have formed an organic network in Shanghai for making cash to take back West. Ma Feng has been in Shanghai for only two weeks, having just come here to work for his uncle after getting fed up with another relative’s Lanzhou Pulled Noodles shop in Guangzhou. By the way, he’s 18 years old, but horse-plays with the other five or six young men like a 13-year-old and talks to me with the calm demeanor of a 25-year-old.

As usual, though, my real question was what the hell would drive him to come to this ugly, insignificant corner of Shanghai.

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Flying kites is one of the most popular passtimes among China's elderly. They fly them higher than I've ever seen and have some pretty impressive looking reels. Temple of the Sun Park was full of people trying to fly kites last weekend, but unfortunately there was little in the way of wind.

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Yangshuo, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region

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I took this picture in Henan, a generally bare and dusty place that is one of China's poorer provinces. What is immediately surprising about this family is that it has three children, despite China's One Child Policy. In rural areas, I believe the policy permits you to have a second child if the first is a girl, but it looks like all three of these little hedgehogs are boys. It's possible they are from different families. What is not surprising is that they are being cared for by an older woman. The garden in my own apartment complex in Beijing is filled with little babies running around with crotchless pants, each with a middle-aged "ayi," or auntie, taking care of him or her. Here most of the ayis are hired and paid for their work. In the countryside, they are just an older member of the extended family who can care for the children while the parents labor away in the parched fields of Henan.

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For the reference of anyone interested, Elizabeth Balkan over at New Energy and Environment Digest 新能源与环保参考 has a good post on some of the (limited) recycling initiatives being undertaken by the Shanghai government. As she points out, one of the major concerns the government has to take into account when considering any action in China is how it will affect employment. As I mentioned, a staggering number of people make a meager living off of China’s trash collecting/recycling industry. Having residents sort their own trash, while more efficient and sanitary, cuts a number of people off from their main source of income.

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I've posted pictures of Beijing's trash collectors before, but neglected to elaborate on how the system works. There is no formal recycling system here as one would be used to if one has ever lived in the U.S. -- that is, no one separates their paper and plastic from the rest of the trash and sits it outside in a blue or green bin. Instead, everyone tosses everything into the trash. Nevertheless, I'm fairly confident that most bottles that are thrown out this way are eventually picked out of the trash by one of Beijing's many trash merchants, such as the woman in this picture. Mostly you see them scavenging around in public trash cans for any bottle of piece of cardboard who they can then sell to another guy for less than pennies on the dollar, although I'm pretty sure someone picks through the trash from our apartment as well. That person then takes the recyclables, usually on a tricycle with a cart on the back, to a center that separates things into different categories and sends them off to be recycled. Like many other ways of doing things here, it's an inefficient system, but it provides a staggering number of people with a very meager salary on which to live. I photographed this particular woman at Beijing West Train Station, which is one of the most interesting places to watch people in Beijing.

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I'm posting this image in honor of the fact that winter in Beijing seems finally to be passing. Being basically on the edge of a desert, weather in Beijing swings from one extreme to the other in the blink of an eye, with only a few short weeks' respite between dry, cold winters and dripping wet, hot summers.

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