Portrait of an LBX

What a difference 39 km can make! After the police hijinks in Wen’an we made southward into deep Hebei determined to stay on the country side of things. The dirty hotel room we found in Liugezhuang (留各庄) for 30 yuan (~$4) was across a dirty courtyard from the hotel’s banquet facility / restaurant (mind you, the best restaurant / banquet facility in town, which isn’t saying much), where during our dinner a terribly drunk middle aged LBX man (they don’t need an excuse to be drunk, but on this particular night there was a wedding party going on) barged in to drink with us. In between strange nonsensical outbursts, he repeatedly told us, “I’m a policeman!; I go for training to Beijing all the time!; My family has connections and are in power!; This is my son! (as his son burst in); My son is in power with the government! This is my son! (he was afraid we might forget)” and so on. Basically you should imagine being in backwoods, Massachusetts and being told by a flamboyant drunken asshole, “I’m a Kennedy! I got put in power because of my family! My son has political pull and a hefty paycheck because of our family connections!”  After his son dragged him away embarrassed, and we left the restaurant, we were again forced into drunken conversation with two more elder male members of the family, primarily surnamed Gao, one the head of a local insulation enterprise (more on that later) and the other a government official. They both regaled us with stories of how successful or powerful the other was (a favorite face-giving game) before insisting we meet them at noon for lunch the next day in the courtyard. My point is that in Wen’an the police are terrorizing unsuspecting locals because of connections to us, and in the other they’re sitting us down over beers letting us know how great they are.

That lesson on the corrupting tendencies of power aside, we had a nice second day in Liugezhuang. We left our hotel a little after noon (drunken promise not fulfilled) in the industrial sector of town to walk down a new road – covered in tattered plastic and heaped over in so much dust you’d think they had it shipped in just to make the place look dingy – and took a stroll past some of the industry of the town, across the green river covered with trash (posted “bathe at your own risk”) and happened across a really interesting old neighborhood just beyond Main and Dusty Sts. The inhabitants were mostly shucking giant amounts of corn outside their courtyard dwellings or riding around on farm machines, but were mostly very affable. We found amid the yellowish-gray courtyards and piles of corn husks, to our surprise, a brand spanking new temple, outside of which a man of about 70 ushered us inside for a look. The temple itself was something. The architecture seemed authentic at very first sight, but there were several tell-tale signs of half-ass quality, including red paint splatters on the walls, an incorrect full-form character for “bell,” and a cheap feel about the statues and paint jobs. Another man in his 50′s wearing a white tshirt – apparently the full time guardian of the temple – told us it was 3 years old and built on the site of a previous, much smaller temple from donations by several citizens of the town (we had seen the list of donors, of about a hundred of whom, about eighty were surnamed Gao – go figure). When asked if the most of the temple-goers are Buddhist, he responded, “Some believe in Buddha, and some come to solve problems.” I could imagine a Catholic priest saying something similar.

Basically there were many parts of Liugezhuang that were beautiful and worth seeing, such as the old courtyard houses and the narrow streets of what was clearly the old city. They were charming, well thought out, and relatively ornate compared to their surroundings. However, the main drag of the town was a blight, and there were reeking piles of garbage strewn about everywhere, including right across from their new temple. We found out that the village mono-industry (just about all villages in China pick one industry and invest in it all-or-nothing) of insulating materials had recently gone nuts after Australia passed legislation subsidizing eco-friendly construction. Thus the village had come into some wealth, of which the temple was just one vestige. Despite that, the overall feel of the city was still utterly terrible, an example of what you might call “shitting where you eat.” As always the most recent additions to the city were the most despicable, leading me to believe more and more strongly that the (scientific?) development of these little places in recent years is really sucking the countryside dry of quality. As Andy said today in reference to one of the many nondescript Hebei towns we passed today, “I can’t imagine how they’ll develop all this into something good.” God, I hope we can find some traces of decency soon. At least last night we had a lively conversation with a Southern guest of our hotel, in town for over a month on business, who gave us a bottle of Johnny Walker black and took us to his favorite donkey cakes (local specialty) place. His arguments that Marxism is a valid religion and that China’s quality can be measured by its immense potential to change at any moment (which I said was pretty close to, “sleep with me today; we’ll get married tomorrow.”) were at least an amusing sidebar.

Today we made a 120 km jaunt across the rest of Hebei, stumbling across a group of bicyclists followed by a TV team, who gave us an on-the-spot interview. Afterward we followed them into yet another crappy third-tier city called Botou, where the police pulled us over from the middle of a crowded street to check our passports. After begrudgingly complying and telling the cops they made foreigners feel unwelcome in their city, we pulled out and a few hours later finally arrived in the greener (literally) pastures of Shandong province and a little Muslim enclave called Changguan (长官), complete with beautiful old Mosque and old city to boot. So far we have been treated by far the warmest by our Hui minority friends here of anywhere on the trip, and their neighborhoods are lively and colorful. Well, the old ones at least. We’re going to head out one more time tomorrow to see what we can find in the old city before starting to clip away at the next 450 km to Qingdao. More posts to come.