Portrait of an LBX

Before I can possibly hope to explain why we’re undertaking this monstrous bicycle trip around China, I have to explain to you some background on what led up to this moment. Years ago as a bright-eyed college student, extraordinarily naïve about how the world worked and interested in linguistic challenge, I signed up for intensive Chinese classes, which turned into a Chinese major when I found out I could live in Beijing (what could be cooler?) for a whole year. So I came to Peking University and fell in love intellectually with the complexities of the language, the culture, and what you might call “the way things work” which at the time was to me what the Chinese call a 不解之谜 (an unsolvable mystery), or an endeavor that required intense analysis and energy at all times just to stay afloat – effectively the opposite of the boredom and malaise that accompanied my youth spent in American suburbia. After my return to school for senior year and a few months spent home twiddling my thumbs, the only option that made any sense was to fling myself back into the rodeo that is life in Beijing. And so I adventured and learned for years, including a year-and-a-half corporate job in Shanghai. At this point I couldn’t honestly say I’ve got China “licked” or that there’s no more mystery left, but something fundamentally changed within me over the last year.

Basically, years of living in China’s biggest cities have finally worn me down.  What once was the greatest adventure in my life has turned into an endurance contest against pollution, political insanity, and mind-bending imbalance and ugliness.  I suppose everything is interesting while it’s novel, but after novelty has worn off, just like a shotgun wedding to a stripper in Vegas, all you’re left with is a reality you understand more than you thought you could and wish you could either unlearn or dismantle.

Now that last paragraph might make it sound like I hate China.  That’s as far from the truth as possible.  I love China.  I love its culture, its people, its food, its values (of course I refer to its traditional values which ought to be on an endangered species list) and even all those crazy little idiosyncrasies that drive a lot of foreigners nuts.  What I don’t love, however, is what is happening in China today.  It’s unfortunate that China’s identity has of late been completely intertwined with those people who are supposedly its vanguard.  That’s why I had to go to Taiwan to see what “China” looks like when its “vanguard” is (judgment reserved) different.  What I saw there conformed more with widely and personally held conceptions of “China,” and I liked it.  Hell, the whole inspiration for this trip in the first place was a ride through some of China’s most beautiful expanses, in beautiful, more wild places that the vanguard has — likely due to geographic inconvenience — been unable to whitewash for the sake of uniformity and “progress.”

So now, today, September 21, 2009 here we are, three foreigners who love China and have come here to the very heart of China and find that there’s just no China to be found, and what’s taken its place is unsettling in the way Marlow found Africa’s dark heart, with the exception that our horror has been revealed to us incrementally over years.  We found that we’ve been spending our lives wading through a cultureless cesspool, and for the last who-knows-how-long have been basking therein and complaining about it.  Now, thanks to divine inspiration and crystallization of willpower, we have realized that our calling is not to sit in the muck and be angry about it, but to go out and find out what beauty still exists, and to record as much of it as we can before it is lost.  Maybe, just maybe, we can find a way during our year to even preserve some of the beauty we find — that would be ultimate fulfillment of our role as human beings and stewards of the world.  Who knows how much we, the ignorant but passionate youth we are, can achieve, but now, our ambition solidified, we will heed the call to action.