Portrait of an LBX

In the last couple days we have inched slightly closer to our goal for this journey, which is to spend some real time getting to know the laobaixing of China in a personal setting — at meals and hopefully in their homes. Before we began this trip, my biggest worry was that it would quickly turn into a balls-out contest to see how far we could travel each day by bicycle and the goal of learning about the Chinese people would be left in the dust somewhere in Hebei (and there’s plenty of dust there). While we are by no means spending each night downing beers and baijiu with LBXs and sleeping in their courtyards, we are gradually coming by a strategy by which this may be possible.

At first, our Western sense of “civility” had us going up to random people and saying, “We’re looking for a place to stay. Can you recommend any?” Our hope was that people would somehow intuit our meaning and say, “I’ve got a giant courtyard, and I see you’ve got some tents on your bikes. Why don’t you set up camp there? I’ll bring the beers and tell you everything about my LBX life.” I suppose that sort of response is unlikely in any culture, but in rural China in particular, where most people have only seen foreigners on television, the immediate reaction is to ask us why we would come to their poor little town and to point us toward the nicest hotel around, which is the last place we want to be given both our budgetary constraints and goals.

Seeing our failed efforts, we tried a slightly more direct approach, going up to farmers in the fields near the end of the day and asking if there was a place where we could pitch our tents. While everyone was friendly enough, they still didn’t read between the lines. “This is the countryside. You can sleep anywhere!” They told us. Apparently they haven’t had any reason to read up on rules regarding foreigner residence in China. But that night we ended up pitching our tents on a tree farm of sorts and foregoing dinner. But we were closer — we weren’t in a hotel.

In general, and particularly since we’ve entered Shandong, we’ve been struck by the kindness of common people with little to offer. Before setting out from Beijing, we all knew Chinese people were rather welcoming (excluding the police), but we’ve each spent so much of our time in large cities where apartment living and a constant scramble for the next paycheck are quickly stripping away the last remnants of traditional Chinese culture. So far on this trip, however, we have seen a hotel owner implore us to remember our friendship as the police began shutting down her hotel as a result of our stay; we were offered lunch by a car full of twentysomethings as we passed; we have had another hotel owner attempt to let us eat and stay at her hotel for free; we were given a seemingly endless supply of Chinese pears from some pear farmers; and we were treated to lunch and had a number of cigarettes forced on us by some residents of a town we skirted around yesterday.

This sort of generosity makes it seem like we are simply not asking the proper question, and that people would be more than happy to invite us into their homes…if we would just ask them to do so. We tried this in Zhangguan and ended up sitting and drinking tea with an old Hui man and his wife for nearly an hour, and it seemed like if we had wanted, he would have been happy to sit with us all day talking and drinking tea. On separate occasions, we have broached the subject with a couple people after talking to them for a while, and they replied, “Sure, come stay with me!” But it was usually at lunch and we had another 50km to ride.

So, after the National Day holiday when security paranoia and overzealous policing has hopefully died down a bit (probably a week from now) we will try simply asking someone with whom we have struck up a good repoire if they would mind us pitching our tents in their courtyard. If that fails, we can always sleep in the woods, but I’m confident that we are getting closer and not further away from or goal.