Portrait of an LBX

By Evan Andy has summed up the last few days in great detail, so I will skip straight to my take from the last few days. Since Andy is trying to get in more analysis, I’ll throw in my two bits in the form of a list of revelations I’ve had over the last few days.

It’s hard to gauge the way laobaixing think of you from just their initial reaction. The only problem with objectivity in interpretation of foreign cultures is that you can never be sure how the locals would act if you weren’t around – sort of like Schrodinger’s cat. All I can do is be myself and hope that eventually they’ll toss me a bone (glimpse into their real lives) eventually. I try to wave to, nod at, or greet everybody we pass out drying grain or working the land or riding by on farm implements/scooters every day, and every one of them gives a different reaction. Most just stare blankly in stupefication, and some wave back elatedly with huge smiles from under their work loads. Several scream “hallo” or “very good” or “nice to meet you,” and some respond in Chinese (fewer than you’d think). Some, on the other hand, give us what I call the ‘gorilla reaction,’ or a face that combines surprise, confusion, and dread that I think I could make only if I saw a flock of gorillas running down the road throwing poop at people. Now beyond just humor, it’s important to our cause to figure out how to read LBX’es, because we are trying to stay with as many of them as possible. Two nights ago when we went into a town and tried our new tact of directly asking people if we could stay with them, they all balked and pointed at hotels or empty buildings. However, everybody we talk to for over 5 minutes tends to go through the cycle of staid remoteness – cautious curiosity – friendship – jubilation – inviting us to tea, dinner, whatever. Hopefully in the future we’ll be able to start more conversations with LBXes around afternoon time so we can take out two birds with the one stone. Then I can put in some real thoughts.

I’m not afraid of camping in the farm land anymore. Now this may seem like a very personal observation, but to me this is a testament to the way locals have reacted to our presence. When I was free camping in Santa Barbara over the summer, I was paranoid about being caught by the cops – or more specifically about being ratted out by the silver-spoon-in-hand local residents who might spot me while out walking their whippets. On our first night camping here, we had recently had several incidents with local police, and I started at every leaf fall or tractor noise in the distance. These last two nights camping in thickets of row planted trees between crops were actually very peaceful, if a little cold. When on our last bout of camping, a kilometer away from the Yellow River, a 50 something local farmer in a black suit walked up to us as we broke camp, I had no idea what to expect. “Where are you from?” he asked with a big smile. “Are you students? Or have you participated in work yet?” He had only wonder in his eyes as we exchanged questions. He even asked us to go to his house for breakfast after he finished spreading fertilizer over his wheat field adjacent to our one-night tree stand home. What that first farmer a long time ago is probably true – nobody is liable to mind us being out in the fields, except the police, who, as Andy so aptly pointed out, represent interests outside of the locals anyway.

I knew they were everywhere, but I had no idea they were so poplar! I know I’ve mentioned it several times already, but there are just no wild trees anywhere in Northern China that we’ve passed through so far. None. During our interchange with farmer. Liu, he informed me that the trees between which we had slept, the same kind of tree we’ve seen for over a thousand kilometers in the exact same row patterns, are poplars (杨树). “They grow fast.” Of course – they grow only trees that can advance them toward development! The particular trees we had chosen as our rest stop were well over 40 feet tall after only 3 years, and would be sold for furniture or paper production when tall enough, the profits being split among the residents of the area. Are there any wild forests around here, I asked. “This isn’t a forest. It’s just ‘area (面积).’” Thus he reinforced what I said about China being completely viewed and treated as the complete domain of mankind. Alexis even pointed out that it’s crazy that over the last weeks, no matter how many kilometers we put in on the most out of the way roads, the wildest animal we’ve seen so far is a frog.

Even the nuts are friendly, maybe even the friendliest. Now I learned this lesson a long time ago from my more eclectic Southern family, but retired PLA officer Liu reminded me of this point. Thinking us to be Russian (since I responded yes to his first question about our being from the Soviet Union due to the incredible frequency of that particular question), he invited us into his most humble abode, which if culturally translated to US standards would be ex-Marine Bubba’s (complete with Semper Fi tat, of course) Alabama hovel full of Civil War paraphernalia, cats, dogs, a hog, and a life-sized picture of Elvis hanging over the mantle. In Mr. Liu’s case, it was of course all Mao era posters and every stereotypical Chinese trinket you can shake a chopstick at. “Did you see the review of the soldiers for National Day?” Yes, we saw it on tv, we responded. “I thought it was magnificent, a very important ceremony for China.” I guess I should have guessed that from a 12 year veteran of the PLA, but I never would have guessed that he’d insist we stay for dinner and spend a night with his family enjoying their hospitality, which unfortunately we weren’t good enough Russian imposters to accept. The moral here is that despite his extreme loyalties to a time gone by, he was as welcoming as anybody we’ve come across. God bless the fruits and nuts.

The Yellow River dike road is by far the best road for cycling in Northern China we’ve come across. Again I managed to plot a route that traced “some big river” that follows the border between Shandong and Henan, and again it turned out to be the Yellow River. That combined with my neglecting to notice the difference in scale between the maps of the two provinces doesn’t bode well for my professional navigation career. The road was long and winding, and full of that yellow earth dust to which the river and its people owe their reputation, but the ride was the best we’ve had outside the mountains in terms of scenery so far. Farmers on all sides were busy tending to crops, and we were graced by the sight of hundreds upon hundreds of flocks of sheep being tended by hardened faced shepherds wandering between fields and patches of trees. Now most of the fields seemed dry and dusty to the point I don’t know how they can be expected to produce without heaps of fertilizer, but at least the place where Chinese civilization – that is to say Chinese agriculture – began is still being used the way it has been for thousands of years.

It’s soybean season in Shandong. One of my favorite parts of this trip is watching the crops as we fly by them and seeing them change regionally and seasonally. While we started in a flurry of corn followed by cotton and then more corn, those times have past. All the fields we passed at the end of our time in Shandong were either freshly ploughed over or slightly greened by the tips of budding winter wheat. Now that we’ve gotten further south and west, different crops have appeared on the sides of the roads, most notably peanuts and – by far the majority – soybeans. It’s really fun to watch the locals run over dried soybean plants with little vehicles and then toss them up in the air to separate the beans from the chaff. It’s less fun to ride past the separated chaff flying directly into your face as you pass pile after pile of it, but at least I know where my tofu is coming from. Go check the video on the Picasa site to get a feeling for what we ride through on a daily basis.

They grow rice in Henan. To my amazement, the crops we saw at the end of our epic ride to Kaifeng were all rice paddies. Not to anybody’s amazement, they are being dried and separated on the roads. Nevertheless, I love to see all that brown rice sitting there in piles and hate to think they’ll be separating the best part of it – the husk – out for animals to eat while retaining only the starch for themselves.

No matter how much history a Chinese city may claim to possess, never underestimate the power of modernity to level its charm. Kaifeng, former capital of China during the Song dynasty and purported to be the most populated city in the world for a period, is a place you’d expect to feel old and heavy with memory. Au contraire, it’s just another northern city teeming with the heaving, spitting, throbbing, screaming masses that comprise China’s lowest class of city laobaixing – and all the dirty fringe that comes with them. Despite having an old city wall, several temples (which charge steep admission, mind you) and a very old Hui (Chinese Muslim) quarter, it’s just like every other city of its type, rode hard and put up wet after being developed too fast and having too much demanded of it.

You meet the darnd’est people in the dirtiest places. Being the spendthrifts we are, we always choose the cheapest places we can find that will take us in. A few years back when my friend Louis lent me the Libertarian manifesto “Freedom Road” about withdrawing from society and living out of a mobile home on beans and rice, I never thought I’d find myself on Freedom Road (自由路) in Kaifeng in the most tattered little pink hole-in-the-wall hotel you ever saw, the Hongyun Guest House. Today’s post isn’t about paper thin doors, drunken alcoholic bosses who sleep in a pig sty through which you have to pass to get outside into the courtyard to pee in the middle of the night, upstairs plumbing passing through pipes over Andy’s bed that leak in the night, showering over squat toilets that still contain fecal matter, or loud, angry, disgusting hookers who live in an interesting hovel on the third floor where we dry clothes – but it is about the opportunities such places offer to find some great specimens of humanity. First there’s our boss, who was stinking drunk last night and entertaining company over dinner as we arrived depleted after 137 km against the wind. “Sit down and have a drink!” Man, you don’t know where I’ve been. This morning as he lazily swept some leaves around the courtyard, two young, truly horrid looking girls came in screaming, “Hey, old Li, where’s our money?” as Alexis and I sat cleaning our bikes out front. “Don’t worry about them,” he said to us in reaction to what must have been comical looks on our faces. A few minutes later a 50 year old man with one arm and poofed out Kramer hair wearing a bright pink shirt, yellow tie, and shiny black pants waltzed into the courtyard hammered to all hell and, after the usual babble, started screaming, “Get a hooker! It’s on the house! Young people should live carefree! (找个小姐吧，老板请你们的，年轻人应该潇洒一点!)” The boss, with an expression of “um, not on my house” just stared drunkenly out shaking his head. After that apparition disappeared, a very nice young Hui boy came in to talk to us and told us about his father the noodle-maker and how lousy the Hui schools are. Only ten minutes later, another guest of our establishment, a stocky man from the Northeast, drilled us on our drinking abilities, to which I responded that I can’t drink too much. In the hearty spirit of the Northeast, he retorted, “We Chinese used to say ‘Being humble makes you backward (谦虚使人落后)’” before saying, “if you get drunk and like to fight, I used to be a boxer!” Then he offered to drink with us. Talk about a hard offer to refuse. Basically despite the putridity of it all, everybody is in generally good spirits and always cordial to us even through their very base mannerisms. How much of their high spirits comes from spirits is a valid question, but at least we’re having sober fun from the sidelines (at least for now).

That’s it for today from Kaifeng. More to come as the stories unfold.