Portrait of an LBX

By Evan

The origin of this post’s title derives from both the landscapes through which we have most recently passed and the unfortunate temporary loss to rehabilitation of our teammate and preeminent photographer, Andy. Wise men have made note of — in addition to the equally fitting adage “only fools rush in” — the tendency to go astray of even the best laid plans. Sage Woody Allen likewise reminds us, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.” It’s easy to plan the equipment list, the route, the goals, the budget, the website, and a million other details necessary to make our trip possible, but there’s just no planning around inclement weather or bodily breakdowns. Today as I write this post from Shaoxing, it is sadly for the first time without Andy at the same table keeping us up to date on world news and editing his most recent take of photos. For those savvy on sports injuries, he has irritated the menisci in both his knees — probably the result of old stress placed thereupon during his hurdling days from the college track team — and has returned via bus from Hangzhou to Shanghai for R&R and second opinions. If you have any tricks for quick knee recovery or are a practitioner of any tribal religion / voodoo in which it is possible to heal a knee via strategic pricking of Andy-effigy (we’ll prick anywhere), your help will be most appreciated.

**Note: for the time being pictures in these posts will come mostly from my point-and-shoot Canon and not from our pro. Please excuse the quality deviations.**

At the top of the hill "too steep for even cars to climb"

So backing up, it’s time now for a review of where we’ve been lately. My last post came from a foofy, Western-style café similar to the one in which I now sit, in the regional center of Anji (安吉县城 / 递铺镇). On our day of rest in which we hoped that Andy’s knee would recover, Alexis and I took the opportunity to go looking for other celebrated local specialty (since we’d already found white tea): bamboo products. Fortunately just a quick jaunt across Ecology Square (生态广场) and the enormous People’s Government building from the hotel we found a sizable market full of storefronts for wholesale distribution of all manner of white tea, Chinese hickory nuts (山核桃 – delicious!), bamboo charcoal (竹炭, supposedly good for both making pillows and roasting meat…), and all sorts of bamboo paraphernalia, including furniture, instruments, and summer sleeping mats (凉席). Having spoken to several store-front managers about the prospect of touring a bamboo factory without much success, we came upon a super nice woman in one of the sleeping mat stores. Seeing that we were excited about her family business, she called her husband, Mr. Xu, to come fetch us in the car over to his factory in the development zone (开发区), dramatically industrialized, outside of the differently but equally ugly city center.

Upon arrival at the factory, we noticed that an old woman was sitting at the gate knitting where a guard might normally be and that the concrete interior courtyard was covered with rice. It turned out that he kept his mother at the factory with him and his older sister, his employee, most of the time, and he allowed some local farmers to dry their grains in the courtyard. “I came from the farm villages and in my heart still am a peasant,” he told us. He’s managed to keep his humble LBX moral outlook despite the income from his mid-sized factory of 100+ employees. “We started back in the village actually, with a handful of employees 10 years ago right when Anji bamboo-strip sleeping mats were becoming a hot item,” he said. At first it was ten, and as more orders came in from distributors to Carrefour and other such supermarkets, the company’s scope grew accordingly. Why bamboo sleeping mats though? “It’s what people here do, and it was easy enough to find some technicians to set us up.” Apparently 70% of the country’s production comes from Anji, a fact that explains why all the bamboo-stitching machines in his factory are made in Anji as well. After showing us his factory (he requested we not take pictures, even though it was nothing more technically sophisticated than piles of bamboo strips and young women working in front of what amounts to giant sewing machines) and explaining how his employees can earn between 1500 and 2500 yuan per month (really not a bad figure all things considered) depending on their output, he took us back to the office for tea and prolonged conversation about Anji, tea, bamboo, Chinese politics, foreign politics, the inutility of our Nobel Prize laureate (he was taken aback when I said I haven’t supported any of the presidents elected in my lifetime the way Americans are when they realize that Chinese really do eat dog meat), and above all life philosophy. Mr. Xu, it turned out, is an example of a zero-BS LBX — truly hard to find anywhere — which was why we ended up liking him so much. He explained that business is doing fine lately despite the crisis, since the market for his mats is all domestic (there had been some small business to Japan and Korea which petered out, but not enough to affect his GM) and “domestically China’s economy has not been affected at all by the crisis.” At this I suggested that maybe the domestic economy hasn’t fallen too much due to China’s world’s-biggest (do they do anything that isn’t the world’s biggest anyway?) stimulus package, he rebuffed by saying, “Maybe you do things like that in the US, but not here!” Mr. Xu, who is most appreciative to his local government for helping him open the current incarnation of his company with low-interest loans in the development zone, doesn’t read much international news, it seems. He also told us that he admired how we Westerners became independent at the age of 18, to go on adventures and discover the world as we are, but in the same breath said that Chinese — himself included — view their children as completely dependent until they are married, at which point it is impossible for them to discover anything. His attitude that what we’re doing is great but completely incompatible with himself is just another example of what I’ve taken to calling Chinese exceptionalism (see American Exceptionalism), or basically the complete rejection of any decent opinions we have regardless of their merit, just because it isn’t Chinese. That aside, the conversation was genial and informative. After an hour or so he rode us back into town where we bade him adieu and left to rejoin Andy in the C-Straits Café for internet and overpriced coffee.

The following day Andy woke with his characteristic “push on or be damned” attitude, and we left the concrete box city (yes, there was a McDonald’s) to

Andy rides ahead through some bamboo, not feeling too great knee-wise

chart a course through a pass in the mountains to the south. When we got to the point where the pass was to start, we were informed that the pass was closed due to the construction of a ginormous reservoir between the mountains. What about Shuangxikou Village (双溪口村), I asked regarding the village on the map that we planned to pass through. “It’s underwater now. The village has moved over there,” a local informed us pointing off in the distance, “but there is one road around the reservoir from below.” [Video here] An elderly local gentleman informed us that the older generation of relocated villagers were amply compensated monetarily and with an apartment in one of several identical concrete boxes lined up in rows before the reservoir, but the younger generation would have to leave the village to look for work since there was no livelihood to be made in the new artificial community. We then headed for a little mountain road to which the kind man had directed us, up which we wound through more ravishingly verdant bamboo-ific mountain landscapes. Eventually we wound through some of the most pristine, charming villages we have seen so far, their typical Jiangnan whitewashed houses staggered up steep grades and bisected by crystal clear streams. Every discovery of such places is to us a little victory in our ideological struggle against China’s resolute march toward oblivion called Scientific Development by central planners.

Old mountain house next to a pristine stream

A villager told us in passing that the road up and over toward our destination was too steep even for cars to traverse, just the news Andy’s knee wanted to hear. A good panting push on lowest gear straight up a dirt road saw us through more endless bamboo and finally to yet another surprise: a one-time-use bamboo chopsticks factory. Now anybody who’s lived in China as long as we have has eaten hundreds upon hundreds of meals with China’s equivalent of Dixie plastic forks, but to actually come upon the source of our convenience was something else. The bamboo, we were told by the factory’s boss, is harvested locally (where else?) and processed into the long strips we saw sitting in bundles by the score outside of his factory. After allowing them to dry and putting the long rods through a sanitizing process, the workers cut them to size with a very simple (dare I say LBX-rigged?) table saw onto which a piece of wood has been screwed to ensure uniform length before they’re placed in a smoothing machine for hours to wear down the rough exterior. Workers then run them through another machine to bevel them slightly at one end before picking out the defects and running through the packaging machine. The amicable boss, surnamed Wang, takes in exactly .03 yuan (~$.0043) per finished pair, which he sells to a distributor in Hangzhou.

A view out of the chopstick factory onto the scores of bundled bamboo rods waiting to become one-time-use chopsticks

On the way down the mountain road from the village of the ancient pine village of the ancient pine pass (古松关村 – thanks to Lew for pointing out my error), where incidentally we spotted two other similar chopstickeries in operation, Andy’s knee began speaking to him with increasing frequency and discontent. Finally it was decided that we should detour to Hangzhou, the nearest metropolis where he could have his knee properly medically evaluated. A preliminary visit to Sir Run Run Shaw hospital, decidedly the best public medical facility either of us has seen in China, was followed by Thanksgiving à la Japanese food, medicinal baijiu (药酒), and cheap convenience store beer. On Hangzhou day 2, Dr. Zhao of the orthopedics department, upon evaluation of the MRIs and X-rays, tossed some prescriptions at Andy and suggested at least a week of rest plus the wearing of two braces. The rest, as they say, is history.

Before I end the post, I’d like to say a word or two about Hangzhou, where we ensconced ourselves for two days while waiting for the MRIs. When Marco Polo visited it during the 13th century, he called it “beyond dispute the finest and the noblest in the world.” They say time changes all things, and Hangzhou is unfortunately no exception. Today the capital of Zhejiang province and tourism Mecca for romantic Chinese doesn’t carry so much a palpable feeling of history as much as a hyper-inflated sense of commercialism. When we asked locals where the best place to spend time in the city is, they all responded mechanically, “West Lake, of course.” The lake, near which we were lodging, is entirely surrounded by expensive restaurants, fancy car dealerships, bars, giant shopping centers, ritzy hotels, etc. On our walk toward the hospital, we discovered the crossing of Liberation Road (解放路) — how appropriate — is like crossing the city planning office’s demarcation line between ultra-gauche high-dollar luxury retail hell — beyond a doubt unaffordable to the vast majority of LBXes — into the gray, polluted, repetitive concrete slab jungle of tall apartment buildings, omnipresent in any Chinese city worth its tier rating. The difference was like night and day. At the moment I don’t want to reopen the tired, sad subject of depressing Chinese urban planning so much as to point out that the definitive lack of culture (aside from spending culture) and the comical results of superimposing ultra-capitalism directly on top of the fatigued structure of planned economy. Now I’ve been to Rome, and of course, you couldn’t expect it to be anything close to its height during the days of the Caesars. That said, at least the city has maintained its heritage gracefully, and the city is much much more than just a few photo ops for tourists around the Coliseum next to Porsche and Ferrari dealerships. We became grimly aware that it’s now nigh impossible to find anything of real, intrinsic value in Hangzhou, once one of the jewels in China’s crown. Add that to the compounding misfortune of Andy’s knee situation, and it was time for Alexis and me to get the hell out of Dodge.

Yesterday after seeing Andy off at the bus station, we arrived after a short 55 km trudge down a cold, industrialized stretch in the city of Shaoxing, the last big city we plan on visiting for some time. We came here to tour a factory of one of the famed Shaoxing wine factories, but of course, today is Sunday, and nobody is working. We’ve been unemployed bums for so long that we’ve forgotten the days of the week still matter to some people. Woops. The next post, which will be delayed a little as we’re going to avoid the internet for a few days, should hopefully include an account of our Monday morning tour of a rice wine factory. Until then, hope everybody had a good turkey day. Peace from Shaoxing.