Portrait of an LBX

By Evan

First and foremost, I’d like to wish everybody who cares a Merry Christmas. As I write this post on December 25th in the Sun Party cafe of Quzhou, I am physically surrounded by cheap Chinese renditions of Christmas paraphernalia and stereos blaring a strange holiday music mix of about ten songs on endless repeat, but as for the rest of the world outside the window, today remains just another day in a big, polluted, frantic urban mess. In a way I’m relieved that the commercial nightmare back home snuck up on us without my realizing it.

Back to the blog, here goes a review of our activities since last I updated. Before leaving Jingning, I stumbled across a She clothing shop all done up in quasi-traditional wooden motifs outside and was culturally compelled to enter. In the store the two young She girls working the floor explained to me that the She people’s traditional symbol is the phoenix, and let me tell you, they put it on everything. The shop, they told me, is one of a very few in the whole world that produces traditional She wardrobes (most She now dress the same as their Han counterparts, i.e. neo-modern tacky for youth or standard black LBX garb for the older generation). Apparently they even sell some outfits to overseas Chinese restaurants as uniforms — cool. Upon request, I got a tour of the upstairs workroom, where I had a funny conversation with the head seamstress. “The phoenix is the symbol of us, the She people. (凤凰是我们畲族的吉祥物),” she told me. Oh, you’re a She as well, I asked. “Well, no, but I know a lot about that sort of thing.” Oh you silly poser Han! At the end, I wanted to pick up one of their really cool shirts, but realizing it impractical to lug around for the rest of the year, I compromised and had a phoenix sewed onto my Under Armor shirt — now equally sweat-wicking and auspicious!

A sampling of traditional She minority outfits on sale in Jingning. They are used almost exclusively for formal She events and song/dance galas.

It's not the size of the phoenix - it's how you wear it

Next door to the clothiers we followed our curiosity into a store selling the local specialty Huiming Tea (慧明茶) and asked the young girl at the counter for an explanation of the tea’s history and characteristics, to which she responded with a blank look of stupefaction. Not five seconds later, however, a middle aged man emerged from within and magnanimously offered to respond for the girl, whose face flushed with relief (must have been overwhelmed by our stunning good looks). Mr. Lin, a friend of the owner who happened to be sitting in the shop doing some work, instructed the girl to pour us all glasses of the shop’s finest leaves and led us into the back room to sit, savor, and speak. “You can’t stand and drink fine tea,” he explained. “Drinking tea is all about the culture of it — appreciating the aroma, taking small sips, enjoying your environment, and accompanying the experience with refined conversation.” And refined conversation we had. Mr. Lin, a Han, talked at length about his home of Jingning, the She, tea, and the changing times. He spoke wistfully of bygone days when people appreciated the culture of their own home, saw beauty in good traditions, and valued their own dialect (his own children have forgotten their native tongue and speak to him in Mandarin) — things he sees slipping off the face of the land and into the realm of history. Amazingly he then added, “We can’t even be sure the culture will be preserved in history, because as you know, the history in the books here isn’t always true.” Wow. After thirty minutes of enlightened discussion, we exchanged information and parted — but not before one last question. What is it you do for a living that your speech is so scholarly and you spend afternoons in tea houses, Mr. Lin? “I write party history (我写党史).” His avowal both stunned me and made sense at the same time — he has the perfect vantage point to see what’s going on, even if he’s a part of the process he laments at the same time. Alexis today found that he had written about his encounter with us in his blog (in Chinese). Apparently we made quite an impression on him.

The next morning after a brief return to the clothing shop to pick up some spare phoenixes (you just never know), and a little chat with the owner (a She woman who was recruited at the age of 18 to sing and dance for the local Department of Culture and never left the entertainment circle and her Han husband who collects and resells ancient stone artifacts from the area), we took our leave toward Quzhou, where we’d pick up Andy, finally feeling knee-ready. Of course, we didn’t make our goal of arriving halfway to our final destination (I don’t know why we still bother to make plans), and night fell on us in the middle of a secluded, mountainous back road. A quick search yielded a flat bank along the side of a clear babbling creek, down to which we scrambled the 4 meter drop and set up our tents only just before it went pitch black. Again I slept poorly in the tent, plagued by weird nightmares about wolves with razor blades. Alexis hardly slept at all due to the cold, which we found in the morning had manifested itself in the form of ice everywhere — on the tent, on the ground, on the bikes, and in our bones. We didn’t get up the gumption to start packing until 9am (had to wait for it to warm up), and by then a road crew had installed a metal barrier along the road above our location, adding a level of complication to our sortie. How they happened to be scheduled for that installation on that exact part of the road on the day of our frigid misery is really evidence that there is a force greater than we in this world — and that force has a sick sense of humor.

Think we were cold sleeping in those?

From there we continued in our usual undulating up and down mountain cycling pattern along different streams and through various small villages. Lunch was fried rice noodles and eggs à la Zhejiang (鸡蛋炒粉干), the same thing we eat almost every meal these days, but augmented by a plate of fried fungal delicacy. This region, we found, in addition to being planted with the highest proportion of tea trees we’ve seen so far, is through the roof in production of shiitake mushrooms (香菇) — hardly any farm we passed for two days was without rows of mushroomery. Seeing a farm woman pulling the visqueen from over her rows of mushrooms, we stopped to request enlightenment. Apparently around this time every year the locals go into the forests to chop live wood and bring it back home to pulverize it. The wood chips are then stuffed into little plastic sacks, into which the farmers place some shiitake cultures before stacking them out in the sun. Every morning at 4am somebody goes into the mushroom shelter to look for new growths in the sacks and cut a little hole to let them emerge. Once given a space through which to grow, the mushrooms are full sized and ready to be picked in 2-3 days. What does our farm girl think of the flavor of her shrooms? “We’ve been around them for so many years that I can’t stand the taste of them anymore,” she confessed. All the same they’re selling for 8 yuan / kg, the highest price she can ever remember. Incidentally, I thought they were a homerun.

This kind women, here lifting the plastic coverings from her mushroom green house, explained to us how Shiitakes are cultivated in the region

Inside of the Shiitake green house

Down the road a little we came across Shicang village (石苍村) some of the most beautiful architecture we’ve seen so far — several well preserved, white walled, slanted-roofed, very large structures that seemed like temples at first sight. Upon closer investigation, we found out that they were in fact large, familial, communal houses, over a hundred years old apiece. The story goes that a long time ago the Que (阙) family moved into the region and set up shop. Gradually the Que’s grew to be the biggest name in the village until eventually — as now — they were the only family. The large houses we saw were built from necessity to hold ever expanding branches of the Que family. The inside of the houses were gorgeous, something right out of a book, and the kind of place you’d hardly expect to find outside of a museum. In the middle of the largest house throngs of old Que’s sat in a courtyard focused around the Que ancestral shrine, where old women were worshiping as we visited. It was like stepping back in time 100 years. The only man in the house who could speak Mandarin explained that the house had survived the Red Guards since the houses weren’t owned by landlords but rather by families already leading a traditional, communal lifestyle. It turned out that the winter solstice, to be the day after our visit there, was the Que family’s biggest holiday, and again we were invited to stay in the village. Alas, we had to push on to reunite with our long lost teammate. On our way out of the village, past old men sitting around smoking pipes, operating mushroom-drying rooms and drying woodchips destined to be fungalized, a mentally handicapped woman ran up to us wailing before being called back into the house by another villager. It may just be time for the entry of a new surname or two to revitalize the Shicang gene pool.

View of a Que house from the road

In front of the largest Que house. Notice the drying mushrooms.

Entrance to the largest Que household

Old Que woman worshipping at the ancestral shrine

Shiitakes drying in Shicang

Not as psychedelic as some of their relatives sold in Amsterdam, but pretty delicious anyway

That night we again fell short of a distance goal and crashed out early — utterly exhausted I should add — in the mid-sized county capital of Songyang. The next morning we both woke up feeling sick and called Andy to push back our glorious reunion (not to mention the day I’d finally be getting my new camera) one more day. A day of rest under our belts, we woke up refreshed and scrammed as fast as we could to cover the 120 km to Quzhou, albeit after an 11am departure (we’re bad about this). We finally did get here after 7pm that night, riding the last 35 km in the dark alongside a national highway (exhilarating as always). In town we found a Giant bike shop and had some much-needed repairs done on the bikes. You see, 2 days before in the middle of a long tunnel my chain had broken and fallen off, and at the same time my front derailleur twisted in on itself in such a way as to impede my riding the bike — all inexplicably. In the dim light of the tunnel next to passing trucks I jury-rigged the puppy into semi-functionality, but then proceeded to click-click the rest of the 2 days of riding. Anyway, our new Giant bud showed me yet another time why I’m an idiot and pulled my chain from over the flap of metal I had caught it on. After some other adjustments and equipment purchases, we rolled blissfully noise-free toward the long-distance bus station into which Andy would be arriving presently, thus beginning the beginning of our Quzhou police saga.

The first hotel we tried showed us a room and agreed on a price before somebody remembered, “oh yeah, foreigners can’t stay here.” Oh well, it happens. So we went a little further and tried again. Again, the boss lady showed us a room and agreed on a price, but balked when she realized we had passports and not Chinese ID cards (what was she expecting?). Strike 2. We tried a more expensive looking joint, and again after agreeing on a price and being on the verge of moving in, the boss’s wife popped out of the woodwork to tell us it was a no-go. Strike 3, and it was time to try a new strategy — but just then Andy called to request a pick up from the station, except now it was raining. And Andy was sick. It was one of those days. Alexis and I deposited him in a Lanzhou noodles shop and determined to ride to the police station to demand where we could be lodged affordably. You see, in cities of this size, local regulations require foreigners to stay in laowai-lodging-license holding fancy expensive hotels. Just before we got to the cop shop, we spotted another small hotel and gave it a try — this time successfully. After fetching our Andy over to the little dump, we thought it was all over.

Christmas Eve, the following day, we met up with Xu Bin, the peasant who builds his own aircraft, and our whole reason for coming here in the first place. A post on him is coming next. At around 10:40pm that night after we had already gotten cozy under the covers, a familiar, heavy knock echoed through the tight, damp little wooden room. “Goddamn! (我操!),” Alexis exclaimed in Chinese to the two cops standing in our doorway. What came out of their mouths was predictable: “it’s not convenient for you to stay here,” “foreigners should stay in certain hotels,” “your countries have the same regulations,” “you can’t register properly here,” etc. I immediately shot back that we were already properly registered (I took special care to enter all the info into the computer system) and that their behavior was openly racist toward guests of the city. Alexis chimed in that we’d move only if they found us a hotel the same price as the one we were in and that we’d camp in front of the police station if a reasonable solution was not found. Seeing that we meant to make their implementation of a ridiculous regulation a giant headache, they finally took our passports to another hotel, registered us there falsely, and returned our documents to us, whereupon we were left in peace. We realized, of course, that they didn’t actually care whether we left or not but that they’d probably lose their jobs if their boss thought we hadn’t been relocated. So presto change-o, on the books we had moved, and the illusion of security was restored.

This morning we headed back to take more pictures of Xu Bin’s gyroplanes, and that brings us to back to right now in the Sun Party cafe. Barring any additional stupidity, tomorrow morning we’ll leave this middling abyss of Middle Kingdom oblivion and head to the traditional center of Chinese ceramics, Jingdezhen. Until then, I hope you all got less coal in your stockings than China deserves jammed where the Sun Party don’t shine. Good night.