Portrait of an LBX

By Evan

Mr. Zhuang on the left with his chef/farmer cousin, by Andy

Way back in Haikou we were pleasantly surprised to find cheap, pretty good coffee brewing next door to us. As it turned out, the coffee was a product of Hainan, grown in a little place called Xinglong (興隆) on the southern coast. Now, Andy being a veritable coffee fiend, and myself not trailing too far behind, we decided on the spot that we must go to this place that produces the godly black drink and shake hands with the men who dare to take on tea.

As it happened, we weren’t far from Xinglong when we camped on the immaculate beach, and it was planned that we should arrive there early to rock that big caffeine buzz early enough to keep us from sleeping. At breakfast in Wanning city (萬寧市) though, which was complemented with 2 hot cups of 1.5 yuan local coffee (amazingly enough, the locals have taken to drinking it, and it’s a menu item along with all sorts of tea), something else tickled my guts the wrong way, and it was slow going to coffeeville, frequent stops under palm trees the length of the short 34 km day. When finally we arrived just before dinnertime, we were greeted by a very unusual sight.

On my map, Xinglong had been signified by a little dot, which usually indicates sleepy village. The place we came to was, quite to the contrary, a very developed little hub of tourism and shopping on the middle of an otherwise radically rural route. Huge villa complexes sprawled beyond patches of palm trees. Just past the town demarcation line, a faded billboard on a yawning construction site boasted of the imminent construction of Beijing Village (北京村), complete with pictures of the concrete boxes to emerge and official catch phrases from the Olympics. We had now entered the twilight zone.

At that point, it was too late for coffee (not to mention my stomach), and so we found a hotel and decided to try again in the morning. When we told the very high-strung yet motherly proprietress of the hotel we were in town on a coffee quest, she volunteered her husband (nice of her) to drive us out to see some of the plants.

These areca palms make you want to sip on cold rum, don't they? By Evan

The following morning, after our breakfast, we found the short, dark-skinned proprietor complete with a robust Buddha belly napping on the couch in the lobby. Once awake, he told us to hop into his little red Buick, in which he would take us out to see his cousin’s coffee farm. In the car, after I asked about how the area came to produce coffee, he informed us matter-of-factly that, “It’s all grown by returned overseas Chinese. I used to grow it too when I was young. (都是海外華僑回來種的，像我小的時候也有種)” Making the easy logical connection, I asked if that meant that he too is overseas Chinese. “Why yes! I was born in Vietnam and moved to Xinglong at the age of 6. In fact, there are returned Chinese from over 20 different places living here (是啊！我是越南出生的，六歲的時候跟家人搬到興隆來。這裡有二十多個地方的華僑都聚在一起呀).”

It turned out that the family of our hotelier, Mr. Zhuang (莊), had left their native Guangxi (廣西) at the time of the invasions by the 8 nation army (八國聯軍). He talked about the disgracing army in such a way as to prove that he had been educated in a PRC school, further evinced by the two-sided young Mao / old Mao pendant hanging from his rearview mirror. His family had been farmers in the north of Vietnam for decades, speaking Guangxi Cantonese and teaching the Chinese language to their children the whole time. When in the late 70’s, things got hot for ethnic Chinese in Vietnam after the Sino-Viet War, his family needed to get the hell out of Dodge. Luckily for them, right at that time the PRC government had designated Xinglong, then a largely uninhabited backwater, as a returning point for overseas Chinese willing to come back. The Zhuangs made the move to start a new life growing and roasting coffee, and the rest is history.

Mr. Zhuang's cousin tells us, "my jackfruit grow this big!" by Evan

Shortly the car wound onto a narrow country road, and we pulled into the farm of his cousin. Now from the looks of this place, it could very well have been a scene out of the Swiss Family Robinson (sorry to those who haven’t seen this, but it was my favorite movie when I was a kid). The whole front of the property was covered over in tall, skinny areca palms (檳榔樹, the ones that make betel nuts) a familiar sight for us now, and the house felt like a lot of Margueritas would be consumed there if only this were America. His shirtless cousin, teeth predictably covered in red stains, emerged presently and gave us the tour of his property, on which he grows coffee, black pepper, jackfruit, and of course, betel (咖啡樹、黑胡椒、波羅蜜與檳榔). On the tour, he picked a fresh betel nut (really these are areca nuts, but nobody calls them that), which were in season, and picked a fresh betel leaf (簍葉), the sweet leaf chewed with the nut to offset the bitter taste) and explained how the shell paste included in the final product is what makes your spit — and ultimately teeth — red. Though coffee used to be the power crop, it’s fallen off of late due to competition. Recently the most valuable on the 20 mu (畝) property is the black pepper, which he said always maintains a steady price. On the side, this son of long-time Vietnamese Chinese is a chef in one of the local hot spring resorts. Just to look at him and his lifestyle, we would have never guessed he wasn’t 100% made in Hainan.

After the farm excursion, Mr. Zhuang drove us to a local cafe for — can you guess? — local coffee and a spot of breakfast. The black stuff was pretty acceptable (wouldn’t try to sell it in Starbucks anytime soon, but for 2 yuan a cup nobody was complaining), but the pastries were delicious. “The returning Chinese brought all this back with them. Thai cakes, Malaysian cakes, we have it all here (華僑把這些小吃從海外帶進來的，泰國糕點啊，馬來糕點啊，我們都有!)” What was cooler than the coffee and the food though was the cafe itself. The big, open space could very well have been home to a cafe in New Orleans, and the locals were sitting in big groups drinking coffee and eating pastries! There was even Wifi in there, and not a single foreigner in sight. Miracles happen every day.

At the cafe, we got to talking more about Mr. Zhuang’s personal life. Since the age of six, he’s spent his whole life in Hainan, attending university in Haikou. Nevertheless, he speaks only his native Cantonese and Mandarin, which is the Lingua Franca of Xingning since everybody’s from somewhere else. Childhood on the coffee farm was a little bitter (苦, pun slightly intended), but after university he had gotten a job as manager in a hot spring resort, where he stayed for ten years as hospitality manager. Once he felt he knew the business, in the true Chinese fashion, he pooled his family resources together and opened his own hotel, seeing that tourism was taking off in the area. “I wish I had stuck to just tourism, but I at the same time I wanted to try my hand in a new industry too.”

What might that be? “Pigs! We have a pig farm too, and boy, is it a headache! (養豬啊！我們另外也有豬場，可真麻煩!)” It turns out that three years ago, he saw that the mainland was having chronic shortages of reliable pork, and so again he pooled family capital together to build a family piggery. “It was especially successful during the Olympics when there was so much swine flu on the mainland. Still, it’s not easy. Hey, do you want to go see the pigs?” How could we refuse an offer like that?

As we stood up, Mr. Zhuang beat us to pay the bill (he’s a quick one) and even picked up the bill of the table next to us. “He’s my uncle and old boss from the resort (那是我的姨丈，也是我以前的老總). We Chinese like to pick up each other’s bills. We’re very hopsitable (我們很熱情).” Now he was definitely right, but it never fails to crack us up when somebody treats us to something nice and then attributes it to the inborn good nature of the Chinese race.

The Zhuang pig farm of Xinglong, by Evan

After a fifteen minute drive past some glorious green mountains, we arrived down a narrow dirt road to find his old white haired father wearing a bright orange shirt at the front of the pig farm standing next to a group of workers repairing a bulldozer. “Sanitize your feet in this,” said Mr. Zhuang pointing to a small blue puddle in front of the entrance. Then it was pig time, big time pig time. First we walked past the little hovels of mother pigs, gargantuan porkers laying seemingly comatose on their sides either bursting pregnant or being ferociously suckled by a brood of thirsty little piglings. “These are American meat pigs, 10,000 yuan a head (都是美國肉豬，一萬塊一頭),” [--I'm still not sure if there are pigs that are raised for anything other than meat... milk pigs?--] he didn’t betray the Chinese willingness to reveal personal finances. The rest of the covered facility was half full of pigs in various states of development. It was only half full since he hasn’t quite bred to capacity. The only question that stuck out in my head was, how did you learn to do this?

“Oh I read books about it and talked to some people. It’s just like a technology really, like making shoes for example. You read about the technology involved, understand all the processes, and then you buy the equipment and try.” It was the first time I’d ever heard raising pigs compared to making shoes, but I guess he was right in his own way. By the way, the facility was actually pretty clean (though I wouldn’t have sold its essence as perfume), but seeing all those giant pigs laying around sadly torpid (they looked on the verge of atrophy in their giant cages) again reaffirmed my vegetarianism.

Tour finished, we piled into the car again plus Mr. Zhuang’s father, who on the ride back suddenly spoke a long time in Cantonese, which Mr. Zhuang translated to us. “He says he saw a young American pilot who looked like you once during the [US - Vietnam] war. His plane crashed, and the locals pulled him out of the wreck. They were so angry that they dragged him to the village square and beat him to death publicly. Do you know how much it costs to train a pilot? It’s so much! But they didn’t care. To them, he was an enemy. That’s why we should be friends now and not fight.” I was amazed that a man who’s seen so much war and who’s even had to relocate his entire family on account of one can even smile at an American, let alone take one touring around town for a day. But he and his family seem to be past all that now, and Mr. Zhuang at the end told us that he hoped one day his 17 year old son might study in the US and “bring back knowledge we can use here.” I suppose they say time heals all wounds.

Once we had been deposited back at the hotel, Mr. Zhuang bade us to return any time we want, stay free of charge, since he was so happy to have made “new foreign friends.” He also added that he hopes that I’ll come back one day to invest in China. We bade them adieu and made the quick jaunt to the depraved little tourism pit of Lingshui (陵水黎族自治縣縣城), from which I write this post. Soon come the inner mountains, and hopefully some chances to spend time with the real natives of Hainan, the Li people (黎族).