Portrait of an LBX

By Evan

*See all our pictures from the Ameng market here

Riding through Yuanyang with Louis, Yunnan on loaded 20" wheel Dahons in October, 2008. You think we're crazy now? by Andy

So, fair readers, since leaving our friends from that last post in Guangxi, we’ve made the big push and finally arrived in our favorite province in China, and the place that inspired this whole shebang over a year ago: Yunnan (雲南). It’s my fourth time in the province and Andy’s third, our last time being October 2008, when we took a one week cruise through the mountains for which we were thoroughly unprepared on 20” wheel folding Dahon bikes with my friend from home Louis. At the end of that trip, sitting in the Hump Hostel in Kunming reflecting over what we had just done over Qingdao and Rummikub, Andy and I decided that riding bikes around China taking pictures and writing was way sweeter than our day jobs. The rest is history.

Yunnan packs in the color, by Andy

Now, while Yunnan translates literally to the land “south of the clouds,” it could just as appropriately have been called the land “in the middle of the mountains (山中省)” or “the land of “10,000 colors (萬色省).” It deserves the mountain moniker because it’s just chock full of insane peaks over which insane highways climb at insanely steep angles, pushing us near (if we’re not already past it) the brink of insanity! It’s that second descriptor, though, that takes the sting out of all that lactic acid. As we forge into the west and toward the skies, the mountains open up into sprawling valleys cut into fractal-like patterns of centuries old terraced fields, and the people adorn themselves in the most eye-catching colors to be seen this side of India. More than the spicy food, the rich cultures, the pristine air, or any of the other million reasons to love Yunnan, the real reason to come is the visuals — drought year or not.

So it was on our third day in Yunnan that we found ourselves approaching the town of Ameng (阿猛鎮) just before noon. A few kilometers out, we began to compete for road space with… horse carts (video). First one, then two, and then in huge clusters all down the road, until finally right at the last descent into the town, we realized that we were in for some kind of spectacle down below.

An Yi woman and her baby backpack, by Andy

Right at the entrance to the city, just as predicted, we rode through what can only be called a horse parking lot, hundreds of little ponies tied up to carts, among an equal amount of motorcycles and scooters. A few hundred meters further down the road, and we had landed squarely in the middle of the weekly market of Ameng (阿猛鎮), the administrative hub of a region full of different peoples: Zhuang (壯族), Yi (彝族), Miao / Hmong (苗族), Hui Muslims (回族), of course a healthy helping of Han (漢族), along with probably several others. What you get when you place a powerful people magnet in the middle of a place like Ameng is more colors than an Andy Warhol painting, more languages than a New York city block, and more flavors than a pot of gumbo.

The great thing about any market anywhere is its power to bring people together through commerce, maybe the oldest cultural glue in the world. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Hui or a Miao or a fish that just crawled out of the primordial goo — when you need something that you can’t gather in the wilderness or grow in your patch of dirt, you have to go hunting for it with cash in hand. Whether you need seeds or hulled grain, vegetables or fruits, pork or beef, cookies or noodles, seeds or fertilizer, bicycles or washing machines, linen or sandals, chemical cleaners or herbal medicine, you can find just about whatever your neck of the township doesn’t have in the Wednesday market.

"How big do my growth-hormone chomping chicks get? Well, see for yourself!" by Andy

And oh, what a scene the market is. Business-like Han men in their drab clothes run stalls of the latest and greatest, blaring their pitch for herbal medicine or super-powered laundry detergent to groups of women in pink headwraps carrying babies in brightly colored cloth packs on their backs. Hard-faced men in straw hats peruse cabbages stacked high before the Yi women who grew them. Young Hui girls wander around in full robe and headscarf brushing shoulders with young Han and Zhuang girls wearing short shorts licking ice cream cones. Here a pot-bellied farmer is picking up a sack of corn seeds. There an old peasant is buying a new bicycle for his grandson, and off in the distance some hungry Miao women glitter under the sun while munching on peppered lamb kebabs sold across from the halal butcher. There are enough little social mishmashes going on at any given time to fill a hundred pages or more.

Looking out into the market, Andy licked his lips went berserk with both pro cameras around his neck while I opted for a bit of shopping. A few pears, some sweet rice cakes, and two kinds of locally grown tea dangling in plastic sacks from my hands, I moseyed back to our bikes behind a gray-haired Han man in nice slacks and a red tshirt barking over a loudspeaker in Yunnan dialect about his “Tibetan Sacred Formula (西藏聖方)” medicinal herbs. During a break between his pitches, I asked if he knew the difference between all the various peoples frequenting the market. “Of course, I know (我當然知道!),” he was incredulous, “I’ve lived here my whole life. There’s a Zhuang, (我一輩子都在這裡。你看她就是壯族)” he said pointing to the woman in a pink headwrap and blue dress, “but they are more or less like us Han nowadays. Those are Miao, (可是壯族現在跟漢族差不多了。那些女人是苗族呢)” he pointed at the market’s most peacock-bright women, who wrap their legs and heads in the most ornately patterns, and every one of them unique to my eyes! “Those are Yi (她是彝族!),” he waved his finger at two baby-papoose toting women in light blue shirts with pink and blue crisscross patterns on the cloths around their heads. “But really, every kind of person comes to town for the Wednesday market. As long as they have money, they’re all the same to me! (其實來這個市場什麼人都有。對我來說都差不多，只要有錢花就行!)”

Photo Interlude: Faces of the Ameng Market

Like mother, like daughter, by Andy

We couldn't get an answer on these women's background, by Andy

Corn merchant, by Andy

Miao women are the most glittery, by Andy

Hui Muslim women, by Andy

An Yi woman, by Andy

Biked in for some vegetables, by Andy

Not sure about her either, by Andy

No, he doesn't look outlandish at all, but all the same this "normally dressed" man with his sack of seed stands out in Ameng, by Andy

These farmers have the drought to thank for all their free time, by Andy

On complete sensory overload, I let the herb hawker continue his pitches and plopped down in the shade across from a man in his 50’s to. He was thin, with a long face and wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat and sandals. Why aren’t you out shopping, I asked him? “I don’t have money to buy anything, (我沒錢買東西)” he responded. I figured that meant he must be in a bad way and extended a rice cake to him. “I’m not hungry! (我吃過飯的),” he looked surprised, “I just don’t have money to buy those things (我只是沒錢買那些東西),” he says. He turned out to be a Han farmer from a village seven kilometers away, and that he had walked that whole distance in the morning just to look at the market, and would return on foot later that evening. He explained that there was no work to do on the farm, and nothing to do around the house — as far as he’s concerned, there’s just no better way to while away the time than to head into town and watch the people.

Shortly another man came to sit with us, and then another, and another, and then Alexis came to join me. I asked the general crowd about how the crops are this year, and an old man wearing great big Ray Charles glasses who had biked in to buy some vegetables responded, “Nothing growing this year, too dry! (今年什麼都種不成，太乾了!)” Are you going to make it this year, I asked? “Oh sure we’ll make it (唉呦，我們沒問題啊!),” said a man in his 40s with a clay-colored face and crooked teeth. “The government gives us subsidies. The nation is very good. (政府給補助嘛，國家好得很).” Apparently none of the twenty or so men who eventually gathered around us had planted anything since the drought took hold, for fear they’d “put the seeds in the ground but nothing would come up. (種子種下了，但是什麼都長不上來)” However, as soon as a good rain came through, they’d all be out in the fields planting corn the very next day. Until that happens, they’re taking it easy and not sweating the dry times, during which the government has been delivering to every household four cubic meters (~1050 gallons) of water per month per human mouth, to be divided between every member of the family, two legs, four legs, or feathers. We’ve had some harsh things to say about the government here on this blog, but in this instance, they seem to be doing something right.

Strumming away the afternoon, by Andy

Beside the gall-darned gub-mint, another thing we’ve lamented to no end, more among ourselves than in writing, is China’s utter lack of genuine music. Sure, we hear lots of pop, foreign hip hop, or that one infernal Kenny G CD blasting from KTV parlors or shoe stores, but real, down-to-earth music, something that feels like it comes from among the people instead of outside of them, well, that’s quite a trick to find. In fact, I can remember to date only three different instances of folk music being played anywhere. On this day, however, the market didn’t disappoint in that regard either! As we left the town market, there in a doorway stood a Miao man strumming away on his round wooden string instrument the most beautiful little ditty (short video). It was the perfect note on which to end our afternoon at the market!