Portrait of an LBX

By Evan

The half flooded village of Buxin in Guangxi, by Andy

It was around noon on the day we were to arrive in Jingxi when Andy and I glided through a crevice between two towering precipices and smack into a most unusual sight: a valley-set village half submerged under a lake. The tops of buildings, some with roofs and some without, were jutting from the top of the water, and they seemed to have been that way for years. Naturally curious and interested in photo fodder, we rolled past the “frontier management area (邊境管理區)” sign that meant the area abuts Vietnam and right up to the water’s edge. Right as Andy began snapping, an old woman with a worn but kind face and a baby propped up on her hip bade us in her heavily accented Mandarin, “Come have lunch with us (來跟我們吃飯吧!)” Hell yeah, we will! And so she led us along the water’s edge, past flocks of geese and a woman on a small skiff floating next to a half inundated house to her own home.

Inside, her 25 year old son, shirtless with orange shorts, sat next to a man in his forties wearing a dark blue guard’s uniform. The house of the Zhuang minority (壯族) family was dark, intimate, and cosily cluttered with baskets, chairs, farm utensils, etc, invoking memories an inscription in the house of the Haywood family in Baton Rouge, my second home — “I’d rather it be said that this house isn’t kept perfectly tidy than that our family didn’t live full lives here.” It, like the other houses on dry land or otherwise, is built of gray stones, and we saw as we approached that its broad old wooden door had been flung wide open. Outside the house was a patch of dirt maybe twenty meters long before the edge of the ominous lake, on which a few brightly colored peasants tossed nets from little rafts. Geese honked back and forth by the dozen. Surrounding the village of maybe ten houses was a stark, enclosing rim of limestone peaks dotted with emerald vegetation.

The son, Little Xi (小習) looked at us with immediate misgivings — a feeling magnified by the scar over his right eye — the kind of mistrust born from never having dealt personally with a foreigner. But the man, the very giddy Old Zhao (老趙) grabbed out two more plastic cups which he filled with a clear rice wine from an old Sprite bottle. “Drink! (喝酒!),” he said raising his cup to us, and then everybody got settled into easy conversation. Soon the woman who had invited us set the table with a fish, a plate of pork and chicken, some turnip strips and fatty pork, and pickled vegetables with yet more pork. She sat feeding a watery rice gruel to her young baby, and next to her sat the old grandmother in her matching dark blue outfit and light blue hat, who stood and sat completely doubled over — like many old women we’ve seen — presumably from a lifetime of bending over rice paddies, clothes, and her family’s meals. They spoke to each other in Zhuang, but the two men and the mother all attended to us, their guests, in very good Mandarin.

The food was all delicious, most notably the fish, a crispy tilapia that Little Xi told us he had caught twenty minutes earlier in the lake behind the house. How, I asked, by net or pole? “With a … machine (用…機),” he said a word I didn’t understand. Then he grabbed a metal box out of the corner that straps to a car battery — ah yes, you electrocuted the sucker, eh? My country grandpa wouldn’t have approved of the fishing method, but they cooked the fish in a way my French grandma would have appreciated – pan fried with soy sauce, ginger and a pinch of salt — delicious! In fact, it was the best meal we’ve had in weeks of bland vegetables and rice noodles on the road.

Through the conversation we discovered that the village had flooded irrevocably seven years earlier when a mining operation opened in abutting valley, an ugly, mile-long operation we had just passed on our ride down from the mountains. Apparently excess rain water used to empty into that valley, but the mining operation had stopped up the natural drainage channels. “The water came up this high the first time (第一次，水就這麼高),” Old Zhao told us, pointing to a water line over a meter (3+ feet) from the ground. The entire village had to evacuate for a month before the situation was resolved, but still, Old Zhao’s old house sits mostly submerged halfway into the lake. It seemed that they had forgiven and forgotten the whole issue though, since both the men at the table and most of the men in the village are now employed at the mine. Both Zhao, who has since built a new house on higher ground, and Little Xi work as security guards four days a week when not tending to their corn or rice crops.

One cup of rice wine down, Old Zhao, who spoke with wild facial expressions in quick, excited bursts, told us that we’d have to follow their custom of drinking three cups with them, and that he was going to go fetch us something special to eat for dessert. After he zipped down the trail on his motorcycle, Little Xi told us about how he and his friends like to spend their down time drinking with the old men or riding their motorcycles to Vietnam, only one kilometer down the gravel road. Once he warmed up, he took an immediate liking to us, the kind of liking that seemed to stem from too much time spent with farts like Old Zhao and not enough people his own age. Most of the other kids his age are off in the Pearl River Delta or Fujian logging twelve-hour days in factories. “I spent a year in a Dongguan furniture factory once (我幾年前在東莞待過，制造家私),” he told us, “but I didn’t like it. Too much pressure, and the space was too tight. I don’t want to go back there again. (可是我不喜歡，壓力太大了，空間太緊了，我不想回去.)” He, like most young guys we meet, had all kinds of dreams of going to big cities and living the vagabond lifestyle in Shanghai or Guangzhou, but no expectations of actually going for it. He seemed resigned to live the rest of his life in the little valley.

Dessert Surprise, by Andy

A few minutes later, Old Zhao burst back through the door carrying a new plastic soft drink bottle full of a very milky liquid in one hand and part of a hornets nest, crawling with ants, in the other. “This is the best dessert we have here,” he said indicating the hornets nest. The mom then put it on a plate on the table and began picking off the ants and baby hornets that were drowsily climbing out of the honeycombs with her fingers. “And since we have American guests, I thought we should drink the best alcohol! (今天有美國客人來可，我就買了點好酒!)” he said opening the new bottle, which he had just bought from a neighbor. He didn’t get to pour it since Little Xi had with ghostly speed produced a clay jar stuffed with grasses from below the table and poured its amber content into our glasses before Old Zhao had a chance. “This is medicinal wine that we steeped ourselves with herbs we find in the mountains. Drink one glass of this, and after the rest of your day of biking, you won’t be tired!” As we drank glass number two, Old Zhao grumbled something about his wine being better, and the mom went off on a five minute sermon about the medicinal benefits of her herb wine. Between that and her incessant urgings to “Eat more fish! Eat more rice! (多吃魚！多吃飯!) Make sure you eat enough so you have energy for biking,” there was no doubt that this was your stereotypical Chinese momma. Unfortunately after a few minutes of picking live insects from the comb, it was decided that the ants had eaten the best parts of the honeycomb, and that the idea was abandoned.

Little Xi in front of the basin of live fish, by Andy

By halfway through the second cup, we had picked the fish clean and done a good job on everything else. We explained that they cook fish better than anywhere in China, and that back home we cook it similarly, except we cook only a slender filet off the sides, while the Chinese won’t waste a single sliver of it. “Then we’ll make you a fish soup if you want some, spicy just the way you people on the Mississippi River like, (那我們就給你們做一個魚湯吃，你們密西西比河人都愛吃辣吧？那我就多放點辣)” said Little Xi with an ear-to-ear smile. I still have no idea where he got that half-true information, but, oh yeah, we said yes to some fish soup! He grabbed out a little plastic basin full of small, live fish, which he said he had netted in the lake. While we continued to chitchat about this and that, he jammed his extra-long fingernails — another rural Chinese tradition — into the gills of the wiggling fish, ripped off their heads, and pulled out the entrails, all without skipping a beat in the conversation. Then he disappeared into the kitchen for a while while his mom told us how he’s the village’s best cook and Old Zhao blib-blabbed stories about anything in elastic, undulating tones that started low and ended high-pitched, sort of like a Zhuang doppelgänger of Peewee Herman.

Shortly thereafter Little Xi reemerged with a steaming bowl of fish soup heaven. I mean I’ve never had one before that even comes close — perfectly blended flavors of ginger, garlic, pepper, and fish, salted right to that good place — even a Cajun would go nuts over the stuff. I realize we’re not a culinary blog here, but sometimes you just gotta stop and salivate! I wrote down his very rough recipe, which called for “the right amount (足夠的)” of ginger and “very fresh fish (很新鮮的魚)” — the same way any good cook can never give you real amounts — and plan to bring a little bowl of Zhuang cuisine home to New Orleans next year (oh and forget about seeing it written down here — you’ll have to buy a bowl like everybody else at Chez Evan in the French Quarter when the time comes).

Once we had housed the soup, we realized that precious riding time was flying by, but Old Zhao wouldn’t let us leave without our third cup of booze, his murky stuff that tasted a little like Cheerios. The mom left with the baby somewhere unknown, and the two men implored us to stay for the night. “We’ll go kill one of those waaa-waaa’s for you tonight, (我們去給你們殺一隻哇！哇！晚上燒給你們吃!) Old Zhao said imitating the honking of the geese running frantic circles in front of the door, “and we can go to Vietnam, and we can drink more! (我們帶你們去越南看看，然後回來繼續喝酒!)” It all sounded like a rowdy good redneck time, but by this time we were were a sheet and a half into the wind (半酣), and Alexis had already made three hours of progress ahead of us. Presently a neighbor friend of theirs, a burly man with thinning hair and a security guard outfit identical to Old Zhao’s, skidded to a stop in front of the house on his motorcycle. We knocked out the third cup, took a few photos, and thanked our hosts profusely. Old Zhao said we had no reason to thank them, and Little Xi added, “You come back any time you want to. You’re not foreign guests to us; you’re our good friends now! (你們隨時都可以回來，你們現在不是外國客人了，現在是我們的好朋友了!)”

Little Xi, despite being already red in the face from the hooch, insisted on escorting us to town on his red Suzuki motorcycle. Andy and I panted up the slopes with him for a good few kilometers before arriving at the dinky little country tradepost town of Xinxing (新興鎮). Right after we had bought some water in the shop of Little Xi’s friends, the clouds hit saturation point and opened up on us. Little Xi got to talking very loudly with us and referred to us in front of everybody huddling under the roof for shelter as his “American friends” with a lot of pride. “I really admire you, (我很佩服你)” he said, “because you do whatever you want and follow your dreams. I could never be like that. (因為你們想做什麼就做什麼，追隨夢想，我就不行)” As the rain broke from torrential to just annoying, we told him we really must be off. After going over the exact directions to our destination three times, he grabbed me firmly by the hand and said, “I hope you come back to see us again. We’ll have a good time. (我希望你們會回來看我們的，我會帶你們玩.)” And with that Andy and I rolled through the cool raindrops into the billowy mountains, counting our blessings yet again.