Portrait of an LBX

By Evan

My mother, who doesn’t care diddly squat about China, has requested that I write something about personal development and insights over the trip, something more on a human/emotional level and less about the place I’m traveling in. So, fair warning, this piece is entirely subjective and in parts dangerously touchy-feely. It might, however, be of interest to others who have taken long trips in strange places.

The first thing to discuss is the psychology behind a trip like this. By that I mean the importance attitudes and moods play, especially when you’re essentially repeating the same up-down pedal motion eight hours a day and when you’re as severely introverted as I am. When I say introverted, I mean that my default mode of operation is to sink deep into my thoughts unless prompted by necessity or curiosity to interact with the outside world. So whenever we start pushing out a long, hard ride, my mind will grind away with increasing momentum in whatever direction it started that morning, usually tempered by extreme emotions. I can be in the highest of spirits while climbing a giant hill or sucking away life-shortening clouds of black truck exhaust, or I can be melancholy riding through a bamboo forest full of chirping birds. Unfortunately, in the last weeks the bottom fell out of my self-confidence, and I’ve been dwelling for hours at a time about how I won’t be able to write a decent book since I suck so much at organizing my ideas, and how I don’t know what the hell we’re doing this trip for, and how maybe it was a stupid idea in the first place, etc. etc. That’s why I haven’t been able to make myself write anything for this blog in so long, until two days ago I rode alone the last 75 km into Guiyang and blasted out the negative gook that was clogging me up. A month ago, I felt so great about this trip and the things we were seeing and how super duper insightful I thought I was that — with a little inspiration from reading The Sun Also Rises — I decided to write a novel about life in China in addition to the travelogue from this trip. I spent my biking hours soaking in every minute sensory detail to be recorded in notes, and simultaneously cooked up a killer storyline and a cast of characters. I was so high on the idea that I wrote 50 pages of it!

So you see, your attitude dictates everything when your activities don’t have natural beginnings and endings. That is to say, everything we do, determining destinations and distances for a day, writing posts, taking notes, having LBX experiences — it all comes entirely from us. Nobody is telling us what to do. When you’re the master of your own fate, your mentality determines whether you’ll use that freedom to become great — like Benjamin Franklin or Zhuge Liang or Ernest Hemingway — or just give up and become a bum. There’s a good line from the movie No Country for Old Men about having to recommit yourself to your task daily, maybe even twice daily when it’s particularly hard, that sums up the lesson I’ve learned about the importance of keeping my thoughts pointing in the right direction and not letting them fall into an abyss.

As for China, I’ve learned so much I don’t even know where to start — I guess that’s the topic of the travelogue though. For one, we’ve learned how to survive absolutely anywhere in this country, how administration works, where to find what we need in almost all cases, what people will know what things, what a place will be like based on a few scraps of information. As for the language, this trip has filled in all those gaps of basic life vocabulary and country talk, etc. that all my years of book learnin’ and city slickin’ had glossed over. To elaborate, I graduated with a degree in Chinese, was a professional interpreter for a Fortune 500 company, and am to this day — along with Andy — a translator for one of China’s most respected magazines, but none of that matters when you need to communicate with a rice farmer in the extreme southwest who left school after 5th grade. Mom, try to imagine a Russian who learned the Queen’s English at Oxford trying to understand my late Grandpa Harold… “Say Vladimir, djeet? Well, yaounto?”

Knowing so much about the language(s), culture(s), government, geography, etc. is great on the one hand, since there’s absolutely nowhere, and absolutely no task that could daunt me in this country anymore (except for maybe having to talk to young Chinese girls on a regular basis). However, believing that I could complete the puzzle based on only a few pieces was a bad thing for a while. In the first two months, between Beijing and Shanghai, I was crushed to see just how terribly unlivable the countryside was. For a while, I told Andy we should call our book, “Why is China so F***ing Ugly?” I was getting close to giving up all hope for the entire country. Then, thankfully, right after Shanghai, we were rewarded with the beauty of Zhejiang province. Since then, my faith in rural China has been renewed over and over, and I’ve fallen in love with huge tracts of Zhejiang, Fujian, Guangxi, Yunnan, and now Guizhou — in addition to much smaller areas of other provinces. But all those negative experiences up north were good too, since I now know, not from just amorphous articles, but from my eyes, ears, nose, and lungs, the extent to which humans can destroy their own country. Some people, like my father, think that all this talk about protecting the environment is just some enormous hoax to bewitch hard working folks, a vast left-wing conspiracy. Well, I’ve seen it, and it’s not. It’s real, and it’s ugly, and it calls for immediate attention. Considering that the worst environmental disaster in US history is still becoming worse with every second only miles from my home in Louisiana as I sit here and type, it warps my mind to think that I even have to say this! Segue over, moving on!

As for the people of China, I’ll continue with a question that Andy’s American friend and long time China-dweller Rick asked us a few weeks ago: “do you have more or less patience for Chinese people after this long on the road?” “Much much less!” was my answer, one that honestly is half true. Our whole self-assigned task out here — other than that whole bicycling 10,000 miles thing — is to seek out  and interact with as many regular folks as possible. But that task is complicated when the regular folks we want to seek out are to a humongous extent different from us — in terms of level of education, culture, values, worldviews, etc. etc. Back at the beginning of the trip, I used to wave to as many people as I could, screaming “nihao!” or some stupid joke related to what they were doing (“don’t fall into that pile of cow crap, har har har!”). Since then the never-ending torrent of “HALLO!” or “Niiisah tooo meeaht you!” or other pearls from elementary school English class shouted at us from behind our backs has made it hard for me to even make eye contact with new people.

Let me back up a second here. Usually when we tell the uninitiated that our biggest complaint about the natives is that they scream “hello” at us, they wonder why we’re such assholes about nice folks just trying to communicate with us in our own tongue. The problem is not the word that they use, but the tone in which they scream it, and the hen-like cackles that follow. They never walk up to you, look you in the eye, and say, “hello” in a polite, moderated tone. 99% of the time, you hear it screamed in a high pitched voice, either the tone a mother tells a toddler, “look at the pretty dog, baby, tell him WOOF WOOF” or the tone I remember once hearing a New Yorker use to call Derek Jeter a “$hit-eating f@**ot” when he struck out in Yankee Stadium. They’re never trying to engage in real communication, just trying to get their jollies out of the uncommon sight of a bicycling gorilla. It’s also amazing that they all, all across the goddamn country, all know to scream the very same word at you, and that it makes them all, without exception, laugh riotously as though Hu Jintao had just farted on national TV. As a side note, I have found this to be an entirely mainland Chinese phenomenon. Last summer when I rode down Taiwan’s east coast, I mean the boondocks of that country, not a soul every yelled at us derisively or as though we were monkeys. Most people respected that we were seeing their island the hard way and screamed encouragements like “jiayou!”, which means “go for it!” The people in this country, however, generally don’t see us as people, but simply as laowai, strange alien creatures who aren’t going through the same human experience they are.

Speaking of laowai, that’s the other word that gets our goat. Laowai — along with dialectical equivalents: lowei, waigolo, gueilo, etc. — means “foreigner,” but it is the slang way of saying it compared with the proper term waiguoren (compare the word “Paki” for “Pakistani” or the French slang “ricain”, semi-derogatory shortening of the formal demonym “américain”). Just about every Chinese in the country will shout this out from either pure stupefaction at seeing us or just to let everybody know what’s coming through town (imagine the scene from Blazing Saddles when the town drunk is screaming, “the new sheriff’s a ni**er!”). I’ve tried explaining to countless Chinese why we don’t like it when people shout laowai out in front of our faces. We know we’re different, that we come from somewhere else, that our eyes and noses and hair and whatever other parts don’t look like theirs — we know all of that very, very well, and when we’re trying to initiate contact with a new person, the last thing we want is for them to turn to their buddies laughing and say “laowai” as though a stray dog had just started talking. Every time I explain why this irks us, they just give me blank faces and say, “but that’s just the word we use for you… we don’t mean anything by it.” I suppose they, coming from one of the world’s most insular societies, have absolutely no idea what this must feel like, and rationally this shouldn’t be a problem for smart people like Andy and me. But hearing it thirty times a day, in addition to all the other stupid jeers, just really wears us thin, especially when we’re tired or in a bad mood (see above). I do suppose that if you went back a hundred years, before there was any idea of political correctness or courtesy for people who look *different*, and asked even an educated, open-minded man in the American South why he used the word, “ni**er” to refer to black people, he probably would have responded, “well, that’s just the word we use for ‘em… we don’t mean nothin’ by it.” Maybe when my grandkids come to China, things will be different. Until then, we grind our teeth and bear it.

But whenever we are in a good enough mood, and all the things they do to annoy us get the volume turned down, we have a great deal more patience for them. We’ve learned about how hard life is here, how most people are trying to pull themselves up by the bootstraps even though they’re wearing sandals. When we’ve gone out with an open mind, we’ve met dozens of brilliant personalities — the kinds that only a dynamic place like China could have produced, and our faith is restored. Before the trip, the love I had for China was mostly a literary kind of emotion, something intangible that told me that this place was worth loving despite my disgust with how it had been modernly manifested in Beijing and Shanghai. Now I have seen what good people and places and arts and values still exist in this pitiful, disaster-laden country, and that fondness for a nebulous “China” of my imagination has been validated by real, positive experiences.

Outside of all the China stuff, my biggest personal gain for this trip has been independence from sedentary life. I went through all this in the last post about being nomads, but it is really, really important. I remember when I rode my bike up the California coastline how desperately afraid I was of not having a place to stay — even though I had a tent and am an Eagle Scout! The highways are lined with signs warning you about $300 fines for staying overnight (“this land is my land” my ass, Woody Guthrie!). The whole reason I didn’t have a place to stay was that I couldn’t afford the ridiculous California prices, and here they are freaking me out to the point that at every single overgrown bush I pass, I ask myself, “how well would I be hidden from the road from right there?” I remember vividly the first night I camped illegally in a Santa Barbara park, how every dog bark was coming in my direction, how every car was a cop coming to arrest me, how every distant voice was an angry citizen raising a bum-slaughtering mob. I didn’t sleep a wink that night. Thankfully nobody ever did bother me over the week that I camped there while learning to paraglide, but man, was I exhausted from sleep loss at the end. The rest of the ride up the coast I camped less worried in legal campgrounds, but the dread of that first night carried over to this trip. I remember vividly the first time we camped way back in Shandong, how we asked farmers if they would mind our camping in their fields, and how they seemed bewildered that we’d even ask. That first night, camping between planted rows of poplars next to a cotton field, Santa Barbara repeated itself: every tractor was coming to get us, and every light was the local police swarming in to arrest us. Again, not a wink of sleep. Since then, I have realized that absolutely none of the regular folks, the LBXes could care less where we sleep as long as it’s not on their crops, and I can now sleep 100% worry-free wherever we camp. For me, who grew up fat, extremely introverted, and afraid of pretty much the whole world, sloughing off huge chunks of childhood fears is my personal success equivalent of a walk-off grand slam in game 7 of the World Series.

More than just the camping though, I’ve learned to be completely ok, a little Zen master, no matter what surroundings we have placed ourselves in. I remember at the beginning, whenever we’d leave an urban area, I’d become immediately anxious about what might lay before us, and whether I would be prepared to handle any situations out in the country. Months and months later, I have realized that we’re ready to deal with anything, and that there is nothing to fear about leaving civilization. If anything, now I’m slightly bothered by having to leave nature — where it’s beautiful and we can always pitch our tent if we get caught short by sunset — for big, stinky cities where a lot of inane regulations have convinced people it’s risky to lodge people who look different from them. I’m also perfectly ok with staying absolutely anywhere, in a field, on a mountain, with the pigs, with a poor family, whatever, wherever. No amount of dirtiness (of myself or my surroundings) or clutter can faze me (people who knew me before will be aghast to hear that I’ve evolved further in this direction). The knowledge that we can choose not to be a part of “civilization” if we’re willing to give up its comforts — that is the greatest personal freedom I’ve picked up over nine months on the road.

Then there are the people — not a damn one of them freaks me out anymore. Sure, they can annoy me, but just regular folks, even the poorest, dirtiest, most broken down ones — I can talk to them all and with a feeling of levity I never achieved in all my years back in the states. When you’re a traveler, you’re cursed in that every conversation has to begin exactly the same way (see above), but you’re free in that you can be and say whatever you want. It’s ultimate freedom, not having a past, and there is nobody, not a big boss, not a dirty bum, not even the $#$)-$@#$‘ing, @$#-#@*hole @#%^^-up-their-#$@ police I’m afraid to approach and talk to. Of course, I doubt I’ll ever get over my fear of talking to beautiful women until I take a bike trip through the land of the Amazons, but that’s another story for another time.

As for the bikes, I never thought I’d be this competent in the maintenance of a machine. That is simply because no machine has ever been so incredibly relevant to my life and so dependent on my competence. I did own a car for two years, but during that time the most I ever learned was how to change the oil and tires. Everything else could be trusted to my dad or a mechanic, if need be. But I never had to depend on that Bronco II to carry me across vast stretches without the possibility of repairmen. After this long, I trust that I can fix most problems out of the supplies and tools with me, and the problems I can’t fix I can at least identify and know what I’d need to fix. This too affords a great feeling of freedom.

So that’s it for today, a big, yet still incomplete, disorganized collection of things that have changed in me as a result of this trip. Most important of all, even though I sometimes get into those ruts of what my mom calls “stinkin’ thinkin’,” I am still thoroughly glad that we are doing what we’re doing, zero regrets. At the same time, I’m excited to finish up too, to move on to the next part of life and apply all these great things I’ve learned about the world and start implementing some of those ideas I’ve had time to think about on long, long riding days. Alright, Mom, don’t say I never did anything for you!