Portrait of an LBX

By Evan

Sichuan (aka Szechuan) is one of the provinces we’ve dreamed and talked about since the beginning of the trip, especially on bland food days. Andy and I had both been here a number of times, and we had the impression it was one of the most in-your-face, interesting, and visually striking provinces around. Unfortunately, Sichuan and sister municipality Chongqing have largely been a disappointment. There was certainly a lot of greenery, mostly from of growing corn and rice, but it was all very monotonous. The villages and towns mostly looked alike, lots of concrete squares and white tiles. Just as up in the North China plain though, the place has been full of industry right smack in with the villages and towns, and we’ve seen nary a blue sky in our entire time crisscrossing the basin. Sichuan does have the rotten luck of following Yunnan and Guizhou, where we could hardly go a day without giant blue skies and stunning landscapes. All that said, there were some moments worth sharing, which I’ll talk about now.

Only a few days into the province, we undertook our greatest physical challenge to date, a 235 km (146) mile push from Jiang’an county (江安縣) on the Yangtze into Chongqing. All I’ll say for the ride is that the first 100 were the hardest, since it’s all in the head, and then the last 135 actually went fairly smoothly, with the exception of those 3 mountains (bad navigator). Once we shot out of the last tunnel and into the beginnings of what the uninformed might call “the city proper,” we were deluded to think we were almost there. For anybody who has never had the pleasure of entering a first tier Chinese city, I’ll try to explain succinctly. First you hit a wall of towers, giant gray rectangles somewhat spread out and interspersed by mega highways 6-10 lanes wide with no smaller surface options. As you travel inward, the buildings grow taller and tighter, and the roads become more crowded and frantic. Imagine a Beethoven symphony perverted into rhythmic bursts of cacophony, a grating, unchanging noise that rides a quickening pace up and down louder and louder until you think it should hit a deafening crescendo. But it never does. We rode down those mega highways for 15 km, past dozens of signs prohibiting bikes, and likewise past hundreds of bikes and pedestrians (since they have nowhere else to traverse) deeper and deeper through more and more sociopathic drivers until we hit the city center, where the only visible difference was higher density, more traffic, and more signs for brand names. With few exceptions, you could airlift us blindfolded to any big city in China, and we’d never know where we were based on the surroundings alone.

But, that, of course, is just a surface assessment. Chongqing has succumbed to scientific development and cultural gigantism, but it’s got some character to it, oozing through the cracks. The oldest part of the city is a huge crag on a peninsula, wrapped around by a bend in the Yangtze and one of its major tributaries, the Jialing. The center of the city is ugly, but it’s fast paced and full of quirky back alleys and long, slippery staircases through old, dilapidated neighborhoods. They’ve somehow managed to fit more hot pot places per square km into the place than New York has pizza places, and the whole city smells like chilies and numbing peppercorns as a result. The hot pot, incidentally, lived up to its volcanic reputation — delicious. Even though it’s been covered over by gray concrete, the city still has a pulse, and I couldn’t help feeling that there were millions of stories bursting out from every direction that I could just learn if I lived there a while. Other than the fact that I couldn’t find a legitimate foot massage place anywhere — one parlor owner when asked if he offered them responded, “yeah, but they’re not good” — the weirdest part of Chongqing was how few foreigners live there.

At a little bar across the river called Dee Dee’s, we found two old British men drinking. The Scot, in his sixties, had lived there 12 years, “hooked in” by the life there, he said. A brief while later he excused himself, and the gorgeous, curvy 20-something girl in the corner got up and left with him. Rat! The Englishman was nice enough, but a depressed sort, having worked as an automotive parts assembly instructor without his family in the city of 12 million with an expat population of 1000 for the last 3 years. His only recourse, he told us, was the bar, and it was the reason he chose to live in the apartments next door. Briefly, Chongqing seemed like a good place to explore one day later, with its winding alleys and sordid mafia and even its insipid expats.

In the days following Chongqing, we slowly paced toward Chengdu, from which I type this post. Only once in this province have we been invited into somebody’s home, a big drop from our usual hospitality rate. The people in this province are also much slyer, pushing harder to get more of our money out of every transaction than we’re used to. They, along with the Henanese, are infamous all over the country for that slyness, a defense trait I imagine both places developed from thousands of years of immense population all squeezed on top of each other. It’s also for that reason that Sichuan is one of the biggest contributors of migrant laborers to everywhere in China, Xinjiang, Tibet, Guangdong, Shanghai, etc. etc. We’ve been mighty thankful for those migrants too, since they are the only ones around here who can speak a proper Mandarin. The rest, as up in Shandong, think that their own dialect is close enough that they don’t need to make the effort — making Sichuan the most difficult place for us to understand the locals yet! The one guy who invited us in for dinner, a former English major now selling knock-off phones (山寨), said quite apropos-ly that Sichuanese is to Mandarin as Ebonics is to English. Coming from Louisiana, I couldn’t have agreed more!

The best part of Sichuan, and the reason it’s so famous all over the world, is its food. We’ve actually gotten sick of it already, since most of its vegetarian options repeat themselves ad nauseum, but it’s been nice to get into the mala (spicy and numbing) cuisine. I imagine most of you know what spicy is like, but numbing requires a little explanation. There’s a kind of peppercorn called huajiao (花椒) in Chinese, an innocuous-looking purplish round spice the size of a clove that finds its way into just about every dish. The other day, Andy picked up a few fresh ones from a market for us to chew on, so I can explain to you what the direct effect is. First a wave of sour washes over your tongue, and then a tingle starts at the tip, radiating out into the rest of your mouth and your lips. Eventually everything feels numb, but still the sour flavor persists. After a few minutes, the numbness subsides, but your lips quiver as though you had a stick massager between them. In a flavor, huajiao is Sichuanese food.

As for Chengdu, it has more or less epitomized our disappointment with the province. Andy and I both remembered a slow paced life, hordes of locals drinking tea and baijiu in streetside restaurants, and a general good feeling about the place that made it feel different from everywhere else. Now only three years since our last visits it feels more like… everywhere else, more and more diluted, and without even the good fortune of the intersection of major rivers to mark its center. So we’ve had our best times in Chengdu so far with other foreigners to be honest, even though that violates the nature of our planned trip. On the way into town, I stopped in the first foreign bar we saw, the Shamrock, just to see if they had any stouts. My friend Bryan had coincidentally just come into town from Shanghai, and so he treated us to several rounds of Guinness and Tiger. The next night we had a nice Sichuan dinner with the people behind gochengdoo.com, followed by a bottle of wine at Le Sud, the swankiest French joint in town. The owner, a really out-there ex-engineer-turned-restauranteur/adventureur named Julien, treated us to our second bottle of wine on the house “to support our craziness” and stayed out drinking with us until 3am sharing stories. It’s been nice to be with kindred spirits again.

Today I had my only local Chengdu experiences. First I wandered past the zoo of Zhuge Liang’s memorial hall (woe for my man!) down into the Tibetan quarter of the town. There, among the throngs of Tibetan families and monks winding among the teeming crowds of tourists and Han locals, I walked into a little restaurant. Two monks in town to buy supplies for their monastery called me over to their table and started a conversation, exclaiming that our meeting was fate. Once we got comfortable, they whispered questions to me about the Dalai Lama, afraid to be heard even though only other Tibetans were around (gotta keep the DL on the DL at all times!). I said that we Americans supported him, and that I had even been in D.C. when he had given a lecture. “Then your blessing is great,” said the quiet one, who breathed a sigh of relief that we in the US hadn’t bought into the lies propagated by China. As I worked on my bowl of ginseng roots and yoghurt, the other monk poured me yak butter tea and stuck his fingers into my bowl of zangba, a bowl of barley powder and yak butter, instructing me on how to properly roll it up. They told me all about how hard it is for their people, and how the government restricts the learning of their culture, but the whole time they were smiling and terribly upbeat. When I mentioned we’d be passing through the region of Aba to the north of here, the boisterous one said, “There you will find the most beautiful Tibetan girls. Your blessing really is great!” followed by a deep belly laugh. On the way out, they picked up the whole tab, insisting I let them improve their karma, and gave me their phone numbers in case we have troubles. The whole encounter has me very excited for the next part of our trip: one month on the plateau!

Finally today I made the one stop I couldn’t miss in Chengdu: the Manjusri Temple (文殊院). In three visits, I’ve visited the old temple’s tea garden three times, and I find I like it more each time. It’s built into the side of the courtyard complex, ringed in by red walls and upturned, dark tile roofs. Bamboo and other plants are tucked away everywhere, so that it feels like a lush garden in the country (as long as you don’t look up at the skyline outside). People sit in groups of varying in bamboo chairs around the stone tables, drinking tea that is reinfused constantly by attentive workers, playing cards, talking, reading, or even napping. It’s got a hushed kind of liveliness and a status among locals that rivals the Café du Monde in New Orleans. It’s reminiscent of the slow-paced life that made Sichuan so great in the first place — the food, art, opera, etc. — and is now an island in the middle of a city actively disassembling its own culture. My cup of Wulong steaming in front of me on the table, I heard from behind me the other big draw to the teahouse: the tuning fork clang of the ear-cleaning man. I caught the old man’s eye, and he was at my side in a second, sanitizing his set of metal implements and brushes in a bottle of alcohol. The next second he was jamming a series of cold scoops and brushes down against my eardrum cleaning out all the accumulated gook. Finally he stuck in the long brush and pulled out the tuning fork — his signature — to vibrate the the brush and thus shake the last bits out. As usual, I could hear just a little bit better once he was finished.

Now with improved hearing, lots of rest, and a good bit of exposure to Western comfort, we should be ready to tackle the last major challenge of our trip, and hopefully find enlightenment! Wish us luck!