Portrait of an LBX

By Evan

The Sino-Tibetan fusion family of Emasiji, Duosiji, and Mr. Sun, by Andy

It’s been only six days since we left Chengdu, but it feels like a year ago already. Fat reserves replenished and bikes passably maintained (poor Andy’s bar-end shifter crapped out in a part of the world where only mountain bike parts are available), we made our way to Dujiangyan (都江堰). That city, located in the northeast corner of the basin, is named after one of the engineering marvels of the ancient world. It is a complicated flood relief system that redirected the tempestuous Min River (岷江) into the irrigation system that allowed the Chengdu plain to become “the Garden of China.” The plain is now so covered by sprawl and industry it could be called the “New Jersey of Western China,” but the irrigation system works today just the way it was designed to way back in 256 B.C. Sweet!

From there we headed north on G213 following the Min River valley up through the scads of giant green mountains that delineate the low basin and the high plateau. The road, the only one for hundreds of miles around, happens to be the preferred biking route from Chengdu to Lhasa, and so we were repeatedly asked if we were on the classic Chinese “prove your biking mettle” path. Andy pointed out that a long time ago, a pilgrimage to Lhasa, was a deeply significant affair reserved for devoted Tibetan Buddhists and the occasional Brad Pitt. Nowadays it’s the destination for all self-proclaimed badass bikers. That is to say that basically any pedaler worth his spit has either been there, is en route and already ran into us over the last few months, or is planning to go just as soon as he gets his chance. We met several groups making the month-long trip, including four cool dudes from the Beida (北大) cycling club and a bunch of old folks from the Chengdu Retired Persons Association — power to them!

The route also brought us smack through the heart of Wenchuan, 2008’s earthquake disaster area. As we neared the epicenter, evidence of the destruction was everywhere: ruined bridges laying sideways in the river, the old highway covered over by landslides 50 stories high (they rebuilt the highway on the opposite side of the river), and destroyed, abandoned clusters of buildings scattered on the higher parts of the valley. However, in the two years since 5-12 (the date of the quake and a number you see written everywhere), they’ve managed to rebuild damn near everything. Construction is still raging for 100 km in both directions from Wenchuan, since they’ve declared 2010 the “year of absolute victory (決勝之年),” but honestly the extent to which they’ve already thrown communities, villages, towns, and even whole cities back up — and the apparent quality with which they’ve done it — has been a huge positive surprise. Hats off, Chinese government! This just proves you can do stuff when you feel like it and/or when the entire world is watching. They’ve even managed in many cases to use Tibetan motifs in the construction of entire villages of identical houses, even where the tenants aren’t Tibetan, and the houses never looked like that!

Speaking of ‘betans, we had no idea that the majority of people affected by the earthquake were ethnic Qiang (羌族, culturally two shakes of a lamb’s tail from Tibetans) or Tibetan, and that the areas most ravaged were up in the high mountains. People we’ve talked to who lived through the quake have told us how epically grim the affair was. “On both sides there are mountains, and in the middle there’s water. There was nowhere to run,” said one Tibetan guy. Another said he wishes he could live in Chengdu because in the event of another quake, “at least there it’s flat.” An old Qiang farmer whose house slid down a slope into the river said he thought the “world was ending (我以為世界完蛋了).” Now I’ve lived through minor hurricanes (not Katrina thankfully), but from what we’ve seen and heard on the road, I feel there can be nothing more terrible to experience than a quake like Wenchuan’s.

As previously said, with destruction comes rebirth, and unfortunately for us that meant a highway that has been under construction for — this is no joke — 175 continuous kilometers and still counting. That means we’ve inhaled more dust than a hotel vacuum cleaner, heard more stupid screams from construction teams than an attractive girl walking through death row, and after it rained, caked ourselves in more mud than we could at a fancy spa. We’re told “absolute victory” will be declared on the entire highway in three months, which seems like “absolute fantasy,” but we’ve been surprised before.

One of those surprises has been the existence of what I call “lowland Tibetans.” Andy and I have both been around “real Tibetans,” the ones who wear cowboy hats, subsist on yak and yoghurt, and ride motorcycles covered in colored tassels blaring giddy Tibetan ditties. The ones down at “low elevations” of 2-3000 meters look Tibetan in the face, but they wear Han clothes, have Han names, speak Sichuanese, and subsist on — gasp — rice, cabbage, and pork. No yak butter or barley anywhere. They make spicy food for God’s sakes! We’re even told that the clothes, customs, and even Tibetan dialects of the highly sinicized (漢化) lowlanders are completely different from those just 100 km or so up the road. Our prior expectations are something akin to heading into northern Italy from Switzerland looking a bunch of wily, dark haired Sicilians and red sauces to find a bunch of easy-natured blonds munching on white sauces. The moral is: always expect a transition.

Transition! On our first night out of Wenchuan, we wandered into a newly rebuilt village up a tributary river to the one we were following just before dark. Every flat part of the narrow valley between massive sheer cliffs not covered by landslide or at the bottom of the river was planted over in cabbage, the only cash crop we’ve seen for days. We asked the first local we saw where we could camp, and he told us, “right here!” indicating the concrete patio next to his house. We set up camp in front of a dozen curious Tibetans, explaining every item of our gear and every detail of our trip. Once we were set up outside, the crowd scattered, and we went to sit with our host, Mr. Yuan, for a little chat. He owned a house in the county seat down the road where his son is in school, but made damn sure to come rebuild his house in the village. He did so to maintain his official “peasant (農民)” status. While migrants in Shanghai lament their non-urban registration, he wanted to maintain it so that in case his son, “doesn’t do well in school, he’ll at least be able to farm for a living.” Otherwise, Mr. Yuan was awesome to chat with, very level-headed and well-balanced. He thought people lived with too much stress these days, especially in Chengdu, and said we know how to live right. He especially loves Americans because among all foreign hikers who tackle nearby Four Girls Mountain (四姑娘山 — a much more rugged trek than the name gives on), only we carry all our own gear without hiring local porters. F*** yeah, America! When we thanked him for the place to stay, he said, “I’ve been on the outside, and had many troubles I couldn’t have overcome without the help of others. No need to thank me.” I love these people!

The next day we road further up dusty construction alley, past some of the first “authentic” looking Tibetan villages and about an a**load of hydroelectric dams. Seriously, China is dam-nation, having managed to plug more rivers with the damn things than any group in history except maybe beavers. Maybe. Otherwise, as we went along, it felt like coming through the Rockies with periodic patches of what looked like “see how Tibetans live” exhibitions out of EPCOT — both beautiful and bizarre.

At the end of that day, around 3,000 meters up (10,000 feet) we asked yet another man, wearing a camo Harley Davidson cap and unloading bundles of dried grass from his tractor where we could camp. He told us it’d be too dusty to camp and directly invited us into the house for dinner and a bed. First, however, at his request, I demonstrated to him and a gaggle of Tibetan women how my tent is set up, since their idea of a “tent” is a structure that sleeps at least 10 people. They were breathless through the unrolling and snapping together of poles, and my grand finale of throwing on the rain fly was met with a round of applause. That’s right — I impressed a bunch of Tibetans with my outdoorsmanship. F*** yeah, American-made tent!

We put our stuff in the downstairs guest bedroom of their brand spanking new concrete house and sat down on the kitchen sofa next to the wood-burning stove. For a while we were with über-Tibetan-looking grandma, who spoke next to no Chinese yet was mesmerized by the pictures on CCTV. Mom and 10-year-old daughter then came home and started whipping up a giant meal that was an hour in preparing and all cooked over the wood fire. Their small kitchen, much the same as in many old-style Chinese houses, also served as living room and dining room, since the warmth from the stove and other bodies is so precious when it gets cold. Two female Tibetan friends of the mother who were cooking for road workers in a giant tent next door joined us for the feast, which consisted of spicy pork, heaps of vegetables, preserved eggs, and wild mushrooms that the dad had just collected from the pine forest behind the house. Andy and I were each served a glass of baijiu infused with the same mushrooms, a quaff they claimed to be anti-carcinogenic — which God knows we needed after that highway.

It was the most wholesome, down-to-earth dinner experience we’ve had in ages, not least because the food was so good! It turned out that the dad, Mr. Sun, was a Han from down in the basin who came up to do some work, married a local, and never looked back. He was handy too. In the hour or so before dinner he installed a light, laid out his grass rolls to dry, and went foraging in the woods. His wife, Emasiji (Tibetans have only one name) clearly wore the pants in the house, Mr. Sun seeming only too glad to be a “yes, dear” man. The house, by the way, was completely Tibetanized — from the ornamentation painted on the outer walls to the multi-colored prayer flags flying from the roof to the Buddhist shrine in which she always keeps a candle burning upstairs. Their 10-year-old daughter, the cutest, most well-mannered little girl I’ve met in China to date, is a product of both cultures. She speaks three languages (Tibetan, Sichuanese, and Mandarin) and goes by either her Tibetan name, Duosiji, which per tradition was chosen by a lama, or her Chinese name, depending on the company. They were what you might call “simple folks,” but they knew how to treat people right and love their family.

Dressing up an unwilling Duosiji, by Andy

After a night spent in the spacious guest bedroom, twice as big as the master, breakfast of steamed bread, congee, and salted vegetables was served to the same group as the night before — again in front of the television. Andy at this time asked to take some pictures, so Emasiji fetched out Duosiji’s traditional Tibetan ensemble and proceeded to spend ten minutes dressing that poor little girl to the hilt. She protested a good bit, but finally gave in and was happy to be photographed, especially when we promised to send them copies when we have access to a printer. Once the photo session was over, Emasiji and Mr. Sun needed to take off for some errand on the motorcycle, but entreated us to “spend the day with their daughter.” I doubt many American parents would ask two strange men to stay unsupervised with their 10-year-old daughter, but maybe we could say they’re good judges of character?

We passed up the offer, took the flatbread Emasiji roasted for us on the stove, said goodbye to Duosiji, and headed off. Unfortunately, rain that night had turned the road to a muddy reverse Slip-N-Slide, and the going was fairly miserable. Eventually we did arrive in the only town we’d pass for some time, looking like we had just gotten a Dairy Queen chocolate dip. This town, called Shuajingsi (刷經寺鎮), looks like a Wild West boomtown, and marks the first significant widening of the valley and the demarcation point between the laid-back lowlanders and the popping plateau-dwellers. We’ll apparently be up in the endless grasslands after another 40 km of climbing from here, already 3,300 meters high.

The last thing I’ll note is what I did for kicks this morning. Shuajingsi is rimmed by ridges about 1,000 meters above the town, the sheer faces of which are covered in dense pine woods (we’re not quite at the timberline). I wanted a quiet place to sit and write, so I asked a local girl how to climb to the top. She pointed me to a trail and said the locals are always up in the woods scouring for wild mushrooms. So I took a grocery bag and my journal and headed up and up and up, until all I could see were rolling green peaks below the boundless azure sky, and the sounds of the town below were inaudible, and sat in a field of wild purple flowers contemplating. It was most excellently zen. On the way back, I came directly down through the forest away from the beaten trails, where the locals picked all the “low-hanging” mushrooms long ago. As I was sliding down (literally) through the mud and underbrush, I caught out of the corner of my eye a flash of brown at the base of a pine and scurried over to investigate. Sure enough, it was the mother lode of wild ‘shrooms, totaling about five pounds after I had picked them all. When I finally staggered dirty as hell out of the woods with my treasure, local women gawked and called out to their friends all down the street back to our hotel, “this laowai is really something! (這個老外能幹啊!)” We had over half of them stewed up in a local restaurant, despite the chef’s insistence that eating so many wild mushrooms without meat would make us throw up. The result was just OK (no, we didn’t puke), but at least now I can scratch off “making a meal of edible mushrooms gathered in the woods” from my bucket list.

Ok, that’s it, I swear! Sorry for the scarcity of pictures — we’re operating off slow 2G internet in the middle of nowhere. Hopefully the next post should be full of Tibetan shenanigans! Good night!