Portrait of an LBX

For most who visit this site without having extensive prior knowledge of China, an explanation of the title is in order. LBX is an abbreviation for laobaixing (pronounced roughly lao-by-shing), the Chinese term for “the old one hundred surnames” – that is, “commoners” or “the common people.” Although the Chinese word has existed for centuries, the nickname LBX has in our circle of foreigners living in China come to designate the poor, low-class, uneducated (in the Western sense) subsection of Chinese society. We will readily admit to on occasion using the term in exasperation at some of the uncouth habits exhibited by this particular group of people – the spitting, smoking, frequently stinking and always surprising habits sometimes offensive to Westerners more acclimated to a more delicate way of life.

The genesis of the term, however, was simply a need to quickly describe a group of people we encounter frequently and often wish to discuss*.  The word “Chinese” didn’t suffice for quick distinction since it can describe the nationality of a billion and a half people and the ethnicity of an even greater number of people who are now scattered across the globe. There are rich Chinese, bureaucratic Chinese, sophisticated and refined Chinese, minority Chinese, American Chinese, Hong Kong and Taiwan Chinese – and then there are LBX’es.

LBX’es are decidedly the products of 5,000 glorious years of Chinese history, forty glorious years of Communist China turning the previous 5,000 on its head, twenty glorious years of market reforms completely undoing the previous 5,040, birth into the caste of 800 million Chinese referred to casually as “peasants,” little to no formal education, lives that in many cases might be called “cold,” “brutish,” or “short,” and stupefying uncertainty about where the next glorious set of years is going to take them.  Any geologist can tell you that all it takes to produce some of the world’s true gems – or oddities – is time and pressure. LBX’es have certainly been subjected to enough of both to achieve stunning effects, making LBX’es into an extraordinarily curious lot from the perspective of an American, and hence a group of people very much worth describing.  They are, as a result of pure circumstance, extremely different from their more affluent or overseas cousins.

LBX’es are everywhere in China. Most of them live their lives on the farm and comprise the some 70% of China’s population engaged in agriculture. A horrible many of them are of late engaged in manufacturing. Been to Wal-Mart lately?

The majority of the LBX’es we the authors, on the other hand, meet live in China’s huge cities in service professions. To get a feel for the effect on society this has, imagine that the U.S. never had an industrial revolution, and most Americans to this day resembled rural Alabamans (give or take an accent or a cuisine). You should also imagine they’re all the same race just for giggles. Now imagine that one day all those Alabamans were driven by powerful economic forces into New York, Washington, Boston, San Francisco, etc., swarming the streets by the hundreds of thousands. Got a mental image? Those Alabamans in China’s big cities are LBX’es, and they’re cabbies, waiters, chefs, construction workers (oh so many construction workers), karaoke prostitutes, bath house prostitutes, barber shop prostitutes, massage girls, store clerks, street cleaners, street vendors, traffic assistants (you don’t want to know), repairmen, maids, babysitters, elevator ladies, loafers, and about a thousand other professions they pick up when they come into the city trying to make a buck. Some of them bring with them collected capital from their hometown to open little tiny businesses like the dry cleaners around the corner or the fruit stand lady who sells me bananas. Some of them leave home, make it big, and open Shanghai’s largest chain of shopping malls (true story). Sometimes you can even see lucky nouveau-riche LBX’es abroad (think Jed Clampett goes to Paris).

Due to one of the more frustrating legacies of the planned economy, China’s hukou residency system, most LBX’es aren’t entitled to send their kids to school in the cities where they work. The majority of them leave their children back home with the extended LBX family network while they work long, long hours in China’s cities for low wages that they use to support God-knows-how-many people back where they came from. Many LBX’es readily visible in the cities are thus similar to the ants you see in small numbers carrying ten times their weight in food toward a mound somewhere distant from your cereal crumbs.

I could, of course, go on ad nauseum trying to capture the essence of LBX’es all in one earth-splitting article, but you didn’t come here just to hear some self-inflated American attempt to summarize a giant swath of the world’s population in a few paragraphs. Our goal is to capture that essence through the stories of some of the more unique people we know and meet.

We realize it’s impossible to properly summarize or categorize any group of people in a single phrase. I personally want to put my fist through a window when I hear things like, “those Asians are all out to get you,” or “Muslims are all terrorists” or “Americans are all pompous assholes” or “all Parisians disdain Americans for being pompous assholes” or any other such nonsensical overgeneralization. The term “LBX” was created and is used as simply a short handle for convenience in describing a phenomenon we see in our daily lives. Hopefully you’ll start really understanding what LBX means – and more importantly what it means to be an individual who is born as one – through the portraits and other articles on this site.