Portrait of an LBX

By Andy

After a couple days through some serious mountains, from Jiangle to Gaoqiao and Gaoqiao to Huyuan, our legs were starting to scream for a break. As we pulled off the road for lunch on our way from Huyuan to Anxi, I told Evan that after another full day through the mountains, I didn’t think I would be able to do much the next day. I suggested we check the map for a county seat with internet and take a rest day before setting out again.

Back when we first started the trip, we had resolved to stick to the back-country — to spend as much of our time as possible in villages (村) and townships (乡). A disheartening run-in with the cops on the second day of our trip temporarily resulted in a policy of avoiding mid-tier, regional centers at all costs. That was until we realized that we needed internet access to write this blog. Since then, we’ve pretty much decided that if we’re going to take a rest day, it should be in business hotel with internet in the room, which are usually found in only county seat-level cities (县城) or larger.

So we set our sights on Datian (大田), a county seat where we could be assured of finding a room with internet access. Exhausted, we pulled into the city’s dusty center late in the afternoon and started checking out the coffee shop internet scene in case we couldn’t find a wired room at the right price. The coffee shops, all rip-offs of the usual suspects like Straights and UBC, were a bust internet-wise, so we went to find a hotel. As we pulled up to a slightly expensive-looking hotel and Alexis went in to inquire about prices, a voice to my left called out in Chinese, “Can you speak Chinese?” I turned and saw a head poking out the passenger side of a police car and swore under my breath as the car pulled in front of Evan and the man got out to talk to us.

After a number of frustrating experiences, our blood pressure rises to dangerous levels at the sight of authority of any sort in China, especially the police. When the athletic man, Mr. Chen (陈), whom Evan would later rename Biff due to his resemblance to the antagonist from Back to the Future, told us he and the two other, overweight cops who had gotten out of the car were from the local cycling club and wanted to help us find a hotel room, we could only chuckle at the nerve of such a lie. We tried to shoo off the Police Uncles (警察叔叔), but they were not giving up.

When Biff told us they had known we would be coming into town for over an hour and had cars out looking for us, we kicked ourselves for being so open with Mr. Wang and the police back in Gaoqiao. Every police station in Fujian must be on the lookout for us now, we thought. I told Evan that with our Z-visas (the Z-visa, one of the most difficult to attain, is a one-year employment visa, which Evan and I still retain despite having left our previous jobs), we should probably start telling people that we had biked from Shanghai rather than Beijing so that we could plausibly claim that we had requested a sabbatical for the bike trip. We also decided to say we were ending our trip in Xiamen. “No matter what, we are not going to Anxi (安溪),” Evan told us. “That is the one place I absolutely want to go in Fujian, and we are not going to let these cops call ahead and get us kicked out of there. Tell them we’re going to Yongchun (永春) [one county north of Anxi].” So we began lying.

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By Evan (with significant contributions from Andy)

*Click here to see all the  pictures we took in the old town of Tangyin

The path between the fields on the outskirts of town and the stone compounds of the Tangyin Old Town, by Andy

In Shanghai we decided to modify our methodology of just fluttering around China wherever the four winds blow us toward a system of identifying some worthwhile destinations in advance. As such, we picked up some books about ancient towns (古镇) in Jiangxi and Fujian. Pushing into central Jiangxi, we had a chance to make use of our guides and pedaled toward the recommended ancient town of Tangyin (棠阴镇). As we crested a green mountain pass topped with a sign exhorting the locals to “develop the tourism industry (大力发展旅游产业),” we feared a repeat of our last ancient town experience in Wuzhen (乌镇), Zhejiang — an over-commercialized, touristic, stupidscape with a extortionate entrance fee and nigh zero meaning whatsoever.

A street bisecting the main road at first seemed to confirm our worries — Commercial Street (商业街), as it was called, was a filthy, cluttered, little road with hawker stalls on both sides. It appeared that the city was trying to enact its goal of tourism promotion but, not knowing what to do, resorted to the tried-and-tested “tourism alley” strategy. We were encouraged, however, to see many old structures just beyond the end of the street, and determined to find a hotel and return on foot to explore. (more…)

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By Evan

Every once in a while a new acquaintance asks us if anything bad has happened to us on this trip. The honest answer is yes, any run-in we have with Public Security organs or the state in general is an event we wish we could forget, but we usually bite our tongues. In truth, the police have been our biggest worry since the planning stage of Portrait of an LBX began about a year ago. Nowadays we frequently pass signs on the side of the road that say, “If you have a problem, call the police!” accompanied by the cute little cartoon police characters Jingjing and Chacha (think comical cop icons called Po-po and Lice-Lice). “What if your problem is the police?” we wonder.

The long-standing fear reared its repugnant head in Tangyin (棠阴), Jiangxi just after we had ridden past a statue of the solemn fiberglass police officer saluting us in front of the busted town hospital with a rusted-out, tire-less car out front. As we stopped to take pictures, a cop car headed in the opposite direction suddenly turned around and cut us off. We were braced for confrontation, but the cops, after hailing us to stop, simply offered any assistance they could and, amid the usual compliments on our Chinese ability and exclamations about our height, gave us words of praise for our bike journey. Whew, that was a little too easy. (more…)

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By Evan

First and foremost, I’d like to wish everybody who cares a Merry Christmas. As I write this post on December 25th in the Sun Party cafe of Quzhou, I am physically surrounded by cheap Chinese renditions of Christmas paraphernalia and stereos blaring a strange holiday music mix of about ten songs on endless repeat, but as for the rest of the world outside the window, today remains just another day in a big, polluted, frantic urban mess. In a way I’m relieved that the commercial nightmare back home snuck up on us without my realizing it.

Back to the blog, here goes a review of our activities since last I updated. Before leaving Jingning, I stumbled across a She clothing shop all done up in quasi-traditional wooden motifs outside and was culturally compelled to enter. In the store the two young She girls working the floor explained to me that the She people’s traditional symbol is the phoenix, and let me tell you, they put it on everything. The shop, they told me, is one of a very few in the whole world that produces traditional She wardrobes (most She now dress the same as their Han counterparts, i.e. neo-modern tacky for youth or standard black LBX garb for the older generation). Apparently they even sell some outfits to overseas Chinese restaurants as uniforms — cool. Upon request, I got a tour of the upstairs workroom, where I had a funny conversation with the head seamstress. “The phoenix is the symbol of us, the She people. (凤凰是我们畲族的吉祥物),” she told me. Oh, you’re a She as well, I asked. “Well, no, but I know a lot about that sort of thing.” Oh you silly poser Han! At the end, I wanted to pick up one of their really cool shirts, but realizing it impractical to lug around for the rest of the year, I compromised and had a phoenix sewed onto my Under Armor shirt — now equally sweat-wicking and auspicious! (more…)

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