Portrait of an LBX

By Evan

Looking down from about 3/4 up the giant mountain over endless bamboo stalks. Photo by Andy

It’s been a long time since my last update (is anybody surprised?), so I’ll try to go easy on not overloading you with the silly stuff we’ve been doing. When last we left off, we had been stuck in Jiangle for days due to nonstop rain. Finally we caught a break and rolled south three days after expected and after skipping past the Yuhua caves (玉华洞, we still refuse to pay admission anywhere) rolled for over an hour and a half up a mountain through cloud base up to just shy of 1000 meters high followed by a breakneck plummet of 10 km. At the bottom of the mountain in the little village of Dakeng (大坑), we came across an unusual sight: a large group of LBXes gathered on the roadside clustered around several women in red coats playing music on marching band instruments with the reverb kicked way way up (no, that’s not poor audio quality on the video). Intrigued, we asked what was going on, to which one of the red-clad band members responded: “a funeral! (葬礼呀)” Then about five women screamed at us in unison, “come sit down and have a drink (过来喝一杯酒吧)” and a minute later we were sitting at the table facing one Mr. Le (乐先生), whose grandmother, 87 year old Mrs. Zhang, had just passed away. (more…)

By Evan

Forgive me, readers, for it’s been a long time since I last posted. Before I begin, I’ll note that I have been alerted that most don’t appreciate my rants about how overwhelmingly terrible modern Chinese cities weigh on me. I genuinely do lament the way China has been constructed over the last several decades, and I wish from the bottom of my heart that something could be done to salvage what I see as the finishing off under updated pretexts (aka Scientific Development) of decent urban culture that was started back in the Cultural Revolution. That said, I’ll try to keep it to a minimum unless a particularly egregious offense forces my hand.

So back to where I left off: when last I wrote, Alexis and I were in Shaoxing trying to angle a tour of a huangjiu (黄酒) factory. Since the slackers at the biggest factory in town don’t work on Sundays (the nerve), we resigned ourselves to head into what’s left of the city’s old neighborhood and experience huangjiu the way LBXes do — 6 yuan (~$0.88) per warmed iron kettle (big enough for 4 cups full) with a big dinner. Several hours, another incredible meal (the best food of the trip so far has come from Shaoxing and its environs — I swear it’s universal that the food just gets better the further south you go), and six, seven, eight, or who knows how many kettles later, and we were on the alley after midnight with no hotel. Who needs hotels when you’ve got tents and an old neighborhood to camp in anyway, right? Anyway it made sense to us at the time, so we as quietly as we could drunkenly manage set up our tents in a courtyard among a cluster of houses next to Lu Xun‘s former house. An LBX heard us, came out and asked very worriedly what we were doing. Just camping, leaving tomorrow, we told him. “Oh, then sleep well,” he said before going back in. A few hours later at 6am when my alarm went off and the steady throbbing of my head entered my conscious thoughts, we packed up and made to head out. “Why are you up so early? You could sleep a few more hours!” said the same man from the previous night on his way out. Sometimes I love LBXes, I really do. (more…)