Portrait of an LBX

Spring is here, the flowers are blooming, and LBXes and everyone else are heading to Beijing's parks to enjoy the pleasant weather before it becomes unbearably hot. Of course, parents are still bundling their kids up like it's mid-winter. Taken in Ritan (Temple of the Sun) Park.

Flying kites is one of the most popular passtimes among China's elderly. They fly them higher than I've ever seen and have some pretty impressive looking reels. Temple of the Sun Park was full of people trying to fly kites last weekend, but unfortunately there was little in the way of wind.

I'm posting this image in honor of the fact that winter in Beijing seems finally to be passing. Being basically on the edge of a desert, weather in Beijing swings from one extreme to the other in the blink of an eye, with only a few short weeks' respite between dry, cold winters and dripping wet, hot summers.

Many who come to China are first struck by is how modern its Tier I cities are -- new subways, highways, shiny buildings, etc. Today's China is built on the migrant worker. Unable to make enough money in the fields or find work at home, they come to the rapidly developing cities looking for work. They build the apartments, office buildings and overabundance of five-star hotels where we live, work and bargain down the rates when our parents come into town because someone built too many five-star hotels for the Olympics. Most of these LBXes from the countryside have few skills except for a determination to do whatever it takes to help their families back home live a better life through the paltry sums they are able to send home each month. Last year about this time I took a bike ride to the still-incomplete Olympic Park in Beijing. I stopped for a chat with this migrant worker from Hebei province as he was taking a break for lunch. At the time, he had been working on the Bird's Nest for about a year, eleven hours a day. He made it home for four days for Chinese New Year, but then he was right back at it. Indeed, the eleven-hour days paid off -- at least for the rest of us. The Olympic venues were all completed with time to spare and we all enjoyed the spectacle.

This man is one of the many residents of Beijing and other Chinese cities who make a living digging bottles and cardboard out of trash cans around the city to sell to recycling centers. Others have a set spot in their neighborhood where residents will bring them their recyclables. But with the downturn in the economy and prices for recyclable goods dropping, competition in the business is fierce. The neighborhood recyclables-collecting types have said that if they leave their spot for a day, they will be replaced by someone else desperate to make a buck.

I'm afraid I didn't get out to shoot this weekend, although Sunday was one of the most beautiful days I've seen in a while in Beijing. I'm still going to keep the pictures going though, but I'll be pulling from the archives. Today's is a man from China's growing middle class. By standards here, he's fat, but on the whole, that's still considered a good thing. After all, we're still only about half a century away from a manmade famine that killed between 30 and 100 million people.

Note to self: LBX mommies are almost always happy to have their baby photographed by a random foreigner.

One of the more citified LBXes I've photographed for the site thus far. This was shot outside the modern art museum near my house. The woman with the baby is writing on her cell phone with a stylus.

A couple of LBXes sell fruit from the back of their mianbaoche (bread car) on the south side of Tonghui River

A woman and a baby spending some time in the rubble on the south side of Tonghui River in Beijing. Some of the area has been demolished and the rest can't be far behind.