Portrait of an LBX

We are currently resting in Tai’an, the city that sits below Mount Tai, one of China’s five great mountains. Tomorrow we will travel 50km south to meet the family of a Chinese friend of Evan’s, after which we will move out of Shandong and into our third province, Henan.

Our ride to Tai’an was marked by our first hills and mountains, which while nothing compared to what we will face when we climb up onto the Tibetan plateau next summer, were enough to give our relatively inexperienced legs the workout of the trip so far. In the mountains, we passed a number of villages that, aside from the occasional slogan painted on the wall of a house, seemed untouched by the maddening rush for development of the past forty years. Nestled down from the main road among some of the largest and most natural trees we have seen thus far, the villages could easily be overlooked.

Clamoring down the steep slope into one such village, I was immediately struck by the tranquility of the place. With the majority of the tiny population out in the fields, themselves on terraces painstakingly cut out of the rocky mountain slope long before, the village was abandoned except for the occasional chicken and an old man pushing a wheelbarrow of corn who asked me if I was lost. Red paper banners with black characters imploring fortune and prosperity decorated the doors of each house. When an old woman peered out from behind one of the doors and responded to my “Ni hao” with only a blank stare, I began to feel like an intruder and made my way back up the rocky path to the road.

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One thing that caught my attention over the past few days is the condition of the elderly in these mountain villages and other small towns. In Beijing, retirees gather in parks to practice tai chi, fly kites, play chess, show off their caged birds or just sit and talk. Their only worry seems to be boredom. Passing through these villages, however, I have watched old ladies, clearly in their late 70s or 80s, crossing the road, their bodies doubled over under the weight of a load of dried tree branches with which to cook dinner or a huge basket of corn ears to husk. Old men push wheelbarrows full of rocks uphill for kilometers. In contrast to our romanticized view of life in the countryside and abhorrence of the mess created by the all-too-rapid development of China’s cities, life in the country is undeniably hard. The old ladies are the least likely to respond to a wave or a smile from us as we pass, instead only gazing at us from behind empty eyes as if to say, “I have seen crazier things, and I am too tired and broken to care.”

Now we are back in the city – another soulless place indistinguishable from the myriad, gray, expressionless urban centers that are already blurring together in my memory as if viewed from a merry-go-round. But in front of the temple next to our hotel, behind which the outline of Mount Tai is visible through the haze, the elderly sit and play chess or practice tai chi as black Audi A6s rush past on the main drag.