The most important thing to do before taking on a task like this is to clearly define what we’re looking for. It can’t be just LBXes. Nor can it be just LBXes and the mess they’re in. Many of the LBXes in China’s cities are indeed in a big mess, but we’re not trying to describe how hard their lives are or what obstacles stand in the way to their happiness. There is a great volume of work available on this already, and it’s depressing. Our goal then is more positive and hopefully useful: to seek LBXes who have been able to create happiness and beauty despite it all.

So we start our journey from the big cities, the center of China’s development and the heart of the madness that spreads over the land more frantically and with more gusto each passing day. We’re not interested in capturing the essence of China as a whole because frankly the subject is too colossal to try to encapsulate in one fell swoop. And besides, enough ink has already been spilt on such endeavors. Likewise, we’re not out to report on the economy. Of course economics are important on a macro level, and clearly money affects the lives of every LBX. Nonetheless, they’re all affected at an individual level, and we’re interested in the effects from the vantage point of the individual LBXes themselves.

We’re interested not in how wonderful is the world of the modern Chinese man or how his comforts are tripling or how his access to information is ever increasing. All of that too has been well documented, but more importantly implies movement by something greater than the man while the man passively receives from below. The essence of an animal is lost when it is described in terms of its ever bigger cage with air conditioning and more nutritious food – and harmony among its co-cage-dwellers. No, we’re searching for how the modern Chinese man flourishes in his own environment, where he feels relaxed and free. We’re out to tear down the walls of his cage to find signs that red blood still flows in his veins and that he has potency on his own.

Don’t get us wrong — this project is not meant to be destructive toward people or the systems in which they live, although God knows we’d love to have the magic button to destroy a system or two. We’re philosophers, and as philosophers, we’re out to seek inspiration in an old place full of secrets that can further our enlightenment and hopefully at the same time further enlighten anybody who stumbles upon our work. A rather pertinent Chinese saying goes something like, “The essence of a mountain is not in its height; the presence of immortals there makes it celestial. The essence of a body of water is not in its depth; the presence of a dragon there makes it divine.” So we’re not looking for big mountains or deep waters; we’re looking for remaining traces of divinity and immortality embodied in humanity, which we value more highly than the physical observations that point thereto.That we are carrying a camera is indicative of the fact that we are also searching for beauty, but we’re looking for beauty in the form of mastery of the art of human life. We want people who take life as an art form in itself and who have achieved high levels of proficiency in mastering their own fates — truly a lost art in most places, let alone zombie-ridden China.

Aesthetics in the unchanging and permanent – the philosophical – sense runs much deeper than the surface. Beauty to us is thus something alive and thriving and creating its own rules. It’s a mastery of the game, an ability to seize and savor that which is necessary for both survival and happiness and to disregard the rest. We’re looking for the spirit of humanity in a place where the rush for development has made humanity more difficult to find with each passing day.

China is a world where the currents of reality run deep, and the waves come hard and fast. Many are either drowning or just barely staying afloat, but we’re not interested in them, pitiable though they may be. We’re looking for those who craft their own boats and sail atop the waves. That said, most of the characters we seek are hanging onto little bamboo rafts while huge tankers dominate the straights. We’re interested in getting to know these raft pilots, where they go, and why they go there.

The Chinese even have a phrase for what I’m describing that goes something like, “Even though the swallow is small, its five organs are all there.” Yes, it’s small, but it lives and thrives just as well as the big birds. Perhaps it even lives a more complete life for its being small.

So that’s the perspective we take at the outset of this project: to find dignity and humanity in a place that is perhaps most replete of both. Our challenge then is to render our discoveries into a transferable medium. We hope you’ll join us for the journey.

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.

LBXes 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. LBXes have certainly been subjected to enough of both to achieve stunning effects, making LBXes 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.

LBXes 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 LBXes 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 LBXes, 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 LBXes 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 LBXes 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 LBXes 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. 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.