Portrait of an LBX

By Evan

Glorious landscapes of... Hebei! by Evan

Just two days ago when I woke up at 11:00am in my top bunk sleeper train berth, we were rushing past tranquil scenes of rolling green hills and high rice paddies. In fifteen short hours of much-needed repose coiled up in less space than corpses get in coffins, I had been passively sped back to the enchanting South and its rice, a sight that previously required two months of hard cycling across the Mad Max landscapes of the North China Plain. More than any moment in Beijing during the few days prior, it was those paddies that made me violently awaken to the fact that the all-consuming trip of my lifetime (up to this point), the one where the scenery changed gradually and pedal by pedal, is now over. As I now recall the last week up to the finale, all the events have taken on blurred edges as if part of a dream.

Without further ado, I should relate some of the details of that last week. To our dismay, the forecast called for up to six days of rain across all of central Inner Mongolia, and for once did not deceive us. The first bit out of Hohhot had us push up the longest, hardest hill we’d face for the rest of the week through a steady rain. The driving rain and gusty wind on the downhill robbed my body of all its heat and forced us to take shelter and change clothes in the first crappy restaurant of the town after the descent. I had gotten so chilled that Andy could in no way convince me to finish the day — it was still raining — to our goal, especially since the patron had cheap rooms to let. Then said patron did himself the disservice of attempting to double the cost of our fare on account of our having “cleaned up in the bathroom,” and so anger propelled me the last miserable 20 km. (more…)

What a difference 39 km can make! After the police hijinks in Wen’an we made southward into deep Hebei determined to stay on the country side of things. The dirty hotel room we found in Liugezhuang (留各庄) for 30 yuan (~$4) was across a dirty courtyard from the hotel’s banquet facility / restaurant (mind you, the best restaurant / banquet facility in town, which isn’t saying much), where during our dinner a terribly drunk middle aged LBX man (they don’t need an excuse to be drunk, but on this particular night there was a wedding party going on) barged in to drink with us. In between strange nonsensical outbursts, he repeatedly told us, “I’m a policeman!; I go for training to Beijing all the time!; My family has connections and are in power!; This is my son! (as his son burst in); My son is in power with the government! This is my son! (he was afraid we might forget)” and so on. Basically you should imagine being in backwoods, Massachusetts and being told by a flamboyant drunken asshole, “I’m a Kennedy! I got put in power because of my family! My son has political pull and a hefty paycheck because of our family connections!”  After his son dragged him away embarrassed, and we left the restaurant, we were again forced into drunken conversation with two more elder male members of the family, primarily surnamed Gao, one the head of a local insulation enterprise (more on that later) and the other a government official. They both regaled us with stories of how successful or powerful the other was (a favorite face-giving game) before insisting we meet them at noon for lunch the next day in the courtyard. My point is that in Wen’an the police are terrorizing unsuspecting locals because of connections to us, and in the other they’re sitting us down over beers letting us know how great they are. (more…)

After attempting in vain to resolve the situation between the hotelier and police in Wen’an, we begrudgingly set off on the road south out of town for another late start. Power and politics in China has a way of making you feel completely helpless, and it cultivates a natural instinct for self preservation and nourishes it until it becomes a way of life. This often means that a car accident victim will lie on the ground, bleeding from the head, while a crowds will simply look on. It is tempting to identify the phenomenon as part of Chinese culture, but after observing it for some time, I now feel that it is much shallower than that. Rule of law is secondary to the power of people here, and the legal system is not developed enough in most places in China to ensure your own protection if you choose to help an injured person. If the police are involved and the injured is someone of means, you could be arbitrarily punished because they are looking for someone to blame quickly. If the injured is a commoner, a laobaixing, he likely doesn’t have the medical insurance to pay for his rehabilitation and is looking for someone to blame for the accident (the guilty party has probably already fled the scene), and I have heard of numerous cases of someone stepping in to take someone in dire need to the hospital only to be blamed for the accident later. “I was just trying to help!” is met with the response of “What business is it of yours to help this person? You don’t even know him!” by the authorities.

So it is with this background that I recommended from the beginning of our incident at the hotel to try to stay uninvolved. Morally, it is difficult to watch an innocent person suffer, but in the context of power and law in China, it is much safer to let events simply unfold around you.

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Today was quite the day, as Hebei is quite the place. After last night’s hour and a half local police fiasco at our cheap little hotel, we assumed the whole affair done and laughed it off as just another example of why we should avoid third-tier, middling cities. As we left the hotel this morning, and I got my deposit money back, the laobanniang (boss lady) gave us three apples for the road and said she admired both the courage it takes to be on such a journey and the way we talked to the police as it displayed how much we know about China and that we got out of the situation much better than any laobaixing could have. When I asked her name, she said, “please don’t put my name into anything you might write about your trip. We laobaixing have enough trouble.” (more…)