Portrait of an LBX

By Evan

It was around noon on the day we were to arrive in Jingxi when Andy and I glided through a crevice between two towering precipices and smack into a most unusual sight: a valley-set village half submerged under a lake. The tops of buildings, some with roofs and some without, were jutting from the top of the water, and they seemed to have been that way for years. Naturally curious and interested in photo fodder, we rolled past the “frontier management area (邊境管理區)” sign that meant the area abuts Vietnam and right up to the water’s edge. Right as Andy began snapping, an old woman with a worn but kind face and a baby propped up on her hip bade us in her heavily accented Mandarin, “Come have lunch with us (來跟我們吃飯吧!)” Hell yeah, we will! And so she led us along the water’s edge, past flocks of geese and a woman on a small skiff floating next to a half inundated house to her own home.

Inside, her 25 year old son, shirtless with orange shorts, sat next to a man in his forties wearing a dark blue guard’s uniform. The house of the Zhuang minority (壯族) family was dark, intimate, and cosily cluttered with baskets, chairs, farm utensils, etc, invoking memories an inscription in the house of the Haywood family in Baton Rouge, my second home — “I’d rather it be said that this house isn’t kept perfectly tidy than that our family didn’t live full lives here.” It, like the other houses on dry land or otherwise, is built of gray stones, and we saw as we approached that its broad old wooden door had been flung wide open. Outside the house was a patch of dirt maybe twenty meters long before the edge of the ominous lake, on which a few brightly colored peasants tossed nets from little rafts. Geese honked back and forth by the dozen. Surrounding the village of maybe ten houses was a stark, enclosing rim of limestone peaks dotted with emerald vegetation. (more…)

**This is by far the longest post I’ve written, and considering that everybody complains about my long posts, I don’t expect anybody to read it. Basically we left Mt. Tai, toured a baijiu factory, spent 2 days at a state owned coal mine getting hammered all the time, and have now arrived in Qufu, birthplace of Confucius, from which place we hope to spring to Henan tomorrow at long last. If you are up for a long read, however, I think there’s some quality stuff below. More pictures coming as soon as we can get to it.**

Having spent a decent rest day in Tai’an under the shadow of Mt. Tai, China’s most sacred mountain, and having consumed the majority of our meals in the old Hui (Chinese Muslim) quarter as usual, we struck out south with two destinations: a Chinese sorghum liquor company and 40 km further down the road the family of my friend and our lodging for the night. Leaving from the old mosque after lunch and watching some really disgusting lamb entrail washing, we arrived at the Taishan Shengliyuan sorghum liquor (baijiu) company just south of town. We asked a group of about 30 unemployed men waiting on the side of the street for work how to get there, and they responded, “just down there” with the smell of baijiu on their breaths that we immediately smelled also emanating from within the baijiu compound. After a little while of talking to people in the sales department, I finally got to a manager who agreed to let us tour the production facility down the street.
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