Portrait of an LBX

By Evan

The mosque of Shadian will be Southeast Asia's largest, by Andy

So since our last rest stop in Yanshan (硯山縣), we have coursed peacefully through rolling mountains inhabited primarily by Yi in small villages or Han in ugly concrete burgs — no surprises there. However, two days ago, after a climb to 2000 m (1.25 miles) high and subsequent plummet, we were in for a surprise. As we approached the town of Shadian (沙甸鎮), the frequency of halal restaurants (清真飯店) increased sharply, to the extent that the non-halal eateries actually had to announce themselves as just plain old Chinese (漢族飯店). Curious, Alexis and I made our way into town, under the sign in Chinese, English, and Arabic pointing us toward “Moslem Street (穆斯林街).” Immediately after making the turn, we were staring down a kilometer long boulevard straight into the biggest mosque I’ve ever seen — I mean the place gives St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican a run for its money.

We found Andy, who had ridden ahead, in front of the mosque chatting with three old men. Before we arrived, Andy had been told that the mosque will be the largest in Southeast Asia (confirmed on the town’s website — I suggest you watch the video on the home page if you understand Chinese and are curious) once it’s opened for service in August. Its total cost is over 100 million yuan (一億元), or over $14 million USD, all furnished by local businessmen as a part of their obligatory Zakat tithings, and it will be able to accommodate over 10,000 worshipers. A minute after Alexis and I arrived, one of the old men, the one who spoke the most enthusiastically but also in the least understandable dialect, invited us for a dinner of noodles in his house. As usual, we accepted, whereupon our courteous host led us toward the town center. (more…)

Mr. Zhang and Wife by Andy

You’ll have trouble finding our Mr. Zhang by name, as 90% of his fellow villagers are also surnamed Zhang (张). A grandfather in his early fifties, Mr. Zhang has spent most of his life in his hometown, the Hui (Muslim) minority village of Zhangguan (长官), Shandong province.

We met Mr. Zhang by coincidence. We had arrived in Zhangguan a day before and had already visited the 600-year-old Mosque twice. On our third run through the compact town, we were greeted by a man in his forties carrying a baby and two women in front of their doorway, who after a brief conversation graciously agreed to my request to see their house. Once inside, the stocky, lush-black-haired Mr. Zhang emerged from his nook of the complex and most dutifully — as preeminent male of the family — showed us to the central dwelling of their courtyard mini-complex.

Tea already served to us on the sofa and formal introductions aside, Mr. Zhang began immediately by describing how much better life is now than before. “Before we could never get full. Now we always have plenty to eat,” he said as he picked up some flatcakes and an uneaten chicken wing from the previous night’s meal. “This is a new house, built only 5 years ago. Everything is better since reform and opening.”

Mr. Zhang’s business, that is to say the family’s business, like most of the town, is the slaughter of sheep and cattle. Now that he’s a grandfather, his son and nephew handle most of the business. Nowadays he prefers to spend most of his time watching over the children of the extended family or helping out at the Mosque, where he goes to pray five times a day. That’s saying a lot since most of the other Hui we talked to in the town were religious equivalents of what my family calls “Christmas and Easter Catholics.” In a way he reminded me of a Hui version of my uncle Jack, minus the Knights of Columbus.

His family had moved to Zhangguan from Nanjing several generations prior, though the town had been Hui for much longer than that. The second of four brothers, Zhang was the only one who stayed during the “bad years.” The rest of his siblings took their families to the predominantly Muslim province of Ningxia, where the family visits every year.
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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…)

There are thousands of these little hole-in-the-wall restaurants all over Shanghai, each with an almost identical blue sign adorned at the bottom with Arabic for what I must assume says, “Lanzhou Pulled Noodles” like the much larger Chinese right above it. There are so many, and they’re so similar, that I thought for sure they must be franchised.

“No, our sign is not like brands in the mall,” says Ma Feng, my newest noodle-making buddy says as he points to Cloud Nine mall –  one of the most ungodly big behemoths of commercial culture in Shanghai – across the narrow but extraordinarily busy street from the twenty by thirty foot hole in the wall noodle restaurant. He then explained to me two mysteries about the enterprise I hadn’t understood until today.

First, every single Lanzhou Pulled Noodles in Shanghai is owned by Muslim Chinese – called Hui (pronounced hway) in Mandarin Chinese – from Qinghai (pronounced ching-high) province abutted against Tibet way out West. One reason that’s odd is that Lanzhou is a province away from Qinghai in Gansu. The other reason is that Qinghai is like a cross between Texas and Wyoming – gigantic in size but mostly desolate and very thinly populated. My man, Mr. Ma, told me that it’s more of a style of noodle than a geographic nomenclature, and that the Hui have been pushing into developed Qinghai from Lanzhou, which itself supports tons of Hui, for a long time. As for the noodles, I’m not a big fan, but Ma Feng told me his white hat and sari-clad brethren wrangle down noodles thrice daily. Small wonder they all have the ever-rosy cheeks of malnourishment.

Second, as Ma Feng indicated, there’s a strange understanding between all the owners that they’ll use the same sign and restaurant name everywhere as long as they don’t come too close to one another. God knows what he meant by “too close” since I can get to three of them within 15 minutes walking from my apartment. Given their profound proliferation, I’d imagine “too close” means you can’t walk out of one Lanzhou Pulled Noodles and see another Lanzhou Pulled Noodles across the street – a rule that Starbucks egregiously flouted about a block away from Ma Feng’s restaurant.

Probably the most interesting revelation I made from the whole conversation was the way that Muslim families from Qinghai have formed an organic network in Shanghai for making cash to take back West. Ma Feng has been in Shanghai for only two weeks, having just come here to work for his uncle after getting fed up with another relative’s Lanzhou Pulled Noodles shop in Guangzhou. By the way, he’s 18 years old, but horse-plays with the other five or six young men like a 13-year-old and talks to me with the calm demeanor of a 25-year-old.

As usual, though, my real question was what the hell would drive him to come to this ugly, insignificant corner of Shanghai.

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