Portrait of an LBX

By Evan

Mr. Li returning from a day's work in the paddies, by Andy

For months now, a powerful urge has been rising in me. At first I could control it, but then its intensity grew too much for me. Finally, in a moment of sheer desperation and weakness, I broke down and indulged my double fantasy. Now here I am, admitting before God and man, that I plowed a field with a water buffalo and planted rice.

One of the primary goals of the trip has been to get ourselves into the LBX experience, and honestly there’s nothing more Chinese than getting involved with the farm work. Hell, between subjectively lamenting that their country is “backward (落後)” and “poor (窮)” and “undeveloped (不發達),” they often utter one undeniable fact: that China has historically been and still largely is an agricultural nation (農業大國). Biking thousands of kilometers through the farmscapes, I don’t know exactly how many thousands of buffalo or tens of thousands of acres of rice paddies we’ve passed, but it’s been enough to make me need to know what the deal is behind it all. (more…)

By Evan

A Guangxi rice farmer, by Andy

After returning to Zhanjiang, where I left the guys marooned for almost a week while I wrangled with the increasingly capricious visa gods in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, the trip was back on, and it was high time for us to get out of Guangdong. Around noon on the day after our departure, we were rewarded by a sign warning us not to bring improper out-of-province cars into our new province of Guangxi and the most unridable, full-of-holes national highway we’ve seen yet. Over the first few days, the landscape remained flat like Guangdong but was remarkably more agricultural and green than its industrial, eastern twin. We even saw the reemergence of row-planted trees, something we haven’t seen in such abundance since north of Anhui.

On a cultural-linguistic note, the dispersement of the Cantonese language has been very different from our expectations. We had gotten sick of being called “weigolo” (外國佬, derogatory for foreigners in a lot of Fujian dialects) and were really hoping the locals would start screaming “gweilo” (鬼佬, derogatory for foreigner in Cantonese) at us as soon as we crossed from southern Fujian, if for nothing but a change of pace. Alas, it turned out that the Hakkas reign over a territory that extends hundreds of km south to Huizhou, just north of Shenzhen, and they scream “waigolo” like the rest of ‘em. Then of course, we exulted in Canto bliss from Hong Kong through Guangzhou all the way to Zhanjiang, where apparently it’s all about the same, except for a few patches of Taishan dialect. Then as we lighted out from there toward Guangxi, we began to realize that the “gweilo” we had so eagerly wished for was now lingering like the smell of stinky tofu. The language remains 90% the same as Guangzhou all the 500 km to Nanning, but the “moral fiber / social etiquette” (素質) of the locals drops off dramatically after the provincial border, we’re told. (more…)