Portrait of an LBX

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.

(more…)

For the reference of anyone interested, Elizabeth Balkan over at New Energy and Environment Digest 新能源与环保参考 has a good post on some of the (limited) recycling initiatives being undertaken by the Shanghai government. As she points out, one of the major concerns the government has to take into account when considering any action in China is how it will affect employment. As I mentioned, a staggering number of people make a meager living off of China’s trash collecting/recycling industry. Having residents sort their own trash, while more efficient and sanitary, cuts a number of people off from their main source of income.

As I was coming up the stairs to my apartment, a neighbor I’ve never spoken with before asked me where I’m from. After I told him, he inquired, “Why would an American come to China?  We’re a poor country.” There you have the attitude of almost every LBX I encounter.

I’ll never forget the man I met two years ago along a country highway in rural Sichuan. We had been biking all morning and were looking for a rest and a snack when we saw a man sitting under an umbrella, selling watermelons. Delighted to make the acquaintance of two foreigners, the man promptly invited us to his garage, under cover from the intense summer sun, whereupon he cut up amelon and brought it to us.

I couldn’t help but notice that the front of his house was divided into sections – an open room filled with all sorts of tools, an open room full of stock feed, and another full of small, packaged foods and drinks. I asked him what the rooms were all about. His family, he explained, sold feed and packaged foodstuffs to local farmers when in downtime from farming. As for the tools, he was the local motorcycle mechanic, something he’d learned while away from home working in a factory and something almost everybody we encountered on our route does to earn cash for the family. It was also the reason he spoke intelligible Mandarin. The local dialect in Sichuan is harder for a Beijing-educated Mandarin speaker to understand than a Scottish Highlander’s speech would be to an Ohian.

Just a little while after, he was called away for a repair. Once he came back, the family invited us to eat lunch with them. After a gigantic lunch complete with home-grown rice, lots of vegetable dishes, and a slice of the pork they’d been open-air curing for months right above where we were sitting, we took a tour of the house. Right behind the kitchen and adjacent to the room that doubled as the bathroom (i.e. two boards over a hole) and the lone, gigantic pig in its sty, they had a room full of caged rabbits. I mean this was rabbitopia. You’ve never seen so many rabbits in such a small, dark, wooden room. There was one big rabbit, probably ten pounds each, per cage, about ten cages high and thirty cages across.

Okay, mister, what’s the deal with the rabbits?

(more…)

Our journey begins in Shanghai and Beijing — chaotic places where millions of LBXes scurry about doing all sorts of maniacal activities that are impossible to compile into any coherent story. If this is your first time here, you’d do well by yourself to know what an LBX is.

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. (more…)