By Evan
Every once in a while a new acquaintance asks us if anything bad has happened to us on this trip. The honest answer is yes, any run-in we have with Public Security organs or the state in general is an event we wish we could forget, but we usually bite our tongues. In truth, the police have been our biggest worry since the planning stage of Portrait of an LBX began about a year ago. Nowadays we frequently pass signs on the side of the road that say, “If you have a problem, call the police!” accompanied by the cute little cartoon police characters Jingjing and Chacha (think comical cop icons called Po-po and Lice-Lice). “What if your problem is the police?” we wonder.
The long-standing fear reared its repugnant head in Tangyin (棠阴), Jiangxi just after we had ridden past a statue of the solemn fiberglass police officer saluting us in front of the busted town hospital with a rusted-out, tire-less car out front. As we stopped to take pictures, a cop car headed in the opposite direction suddenly turned around and cut us off. We were braced for confrontation, but the cops, after hailing us to stop, simply offered any assistance they could and, amid the usual compliments on our Chinese ability and exclamations about our height, gave us words of praise for our bike journey. Whew, that was a little too easy. (more…)
