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.

After a quick poke around to make sure there was in fact an old section of town, we were in the midst of our hotel search when we again found a police car blocking us in the street with our Uncle Policemen (警察叔叔, as we’ve come to call Chinese cops) again flagging us down. Still all smiles, they requested that we follow them to the police station.

I immediately bristled and asked, “What’s the issue?” His response was that somebody from the county-level public security bureau (宜黄县公安局) was currently en route to “have some tea and chat with us. (跟你们喝茶聊天).” Having no choice, we followed them a block to the station and sat in the courtyard parking lot, not wanting to go into the station itself. We sent out text messages and Tweets with our exact location just in case anything unexpected happened.

The fat cop who had stopped us in the first place tried to make polite conversation, periodically answering his iPhone with its ring tone of “Heavenly Road (天路)” (a song about how the CCP’s construction of a railroad to Tibet has brought endless happiness to the people there), and generally trying to grease us up. Thankfully, Alexis was in an upbeat, chatty mood and played the “good cop” in the routine we’ve fallen into.

The car from Yihuang finally arrived after 20 minutes, and from it emerged a young woman — maybe 23, long hair and in her police blues — a slightly older man dressed in civvies, and most importantly a middle aged man in the uniform of somebody important, complete down to the combover. This last one, who introduced himself as the Director of the Foreign Affairs Bureau of Yihuang County (宜黄县外事局局长), upon realizing that we spoke Chinese and there was no need for translation by his female associate, began his buttering up routine.

“We extend you a very hardy welcome to our county! (非常欢迎你们来我们宜黄县旅游!)” he began. “Have their been any inconveniences on your trip so far? (你们路上遇到了什么困难或不方便吗?)” I was about to give him the obvious response, but Alexis saw my mouth open and grabbed my arm to shut me up. Next he asked to make copies of our passports, which we were used to since it’s the standard law all over China. That said, I knew he hadn’t come all the way here to see our passports. While the pudgy officer who had brought us in was off making photocopies, the director’s male crony kept interrupting to ask us about our bike trip and tell us how great we were.

After ten minutes, the director finally killed the suspense, “Our county is a sensitive area, and we would like to look at any pictures you have taken here (我们宜黄县属于敏感地区，所以我们想看看你们在这里拍的照片).”

A sensitive area? What does that even mean? What the hell did he think we were doing anyway? I let Alexis and Andy know through an animated torrent of vitriolic vulgarities that I had no intention of showing those you-know-what’s my pictures and we would get the you-know-what out of their you-know-what town if we weren’t welcome. Ironic images of the sign on the way into town exhorting the locals to develop the tourism industry (大力发展旅游产业) flashed in front of my eyes. The crony picked up on some of my choice words and translated very unnecessarily to Herr Director, “F***. Camera. He isn’t happy (F***. Camera. 他不高兴).” The female translator kept her mouth shut.

Realizing that we weren’t the helpless farmers he’s used to dealing with, the director stepped away and talked on his phone for a minute. When he returned he told us in a manner-of-fact tone, “We are from the Foreign Affairs Bureau. We have the right to look at your pictures (我们是外事部的, 我们有这个权利).”

I was ready to show him the right to my middle finger, but suddenly I remembered the content of the first picture I had taken that day. “Ok, I’ll show you the first picture I took today in your county, I said. “What is that, ancient architecture? (那是什么？是古代建筑吗?)” the slack-jawed underling asked as I showed him a picture of a strikingly large turd I had snapped in the outhouse at breakfast. Wow. Maybe it wasn’t all that stupid though as it was indicative of the country’s general attitude toward cultural preservation. I sifted forward to a shot of a large roadside billboard which featured a male and a female hand touching a condom and the caption, “We should really use a condom (咱们还是用避孕套吧).” The underling asked why I had taken it, to which I replied truthfully: because it’s pretty funny. “It’s not funny,” he said, “In China our population is too large. This is our Planned Birth Policy (这个不搞笑，中国人口太多了，那就是我们的计划生育).” His mechanized response only took the juvenile humor of the sign up to a whole new level.

Eventually he saw that I was taking my usual roadside pictures of water buffaloes and LBX’es and nothing “sensitive” (unless they’re ashamed of their own people). Fortunately I was the only one whose camera was visible, and finally the grand poobah blessed our departure, about 45 minutes after we had arrived.

As we were leaving, the mindless underling looked at his watch, saw it was 1:30 and said in a very chipper tone, “You should really get lunch soon. Everything closes early here!” Yes, lunch, where we had been going before that monumental waste of time. I didn’t look at the combover-crusted mug of the director or any of his cronies again as we rolled out of the station parking lot abruptly and without words.

After I had calmed down a little, it occurred to me that Herr Director probably never gets any foreign visitors to his county, and on the momentous occasion that some actually happen to roll into town, he has to jump on the opportunity to put some party feathers in his hat. If word had gotten out that foreigners had come through, and the director hadn’t intervened personally, I imagine somebody above him would question him for dereliction of probably the only duty with which he’s been charged. In that sense, I do have compassion for them — as they are just pawns in a much larger and more disturbing system of idiocy.

But what really gets my goat, beyond all the insanity of the situation, is that in the end they didn’t even offer us any tea!

Steaming mad, we rode back to the hotel to set down our things, packed our computers in bags (as we suspected the cops would not be below rooting around the room while we weren’t there), and set out. At lunch in a small restaurant, we were surrounded by a group of local Insurance Investigators from PICC (保险查勘队, I still have no idea what that means), who had baijiu’ed themselves to oblivion before 2 p.m. A middle-aged woman among them, who called herself Big Sister Chen, told us it was an honor to have foreigners in town and picked up our tab. After posing for a group photo, she entreated us to find her online whenever we had time to play video games. This awkward but unexpected display of hospitality almost completely extinguished my rancor following the police session.

Finally, after all the shenanigans, we were able to start exploring Tangyin itself, which I’ll detail in a separate post as this one has already become monstrous.