The most gleaming accomplishment of Andy's and my first weekend of collaborative work was without a doubt a focusing of our goals and a solidifying of the overall vision of the project. The goals and ideals of the project will become more apparent as I write more entries, but here's my first crack at it.
By the way, here might be a good time to tell you what the title of this blog means. LBX is an abbreviation of a Chinese word pronounced lao bai xing (lao by shing), meaning commoner. It's our way of designating any Chinese born into the lower, more populous caste of Chinese society, and is meant to differentiate the poor, dirty, smoking, spitting, squatting, and screaming lower class from their more comfortable, fatter, cleaner, richer, and fewer counterparts. We use the term sometimes affectionately, sometimes with disdain, but always to further accuracy. What we intend to do here is infiltrate and study the common Chinese, the LBX'es, and record our findings here.
LBX definition of out of the way, I'd like to start detailing the philosophy and methodology behind our project. That starts in the city I live in, Shanghai, a huge mess full of LBX'es everywhere doing all sorts of maniacal activities that are hard to compile into anything coherent. The most important thing to do before taking on a task like this is to clearly define what I'm looking for. It can't be just LBX'es. Nor can it just be LBX'es and the mess that they're in. A lot of the LBX'es in the city are indeed in a big mess, but to undertake the description of chaos would be like trying to tell you what color a hole is. We're not trying to describe how hard it is, or what obstacles stand in the way to their happiness. We do realize that many obstacles do stand in the way of their happiness, but our goal here is to find out where they've found happiness despite everything that's around them.
By the way, here might be a good time to tell you what the title of this blog means. LBX is an abbreviation of a Chinese word pronounced lao bai xing (lao by shing), meaning commoner. It's our way of designating any Chinese born into the lower, more populous caste of Chinese society, and is meant to differentiate the poor, dirty, smoking, spitting, squatting, and screaming lower class from their more comfortable, fatter, cleaner, richer, and fewer counterparts. We use the term sometimes affectionately, sometimes with disdain, but always to further accuracy. What we intend to do here is infiltrate and study the common Chinese, the LBX'es, and record our findings here.
LBX definition of out of the way, I'd like to start detailing the philosophy and methodology behind our project. That starts in the city I live in, Shanghai, a huge mess full of LBX'es everywhere doing all sorts of maniacal activities that are hard to compile into anything coherent. The most important thing to do before taking on a task like this is to clearly define what I'm looking for. It can't be just LBX'es. Nor can it just be LBX'es and the mess that they're in. A lot of the LBX'es in the city are indeed in a big mess, but to undertake the description of chaos would be like trying to tell you what color a hole is. We're not trying to describe how hard it is, or what obstacles stand in the way to their happiness. We do realize that many obstacles do stand in the way of their happiness, but our goal here is to find out where they've found happiness despite everything that's around them.
So we start our journey from big cities, the heart and source of the mess 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 (nor do we think that you could ever ever even begin to say what "China" is, in the same way that you can't tell me what "America" is or what "Americans should be"), and we're certainly not interested in capturing any economic trends. We are interested in how money has created the gray clouds that lurk over the lives of our beloved LBX'es, but we're interested in it from the point of view of the LBXes themselves. Something I realized this weekend while at Xintiandi was that there's really a gap of perspective in terms of propriety. It's strange to imagine, but there are places where some people feel entitled and where others feel not entitled. There really is a split citizenship in Shanghai, and it's very interesting to see how the one prospers and the other is subservient out of a feeling of almost privelege.
Anyway, I'm straying again. We're interested in not how wonderful the modern Chinese man is or how his comforts are tripling or how his access to information is ever increasing. All of that implies movement by something greater than the man while the man passively receives from below. In that sense we could just as easily be describing how lab rats are getting even bigger cages with more air conditioning and more nutritious food. We're looking for how wonderful the modern chinese man (not all of them at once) is in his own environment, where he feels relaxed and free. We're out to find signs that red blood still flows in their veins and that they have potency on their own.
This book is not meant to be destructive toward people or systems in which they live. Even if our goal were to destroy certiain man-made institutions or their outcroppings, it is highly unlikely that we could. We're also not interested in just taking a snapshot of a situation and describing it in flowery language and with pretty pictures. We're philosophers, and as philosophers, we want to go seeking inspirations in an old place full of secrets that can further our enligthenment, and hopefully at the same time further enlighten anybody who picks up our work. A very pertinent Chinese saying I learned over the weekend goes something like, "A mountain is not about its height; the presence of immortals there makes it celestial. A body of water is not about 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 in the old Celestial Empire - which we value much more highly than the physical observations that point thereto.
The very fact that we're bringing a camera with us is indicative of the fact that we are also most definitively looking for beauty. We're not looking for traditional aesthetic beauty (because I suspect we'll find precious little of that among those people far away from cosmetics and designer brands). We're looking for beauty in the form of mastery of the art of human life. We want people who take life as an art form itself and have achieved high levels of proficiency in mastering their own fates.
Aesthetics in the unchanging and permanent - philosophical - sense run much deeper than skin deep. To me something beautiful is something alive and thriving and creating its own rules. It's a master of its game, a game that it invented to take what's necessary for survival and everything else that suits its purposes while disregarding the rest. It's like monkeys on discovery shows: they play all day and make their every activity into something fun to be savored. Similarly we want people who take the plot of their lives and fill it with seeds that suit their purposes. They light it on fire and blow the fucker up. They shake it up, mix it up, and are examples that the vigor of humanity that made us the strongest species exists still. We're looking for the essence of humanity in a place where humanity is becoming harder to find on a daily basis.
This is a world where the currents of reality rise high, and the waves come hard and fast and many people are either drowning or just barely staying above the surface. We're not interested in them, pitiable though they may be. We're looking for people who build their own boat and sail along the top of the waves triumphantly. We realize that most of the characters we seek are hanging onto little bamboo rafts while huge tankers dominate the straights leaving tremendous waves in their wake. We're interested in getting to know those raft pilots and where they go and why they go there. Hell, one thing I've learned from biking in big cities is that the little quick guys can usually fly through the cracks between behemoths and can generally be much freer and squeeze into many more places than the giants, despite the fact that the giants have occupied all the open and easy water.
So that's the perspective we take at the outset of this project - to find dignity and humanity in the one place that is ostensibly the most replete of both. With that goal in mind, we move forward and tackle the next question: once we've found the dignity, how in the hell do we capture its essence and convert it to printable format? Only time can tell.
