"You're not from around here, are you?"
In which I think about ethnic minorities and cultural baggage
The elderly gentleman in the pew in front spent a few moments looking me up and down. It was the end of the service, in the peaceful pause after the benediction when people sit and reflect a little before heading out. I smiled at him, and he gave a nod and a twinkle of acknowledgment.
“You’re not local, are you?” he said eventually. It was a friendly rather than a threatening question. The phrase he used (本地人, běndìrén, literally “this-place person”) is typically used to refer to someone from the specific locality - the town or city or province. Someone whose roots are in that place.
“No,” I said, amused. The old man continued to examine my face — my long nose, my indeterminate grey-blue-green eyes.
“Which ethnic minority are you? Are you from Xinjiang?”
It’s not the first time I’ve been taken for an “ethnic minority” rather than identified as an out-and-out foreigner, a laowai. China officially recognises 56 ethnic groups, of which the largest by far is the Han Chinese. Ethnographers and linguists would probably say there are many more, but every Chinese citizen will have one of these 56 ethnicities printed on their ID card. I’m not going to go into detail here, but suffice it to say that policies over the last number of years have made a concerted effort to reduce cultural and linguistic differences to choreographed song-and-dance routines in colourful costumes, stamping out the real identities of many of the minority groups. The most extreme situation is Xinjiang, which you’ve probably heard about in Western news media.
I had the privilege of visiting Xinjiang some years ago, before oppression in the region had developed to its current hideous strength, though I’m sure there was plenty going on even then. It’s the only place I’ve been in China that local people, strangers, greeted my American friend and I with enthusiastic statements that America was good, the friend of the Uyghur people, rather than polite but wary recognition that we as individuals can be friends although our governments don’t see eye to eye.
In most parts of China, when someone asks where I’m from, I hesitate for a fraction of a second while I buckle up the mental armour. I also weigh up whether to keep it general and say “the UK” or be more precise and say “Scotland.” If I go for “Scotland,” which is what I would say in other contexts, I often have to explain where that is. (One of our gate guards probably still thinks it’s part of the former USSR). Either way, the spectre of the Opium Wars looms.
Most people in Scotland (or the rest of the UK) have probably never heard of the Opium Wars (from 1839-1842 and 1856-1860), but in China that period is like a wound that has scabbed over but not truly healed. It festers deep. It marks the beginning of “China’s century of humiliation,” and I think it is crucial to an understanding of China’s ongoing push for power and prestige on the world stage today. On an individual level, there is a faint sense of shame every time I say where I’m from and remember the atrocities that were committed. After all, opium money build the Victorian castle that dominates the harbour as you sail into the town where I was born.
My most awkward encounter with the damnable history of Britain’s drug trade was when I lived in Beijing. My father was visiting, and I took him to visit the Old Summer Palace, the Yuanmingyuan. Little remains now, other than jumbled heaps of masonry and traces of the formerly glorious buildings. It was looted and burned to the ground by British (including Scottish) and French troops in 1860, near the end of the Second Opium War. As we stood and looked at a scenic pond, a Chinese sightseer wandered casually over and asked where we were from. When I told him, he launched into a tirade about why it was wrong to invade other people’s countries and burn their palaces. I could only nod and try to let him know that I agreed with him.
Most people are too polite to bring up colonialism, and most people, thankfully, recognise that the descendants are not responsible for the sins of the ancestors. And most encounters with people curious about the foreigner are more lighthearted.
This includes interesting assumptions sometimes. Not too long ago, when I went to pick up a package from our apartment delivery point, a middle-aged local lady started talking to me. I didn’t catch a word of it. Wow, this local dialect is really difficult, I thought, and asked her to repeat it. Again, not a word. Embarrassed, I asked if she could speak in Mandarin, because I didn’t understand.
“Oh!” she said, straightening up from where she was sorting through the pile of packages. “I thought you were Russian! I was speaking Russian. I do business there.”
I get taken for Russian fairly regularly. In Beijing, I had elderly people try chatting to me in Russian a couple of times, while waiting at the bus stop. They were of the generation that had been in school before China and the USSR fell out with each other, when Russian was the standard foreign language to learn. Other times, when I’ve been in a taxi and the driver asked where I’m from, I’ve asked if he can guess. That’s given “Russia” a few times too, but my favourite response was “Lithuania.” (It seems he had had a Lithuanian passenger recently, and I looked a bit like that).
Being taken for a Uyghur or other non-Chinese-looking ethnic minority is rare though. I can recall just two or three occasions, all involving elderly people. Reflecting on the conversation with the old man in church, it strikes me that Canal Town is much more ethnically homogeneous, in terms of China’s minorities, than other cities I’ve lived in. I see very few visibly identifiable minorities here. There’s the Uyghur restaurant in town. There’s the Hui (Chinese Muslim) couple who cook in the halal section of the campus cafeteria. And that’s all I can remember seeing. Among the students, I know of one girl who is ethnically Korean, from one of the north-east provinces where there is a sizeable Korean minority. I assume there must be others, but they’re invisible.
Canal Town’s relative lack of diversity also struck me when I visited my old haunts in Xi’an during the holiday. Walking the crowded market streets, watching the Hui butchers carving sheep carcasses, I realised how few Hui I’ve seen in Canal Town. Xi’an, further west, the starting-point of the old Silk Road to Central Asia, has a large Hui population and its Muslim Quarter is a popular tourist spot. When I lived there, it was also common to see Uyghurs, easily distinguished by their Turkic features. Even in Beijing, there were often Uyghur vendors selling fruit or sweets at the crossroads near my campus, and there several Uyghur academics and PhD students at the research institute where I worked. The vendors are long gone. They were cleared off the streets in the capital’s campaign to “tidy up” some years ago. I don’t know if the academics are still there or not.
“No, I’m not from Xinjiang,” I told the old gentleman in the pew in front of me in church. “I’m a foreigner.”
“Oh? Which country?” he asked.
As usual, I braced myself then told him. He nodded and smiled, his brown eyes bright as he continued to scrutinise my foreign features.
“We all have the same Lord,” he said. “Thanks be to the Lord.”
“Yes,” I agreed. It was wonderfully heartening. I then asked him if he was a Canal Town local, and how long he had been a Christian.
“Eighty years!” he told me joyfully. That puts him at something over eighty years old — older than he looked. That means he is a little older than the People’s Republic itself, and that he has lived through its ups and downs, through the Civil War and the Great Leap Forward and the famine and the Cultural Revolution and the Reform and Opening period and now whatever this is.
He got up to head out.
“以马内利 (yǐmǎnèilì, emmanuel),” he said in farewell, a word of blessing often used by Chinese Christians. God with us.
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