Being a Minority in China

In the course of our travels in China, we have met all sorts of minorities with interesting stories to tell. Of course, as a white and a black person from America we are minorities ourselves. The picture to the left is of a house in a Muslim area of Baoji. Notice the Arabic writing over the door. Muslims (called 回族, huízú in Chinese) are the most widely distributed of China's 55 "official" ethnic minorities, with a population of about ten million, and Baoji, where we live, has a sizable population. They are distinguished from other Chinese mainly by their practice of Islam, including cultural differences like wearing headscarves and caps and not eating pork, the most common meat in Chinese food. Muslims in Shaanxi are well-known for their 羊肉泡馍 (yángròu pàomo), a noodle soup with broken up 馍 (mó, a type of bread), mutton, 糖蒜 (tángsuàn, garlic pickled in sugar and vinegar), cilantro, hots, and sometimes pieces of sheep blood. It's really good!

Of course, being a minority in China is not all about wearing exotic clothes and doing traditional dances, despite the government propaganda to that effect. I won't talk about the government to avoid the "net nanny" catching this site, but minorities we've met have said some interesting things about life in China in general. Keep in mind that we view these through American eyes, with our own concepts of race, prejudice, discrimination, etc. that Chinese don't tend to see in exactly the same way.

Muslims have not always had smooth relations with the 汉 (Hàn Chinese, the majority), sometimes including violent conflicts, despite centuries of living together. Some people will say something like "Oh, they're not civilized" as soon as you bring up Chinese Muslims, but stereotypes like that tend to be rattled off at will here. There is definitely not very much regard for "political correctness". The first Chinese Muslim I met was in a restaurant we go to often, a boy of about 12 helping mom and dad take orders and clean up. He wanted to know where we were from, and how come we like eating 牛肉拉面 with chopsticks even though we're foreigners. We asked him what his white cap was for, and he said it's because his family is Muslim. He said that they speak Mandarin just like everyone else, and didn't seem to like my idea that they might speak another language. I asked if he liked working in the restaurant, and he said yes because he gets to help mom and dad and talk to people. He said that other kids sometimes made fun of him for being Huizu, but not his friends. I asked if most of his friends were Muslim too, and he said no they're mostly Han. He said he loved basketball (most Chinese boys do these days).

While we were in Hangzhou, we met a girl from Inner Mongolia who worked in a hotel. She sympathized with us, because Chinese was also a second language for her, her first language being Mongolian. She said that she left Mongolia because of economic conditions, and because of work discrimination against Mongolians there. From childhood, she had wanted to be in politics, but said that ethnic minorities are often turned down from careers in politics, including several of her Mongolian friends.

We shared a car on the train to Shanghai with a whole family of Mongolians, and they let us try some of their special alcohol and Mongolian snacks. They said that Mongolian culture is considered to be the foundation of Chinese culture, as well as Japanese and Korean culture, which he said both speak a variety of Mongolian (linguistic research has not yet come to the same conclusion ;-). Once drunk, they sang some traditional Mongolian songs for us. They seemed to be fairly wealthy, and were traveling around the country.

As foreigners, we are subject to some of the strongest stereotypes, but we've learned to roll with the punches. Of course, we are from a rich country, and so it's not quite the same as being a Chinese ethnic minority, among other reasons. The first thing to get used to as a foreigner is constant staring and yells of "Hello! Hello! 老外! 外国人！". In Beijing we made friends with some guys at a college who seemed pretty cool. One day though, we were in the elevator, and one of them started making the motion of dribbling a basketball and shooting towards Brandon, who is black. I thought, "I hope he doesn't mean what I think he does...", but he then said to Brandon "I think you're good at basketball". Brandon said, "Um no, actually I'm not," but they all insisted that he was. We couldn't convince them otherwise. He's shorter than me! Since then he's gotten hundreds of basketball-gesturers, along with usual calls of "African! African!" in Chinese to accompany the normal "Foreigner! Foreigner!" that I hear as I walk down the street. People also tend to insist that he isn't American, despite that they claim to know all about American culture (everyone knows that all Americans are from England). The most common reaction when people meet us together is "你们不是一个国家的。You're not from the same country", and they can be pretty persistent on that. Of course, I'm always told that I'm a rich American businessman. "Oh, I think you definitely are," they always say. Chinese ethnic minorities have actually been the only ones to ask us, "Are you Chinese?" upon hearing us speak Mandarin, quite a refreshing reaction. Well, how do you think most Americans would react if a Muslim said they were Chinese? How about a white person of European descent who grew up in China (which we have also met)? In Shanghai we even met an African-American couple who were raising their two sons there. The times they are a'changing.