Racism, Sexism, and the Concept of "Face"

It's not like my trip to Xinjiang was the only time I've encountered racism and sexism in China, but it's much easier to find outside of my campus bubble. After all, Beida is the best university in China, so the people there tend to be better educated and less prejudiced, although even at Beida there are still people with very unfortunate mindsets.

Let me start by saying that the Han Chinese are incredibly racist. Yes, they have a long tradition of Chinese culture and they are proud of their noble country and whatnot, but that's no excuse. The main issue in Xinjiang is ethnic tension. Xinjiang is Uyghur country (its official name is still Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region), and it has been annexed by China and broken away from China and been re-annexed quite a few times. In order to prevent this sort of thing in the future, more and more Han Chinese have been moving to Xinjiang to dilute the ethnic Uyghur population. The Uyghurs and the Han don't like each other at all, and Han Chinese consider Xinjiang to be a dangerous place because of certain acts of terrorism committed by members of the independence movement. It's a bit of an exaggeration, though...I never felt particularly threatened during our trip, but maybe it's convenient that the Chinese are intimidated by Xinjiang: fewer tourists to get in our way. Hen hao!

At any rate, we observed some interesting ethnic relations during our trip. When we were going out to the border of Pakistan and discovered out in the middle of the desert that our lunch hadn't come along with us, our Han daoyou (who had gotten a call early in the trip about some bags of food left in the hotel, and had brushed it off) completely flipped out on our Uyghur driver, as if it was completely his fault that he didn't put the food in the trunk. The daoyou was also generally disrespectful to the driver, yelling at him for not understanding the place names that she was telling him, even though the Mandarin "phonetic translations" of Uyghur place-names are generally a complete butchery of the actual name. We felt bad for the driver, who was a pretty laid-back and good-natured guy, and we gave him a tip at the end. I also learned from our daoyou that Han and Uyghur children go to separate schools, ostensibly to help preserve their separate cultures. I could maybe accept that excuse, if it weren't for the fact that the Chinese government cut off secondary school funding for Uyghurs. That's not preserving culture, it's just giving the Uyghurs the short end of the stick. Interestingly, there's a sort of affirmative action program to help Uyghurs get into college, although if they can't go to high school how are they even going to make it that far?

As angry as we were at our daoyou for her disrespectful treatment of the driver, I also felt a little bit bad for her because, as a woman, she also had a hard time getting respect sometimes. When we were near the border of Pakistan, we had to pass through some sort of booth where we all showed our passports and such, but on the way back the men manning the booth had some sort of problem (I don't know what; everything was in order as far as I could tell) and started yelling at the daoyou. She hustled us along to the van and stayed to deal with the men herself, but she had a hard time of it, and she came back rather angry and frazzled, saying that it's hard to make your voice heard to men when you are a young woman (she was only 23!).

We were a little concerned before going to Xinjiang that the Uyghurs wouldn't like it if we spoke Mandarin, but I feel that they didn't hold it against me, at least, because I am obviously not Han nor any other kind of Chinese. So I got along fabulously with Uyghurs using Chinese, and I understood where the knife-selling man was coming from when he told me that I should buy his Xinjiang-made knives and not the low-quality knife that was "made in China."

In Urumqi the ethnic situation is also interesting because it's 80% Han, unlike Kashgar which is 80% Uyghur. In downtown Urumqi, we basically didn't see any Uyghurs, because they all live out in the slums. The Han Chinese seem to enjoy pretending to observe Uyghur *culture,* though, because our travel agency kept taking us to places run by Uyghurs where they'd demonstrate traditional Uyghur dance for us and then try to sell us things. You wouldn't believe the way the Chinese people eat that stuff up, but under the facade of their performance, I'm sure those Uyghurs dislike Chinese tourists as much as I did. Imagine what it would be like to make your entire living by exploiting your traditional culture to earn money from the people your culture traditionally hates and who treat you like second-class citizens. This idea occurred immediately to me, Richard, and Casey, but didn't seem to even cross the mind of anyone else in our Chinese tour group. As we left the second Uyghur vineyard that we went to that one day, our tour guide remarked to the bus that all the Uyghurs ever do is sing and dance and eat grapes - don't they have a comfortable life? Yeah right. Sing and dance and pander to patronizing bozo tourists. Sounds fabulous. Kind of like the "people zoo" in Beijing where they have people from all the minority groups and tourists come to look at them and see their *traditional lifestyle* and *culture.* I wish I were making that up...although now that I think about it, it kind of sounds like that one part of Disney World with all the different countries. Hmm. Anyway...

Han Chinese racism isn't just directed towards Chinese ethnic minorities. Some of the most ridiculous stories of racism I've heard are about Chinese prejudice towards black people. For instance, Alex, another student in my program, is black, and he's had times when women saw him walking down the street and quickly ran into a store to hide. Apparently the Chinese have the idea (they get it from the Western media, I believe) that black men are dangerous thugs. Alex's Chinese tutor is also incredibly racist, and tells Alex all kinds of crazy stuff. He came to a tutoring session once and told Alex that he had figured out why Africa was so poor: it's because Africans spend all their money buying Coke, and drinking Coke keeps their skin black (or Coke-colored, presumably). Another one of my American friends told me that in his apartment, the landlord had asked them not to have black guests anymore because it made the neighbors nervous. In addition, this kind of racism is built right into the Chinese language. Now, Chinese names for countries are generally phonetically transcribed into Mandarin syllables, and although there can be many meanings to a single syllable, whoever coins the Mandarin name for another country picks which characters (and therefore which meanings) represent each syllable. "America" in Chinese is Meiguo, which means "beautiful country." "Africa" is phonetically(ish) translated as Feizhou, but instead of using a nice fei like the one that means "to fly," they picked a fei with a strongly negative meaning (it's in words like "illegal," "rude," "blame," and "inhuman"). This discovery both offended and interested me, so much that I'm thinking about doing my linguistics honors thesis on the prejudices built into the Chinese language.

Race is also always an interesting issue for me personally, as a curly-blonde-haired, blue-eyed, white-skinned person in China. Occasionally people (generally service workers) don't acknowledge my presence because they assume that since I'm a foreigner, I can't speak Chinese, so they don't want to deal with me. Sometimes I get patronized a lot, like by the tour guide who would translate things into English for me (although she only knew enough English to translate the very simple things that I already understood in Chinese) or the guy at Mogao Caves who told me in broken English that I shouldn't be walking around without a guide, as if I were a child. The foreigner thing also means that people will try to charge me higher prices. On the other end, in some areas I get more respect because of the color of my skin. This was particularly apparent when traveling with Richard and Casey, who both have Chinese faces (although they are Americans). People more willingly offered me assistance with things like carrying my suitcase, and Chinese people frequently assumed that Richard and Casey were my guides, and sometimes wouldn't believe them when they said they were Americans. On the train to Dunhuang, a drunk man wandering around the train came over and rambled at Richard a bit about how we're all Chinese (even after Richard said he was American) and how we Chinese had to stick together and not lose face in front of the foreigner.

"Face" is an incredibly important concept in China. "Losing face" has approximately the same meaning as it does in English (losing one's dignity, being humiliated), but people are a lot more touchy about their "face." If you're bargaining for something in public where there are lots of people around to witness the transaction, it's harder to get a good deal because the vendor would feel that they lost face in front of everybody by letting you get the better of them, pricewise. On the train, a woman asked if her friend could switch beds with Richard because her friend was pregnant and had a hard time climbing up to her high bunk. There was a 4 kuai price difference between the two tickets, and our immediate reaction as Americans was "oh don't worry about it, it's only 4 kuai," but we quickly realized that if Richard didn't accept that 4 kuai, he would be causing the woman to lose face. The Chinese system of guanxi dictates that you owe someone for every favor they do for you, and for a grown woman to be indebted to some young kid is humiliating, a loss of face no matter the amount. We felt this to be rather silly and inconvenient, but it's such a large part of Chinese culture that it can't be ignored.

However, the most glaring example of Chinese prejudice was one we encountered while shopping in Urumqi. Richard and I were out buying fruit on the street while Casey looked for iPod chargers in a department store, and we noticed a man and a woman having a fight. The husband had taken away his wife's cell phone, and she was screaming at him to give it back. He refused, and in the course of arguing hit her several times (unfortunely, not the first time I've seen a man publicly hit a woman repeatedly in China). He dragged her down the street, trying to get out of the public eye, and Richard and I followed, afraid to intervene but not wanting to just let it go. A crowd gathered around them as the woman screamed and struggled, but as is typical, nobody actually did anything; everyone just stood and stared. Eventually a guard from a nearby hotel came over and separated the two, and tried to sort out the fight and get the woman to behave while she protested that she just wanted her phone back and she didn't want to go home with the man. While this was happening, a random older man from the crowd stepped up and started berating the woman for fighting with her husband in public and making him lose face in front of everybody. The poor wife was crouched on the ground, with an expression of such fear and anger as I've never seen on a human face. She looked like nothing more than a hunted animal, and in fact that man was treating her as if she were a dog. Richard and I were mad enough to spit fire, but we knew that, sadly, the entire male-dominated cultural and legal system was on the husband's side, and if we tried to physically intervene we'd probably get arrested or something equally inconvenient. Neither of us knew how to express what we wanted to say in Chinese, so for a while we yelled at the man in English. The crowd dispersed a little, and the couple moved around the corner of the building, and it looked like everything was going to calm down. We didn't want to just walk away, so I went to the girl and put my arm around her shoulders, wishing that my Chinese wasn't so inadequate to express all the things I wanted to say. Then we delivered our few coherent sentences of criticism to the husband and left; there was nothing else that could be done. In retrospect, even this small action was probably harmful in the end, because being confronted and criticized in public was another loss of face for the husband, and losing face in front of a foreigner is especially humiliating. I'm sure that the loss of face caused by our little bit of righteous indignation got taken out on the girl that night at home. It's kind of a good thing Casey wasn't there at the time, because she wouldn't have thought twice before slugging that man, and who knows what would have happened then. There was no way to win; we felt so frustrated and helpless. If that had happened in America, any woman on the street would have gone and slapped that man (I definitely would have), and even men would have had to take the woman's side. But this isn't America. Richard's words really hit home when he bitterly stated, "This is a time when I feel ashamed to be Chinese."

In the social bubble of the American Northeast, I'd never felt that racism and sexism were particularly big problems. I like to think that nobody I know would judge another person to be inferior merely because of their race or gender. Openly expressing a disdain for black people or beating one's wife in public is completely unthinkable and not at all socially acceptable. But I have to remember that my acquaintances at home are part of what on the global scale is a very small, well-educated elite. On the other hand, in China, the government doesn't provide schooling for the children of migrant workers, doesn't fund secondary schools for the Uyghurs, and only 2% of Chinese children make it to college. Unfortunately, without a decent educational system there doesn't seem to be much hope that China will be able to change its attitudes any time soon. Zhen bu hao.