Last night JJ and I, along with her parents, visited a XinJiang restaurant in Shanghai.  For those of you who are not familiar, XinJiang is the area in the northwest part of China. Being so close to other countries means that it has a rich history of diversion, with boatloads of ethnic rivalries between people of many different kinds of cultural backgrounds (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkish and all those crazy countries ending in “stan” with lots of k’s, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan). Also, most of the area is home to religious Muslims, which is a strike contrast to the rest of China, which is pretty much areligious.

In Shanghai however, XinJiang culture and people are pretty much stereotyped and typecasted down to having restaurants and street food and not doing a whole lot else (at least from my own experience). I cannot think of a single instance of seeing someone from XinJiang not working as either a street seller, selling XinJiang meat skewers and barbecue, random Muslim cake or working at XinJiang restaurant. It is kind of an interesting phenomena to look at how XinJiang people in China are treated and thought of, at least in big cities in Shanghai, as compared with the transformation of race relations in the US over the past century. China as a country is remarkably different by the simple fact that there is very little diversity in their people as far as appearance is concerned. They don’t have to deal in large proportions with how people naturally and unnaturally treat other people who look stagnantly different than them. This is why I would get loads of people staring at me when I visited places in and around Tibet, simply because most of them don’t see ‘white’ people very often.

Oh and by the way, XinJiang people are notorious in China for being thieves. I can’t really verify that its actually completely true, although I have a suspicion it is. Basically my interpretation of it is that local governments in Shanghai and elsewhere have in the past struggled with providing equal rights to people from XinJiang. It’s hard for them to get decent jobs, hard for them to find decent housing and if they do migrate to Shanghai or other big cities, they have a much higher percentage of becoming poor, homeless and eventually resort to crime. So in order to balance the playing field, the government acts leniently towards people from the XinJiang area when they get in trouble with the law. Probably over the years, this policy has backfired and you have loads of XinJiang people, surviving in Shanghai by stealing and pick-pocketing, mostly because the punishments for crimes like these are sparse and jail time is little to none.

So, there is definitely no intermingling between XinJiang people and run of the mill Chinese people and the weird thing is that there is this feeling that they are kind of not the same, but at the same time, they are ‘Chinese’ (In relation to them becoming independent or whatever crazy ideas they seem to have every few months…). Like at this restaurant we visited last night, there were two obviously looking XinJiang people, acting as waiters and everyone else was looking more like Chinese people. This was the kind of place that was pretty nice, somewhat busy and not incredibly cheap like other XinJiang restaurants I’ve been to. I kind of got the feeling that there was a sense that if it was all XinJiang people, the business would not be trusted, would be less credible and would in reality receive less business because probably a percentage of Chinese people would avoid a place that was seen as maybe too ‘XinJiang’ess.

The most curious thing about the event of course dealt with JJ’s parents.  They had never in their life eaten XinJiang food.  Never once.  Now I can understand them not liking it, or even not outwardly not liking XinJiang people, but never to even eat XinJiang food in their entire life?  That would be like an American who couple, 60 years old who had never in their life tried New England Clam Chowder.  Of course they might not like it, but to never try it?  Just so weird.  XinJiang food is everywhere in Shanghai, I’ve probably had it 20 times, just in my short stay in Shanghai in the past few years.  And to top it off, a good majority of the food is lamb, which JJ’s father loves!  So in addition to never trying it, they really enjoyed the food.  SO strange….