Chinese conversations

This conversation happened a while after I told my friend about a new teacher that was coming to work at our school, a university friend of one of the foreign teachers from Nottingham, Dan.

Chinese person:       When does the new African teacher start working?

Me:                             What new African Teacher?

Chinese person:       You said there is a new teacher starting, and she is from Africa.

Me:                              No I didn’t, but there is a new teacher starting soon,she’s not                     from Africa, she's Dan’s friend.

Chinese person:        Yeah, Dan’s friend.

Me:                              She is from England, not Africa.

Chinese person:        Then why did you say she was Black.

Chinese people have very funny ideas about nationality, as this conversation shows.  It’s hard for them to imagine that a black person can be English.  I think this stems from their ideas of Nationality regarding their own country.  They think of China as pure, and foreigners clump together in to ‘not Chinese’, so when they see whites, blacks, Middle Eastern of Southern Asian people they simply label them a non-Chinese.  I find it funny coming from such a large country with a broad mix of ethnicities, a quick walk around a city here you will see a very eclectic mix of Chinese people, a product of the greatest migration in human history of peasants from the rural countryside to the cities.  This means each city contains people who have come from the freezing cold Russian north as well as the Boiling hot south and the Muslim East, all mixed together in massive east coast cities.  Even so, Foreigners do stand out quite a lot and despite the fact that they may have lived here all their life, their ancestors haven’t lived here for five thousand years, and that means they are not Chinese.  So when they think of somewhere like England they think of white people, Kings, the Industrial Revolution and David Beckham, and although their geographical knowledge outside of China is pretty bad they still know that England and Africa are quite far apart.  Therefore they assume that black people from England are just Africans who are living in England. 

Of course this isn’t always the case, the Chinese are now the biggest travellers in the world, ninety million went abroad last year, and more and more Chinese people are getting a better understanding of foreign culture.  It used to be very difficult for a Chinese person to travel, but now it seems that everyone is getting away.  Especially students, I am forever bumping in to young Chinese who can speak decent English and then say they have been studying in England or America, or bump in to people who say their children are studying abroad.  And they are not always wealthy looking people, it’s quite easy to discern someone’s wealth by just a simple look here, as if a Chinese person has made money they generally like to show it, and the kind of people who say their children are studying abroad aren’t always rich.

Even so, ninety million people going abroad still isn’t that much in China, maybe only one in fifteen people.  The vast majority of people I meet here have never left China, most people have barely done much travelling around China.  And in a smaller city like Xuzhou with only one thousand foreigners most of them barely see foreigners, or get to speak to them, and if they do hardly any speak Chinese.  This combined with their education, which is massively focused on Chinese history and culture, and TV, also only about China, would no doubt lead to them being slightly ignorant about foreign culture, and what nationality really means.  As well as leading to some very funny conversations.