Tidbits From the World

In Xi’an, there are many restaurants that claim to serve real Xinjiang food, but they are mostly owned by Chinese muslims of the Hui minority. Hui cuisine is different from the Uyghur’s (hereafter referred to as “the people from the New Territories/New-Territorians“, to avoid having my website blocked by the pesky Great Firewall which seems to automatically block any website containing any reference to this people…) Xinjiang means “New Frontier” or “New Territory” in Chinese, it is the name of a Chinese province located at the North Western part of China, it shares borders with Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Chinese language has two terms for this people: “the Weiwuer people: 维吾尔族” and “the people from the New Territory (New-Territorians): 新疆人”.

There is that one restaurant close to my apartment where they serve genuine food from the New Territories. They have great noodles, with great sauce and bread… oh good bread is so rare in China! Their food is great, the exotic ambiance is fabulous, but their service, let’s put it this way: sucks. They lie to their customers whenever a request is too troublesome to be fulfilled, for instance if you want noodles, but they want to sell off all their rice, they will tell you that they have no noodles anymore, and two minutes later you will see one of the staff eating noodles. They are harsh to their customers and act like real misers in front of money… but anyway, it’s basically the only place where you can taste one of the best foods in Xi’an, so I guess it’s the price to pay for good bread and noodles.

The restaurant is always full… of people. They are mostly family members of the owner. Sometimes you see customers, other fellow New Territorians, or even Han Chinese, who come to have a taste at some halal food (which is translated in Chinese as “清真食品” (clean and real food)).

Over a period of one year, I have been very few times to that restaurant. I had always been repelled by the complete lack of courtesy from the staff. But last week, I finally got some human touch from the family.

I was happily surprised when, after taking a picture right outside the restaurant, I was asked by the owner, and subsequently by everyone in the restaurant, to have their portrait taken. I therefore took a picture of each one of them, in front of the Shahada, the Muslim declaration of belief pictured above, behind the man. It is written in Arabic and means “There is no god but God and Muhammad is His prophet”.

I think they are all family members, but I could not make sure as we had no common language. Their Mandarin is even worse than mine! and they certainly don’t speak English. They speak Uyghur, a turkic language, and some of them speak Arabic as well.

She is, I believe, the wife of the owner of the restaurant. She is the one who manages the money… a very harsh and straight-forward woman. If you’re trying to pay your meal with a 100-yuan bill, she will bluntly ask you for smaller denominations. Seeing her smile on this picture is particularly moving for me.

On that day, when I ordered my food, she came with the noodles. I said “xie xie (thank you)” and she looked at me with a puzzled glare, as if it was the first time she heard the word. Then, I called her again and asked her for some “na’am” (bread), she came back with my na’am and I said “xie xie” again. She gave me the same suspicious look. Then, I called her a third time for one mutton kebab, and she came again to my table with the kebab, this time smiling and she said:

“PAKI! here’s your kebab!”… I thanked her and said in a mix of Mandarin, French, English and what I believe to be Arabic…

“Me… no Paki… Paki, no, no, no!”

Everytime I grow a beard, I am always asked if I am Pakistani. Han Chinese ask me… Indians ask me… Hui minority people ask me and now, this New Territorian also assumed I was Pakistani. She replied with a question, in her language:

“You’re not Paki?… Are you Turkish?”

No.

“Are you Kirghiz?”

No.

“Are you Kazakh?”

No. “I am from Jianada (Chinese for “Canada”)”.

“Jakarta?”

She then asked the other people in the restaurant if they knew that place called “Jakarta”…

“No, not Jakarta… KA-nada!”

Ah! Canada!

She followed with a question, which I naturally didn’t understand… I said “bu mingbai”, which is Chinese for “I don’t understand”, but she probably didn’t understand me either, it was like a dialogue of the deaf.

Then, some random customer turned over and translated to me what she had just said… in perfectly clear French!

“Elle demande: Comment vous appellez-vous?” (She is asking: “What’s your name?”).

Alex…

“Alex! isbdgo fsdif fafsdaf”. And she left.

I had not heard French spoken so clearly by a non native for a very long time. I was so amazed and happy that I went to his table to chat with him. It was my first conversation with a man from the New Territories. And it was very instructive.

Some of the cooks.

When I go to class every morning at 8 o’clock, I see this young guy peeling carrots and potatoes and preparing the meals for lunch. He looks very young and tired.

Last weekend was Eid al-Adha, the festival of sacrifice in which an animal, usually a sheep, is sacrified by Muslims.

The following day, I had the pictures printed and I gave them a copy of their portraits.

I hesitated before putting this picture on this article, because it sort of destroys its whole positive mood. But I think it is important to mention one of the reasons why there are racial tensions in China. The customer in the restaurant who spoke French to me (I did not take any photo of him) told me that he is often mistaken for a foreigner when he walks in Xi’an. Some people greet him in English, in a manner way too familiar to any expatriate in China: “HHHaallllo!”, and he is often asked which country he is from. He never replies that he is from the New Territories because, according to him, the Chinese are afraid of those people. He prefers to say that he is from Kyrgyzstan. New Territorians are almost always tagged by the Chinese (and not only by Hans) as thieves, bums and lazy students who get a free pass to higher education from the government. In that kind of environment, integration is very difficult, if not impossible. The whole concept of “Harmonious Society” of the current administration will have to be reconsidered…

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