On warm evenings throughout China, stroll through almost any urban neighborhood, and you'll catch the smell of charcoal fires and roasted meat waft through the air. Follow your nose to the source, and you, too, can partake in one of the country's favorite leisure pasttimes: enjoying a cold beer and a couple skewers of yangrou chuan'r (lamb kebabs, 羊肉串儿). Meaty bits of lamb and fat, seasoned with chili and cumin, threaded on to skewers, and flash-grilled over searing hot flames, yangrou chuan'r is the pinnacle of China's barbecue tradition, which blends styles of cooking imported from Central Asia with local ingredients. Going out for chuan'r after work is a pretty frequent spring and summer activity for a lot of the country's danwei (work units). Countless times on Friday nights in Jinan, my friends and I frequented a chuan'r joint next to the subdivision we lived in, and often we'd find ourselves in the midst of an entire office group, or assembly line crew blowing off steam to start the weekend. Going out for chuan'r is a social phenomeon. It's an immensely popular, and incredibly blue collar, dining experience. It's also an incredibly interesting puzzle in regards to determining the boundaries of Han and Hui ethnic identity. Yes, once again, food plays a pivotal role in helping to sort out how ethnic identities work.
Over the last twenty or so years, scholarship on nationalism and ethnic identity basically reached a consensus that ethnic identity is continually constructed in a process of contestation. The content of an ethnic identity (e.g. what it means to be Italian, or German, or Punjabi, or Hui, etc.) is constantly negotiated and redefined through this process. But this process of figuring out what it means to be a member of a group doesn't happen in a vaccuum. Figuring out who belongs also requires understanding who doesn't, and how to tell them apart. These invisible, abstract boundaries of identity rely on intelligible markers that separate members of the group from non-members. Often things like speaking a common language, coming from a common place of origin, sharing a common set of cultural practices or a common historical past are cited as markers of a group identity. Speaking French is a marker of French-ness. Tracing one's cultural roots to ancient Athens a marker of Greek-ness. In this way, the lines between in-group and out-group emerge.
Increasingly, scholars seek the ways in which ordinary activities help to reinforce and maintain these boundaries. How does what we eat, or what we wear, or what we buy, or what we listen to, or what we read contribute to this process? In these studies, cultural items inform our understanding of how ethnicity is lived and experienced in its everyday form. So, Columbus Day becomes a key moment for expression of Italian-American-ness, or asking for "sweet tea" rather than "iced tea" becomes a shibboleth for southern identity. Furthermore, these markers allow for marketing and sale of ethnicity as a commodity. So called "ethno-preneurs" use these markers to build brands, and associate a product's ethnic origins with superior quality or particularly .
So again, we talk about food and identity. Previously, I wrote about how halal, or qing zhen, food is a major marker of Hui culture for both Hui and majority Han alike. While the subtleties and nuances of Islamic faith which distinguish the Hui from Han are more difficult to observe on a surface level, the obstention of observant Hui from eating pork and drinking alcohol provides a simple, readily identifiable means of separating the group. Dietary strictures that have their roots in Islamic religious tradition have become ethnic markers. Further, this leads to an association of lamb and beef as prominent features of Chinese-Islamic cooking. As a Hui interviewee recently explained to me, because the Hui frequently eat these meats, common wisdom states that beef and lamb made by the Hui will simply taste better. True or not, the reputation holds up: for the best lamb, you'll want to find a qingzhen restaurant.
And so, we return to yangrou chaun'r.
In Jinan, as in Yinchuan, Xining, and many other Chinese cities, chaun'r is an undisputably Islamic (and often Hui) specialty. As I've mentioned before, chaun'r is so associated with Jinan's Hui quarter, that cabbies use it as a verification when you ask to be taken there: You're going to Hui Quarter? You must be going to eat yangrou chaun'r. Row after row after row of Chinese style halal barbecue restaurants that serve up the specialty seemingly validate this association. Interestingly, on a street just outside the Muslim Quarter, a row of non-Islamic restaurants advertises pork kabobs (猪肉串), as if in attempt to differentiate themselves from their nearby competitors, and carve out something of a niche. It's clear that, in Jinan, yangrou chaun'r is a distinctly halal food. And so the Muslim Quarter in Jinan glows at night with neon lights, advertising yangrou chaun'r and testifying to their halal quality in Arabic script.
The same holds true in Yinchuan, where barbecue restaurants fill the alley next to the city's famous Southern Mosque. Grills bear the same crescent moon spires that top the dome of the adjacent mosque. Elsewhere in China, for instance in Lanzhou, where the photo below was taken, chaun'r grills are quite literally marked with the characters for qingzhen (清真).
It's a triumph of successful ethnic branding. Want good chuan'r? Head to the Hui neighborhood. To me it seemed that yangrou chuan'r were not just a qingzhen food item, but perhaps THE qingzhen food item. Given the prominence of Islamic barbecue stalls throughout China, it seemed obvious to me that selling these skewers of lamb as halal cuisine was exactly the kind of ethnic marker that I needed to track and explore in my own work (a professor of mine at OU jokes that the bulk of my research will be spent hanging around in Chinese barbecue joints, and in some senses he's not wrong).
"But are yangrou chuan'r a thing, though?" asked someone sitting down on the far end of the table at a recent dinner I attended with a friend and some of his colleagues. "I thought that chuan'r was just kind of everywhere." My first impulse was to answer that of course yangrou chuan'r is a Hui food. But in Beijing, the evidence doesn't sort out so clearly. To be sure, the skewers of lamb are branded here in Beijing, just as they are elsewhere in China. Walk down any street at night here, and you'll be sure to see strings of lights hanging outside restaurants, twisted into the shape of the character chuan'r (串), itself a pictographic representation of meat on a skewer:
Absent from this signage? Any indication that this food has any ethnic properties whatsoever. On a recent evening I enjoyed a beer and a plate of chuan'r at barbecue restaurant down the street from the university. Like many of the barbecue restaurants in the neighorhood, it wasn't a halal restaurant, and t it wasn't run by Hui restauranteurs. As the waiter brought over my plate of skewers and popped open the a bottle of Yanjing Beer, I decided to delve into the matter a little further.
"Are these chuan'r halal (qingzhen)?" I aksed.
"Oh, we're not a qingzhen restaurant." he replied, a bit confused. "We just make barbecue here."
I decided to probe a little further. "But I thought that yangrou chaun'r was a qingzhen specialty (清真特色)?"
"I wouldn't know about that," the waiter responded. And then after considering it, he replied "You know Xinjiang province, right? Well, the most famous chuan'r come from Xinjiang" he offered.
"I see," I said. Any connection between the barbecue and religion was lost on the waiter, who regarded it mostly as work.
So why is this so important? I'll grant that it seems like a rather silly thing to get hung up about. Is yangrou chuan'r a Hui specialty? The question seems trivial, or like some sort of semantics game. But I think there's actually a good deal of significance in the ambiguity one finds in a place like Beijing. How can something so deeply endowed as an ethnic marker in one place be regarded with such ambiguity in another? To what should this be attributed? Cultural appropriation? Overlapping boundaries? To me, this confusion about the origins of the nearly ubiquitous skewers of grilled lamb indicate just how porous or shifty these ethnic boundary lines can be. Or how easily ethnic claims may be replicated, or shared, or the lines between groups blurred. As trivial as it may seem, the ethnic origins of yangrou chuan'r reveals a lot about how we conceptualize and understand ethnicity. It yet again suggests that distinguishing Han from Hui or Hui from any of the other minority cultures in China isn't clear cut and simple.