A common theme on this blog is the diversity of China's Hui community. As I've noted before, Hui communities exist in nearly every major city in the country. There are some Hui who speak with a Beijing Mandarin accent, while others speak Cantonese, and others still speak regional dialects inflected with loan words from Mongolian, or Tibetan. Similar differences in religiosity divide the Hui: some are totally secularized and only observe Islamic dietary codes, while others regularly attend prayers. In any given community, it's likely you'll find a grab-bag of these personality types. Especially in urban centers, Hui neighborhoods tend toward a wide array of cultural, linguistic and religious types.
Jinan is no different than anywhere else in China in this respect. Though the community here is longstanding (inscriptions at the Great Southern Mosque indicate that Jinan's Hui community has been around since at least the Song Dynasty), the Hui Quarter in Jinan is also a place where cultural tastes and changes have rapidly evolved over the last several years. One of the primary reasons for this, is tied to the kinds of economic forces that have engineered China's rise throughout the last 30 years. An influx of migrant Hui labor from various locations throughout northwest China (though seemingly from Qinghai province more than anywhere else) has prompted a few shifts in the cultural landscape of Jinan's Hui community. How?
One of the oft-repeated statements I hear during my interviews concerns the changing demographics of the Hui Quarter. "You know, a lot of people who live in the Hui Quarter are renters, (租房子)" says a Han friend of mine, adding "they come from a lot of different places." The word she doesn't use is the one which is probably most accurate: many of the neighborhood's residents are yimin (移民), migrants. Though she's not the only one who notices. The woman who runs the dumpling shop which I frequent in the neighborhood is a lifelong resident. One night over dinner, I ask her "What's the biggest change that's happened in the neighborhood in the last 30 years?" The neighborhood has, indeed, changed dramatically since the 1980s. Longtime residents always mention that prior to the mid-'90s, the houses in the area all resembled the dazayuan'r (大杂院) courtyard style houses that are typically associated with Beijing. Starting at around 1993, however, the bulldozers demolished the courtyards and 4 to 5 story walkup apartments rose in their place. These buildings look far older than their twenty years, but they stand as testament to how recetnly the entire neighborhood has been turned over. When I ask what the changes the neighborhood has seen, I expect her to answer with the usual story about the change in scenery. Instead, she says something that surprises me: "现在外地人多." There are more outsiders here now. As she says this she gestures out the window at the blinking neon lights of the Chinese-style barbecue restaurants that line the neighborhood's front streets.
Many of the interviewees I talk to here cite an influx of migrants from west China as a dramatic change in recent years. Though Jinan is not as cosmopolitan as Nanjing, Suzhou, Hangzhou, or even nearby Qingdao, as an eastern city it still has benefitted from China's economic rise in a way that many cities on China's western periphery have not. As in many urban centers throughout the east, from Beijing and Shanghai to Zhengzhou and Shenzhen, migrants from the under-developed west come to Jinan looking for part-time work. In the case of the Hui Quarter in Jinan, many of these migrants end up working in Halal restaurants throughout the city. Often whole families come to staff kitchens, oversee grills, wash dishes and bus tables. Why come to Jinan? A newly arrived 40-something restauranteur from near Xining that I met one afternoon while he waited for the start of evening prayers at the Great Southern Mosque explained the logic behind his choice in fairly simple terms. "The competition in restaurants in Xining is too intense," he told me. "You can't earn enough money there." But Jinan was different. "这里人多, 餐馆少" he said. There are a lot of people here, and fewer restaurants.
The impact of the migrants in the local eating scene becomes apparent immediately upon entering the neighborhood. The arrrival of northwestern Hui coincided with the reconstruction of the neighborhood, and the great availability of space for restaurants. "There were some stores and restaurants here before," says the owner of a tea shop in the middle of the neighborhood, "but not like now. It used to be just vendors selling dried fruits and nuts. Maybe every now and then you'd have someone who'd sell xian'r bing (馅饼, stuffed meat pies) or something, but not like now. Now all kinds of people from Northwestern China have restaurants and barbecue stands here." Outsider entrepreneurs brought a very distinct version of halal food to Jinan with them. On nearly every street in the Hui Quarter one finds evidence of northwestern culinary influence: restaurants for Lanzou Niurou Lamian (兰州牛肉拉面, Lanzhou-Style Beef Noodle soup, a dish worthy of it's own future blog entry) and Yangrou Tang (羊肉汤, lamb soup, a Xi'an specialty) are everywhere. Most noticably, in recent years, Chinese barbecue (shaokao, 烧烤) restaurants flooded the Hui Quarter as a wave of migrants arrived from Xinjiang Province. A neighborhood baker, himself a life-long Jinan resident, explains "We didn't have shaokao here at all until the '80s. It came with people from Xinjiang, and at first people didn't really like it." What about now? "Now it's everywhere."
Migrants have also, in some cases, revitalized mosque communities and interest in Islamic heritage. The baker noted, "The Hui from the northwest go to pray more often than a lot of locals. For them, Islam is absolutely a part of their daily lives. We local Hui are very marketized (shangye hua, 商业化). We're really concerned about work, and don't have a lot of time to go pray." Another interviewee, a woman in her early 20s who'd grown up in JInan, noted that Hui from the northwest were far more likely than locals to wear prayer hats or hijabs as a regular clothing item. "I usually only put on a hijab if I'm going to the mosque on holidays," she said. Jinanese Hui frequently tell me that they feel these outsidesr are more devote and more knowledgeable about their faith. The locals often tell me that these migrants are not "Han-hua" (汉化, "Han-ified"), which is to say, assimilated, as themselves. Often, such sentiments are expressed alongside expressions of regret for loss of touch with heritage. In some senses, then, the presence of devout, migrant Hui galvanizes many locals to rediscover their religious and cultural roots.
But the transition to life in east China isn't always easy. Even in a neighborhood full of other Hui, migrants from the west may experience a form of culture shock. I talk with an 18 year old migrant worker from Qinghai as I eat lunch in his restaurant.
"How long have you been here?" I ask him.
"Not very long. Only about a month," he tells me.
"Is Jinan very different from your hometown?" I ask.
"Of course it is. It's totally different," he tells me.
"How so?" I ask.
"Well, like language," he says. "People here speak Jinan dialect."
"Is that a problem?" I ask. "Can you communicate with them?"
"It's not a problem. I can understand them. But it's so different from our local dialect," he tells me.
"What else is different?" I ask.
"Well, people here aren't very serious Muslims," he says.
"Really?" I say.
"Yeah" interjects his co-worker, another young Hui from Xining, probably in his early 20s. "People here really don't know much. They just know 'I'm a Hui.' They don't really understand much about Islam."
The first man says, "Yeah, they only really go to pray on holidays. On Friday at ZhuMa (主麻, Jumu'ah) Prayers in Xining at the Donguan Mosque, people spill out into the street. In Jinan, there's usually only one row of people outside in the courtyard that can't fit in the mosque."
"Oh," I say, turning back to the first man. "But, what do you think of Jinan? Do you like it here?"
"Jinan's alright," he says, and then with a sad smile say, "It's not as good as home."
Difficulty fitting into a far-flung community like Jinan is typical for China's migrant workers, regardless of ethnicity. News coverage of China's migrant communities tells of families constantly on the move, usually unable to gain basic social services, and often living around the margins, pulling their children out of school, and working constantly. Matt Sheehan, a friend and former Princeton in Beijing classmate of mine, covered this story from a human level in a really great story he wrote for the Huffington Post last year. In JInan, however, Hui migrants have the advantage of having a centralized and active Hui community that provides some outreach to help. Unsurprisingly, the mosques spearhead these initiatives. "Our community has a lot of people who've come here from the northwest," say one of the imams from the Great Southern Mosque. "They come here to open restaurants, but many of them have trouble adjusting. The mosque trues to help them out." The imam at the women's mosque mentioned that often recent arrivals to the neighborhood attended their weekly women's study sessisons to learn about local nationalities policies and get a grasp on Islamic life in the neighborhood. This outreach, though minor, seems to make a difference. Realtionships between merchants within the community appear cordial and cooperative.
However, not everyone is so welcoming. As I've mentioned before, even many Hui regard the Hui Quarter as "zang, luan, cha" (脏, 乱, 差), or "dirty , disorderly, and poor," a condition that some link to the barbecue culture brought in by migrant Hui. "I really don't like going to the Hui Quarter," a 52 year old Hui engineer who grew up in the Hui Quarter but has since moved away, tells me. "It's not like it used to be. A lot of new people have come into the neighborhood. Probably less than half of the residents there are locals now. It just seems like the people that live there aren't very well-educated or well-mannered." Another local Hui woman in her late forties specifically decries the rise of shaokao, linking it to the disorder in the neighborhood. "I really don't like yangrou chuan'r restaurants," she says. "Shaokao wasn't a big deal until maybe 20 years ago when people from Xinjiang brought it in. But it's dirty. There's trash and plastic bags all over the place from the restaurants, and all the smoke makes the air really bad. People go to eat chuan'r and they drink too much, and make noise, and sometimes they even fight. It's not a very pleasant place to go." Another interviewee explains, "Those restaurants grill on the streets, and the smoke goes up in the air. That's technically not allowed. There's nowhere else in the city where you can do that. But because we live in a minority neighborhood, nobody dares do anything about it, and we're basically left on our own." While these respondents never express open hostility to migrants, their expressed dislike of the side-effects of their presence in the neighborhood-- environmentally and economically-- points to some areas of tension between some local Hui and migrants.
But perhaps the largest hurdle facing these outsiders is the instability. In the many conversations I've had here, locals have reported varying timelines for the imminent urban renewal that will begin in the neighborhood. Some suggest that large scale demolition could begin within the next year. The plans, as my interviewees understand them, are to build new high-rises in the area. As one respondent told me "I'm afraid the size of the Hui Quarter will get smaller. Some people may be able to afford new apartments, but many will have to move elsewhere. Lots of them will just leave. Like the people who've come hear from the Northwest, they'll just go somewhere else." It's true that in large-scale projects like these, migrants are often the most vulnerable. Their position is least permanent, and their recourse (economic or otherwise) is far more limited. Perhaps the biggest question concerning and identity the vitality of Jinan's current Hui community is this: what will it be like if and when all of the outsiders leave?