Tung Sing, Ancestral temple in Barrio Chino, Lima

Tung Sing （同型, Mandarin: Tong Xing is a temple near Barrio Chino, in the Central Market area of Lima. Barrio Chino is essentially a series of streets in the middle of the Central Market, and the concentration of Chifas (Chinese restaurants) and businesses peters out as one walks further from the main drag of the Calle Capon street and the perpendicular Jiron Paruro street.

The temple is not visible from the street, it is tucked behind a nondescript alleyway, and its main facade is facing away from the street.

The temple is mainly used by immigrants and descendants from Zhongshan (中山）, an area in Guangdong province. It seems as if most Chinese here are from Zhongshan, and to a lesser extent, from Taishan county (where my mother's family is from), Guangzhou city, and Nanhai.






In the corner is German Koo, the "priest" of the temple. Apparently he has some sort of qualifications, but I am told by Chinatown residents that he is quite a greedy character. Indeed, he immediately asked for a donation upon my arrival in the temple.


Photos of Sun Yat-sen, considered one of the founding fathers of modern China, are popular in El Barrio Chino. Actually, Zhongshan was named after Sun Yat-sen (who's name in pinyin is Sun Zhongshan).

Snakes in a market

Since I've told this story to a couple of people now, I may as well repeat it here:

There's a little alleyway off the main street in El Barrio Chino, quite shady in both senses of the word. The alleyway serves as a produce market where one can get all sorts of Chinese vegetables, including (as I've mentioned earlier) my favorite kongxincai. They also have excellent, fresh tofu made daily (although it usually sells out by 3 pm), and sometimes fish in the mornings. There's also a fruit vendor, from whom I buy kiwis, and who I will talk about later in this blog.

I was talking with the fruit vendor last Tuesday, when some guy starts pulling out this long, taut, but slightly curled thing from a large rice sack. It keeps coming out, and three guys join in to pull the thing out. People start murmuring in the market, when they realize it's a giant boa constrictor. The guys seem to inspect it for a while (I was maybe 20 meters away -- no pictures, sorry), before putting it back into the rice sack and leaving it near the entrance of the alleyway market, on the ground.

As I walk out, I notice that there are a couple more rice sacks with the boa constrictor sack, lying haphazardly on the ground, their contents unknown.

A nonsubstantive update

Over the past week, among other things, I have been delving into religion-related topics. I will be continuing a conversation with a Falun Gong member, who left China not too long ago. A fruit vendor in Chinatown introduced me to a Chinese-run Catholic church, where I will be attending services on Sunday. A Confucian temple is holding services on Saturday. I will be meeting a Chinese-Peruvian Buddhist tomorrow.

Because of the sensitivity of some of these topics, particularly regarding the persecution of the Falun Gong (I apologize for the proliferation of wikipedia links), I'd really like to blog about it later. In the eyes of Duan, the Falun Gong member, I best "wait until I better understand Falun Gong." I happen to agree with him, so I'm going to hold off on writing about these things until after this weekend.

"91% are proud to be Peruvians..."

"...and would not change their nationality." This was the headline today in El Comercio, the major daily newspaper in Lima. Signs of nationalism seem to be on the rise here in Peru, probably because of the upcoming independence day, July 28. I'm honestly a little scared for when the day finally arrives, as I'm sure it'll all be crazy and insane given last week's "Gran Curso Wong." The Gran Curso Wong is a parade commercially sponsored by the giant supermarket chain "Wong," which was started by early Chinese immigrants maybe a hundred years ago, and has since grown into a kind of Target or Walmart. Considering the madness that was that the Wong parade (I'm still getting over the fact that a giant parade was held by a giant corporation with huge crowds and security and fireworks and shutdown streets), I can hardly imagine what kind of independence day party the Peruvians are about to throw.

(Photo caption: Onlookers at the Gran Curso Wong)

I've always found nationalism interesting; nationalism seems to inspire all sorts of emotions. One popular idea of nationalism holds that nations are "imagined communities," wherein nations are socially constructed community in order to define a national identity and create a sense of belonging among its citizens. Whereas "real" communities are often based upon kinships or small geographic boundaries, imagined communities must often construct identities in order to delineate a nation. Nationalism in Peru appear to be quite strong: the soft drink "Inca Kola" continues to outpace Coca-Cola (one of the few local beverages in the world to do so), people everywhere wear little lapels with the Peruvian flag, and as I mentioned in an earlier post, street names have all been renamed to more patriotic-sounding names, "Calle Wilson" became "Inca Garcilazo" (anything with "Inca" carries clear nationalistic connotations) "Jose Leuro" became "28 de Julio" (the day of independence), "Geldres" became "Libertad" (Liberty). It almost seems 1984-esque.

So how does this all relate to Chinatowns and the diaspora? Well, it occurred to me that I had largely considered myself first and foremost an American, and as a kid I enjoyed participating in activities celebrating a national pastime. I joined a fife and drum corps in fourth grade and felt proud to be celebrating my nation's heritage, which despite the fact that my parents were immigrants to the U.S., I saw as my own heritage. I memorized all the presidents' names and years, learned about the various wars the U.S. had fought, and was proud to be from Concord, Massachusetts, where the American war for independence had begun. I was bored by Chinese school and took little interest in learning about my family history (which I now know to be objectively, quite fascinating...).

I shouldn't be surprised, then, by the fact that most kids and teenagers of Chinese descent I've interviewed here know little about their Chinese familial history, seem bored by the required Mandarin classes, care little for anything Chinese (except the hongbao, or "red envelopes" stuffed with cash that Chinese kids receive during Chinese New Years), and consider themselves proudly Peruvian. And it shouldn't be surprising that Peruvians, regardless of whether they are white, mestizo, black, Chinese, or anything else can still dress up in "traditional Peruvian" costumes (often of Incan, pre-Incan, or pre-Spanish origin) and celebrate a national heritage. But I still have trouble getting over this embarrassingly obvious fact.

(Photo caption: First-generation students at the Chinese-Peruvian school "Diez de Octubre" prepare for a national Peruvian dance. Most can speak Cantonese in addition to Spanish.)

Roxana has a son, Jose, who was born in Peru the same year I was. Although he grew up in the Barrio Chino and both his parents were Chinese, he can only understand some basic Cantonese and admits to feeling far more Peruvian than Chinese. Even though he attended a Chinese-Peruvian elementary and secondary school, Jose tells me that he found the Chinese kids to often be cold and uninviting, whereas the Peruvians were much were carinoso, or warm-hearted.

(Jose in his room in Barrio Chino.)


In contrast to the tusan Peruvian-Chinese (those born in Peru), though, recent immigrants feel no such love for Peru. Many recent Chinese immigrants see Peru as little more than a place to make money before returning to China. Others see Peru as simply a gateway to the U.S. or wealthier Western countries. A group of teenagers at a Peruvian-Chinese school admitted that they understood little Spanish and would return to China once their family had enough money. All of them have told me they lived in the countryside, and moved to Peru because of poverty. China remains their homeland, and although I haven't detected any particularly strong sense of nationalism, it seems as if there does exist a sense of Chinese cultural superiority.

(Ping-pong tournament at Juan XXIII, the other Chinese-Peruvian school. Juan XXIII was originally founded by an Italian missionary who worked in China during the 1930s and 1940s. After China became ruled by the Communists in 1949, he apparently went back to Rome and asked the pope what he should do, mentioning the fact that he wanted to work with Chinese people. The pope sent him to Peru, with its substantial Chinese population.)

Like their North-American counterparts, however, Peruvian-Chinese do not necessarily have to choose between a Peruvian identity and a Chinese one. The descendants of the first Chinese immigrants here are proud of their hybrid identity. Doctor Luis Yong, the owner of a successful chifa restaurant in El Barrio Chino, director of the Associacion Peruana-China, and a surgeon, was emphatic in explaining to me the success story of Peru's Chinese immigrants. For him, the Chinese-Peruvians succeeded because of a cultural propensity toward hard work, integrity, respect, filial piety, and other guiding principles rooted in Confucianism and Daoism (and to a lesser extent, he says, in Buddhism... he seems to think that because Buddhism was not natively Chinese, it does not hold as large of an influence). The Chinese-Peruvians are distinguished from their Japanese-Peruvian, Italian-Peruvian, or Arab-Peruvian counterparts because they have both successfully managed to integrate into Peruvian society (Luis notes the hybrid chifa food), while also maintaining a strong cultural background. There is no Japantown, Little Italy, Luis says, perhaps idealizing the Chinese community.

Nationalism is often capable of clearing the identity slates of first-generation immigrants such as myself or Jose. First-generation populations, have far more malleable identities than their immigrant parents. Whereas immigrant parents have often seen Peru as simply a foreign land of opportunity, many first-generation children have adopted new national identities, and perhaps only secondarily bothered to consider their family's cultural heritage. Striking a balance between a cultural heritage and an adopted national identity is not impossible, but often induces false or simplistic ideals of nationalism or cultural superiority.

请客 (qing'ke), or, the art of invitation

It is one of the first lessons in college-level Chinese, something described as an indispensable part of Chinese culture, and something I actually attempted to describe in my fellowship interview. My concise Oxford University Press Chinese-English dictionary defines "qing ke" as the following:
"stand treat; entertain guests; give a dinner party; play the host."

I think I described it in my Watson interview when posed the question, how exactly are you actually gonna get to know all these Chinese people? I tried to describe how during my times in China, as well as with my family back home in the U.S., relationships are made and cemented through "qing ke." Basically, one asks another (or a group of people) for a lunch, a cup of tea, a beer, or really any other social activity. I'm not well versed in the specifics, but I'm pretty sure some sort of monetary exchange is necessary, in order to demonstrate that one is actually treating the other person (So, inviting someone for a walk in the park doesn't count, but paying for the post-walk teahouse does). When the bill eventually comes, the appropriate parties spend a good amount of time fighting over the bill. If one is particularly determined to treat, he or she makes prior arrangements (with the restaurant staff, for instance) so the bill doesn't slip into the wrong hands.
Of course, once one has treated another, it is the guest's unspoken duty to treat the host the next time.

I should mention that I tried to "qing'ke" the second day in Lima, with a chain-smoking Tianjin guy with stained yellow teeth, a leather jacket, and a thick Northerner accent (which stands out against the Cantonese-inflected Mandarin that most others speak here). It was like I was in Beijing all over again -- visitors of the Chinese capital have probably all noticed the large groups of such men in restaurants rowdily downing beer after beer, shirts rolled up and faces red, cigarette stumps littered across the floor. After noting we were living in the same neighborhood, I invited him out for a beer, as befits this seemingly stereotypical northerner. He politely agreed, but nothing ever came of it, and for some odd reason, I haven't seen him in his shop since that first day.

It's now been nearly two weeks since I got here, and I finally had my first two "qing'ke" exchanges in the past three days. I failed to pay both times, perhaps reflecting my novice bill-fighting abilities. I would like to note that I was also quite clearly playing against a home-field advantage: the first time, it was the restaurant owner who was treating me. I tried to force the ten soles bill (about $3.40) into her hands, but it simply wouldn't take. It's amazing. I tried a couple times, but she refused and simply said "next time."


The second time happened today. Roxane, who I think I mentioned in a previous post, invited me and her son (who is the same age) out for lunch at Chifa Canton. The food was delicious, a great vegetable dish with my favorite mu'er, a fungus literally translated as "tree ears," and a local fish steamed in classic Cantonese style with a healthy amount of ginger and scallions. I kept thinking, there is no way I can let her pay for this. Unbeknownst to me, however, Roxane had apparently made previous arrangements with the restaurant owner (who is her good friend) to pay for the lunch, so when I asked for the bill, they said it had already been paid. Even worse, Roxane had slipped out to work, so I couldn't even fight with her for the bill.

But I think that these two "qing'ke" incidents are good signs. They may have treated me this time, but no matter how much they fight for the bill next time, eventually I'll win, and I'll pay. It's an unspoken rule. And it signifies that at the very least, a kind of personal relationship is forming.

Food in Lima

Food in Lima has been great. I was expecting to cook a lot more, but with such delicious and relatively inexpensive food everywhere, I've been eating out quite often. I often eat Chifa, Peruvian-Chinese food, in Chinatown or elsewhere. Someone quoted that there were approximately 4,000 Chifas in all of Lima, quite a large amount, even taking into account Lima's size (estimated population of 8 million, about a third of Peru's total population!).

Limenos (Lima residents), it appears, are carnivores, and it's difficult to order dishes that feature vegetables and not meat. Most of the Chifa menu items are quite meaty, which can get overwhelming at times. Because I'm a cheapskate and because I normally eat by myself, I order off the "El Menu," which is basically a set-price, 2 or 3 course meal. Chifas usually have a "sopa wanton" and a main dish, such as "pollo tamarindo," chicken in tamarind sauce, and maybe a small desert or drink if you get the "menu ejecutivo." This all costs about 6-9 soles, or about 2-3 dollars.

I've also been able to get a good variety of Chinese vegetables in a sidestreet market in the Chinatown here. They even have kongxincai (literally translated as "open-heart vegetable... the stalks are hollow), my favorite Chinese vegetable. I bought some homemade tofu today as well, and it was quite delicious.

When people ask me what I eat here, the other thing I usually mention besides chifa is ceviche-- raw seafood-- which is famous in Peru. The fish ceviche is the classic dish and my favorite, although the conchas negras (black clam) ceviche is also delicious. Its normally served dunked in lime juice and with red onions, as well as corn and sweet potato on the side. All told, I'm quite happy with the food here!

Things go poorly sometimes

A few days ago I went out to try and find the Peruvian-Chinese Association, an organization that appears to be geared mostly towards the tusan Chinese -- those born in Peru. I had been in email contact with them while applying for the Watson Fellowship, and they had been very helpful in their emails. After hearing back from the fellowship committee, I wrote them again, but they did not respond. At any rate, I decided I would try to seek out their actual association building, having gotten their address. Several things went wrong:
1) Street names had changed -- all maps I consulted gave the street name "Republica de Panama," whereas the actual street name had become something like "Avenida Roosevelt." I walked about an hour too far before realizing that I had probably missed it.
2. Building were not numbered.
3. To top it all off, when I finally got to the correct building, I was told by the security guard the Association had moved not too long ago (Their phone number wasn't working, either).

I have yet to try and find the new location, and although I will make it there, I am not going to be terribly optimistic that it will contribute significantly to my project. I'm interested in people, not organizations. And I am also still fine-tuning my "photo-interviewing" skills, so that people will be as they are and allow me to photograph. Many people have been very open to sharing their stories, but many also put up their defenses when I begin to photograph. Actually, I have had great opportunities to get to know a lot of people here, and many go way out of their way to help me.

Finally, my pocket-sized camera appears to be out of order. The lens won't slide back into the camera body or slide all the way out; I'll visit the Canon shop in Lima, but for now it's a no-go.

Photos from China, 1917-1932

Duke University has just put online a great collection of photos taken by Sidney Gamble in China between 1917-1932. Although this is not related to my project, it's quite an extraordinarily collection.

http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/gamble/

An introduction to El Barrio Chino in Lima, Peru

"Chifa" is the word used to describe Chinese food in Peruvian Spanish, a slight corruption of the Chinese compound chi-fan, literally translated as "Eat Food." Chifa seems to be ubiquitous in Lima, even outside the Chinatown area. In my district, Miraflores, there are two Chifas only two minutes away from my apartment building. It appears as if the Chinese influence in Peru has at least permeated its cuisine, and foods such as sopa wanton and chaufa (fried rice) are found everywhere. Often after attempting to explain my project to Peruvians, I ask them if they've had Chifa, and if so, if they like it. I have yet to meet a single Peruvian (or more specifically, someone from Lima) who isn't aware of the Chinese population here, or who hasn't tried Chinese food. They have all said that they like it, but that may be a different matter.


The Chinese have settled in Peru for over hundred years, and continue to do so today. Lima's Chinatown is one of the most established in the Western Hemisphere, and is perhaps the most famous Chinatown outside of the United States. Geographically, however, "El Barrio Chino" (the Chinatown) is quite small -- it is composed of only two perpendicular streets, Calle Uyacali and Calle Capon.

I arrived in Lima one week ago, and I quickly obesrved that the Chinese community here in Peru isn't really a unified entity. Similar to the Chinese community in, say, New York, the Chinese community in Lima is an eclectic mix of recent immigrants, first-generation Chinese (such as myself), and descendants of Chinese immigrants who arrived here as early as the mid-1800s.
Cantonese immigrants were the first settlers in Peru. Many of their descendants are already well-integrated into Peruvian society, no longer speak Cantonese, and seem to separate themselves from the more recent immigrants. These different groups don't necessarily interact on equal terms, either.

Roxane Lok, who works at a foodstuffs store, arrived from Guangdong less than ten years ago. She was friendly with me on my first day in Barrio Chino, and was willing to pose for a photograph with her boss, Julia, a Peruvian-born woman of Chinese descent, called tusan, another Peruvian Spanish term that is derived from the Chinese tusheng, or locally-born.

Roxane appeared quite aware of the disparities between these two groups. I asked the two where they live, and Julia replied San Isidro, a posh suburb where private guards and electric fences are the norm; whereas Roxane replied El Barrio Chino, which despite its touristy veneer, is the first stop for many newly-arrived immigrants. Roxane simplified the difference between these two groups as symbolic of her relationship with Julia, "La duena y la trabajadora" (The Boss and The Worker).

Most recent immigrants have also arrived from Guangdong, but many more have come from another southern coastal province that has historically sent many immigrants abroad, Fujian. Mr. Lu, an acupuncturist in the Barrio Chino, estimates that within the past eight years the Fujianese population here expanded from only 200 to over 5,000. I don't know whether that is true, but many of the new Chifas that are popping up around the two main streets of the Barrio Chino are run by Fujianese.

Mr. Lu

Mr. Lu, however, does not fit into either of the two predominant categories of Chinese here; he is neither a part of the recent migration from the southern provinces nor is he a descendant of early settlers. Mr. Lu is from Shanghai, and at the age of fifty-five, he managed to get a visa out of China in 1987 (do the math... I did). Unlike most of the other Chinese here, too, Mr. Lu seems enamored of his adopted country and highly critical of his country of birth.

Mr. Lu almost immediately began describing to me the great freedoms he had in Peru, that although China's economy has opened up, its government still hasn't, and that the Chinese are all after money whereas the Peruvians are much more humane. More than once, Mr. Lu grandly described the "libertad" in Peru, which he asserted was near-absent in China.

Mr. Lu's age already hinted at the fact that he undoubtedly lived through some of the most traumatic periods in Chinese history -- the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution during the 1960s and 1970s. Mr. Lu's iconoclastic comments further contributed to a suspicion that he must have endured unspeakable hardships in China. One common theme that will undoubtedly run through this project is attempting to understand why people left China, and perhaps more historically, under what conditions they left.

Because of my thesis work on China's barefoot doctors (Chijiao yisheng) during the Cultural Revolution, I was interested in whether Mr. Lu had trained any doctors, since he had already finished medical school (in Chinese medicine) by 1961, at the Medical University in Anhui province. While writing my thesis, I learned that China was able to rapidly train over 1.5 million "barefoot doctors" -- minimally trained rural paramedics -- largely through the help of forced rural conscription of urban doctors.

He said that he was "sent down" (xiaxiang) to the countryside in the late 1960s, which was quite common for urban residents with the wrong politics, and yes, he trained many barefoot doctors in rural Anhui, as well as "worker's doctors" (gongren yisheng) outside of Shanghai. During the Cultural Revolution many political undesirables -- intellectuals, "capitalist roaders," teachers, doctors -- were forcibly sent to the countryside to engage in grueling manual labor.

Mr. Lu also indicated that he would not have been able to go to medical school later on, because as he put it, his parents had a "hacienda." The nice thing about talking with these Chinese-Peruvians is that when my Chinese fails (i.e., I had forgotten had to say "landowners" in Chinese), we can often switch to Spanish. Both Chinese and Spanish are currently occupying the very small space my brain has allocated for foreign languages, so mixing up the two is inevitable. Back to the Hacienda. Shortly after Mr. Lu must have entered medical school in 1957, class struggles would have made it impossible for Mr. Lu, the son of landowners, to attend a medical school. On the other hand, those who had grown up as peasants or landless laborers would have had a far greater chance at higher education.

Mr. Lu is spritely and in good spirits at 75, and seems to have adapted to Lima quite well. He has a Peruvian wife and his three children (I assume from a previous marriage in China) are scattered across the world -- one in Canada, one in China, and one practicing acupuncture in you guessed it, Cote d'Ivoire. I told him that this was a little strange, going to Cote d'Ivoire, and he goes "Yes, it's hard there, but it's still good."

Welcome

So this is a blog that is meant to describe and show some of my experiences during my year as a Watson Fellow. My project focuses on documenting various Chinatowns and Chinese communities (where a "Chinatown" has not yet been formally established), and you can read the abstract at watsonfellowship.org (the link goes to a list of 2008-09 fellows).

 I love photography (otherwise I wouldn't be doing this...), but didn't get a chance to do as much as I would have liked in college. I spent the latter half of my college career focusing on my major, East Asian studies, and the field of public health, eventually writing my thesis on China's barefoot doctors program during the 1960s and 1970s (shameless plug: PDF copy available at the link). What my liberal arts education did teach me, I hope, is how to look at things holistically, which I think may help as I attempt to understand and document things around me.

Please do leave comments and questions in the comments section of any blog post. Many people have already asked me very good questions, and they help me think of different perspectives and approaches.