Mazu's birthday

Mazu is a Daoist deity that is highly revered among Chinese immigrants, largely because she is considered a protector of fisherfolk and other seafarers. Apparently, she was the daughter of some official in Fujian province in the 10th century A.D. I think she's a big deal in coastal provinces like Fujian and Guangdong, as well as Southeast Asian countries with substantial Chinese populations, such as Taiwan, Vietnam, and Malaysia.

Anyways, Mazu's birthday is something like the 23rd day of the 3rd month (using the lunar calendar), which happened to fall on April 18 this year.

Mazu is a huge deal here in Taiwan, they have all sorts of festivals where villages bring their Mazu image to commune with the mother image, which is usually at some big temple. These photos are from Chaotian temple, one of the oldest and most important temples in Taiwan in the town of Beigang.


They had these huge floats with kids dressed up as Chinese gods throwing candies at adults. It was like Halloween, in reverse.


I've been telling people that the entire festival was very pyrotechnic and bloody. Yes, bloody (I'll get to pyrotechnic later). Some was fake blood, like in the two images below, where this handicapped guy would put these young guys into a (fake) trance.


This guy, pictured below, was actually using a sharp metal spiky thing and pounding it on his head and back. In other words, real blood. And I'm pretty sure he went into a real trance, if there is such a thing.


Tattoos are big here.

Now we get to the pyrotechnic part. Firecrackers, lots of them. If you go to a Chinese street celebration, definitely bring earplugs. This bit almost seemed a bit masochistic: a guy would run around in circles in a costume as about 5 to 10 other guys would literally throw firecrackers at him. When the smoke had cleared, most of the costume was burnt.




The music was pretty cool, very loud trumpet-like horns that actually sounded a bit like bagpipes. I've got a sound recording somewhere.
Annalisa says, "Taiwan never ceases to amaze me." Exhibit 7c: One village decides to bring their Mazu image decked out in disco lights, dancing, and playing disco music.

America is difficult, English is difficult

"You're from America? Life there is really difficult, isn't it?" An unemployed, single man from Fujian asked me this today in Milan.

I was almost relieved to hear someone say this.

I've been outside of the United States for nearly six months now -- the midpoint of my journey -- and up until today, no one from any of the Chinese communities seemed aware of the many hardships that confront immigrants in the U.S.

To many people, the U.S. is Disneyworld; even some Italians said they were surprised how different New York City is compared to how it is portrayed in Sex and the City.

Is it the influence of American culture and media? Maybe: one bored day in Sao Paulo I spent with a first-generation Chinese family watching American music videos from Mariah Carey to 50 cent, and then watched the first two "High School Musical" movies. Mind you, I had never seen any of the above, and considered the day well spent if for purely ethnographic purposes. One of the kids later told me that when he was in China, Michael Jackson was hugely popular, and he had bought a couple music videos of "Thriller" and "Billie Jean" when he first got to Brazil. American movies, television shows, music, have an enormous influence everywhere in the world, which undoubtedly help create a certain idea of America.

To be clear, I'm not saying that the "American Dream" doesn't exist. I know it does -- at least for a lucky few -- like my family. But it is this fantasy that the U.S. is paradise that is especially striking. Perhaps Europe may seem less appealing to Chinese immigrants, since Europe has only recently become an immigrant destination. Maybe, for poor Chinese immigrants, America's culture of individualism and capitalism are more promising than Western Europe's more socialist-leaning tendencies. I don't know.

Oh, and about English being hard: I got asked a bunch of English grammar questions by a first-generation Chinese immigrant, who at age sixteen, has only been in Italy for three years. The questions were mostly about distinguishing prepositions such as on/above, on/over, through/across, etc. As a native speaker of English I know instinctively what is right and what is wrong, but found it nearly impossible to explain these differences. I took comfort in the fact that the textbook was in Italian and I was trying to explain it in Chinese. But nevertheless, it made me remember how hard teaching English is. I did it for a few months when I was eighteen, in Nicaragua, and ffter that informative experience, I decided I could never do it again.
Kudos to my friends teaching English as a second language!

"Who's killing all the Chinese people?"

"Who's killing all the Chinese people?"


This isn't the question you want to hear asked of you, especially when you're researching the local Chinese community.

Yet after explaining my project at a bar in Sao Paulo, I was asked this very question. Not a good sign, eh?

I don't know the answer to this question, but it's a fascinating subject. Four Chinese merchants have been murdered in the past two months, and forty to fifty have been robbed. The circumstances are usually more or less the same: someone breaks into an apartment, usually at night, perhaps knowing who is living there, takes the cash. Whether or not violence follows seems completely unpredictable. Apparently it is well known here that many Chinese immigrants keep their money (in cash) at home, rather than putting it in a bank. Many carry loads of cash around themselves in the first place. I've heard some people claim that this is a cultural difference, but it may also be a very practical thing -- many immigrants here are illegal, and therefore don't open any sort of account.

I happened to stumble upon the crime scene of the last murder, which didn't fit this profile at all. A Fujianese man was beaten to death in the early morning of a Saturday, inside of store on a quiet street in Pari, a commercial district. He was just a worker, and not the owner -- and given the strangeness of the crime -- the murder seemed completely random. Other Chinese merchants around the area knew about the murder, but didn't know him nor any details. One Taiwanese family two streets down was good friends with him, and said he was a very... "straight" and "abiding" man (terrible translations, sorry). Apparently he used to live in Ciudad del Este with the Taiwanese family, and were regular churchgoers in Sao Paulo.

Violence is a strange thing, which has unfortunately touched the heart of the Chinese community here in Sao Paulo.

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."