Today, Will and I had an interview with a grad student in anthropology at Peking University. Every time we go to Beida, we get lost on campus, despite all kinds of bilingual signage. It’s kind of a problem. Anyway, our interview-ee, Ma Yinqiu, was just really really cool! She was so Swattie, in a “save the world” kind of way. She’d done fieldwork on the impact of poor education on women and girls in the Yi people. Ethnicity/nationality play out in really interesting ways in China. Approximately 5% of the population is comprised of ethnic minorities, who are people of Asian descent/are from China, but are not Han Chinese (Han Chinese = what everybody thinks of as Chinese, the culture you studied in class); think people from inner Mongolia, Tibet, etc. Anyway, peoples who are officially recognized as ethnic minorities have some degree of political autonomy, but are seriously disadvantaged in other ways, such as their access to educational and economic opportunity. Maybe the best American analogy is to think of ethnic minorities as vaguely like Native Americans who live on reservations.
Anyway, Ma Yinqiu (the grad student) had lived with the Yi tribe in Sichuan province for 6 months. Drug usage is pretty common–she didn’t know the English word and we hadn’t heard of the Chinese word, but I think she was talking about heroin. As a result of people’s poverty/being unable to buy their own needles, the spread of HIV is pretty rampant. And because most women have never been exposed to the concepts of sexual health, safer sex, contraceptives, or STIs, HIV spreads to the female population from the male migrant worker population (there is really no work in the Yi’s traditional homeland, so a lot of men go the cities as migrant workers.) Anyway, she did a lot of sex ed/preventative education while she was there, and wrote her thesis documenting the problem/what she thought people could do about it.
For me, the most thought-provoking part of the interview was when I asked her if she considered herself an activist. She thought for a moment and said, “No, I don’t think so. It’s not really about me; I don’t want my name or my face out there. I just want to help these people and be an interpreter between them and the rest of China.” That is a really interesting way to think about activism. I’m going to have to think on this one.
Then she took us around the campus and she and Will and I bonded about our shared love for trashy American television. Apparently there are Beida students who are just as obsessed with Gossip Girl as I am. Who knew?
xoxo amanda ling
TV Show of the Day:
Prison Break
(Beloved by Beida students for being more realistic than Korean dramas. Hmmmmm.)