Home to 26 of China’s 55 national minorities, Yunnan is a gold mine of diversity and tradition.  Travelers will often plot their trip around Lijiang or Shangri-La in the north and Jinghong in the south, later complaining that the local culture they encountered seemed exploitative or “for show”. More seasoned travelers will tell you that “real” culture can only be found in small villages.

However, with just over half of China’s population living in urban areas, “real” minority culture must exist in cities too, because minority peoples are moving to them, just like everyone else. Yunnan’s capital, Kunming, where I reside, hosts a literal A-Z of the country’s different minority groups, from the Achang to the Zhuang. I interviewed three very different women to see how their connections to their ethnicities—Bai, Tibetan and Mosuo— have changed since moving to Kunming.

Note: whenever writing on a topic like this, one becomes acutely aware that the literature is written by “others”, not by people from within the community.  The articles are a comment on rather than a comment from a community. I acknowledge that I am adding to the former.  I hope not to provide definitive answers but only to give voice to three perspectives. 

Photo: sh51616.com

Three minorities, three women, three voices

1) Haizhen
Haizhen, a woman in her late thirties grew up in a village in Dali prefecture. She left her village in 1994 to attend the Nationalities University in Kunming and then stayed here to work. She married a Naxi man, has a 3-year-old daughter and now works as a lecturer at the Agriculture University.

Haizhen is part of the Bai minority. According to a 2010 census there are 1.9 million Bai nationals in China. The Bai became prominent in this area during the Nanzhao Kingdom, and its later incarnation, the Dali Kingdom. During this period there were strong cultural exchanges between China and India. In Bai religious life today you can still see influences of Buddhism, Daoism, Hinduism as well as indigenous folk elements.

When I asked Haizhen to describe key elements of Bai culture, she spoke of their traditional houses, as well as their warmness to outsiders. Bai traditional houses are not too dissimilar to other ethnic minorities’ houses in the area, with four families living in a square and sharing the courtyard in the middle. Her parents and brother’s family still live in this style of house.

2) Xiaojuan
Xiaojuan is a 27-year-old woman who moved to Kunming from Zhongdian 8 years ago to attend university, and like Haizhen settled here once she graduated. Having studied Japanese at University, she became a Japanese and English language teacher at a private Chinese school. Xiaojuan’s father is Naxi and her mother Tibetan. Her identity card says she is Naxi. However, having grown up in a predominantly Tibetan culture, she feels more Tibetan, and when people ask (excluding official paperwork) she’ll say “Tibetan”.  

The Tibetan peoples of Yunnan are descended from the Qiang, a group that migrated from the north and the east in ancient times. According to Xiaojuan, Yunnanese Tibetans are much less political than Tibetans groups in Sichuan and Tibet.  

When asked about what Tibetan culture entails, her immediate answer was “yak butter tea”. If you’ve tried this, you know it’s a bit hard to swallow, especially when the yak butter has gone rancid. For those who haven’t tried it, it’s churned yak milk and has a unique taste that I can only describe as salty, buttery, warm and disconcertingly thick.  I will say this however: during a 5-day hiking trip in northwest Yunnan, where the altitude makes you not want to eat anything, yak butter tea is a real life saver. Xiaojuan misses yak butter tea so much that she’ll go to one of Kunming’s Tibetan restaurants just to order it.

3) Xiaomei
The same year that Xiaojuan left Zhongdian, Xiaomei left her village (at age 16) for Kunming to work in the noodle shop that employed her older sister. She has been a waitress in Kunming ever since. Last year she switched jobs and now works for a Western-owned café.

Xiaomei belongs to the Mosuo minority group. The group isn’t officially classified as one of China’s 56 ethnic minorities, but as a sub-group of the Naxi minority, which the Mosuo dispute. The Mosuo are most famous for being one of the world’s last matriarchal societies and for their crudely-termed “walking marriages” (走婚), wherein men and women stayed in their own households. When a woman came of age she could receive male visitors in her room at night, but in the morning the man must return home and work for his family (according to Xiaomei the custom is no longer practiced). While the idea that the Mosuo are the world’s last matriarchal society is a stretch, its matrilineal system has remained—children born still join the mother’s family.

When we discussed traditional Mosuo culture, Xiaomei focused on the role of women. Girls become women at the age of 13, in a ceremony that includes standing on a dried and flattened pig with one foot (all the insides and bones are discarded) and a bag of rice with the other. This ceremony symbolizes wealth and abundance. Once adults, women are allowed to make their own decisions. When Xiaomei told her parents that she was leaving school at 16, they weren’t happy, but they couldn’t stop her.

Moving to the bright lights

Though the decision to move to Kunming was not difficult for any of them, their actual experiences with moving here were different. Haizhen and Xiaojuan eased themselves in by going to university. For Xiaomei, the early days were quite hard. At the beginning she had difficulty understanding the locals. She couldn’t pick up on the meanings of what they were saying and struggled with knowing how to behave. Despite working alongside her sister, she found life in the city so hard that she even considered returning home.

Haizhen went to the Yunnan Nationalities University and many of her friends were also from minority groups, which helped her transition from rural to urban life. She had people to talk with who were going through the same thing. Xiaomei told me she also finds it easier to talk to people from other minorities because Han Chinese can’t understand her emotions as clearly, and most of her friends are from minorities, but not Mosuo. For Xiaojuan it is different. Her friend group is mixed, though the majority are Han and she has no difficulty talking to them about her culture or emotions. She has some Tibetan high school friends that also live in Kunming, but they only meet about once a year. She says she can feel a definite culture change when talking to Han as opposed to talking to minority peoples but had trouble describing what that change was precisely.

Finding culture in Kunming

A wish all three women shared was for Kunming to have places where they could meet with others from their culture. In the villages and towns that these women came from, the government has supported minority culture by creating squares where they can meet and dance, as well as special cultural centers (in Zhongdian there is even a Tibetan language school). In Kunming, this kind of support is much harder to find. Granted, there are a number of “prefecture buildings” in Kunming—the Tibetan restaurants Xiaojuan goes to are near her prefecture center, and when her parents visit they’ll stay at in hotels in that area—but these places are for official business only; they are not community centers. 

The cynic would argue that local governments only promote minority cultures in rural areas because they want to draw in tourists, but I think it’s more complicated than that. There is a desire to preserve China’s cultures and history. But with the enormous migration of people to urban areas, it is shame that this desire has yet to spread to cities.

All three said they were never taught about their culture. It was all around them, and they simply watched it and lived it. But in a city that isn’t possible, and none of the women plan on moving home. For the next generation to know their history, they’ll need to be taught. Haizhen wants her daughter to know the Bai dances and Bai history, but she never formally learned it herself and has already forgotten much. Xiaojuan still remembers some Tibetan, and she’s started learning it again so that she can speak it with her future children. Xiaomei thinks that if she stays in Kunming her children won’t be able to speak Mosuo, but she hopes they will at least know and understand Mosuo customs.

Planning for the future

The way all three women think and understand their cultures is heavily connected to life in rural areas. Like with the large majority of the Chinese population, village life is still the root. When they moved to Kunming their ethnicity became much more personal: it is an inward understanding of who they are, rather than something they project. Unfortunately, the revival of interest and pride in minority cultures that has taken place in rural areas hasn’t spread to the cities. Once in a city, you find a job, find a partner, get married, and have children. There are no resources to renegotiate understandings of minority culture away from the villages. Much of the next generation will be born in a city landscape. For them to enjoy the same understanding, a change in strategy is in order.

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Keywords: national minorities minority culture ethnic minorities minority group