Ryan ChartrandHow many people are in the world? How many languages? How many ethnic cultures and nations? Just how diverse is our planet? I can tell you that it’s more than you or I have thought.
I am just about to return from nine months abroad in Chengdu, China. Coming to China is like coming to another world. That sounds really clich‚, but it’s pretty accurate. This is the Middle Kingdom. I had been used to life in the Beautiful Kingdom. That’s how to say “America” in Mandarin. I love telling people that I am a beautiful country person.
Life in China is fun and challenging. It took me a little while to adjust, but now I love this place. I can eat at the spiciest hot pot restaurants, where you have a pot of boiling oil in the middle of the table and you cook your own food. The oil is full of peppers and is well known throughout China as being very spicy. I always ask for the special Sichuan numbing peppers when I get tofu, fried green beans, or kong bao chicken.
Unlike some other foreigners, I also eat MSG. When I barter for goods, I can get good prices, not the foreigner prices. I zoom along on my bike every day, weaving through Chengdu traffic. Here, stop signs are mere suggestions, and the mixture of private cars, bikes, buses, taxis, rickshaws, and pedestrians on the streets often looks like frightening chaos. Chengdu has 12 million people. From the outside it can seem a little overwhelming, but I have found its harmony.
I expected all of this out of a study abroad program. Getting to travel throughout the rest of China was an added benefit. For spring break, I went on a journey to Xin Jiang province in the west of China. This province has a large Uygur population. The Uygur people are mostly Muslim, so while I am used to seeing Buddhist temples in the rest of China, there are mosques here.
Most men wear traditional rounded Muslim hats. They speak their own language which presently uses an Arabic script. This made Xin- jiang feel more like the Middle East than China. The people there barter tougher as well. Lamb meat is eaten at almost every meal. Even breakfast consists of rice pilaf topped with a few lamb ribs, or baked mutton dumplings. After traveling for a few days, I thought I was getting culture shock, again. In the other world I found yet another world.
One of the destinations on my journey was a small mountain town called Tashkurgan. If you put your finger on a map of the world so that it touches China, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, then Tashkurgan should be directly under your finger. It is the last town in China before crossing the border to Pakistan. This is a part of the world that I had never thought about before. I never even imagined what life is like for the people who live there. I was about to find out. I was traveling with an Australian named Josh and we hired a car to take us on the six hour drive through rugged mountainous wilderness. On the way, we picked up a hitchhiker and were invited to her family home for lunch. They were Kyrgyz, another minority.
Over lunch, I spoke English with Josh, both of us spoke Chinese with our driver, who spoke Uygur with our new hitchhiker friend, who spoke Kyrgyz with the rest of her family. We were using four languages for one conversation.
That night, we arrived in Tashkurgan, which is mostly inhabited by Tajiks. The Tajiks are another minority in China whose language, culture, and physical appearance are different from both the Uygurs and the Han Chinese. I would best describe them as white, some with blue eyes, and most with tans from the mountain sunshine. Except for their clothing, which looks about a century out of date, the Tajik people could just as easily be living in Southern California. In their culture, people often greet each other with kisses on the back of the hand, something I haven’t seen outside of a fairy tale.
I had gone to the most remote, unheard of place on the planet and found, once again, another world that was new to me. In just one day, I experienced life of three different minority groups. I will forever be in awe at how wonderful and diverse humanity is, and at how many languages, cultures and peoples exist on this planet.
We often make the world seem simple when, in fact, it is much more complex.