African Fathers, Chinese Mothers: "So Where Am I From?" | "Low-End Globalization" ④

Adams Bodomo, a professor of sociolinguistics at the University of Vienna, predicts that within 100 years Afro-Chinese children will form a new ethnic group — chocolate-skinned Chinese with an identity of their own, who will demand their own civic rights in the cities.

North of Guangzhou Railway Station sits a ring of leather-goods markets, large and small. In mid-June the slow season was nearing its end: Ramadan had just finished, and the wave of African buyers had not yet reached Guangzhou. On a Sunday afternoon, the streets around Sanyuanli were close to empty.

Sanyuanli is where West African traders gather. Inside a wholesale market called Guotai Shoe City, nine-year-old Abby and her six-year-old sister run and chase each other between the stalls. Some stalls sell leather wallets with no visible brand; others are piled with women's shoes of every kind. Upstairs are West African trading companies and freight agents.

The market is full of children of every age — the smallest in strollers, the older ones leaning over counters to do their homework. Chinese or African, the traders here like to keep their children close, so that business and schooling don't get in each other's way.

The market is Abby's dining room, study and playground. Nearly every stallholder knows her by name.

Abby is already over 1.5 meters tall, well above Chinese girls her age. Ask the sisters where they are from and they answer in unison, the way Chinese children recite a textbook passage: "We're from Nigeria," followed by the Chinese word for "Africa."

"It's not that they're 'like' Chinese children — they are Chinese children," their father, Olariwaju Ade Peters, said, correcting me. Peters is from Nigeria; his wife is from Xi'an, in Shaanxi. The sisters carry their mother's surname and her household registration, and their nationality is Chinese.

It is Nigeria that is strange to them. Neither girl has ever "returned" to Africa. Peters had long planned to take the whole family to see the extended family in Lagos, but the birth of their third child last year pushed the trip back again.

Lately the question of where she is from has begun to trouble Abby, now in third grade.

In class, the teacher was teaching the children about China's ethnic groups. A chart showed figures in distinctive dress, labeled "Han," "Tujia," "Mongol"... A boy pointed at Abby and shouted, "Our class has the 57th ethnic group!" The whole class laughed.

"Her household registration says China, but that doesn't mean people can calmly accept that a chocolate-skinned person could be Chinese." Peters sounded helpless. Beyond telling his daughter she needed "a strong heart," he had found no better answer.

There is still no reliable count of how many Afro-Chinese children like Abby live in Guangzhou. The Royal Victory Church, an informal Christian church that Guangzhou's Nigerian traders often attend, regularly holds weddings between Chinese brides and African grooms. Peters says the mixed-race children there are not few, and that as they grow up, more and more of them run into the same confusion Abby has.

Adams Bodomo, a professor of sociolinguistics at the University of Vienna, published Africans in China in 2012. He predicts that within 100 years Afro-Chinese children will form a new ethnic group — chocolate-skinned Chinese with an identity of their own, who will demand their own civic rights in the cities.

For now, though, the young Abbys are still living with the small frictions of every day.

"Where do they belong, and where will they end up? Someone has to ask."

I

More than a decade ago, Peters met his wife in Xi'an, where she taught English at a high school. Her parents did not put up much resistance, and the two took their vows in a church: "till death do us part."

He still remembers the lavish Chinese wedding. The banquet hall he rented had 21 private rooms, and to house the guests the couple booked nearly every room in a high-end Xi'an hotel. To him it was no different from a traditional Nigerian wedding feast: the extended family, relatives, friends.

His wife followed him to Guangzhou and helped him run an import-export business, shipping Chinese goods back to Nigeria, from clothing to building materials.

Not every African groom is as lucky as Peters. Many Sino-African romances end the moment a woman tells her parents that her boyfriend is Black.

Ka, from Senegal, had to work at it before his father-in-law would accept him; his wife is from Chaozhou. His mother-in-law now calls him her "imported son-in-law."

Pat Chukwuonye Chike, a Nigerian, leads a double life: clothing wholesaler by day, hip-hop singer by night under the stage name Dibaocha Sky. He appeared in the short documentary China Remix.

Pat is not happy with his marriage. He complains that his wife can't cook and that their two children are being raised by his mother-in-law. He believes the old woman is "poisoning" his children, teaching them to look down on Africa and on Black people. In an interview with the South China Morning Post, he said that making Nigerian children afraid of their own homeland is a crime.

Death is not the only thing that parts people.

For African husbands, the visa is a bomb that may go off at any time. Marrying a Chinese wife buys no advantage in a visa application.

China has tightened its visa rules in recent years, and Guangzhou has repeatedly cracked down on overstayers in Sanyuanli and in the Xiaobei "Chocolate City." Most of the Africans still here have legal status, Peters among them. They renew their visas on a schedule, and can never be sure how long they will be allowed to stay legally the next time.

Moustapha Dieng, from Senegal, told me that the new visa policy requires proof of education. The higher the qualification, he said, the longer the stay a person is likely to be granted; those with little schooling may be refused outright. "The days of easy gold are over."

Guangzhou still has plenty of overstayers. Among the city's African traders, Nigerians are the most numerous, and they overstay most often.

For many who are living here without papers, taking a Chinese wife is more than love; it is also a business calculation. A Chinese wife can get past the language barrier and run the business in her husband's place. But once a husband is caught and deported, how long can a marriage stretched across an ocean hold?

Gordon Mathews, a professor of anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, studied this group of African shuttle traders in Guangzhou — the phrase "low-end globalization" comes from his work. His student Yang Yang found a QQ group called African Beauty, where Chinese wives swap parenting advice and their various worries.

In August 2010, one Chinese wife asked the group for help. Her husband had been deported to Lagos a year earlier and she had heard nothing since; the Nigerian phone number he left her was dead.

2010 was still the golden age for Africans chasing a future in Guangzhou. Everyone wanted to come and take the risk; some made it, some did not. Many rushed into marriage vows, and for a while there was no shortage of sad stories. Another Chinese wife in the group wrote that she had grown "immune" to them and had run out of sympathy long ago.

II

"We have to admit that Sino-African marriages carry risk," said Emmanuel Ojukwu, 46, president of Guangzhou's Nigerian community association. Most of the time, he added, the African husband is not a con man faking a marriage: "When you live in two countries, nobody knows what is happening on the other side of the world."

Emmanuel once got a call for help from a Chinese wife whose husband had been deported and would have to wait at least five years before he could enter China again. She had not yet learned how to trade, so the business stopped. Her husband had no luck either — he couldn't make money in Lagos, and soon stopped sending money for his wife and child.

She went to Emmanuel, who finally reached the "missing" husband. After they talked it over, she decided to fly to Nigeria with the child. The community association took up a collection and bought her a ticket to Lagos.

As peace-keepers, men like Emmanuel have to settle not only business disputes but family ones, and sometimes provide help across an ocean.

In 2012 they set up the Nigerian Chinese Family Forum, a mutual-aid group that more than 200 Nigerian-Chinese couples joined.

"You have to learn to understand the other person's culture," Emmanuel said. One lesson he learned was why young Chinese women don't cook, something unimaginable in Nigeria, where bringing up a girl includes a full training in housework.

"But in China, many young women are only children. They are too busy — busy studying, busy working. A lot of them are very good at business, and next to that, cooking matters less. In Xiaobei and Sanyuanli it's easy enough to find the taste of home."

Many Africans marvel at what Chinese wives can do. A trader from Bahrain once told Mathews that he felt a kind of fear of Chinese women: "When you marry a Chinese wife, she becomes the man and you become the woman... She watches where you have been and where every cent went. She turns your life into her life; she tries to control everything, down to the last detail. You can no longer do what you want to do. You can only do what she wants you to do."

Emmanuel also married a Chinese woman, and they have an eight-year-old son. He thinks the boy is clever, and not only because of his genes: "These mixed children have lived with the clash of two civilizations since the day they were born."

III

After the classroom farce over the "57th ethnic group," Abby told her father she did not want to go to school anymore. It is a private foreign-language primary school in Guangzhou, with tuition of 20,000 yuan a semester.

"I was a little angry," Peters told me. He worries that his introverted, gentle daughter cannot protect herself in this "jungle society." "She is the tallest in her class and the strongest built, and she still gets bullied. She looks the most like me, but she has a Chinese soul — all she can do is stand behind an adult and ask for help."

Peters went to the school to talk to the teacher, and the boy who started the mockery had his parents called in. Peters was not satisfied with that. "Why can't you tell all the children right away what is right and what is wrong? Handle it privately and, next time something like this happens, someone else gets hurt."

"But maybe even the teacher doesn't know what the right thing to do is," Peters said, softening. They had never dealt with children of such a complicated identity before.

He then praised his six-year-old: "She looks like my wife, but her character is like mine — direct, doesn't know what shyness is. If the family is attacked, she is the first one to step out and defend it."

Once, on a Guangzhou street, his wife was out alone with the younger daughter and their infant son, only a few months old. Police stopped her and asked for identification. She explained that they were all Chinese and had left their papers at home; the officers plainly were not used to Chinese people with that skin color. The younger daughter stepped forward and told them, in Chinese, that she was "from Xi'an, in Shaanxi."

"You have to become strong. Gender doesn't matter, girls need conviction too. It sounds harsh, but that is what society is like."

Peters also feels powerless against the hostility in this social jungle, which he says keeps growing. He brought up a report in Quartz: in March 2017, Pan Qinglin, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, filed a proposal demanding a crackdown on African communities clustering in Guangzhou. The proposal argued that by 2050 the population of Black descent, including "Black-yellow mixed" people, would pass 100 million, and that China would go from a nation-state to a country of immigrants, from a country of yellow genes to a country of Black-yellow mixtures.

"I have lived in China for more than ten years, worked hard, lived a decent life, and all of a sudden my children and I have become a 'problem.'"

In "Chocolate City" the hostility is concrete. A Guangzhou local told me that the public hospitals near Xiaobei already have long queues, and some people take it out on the parents who bring mixed-race babies in for treatment, calling them "foreigners" who should not be using up scarce public medical resources.

On social media, identity anxiety among mixed-race children is nothing new either.

In 2009, Ding Hui, a 20-year-old Afro-Chinese man, was called up to China's national men's volleyball team. His mother is from Hangzhou; his father, reportedly from South Africa, left China long ago. Ding Hui considers himself a Hangzhou native, though he is often introduced, wrongly, as a "foreign import" on the national team.

Lou Jing, a young woman from Shanghai, once appeared on a talent show on Shanghai's Dragon Television, and her mixed-race background stirred up the same argument.

IV

Unlike Peters, Emmanuel has not chosen to let his child slug it out with reality. He has already changed his eight-year-old son's school four times — an African version of the Chinese story about Mencius's mother moving house three times, and it has not reached a happy ending. He is now preparing for a fifth move. "These schools are simply terrible!"

Most Africans who have settled and started families in Guangzhou send their children to private schools, because most of their Chinese wives are not from Guangzhou, and getting into a public school here on an out-of-town household registration takes complicated paperwork.

For Emmanuel, the 20,000 yuan a semester is affordable. What angers him is that every teacher, knowingly or not, treats his son differently because of his skin color — all four schools so far. He plans to keep switching until he finds a teacher he is happy with. But Emmanuel also admits that he is too busy to know whether his son is truly happy.

Besides the discrimination, what bothers him lately is the English teaching at private schools.

His son's Chinese gets more fluent by the month, but his English gets more and more "like a Chinese person's" — he can write the words and read the textbook, but he will not open his mouth. "The moment he speaks, it's all Chinese."

Peters has the same worry, and he thinks the teaching method is at fault. Africans of his generation "are not afraid of mistakes." They don't fuss over grammar, and they are always willing to make a point in plain, direct sentences. "If one sentence doesn't get it across, say a few more. And not just the Africans — the Chinese wives are the same." Their children's generation has turned timid.

"A language only becomes a language when you use it. It isn't an arithmetic problem; there is no formula to apply."

Beyond English, Emmanuel worries more that his son will never understand Nigerian culture. Like him, most African fathers feel their children's roots are still in Africa, even if the children have never been there.

In 2007, Emmanuel was elected president of Guangzhou's Nigerian community association. Traders from some East African countries are fewer here and mostly marry within their own nationality — Somalis, for instance, prefer to live quietly inside a small circle.

Next to them, Emmanuel the association president looks rather high-profile. Nigerians are the largest African group in Guangzhou, they have the most contact with Chinese life, and they are more willing to take part in local affairs.

In 2012, the Nigerian Chinese Family Forum that Emmanuel organized began to discuss what the African shuttle traders bring to the city: an economic contribution, but also a community that manages itself and keeps its crime rate down. They tried to ask for certain rights, such as longer permitted stays.

They are now preparing to build a school for the children of Guangzhou's Nigerians. Emmanuel says the Panyu district government has offered cheap space, but obtaining a license to operate a school is the hardest step ahead. Within the limits of our reporting, we did not come across a single Afro-Chinese child who had stayed in Guangzhou for middle school or beyond. Once these children finish primary school, where do they go?

"For us, Guangzhou is only one stop. Very few of us will retire and grow old here. But the children? I can't say. Who knows — maybe one day our children will be China's Obama?"

The Nigerian Chinese Family Forum has organized a few outings, group meals, trips to farm guesthouses. At the table the children prefer African food, which gives Emmanuel some comfort, because at home in Guangzhou the Chinese mothers rarely cook African dishes. It may be one of the few moments that make him feel the children are still African.

Asked about the future, he said he plans to go back to Nigeria and enter politics. As for his son: "That is a problem for their generation to keep working on. Maybe it will take several generations."

(Abby is a pseudonym. The cover image is provided by the photographer Li Dong.)