It was a freezing morning; the temperature had dropped to -17 degrees Celsius. Yet despite the cold, I was eager to meet one of my friends, a Hui Muslim, who lives in the mosque near my apartment. He lives in a small dorm room in the mosque that contains a couple bunk beds and one small side table.
“So this is life on the frontlines.”
This is what crossed my mind as I sat on Nai Nai’s couch, enjoying a hot cup of eight treasure tea and snacking on delicious bread, waiting for her to finish cooking dinner. Nai Nai is my seventy year-old neighbor who has taken it upon herself to take me in and love on me like only a grandmother can.
Most workers, when they think about moving overseas, envision living in a forest or jungle, hiking around looking for villages and people groups that no foreigner has ever seen. But those who come to Beijing and Tianjin find themselves instead in two cities whose populations dwarf those of most countries!
Sometimes living in China can be difficult – and there are several ways you can define ‘difficult.’
One of those is that your basic daily activities take a lot more time and energy than in the United States, which can easily be called the land of convenience. My kitchen here is narrow and small, and my refrigerator looks more like my college mini-fridge than the beautiful machine my mother used when I was growing up
There are lots of differences between China and America. (This may perhaps be the understatement of the century!) I remember learning during my first visit to China that many families live apart from one another; husbands and wives often work in different cities, and children often live with grandparents in laojia, or their hometowns.
There are millions of Muslims in China, but I didn’t realize this until a trip to a city in Western China where half of the population is Hui. One of the first things I noticed in this city was the prayer caps on many of the men’s heads. In the city where I live, I rarely see anyone wearing those hats unless they’re working in an ethnic restaurant.