Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [137]
And so I set forth for the Muslim Quarter. There are Muslims in Xi’an. Lots of Muslims. Sixty thousand Muslims. True, it’s all relative in China. There are 10 million people in Xi’an, give or take, and 99 percent are Han Chinese, non-Muslim. Unlike the Uyghurs, the Muslims in Xi’an are Hui, another of China’s diverse minorities, and they’d settled in the sprawling warren of alleys and streets beneath fluttering, colorful streamers near Xi’an’s Great Mosque. I walked in what I presumed was the general direction of the mosque surrounded by men in white hats and women in headscarves and more than a few Arabs and Africans. I could hear the call to prayer emanating from loudspeakers. Every second shop in the Muslim Quarter appeared to be a butcher’s shop, and inside these shops dangled the carcasses of cows and goats and sheep. There were hunks of flesh everywhere, much of it spilling onto the ground. Meat is rarely refrigerated in China, and as I walked among all this flesh and bone, I contemplated a permanent conversion to the vegetarian cause, until I came across two women selling delectable-looking meatballs, the ultimate comfort food, and I reflected on the art of cooking, and that’s why we cook food—right?—to kill the germs, and so it was perhaps okay to eat meatballs amid this scene of bloody carnage.
I approached these two women in headscarves and indicated that I’d like to give them money for their meatballs, and that I was amenable to being overcharged. In response, they stared at me with contempt. What? I thought. Is it the beard? Was it unwise to wander around China with facial hair? Chinese men are not creative in this way, and since my barber experience in Lanzhou, I’d again let things slide. But this was the Muslim Quarter. Isn’t there something in the Koran about beards and that men, ideally, should have one? All of our most famous Muslims today have beards. So that probably wasn’t it. Was it an infidel thing? Iraq? That wasn’t my idea, you know, and I was tempted to blame George Bush for this denial of cooked and delectable-looking food. But this was hardly the first time such a thing had happened, and as I had long since learned, for many people in China, laowais are like an alien species. What does one do when confronted by an alien species? Some are curious, wanting to know what it’s like on Planet Laowai. Others see an opportunity to take advantage; the alien does not know the ways of Planet China and is easily snookered. Some regard the laowai as a harmless freak and they mock him or want to have their picture taken beside him. And some simply have contempt for the Other.
So I moseyed on and bought a hot bun with a vegetable filling from a Muslim man who was only too happy to feed me, and he took a moment to point me in the direction of the Great Mosque, because as always, I was lost here on Planet China. Non-Muslims cannot go inside the Prayer Hall itself, which is a shame really, because it is said to be wondrous and can accommodate upward of a thousand worshipers. Like the Catholic church in Dali, the mosque has a distinctly Chinese architecture, with sloping tile roofs and stone archways. Originally built during the Tang Dynasty in the year A.D. 742, the Great Mosque of Xi’an has four courtyards where visitors can admire the arches and halls and the photos of Muhammad Ali visiting the mosque. It’s a contemplative place, and as I watched art students sketching and men with hats and dangling prayer beads wandering among them, I was reminded yet again that once I’d been so wrong about China. I’d assumed it was a monolithic place. But it is not a monolithic place. Planet China is as varied and diverse as Planet Earth.
The Terracotta Warriors are