A Short Record about the Research in Guangzhou

Written in August 30,2023   /

To make the interview, we lived in the Little North, which is described as the kingdom of African immigrants on the internet. There are still a few glimpses of passing black people on the streets, but most of the faces are plain Chinese. The roadside is full of simple food streets, residential buildings are neither luxurious nor shabby, like the remote suburbs of Beijing, or places that stay the same for more than a decade ago in the city. I started walking the streets looking for people to interview. The people I met spoke in English and said they didn't use wechat but were simply traders who resell goods between China and Africa. They go back and forth every few months or a year or two, quickly buy some clothes or other goods, and then quickly go back. Even when purchasing goods, they will only use some basic Chinese, such as "hello", "three yuan" in Chinese and so on.

For them, China is more like a service area on a temporary highway, like a part in the trade route.

To find some permanent residents of African in China, I asked the taxi driver. He said that some Africans live in Sanyuanli, a place not far from Xiao Bei. We took the taxi and went there, and we saw a street with different stores. However, almost all the people are Chinese, and they told me that this street used to be simply a place to exchange goods, but tourism become also a part in the economy. I asked them whether there where some African residents here, they said that there used to be many of them between the Covid 19. They returned back to Xiao Bei, saying that there is the main residential street for the immigrants. I asked and find roads, looked up closely, and finally I find that there is an apartment, which is said to originally be the place the Africans live. People there seem to be normal, and nothing is different outside now. I remembered that how people describe the departure of the African residents, and perhaps the isolation and the virus can call into their most original emotion to come back home.

There are still some parts unexplained, but I must go back for school work. For example, there are many stores selling sim card and vpn on the street, which can only support a person’s living with a large number of customers. Then why are there many these stores? I also remembered when I asked an African whether he can take the interview. A young girl near him told me he cannot speak Chinese or English, and he is always sitting in the shopping mall, seemingly strange. However, when I am about to leave, I heard that person talking with the girl in Chinese fluently. Then I noticed that many of the Africans are evading from the interviews, and they must live a kingdom that I am not able to enter. In a completely different country, they are finding a new way to survive, not only socially, but also emotionally.