Invisible walls help create sense of us vs. them

• Source: Global Times
• [21:47 November 19 2009]
• Comments

Illustration: Liu Rui

By Rong Xiaoqing

If you bumped into me on the weekends during the mid-1990s when I was a college student in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, you would find me clad in a pair of battered jeans and an oversized T-shirt, holding a bottle of beer and looking intoxicated.

But this was not a normal picture of a college girl gone a bit crazy. In fact, at that time, not many Chinese students would appear like that.

The outfit, which I borrowed from an American friend, was only a disguise to help me pretend to be a Korean student so that I could get into a popular disco bar that was only open to foreign-ers.

Mandated exclusive places like this may no longer exist in China today, but foreigner-dominated venues are far from rare, be it the high-end Houhai in Beijing and Xintiandi in Shanghai or the newer Chocolate City in Guangzhou.

As more foreigners make China their home thanks to the booming economy, there is more opportunity for them to hang out in their own groups.

Other international cities that have a longer history of hosting foreigners have had such communities for a long time.

Take New York, a city where 36 percent of the population are foreign born and more than 150 languages are spoken. It may have been called a "melting pot," but a close look shows the description probably is based more on hope than reality.

It is true that you are able to enjoy various flavors of food or observe different cultures, but to get any sense of authenticity you often have to cross some inner borders from Chinatown to Koreatown to Little Italy to Little India.

Different ethnic groups claim their own parts of the city, which casts doubt over the concept of a global village and leave the city more like a salad bowl, where different ingredients coexist but do not melt together.