Mr. Zhang and Wife by Andy

You’ll have trouble finding our Mr. Zhang by name, as 90% of his fellow villagers are also surnamed Zhang (张). A grandfather in his early fifties, Mr. Zhang has spent most of his life in his hometown, the Hui (Muslim) minority village of Zhangguan (长官), Shandong province.

We met Mr. Zhang by coincidence. We had arrived in Zhangguan a day before and had already visited the 600-year-old Mosque twice. On our third run through the compact town, we were greeted by a man in his forties carrying a baby and two women in front of their doorway, who after a brief conversation graciously agreed to my request to see their house. Once inside, the stocky, lush-black-haired Mr. Zhang emerged from his nook of the complex and most dutifully — as preeminent male of the family — showed us to the central dwelling of their courtyard mini-complex.

Tea already served to us on the sofa and formal introductions aside, Mr. Zhang began immediately by describing how much better life is now than before. “Before we could never get full. Now we always have plenty to eat,” he said as he picked up some flatcakes and an uneaten chicken wing from the previous night’s meal. “This is a new house, built only 5 years ago. Everything is better since reform and opening.”

Mr. Zhang’s business, that is to say the family’s business, like most of the town, is the slaughter of sheep and cattle. Now that he’s a grandfather, his son and nephew handle most of the business. Nowadays he prefers to spend most of his time watching over the children of the extended family or helping out at the Mosque, where he goes to pray five times a day. That’s saying a lot since most of the other Hui we talked to in the town were religious equivalents of what my family calls “Christmas and Easter Catholics.” In a way he reminded me of a Hui version of my uncle Jack, minus the Knights of Columbus.

His family had moved to Zhangguan from Nanjing several generations prior, though the town had been Hui for much longer than that. The second of four brothers, Zhang was the only one who stayed during the “bad years.” The rest of his siblings took their families to the predominantly Muslim province of Ningxia, where the family visits every year.
After almost giving us a caffeine high from compulsive tea refills, he insisted on showing us the rest of their little courtyard complex, which had been in the family for four generations. The central house, composed of a central living room and two small bedrooms on either side, was the nephew’s, although the entire family clearly used it as a communal kitchen and dining room. It smacked of gaudy modern Chinese building, but for a Cultural Revolution survivor, its big windows, modern kitchen, and mid-sized TV must have been paradise. The little house on the left, his son’s and only two years old, was similar in its layout except for the giant carrier pigeon cage out front. Inside the pristinely neat house, among other ornate wall hangings, a beautiful Arabic script was underlaid with the Chinese Communist Party slogan minzu tuanjie (unity among the races). A quick question from Andy confirmed our immediate suspicion; Mr. Zhang is a Party member.

When asked how the Party could accept his religion, which was clearly such a large part of his life, he responded, “The Party has always been very supportive of our religion and the mosque. The Party and religion are separate.” He continued to add how he believed in the CCP and how much better they had made his life of late.

Before we left, Mr. Zhang showed us his house on the right of the complex which he shares with his wife. Clearly the oldest by decades and full of rustic charm, the house was fitted with an old Chinese, coal-heated, rock-solid bed (kana) and small TV set. He plans to tear it down within the year to replace it with another, presumably equally tacky, modern house.

So in one man we could see the product of traditional and modern China culminated into a local success story. If he had a personal saying, I’m sure it would have been, “find a way to make it all work out.” Nevertheless, I’m still not sure how a man can cherish his ancient religion and traditions while embracing the entity that sought to destroy them not 40 years ago and tomorrow, on the 60th anniversary of the founding of the country, will be proclaiming the righteousness of “scientific development” and the “complete victory of socialism with Chinese characteristics” before a terrific display of military autocracy in the capital. Despite my confusion over his values, Mr. Zhang clearly cares sincerely for his family and his friends, among whom he counted us, and it will be hard to forget the warmth we felt from every inhabitant of his quaint courtyard home.