LIFT: Limpeh Is Foreign Talent: I'm black, I'm white, I'm Asian: am I a panda?

Further to receiving my DNA analysis and finding out that I am 15.8% European and 0.7% African, I feel that I can finally use this poster to describe myself, especially since I love pandas so much.

Yeah that's me baby!

I have had the chance to speak to a number of friends about this and this was a common sentiment expressed by a number of them: there isn't a simple, monolithic 'Chinese' race. Hardly. How could that be possible. China is the world's most populous country, united by a common language Mandarin, a shared cultural identity and carefully crafted national ideology. After all, imagine if Mandarin wasn't a common language taught to everyone throughout China - a Cantonese speaking person from Guangzhou would struggle to understand a Shanghainese person as Cantonese and Shanghainese are not mutually intelligible. Let's compare this to the situation in India. The local language in the capital New Delhi is Hindi (followed by Punjabi) - the local language in Kolkata (Calcutta) is Bengali. So what do they speak to understand each other, say when a person from Kolkata goes to New Delhi? They speak English, the former colonial language in order to understand each other.

There is a concept of what it means to be 'Han Chinese' and I note that it is a concept that has been fluid over time as the boundaries are moved. Allow me to quote from Wikipedia on this fluidity:

"The definition of the Han identity has varied throughout history. Prior to the 20th century, some Chinese-speaking groups like the Hakka and the Tanka were not universally accepted as Han Chinese, while some non-Chinese speaking peoples, like the Zhuang, were sometimes considered Han.^[42] Today, Hui are considered a separate ethnic group, but aside from their practice of Islam, little distinguishes them from the Han; two Han from different regions might differ more in language, customs, and culture than a neighboring Han and Hui. During the Qing Dynasty, Han Chinese who had entered the Eight Banners military system were considered Manchu, while Chinese nationalists seeking to overthrow the monarchy stressed Han Chinese identity in contrast to the Manchu rulers. Upon its founding, the Republic of China recognized five major ethnic groups: the Han, Hui, Mongols,Manchus, and Tibetans, while the People's Republic of China now recognizes fifty-six ethnic groups.

Whether or not there was the concept of "ethnic groups" in ancient China is still questionable. However, throughout history, majority of Chinese regarded each other as subjects of a particular Kingdom. Nevertheless, thousands of years of unity under various Han-dominated dynasties have brought a common identity.^[25] Many Chinese scholars such as Ho Ping-Ti believe that the concept of a Han ethnicity is an ancient one, dating from the Han Dynasty itself."

What does it mean to be Chinese?

Besides, a lot of people focus on recent history of the Chinese rather than look at a much longer term picture - the period we are more familiar with is the second half of the 20th century, when China was pretty much an isolated state, shut off from the rest of the world from 1949 until the late 1980s. This image of an isolated, communist state ("the bamboo curtain") fuels the misconception that the Chinese were a 'pure' race, but you only have to look to the period before WW2 to see a large number of foreigners ranging from traders, merchants, missionaries, scholars who have been attracted to China and have been present in China since Marco Polo first made contact in 1266. Furthermore, it isn't just European contact per se, but the Chinese always traded and mixed with other parts of Asia: India, the Middle East, South East Asia, Korea, Japan etc.

Thus it isn't really that surprising that I should have a bit of European and African blood in my DNA despite the fact that I do look Chinese. Nonetheless, there is a huge spectrum in the way Chinese people look: some taller, some shorter, some darker, some fairer and there isn't a standard Chinese look per se. Indeed within China, there are 56 recognized ethnic minority groups and the further west you venture, the more non-Chinese they look. Indeed, when you go to somewhere like Urumqi or Kashgar in Xinjiang, you will see many Middle Eastern/European looking Uighurs who look nothing like their Han Chinese counterparts in the Eastern coastal cities.

I have managed to find a friend on Facebook who also encouraged all her friends to go take part in this DNA research study during the London Olympics and together and here are some of the DNA profiles of our friends that we have compiled. Essentially, we are stripping out any personal data but only adding their country of origin. Of course, I am limited by my sample size - but I hope it gives you an idea of how this works and what one can expect from certain countries around the world. This is simply to give you a snap shot, there's no scientific analysis applied to this data set here.