This is a cheap, lowbrow post, and I’ll admit it right up front.

During our recent visit to Xiamen, I had in the back of my mind the notion to write a post about how people seem, as compared to my previous visits to China, to be shouting “Lao Wai” and staring at foreigners much less and so on. And generally, in Xiamen and Quanzhou and Jinjiang and Anhai, I’ve found this to be true. It happens, but far less than before (“before” = 1993-94, 1996, 1997, 2000).

I was even thinking of a punch line for a post of, “I guess all those ‘Please Do Not Stare at the Foreigner’ t-shirts are starting to pay off.”

But then we visited Gulang Island, just a short ferry ride away from Xiamen, and it was like a step back in time to when entire traffic flows would grind to a halt to stare at a foreigner.

For some reason, the “locals” over on Gulang Island (gulang yu) haven’t caught up with their Xiamen neighbors in becoming disinterested in staring and shouting “Hello!” at foreigners and all that, but even more so, the tourists coming from other parts of China to visit Gulang Island are still stuck in that “earlier phase of social development.”

This is my revenge post.

We were walking along the “boardwalk” after getting off the ferry to Gulang Island, and this old woman, who we could tell by dress and mannerisms wasn’t from “around here,” sauntered up to us, as we stopped for my Wife to tie one of my daughters’ shoelaces, inserted herself without a word right into our midst, and stared at our girls like she was disapprovingly examining some sort of abnormal fleshy growth.

In the first of the revenge photos that follow, you see her doing the close-range staring thing, while her husband, some distance away in the background, has spotted the situation. In the second photo, he’s at her side after telling her, “Let’s go; the foreigner is taking your picture.”

Even as he lead her away, she looked back to stare at our girls with that same Bill Murray/Steve Martin/Saturday Night Live sketch “What the hell IS that thing?” expression on her face.

We’ve gotten used to people “spotting” us and “looking” at us, but most who approach us have drummed up some conversation, maybe said our daughters are pretty, or asked if they speak Chinese, or something.

But not this woman–she spoke not a word, but went straight to her work–it was quite a throwback to the days of feeling like “Foreigner = Circus Freak.”

OK, enough venting. Here she is:

You’ve probably read enough elsewhere about the designation here in China for foreigners, “Lao Wai,” so I don’t think I need to rehash it here.

But I’ve also mentioned “Northerners” in this blog, people who come to coastal southern Fujian Province from less prosperous regions–perhaps mostly from Sichuan and Anhui Provinces–to make money doing the crappy jobs the locals no longer need or want to undertake themselves and who, as far as these locals are concerned, are “to blame” for most major “street crimes” and so on.

(Uh, hello, USA, anything sound familiar there?)

But I finally got a deeper insight, a linguistic one, into the locals’ view of these “migrant workers.”

When we’re talking in English, my Wife has used the term “Northerners” with me when referring to these “outsiders.” In standard Mandarin, she and others have used the term “bei fang ren” (北方人), which I think any good translator would render simply as “Northerners.”

But in a recent conversation I overheard, I caught wind of a different name, “a bei zi” (啊北子), and I learned that this is the name used with a bit of disdain for these “outsiders” (who happen to be from the same country).

Any name for a group of people that has this “zi” (子) character in it implies inferiority (status or situational) of some type, as I’ve encountered it. Haizi (孩子) mean ‘child’, yangguizi (洋鬼子) means ‘foreign devil’, and so on.

If I had to translate “a bei zi” (啊北子), I’d probably use “Northies,” sort of like how those from South Boston are referred to disdainfully as “Southies” by those of greater social standing in the Boston area.

Of course this made me curious as to whether the “Northies” have a name for the locals around here, but if they do, no one I was talking with knew what it might be. The DID, however, know what people down in Xiamen call people in the Jinjiang region when speaking with a bit of mild scorn: nei di zi (內地子), which refers to their being “inlanders,” but the zi (子) character adds that tone of scorn we mentioned earlier. (The interesting angle to that story is that lots of people now leading the economic and capitalistic charge down in Xiamen are people sprung from this “inland” Jinjiang region. (And it’s not really “inland,” just “up the coast.”))

So there. If you thought all Chinese were somehow 100% united cohesively in some kind of pure “Us (China) vs. Them (the rest of the world)” official school of thought, this post is for you: now you know that Chinese of different regions and economic stations have disdainful names for each other as well.

I recently took a ride from Xiamen to Quanzhou, a distance of maybe 100 km. I mentioned the abundance of billboards on major highways in this area in this post, but on this trip had a bit more leisure to check out the scene, which I took a few pictures of along the way. (Note: In that first photo down below, if you’d like to rent space on that billboard, that’s the cell phone number, 13805921617, of the person you can call to work out the arrangement.)

As we drove, I started writing down company URLs from the billboards, curious to go check out what kind of companies these were in more detail. Just for fun, or for your own edification or scholarship or whatever, below are the URLs from just about 1/4 of the distance between Xiamen and Quanzhou. Be forewarned, many of these sites think “Flash” productions are cool, and some include loud and annoying theme music–and for Pete’s sake, if you somehow end up making a profitable deal via something you discover through one of these links, please do the honorable thing and send me a nice “administrative fee” kickback:

• http://www.stonefair.org.cn/
• http://pengxingtile.com/
• http://www.ssfzc.com/
• http://www.alibaba.com/
• http://www.xdt-model.com/
• http://www.df-aoli.com/
• http://www.saiqi.com/
• http://www.qzhy.cn/
• http://www.topstar.com.cn/
• http://www.fffzipper.com/
• http://www.sanyuan-co.com/
• http://www.dnjx.cn/
• http://www.zhongsou.com/
• http://www.baofengshoes.com/
• http://www.anjifood.com/
• http://www.wanling-stone.com/
• http://www.baofengshoes.com/
• http://www.straitfair.org.cn/
• http://www.chinapeak.com/
• http://www.qzxxz.com/
• http://www.jinduren.com/
• http://www.shpeixin.cn/
• http://www.ap365.com/
• http://www.fuhua-food.com/
• http://www.jiujiuwang.com/