Chinese overseas need not keep to ourselves. I certainly don’t

People take selfies in front of the archway of Chinatown in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2025.

Photo: Xinhua While enjoying a foot massage in Buenos Aires’ Chinatown, I chatted with my masseuse, a Fujianese woman in her late 50s surnamed Wang.

Her life, it seemed to me, mirrored that of many recent Chinese immigrants to Argentina.

She eats exclusively Chinese food, her friends are fellow Chinese and she still speaks mostly Chinese.

While it is not unusual for migrants anywhere to gravitate towards their own community, the tendency appears particularly strong among the Chinese.

China’s presence in Argentina has become increasingly visible.

In Buenos Aires, neighbourhood minimarkets are so frequently run by Chinese migrants that locals simply call the shops chinos.

As familiar as the shop may be, the Chinese person behind the counter remains, somehow, distant.

When I asked Argentine friends what they thought of Chinese people, their responses were consistent: hardworking, polite but reserved.

The shops were woven into the urban fabric; the shopkeepers were not.

That gap intrigued me.

Travelling through Peru, Argentina and Ecuador, I have visited several Chinese enclaves.

Again and again I have observed similar patterns: communities clustering tightly together, socially and economically.

There are hometown associations connecting migrants from the same Chinese provinces; Mandarin-speaking churches that double as support networks; WeChat groups organising everything from childcare to bulk purchases of cooking oil.

Around the world, overseas Chinese are often industrious and resilient.

Yet many remain socially self-contained.

This raises an uncomfortable question: are we, as Chinese, naturally inclined to keep to ourselves?

To describe this tendency as a Chinese trait might be to mistake history for personality, however.

A fortune-teller gives a reading in Chinatown in Lima, Peru in 2008.

Photo: AFP Migration has rarely been a carefree adventure; more often it has been driven by necessity.

Early overseas Chinese communities formed because they had to, during times when many migrants faced exclusion, discrimination, even violence.

In the United States in the late 19th century, for example, the Chinese Exclusion Act barred Chinese labourers from entering the country.

In such a hostile climate, it made sense for Chinese migrants to cluster together to survive.

As the expression goes, bao tuan qu nuan – in a harsh winter, people huddle together

原文链接: 南华早报