"Fifty," the vendor said.
"Twenty," my father insisted.
I was standing in a market in Yongning county, Ningxia Hui autonomous region, my face burning with embarrassment. My father wanted me to help bargain, but I could not bring myself to do it.
Years later, I would speak Chinese into microphones and in front of cameras. Back then, I was still Ameen Muneer Mohammed Al-Obaidi, a boy too embarrassed to bargain for my father.
Before I arrived, Ningxia already existed in my imagination through my father's stories. Three years before the rest of us came to China, he had visited Beijing and Ningxia and watched the Olympics in Beijing. When he returned, he said China was another world. The streets were clean. People on buses were polite. And in Ningxia, he said, the lamb was as fragrant as the lamb back in our Iraqi hometown.
In 2011, after we arrived in Yongning, I noticed another smell: the scent of wheat in the air. We had lived in Syria before coming to China, and it reminded me a little of there.
Ameen Muneer Mohammed Al-Obaidi (left) poses for a photo shortly after arriving in Yongning county in 2011. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]
Fireworks and classrooms
A few days after we settled in, close to midnight, we heard bursts of crackling outside. I ran to my parents. "Are those shells?" I asked. "Do we need to hide?" My mother was startled, too.
Then my father opened the door. Fireworks were filling the sky. In the yard, children my age were setting off firecrackers, their faces lit by the sparks. Only later did I understand that it was Chinese New Year's Eve. Where I had grown up, that kind of sound carried one meaning. In Ningxia, it carried another: family, celebration, and safety.
I enrolled at Yongning No 3 Primary School, where the principal allowed me to start in fourth grade on a trial basis.
Chinese was difficult. The characters on the blackboard looked like an unreadable script. During breaks, my classmates would turn their chairs toward me and speak to me in the Yongning dialect. "Where are you from?" "What is your name?" "Can you play soccer?" I understood almost nothing and could answer only with gestures. But I never felt shut out.
Ameen Muneer Mohammed Al-Obaidi and his schoolmates after a soccer match. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]
New name, new work
By 2012, I had become fluent in Chinese. I could write Chinese characters, recite poems, take exams, and write essays. I played soccer, entered a speech contest, and slowly found my place. At home, my role began to change as well. When my parents went out, even to buy groceries at the local market, I often translated for them.
Later, at North Minzu University, where I studied international economics and trade, I received my formal Chinese name: Fang Haoming. "Fang" comes from fang in beifang, the pinyin for the first two Chinese characters of North Minzu University's Chinese name, while "Haoming" suggests vast brightness.
At university, I took part in Chinese-language competitions for international students. After I won first prize in a Chinese-language competition for international students in Ningxia, an interview with Ningxia Radio and Television drew the attention of China-Arab TV.
Today, I work as a journalist. But when I think about where that path began, I return to Ningxia: the wheat in the air, the market stall, and the classroom where I first learned to speak Chinese with confidence.
Fang Haoming is interviewed by media outlets while covering China's annual two sessions, or meetings of top legislative and political advisory bodies, in March 2023. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]
The author, Fang Haoming, born Ameen Muneer Mohammed Al-Obaidi in Iraq, is a journalist with Dubai-based China-Arab TV.