Welcome Aboard!

Early on the second day of that short trip, I set out to locate Tianxiu Building — the site where, according to Bertoncello and Bredeloup (2007), the first trader from sub-Saharan Africa (a Malian national) set up a shop in 2000. I took Line 5

on the metro to Xiaobei and exited on the southeastern side of Huanshi Middle Road (iT fl? 4¹ • I was immediately struck by the jumble of signs in Arabic,

Chinese and English that belonged to a number of sprawling Middle Eastern restaurants. I entered the first one, which was named ‘Al-Jazeera Resturant’ in English, and asked a waiter for the location ofTianxiu. He pointed me towards the opposite corner of the intersection. I only needed to walk a few metres before my gaze fell upon the three colossal towers of the building.

I crossed the street over a wide pedestrian bridge, dodging the mix of peddlers selling everything from prayer rugs to battery-operated toys, beggars, and young Chinese girls offering marketing leaflets. As I reached the entrance of the building, the thick aroma of coffee wafted up. I looked down to the ground floor and saw a sign:‘Lounge Coffee’. I decided to give Chinese coffee one last go. As I opened the door, I realised that this was no place for Chinese coffee. There were some 40 African patrons crammed into a 100-square-metre room along with five or six young Chinese waitresses. The air was heavy with the smells of coffee and tobacco, and the mix of animated conversation and laughter created an atmosphere of intense excitement — almost joy. As I wove my way past the heavy wooden furniture towards a small corner table, I heard French, Mandarin, English, and Arabic. Some patrons were speaking jovially to the waitresses in Mandarin, and there was a feeling I interpreted as familiarity. I quickly realised that most of the people in the room knew each other or were at least acquainted with each other’s origins and/or businesses. The friendly manager, who I later found out was from Egypt, approached me with a menu and a greeting in Arabic. When I replied in English, he seemed disappointed and shouted in Mandarin for one of the waitresses to take my order.

As I was waiting for my double espresso, a warning notice slipped under the glass tabletop caught my attention.

Caution From the Police to Foreigners

• • Every foreigner who lives here should register your accommodation at the local police station, (remember to take the copy and original of your passport and the renting contract, house owner’s ID card copy is also needed) If you didn’t do it, you would be fined up to 500RMB and have a bad record.⁴
• • Every foreigner must bring the passport when outside.
• • Change money privately is illegal in China. The guy who asks you to change money is trying to cheat you and use fake money.
• • In China, there are many stores to sell telephone cards. Buying cards outside may cause some criminal problems. For example, robbery and fake money.

Hong Qiao Police Station

ADD. No. 147Yingyuan Road

In all my years in China, I had never seen a notice like that. Even before I had finished reading it, I must have been shaking my head in disbelief, because the man sitting next to me leaned over and said: ‘So, you’d better carry it at all times’. His name was Seydou and he was from Mali. In the short conversation that followed, he told me that he liked ‘the Lounge’, because Ibrahim (the Egyptian manager) really knew what Africans liked. He also suggested that I survey some electronics markets in Haiyin Square (jígrfpi^J^) which had good prices. Before leaving, I asked him for a good place to eat African fare (I had read that there were many African kitchens operating out of the apartments in Tianxiu), and he directed me to a Ghanaian restaurant in one of the towers above us. As I stood up to pay the bill, I noticed the cafés maritime theme — there was a massive ship’s wheel at the entrance and three white and navy lifebuoys on the wall behind the coffee bar sporting the words ‘Welcome Aboard’.

As I headed out of the café and into the building, I thought of the maritime theme as a metaphor for how Africans were moving from place to place, across the vast circuits of trade that they navigate. In the late 1990s, they sailed away from Dubai — and certain key Southeast Asian locations — to set foot ‘near’ China, in the then thriving export-oriented microindustries of Hong Kong’s Chungking Mansions (Mathews, 2011). In the mid to late 2000s, as it became easier for foreigners to live in China, they started moving away from the Special Administrative Region and into the Chinese hinterland, arriving first in Guangzhou, before spreading to other cities in the Southern China region. Indeed, I pictured Tianxiu and Chungking as different decks of the same ship. I thought of the buildings as places/vessels (buoyant assemblages of relationships) that travelled through geographical space and networks carrying along people, relations, things, and images, and producing new relationships as they moved through new and distant spaces (Sheller & Urry, 2006). As I entered the building, I wondered: what will the next port be like? Will this formation stay, or sail away? And, where will it go after China? Is there something out there, beyond China?

Figure 1.3 Left: ‘Caution From the Police to Foreigners'. Right: Seydou testing some ‘movie-glasses’ that he was planning to take to Mali — Lounge Coffee, Tianxiu Building (photos by author)

After making a quick survey of the first four floors, I joined one of the long queues for the elevators. It was nearly lunchtime, and there were dozens of Africans lined up along with some Chinese workers with heavily loaded trolleys. It took me several minutes to get into the overcrowded elevator and up to the kitchen that Seydou had suggested. When I finally reached the floor, the rich smells led me directly to Madamatta’s kitchen. Madamatta, a middle-aged Ghanaian woman, arrived in Guangzhou in 2008 when business was at its peak.’ As time passed and profits dwindled, she ended up moving in with a Chinese couple, and together, they had opened a kitchen in their apartment. Before long, her business partner, Mr. Xu, had learnt how to prepare foufou.jollof rice, and other dishes for the many West African patrons who frequented their kitchen. As I was digging into my fou-fou, two men in the corner kept throwing me suspicious glances. At some point, I considered that they might have been assessing my poor foufou eating skills. Finally breaking the tension, one of them asked me if I was Egyptian. I told them I was Mexican, and they laughed in disbelief. ‘Mexican? You look like an Arab!’ One of the men was from Guinea and the other was from the Ivory Coast. Strangely, when I spoke to them in French, they rapidly accepted that I was a Mexican, and the conversation turned to the Mexican telenovelas that were such a hit in the 1990s. As my comfort with them grew, I asked them how to get to the ‘Chocolate City’. They shot each other a confused look and changed the topic. Still without an answer, I asked Mr. Xu for the bill and left. I had a train to catch.

Figure 1.4 Left: a passerby gets her portrait taken in front ofTianxiu Building. Right: ‘Lounge Coffee’, on the ground floor ofTianxiu Building (photos by author)

More than simply a building, Tianxiu — Xiaobei’s 24-year-old landmark — is a massive multi-towered complex. Apart from a three-star hotel and the commercial spaces on the first four floors of the towers, the 36 storeys ofTianxiu are filled with a mix of offices, residential apartments, and eateries. The building is one of the several commercial centres that sprung up in the area as foreign trade extended beyond the premises of the Canton Fair. Moreover, Tianxiu became the first place to be identified as a site of congregation for‘transnational migrants’ (mainly African and Middle Eastern) in Guangzhou (Li et al., 2008). Bertoncello and Bredeloup (2007) contend that the first African traders (who were Malian) arrived in Tianxiu following the 1997 Asian financial crisis with plans to (re)activate the connections they had made over the years at the Canton Fair. Shortly after, a number of Guinean and Nigerian traders left their positions in places like Dubai, Bangkok, and Jakarta to establish outposts in Tianxiu and a few other emerging trading centres and housing blocks in the area (see Bertoncello and Bredeloup, 2009; Zhang, 2008; and Li et al., 2008).These early ‘pioneers’ carried out the collective, but perhaps unintended, task of opening trading routes, opportunities, and imaginations for future generations of African traders and entrepreneurs. Their Guangzhou offices in the early 2000s also laid a foundation for the emergence of’eatering networks’ (a concept I discuss later in this chapter) that have facilitated the continued and recurrent presence of Africans in the city throughout the years.

Due to the presence of these transnational traders, Tianxiu has repeatedly been equated with Hong Kong’s famous Chungking Mansions as a container for ‘low-end globalisation’ in China (see Mathews, 2007, 2011; and Mathews and Yang, 2012).The ‘low-end globalisation’ perspective casts African and South Asian traders in Southern China as carriers of globalisation by means of acquiring and smuggling cheap and (sometimes) counterfeit goods across borders. Mathews’ conceptualisation, which is profoundly inspired by the state-centric ‘world systems’ perspective, deems ‘low-end globalisation’ as a process that takes place somewhere between the semi-periphery (e.g. China) and the extreme periphery (e.g. Africa). Mathews claims that without these carriers of globalisation, regions like South Asia and Africa would not experience globalisation (2012).

Despite relative underoccupancy in the early years (caused by an oversupply of commercial spaces in the area (Zhang, 2008)), by the early 2000s, business in Tianxiu was thriving. Although there could have been any number of contributing factors as to why Tianxiu became a point of congregation for foreigners, and in particular for Africans by the mid-2000s (e.g. rental prices, high vacancy rates, management issues), location was paramount.The building is less than a 10-minute drive from Guangzhou Railway Station and in walking distance of the Huaisheng Mosque — Guangzhou’s principal mosque.'¹ It is perhaps for those reasons that, in the early days, dozens of trading companies from the Middle East (along with a handful of Chinese ones) set up offices, and Tianxiu became informally known as the ‘Yemen Building’ (Bertoncello & Bredeloup, 2009) or‘Dubai Tower’. It was not until the late 2000s that the change in demographics led Tianxiu to being called — albeit unofficially — ‘Africa Tower’ (^kittl^x®).⁷ From the mid-2000s,Tianxiu’s towers were one of the few sites where African entrepreneurs networked and organised trade deals. Places like Lounge Coffee and the adjacent Moka Coffee

Figure 1.5 Left: man waiting for a takeaway meal from M. Atta’s kitchen. Right: Dinner time, people queuing atTianxiu’s elevators (photos by author)

became crucial locales where African transnational traders successfully extended their networks from Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia to China.

As I sat on the train heading for the Shenzhen-Hong Kong border, I began to gather and write down my thoughts. An early impression of those first encounters was that while it was possible to frame the multiplicity of the exchanges between Africans and Chinese within the state-centric narrative of the increased economic and political relationships between African states and China, doing so could risk abandoning the task of detailing the nuances and complexities involved in their stories and experiences. At the same time, another idea that emerged from this first short visit was that while I suspected that there were several regimes of mobility at play in this case study, I believed that part of what was happening on the ground happened far away from the reach of the state. In this sense, I wondered how to go about the study of the interconnectedness and mobilities that Ong (1999) puts forward as the main characteristics of transnational phenomena, without having to rely on the nation-state as the framing/container of analysis. Hence, I thought that an analysis of transnationality as a cultural condition informing contemporary mobilities required a perspective that, while considering the importance of state controlled/produced regimes of mobility could move beyond nation-state centric analyses. This is how I first understood the ‘condition of transnationality’ implicated in this case study.

Moreover, I thought that in order to better understand the lived experiences of individuals moving between Africa and China, rather than basing my analysis on the assumption that these individuals were ‘transnationals’ only because they constantly crossed borders, I would benefit from focusing on how such conditions impacted on their ways of making sense of their journeys and, perhaps, in the ways in which that sensemaking may (or may not) challenge their national identities. In short, I wanted to look at how this condition of transnationality was negotiated at the individual level. In doing this, I needed to think of the ‘trans’ in ‘transnational’ not only in the trans-gressive, trans-versal, trans-actional, and trans-lational senses suggested by Ong (1999, p. 4) but also as in trans-cending the national for the sake of analysis.Thus, my first reading of the ‘trans’ in transnational was in terms of perspective. Put another way, I thought about this transcending as an attempt to circumvent the monolith of ‘methodological nationalism’, not only in terms of framing my analysis but also in terms of the representation of the lived experiences of individuals on the move.⁸ So, rather than looking at how the condition of transnationality impacts on the lived experiences of individuals on the move by following them through several nation-states and border crossings, I decided that the ‘local’ was also a space/platform from where a transnational analysis could be undertaken — a methodological — nationalism — informed transnational perspective, if you will.

Transnationality, as a condition, is a multi-scalar phenomenon. As such, I suspected, it could also be analysed beyond the national scale and far away from border checkpoints. In short, while I thought that I could benefit from following research subjects through several geographic locations, I deemed it more important to analyse how this condition (and associated interconnections, mobilities, and systems of governmentality) impacted on the lived experiences of individuals, and in the formation of identities and aspirations. As the train was crossing the border, I thought that while a transnational analysis required a multi-sited perspective, these multiple sites did not need to be equated with multiple geographical locations, in different countries. ‘This could be a way of grounding transnational research in the everyday’, I thought, just before reminding myself that I had failed to locate the ‘Chocolate City’ that I had read about. I would have to wait. My next fieldwork trip was scheduled a couple of months ahead.