Minority Communities and Languages

Abstract

Like many Han Chinese, I grew up knowing little about China’s minority communities, except for the impressions I gained from a few films. One of them called Wu duo Jinhua, (Five Golden Flowers), was about five beautiful Bai girls in Dali, Yunnan, who shared the same name, Jinhua (golden flower). The film followed their lives through the social changes in the late 1950s as they became bureaucrats and professionals and conducted their individual love lives. Another film called Bingshan shang de Laike (Visitors to the Ice Mountain) told the touching love story of a young Tajik man named Amir, who was a brave PLA (People’s Liberation Army) soldier, and a very beautiful Tajik girl, who was actually played by a Uyghur actress. Thus, my earliest impressions of minorities were that all the girls were beautiful, talented and romantic, wore beautiful and exotic clothes, and spent much of their time singing and dancing. I did not even know that they spoke different languages as everyone in these films spoke Putonghua (Mandarin).