#her work as an educator of history is amazing at times don’t get me wrongn

[flowerwebs]

xiran jay zhao is heavily exaggerating their hui ancestry, if they have any. they went from “some heritage” to “half hui” to now only mentioning being hui despite admitting to being mostly han. it pisses me off that hardly anyone took note of their revisionism

hi anon i see u dug quite a bit thru my asian tag 😭 i’m not hui chinese myself so its not really my place that much to comment on xiran claiming hui ancestry but it does feel like racefaking in my eyes. from what i’ve been told by hui people in my life, hui is a broad term that can refer to a lot of diff chinese ethnic groups who practice islam. because of this, being hui is not a marker of ethnicity per say but most times another word for a chinese person who actively is a devotee to islam. i have roots from a chinese ethnic minority who can technically be considered hui because we at times have been classified as muslim by the chinese gov and many of our descendants today are muslim, but i cannot identify myself as hui because my family and i are not muslim and because of that i do not have the lived cultural and societal experience of a hui person. HAVING HUI RELATIVES OR ANCESTRY DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY COUNT YOU AS HUI BUT ACTUALLY BEING CULTURALLY AND RELIGIOUSLY MUSLIM DOES. from what we know xjz does not follow or even practice islam; she can say she has hui ancestry or descent yes, but claiming she herself is hui chinese is a bit of a stretch. also i’ve never seen xiran act talk about hui chinese culture or society the way she adamantly talks about han chinese related stuff; the only times she brings it up is literally in twitter discourse. even if xiran is muslim, she often only uses hui identity in a way to tokenize herself as the winning point in internet arguments which rubs me the wrong way. also like you said her contradiction of herself in claiming diff percentages of hui everytime she talks about supposed hui origins is immensely suspicious to me