i normally fight them when i play with
them
my name is ulu shay abdullah i'm a
nigerian resident in beijing china
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i'm a loving father a businessman a
husband
a music lover and of course the chief
representative of
agiles since becoming the main mandate
of faji house in china
african musicians and artists have
started making a name for themselves
create something that we bring chinese
people like the africans here in china
together
i've been in china for more than a
decade now of course there's racism in
china
just like you have all over the world
i faced racism the first time i came to
china
i found out that it was going to be
difficult for
for a black man you know to get a job
most time you send an application that
they're always like
they prefer the other race so that's
part of racism but i didn't let that get
to me you know
because afterwards i met some very
beautiful chinese you know
that also assisted me it was also
chinese that assisted me
i came to china when i was very young
and i think at the beginning
when we when we you know gather
black people together the authorities
want to know they want to come and check
or disrupt our activities it was very
very challenging you know over time
and with the assistance of our
authorities yeah
we started getting a bit relief
for me i was just lucky i think i was
lucky i didn't face so much of racism
maybe because i met my wife two weeks
after i came to china
and she showed me the love she showed me
that chinese are not just
what i've been seeing children are doing
good you know because of course i knew
that they were going to face a lot of um
discrimination it's cool you know so i
always make them to
to know that hey you are black your
father is black your mother is chinese
that's why you're black
so you have to be confident just know
you're beautiful
you know they're very strong children so
they don't feel intimidated
if you ask them you know how do they
feel they'll tell you they're
hey i'm black i'm beautiful so i think
they're very strong
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i came to china when i was very young
and i think i've spent
like the most interesting part of my
last one in china
i would love to stay in china for as
long as i can because i have my family
here and
i've enjoyed you know everything that's
been happening you know so
of course if the environment is suitable
i'd love to change china
as long as i can
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get down get down get down get down get
down everybody rise up
mct um i'm originally an artist from
washington dc
uh based in harlem i'm a
multimedia artist a bilingual rapper
raps in english in mandarin chinese
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my work is about bringing forward a
whole new internationalist world and way
of being where it's not weird for a
black dude to rap in chinese
i started studying chinese in high
school i've been a lifelong fan
of hip hop i was a study abroad student
i got invited to participate
in doing a documentary on the hip hop
scene there
for a show called sexy beijing in an
episode called bling bling in beijing
and so this was like the first
introduction for a lot of westerners to
like hip-hop
the homegrown hip-hop scene that was in
china so souffe called me up and i said
of course i come all the way from
washington dc
chocolate city just to come check out
beijing and see if the hip-hop is really
real
or really not so real the year after
that i applied for a fulbright grant to
really develop this
study of hip-hop in beijing and you know
really embedded myself
with a network of like rappers djs
graffiti writers
skaters uh over the course of a year and
i found a lot of solace within the hip
hop community there you know you belong
to
like a culture you go out and go break
dancing together we go on go rap
together you know they're challenging me
and challenging them they're saying like
you know stop rapping in english we know
you can rap in english rap in chinese
what's up plus we can't understand
it um there was a real community around
that and
it was you know
section six hip hop cipher 2006 2007
uh you have a bunch of
folks like nasty ray dj wordy um
insari in song a lot of these kind of
denizens of the old hip hop scene
and uh i was there as a student i jump
up on stage i have a shirt that says
ting bu dong that i got like from some
tourist trap in guilin
and i you know start rapping in english
and chinese
and there you know folks audience
members start shining out like ah
and from there like it was really that's
really where the moniker and t tingle
came from the mask i actually got in
dali
as part of fountain china when i was
performing as an artist in situ
and that really came from kind of being
like
walking through disneyland but the main
attraction and so grabbed a mask and
started to
rap and perform in that that
fish out of water that would be the
experience when you get to china you
know you're a foreigner but then you're
also like a black person and you know
you have people like i need
your [ __ ] generally should make war in
my voice
you know americans aren't that dark you
see this pervasiveness of stereotypes
that that's there
both negative and positive like i
haven't been stopped in first in china
but i have been walking down the street
and
uh chinese person turns around and they
go like
you know and it's like what are you
scared about like i'm
like you know why is it shocking to you
know you know or
what i would even get through my like
homies in the hip-hop scene was like oh
why aren't you
but didn't aren't you like from the hood
like why aren't you more like gangsta
you know
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those are the major distinctions where
it it wasn't the same kind of look over
your shoulder fear
there was those instances of like people
like generally wondering
people who were functioning from that
but limited from their framework because
of
you know just the pervasiveness of white
supremacy and stereotypes
but it's not like you won't find the
same conventions and notions in any
country
in the world
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when you look at like the historical
connections between black america and
china
with like paul robeson you know
introducing chili
to audiences in harlem
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raising money for the like chinese
workers party and
you know mao sharing correspondence with
civil rights leaders and
delegations from black america to china
right to kind of build this bridge
and i think a lot of it really does come
down to like recognizing this
shared history and working together to
actually create a vision of the future
you know kind of what i was describing
like what would actually revolutionary
vision of the future and art and culture
look like
that was you know inclusive that was
internationalist you know
that's really what i see the role of
these like
88 rising in rap of china what they
could actually do right now
is actually present a whole different
vision of what like
chinese rap asian hip-hop looks like
feels like
could be can can be about and that's the
role that i see myself
the game of death don't matter if you
black white or yellow need everyone to
fight back no second row spectator
so my name is
and i'm nigerian i'll be 26 this year
i moved to china when i was 15 years old
in that school that i was going to
number 19 high school it's called
it was fun being in that school because
you know i love the teachers they
taught us a lot about chinese culture
chinese history
i learned about 60 of my mandarin
because um
you're forced to speak the language you
ready
how's the sound that's good okay i write
i like i love to tell stories
you know visually and so that was how i
started photography
um i suppose that was how i got into it
properly
and i'm as i developed my skill
i started taking gigs here and there
mostly through
schoolmates all right roland
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action the thing i would say
is as a creative creator in beijing
one that i always struggle with is
collaborators it's easy to find
caucasians that i can work with models
or actors
i'm nigerian you know so you know i tell
i influenced by
my own existence so it would be weird
for me to
start it's very i'll say a story where
the character is obviously black
but then it's played by a white person
or chinese person
it happens you know so that's one of the
difficulties that i have
not having access to enough black
people enough nigerians just to work
with
this is all going to the end i i want
them to nail it
i think as a black creator in china
that's the biggest that's the biggest
issue that i have but as far as myself
and just
having access to opportunities for the
most part it's been pretty good because
um my team is made up of
chinese women and um they've made the
experience
easy for me i believe that when when you
are in a locality you should surround
yourself with
locals because that's how you get access
into the marketplace right
you don't just surround yourself with
foreigners it's going to restrict you
and a lot of times that's what foreign
so i want you guys to like in the shots
like
try to think about what the audience
needs to be seeing right now
okay because when we cut
we need we need something
and for me you know so you know i always
joke with my friends about being half
chinese because
i spent like you know almost half of my
life in china
and you know all of my adult life in
china so i definitely feel like
um that china has raised me to a certain
degree
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okay
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you