A personal essay by a young Manchu woman attending university in Tibet, documenting the experience of being from an ethnic minority background in China.
Recommended by: Jessie Lau
“What does it mean to be Chinese today?” This question shadows over a recent personal essay published by NüVoices, written by a young Manchu girl in Tibet, whose name has been withheld for her safety. Her essay traces the quiet, daily degradations of life as a minority in a state that proclaims unity but demands uniformity. Her writing shares more than grief. She offers a vision: “the day when every nationality, every person, every voice in China is listened to with care and respect.”
That a country of over a billion people houses a constellation of languages and cultures ought to be obvious. Yet this fact remains inconvenient for the story the state prefers to tell. The mainstream narrative is one where Han Chinese dominate, and this Han cultural majority is a state sanctioned imbalance. This essayist’s life is proof of an existence that is becoming increasingly impossible. She hints at the hollowness of state slogans, “56 nationalities, one loving family”, noting that her own story rarely fits within that family portrait.
Even after moving from her native Heilongjiang Province (part of the historical region of Manchuria), to attend university in Tibet, another region acutely charged with political tension, her experience of discrimination did not end. Each weekend while her Han Chinese classmates were free to do as they pleased, she sat through lectures on the Five Marxist viewpoints every weekend. The sheer unjustness of it all fuelled her desire to become an advocate for minority students.
She began to document the experiences of being a student from an ethnic minority background, cataloguing incidents of racial harassment, verbal abuse and discrimination. But her bravery came at a cost. She was put under house arrest for the entire week of the National Day holiday. An experience that led her to harbour a deep sense of betrayal, prompting her to question, “Where do I really belong?”
The deliberate erasure of their narratives from the political sphere make the personal stories of those from minority backgrounds all the more important and powerful. “I believe that each person’s story, especially those from the margins, add a vital, beautiful movement to the symphony of our country.”
Determined to not be silenced, this Manchu girl continues to “call for a China that is done with oppression, where everyone is free to follow their own path”. Writing and other artistic forms become a tool of political emancipation, uplifting the voices of those on the margins.
Original essay (“我的中国身份：在压迫与迷茫中寻找自我”) by an anonymous author was first published in Chinese and English on 13 June 2025.
It’s available here.
The author has been anonymised in regard of her personal safety. The essay has been translated into English by Anne Henochowicz.
NüVoices is an international editorial collective gathering veteran and emerging writers, journalists, translators and artists to celebrate and support the diverse creative work of women and other underrepresented voices/communities working on the subject of China (broadly defined).
Summary by TMH
Jessie Lau is a writer and multi-platform journalist from Hong Kong, now in London. A global affairs reporter with expertise on China and Asia, she covers the intersections of human rights, politics and culture, with a transnational feminist perspective. Her work has appeared in BBC, The Guardian, CNN, The Economist, WIRED, Los Angeles Review of Books and many other publications. She edits at NüVoices, a collective supporting women working on China topics, and holds degrees in History, International Studies and English from the London School of Economics, Peking University and the University of California, Berkeley.
