In Shenzhen, Ma Lan Has No Dining Companion
Editor’s Note
Few dietary cultures are as defined by religion and as deeply woven into ethnic life as halal. After getting to know Muslim friends from the northwest, I realised that once you leave a Muslim-majority area and head south for work, affordable halal dining options beyond Lanzhou lamian are virtually non-existent.
How does one maintain a halal diet in keeping with religious doctrine and faith? Are respect and accommodation available, or must one compromise? At Ma Lan’s dining table, we see that the simple act of eating resembles a low-grade but persistent chronic pain, reminding her at every turn that her choices are limited, and overlooked by the mainstream.
The Migrant Worker’s Table is a series documenting the lives of working people, supported by the Foodthink “Lianhe Creative Programme”. The first article, “Ame the Cleaner, Who Wants to Eat Properly”, captures a cleaner’s labour and life through her three daily meals. This second piece records the halal life history of Ma Lan, a Muslim girl living in Shenzhen far from her Ningxia home.
The three points form a winding L-shaped line, one kilometre in total.
Sometimes the three shrink to two: the rented flat and the office. Ma Lan cooks for herself, so there is no need to visit a Lanzhou lamian.
Sometimes she steps off this fixed track and adds a temporary point: the fresh-food market. It is 1.5 km from where she lives, and she visits at most once a week, buying enough vegetables to last the week.
There is one further point, nine kilometres away – a halal food shop where Ma Lan buys her meat, which she needs to visit only once a month.
Every one of these points in Ma Lan’s life is tied to one thing: food.
I. From Xihai Gu to Shenzhen
In central-southern Ningxia lies a region known as “Xihai Gu”. In 1972, the United Nations World Food Programme classified it as “one of the least suitable regions in the world for human survival”.
Xihai Gu is a Hui-majority area, and Ma Lan’s home is Xiji County, nestled within it. Data from the 2020 seventh national census shows that Xiji County had a registered population of 475,000, of whom 284,000 were Hui.
Eight years ago, Ma Lan left Ningxia; her household registration was transferred to Shenzhen four years ago. Under the talent-recruitment regulations then in force, her bachelor’s degree entitled her, after obtaining residency, to a municipal settlement bonus of ¥15,000.
From Xiji to Shenzhen – between the barren Loess Plateau and the gleaming coastal metropolis – lie 2,000 kilometres. Everything in Shenzhen was unlike home. The long, scorching, humid summers were almost unbearable: “Even just sitting there, doing nothing, I’m dripping with sweat.” It was not only the climate she struggled to adjust to – food was another matter.
Shenzhen has gathered flavours from every corner of China and the world; its diverse dining scene caters to the needs of over 17 million people. Halal restaurants form one piece of this mosaic.
Yet for Ma Lan, “diversity” is built on a “Han-centred” foundation. Eight years in Shenzhen, walking every street and alley, and Ma Lan has rarely looked to see what restaurants line the road. What most people take for granted – luosifen, bucket rice, malatang, hot pot, Hunan cuisine, Cantonese cheung fun, cakes and bread – none of it is within her reach.
For most Muslims, Lanzhou lamian is one of the few everyday dining options.
III. “Lanzhou Lamian”
“The first time we arrived at that place, the person who’d brought us said there was no food there that Hui Muslims could eat, and that they’d sort out some biscuits, instant noodles, and the like.” As they wandered outside the factory, one classmate suddenly cheered and jumped for joy – not far away, a Lanzhou lamian restaurant with “Halal” written on its sign had appeared.
*Note: The Arabic word “Halal” (清真) means “permissible under Islamic teachings”. Trade and the movement of people have made it harder for individuals to identify halal food; Halal certification emerged to safeguard Muslim consumers’ rights.
Thereafter, she noted that in the south, unless an area was particularly remote, a Lanzhou lamian restaurant could always be found within a few kilometres.
Halal lamian restaurants emerged alongside the migration of Muslims from the northwest to work in the south. A 2022 report recorded that Shenzhen had roughly 2,000 halal restaurants, with halal lamian restaurants accounting for over 80 per cent.
These halal lamian restaurants sustained the mobility of Muslims working in Han-majority areas in the south. After graduating from university in 2016, Ma Lan headed straight to Shenzhen to look for work, and from then on, lamian restaurants have been a constant thread throughout her life away from home.
Across the countless Lanzhou lamian restaurants she visited, Ma Lan had tried every single dish on the menu – soup noodles, gravy-topped noodles, gravy-topped rice, stir-fried dishes – until she felt “everything tastes the same”.
For a while, just the sight of a Lanzhou lamian restaurant filled her with aversion. “When I’d walk right up to one and catch the smell of that broth, I didn’t even want to go inside.”
Ma Lan now works at a neighbourhood-level office in Shenzhen. Because she never eats in the staff canteen, colleagues ask why, and she tells them, “There aren’t many dishes there I can eat.” As they gradually learned that Ma Lan is a Hui Muslim, some pressed on: “Is it just pork you can’t eat? Or can’t you eat any kind of meat at all? Then how are you still so strong?”
Ma Lan finds this exhausting. She has tried to explain, wanting them to understand that she doesn’t refuse to eat meat altogether – she simply cannot eat food that isn’t halal. In northwestern Hui usage, any meal outside halal dining is collectively called “Han food”, while pork is referred to as da rou – literally “big meat”. Few people know this.
When the office organises team-building events or group dinners, Ma Lan heads to a nearby Lanzhou lamian restaurant, orders something to take away, and carries it to the gathering. Her colleagues eat the dishes on the table; she eats her takeaway. The dinner finishes without a hitch.
This quiet, unremarkable marginality is almost never noticed. An invisible wall stands between her and the majority. “I eat alone every single day – cooking for myself, eating by myself, going to Lanzhou lamian on my own.”
During the pandemic, when Shenzhen was under lockdown, “even the Lanzhou lamian restaurants were shut down. I had to scan my health code and check in with my residential community every day – there was so much to deal with. The office canteen became awful. The only thing I could eat was plain vegetables, and really awful ones at that.”
It was over food that Ma Lan had an emotional breakdown.
It was the only time she used the word “breakdown” to describe anything to do with eating. She vented about it on WeChat Moments; Hui Muslim friends she’d met at the mosque saw it and posted some good food to her.
“Who doesn’t love a proper meal, though?” She wanted egg-stuffed pancakes, oden and xiaolongbao from street stalls. Halal versions of these snacks – she’d eaten them before, up north. Now, whenever she finds a halal restaurant she likes, she becomes a regular. “I hope the owner’s business thrives and they stay open forever.”
III. Diet as Faith
When she was in primary school, her older cousin once took her to a Han classmate’s house. She watched the classmate’s mother deliberately wash the pots several times before even starting to cook. But once the food was laid on the table, Ma Lan, scorched by inner conflict and guilt, couldn’t bring herself to eat a single bite.
To this day, Ma Lan’s mother still prays every day, and her father attends Jumu’ah at the mosque on Fridays (Note: Jumu’ah is the congregational prayer observed by Muslims every Friday). For Ma Lan, faith is about belief and sincerity in the heart; daily life is where it takes form – and food is one expression of that.
If she hadn’t agreed to this interview, Ma Lan would never have brought up identity and faith in everyday conversation. When asked what “halal” means, her first reaction was, ‘Why does everything about how people live always get turned into some grand concept?’
‘Halal simply means clean.’ She did go on to share her own understanding: ‘It has to be hygienic, and it has to be in keeping with the teachings.’ No pork; no animals that die of natural causes – cattle or sheep that perish from illness, blows or old age, for instance; no blood; no animals slaughtered without an ahong reciting the proper prayer; no alcohol. These are the basic principles of a halal diet.
*Note: In China, ahong is the honorific title used by Hui Muslims and other Muslim communities for religious clergy.
Ma Lan understands that values such as cleanliness, health and respect for living creatures – the values underpinning halal eating – rest on faith, not on absolute scientific proof.
When she walks into an unfamiliar halal restaurant, she takes a quick look at the environment and the staff. Spotting a worker place ingredients on the floor, she decides the restaurant isn’t clean enough and turns right back out.
With so few options for eating out, cooking for herself became the natural solution – back in Year 2 of primary school, the rural girl Ma Lan had already learned to cook.
In the self-built houses of an urban village, the kitchen is always right next to the bathroom. So it was for Ma Lan’s 750-yuan-a-month large single room, too. Something about it unsettled her, so she moved all her ingredients and utensils onto a storage shelf in the living space, leaving only the gas stove and a small fridge in the kitchen.
A single room you can take in at a glance: two wardrobes, a bookshelf, a storage rack, a desk, a bed, a washing machine – every piece of larger furniture she owns.
The smaller items she keeps neat and tidy.
By the window stands a storage rack: the top two shelves hold ingredients and seasonings, the bottom two hold plates, bowls and cookware.
Before bed, Ma Lan scoops a handful of purple rice and glutinous rice, rinses them clean and puts them in the rice cooker. She washes a few red dates, some sweetcorn and Chinese yam and sets them in the steamer tray on top of the cooker, then sets the timed congee function. When she gets up in the morning, breakfast is ready.
For lunch and dinner, she cooks at least one meal a day, and when she’s feeling diligent, both. ‘I’ve come up with a method – I put rice, meat and vegetables all together in the rice cooker. You know, potato, carrot, that sort of thing – everything cooks together.’
When the meat in the fridge is running low, she rides her electric scooter forty minutes to the halal food shop.
She hasn’t even parked yet, and the shop owner’s wife recognises her. Once inside, Ma Lan takes the lamb pie offered to her without ceremony. After more than a year of buying beef and lamb there, she’s on familiar terms with the couple who run the shop. The wife drops to a softer, lower voice and asks about the young man she’d tried to set Ma Lan up with. Ma Lan says flatly that he wasn’t right for her.
The couple came from Gansu and opened this halal shop in 2019, supplying meat, oil and provisions to halal restaurants in the neighbourhood. A price list is posted on the wall; beef and lamb are priced at roughly the same thirty to forty yuan per jin as at the ordinary market.
The couple are working the slicing machine together, cutting large blocks of beef imported from Malaysia into three-centimetre cubes for a food company that has placed an order. Behind them, lamb chops and legs hang in the chilled display case; in another large freezer beside it, pre-portioned meat packs are stacked to the brim. China’s Muslim population exceeds 30 million and is the principal destination for Malaysia’s halal food exports.
The shop owners carry a quiet certainty. ‘Anyone from the Han community who knows about us comes here specifically for meat. First, you can trust the slaughtering process in every respect. Second, our meat isn’t pumped with water.’
Every time Ma Lan visits, she picks up two or three jin each of beef and lamb, plus some chicken, and carries it all home to the freezer – enough to last a month.
As a child, during Ramadan, Ma Lan would get up before sunrise every morning for a full month to eat, then abstain from food and drink until sunset. But now, after four or five days of keeping the fast, she stops. ‘Mainly, I just can’t get up in the morning.’
Since leaving home, apart from keeping up her dietary habits, she feels she has ‘barely any faith left.’ ‘Those books on the shelf – I haven’t really read them either. These days, I don’t dare call myself a believer, and I don’t dare say I don’t believe.’ Faith colours the undertone of her daily life, yet when she probes her own belief and sincerity, it runs aground.
IV. A Lapse
Take bread: ‘Some types use shortening. I didn’t know that before, so I just bought whatever I liked. Then someone told me that shortening is mainly made from lard. Now I check whether it contains shortening or any meat.’
But even her rule about “Han food” – “don’t eat it if you can avoid it” – has been broken.
Two years ago, at the neighbourhood office where she used to work, contracted staff were also entitled to a ‘five-yuan-three-meals’ subsidy – ‘one yuan for breakfast, two yuan for lunch, and two yuan for dinner.’
‘Poverty broke my bottom line.’ Ma Lan doesn’t shy away from admitting it. She began eating in the canteen, sticking to the vegetable dishes, fish and eggs – ‘only the things we can eat.’
In the turbulent years before, Ma Lan had saved nothing. ‘I was so anxious inside, so insecure – I couldn’t even bring myself to spend money on food.’ A bowl of Lanzhou lamian costs twelve yuan, and every time she ordered one, an inescapable guilt followed: ‘I’ve spent money again.’
Putting herself in others’ shoes, Ma Lan doesn’t want to be hard on Muslims far from home who inevitably end up eating Han food. ‘My cousin came to Shenzhen to work. As long as it isn’t pork, he sometimes eats vegetable stir-fries cooked in the same wok as non-halal beef or mutton.’
Is this close to the way “wok-side” vegetarians eat – Buddhists who eat only the vegetable portions of dishes stir-fried with meat in the same wok? On the spectrum of halal eating in non-Muslim countries, is there room for a “wok-side halal”?
Someone once told Ma Lan that in job ads for factories in the Dongguan–Shenzhen area, a special requirement sometimes appears for Hui workers: no dietary restrictions. In industrial zones where the population is transient and eating habits are a jumble, ‘dietary restrictions’ replaces “halal”, blurring a whole food culture into vagueness.
Last year, Ma Lan moved to her current workplace. Once the canteen stopped offering a meal subsidy, she returned her meal card. After work, at lunchtime and in the evening, she walks two hundred metres back to her room – enough time to cook a simple meal.
On days off, once or twice a friend or two will volunteer to go with her, hunting out the halal restaurants scattered across the city. On a whim, the search extends to the neighbouring city.
Over eight years, the effort to maintain a halal diet has been volatile – there have been convictions and concessions, choices and losses. Yet few people have ever asked her whether it’s convenient for a Muslim to eat in Shenzhen. Ma Lan says she doesn’t feel she needs special consideration.
Instead, she worries that sticking to halal food might look too conspicuous in Shenzhen, and she repeats it again and again: ‘This is my personal choice.’ One clear change over the past few years is that Ma Lan has grown more sensitive to ‘cultural confrontation.’
V. In Search of a Dining Companion
Its white-and-green main building rises gleaming among the surrounding buildings in muted, darker tones – a modern architectural style infused with Islamic culture, a fitting complement to Shenzhen’s designated image as “a diverse, inclusive international metropolis”.
The mosque serves every facet of Muslim life – prayer, scripture study, reading, communal meals, matchmaking…
Ma Lan had attended a few social events organised by the mosque, and some of her Muslim friends were ones she had met right there. The metro from her home to the mosque takes an hour and a half, and last year she even enrolled in an Arabic class at the mosque.
Stepping out of the mosque, Muslims vanish into the crowd of millions, only to reappear in echo-chamber WeChat groups. Foodie groups, secondhand-swap groups, board-game groups, matchmaking groups, housing-rental groups… A single salaam – a greeting and wish for peace – is all it takes for Muslims to recognise one another.
*Note: “Salaam” means “peace be upon you.” It is the most common Muslim greeting, and a way of expressing friendship, goodwill and blessings.
In the foodie group, someone scoured the city for the halal restaurants scattered here and there and put together a guide to halal dining in Shenzhen. On weekends, someone would organise a group meal, and plenty of people signed up. The appetite that had been bottled up from growing tired of Lanzhou lamian came flooding out over the shared table.
Ma Lan went too, though it was not just the food that drew her. ‘The board-game group was only set up this year. I just want to get out and about, see if I might meet a Hui partner.’ She described a “deep longing” to be with people like herself.
She once had a Han boyfriend who was willing to eat the way she did. But over time, Ma Lan felt it was unfair to him. ‘The difference is always there.’ She also knew that some Hui–Han couples, to work around the eating issue, kept two woks in the kitchen – one for Han food, one for Hui food – each serving its own purpose, neither interfering with the other.
After the break-up, Ma Lan was certain she would find a Muslim partner for life. ‘Not being able to share meals is a real pain.’
But it was not that easy.
Three years ago she met a Hui young man and tried dating him, only to discover he was a fraud – ‘and he swindled tens of thousands of yuan out of me.’ After the break-up, Ma Lan was too furious to let it go. She filed a lawsuit and took him to court.
One weekend morning, a message popped up on WeChat – someone in the board-game group was calling everyone out for a whole roast lamb supper. This time she did not want to go. ‘I can’t bear to spend that much – a whole roast lamb works out at 100 to 200 yuan a head.’
Her parents were always on at her, begging her to come back to Ningxia. She had returned briefly to her hometown, spending six months as a supply teacher at a rural primary school. But she left again, heading back to Shenzhen. At the end of 2020, armed with a professional qualification certificate she had earned, she landed this job at the neighbourhood-level office.
With a stable income, Ma Lan “lent” her university-student sister 1,500 yuan a month for living expenses. After subtracting her own outgoings – less than 2,000 yuan – and the roughly 20,000 yuan she sent home to her parents each year in one form or another, she could still put a little aside.
She said she was now frequently treating herself to “a big meal” – on weekends she would head to a Lanzhou lamian restaurant, order two stir-fry dishes, and the whole meal would set her back sixty or seventy yuan. ‘I just want two dishes, but ordering two on my own, I can’t finish them. It would be nice to have a dining companion.’
The day after International Women’s Day, Ma Lan took a trip to Guangzhou to attend yet another singles mixer. Finding a dining companion was probably the one pressing thing in her life at the moment. ‘At least we could eat together.’
Author’s Note 1: In 2024, the global Muslim population reached 2 billion, accounting for 25 per cent of the world’s total. Chinese media have cited data from Malaysia’s Halal Industry Promotion Agency, which noted that as early as 2014, annual global trade in halal food had already reached US$500 billion.
Author’s Note 2: “In order to achieve alignment and mutual recognition of halal standards with Muslim countries worldwide” (Xinhua), in 2013 the five provinces and regions of Gansu, Ningxia, Qinghai, Shaanxi and Yunnan jointly drew up the “General Rules for Halal Food Certification”. In 2018, they successively announced its abolition.
*To protect the interviewee, “Ma Lan” is a pseudonym.
After multiple rounds of interviews with a panel of six judges, eighteen creative projects were ultimately selected for support under the Foodthink Lianhe Creative Programme; five have been published to date:
“Ame the Cleaner, Who Wants to Eat Properly | The Migrant Worker’s Table”
“In Malaysia, Chinese Traders Want Only Grade-A Durian”
“‘Fake Meat’ Drives Out the Real Thing: Herders, Dinner Tables and the Amazon”
“Sweet Watermelons for the Buyer, Bitter Ones for the Grower”
“From the Guoshan Yao to the ‘Chosen Foragers’: One Termite Mushroom Ignites a Frenzy”
Editor: Xu Youyou