Northern Iraq's budding Chinatown (some good news)

[ensho]

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/01/201112201348137881.html


As foreign investment and faces increase in Iraqi Kurdistan, cultural boundaries are being broken.



While Ling Ling stacks hot and spicy prawn crackers and dried black beans with ginger onto the shelves of, to her, a familiar looking Chinese market, her wider surroundings of northern Iraq are more foreign.

Ling, from Anhui province in eastern China, has been managing the shop there for about six months after responding to a newspaper advertisement by a Chinese firm.

She plans to stay for a few more years to take a share of what she sees as the nascent economic potential of the northern semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan.

"I came to do business here. I think people are not very clever here. They need people to come with good idea to sell things here," Ling, 34, said.

"So I can help people here and they can help me."

The Chinese market is in the newly opened Kawa Mall in Sulaimaniyah, Iraqi Kurdistan's second city. Chinese people, outlets and a restaurant dominate the top two floors, which are reserved for firms from the world's second biggest economy, of the Kurdish-owned shopping centre.

-long snip about how it all came about and a pic of a very busy outdoor market-
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good on them

[catabryna]

1. If I hadn't read the entire article...

I would have been offended by the following:

"I think people are not very clever here"

It sounded very dismissive of the Kurdish people. Some things just don't translate well... I guess.

On a whole though, the article was very informative; especially since we don't hear too much these days the Kurdish people in Iraq.