Ningxia: Where my voice began

"Fifty," the vendor said.

"Twenty," my father insisted.

I was standing in a market in Yongning county, Ningxia Hui autonomous region, my face burning with embarrassment. My father wanted me to help bargain, but I could not bring myself to do it.

Years later, I would speak Chinese into microphones and in front of cameras. Back then, I was still Ameen Muneer Mohammed Al-Obaidi, a boy too embarrassed to bargain for my father.

Before I arrived, Ningxia already existed in my imagination through my father's stories. Three years before the rest of us came to China, he had visited Beijing and Ningxia and watched the Beijing Olympics. When he returned, he said China was another world. The streets were clean. People on buses were polite. And in Ningxia, he said, the lamb tasted as good as it did back in our Iraqi hometown.

In early 2011, my family left Syria for China with help from my brother-in-law, who was from Ningxia. I was 10 when we arrived in Yongning. The smell of wheat in the air reminded me of Syria.