River Town (31 page)

At Hami the safety management worker and I stood there watching the fruit salesmen, and I asked him about relations between the Han and the Uighurs.

“We have problems,” he said. “Sometimes the
guanxi
is bad. Now our government helps their education, agriculture, economy, but still there are problems. It's because of the history, not today's policy. Every country has this kind of trouble—you have the same kind of problems with blacks in your America.”

It was a good point, and I told him that I didn't think Xinjiang's
troubles were America's affair. But I said that if it was a Chinese affair, it seemed strange that the violence in the spring hadn't been discussed in the newspapers in Chongqing and Fuling.

“Sichuan is too remote. Bigger cities heard about what happened here.”

“What happened?”

“There were bombs,” he said, shrugging. “It was like Israel.”

“Does your company have any Uighur workers?”

“No. Their education level isn't high enough, and if it's not high enough, it's not safe. If their level was appropriate, we'd hire them.”

“Do you speak Uighur?”

“No. You don't need it here. You always use Chinese at work and when you go shopping.”

“Do you know any words?”

“I know a few.
Salaam aleikum
is ‘hello.' And ‘thank you' is…”

He paused, thinking hard. He had lived in the Uighur Autonomous Region for two years. “I forget,” he said at last. “But I know ‘goodbye.'”

And he said it, but he spoke softly and the word was lost in the hot desert wind that swept through the station.

 

THE OASIS TOWNS
appeared every hour or two, rising suddenly alongside the tracks and then disappearing just as quickly into the rock and dirt and sand. They weren't oases in the romantic sense: no palms or shining pools of water; just concrete and dust and glass. It was as if the oases and the desert had been reversed; we would roll out of town and I would breathe a sigh of relief, unable to imagine that once these places had been inviting to travellers. The land was barren but it was also mesmerizing, and the towns had no charm.

I would have been happy to continue like that for days, passing from oasis to oasis, watching the great nothingness beside the tracks. The train was comfortable and the people friendly; I was the only
waiguoren
of our car and often the other passengers brought me food and drink—tomatoes, cucumbers, flavored ices, dried fish, beer. Occasionally somebody stopped by to talk about prices or Sino-American relations, but at last it was as if the wasteland had swallowed all conversation. Nearly everybody sat silent, staring out at the scenery.

The Flaming Mountains rose to the south, red and scarred by countless ridges, and then the Heavenly Mountains came into view. Snow was streaked bright in the high peaks. It grew dark; a full moon hung heavy in the eastern sky. The train rocked westward. It seemed we'd never get to Urumqi, but I didn't care.

 

THERE WERE CHECKPOINTS
on the Xinjiang highways where policemen with machine guns inspected all vehicles. It was unusual for Chinese policemen to handle weapons like that, and in Xinjiang they were very proud of the responsibility, fiddling constantly with the clip and the handle. They couldn't simply carry the guns on their straps—the point of having a weapon was to keep it constantly in their hands, aimed at something. It was like giving an automatic rifle to a child. I took a bus from Urumqi to Turpan, and the policeman at the checkpoint used the barrel of his machine gun to motion bluntly at the passengers as he inspected our identification.

The tension in the big cities was palpable; conversations with Uighurs didn't last very long before they started complaining. They complained about the number of Han migrants, and they complained about how all the good government jobs went to the Han, and they complained about the planned-birth policy, even though for Uighurs the limit was extended to two children and was imposed only in urban areas. I wasn't particularly surprised to see that the problems of the spring hadn't blown over; everything I had learned about the Chinese suggested that they would be particularly bad colonists. They tended to have strong ideas about race, they rarely respected religion, and they had trouble considering a non-Chinese point of view. One of the best characteristics of the people I knew in Fuling was that they had a powerful pride in their own culture—I had never lived in a place where the people had such a strong sense of their unique cultural identity. Despite the self-destruction of the Cultural Revolution and the subsequent rush to open to the outside world, there was still a definite sense of what was Chinese, and I believed that this would help them survive modernization. But there was also a narrowness to this concept, and it seemed nearly impossible for a Chinese to go to a place like Xinjiang,
learn the language, and make friends with the locals. In the five thousand years of their history it was striking how little interest the Chinese had had in exploration, and today that same characteristic limited them, even within their own borders. They seemed completely content in being Chinese, and they assumed that this feeling was shared by everybody else.

When the Han went to western places like Xinjiang or Tibet, their initial reaction was that the people needed to become more like the country's interior, particularly with regard to modernization, even if it came at the expense of culture. I had trouble understanding this perspective; to me it seemed that already too many beautiful places had been modernized too quickly, and I felt that the relatively untouched corners of China should be left that way. But I had never been poor, which made a great difference in the way you saw a place like Xinjiang.

Everything looked different to the average Chinese, and I had gained some sense of their perspective when my writing class studied the American West in the fall. We discussed Western expansion, and I presented my students with a dilemma of the late nineteenth century: the Plains Indians, their culture in jeopardy, were being pressed by white settlers. I asked my class to imagine that they were American citizens proposing a solution, and nearly all responded like the following two students:

That was the first time I realized how different our perspectives were on progress and modernization. If anything, I had presented them with an idealized version of the Plains Indians, and yet the lifestyle and culture had no appeal to my students. But like most Chinese, the majority were but one generation removed from serious poverty. What I saw as freedom and culture, they saw as misery and ignorance.

And Xinjiang, as well as Tibet, looked much the same. The Han that I met in Xinjiang couldn't understand why the Uighurs didn't appreciate China's efforts; they pointed out how backward the region had been before Liberation, emphasizing the work that had been done by the government. There was no question that this was true—the government had built roads, railways, schools. But the Chinese had failed to take the logical first step; they had never made a serious effort to understand and respect the Uighur culture, and settlers rarely learned the local language. The result was that tremendous amounts of money and work had been sunk into the desert, but with regard to improving relations much of it had been completely wasted.

I found myself oddly situated in the middle of this tension. The Uighurs disliked speaking the language of the Han, and in tourist areas some of them spoke better Japanese or English than Chinese. There was a certain distrust of foreigners who spoke Chinese; it was better if you used English. This was hard for me to do—all summer I had enjoyed the benefits of becoming conversational in Chinese, but now my use of the language established me as an outsider, and a politically charged outsider at that.

In addition to the language, there was a host of new cultural rules that complicated my interactions with the Uighurs. They were very different people from the Chinese I knew in Fuling—the Uighurs showed emotion, angering easily, and I found bargaining unpleasant because sometimes the routine involved a mock show of anger or disgust. I missed the even predictability of the Chinese; I was accustomed to their social rules, and I knew how they would react to the things I did and said. There was something comforting about all of those rote dialogues—the conversations about my salary, U.S.-China relations, and Da Shan. In Xinjiang I found myself gravitating to Chinese
restaurants and shops, and especially I liked talking with the Sichuanese, who had migrated to Xinjiang in large numbers. After a summer on the road it was good to hear their slurred tones again—much more soothing than the Turkic trills of the Uighur tongue. And I realized that I had picked up some of that distinctly Chinese narrowness: I was also content in being Chinese, even here in Xinjiang.

But things were different if I didn't say anything. I have some Italian ancestry and don't look too much different from the Uighurs, and I could walk down the street and not attract attention. Occasionally I was mistaken for a native—the Chinese sometimes asked if I was a Uighur, and the Uighurs sometimes asked if I was a Kazakh. In Fuling I was always extremely conscious of my appearance, because every day I was confronted by the ways in which I looked different from the locals, but now in these desert towns I saw people with noses and hair and eyes like mine. For the first time I realized the full importance of race, not just in the way it divided people, but also in the sense of feeling a link to those who looked like you. For a year I hadn't felt that connection, but here in Xinjiang, although the link was tenuous, it was better than nothing.

My vacation was winding down, but I had no eagerness to leave. I liked the lazy freedom of traveling, and I liked the uncertainty of my position here in Xinjiang, where I had no job and even my race was in question. It was a vague place—even time was uncertain here. All of China is on one time zone, which meant that in Xinjiang the sun didn't rise until eight or nine o'clock and it set after ten at night. Most of the people followed a more practical schedule, based on a mythical local time zone that was two hours later than the one in Beijing, but all of the government offices and state-run transportation followed the official standard time. It was the perfect symbol of the divide between the government and the governed, both of them living in the same place but going about their separate routines a full two hours apart.

Mostly in Xinjiang I liked the brutal landscapes. For three days I camped at altitudes of more than ten thousand feet in the Heavenly Mountains, and a day later I was in Turpan, where the desert basin dipped to five hundred feet below sea level and the Flaming Mountains rose north of town. Turpan was so hot that even the gov
ernment couldn't control the temperature. Every day I was there, it reached forty-two degrees, 107 Fahrenheit, and it was reported as such. Shops closed during midday, so everybody could rest inside until the worst of the heat had passed.

It was almost as hot in Hami, where my sister Angela was looking at rocks. Along with another Stanford geologist, she was employed by a Chinese state-owned oil company that had built an entire city outside of Hami. It was literally a city—schools, hospitals, shops, apartment buildings; everything was neatly laid out on well-planned streets that had been desert wasteland but four years ago. There were fifty thousand employees who worked there, all of them Han Chinese who had been shipped in from Gansu province. When I went to the market, people mistook me for a Uighur, because they had seen so few of the locals. The Chinese rarely left the complex; everything they needed was provided by their oil-built oasis in the desert.

And yet the city was a mirage. There wasn't much oil in Hami, at least according to Angela and her colleague, who knew the region's geology. All of it was a mystery—why had they built the city here in the desert? Why had all of these people been transferred out to this desolate place? What were they looking for? In five hundred years, would it be like the Great Wall, money and work buried in the sand? What was it about the Chinese that made them come slightly unhinged in the border regions—what inspired them to build walls, forts, cities; why did they construct Ozymandian monstrosities in the far reaches of their country? And what prevented them from actually talking with the people who lived there?

But these were mysteries that I didn't have time to untangle. I was in Hami for three short days—I stayed in Angela's hotel, along with Adam Weiss, another Peace Corps volunteer, who had met me in Turpan. And then our time was up, and Weiss and I left the city in the desert, catching a train back to Chengdu.

 

THE TRAIN TO CHENGDU TOOK FIFTY HOURS
and I had a bad feeling about it from the moment Weiss and I tried to buy tickets. They wouldn't sell us sleeper berths at the Hami station, and all they
said was that we could try to upgrade our hard seat tickets once we boarded.

School was about to start, and the train was full of college students who were returning to Sichuan. There weren't any sleeping berths left, and there weren't any open spots in the hard seat cars. People were stuffed in the aisles, sitting on their luggage, leaning against each other. The walkways between cars were packed with passengers squatting on the floor. People sat in the sinks. It was the most crowded train I had ever seen in China.