Oracle Bones (20 page)

INCREASINGLY, POLAT TALKED
about going to America. He’d mention the possibility of studying abroad, or finding some kind of job that would take him across the Pacific. For a spell, he was interested in Canada, because somebody told him that immigration was easy in Quebec, but then he decided that he didn’t want to learn French. Our Hollywood discussions always returned to the same place: the United States.

Polat’s desire to go there mystified me. He spoke no English, and I couldn’t imagine how he’d qualify as a student or a businessman; the U.S. embassy would never give a tourist visa to somebody who worked as a middleman in Yabaolu. He had a wife back in Xinjiang, although he rarely spoke of her, and I sensed that there were complications with the relationship. He told me that he didn’t want to bring her to a place like Yabaolu. They didn’t have children, and I had the impression that the couple hadn’t spent much time together. In China, that sort of situation wasn’t unusual, especially when migration was involved.

I wondered if Polat’s talk about America was just a reflection of his instability, but I also worried about possible misperceptions of the United States. In China, people who had never been to America tended to take extreme views, and often both sides were equally inaccurate. I met many Chinese who believed that America was evil incarnate, but I also met others who had complete faith in the wealth, opportunity, and freedom of the United States. In conversations,
I often tried gently to push people away from both extremes, but it was difficult without any context. America was an idea, not a place.

In a few parts of China, certain concepts about America had become so deeply ingrained that people would do almost anything to emigrate. In January of that year, three Chinese men died in a shipping container en route to Seattle. Along with other illegal immigrants, the men had come from Fujian province, in the southeast, which was famous for its “snakeheads”—people smugglers who arranged passage across the Pacific.

After the deaths, the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
hired me to write a series about the snakeheads. For most of a week, I traveled along the coast near the city of Fuzhou. On an island called Langqi, I found the family of one of the Seattle survivors; the man was in detention, awaiting a hearing with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Invariably, such immigrants claimed political asylum, although in fact most had left for economic reasons. In one of the Fujianese villages, I randomly met a young man who told me that he had spent four months in a detention center, in Jamaica, New York, before being denied asylum. The snakeheads generally charged between thirty and fifty thousand dollars to arrange transport, and usually the emigrants’ debt ensured that they would spend years as indentured servants in Chinatown restaurants or sweatshops.

It might have been understandable in a poor part of the country, but Fujian was far better off than the average province. Nevertheless, many Fujianese weren’t satisfied with a good life by Chinese standards. An entire industry had sprouted to support the local version of the American dream: snakeheads, shady visa services, pre-emigration English lessons. In the small village of Tantou, three private English schools offered courses such as “Restaurant English,” “Life English,” and “English for Leaving the Country.” I saw one advertisement for a class that was simply called “Menu.” Another sign promised:
FOR THE MONEY YOU’LL MAKE IN A DAY AND A HALF WORKING IN AMERICA, YOU CAN STUDY A FULL SEMESTER OF “RESTAURANT ENGLISH.”
One school offered a course in Cantonese, because that was the dominant dialect in some of the Chinatown restaurant districts. The Fujianese were studying another Chinese language so they could work illegally in America.

A number of locals had made the trip, worked hard, and eventually became the owners of restaurants or some other business in the States. They remitted money to family members back in Fujian, who built enormous mansions in the villages. These structures tended to be narrow and vertical; they might be only three rooms wide but five stories tall. Usually they were faced with white tile, and often they had big glass windows in the shade of green that was so
common in modern Chinese construction. That color always made me think of
The Great Gatsby
—the glow at the end of Daisy’s dock.

But in Fujian, it was like glimpsing light that had taken years to cross a galaxy. Some of these success stories had belonged to an earlier generation, when China’s economy didn’t provide much opportunity. In truth, nowadays the Fujianese might be better off staying at home; even if the immediate dollar figures were higher in the States, they’d probably be happier and have better long-term prospects in China. But the people kept seeing the mansions, and they kept leaving. They were chasing a star that might be dead by the time they got there.

In Tantou, I stopped at one brand-new six-story building whose gateway was inscribed with gold characters:
. The phrase meant: “Garden of Virtue and Prestige.” Inside, I met an old woman who proudly told me that she had four children in America; one daughter ran a hotel. I asked where the hotel was located, and the old woman slowly inscribed five English words into my notebook. She didn’t speak the language, and her handwriting had the odd angles of somebody who has memorized shapes rather than words. Nevertheless, she made only one mistake:

Vallege Inn Edison New Jersey

WHENEVER POLAT AND
I had our Hollywood conversations, I mentioned the Fujianese, because I worried that he might overestimate the economic opportunity in the United States. And I knew that business in Yabaolu was slowly dying. In the past, there had been no shortage of traders from Russia and Central Asia, and many of them acquired visas by joining “tour groups” that stayed for a week. Special agencies arranged the trips; it was much easier to go to China as a tourist than as a businessperson. I imagined the charter flights that set off from Moscow, packed with hard-faced women and heavyset men with vodka-rimmed eyes. They were
jiade
vacationers—bad imitations of people going off on a holiday.

But by the end of 1999, the number of Russians and Central Asians in Yabaolu was dropping. Polat sometimes described these changes in the language of currency movement: he told me that the Kazak tenge had lost a third of its value, and most of his old customers from Almaty were staying at home. It was the same with the Uzbeks, the Kyrgyz, the Tatars. Polat’s last big clothing deal had been in September of 1999, when he arranged for the sale of three thousand pairs of Guangzhou-made blue jeans to a Kazak. Around the same time, he had helped some Russians buy a shipment of
jiade
Nokia cell phone
batteries (they’d function for only fifteen days, he told me). After those sales, Polat’s work as a middleman was essentially finished.

Part of the problem was the strength of the Chinese economy, which was hard on low-level foreign traders, and it also undermined the black market for U.S. dollars. Whenever Polat talked about currency rates, he emphasized the effect of government controls—a border problem in Shenzhen, or a crackdown on some corrupt Central Asian customs office. From the perspective of the money changer, these were the trends that mattered, but in fact larger economic forces shaped the exchange rates. The Chinese government wanted to maintain control over the economy, ensuring some stability during the transition years, and so they kept their nonconvertible currency pegged to the American dollar—at a bank, you received about 8.26 yuan to the dollar. But the artificial stability meant that a black market naturally flourished, serving as a proxy for other opportunities to earn money in China. When wealthy Chinese had no faith in domestic stocks or real estate, they saved American dollars or used them to invest overseas. But that situation was rapidly changing. Since 1999, property markets in Beijing and other cities had boomed, and people needed Chinese currency in order to invest. When I had arrived in the spring of 1999, I could get nine yuan to the dollar; a year later the street rate had dropped to 8.7. It was a good sign for China’s economy, but that meant nothing to people like Polat. The country’s growing prosperity was killing the black market.

Nevertheless, he still earned a decent living from money changing, and I knew that his language skills were far more useful in China than in the United States. I told him bluntly that, from an economic standpoint, he was better off in Beijing than in America. But he insisted that money had no bearing on his decision about where to live. “I’m not a businessman,” he told me once. “I’m educated, and I used to be a teacher. This isn’t my home, and this isn’t the kind of life I want.”

His detachment from business was remarkable. In China, everybody talked openly about money, and Polat was no different; many of our conversations revolved around exchange rates and wholesale prices. But he seemed to keep part of himself separate from that world. He spoke about his deals with bemusement, as if they had been conducted by a person he hardly knew. When he told me about the fake Nokia batteries, I asked if he worried that the Russians would get angry when they realized how bad the product was. “They know they’re
jiade
,” he said. “Otherwise, why would they be so cheap? Anyway, the Russians would never get mad at me. I’m just translating; I’m not producing any of this stuff.”

His life was sharply divided between the pragmatic and the idealistic. He earned his living in the commercial environment of Yabaolu, but he spent much of his free time thinking about faraway places and people. His wife was over a thousand miles away; his teaching days in Xinjiang were a distant memory. When we talked about the place, he often referred to it as “East Turkestan,” the name of the independent republic that had been crushed in 1949. And America seemed equally remote. He told me that he liked reading books about American history, especially Abraham Lincoln, because the president had freed an oppressed minority. Polat loved American culture; every summer he scored a worker’s pass to the jazz concert in Ritan Park. He watched the
Godfather
movies over and over—even in a supporting role,
De Ni Luo
was fabulous.

Initially, I thought that these dreams were simply an escape from the grim reality of Yabaolu: the point wasn’t actually to go to America, but rather to talk about it. Over time, though, I came to realize the complexity of Polat’s position. The small-mindedness of business truly bothered him, and he could be remarkably snobbish about other Uighur traders. Whenever they met, Polat shook their hands warmly, but afterward he’d tell me frankly that they were uneducated and didn’t understand politics. In Polat’s mind, this was the quality that set him apart: he was an intellectual who had come to Beijing only because of his problems in Xinjiang.

Uighur culture had always been divided along class lines, with intellectuals holding themselves above peasants and traders. Since Reform and Opening, these divisions had become even sharper, and each group had developed its own relationship with the Chinese, who used economic development as a political tool in places like Xinjiang. Uighur peasants, who sometimes benefited from government-funded infrastructure and farming subsidies, could be passive or even amenable to Chinese rule. Uighur traders were also pragmatic, because they relied on access to Chinese goods. But many intellectuals fiercely opposed Beijing’s control, and often they were bitter at what they perceived as the complicity of less-educated Uighurs.

For a man like Polat, who felt compelled to participate in trade, the anger was even more intense. And the opposite intellectual extreme—the point where idealism and faith reached orthodoxy—was equally threatening. As much as he hated the trader’s small-mindedness, Polat was even more disdainful of people who, in his opinion, were obsessed with ideas. In Yabaolu, he was relentlessly critical of two groups. He despised the North Koreans—in his opinion, they were the worst Communists of all time. He also had no patience for the Afghan traders. Sometimes, they’d appear in the Uighur restaurant, usually in groups of three or four. None of the middlemen I knew had ever cut
a deal with them; the Afghans didn’t come to Yabaolu to buy Tommy Hilfiger or North Face. The men were bearded, gaunt, and long-robed even in summer; there were rumors that they dealt in gems and drugs. Whenever they walked past, Polat curled his lip in disgust.

“They’re the same as Communists,” he told me once. “There’s no freedom in Afghanistan. You have to believe in something, and you can’t ask questions. That type of Islam and Communism are exactly the same.”

It wasn’t uncommon for Uighur intellectuals to be distrustful of Islam. In the past, the ethnic group hadn’t been particularly devout, but that had also changed since Reform and Opening. In the early 1980s, the Chinese government had deliberately encouraged Islam in Xinjiang, funding mosque construction and even paying for Uighur religious leaders to make the
Hajj
to Mecca. The government hoped that religious growth would defuse unrest, but they were surprised by a series of protests in 1985. Thousands of Uighurs demonstrated in opposition to Han Chinese migration, and they also criticized the Chinese use of desert territories in Xinjiang for nuclear testing. Polat had participated in the protests, and afterward he received his first jail sentence.