Oracle Bones (40 page)

“They think I’m Mexican,” he said.

“Does anybody try to speak Spanish with you?”

“Sometimes,” he said. “But not so often in this neighborhood.”

We came to the intersection of Rhode Island and Montana, and Polat remarked that on that corner drug dealers worked openly at night. He thought that some of the residents in his apartment complex were also selling drugs. People kept strange hours; he sensed that most of his neighbors were unemployed. He had noticed that sometimes they bought groceries with pieces of paper that weren’t money.

Polat had been in the country for only three months, but already he had adopted the all-American habit of dropping your voice when you talk about blacks. He did this even though we spoke Chinese. Sometimes, he referred to them as “African,” in English. He had heard people use the term “African American,” but he had picked up on only the first part of the phrase. He also sometimes used the word “Spanish” to describe Hispanics.

“All of the Uighurs say it’s bad to live in an African area,” he told me. “To be honest, I haven’t had a very good impression of them. Maybe they’re better in other parts of America, but around here they drink and do drugs all the time. I’d say that less than half the people in this neighborhood have jobs.”

He pulled out a Marlboro Light and we continued along Rhode Island
Avenue. The sidewalk was strewn with broken glass and litter; apart from the trash, there were few signs of life. Buildings lay in disrepair; shops were shuttered; the streets were empty. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been in such a silent city. In China, every urban landscape bustled with activity—street peddlers, repairmen, noodle stands, roadside shops, beauty parlors. Even in cities that had been decimated by the reform of state-owned enterprises, locals seemed to be on the move. And there was always construction—the endless clink of chisels and rattle of jackhammers.

But here on Rhode Island Avenue, the only sound was cars rushing by, and they weren’t about to stop. Of the few local businesses, some hardly qualified as such: a Check ’n Go, a Star Pawn. Polat told me that a number of establishments were immigrant-owned, even though there were relatively few foreigners in this area. His car was being repaired at Metro Motors, which was run by an Ethiopian. Koreans owned both the Famous Fried Fish House and Tony’s Neighborhood Market Grocery, which stocked more alcohol than food and had thick Plexiglas barriers protecting the cashier. Next to the Good Ole Reliable Liquor Store (Indian-owned) was the Wah Mee Restaurant, which was run by immigrants from Fujian. That was the province famous for people-smuggling—back in Fujian, the Wah Mee relatives were probably waiting to build a mansion of green glass. Here on Rhode Island Avenue, a battered sign faced the grim street:

WAH MEE RESTAURANT
CHINESE-AMERICAN RESTAURANT
POLYNESIAN COCKTAILS
CARRY OUT

“The blacks bully them,” Polat said. “They eat and they don’t pay.”

THE METRO WHISKED
us beneath the city’s grid—back through the first alphabet, past the Capitol, and on to the Smithsonian station. We walked out onto the faded lawn of the Mall. The Washington Monument was closed for repairs; scaffolding clambered up the base, marble and metal disappearing into the gun-gray sky. While we stared up at the monument, two Asian men walked past. They were dressed identically: dark suits, khaki overcoats. Polat waited for them to move out of earshot.

“Those guys are North Koreans,” he said.

“I think they’re just Asian Americans,” I said.

The men walked west, toward the reflecting pool. Polat watched intently.

“They’re definitely not Asian Americans,” he said. “I can tell by the way
they dress and the way they’re walking. There’s something different about them. I bet they’re North Korean diplomats. They look the same as those guys around the embassy in Yabaolu.”

“Are they wearing Kim Il Sung pins?”

“I didn’t see,” he said. “But in America they might take off the pins anyway.”

We walked down the hill, toward the line of oaks that ran alongside the reflecting pool. Deliberately, I slowed, hoping that the Asian men would disappear. The day was depressing me: the ruined neighborhood, the old Yabaolu conversation about North Koreans. For five years, I had lived on the other side of the world, and so many times in China I had been called upon to talk about the United States—teaching classes, answering questions, holding conversations with curious Chinese. In the Peace Corps, that had literally been my job title: “foreign expert.”

But now that I was finally here with somebody from China, almost nothing about my native country seemed recognizable. Even the monuments looked different, abandoned for the winter. Below the scaffolded obelisk, the reflecting pool was dull as slate. A few white seagulls carved their way across the surface, paddling sluggishly. We stood beside the pool for a moment, and Polat said he wanted to see the Lincoln Memorial. Up ahead, the Asian men had finally disappeared.

We climbed the steps to the memorial. Children’s laughter rang off marble walls; the place was full of school groups. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been here—probably when I was a child myself. Inside, the Gettysburg Address had been inscribed into a wall:

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal….

The words felt as soothing as a rediscovered Bible verse: half familiar and half new, like anything that was recited long before it was understood. I read the Address slowly, pausing at the rhythm of certain phrases—“the world will little note nor long remember”; “the last full measure of devotion”—and for the first time that day I felt calm. That was my language; this was my home.

Polat and I stood in front of Lincoln’s statue. Children swarmed around us, giggling and talking, and their presence made the seated figure even more stately than he looked in photographs. For a moment we were silent.

“A lot of Uighurs admire Lincoln,” Polat said. “I used to read history books about him. We admire him because of the way he handled the ethnic issues.”

We returned to the cold January afternoon. Outside the monument, a simple wooden shack had been erected, along with a sign:

POW-MIA
You Are Not Forgotten
The Last Firebase Standing Vigil
Until They All Come Home

A middle-aged man in camouflage handed out pamphlets—the last full measure of devotion. I accepted one and thanked him, and then Polat touched my arm.

“There’s the North Koreans,” he said.

They walked side by side: black suits, khaki overcoats. This time I checked—no pins.

“I really don’t think they’re North Koreans,” I said.

“I’m sure of it,” he said.

The men walked to a taxi line. They shook hands and entered separate cabs.

“They’re definitely up to something strange,” Polat said. “Why else would they split up like that?”

The vision came to me as if from above: two men, one from Xinjiang, the other from Missouri, speaking Chinese at the Lincoln Memorial and wearing identical knockoff Caterpillar-brand denim shirts. I said that it was time to leave, and at last we did.

THERE WERE ONLY
about five hundred Uighurs in the United States. In the early 1990s, some had arrived as university students, but in recent years there had been an increase in those who came independently. Generally, they applied for political asylum, which differed from the refugee program. Refugees represented a controlled group: every year, the White House determined the refugee numbers and nationalities, which shifted according to world events. Until the early 1980s, the majority of refugees came from Indochina; by the end of that decade, the former Soviet Union took the lead. In 2001, it shifted to Africans: Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone. Typically, refugee candidates applied overseas, and then the State Department provided a loan for transportation and initial resettlement costs.

But asylum was the wild card of American immigration. Unlike refugees, who arrived in the United States under government auspices, candidates for asylum found their own way to the country. Their numbers were low: in 2001, only 20,303 people were granted asylum. (That year, the United States admit
ted a total of 1,064,318 legal immigrants.) It wasn’t uncommon for asylum applicants to use bogus documents, or sneak across borders, or lie to U.S. immigration officials. None of these acts was held against a candidate who was deemed worthy. This created an odd moral environment: Polat’s first act on American soil had been to deceive officials, but nevertheless he could apply for asylum without worrying about the ramifications of his deception. And the asylum program was notorious for false stories—many applicants actually came to the United States for economic reasons, and they exaggerated the political risks of their home country. Chinese applicants often cited the planned-birth policy, knowing that Americans were concerned about abortion.

By the time I visited in January, Polat had already hired a lawyer, who was preparing the asylum application. If successful, Polat would be allowed to seek employment, and he could also apply for his wife to come from Xinjiang and join him. After asylum, there were other stages: first, permanent-resident status (the “green card”), and then citizenship. Other Uighurs had told Polat that if everything went smoothly, he could become a real American in five years.

He had enrolled in an adult English class, in preparation for finding a job. He told me that at the beginning any employment would probably be unskilled, like driving. But for some reason he liked the idea of working at the post office after his English improved. “It’s stable and you don’t have to have a high degree from an American college,” he explained.

That January, he asked if I would write a letter on behalf of his asylum application. I agreed; I hadn’t directly witnessed Polat’s political problems in Xinjiang, but I was well aware of his economic situation. In the letter, I wrote: “By no means should Mr. [Polat] be identified as an economic refugee who simply wants American job opportunities—as an educated person who speaks both Chinese and Russian, he had plenty of business possibilities in Beijing….”

During one of my subsequent trips to Washington, D.C., I met with Polat’s lawyer, Brian Mezger. In 1998, Mezger had been working for a nonprofit immigration organization in Philadelphia, and a potential client called and explained that he was a Uighur. Mezger responded, “What’s a Uighur?” That year, he started his own practice, which soon became largely dedicated to Uighur clients. Mezger’s office was in Bethesda, Maryland, and virtually every Uighur candidate in the Washington, D.C., area hired him. For each client, he charged fifteen hundred dollars, which was a relatively low rate by industry standards.

Mezger was a quietly intense thirty-one-year-old who had been born in Vicenza, Italy, to an American father and a Sicilian mother. He told me that
his mother’s background had inspired him to pursue immigration law. For Mezger, the melting pot had worked quickly. His mother was a Catholic (“in the Sicilian sense”), but he had attended thirteen years of Quaker school. He voted Republican. At Oberlin College, he had majored in East Asian Studies; in his spare time, he still read Japanese and Chinese poetry. He also studied everything he could find about Uighurs. In 1998, he had attended the World Uighur Youth Congress, a meeting of the exiled community, in Ankara, Turkey. “I have a very high boredom threshold,” he explained. “All the meetings were in Uighur or Russian. I just read books or doodled or whatever.”

He had never traveled to Xinjiang. But even in Maryland, he had become familiar with certain aspects of Uighur culture. At one point, he had considered hiring an ethnic-Chinese secretary, but he realized that the Uighur distrust ran too deep for that. He had learned that many educated Uighurs didn’t care for Islam. He had also become familiar with the Uighur class system, and in particular he was impressed by the resourcefulness of the traders (“you could probably drop them into a jungle and they’ll find a way to do business”). And he had learned to be careful when asking question number five on the United States asylum application:

Do you fear being subjected to torture (severe physical or mental pain, including rape or other sexual abuse) in your home country or any country if you return?

“I’ve had Uighurs say no, because they aren’t afraid,” Mezger told me. “They want to be tough. I have to explain that the question is asking whether there is a
possibility
of torture in a Chinese jail.”

Of the estimated five hundred Uighurs living in the United States in 2001, nearly one hundred eventually won asylum with Mezger’s help. But he told me that even when cases were successful, he worried about his clients’ future.

“Every once in a while I think, I’m getting these people asylum, but I’m basically helping to destroy Uighur culture,” he said. “Their kids adjust so fast. For the grandkids, it will just be an oddity that they were Uighur. But this happens with all groups in America. I’m sure the descendants of the German revolutionaries who came over in the 1840s weren’t quite as keen on revolution. It’s the same thing with any small, hunted group.”

Every November 12, the Uighur community in the Washington, D.C., area gathered to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of the East Turkestan Republic. One year, I happened to be in town, and I attended with Polat, whose father had fought for the East Turkestan Army. The banquet was held in a rented room at George Mason University. About eighty Uighurs attended, in
cluding a few who had come from overseas to mark the occasion. One eighty-year-old had flown in all the way from Kazakhstan. He was one of the few living Uighurs who had personal memories of the independent republic that had been crushed in 1949.

At the banquet, people gave speeches in Uighur, and then the younger members of the community performed dances in traditional costumes. One participant was an eighth-grader from Fairfax, Virginia; she spoke perfect American English and told me that she had agreed to dance only because her friend was doing it, too. When I asked the girl if her Virginia classmates understood what it meant to be a Uighur, she rolled her eyes. “They say I’m Chinese, because I’m from China,” she said. After the dance, four adult Uighurs paraded into the hall dressed in the olive-green military uniform of the East Turkestan Republic. They marched to the front, saluted the crowd, and basked in a wave of applause. At exactly eleven o’clock, the loudspeakers crackled and a security guard announced that the room would be closed immediately, and then the Uighurs shook hands, bade each other farewell, and swept out of George Mason University.