Oracle Bones (5 page)

ONE EVENING IN
late May, Polat invited me to dinner with another trader. We met at a small Uighur restaurant on North Ritan Road, which had become my favorite spot. The restaurant was fronted by a broad outdoor platform where we took our meals, watching the traders and the prostitutes walk past. Usually, we ordered Yanjing beer. The restaurant manager would step down from the platform, open a manhole cover on the sidewalk, and pull out two bottles. The cool water inside the manhole served as the restaurant’s beverage refrigeration system. Meals there did not cost very much.

That night, Polat’s companion was a trader from Azerbaijan. He had a very small face, dark long-lashed eyes, and a tiny toylike mustache that played lightly above his lip. He wore a cheap gray suit. He had come to Yabaolu in order to purchase clothes at wholesale, and Polat was providing contacts with Chinese dealers.

“My friend apologizes that he cannot speak to you in English or Chinese,” Polat said, after we had all shaken hands. “And he wants to know if we can drink
baijiu
tonight instead of beer.”

Baijiu
is Chinese grain alcohol, and nobody drinks it for the taste. Reluctantly I agreed, and the restaurant owner set a bottle on the table. I assumed that the young man was Muslim, but most of the Central Asian traders drank anyway. They seemed to leave their religion at home when they traveled for business.

At our table, the languages switched back and forth, with Polat in the middle. He conversed in Turkish with the young man, and then he turned to me and talked in Chinese about the embassy bombing. He was obsessed with it—the protests had died out in less than two weeks, but he continued to bring
up the topic, often with strangers. His earlier outburst at the dumpling restaurant hadn’t been unusual; he loved to goad the Han Chinese.

“They have a problem with their brains,” he said, after pouring each of us a second shot of
baijiu
. “The students are all so stupid—they don’t understand anything.”

“Do you agree with what NATO is doing in Yugoslavia?” I asked.

“Of course I agree with them. The Albanians are being killed because they’re an ethnic minority. I listen to the Voice of America and I know what’s happening there. And I think it’s important because I am a Uighur from Xinjiang. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

I nodded, but he looked hard at me.

“Mingbai le ma?”
he said. “Do you understand?”

“I understand,” I said.

“Many things are difficult to talk about openly in Beijing,” he said.
“Mingbai le ma?”

“I understand,” I said. He studied me carefully, and then he smiled and raised his glass. All three of us drained our cups and made that face that men make when they drink
baijiu
. The young Azerbaijani asked, through Polat, if Americans often drank this sort of alcohol. I shook my head and then Polat mentioned the drinking habits of the Russians. This was an easy topic of international conversation; each of us had stories about Russian drunks, which turned out to be remarkably similar regardless of whether seen from the perspective of Uighurs, Azerbaijanis, or Americans. Polat translated the stories back and forth. The young trader remarked that the average Azerbaijani could not drink as much as the average Russian, but the best Azerbaijani drinkers were better than the best Russian drinkers. He made this point carefully and with great pride. The waiter brought us barbecued lamb. The lamb was spicy and quite good; it would have been even better with beer. I glanced longingly at the manhole.

After a while, the conversation turned to the Uighurs, and Polat mentioned how some of them look like Europeans. “One of my closest friends is blond,” he told me. “He looks more foreign than you. He looks so much like a foreigner that he sometimes plays them in Chinese movies. Did you see
The Opium War
?”

I nodded. The government-financed epic had been released in 1997, shortly before Hong Kong was returned to China. That had been a good year for nationalism and the movie consisted of two hours of evil British imperialists and heroic Chinese resistance.

“Do you remember the scene where the foreigner gets his throat cut by the Chinese person?” Polat asked.

“Not specifically,” I said. “But I probably saw it.”

He said that I couldn’t have missed it—they cut his friend’s throat right in the middle of the screen. Later this year the man was scheduled to appear in another government movie that celebrated the return of Macau to the Motherland.

“There’s a group of Uighurs and Kazaks who often play foreigners in those patriotic movies,” Polat explained. “They have real foreigners for the big roles, but they use the Uighurs and Kazaks for the smaller parts.”

“Do they pay them well?”

“Not particularly. My friend made three thousand yuan. But it wasn’t difficult work.”

The money was the equivalent of less than four hundred dollars. Polat laughed when I asked if he had enjoyed the movie.

“Of course not,” he said. “You know what those Chinese history movies are like—everything is
jiade
. It’s not what really happened.”

The young Azerbaijani sat silently while we spoke in Chinese, but he seemed to be observing me intently. Polat continued. “I prefer American movies,” he said. “The
Godfather
movies are my favorite. And I like any movie with
De Ni Luo
.”

The moment he said it, I realized that he vaguely resembled the actor: worn features, a solid jaw, and a certain weight that lurked behind his eyes. He was a Uighur Robert De Niro. The young Azerbaijani was still studying my face and finally he spoke to Polat.

“My friend would like to know something,” Polat said. “Are you a Jew?”

Sitting in the Muslim restaurant, I was taken aback by the question. The young trader leaned forward, and Polat explained: “He says that you look very much like a Jew.”

“I’m not,” I said. “Actually, I’m Catholic. Some of my ancestors were German and some were Italian.
De Ni Luo
is Italian, too.”

He translated and the young man’s face fell. There was a torrent of Turkish and then Polat said, “My friend is interested because he is a Jew.”

“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t know there were Jews in Azerbaijan.”

“There aren’t very many,” Polat said, and a moment later he raised his glass again.

POLAT WAS THE
first person who made me think about the sheer size and range of China. When you compared the Uighurs and the Han Chinese, they seemed a world apart in every respect: geography, culture, language, history. They were like antipodes contained within the borders of a single country.

Xinjiang lies directly north of Tibet, and it’s nearly as remote and forbidding. It constitutes one-sixth of China’s land mass—as much territory as the states of Alaska and New York combined—and the geography includes some of the highest mountains and most expansive deserts in the world. Ancient history is uncertain; the earliest residents were nomadic tribes who didn’t leave written records. Occasionally, the early Chinese dynasties established military garrisons, but the landscape was incompatible with Chinese agriculture and the emperors didn’t control the area with much consistency. It wasn’t until the ninth century that the ancestors of today’s Uighurs began to settle there in significant numbers. Even then, they were usually based in the oases, leaving large stretches of mountains and deserts to the nomads.

The Uighurs were often middlemen. They taught the Mongols to write using the Uighur alphabet (at an earlier stage, the Uighurs had used a runic script), and they served as intermediaries between the court of Genghis Khan and other Central Asian powers. Uighur religion was pragmatic, often shifting when some new military force arose: at various times, the Uighurs believed in shamanism, Manichaeanism, Nestorian Christianity, and Buddhism. In the tenth century, they began to convert to Islam, and after that, for a period of nearly a millennium, they stopped using the word “Uighur” to describe themselves. Their writing changed as well, to the Arabic script.

Whereas the Chinese prided themselves on continuity, many basic characteristics of the Uighurs were fluid—their name, their writing, their religion, their political allegiances. But they always seemed capable of surviving on the margins. That quality was still evident in modern times, when Uighurs did business in every Chinese city. Often, they opened restaurants or sold Xinjiang produce, such as raisins and melons, and they dominated the black market for currency. In China, it was rare for members of a minority group to establish themselves in predominately Han economies. Some of the Yabaolu traders used to tell me a popular Uighur saying: When the Americans landed on the moon, they found a Uighur there, doing business.

Polat and I had a second-language friendship—we communicated entirely in Chinese. I couldn’t understand the groups of Uighurs who patronized the restaurant, but their body language was eloquent. They were bigger than the Chinese, and they moved with a swagger. They were great handshakers—a rarity in China. If a woman came to the table, the Uighurs stood up. They refused to touch pork. They drank heavily—that particular Islamic restriction wasn’t deep-rooted. They had long sunbrowned noses and a hard gaze, and they carried themselves with a physical confidence that made the Chinese nervous. The few Chinese who ate at the Uighur restaurant minded their own
business, and I did the same if Polat wasn’t around. In particular, there was one large Uighur trader with a heavy brow who intimated a capacity for violence that I did not want to test. Once, he told me that he had just closed a big deal, selling half a million Tianjin-made condoms to an Uzbek. As far as I was concerned, that sounded as impressive as the Uighur on the moon. Another evening, the heavy-browed man stayed late in the restaurant, drinking vodka with a Uighur friend. As the alcohol disappeared, the two men took turns burning holes into their own forearms with cigarettes. Afterward, whenever they met, they would shake hands and each would touch the other’s scarred wrist, smiling at the memory of whatever shared demons had brought them together that night.

THE MODERN PERIOD
had been hard on the Uighurs. In the eighteenth century, the Qing dynasty sent armies westward, hoping to formally incorporate the territory into the empire. Resistance was fierce, but in 1884 the Qing formally annexed the region and renamed it Xinjiang (New Frontier). After the Qing fell, in 1911, Xinjiang became one of many parts of the empire that threatened to slip away. In the 1920s, some Turkic residents began to push for independence, describing themselves as “Uighur”—a name that hadn’t been used for almost a millennium. In 1944, with the Kuomintang government weakened by the Japanese invasion and the struggle against the Communists, a group of Uighurs, Kazaks, and White Russians in northern Xinjiang attacked and defeated the local Chinese garrison. The rebels declared the foundation of a multiethnic state called the East Turkestan Republic.

For the next five years, the East Turkestan Republic functioned essentially as an independent country, with close links to the USSR. But the Soviets never gave open support, and they probably saw the new republic as a bargaining chip for future negotiations with whoever happened to win the Chinese civil war. That was the risk of surviving on the margins: powerful neighbors always had a use for pawns. In 1949, after the Communists gained control of China, they invited the most charismatic leaders of the East Turkestan Republic to come to Beijing for meetings. The men left Xinjiang for their flight from Alma Alta, in the Soviet Union, and were never heard from again. Months later, after the People’s Liberation Army had gained control of Xinjiang, the Chinese announced that the plane had crashed. Many Uighurs believed that in fact their leaders had been executed, the victims of a secret agreement between Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin.

Since then, Xinjiang had remained firmly under Chinese control. After the 1980s, when new oil and gas reserves were discovered in the region, Han Chi
nese migration increased dramatically. Much of the Uighur unrest came from a fear that they were becoming outsiders in their own homeland. Throughout the 1990s, there was periodic violence: bombed buses, derailed trains. People assumed that the attacks were the work of Uighurs resentful of Chinese rule, but no organizations claimed responsibility. The violence, like so much else in Xinjiang, remained a mystery.

In Yabaolu, I watched the traders—the Central Asians, the Middle Easterners, the ones I couldn’t identify—and wondered how many belonged to some obscure ethnic group that had slipped in and out of the histories of great nations. Often, the Uighurs’ fate hadn’t been shaped by language, culture, or tradition; the whim of great foreign leaders mattered much more. Mongolia had recently become independent, a path that probably would have been open to Xinjiang if it had originally fallen under the control of the USSR instead of the People’s Republic of China. In the Great Game of Central Asia, the Uighurs were one of the losers.

After I came to know Polat well, he told me more about his family background. During the mid-1940s, his father had joined the army of the East Turkestan Republic. Like many of his fellow soldiers, Polat’s father had the image of a rifle tattooed onto his left shoulder. That had been a dangerous mark to carry into the Cultural Revolution, and by the end of that period the man was a cripple. Polat said that he wished he could write about this in a true history of the Uighurs. He also wanted to write about his own personal experiences, which included a prison term in 1985 for protesting against Chinese rule. He told me that that was why he could no longer teach in Xinjiang; he had left the province because of political pressure. He also said that he had saved forty thousand dollars, and he swore that sometime soon, when the money and the time were right, he was going to find a way to flee to America.

I TRIED TO
write my travel article about Nanjing but finally gave up. I swallowed the expenses, attributing the failure to bad timing, and then I turned to other projects. By summer, the embassy bombing already seemed like a distant memory. Occasionally, Chinese people brought it up in conversation, but they rarely pushed the topic. When they did, they tended to be more disappointed than angry, because their government had accepted the American apology and a financial settlement for the damage to the embassy in Belgrade. I almost never met a Chinese who believed that the attack had been accidental.