Oracle Bones (64 page)

Our last run took us to 1701 Massachusetts Avenue. Polat parked in front of a
NO PARKING ANYTIME
sign, and then walked into the lobby, past another sign that said
POSITIVELY NO DELIVERY THROUGH THE LOBBY
. The woman tipped Polat two dollars and twelve cents. On Twenty-fifth Street he left the Honda in the fire lane. Returning on Nineteenth, we were cut off by a cabbie.

“I’ve never seen a white person driving a cab,” Polat remarked. “It’s always foreigners. They have a really bad influence on the city’s traffic. The cabbies drive even worse than I do.”

He clocked out at ten o’clock. It was payday—inside Café Asia, the Mexican dishwashers lined up to collect their checks. The Uighurs pooled their tip money and split it five ways: twenty-six dollars each. Polat’s two-week take was $544.38. We headed outside to a pay phone across the street, so he could
call his wife; he was using calling cards because his cell phone bills had been so high lately. The wind was bitterly cold and a wild-eyed black man in a parka stumbled up to us.

“You want some Tylenol?” he said. “Three dolla a box.”

Polat and I stared at the man.

“Tylenol!” he shouted. “Three dolla a box!”

“No, thank you,” I said, as politely as possible. The man staggered down the street, muttering angrily to himself.

“Are you sure this is a safe place to use the phone?” I asked.

“It’s fine,” Polat said. He pressed the numbers—somewhere in Urumqi, a phone rang, but nobody answered. We drove back to his row house, searching the side streets. Parking, parking, parking. Finally Polat found a spot, but the hood of the car remained directly in front of a
NO PARKING
notice.

He said, “As long as most of the car is behind the sign, it’s OK.”

A huge American flag decorated the front bay window of Polat’s row house. He had invited me to stay in his room; he planned to sleep next door on the couch of his Uighur friend. We walked inside, where the Chinese landlord was sitting in the living room. The man did a double-take once he saw me.

“This is the friend I told you about,” Polat said. “He’s American.”

The man studied me, eyes uncertain. “We’re friends from Beijing,” I said, smiling. “I live there, but I’m American. I’m here visiting.”

“Oh, you speak Chinese,” the landlord said. He smiled, but his mouth had tightened into an expression that I recognized from China. He asked Polat if they could speak privately.

I waited in Polat’s tiny room. A moment later he joined me.

“He won’t let you stay here,” he said. “He says you’re a
wairen
.”

He spat out the word. In China, I was accustomed to being a
waiguoren
, “foreigner,” but here in Chinatown the issue wasn’t
guo
, “nationality.”
Wairen
simply meant “stranger.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I can stay at a hotel just as easily. I don’t want to cause you trouble.”

“He said you can stay next door with my friend. He just doesn’t want you in their house.”

“I understand. They don’t know who I am.”

Polat cursed angrily. He said, “Chinese are the same everywhere.”

AT NIGHT POLAT
delivered, but the days were free. We cruised the city in the Honda—he introduced me to Uighur friends, and he showed me some of his regular haunts, like the farmer’s market in northeastern Washington where
a lot of immigrants shopped. It was too cold for outdoor sightseeing, but he liked visiting museums, and one afternoon we went to the Smithsonian. The exhibit was entitled “Field to Factory,” and the introduction read:

The United States has been a haven for millions of immigrants fleeing war, poverty, and discrimination, or seeking freedom. But in some places, at some times, American society has oppressed its own people.

One exhibit described black migration to the North during the period from 1915 to 1940. There was a display of a cramped boarder’s room: bed, nightstand, closet. We stood before it in silence, both of us thinking the same thing. Finally, Polat laughed and said it: “That’s probably better than my room.”

Nearby, another section was labeled
WAS IT WORTH IT?
, and it quoted an anonymous letter that had been collected in
The Negro in Chicago
, a book by the sociologist Charles Spurgeon Johnson:

I thought [Chicago] was some great place but found out it wasn’t. Uncle told me he was living on Portland Avenue, that it was some great avenue; found nothing but a mud hole. I sure wish I was back home.

Polat never talked about going back—that was impossible after taking the step of political asylum. He often remarked that his timing had been bad; he wished that he had been more settled when the attacks occurred. So far, though, there hadn’t been many incidents of open prejudice. Once, a few weeks after 9/11, he had tried to enter a gas station in Essex, Maryland, but some white people asked him to leave. Other Uighur friends had had minor problems, and the ones with Islamic-sounding names noticed that it was becoming harder to find jobs. But the distrust was mostly unspoken, a certain feeling that hung around the city. “Americans won’t tell you to your face that they don’t like you,” Polat said. “It’s not like the Chinese—if they don’t like you, then it’s always very clear. Americans are smart enough to hide those feelings.”

His biggest worry was that his wife wouldn’t make it out. His lawyer had filed the necessary paperwork for her visa, but nobody knew how long the approval would take; all of these procedures were undergoing significant changes in the wake of the attacks. The lawyer thought it would be at least a year, maybe two, maybe more. In the meantime, it was getting harder to convince her that things were fine. During the month of October, after the attacks, Polat had rung up a cell phone bill of $488.75.

In the District, I stayed with Polat’s Uighur friend in the neighboring row house. The place was packed: three Mexicans in the basement, one Uighur on the ground floor, and nine Chinese in the upstairs bedrooms. All but one of the
residents worked in the food industry, and there was little interaction between them. Nobody seemed to care that a
wairen
was sleeping on the couch in the downstairs bedroom.

The Uighur was forty-eight years old, and he had also received political asylum. He was waiting for visa applications to be processed for his wife and twin sons. They were in Turkey; the man hadn’t seen them in more than two years. He requested that I not use his name if I wrote about him.

The walls of the man’s room were decorated with signs in different languages: English (
STOP CHINA’S PERSECUTION OF THE UIGHURS
), Arabic (
ALLAH IS GREAT
), and Chinese (
MAY ALL YOUR WISHES BE GRATIFIED
). On the door hung a Japanese Kabuki calendar from Hibachi Brothers, the restaurant where the man delivered. He held a degree in electrical engineering from a university in Xi’an. Recently, his car had been stolen—the neighborhood might have been in the early stages of gentrification, but it still had a ways to go.

One morning, the three of us talked, and the Uighur said that he was interested in the way Americans perceived culture. He said it was different from anything he had seen in Xinjiang or other parts of China. “I deliver to a lot of homes during my job,” he said. “Usually, they don’t ask me in, but sometimes they do and I can see what it’s like. You know, a lot of them have Chinese paintings in their homes. That tells me that a lot of Americans like China.”

I asked if that bothered him.

“No,” he said. “It’s fine to appreciate another culture. Probably it just shows that Americans have broad tastes. I also see a lot of African masks in people’s homes.”

I asked Polat’s opinion, and he frowned. Over the years, he had always spoken of culture as sacred, something that was more fundamental than economics or politics. Once he had told me that that was the problem with blacks in America—it didn’t matter that they lived in a country with a good economy and a free political system. Slavery had destroyed their language and culture, and that was different from somebody who emigrated freely. In his opinion, blacks would always struggle to recover from that loss.

Now he spoke slowly, thinking hard. “Those Americans have their own culture, the European culture, and it’s also great,” he said. “But I don’t see them with so many European things in their homes. Why do they like China so much? I know that the Chinese say they have five thousand years of culture, but is that really true? Or is it just something that they say over and over again?”

He continued, “I see these Chinese paintings and it makes me think of the restaurant I work for. It’s not real Japanese food—it’s
jiade
. The people who
make the food are not real Japanese. They’re Malaysian and Chinese who are dressed up as Japanese. I don’t see Japanese eating there. It’s all Americans.”

“Well, a real Japanese restaurant probably wouldn’t deliver,” the other Uighur said. “They’re very particular about things being fresh. So my restaurant isn’t a real Japanese restaurant, either. Actually, the owner is Vietnamese.”

“I think it has to do with American freedom,” Polat said. “If you can find a way to make money, then you do it. That’s what matters, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But no Japanese ever eats there. And it bothers me when they dress people up as Japanese. That reminds me of those Uighur restaurants in Beijing, where they have Chinese dressed as Uighurs.”

FOR POLAT’S BIRTHDAY,
he took the day off work. In the morning, we drove around the city, running a few errands and visiting the farmer’s market. Polat pointed out the government building where he paid his parking tickets. On the radio, an announcer referred to a story in the
Washington Post
about the expulsion of illegal immigrants. It was a cold, clear day; few people were outside. Polat had turned forty-six old years.

After the errands were finished, I asked if we could see the Pentagon. Earlier that month, in New York City, I had visited Ground Zero. Living in China had made the attacks seem so distant—the bootleg videos, the unsympathetic responses—and now I felt that I should witness these sites. We circled the Pentagon a couple of times before finding a Citgo gas station with a clear view across the Columbia Pike. As we pulled up, the national anthem was playing on the radio. Polat told me that since the attacks it had become a tradition to broadcast it every day at noon.

The Pentagon’s damaged wing had been boarded up, and the scaffolding was topped with American flags. Overhead, helicopters buzzed on patrol. Three Norwegian tourists had also found their way to the Citgo station and we stood near the foreigners. Polat kept glancing back at the Honda.

“It’s fine,” I said. “They don’t give parking tickets at gas stations.”

“This one might be different,” he said.

I went inside the gas station and bought a
Post
. The front-page headline read:

U.S. SEEKS THOUSANDS OF FUGITIVE DEPORTEES
Middle Eastern Men Are Focus of Search

I summarized the article for Polat: the Justice Department was cracking down on people who had ignored deportation orders.

“I support that,” he said. “People’s visas expire all the time and the govern
ment doesn’t do anything about it, which allows them to do something bad.” He shifted to English. “Too much freedom,” he said slowly, and then switched back to Chinese. “It shouldn’t matter what race a person is; if they come here and obey the laws, then they should be allowed to stay.”

I asked what he wanted for his birthday lunch. He told me that there was an Iranian restaurant that made good lamb kabobs, like the ones in Xinjiang. We drove past the statue of Simon Bolivar, past the World Bank, past Pennsylvania Avenue. Parking, parking, parking. While searching for a spot, Polat told me that life in the District was bound to get easier. “I just need to have courage,” he said. “I had courage in Beijing and that’s how I made so much money there. And it took courage to leave.”

He paused behind a black Lexus, waiting to see if it would pull out of a space. The car didn’t budge; we moved on. “You know, I look at the people here, and a lot of them aren’t as smart as me,” Polat said. “Some aren’t as educated; some are older. It’s not as if everybody in America is intelligent. But, you know, a lot of the people who aren’t so smart still have a good life. I figure that if they have a good life, why can’t I?”

After a few more minutes of searching, Polat found a parking spot and we walked to the restaurant. It was called Moby Dick House of Kabob. Polat smiled and waved when he entered. Another Uighur stood behind the counter, working the grill.

ARTIFACT J

The Criticism

THE STORY OF CHEN MENGJIA SEEMS TO CHANGE WITH EVERY TELLING.
Because so little has been written about the end of the man’s life, I am forced to rely on interviews, memories, rumors. Most people whom I talk to are older than seventy. Old Yang tells me that Chen was accused of having an affair; Old Mr. Zhao says that he got in trouble for defending traditional writing; Professor Shih has heard that the Communists killed him. Others have their own versions, sometimes secondhand. In my notebooks, words accumulate and contradict: