Oracle Bones (75 page)

Wan sui
. Ten thousand years. Then he writes two more:

Wu sui
. In their traditional forms,
wan
and
wu
look nothing alike:
and
. But the simplified characters are easily confused, and in 1966, Chinese had been writing the new forms for less than a decade.
Wu
is defined as “nothing, nil.” The woman’s mistake meant: No years to Chairman Mao.

“She was immediately taken into custody,” Mengxiong says. “For about five years, she was held in Hebei province. For some of that time, she was kept in a pigsty. After she came back, in the early 1970s, she was never the same. Eventually, her health deteriorated even more and she was in a vegetative state for the end of her life. She died in 1982.”

The old man gives a dry Chinese laugh that has nothing to do with humor. “That was an awful time,” he says. “Many people died. There were so many famous scholars and artists who were lost. Nowadays, the young people in China don’t know anything about Mengjia. They don’t know his poems or his scholarship. It’s been almost forty years since he died.”

23

Patton’s Tomb

June 2002

SIGHTSEEING HAD BECOME ONE OF OUR ROUTINES IN THE DISTRICT.
Whenever I came to town, we spent at least a day out in the city, visiting the places that interested Polat. Arlington National Cemetery was one of the last destinations on his list. He picked me up in the Honda, and we stopped for lunch at an outdoor café. It was a perfect day in June.

He had recently switched apartments and jobs. He still lived in Chinatown, on Sixth Street, but now he had moved into the adjoining building. He was upstairs from his Uighur friend; it was much better than sharing space with the Chinese landlord. Polat still delivered, but now he worked for Spices, another Asian restaurant, which drew higher tips. The boss was Singaporean Chinese. When the Singaporean had first come to the United States, he had washed dishes at a Vietnamese restaurant; now he was a millionaire who ran his own business. The boss had made a point of telling this story to Polat when he started work there. At Spices, deliverers made five dollars an hour, plus tips.

Over the past two months, the Honda had required a number of repairs (a thousand dollars), and the parking tickets continued to accumulate (another three hundred dollars). But Polat’s English was improving and he felt more confident when problems arose. One recent evening, he had delivered to a man who attempted not to pay. The customer simply took the food, thanked Polat, and shut the door. Polat waited outside for a while, and then he began knocking. Finally, the man returned, explained that he had no money, and closed the door again. Polat knocked some more, and then he yelled out that he was
going to call the police. After that, the man paid. He said that he had been “only joking.”

In Polat’s opinion, immigrants who looked Middle Eastern or Central Asian had it the worst of all the minorities in the District, at least since the attacks of September 11. “It’s gotten harder for Uighurs who are looking for jobs,” he said. “One of my friends is named Mohammad, and he was applying for a position recently. There was a white person taking the application. The white person looked at the form, and then he noticed the name and looked up: ‘Oh—Mohammad.’ He said he’d call, but he never did. This happens a lot.”

I said that it would probably get easier over time, but Polat shook his head.

“Something like this doesn’t just go away,” he said. “I don’t believe that those feelings will just disappear. Actually, they get deeper and deeper over time. Every time that people see the pictures on the television, and every time they hear the words ‘bin Laden’ or ‘Islamic’ on the news, it adds to those feelings.”

He still hadn’t heard anything about his wife’s application for a visa to join him in the United States. The immigration bureaucracy had slowed down, and for months it had been the same—tense late-night phone calls from Chinatown to Xinjiang.

Halfway through lunch, he got up to check the parking meter. After the meal was finished, we sat talking in the sunshine, and I asked if he had any regrets about coming to America.

“There’s a Uighur saying,” he said. “‘A man with regrets is not a real man.’ There’s no use worrying about that. And I believe that every immigrant who comes to America has a difficult time at first. The early years must be difficult for everybody.”

THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT
had continued to push for the United States to include Uighur independence groups in the war on terror. In late January, China’s State Council released a report claiming that an organization known as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, or ETIM, had received funding and weapons from Osama bin Laden. According to the Chinese government, the ETIM had been responsible for a number of terrorist acts in Xinjiang during the past few years.

The day after the report appeared, the leader of the ETIM granted a telephone interview to Radio Free Asia. The man’s name was Hasah Mahsum, and he refused to disclose his location; he could have been anywhere in Central Asia. On air, he emphasized that his organization had received no financial
assistance from Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda. “We have no organizational relations with the Taliban,” Mahsum said. “We have enough problems to deal with.”

Almost nothing was known about Mahsum, or the ETIM, or many of the other Uighur groups that had been identified by China’s State Council. Over the past decade, attacks in Xinjiang had been sporadic and anonymous; formal organizations didn’t take credit for the violence, which made it difficult to analyze. There were only scattered pieces of information, and often they didn’t make sense. It seemed odd that a supposed Islamic fundamentalist terrorist would choose to make his case on an American-funded station—that was the equivalent of Osama bin Laden sending his tapes to the Voice of America instead of Al Jazeera. The connections didn’t add up: the Chinese claimed that the ETIM was linked to Osama bin Laden; the ETIM made its case on Radio Free Asia; Radio Free Asia was supported by Jesse Helms and other patriotic American conservatives. Something was getting lost in translation.

EVERY TRIP BACK
to the United States reminded me that, from my perspective, there would always be a hole in the nation’s history. I saw the new flags, and the increased security at airports, and the barricades that had been erected in cities like New York and Washington, D.C. The language had new phrases: the war on terror, the Axis of Evil, code orange, the Patriot Act. I boarded the plane in the Motherland and disembarked in the Homeland. I had always thought it was a bad sign for nations to use words like that, and living in China had convinced me that it was unhealthy when people became obsessed with days on which terrible things had occurred. But this observation was easily made from a distance. On September 11 of 2001, when history happened in America, I hadn’t been home.

In China, that had always been my perspective as a foreigner. I had arrived in a country that was recovering from trauma, where the people sorted through echoes and memories. The actual events were unknowable but the shadows were alive; artifacts mattered, and so did stories. Coming from the outside, I was often impressed by the arbitrariness: the coincidences and confusions, the events that mattered and the ones that were allowed to disappear. The divide between meaning and chaos often blurred.

My journeys between China and the United States came to feel the same way—a blurring of old boundaries and distinctions. When I first lived in China, I was mostly struck by differences, but over time the similarities became more obvious. Americans and Chinese shared a number of characteristics: they were pragmatic and informal, and they had an easy sense of humor. In both nations,
people tended to be optimistic, sometimes to a fault. They worked hard—business success came naturally, and so did materialism. They were deeply patriotic, but it was a patriotism based on faith rather than experience: relatively few people had spent much time abroad, but they still loved their country deeply. When they did leave, they tended to be bad travelers—quick to complain, slow to adjust. Their first question about a foreign country was usually: What do they think of us? Both China and the United States were geographically isolated, and their cultures were so powerful that it was hard for people to imagine other perspectives.

But each nation held together remarkably well. They encompassed a huge range of territory, ethnic groups, and languages, and no strictly military or political force could have achieved this for long. Instead, certain ideas brought people together. When the Han Chinese talked about culture and history, it reminded me of the way Americans talked about democracy and freedom. These were fundamental values, but they also had some quality of faith, because if you actually investigated—if you poked around an archaeological site in Gansu, or an election in Florida—then you saw the element of disorder that lay just beneath the surface. Some of the power of each nation was narrative: they smoothed over the irregularities, creating good stories about themselves.

That was one reason why each country coped so badly with failure. When things went wrong, people were startled by the chaos—the outlandish impact of some boats carrying opium or a few men armed with box cutters. For cultures accustomed to controlling and organizing their world, it was deeply traumatic. And it was probably natural that in extreme crisis, the Americans took steps that undermined democracy and freedom, just as the Chinese had turned against their own history and culture.

Even the worst moments, though, were but a glimpse of how history seemed to a marginal group like the Uighurs. From Polat’s perspective, the world had always been arbitrary and unpredictable, and it always would be. Later that summer, in August, he would telephone me in Beijing and say that his wife had asked for a divorce. She was tired of waiting, and emigration from Central Asia to the United States seemed far less appealing than it had two years before.

Later that same month, the American deputy secretary of state, Richard L. Armitage, would visit Beijing and announce that the United States had named the Uighur group known as the ETIM as an enemy in the war on terror. Many analysts would criticize the decision, believing that it gave the Chinese more license to oppress native groups in Xinjiang. But the United States needed to prepare for the debate on Iraq in the United Nations, where China held a per
manent seat on the Security Council. In Beijing, Armitage told reporters, “All in all, I think the counterterrorism cooperation is a pretty good picture for the U.S. and China.”

But that was still in the future on that June afternoon in Washington, D.C. It was a gorgeous day; there wasn’t a cloud in sight. Polat drove the Honda across the Potomac and into Arlington.

WE STOOD FOR
a long time at the tomb of John F. Kennedy. The cemetery was crowded, but people grew silent when they saw the eternal flame. There were only whispers and the shuffled sound of footsteps on granite.