A market in Turpan.
I spent two weeks in August 2007 backpacking around Xinjiang, the far western Chinese province that covers the same area as Western Europe. Xinjiang is home to the Uighur people, who are Muslim, speak a Turkic language, and have more in common with Central Asians than Han Chinese. They also happen to make really delicious food. Although they are persecuted much like the Tibetans, their plight—including that of several fruit sellers who are still detained at Gitmo as part of the “War on Terrorism”—receives only a fraction of the attention.
Although this story takes place in Urumqi, the provincial capital of Xinjaing, it does not concern the Uighurs or their plight. Much like St. Petersburg, which is said to be the most European of cities (even though it is, arguably, not in Europe), Urumqi is the most Chinese of cities even though it’s in the homeland of another people. Nondescript off-white apartment buildings and office towers dominate the city and with the exception of the incredibly imposing internal security building downtown, the city could be plopped down in Hunan or Hubei and no one would notice.
On one particularly hot day in Urumqi, I decided to head to a small, hole-in-the-wall dumpling house near the center of the city for lunch. I ordered noodle soup and baozi stuffed with pork and veggies. As my food came, an old, half-drunk Han Chinese man sitting at the table next to me struck up a conversation. As he peered out from over his soup, he began recounting his struggles during the Great Leap Forward.
“When I was young, we didn’t have any meat to eat. People would literally take the bone out of my bowl as I tried to eat it. It was a struggle to survive.” As he was talking, he noticed that two young Chinese nearby were snickering at him. They seemed more interested in the most recent fashion craze than learning from their elders—both had crazy, only-in-China dos, as well as jeans with all sorts of bling on them. “You see these kids,” he said, “they don’t give a damn about the past. They don’t understand what Mao did, nor do they really care. They are only focused on the making money.”
The author at Kanas Lake, near the Russian and Kazakh Border.
Throughout our conversation, I continued to eat the baozi, even though they tasted a little off. Sure enough, by the time night fell, I was violently ill. Instead of finishing my trip off with a few days in Kashgar, I went to the Urumqi hospital, where I was forced to sit in one of 250 recliners pointed towards a TV showing a ridiculously corny sitcom about how smart Mao was as an IV slowly replaced my fluids. It was not the way I had envisioned my three month odyssey ending, but so it goes.
As I sat in that hospital and reflected on my conversation in the dumpling house, I thought about how quickly China was changing—how it was a society hellbent on developing, carving a new future, and forgetting the recent past (the ancient, 5,000 years of “glorious history” were something that people seemed to hold on to). I instinctively wanted to compare this to the U.S., where we confront the dark episodes in our history like slavery, Jim Crowism, Japanese internment, etc. Yet I now realize that drawing this kind of distinction between the two countries was far too simplistic.
In reality, the U.S. is a country with an incredibly short attention span that doesn’t like to look its problems in the eye. We brush things under the rug. We dissemble. We don’t make eye contact with homeless people on the street.
For me, the problem with this is that it undermines our ability to be honest with ourselves. The old man in the dumpling house was trying to teach his young countrymen a lesson, and they ignored him. Maybe it was because he was old, or wearing peasant garb, or because he was half-drunk. Whatever the reason, they ignored him. And it’s hard to gain a new perspective, and wisdom, if we ignore the people around us who have something valuable to share.
J.R. Siegel and Allison Lipps are Boston-based adventurers who met in China. Read this piece and others at The Adventures of Mumpus and Grumpus.
