The Apartment

We walked up a dark stairwell. The walls were bare, cold, undusted by color or personality. It was as austere as a school marm with a shrew’s soul.

My apartment was on the second floor, though it was really the first floor on which anyone actually resided, which I later learned was a sign of respect for my position – traditionally in China, the closer you lived to the ground, the more important you were thought to be, for you could escape the apartment more quickly and easily should it ever become engulfed in flames.

I’m sure it didn’t take long for them to wish I’d been on the top floor.

The apartment was roomy, if spartanly furnished and somewhat dank. The first room was a bright living room area extending to the right, complete with television, coffee table, utilitarian sofa, and several armchairs. Windows on the wall opened to the courtyard and let in plenty of sun.

To the immediate left was a converted computer room. There was a single bed in there, but the presence of a desk and desktop made it a computer room. It, too, was bright due to a large window, which had a direct view to an empty field adjacent the building and of the East Turkestan hills and mountains far to the north.

Through the living room was a large main room that I suppose would have been a dining area for a family. It was foreboding. Dark concrete floor, dark walls, no windows. High ceiling. Through it at the far end on the left was a kitchen, barely big enough for the full-size fridge, oven, stove, and small table within. It, too, had a window view to the open field.

To the immediate left off the main room was the bathroom, which was dominated by a large tub and a large water heater. There was a concrete shower stall and a sink dating back to the time of Genghis Khan. A small window showed the same field as did the kitchen and computer room.

Immediately to the right off the main room, directly across from the bathroom, was the large master bedroom, flanked on both sides by bedside tables with lamps as shaky as a meth-head with withdrawals. Against the far wall was a large armoire, which is too fancy a word for it. But it’s better than saying “poorly-crafted piece of furniture in which clothing is stored.” A chest of drawers of similar craftsmanship was on the closer wall. A queen bed dominated the room, but the best thing about the room was that it led out onto a balcony, about which the best thing was… let me put it this way:

Stroh’s is shit beer, but when it’s free, it’s less shit. Free beer beats beer that isn’t.

The balcony was like a Stroh’s. It was a shit balcony more intended for hanging laundry or for fermenting vegetables – and it smelled suspiciously like fermented feet. But having a shit balcony was better than not having a balcony. It was clean, despite the ghosts of vegetables/clothes/feet past. It had a view of the courtyard, though it’s akin to saying that a Yugo was a car.

The apartment was like a warehouse-partitioned living space. It could have been the cheap, drab furniture. It may have been the exposed ceiling pipes in the kitchen and main room. Or it could have been the unfashionable, seemingly uncleanable floors.

Regardless, it wouldn’t take much time for me to start longing for the warehouse aura, as it would soon give way to one of a Chinese jail cell.

The Complex

We walked into a grand lobby with high ceilings, dark gray walls, and austere furnishings. It had as much personality as a pair of black socks – and with as much fragance as unwashed ones.

The lobby’s décor was simple, foreboding, and duplicitous, as transparent as China had been reputed to be – and what I’d been expecting. The dank, cramped elevator we took up to the third floor only added to the ambience. A cluster of thoughts cascaded through my addled brain.

What kind of school is this going to be?

There was a ding! and the doors opened…

…to a bright, airy lobby with windows from the ceiling nearly to the floor. To the right was open space and doors leading out onto a huge patio. Forged though snow piled as high as the winter was long lay a walking path; the displaced impure snow had been shoveled to to each side of the path, discarded like old washrags after a morning of handwashing floors.

To the left was a front desk before an unornamented but freshly painted wall. (Later I would find irony in its being painted sky blue, the background of an East Turkestan flag). Beyond that were a computer lab, offices, classrooms, and bathrooms. All modern. All newly constructed or in the process of being so.

The juxtaposition of my first impression when I got out of Scott’s car and when I entered the first-floor lobby with the actuality of the school amused me. It was like going apartment hunting and pulling up in front of the most unappealing building imaginable only to find an residence therein complete with remote-controlled privacy shades, marble countertops, and velour carpeting.

I was about to smile to myself, but it turned into a smile for a short woman with bad teeth and a stylish haircut that I came to realize later was unsuitable for her. She introduced herself, in English, as Ellen.

“I am the Assistant School Director,” she said. It didn’t take but a few days to realize it was titular, for she had as much say in how the school was run as did the scrub brush blowing out in the semi-desert wind. And she had about as much backbone, too.

But I digress, for at that moment, I was just happy for the first time in a week to be speaking to an adult whom I understood.

After a quick tour of the still-under-construction school, we headed to my apartment on the northwest side of town, on West Ring Road, located on the western edge of Karamay proper. As we drove, Ellen proudly pointed out city landmarks big and small that I would soon know myself: People’s Square, Xinjiang Karamay People’s Hospital, Karamay Radio and Television University, and more.

Within a quarter of an hour or so, we turned off West Ring Road and into an apartment complex. In Korea, I was used to scores of nondescript apartment buildings comprising a complex, all colored the same beige or white or light gray. And I had seen similar structures and collections of structures in Shanghai and Urumqi. But I had never lived in one.

But that was going to end. I was finally going to be living in a dank, gray apartment building, a residence with as much personality as frozen mud. We wound through the complex until we got to the far end where, tucked away from most of the other local Han residents, almost in isolation, was a six-story edifice. Along with one adjacent to it and another across from it, it was a buck-toothed rectangle – a three-sided rectangle instead of the normal four-building design with a center courtyard.

It was an apartment complex for foreigners – and the denigrated scourge of Han society forced to share, as punishment, courtyard space with us.

And I say that in the warmest of ways.

The City

Karamay surprised me. No collection of skid row slums. No windowless mud hovels. No goats or pigs running rampant in the road. No mounds of human feces on every corner. No fires in barrels from which people kept warm and/or fed. No signs of backward ass China that I’d just rumbled across for the past five or six hours.

Instead, Karamay appeared quite modern. Working stoplights. Paved streets. 21^st-century buildings. Late-model cars.

But it was an erstwhile East Turkestan in all its modern Silk Road, ahem, glory. All in homage to the Han. Dull, gray, unimaginatively designed buildings were outfitted in metal gleaming in the bright January sunshine. Blocks of shops proudly served Chinese food or sold Chinese-made electronics and fashion. Supermarkets with posters of smiling Han families comprised two full, separate, blocks.

This main street in the bustling business district was littered with businesses and banks, with most billboards, bank signs, and building names in Chinese.

In somewhat stunned silence, I sat and took it all in. There was no evidence of the third world. No hint of the poverty I’d observed barely fifteen minutes earlier. And almost no evidence that anyone other than Han Chinese lived here.

I was bursting with questions (Where was the Uyghur influence? Where were the Uyghur businesses? Where were the Uyghur restaurants?), yet I could do nothing but look around in wonder.

After driving down the main thoroughfare for several blocks, including past a big intersection, we pulled into the front parking lot of a building with banks of dark-paned glass. It looked like the grand entrance to a foreboding hotel.

“School,” Scott managed to enunciate. I nodded.

We smiled and got out.

More China Protestations of East Turkestan and Uyghur Business

Click below for a less objective view of PRC's reactions to Tokyo's allowing the 2012 World Uyghur Congress's meetings, straight from the English-language version of the Communist Party's mouthpiece:

Beijing Discontent with Tokyo

Chinese propaganda in full force and typical spin.

China Trying to Bully Its Neighbors over East Turkestan and Uyghurs

Click the link below for more on PRC's reaction to Japan's allowing the World Uyghur Congress to hold meetings in Tokyo last year:

Japan and China at odds.

The Drive

East Turkestan (called Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region by the People’s Republic of China) is as big as France is. But it has the population of greater New York City and includes a large geological depression split in two (the Junggar Basin with the Gurbantuggut Desert to the north and the Tarim Basin with the Taklamakan Desert to the south) by the Tian Shan Mountains.

Known by various names throughout its turbulent history, East Turkestan is a hostile place to live. I’ve seen reports alleging that more than 90% of the region is unfit for human habitation. After the drive from Urumqi to Karamay (about 190 miles, slightly less than the distance between New York and Boston or between Santa Barbara and San Diego), I didn’t find that hard to fathom; it’s easy to see why it’s so sparsely populated.

From Urumqi west was a respectable four-lane interstate-type of road called Lianhuo Expressway. At Hutubi, a nondescript city about 40 minutes out, we got onto a narrow two-lane road that would be comparable to a state highway in the U.S.

Only this was through tundra-type land (more desert-like in summer). Flat, featureless. Think Nevada on the way to Area 51. Or through Nebraska and Kansas toward the Rockies. Only flatter and more nondescript, if that’s possible. And blanketed with more than a foot of snow.

Only at a Ku Klux Klan rally could I imagine more white. And even then, I’m not sure.

The views were expansive. Far to the west, all the way to Kazakhstan, more than a hundred miles away, were unobstructed views of the Dzungarian Alatau Mountains. As the highway wound and turned more northerly, the flatness of the land allowed the Altay Mountains bordering Russia, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia to come into unblocked view.

We passed through only several small towns, which were really no more than small gaggles of buildings and houses clustered together, as if huddled to help protect each other from the fierce winds whipping through the basin.

The going was slow, too, both temporally and literally.

Because of the impossibility for communication with Scott, I was left to my own observances of the surroundings and my own thoughts questioning whether or not I’d made the right decision to live in the middle of, apparently, nowhere. Time slowed to a crawl.

Often, our drive would slow to a crawl, too. Not because of snow- or ice-covered roads, mind you (it was, fortunately, a sunny day; speaking of which, rarely have I seen such clear, blue skies), but because of all the non-automobile traffic on the road.

Tractors. Horse-drawn carts. Herds of cattle. Wandering goats. The occasional drunk.

The most common things I saw – aside from snow, flat terrain, and animals – were gas stations. This isn’t too surprising when you remember that East Turkestan lies atop vast reserves of oil.

Ahhaaaa…

Now you see why Beijing has so much interest in the East Turkestan. Well, aside from just plain enjoying oppressing dissenting peoples and suppressing differing cultures.

After several days of driving (okay, it was really just several hours), there it was, literally appearing out of nowhere: a restaurant. There was nothing else but tundra, snow, and mountains in the far distance. Imagine driving across the face of the moon in a big Buick and then, suddenly, a restaurant appeared in the midst of barren nothingness.

Well that’s what it was like.

So, we stopped for lunch, which wasn’t as memorable as the bathroom was. That’s not to suggest that lunch wasn’t good – it was – but it is to suggest that I had never frequented a bathroom like that one, nor have I since.

The bathroom was apart from the building where we ate, which in and of itself isn’t so memorable. That the “toilet seat” was actually a wooden plank and that the “toilet” was actually a large hole in the ground about twenty feet deep and maybe fifty feet across made it unforgettable.

Oh, and the stench from the mountain of crap from the countless number of people who had done their business over the course of a just-as-immeasurable period of time made a slight impression, too.

Suddenly, my lunch didn’t seem as tasty as it had been.

As we continued the drive, I wondered – again – what I had gotten myself into. This time, though, I was contemplating not politics or lack of basic freedoms but instead my soon-to-be-living conditions. Nothing I had seen from Urumqi to Karamay had given me any impression that I was in anything but a third-world country.

But I wasn’t necessarily turned off by it. Quite the contrary, actually, as I was mentally preparing myself to deal with those type of conditions.

Several years earlier, I had lived in the slums of Singapore. I had traveled through the rundown Baltic states of Europe – Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia – in the dead of winter. I had spent time in the simple countrysides of Slovakia and Hungary. I had walked and gotten drunk amidst the skid rows of Nepal. Through it all, I had seen poverty unlike anything I’d seen in the worst parts of Los Angeles, Chicago, or New Orleans.

But this seemed like it would be worse.

Three questions rotated in my mind like an iTunes playlist stuck on repeat: How was I going to recruit teachers to teach here? How was I going to find students who could afford tuition? Was I really going to invite my relatively new girlfriend to come and live with me here?

I tried to tell myself that there was no way a large, successful English-language franchise was going to open a school in a remote area of the world (Urumqi has the distinction, if I’ve not mentioned this before, of being the farthest city in the world from an ocean or sea).

I had succeeded in believing that things were only superficially squalid. And then we reached the outskirts of Karamay, and what I saw made the Jordan Downs housing projects in Watts seem palatial and pristine: crumbling mud homes with no windows or doors; too-thin children wandering aimlessly between the huts, and hobbled older people gathered around large barrels that sent thick black smoke into the sky.

What struck me most about the people I saw were their thin coats, ratty sweaters, and lack of shoes – nothing that offered much protection from the bitter wind and cold.

With no one capable of discouraging me from expecting a city of anything other than a gaggle of grimy ghettos, we drove up Yingbin Road, one of the main roads leading over a bridge and into Karamay.

2012 London Book...Fair? Not So Much

It happened last year, but the link below is just another show of how substantial is the PRC’s reach and how strong their will to repress dissent. Shame on the London Book Fair for allowing itself to be strong-armed.

Not So Fair After All

The Week

Because Urumqi is as far from Shanghai as New York is from Los Angeles, I had to take a flight – on China Southern Airlines, one of China’s domestic carriers.

It was not a pleasant flight. Though it’s been nearly ten years since that flight, I can still remember the flight as if it were yesterday. Especially the smoke permeating the cabin.

No, not engine smoke. Cigarette smoke.

Seems China hadn’t gotten the memo that smoking on flights was not a good idea. Don’t know if they still think that way; if you’ve flown on China Southern, or another domestic Chinese airline, please let me know if it’s still true or not.

Anyway, I can’t recall ever being happier that a plane landed. I don’t think I’d have cared if the flight had crash-landed. I was just glad it landed.

But the fun wasn’t relegated to the flight.

As I mentioned at the end of my last post, my new boss, the school owner, didn’t speak English. As a result, he met me at the airport with his family, including his 13-year-old daughter, who did speak a modicum of English. She was my translator for the next week.

Honestly, it wasn’t that bad. She was a nice enough girl and the family a nice enough one. But I couldn’t help thinking a familiar refrain that I’d thought in Korea, too: the owner of a steel company usually knows steel and the business of steel very well – why in Korea and China (and elsewhere) do people who have no knowledge of English think they can run an English school? I know some people would argue that business is business, but I repeat: how often have you run across a steel magnate who doesn’t know steel? A bank CEO who doesn’t know banking?

Anyway, Scott (he was able to introduce himself in English) was in the computer parts and service business. He apparently was a very wealthy man, but it’s all relative.

He and his family showed me Han Chinese culture amidst the week-long Lunar New Year celebrations. Elaborate dinners at sumptuous restaurants. Our own fireworks celebration in a local park. Skiing, snowboarding, and tobagganing at a local resort. Hitting tourist spots for what I realized later were Han Chinese spins of East Turkestan traditions.

At the hotel in Urumqi where I was staying, I even got the obligatory call from a prosititute, which I’d read would be coming. It’s common in big Chinese cities for hookers to become aware that a foreigner is staying at a hotel, particularly a nice one. Sometimes, the hotels have relationships with these women and will call them. Other times, the ladies will call up or visit the hotel and get the room numbers of the names that are obviously foreign.

Regardless of the method, a call is made, in broken English, to the room where the foreigner is staying. If you’re unaware of this practice, it’s easy to get yourself in trouble because any misunderstanding of what is being said that results in a “yes” response from you constitutes an agreement to whatever has been proposed. A visit to your room, whether or not there is sex or even fondling, even if it’s opening the door to answer a knock before quickly realizing what’s going on and rejecting any advances, can result in your being charged a fee. Refusal to pay this fee often ends up in beatings and/or worse. Many hotels, complicit as they are in this practice because they receive a cut, will not side with the foreigner – and neither will the local police. Of course, you’ll never get anyone to admit that this actually happens.

Though I knew it was coming, the call still nearly fooled me. The woman on the other end said my name, albeit in garbled fashion, and offered to help me during my time in Urumqi. Her English was more than passable enough, and her offer not so transparent, that I nearly acquiesced. Being alone in a strange place and being awoken from sleep early in the a.m. both contributed to my nearly being weak enough to say “yes”. Fortunately, I saw through the scheme before I crossed the point of no return.

As for any interaction with Uyghurs, it was limited to getting kebabs at street vendor stalls or at small restaurants and taking them to go. At the Urumqi hotel, as nearly all tourist hotels, there were only Han working. And no Uyghur food. Outside of Urumqi, at some of the tourist spots, however, there was more Uyghur presence in hotels and restaurants, but we didn’t frequent those places as much.

But I saw Uyghurs everywhere. Eating at and running Uyghur restaurants. Riding bikes through neighborhoods. Operating mom and pop convenience stores. Walking to school. Sitting on curbs. Pushing carts. Selling their wares. Playing hauntingly beautiful and often quite rhythmic traditional songs.

Because of the language barrier, I was unable to ask questions. But I watched and observed, marveling at how marginalized economically a majority population could be in its own land.

After a week being in and around Urumqi, and of wondering when I would head north, we finally left for the nearly 200-mile trip to Karamay.

“We” being Scott (no English) and me (no Mandarin). Scott’s family lived in Urumqi and didn’t make the trip with us.

And for such an uneventful trip where the communication was possible only through hand gestures and monosyllabic stabs at each other’s language, it was unforgettable.

The Meeting

Training in Shanghai was boring. I think the only excitement was how the other Academic Director trainees and I compared where we each were going; I was regarded as an anomaly because I was the one going out to Karamay in the wild, wild west. I would be closer to Moscow than I would be to Beijing.

The first two days of training were at the main office – only twice did we go out to observe, and on both occasions, we only went to the closest EF school, which was about a fifteen-minute drive.

To that point, I’d eaten nothing but Chinese food and interacted with either native English-speaking foreigners or with Han Chinese. I’d not yet met a Uyghur, but I had looked up where a sizable population of them lived in Shanghai.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t close to where I was staying in Pudong, and with training starting early every morning, I hadn’t yet ventured out into the labyrinth that is Shanghai.

A chance meeting on the third day of training changed all that; in retrospect, it changed the course of my entire time in China.

On that third day, Wednesday, we trainees visited a branch school in another part of Shanghai, further away, and this is where I met Yoldash. I don’t really remember his name, but I would give him a fake name here even if I did know it.

He taught English, but it wasn’t until later that I realized how unusual this was, even in Shanghai. Uyghurs don't often work at such established franchises in the rather nice positions of English teacher. That Yoldash was able to speak such good English was then, though not later, another surprising revelation to me.

He and I talked for as much time as we could. He was pleasantly surprised at my knowledge of and interest in Uyghurs and particularly amazed when I told him I was going to Karamay, for he had dozens of friends from there.

I didn’t hesitate when he invited me to a party/celebration at a restaurant in his neighborhood the next night. Where it was and how’d I get there or back to Pudong were of no concern to me. I had to meet him and his friends.

The next night, my stomach flipped in excitement as the cab pulled up in front of the restaurant. My fellow trainees were with me, and we beheld this restaurant together: neon Chinese characters and Arabic-eque script. My companions were skeptical, but the Uyghur writing convinced me were at the right place – well, at least at a Uyghur restaurant.

The front door opened into a lobby area where Yoldash greeted us in typical Uyghur fashion: right arm across his torso so his hand, in a fist, rested on his heart.

“Assamau-alaikum,” he greeted us.

“Vei-alaikum-assalam,” I answered tentatively, not sure I said it correctly.

But Yoldash smiled broadly. “Nice to see all of you. Follow me.”

We followed him into this large ballroom-style room where, in the middle, was a large, empty wood floor with two huge chandeliers hanging above. Surrounding this empty area, camped on thick carpet, were dozens of round tables, each with a white tablecloth blanketing it like snow blankets a meadow and illuminated by smaller chandeliers. Intricately patterned rugs hung on the walls next to ornate lamps and portraits of people with Central Asian features.

From third grade to ninth grade, I had taken ballroom dancing at my parents' behest. This room reminded me of that ballroom, except where the stuffy reluctance of pre-teens doing something their parents had forced them to do infiltrated that room, the mouthwatering aromas of lamb, fish, and chicken permeated this one.

Whereas those ballrooms of yore were full of the youthful nervousness and innocence, this room was filled with celebration, not of anything in particular, but of life, of being with good friends and new ones.

And where that old ballroom boomed with classical ballroom music, this one reverberated with laughter and the gutteral beauty that is the Uyghur language.

The images of this restaurant, new to me on that night, would become familiar to me in the coming months.

But on this night, it was all new. Exciting. Educational. Illuminating. Yoldash introduced our group to scores of people. With every introduction of me, there accompanied exclamations, smiles, and warm hugs or hearty handshakes.

I was the one going to Karamay. I was the one who knew who Uyghurs were and what was going on in the west. A surprising number knew English and I was able to learn a lot more than I already knew. I was given lists of phone numbers to call, restaurants to visit, and people to talk to. One man gave me a particular name, that of his cousin, and she would become my best friend in Karamay, my Uyghur “sister”, if you will.

I left the restaurant that night with confirmation that I had made the right decision and was headed to the right place.

But it would be a week or more before I was able to hit up the contacts I’d made in Shanghai. Lunar New Year was on the horizon and my first week in East Turkestan would be spent in Urumqi with the owner of the school, my boss.

And he didn’t speak a word of English.

Uyghurnomics: Loyal Supporters? Soccer and the Modern Uyghur Identity (working paper)

Uyghurnomics: Loyal Supporters? Soccer and the Modern Uyghur Identity (working paper)

I'm still working on my next entry "A Week in Shanghai", but I came across this post this morning, so I thought I'd share the link. Quite an interesting read and very illuminating.

Till my next update...