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.