Ape Rifle

Beijing was the end of the line for my mom’s China adventure. In a bit less than a month she managed to see more of the country than most Chinese people, and she left thoroughly fascinated by the place. A memorable trip to say the least.

My trip, however, was only half done. After saying goodbye to my mom outside of the Beijing airport, Justin and I boarded a plane to Urumqi and the wilds of Xinjiang (新疆). To most people outside of China, this huge northwestern territory is completely unknown (I’ve had so much fun trying to explain it to friends back here in Canada). To most expats in China, it is the source of the famed 羊肉串 vendors and a potential glimpse of central Asian Muslim culture. To many Chinese, it is a place inhabited at once by dancing, smiling “nationalities” and knife-wielding terrorists.

I was warned more than once to be careful in Xinjiang, because it is a “very dangerous place with lots of terrorists”. I greeted these comments with a heavy dose of skepticism, seeing as they came from the same sort of people who were afraid to take a bus from Hangzhou to Ningbo (a three hour journey in one of the most developed coastal regions in the country). Michael Moore could make an interesting movie on the role fear plays in Chinese social stability.

So on June 24th, Justin and I set off for Urumqi without an itinerary nor a clue. We bought the plane tickets in Beijing, and all we knew is that we had to be back in Hangzhou around July 10th. How we were going to get back was to be decided somewhere along the way.

The four hour plus flight was smooth and uneventful, the plane fairly crowded with the usual golf shirt-wearing, leather shoes-sporting businessmen. The highlight of the trip was an article in the in-flight magazine about one of the airline’s stewardesses. Her corporate loyalty was demonstrated by her ability to withstand the horrible conditions of the company dormitories, which “sent most other applicants packing”. Apparently, exploitation has become so commonplace in Industrial Revolution China that a major airline doesn’t think twice about publicizing how badly it treats its employees. I had a great chuckle over that one.

Arriving in Urumqi was definitely strange. The place looked like a Chinese city, but did not feel like one. The buildings looked the same (drab communist blocks), the roads were just as dangerous, and there were mostly Han Chinese around; so what was so different? After a few hours walking around, it hit me: Urumqi had an overwhelming sense of open space. Compared to the out-of-control metropolises way back East, there was quite simply nobody here. It felt like a downtown core plunked in the middle of nowhere. The city seemed surrounded by barren mountains, its minimal bustle the only sign of life in an otherwise desolate landscape.

The crowds were overwhelming

Urumqi, for the most part, was grimy and ugly. Crumbling industry, grim tenements and unfinished concrete hulks made up a good part of the city. The center of town seemed almost comical; huge glass towers and shopping malls, completely out of scale and out of place. The only purpose of their presence was probably to comfort the Han population that, they too, could have a “modern” city like their cousins back East.

Batman would feel at home in this part of town

A typical market street with delicious watermelons

A mere twenty minutes away were the first real slums I have seen in China: muddy settlements in absolutely squalid condition, populated mostly by Uygurs, crawled up the side of the hill past an expressway. A man walked his goat down from this area onto a city avenue, chatted with a moto-cab driver for a few minutes, and then proceeded to force the animal into the back of the vehicle for a ride down the street.

Off to the kebob factory

Urumqi would have been wholly unremarkable (dare I say dead boring) if it hadn’t been for the people. Despite the mostly Han presence, there was enough of an ethnic mix to hint at what was to come. The faces, the languages, even the hat styles; this was the first truly multicultural place I had experienced in China. Skull caps mixed with wool caps and Mao suits, veils and flowing dresses mingled with Chinese princess skin-tight jeans. Urumqi is given a touch of the exotic it doesn’t really deserve.

Donkey carts and cool hats

The south bus station, however, felt more like another country. It serves the Uygur heartland south of the Taklamakan desert (and many, many hours away from Urumqi), and was teeming with decidedly non-Han looking people. I’ve never been to the Middle East, but I think I got a taste. Tired Han women tried to sell bus tickets to old Uygur men who had probably never even heard of Beijing, their grandsons necessarily acting as interpreters. On the whole, I found that Uygur men had a certain confident swagger to them (at least the young ones) that I had not previously experienced anywhere else in the country. We were definitely on the cusp of a vastly different culture, yet somehow still, hopelessly, in white-tile China.

Our time in Urumqi was mostly spent figuring out where we were going next, and how we were going to get there. We decided on Hotan (和田), a town on the southern Silk Road that was a mere twenty-four hours away by sleeper bus, completely across the huge desert.

Before leaving town, though, we had a fun night at a really lively night market. We sat at our table outdoors, drinking beers and chatting with the vendors of our section. I was amazed at how easily I could understand Uygur Mandarin; perhaps it was because their mangling of tones and pronunciation resembled my own weak grasp of the language. As a woman dropped a flyer off at our table, one of the cooks told us about how the paper was code and prices for various sexual services on offer. His laughing friend made some obscene gesture and offered us cigarettes. The neighbouring vendor kept trying to sell us a whole chicken.

The night market around 9:30pm (Beijing time, hence the bright sun)

Our preferred food stall

We eventually made our way back to the hotel, picking up some delicious watermelon slices on the way out of the market. Urumqi had been a slight glimpse of something different, and I was impatient to find out what Uygur Xinjiang was all about.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 16th, 2004 at 5:41 pm and is filed under China, Photography, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.