Wild n’ West of the Middle Kingdom

Xinjiang, translated as ‘the New Frontier,’ is the part of China that isn’t really China. Up through the 1980’s, and especially before the 1940’s, the province of Xinjiang was almost completely inhabited by the Uyghur people, who look, speak, eat and worship differently from the average Han Chinese. With the opportunity for a week off from HKU, I had the choice to travel to Vietnam or Thailand with my Tufts friends, or to Xinjiang with my elder brother, Michael. It was easy to pick the latter, since the prospect of having a family member tour me around a city in an isolated region of China was a bit more unusual that your standard 9-day trip to Thailand or Vietnam on the “tourist trail.”

In order to save a bunch of money on the airfare, I booked a flight out of Shenzhen, which is the city that sprung up on the mainland side of the HK border, once it was opened to Hong Kong at the end of the 70’s. Due to the difficulties of making a 9 am departure, my brother Michael put me in touch with a Chinese friend he had made in Korla, who had since moved to Shenzhen. Traveling out to Korla was uneventful, thankfully, besides a couple of interesting exceptions. First of all, the flight attendants on Shenzhen Airlines were unfailingly beautiful, young and fairly tall. It really let me imagine the “golden age” of American air travel. Then as the flight continued onwards, I was momentarily freaked out by what was going on in the plane. I was minding my own business, trying to sleep or whatnot, when I noticed that some people on the plane were doing some stretching excercises, then as I looked around, I realized that the entire cabin was participating, in unison, with these in-flight exercises. What was going on was that the pretty flight attendants were leading the passengers along with their own demonstrations and the PA system, and nobody seemed able to ignore them. This instance, while unimportant, was probably one of the most alien experiences I’ve had in China so far. I cannot fathom an entire American plane participating in anything besides a meal, let alone in perfect unison. Oh, I almost forgot, I was the sole waigoren (white-person) on the plane, but as soon as I left Hong Kong this became the normal state of things. Therefore, when I saw another foreigner waiting for the short flight (~250 miles) from Urumqi to Kurle (Korla), I didn’t really hesitate into introducing myself and entering into a conversation with him. Tim was a geologist working to extract some of Xinjiang’s vast mineral resources; he flew into China on a regular basis from his HQ in West Australia.

After nearly 24 hours on the go, it was quite a relief to finally arrive in Kuer’le (Korla) and look upon a familiar face – my big brother. It wasn’t too hard to find him at the nice, new airport, although my flight was the only arrival at KRL (it seems that a single aircraft makes three round trips every day to Urumqi and that is the only regular service to Korla). When we arrived in front of his apartment building near the center of town, I was taken aback when I had to get out of the way of a bell-covered horse pulling load of cargo. After dropping off my stuff at Michael’s apartment, we walked across town to the restaurant where I would meet some of his friends for dinner. One of the most striking details of his apartment building is that it lies immediately adjacent to a Uyghur ghetto where the buildings lack running water and are composed of old-fashioned bricks. One day as I looked out of Michael’s window I saw some locals cooking on an outdoor flame, another day I saw crowd gather for a funeral.

The Uyghur ghetto and Chinese district as seen from the apt.

We arrived at dinner somewhat early, and Michael’s friends gradually showed up. When everyone was accounted for, about nine other people, I was thereby dining with the entire expat population in a city of 400,000!!

I spent the next day, in one of the most landlocked cities on Earth, finishing an assignment for my music course. In my free time that day, Michael walked me through the Uyghur neighborhoods, introducing me to some of his friends (none of whom spoke any English) and bringing to my first Uyghur meal. For well under one US dollar, I had some delicious lamb kebabs and some crunchy naan. It was an introduction to a different world of cuisine – to say that Uyghur kebabs are greasy doesn’t begin to describe the difference between these kebabs and the ones you would find in a American-Greek restaurant.

Around midnight that evening, we headed West on the overnight train to Kashgar, the epicenter of Uyghur culture. At this point I think it is necessary to explain China’s time zones – or lack thereof. Despite China’s geographic size, 4th largest in the world, all of China technically runs on a single time zone! So midnight in Xinjiang felt more like 9:30 or 10:00, based upon the solar day. Korla’s sun would set around 9:30 or 10 on the official time, despite the fact that this was the end of winter!! I can imagine that the sun actually sets around midnight in mid-summer. This ridiculousness gave rise to the paradox of Xinjiang having an unofficial and official time – unofficial time runs two hours behind Beijing. This blur of what one defined as the “proper” time was confusing – for even the bus station clocks ran on unofficial time, but one could never be sure which time designation someone was alluding to.

To be continued…

The Photos are Up!

Check out the set on Flickr! and I promise I’ll try and get a post up soon!

Traveling through Xinjiang

The Crew

Originally uploaded by A-Boy.

Apologies for getting lazy with the blog – My experiences up until now haven’t been the most exciting. I certainly have come to get a much better feeling for Hong Kong’s culture, but that is another post. I have just returned to Korla from Kashgar and Tashkorgan – both cities from the extreme west of China. I have already begun to put up some photos on Flickr, as you can see. Anyways, I should be doing a full post soon, so take a look at the photos in the meanwhile.

Quick anecdote – nocturnal living at HKU

In the past 36 hours I’ve slept for a grand total of 90 minutes. “Why?” might you ask. I’ll give a brief rundown of the past 24 hours to explain:

After a normal night of Friday night antics, I returned with the other guys to the hall around 3:30 in the morning. Now, at Tufts, most people are asleep by 3 to 4 am regardless of the circumstances. At HKU, however, we returned to a lively hall ready for a bit of CounterStrike action (a multiplayer computer game, where we’re all on our own PCs, connected over the local network). What I expected to be a few rounds of CS turned into a marathon. By the time our hall had gotten tired of playing it was 7 AM! At this point, with daylight already present, most of the hall went to sleep. However, Jesse and I decided that since it was already daybreak, we should avoid sleeping at such unusual hours and simply stay up.  Joined by Pat, who had just finished a phone interview with a i-banking firm, we headed out to get some Dim-sum. It was an amazing meal, incredibly cheap, and we were completely dependent on locals to help us get food because we are utterly unable to understand the dim-sum procedure (at least at this particular place, theoretically dim-sum consists of snagging dishes off of roaming carts). We then went to a video-game arcade, where the best game was a Japanese drumming game.  Anyways, I let myself sleep from 1:30 to 3, but I did not want to fall into a deep sleep. My roommate, Jacky, for example, only slept a few hours in the morning, but then slept from 5-10 PM. I cannot imagine what that would do to my sleep cycle. Oh, Hong Kong, the city that sleeps even less than NY, by a long shot.

Bangladesh: Part III – In the name of Allah!

After a few days of low-key exploration and R&R, my Bengali experience reached a high point thanks to the dramatic Islamic festival of Eid al-Adha. Let me digress, however; after twelve days backpacking solo through Malaysia, I was absolutely exhausted. Despite being on “vacation,” the experience of never sleeping in the same bed for more than 2-3 nights and lacking a home base was draining. Furthermore, traveling solo required me to really keep my wits about me, especially in Malaysia where every other person is trying to make a quick buck off the white man. Anyways, back to Dhaka. I was quite happy to take it easy for the first few days, content to enjoy the wonderful hospitality Bengalis are so adept at providing. December 20th, the day before Eid, all the men of the house (ourselves included) set out to the markets in search for the perfect sacrifice, in this case, a bull.

Regarding Eid al-Adha, any bull sacrificed to Allah can be be split among seven households (I believe) while a goat may only be sacrificed for a single man. The Muslim tradition requires that all faithful with the available means must make a sacrifice for this annual holiday. Accordingly, Adnan’s extended family were buying a bull collectively (with one third going to the poor, as required), while Adnan, Mateo and myself were chipping together to buy our own (technically Adnan’s) goat. But one does not simply go to a supermarket and pick up a live bull, its an adventure in and of itself.

The first cattle market – more orderly and closer to the wealthy districts of Banani and Gulshan – was largely overpriced, according to Mr. Alam and his brothers. Logically, to get a better price, we drove onto a more egalitarian market, further away from the wealthy zones. The price of the bull was especially important this year, with cyclone Sidr killing many cattle in the coastal devastation, a limited supply led to, any guesses anyone? high prices. This second market, more middle-class (I suppose), was one of Bangladesh’s most crazy experiences to offer, and I highly recommend it.

The first thing that struck me about the market was not the smell or the uncleanliness, it was simply the utter chaos that presided over the entire market. Imagine an American shopping mall on the morning of Black Friday. The entire market for Goru (cow) streched as far I could see, even from the elevated position offered by a parked truck.

As you might guess from the photo, the market was one sign of Bangladesh’s record-breaking population density. And although I’ve probably been in larger crowds before (err, just maybe), the energy and chaos pulsing through the market really drove the sense of population home. It probably helped that bulls were trotting out of the market only semi-controlled by their new owners, furthermore, new deliveries of bulls were driven right through the crowd on enormous trucks. So, if you’d to try and imagine walking through the market, make sure you listen for the calls of “Goru! Goru! Goru…” to get out of the way of large bulls with sharp horns who can sense that something bad is coming for them in the future. That would bring me to the most unusual animal behavior I have seen, ever. Several times during our outing, we saw bulls attempting to mount other bulls – whether this was attempted homosexual behavior or simply an act of aggression, I am curious to find out.

Eventually, after spending what must have been around two hours at the eventful market, a suitable bull was finally found at an reasonable price. After paying the salesman, the men then proceeded a special counter to pay a fee to the market – a market commission, I believe. Suddenly, one bull near the checkout counter attempted to mount another, which the second bull did not take too kindly to. The second bull then attempted to run away, which caused the first bull to slide wildly as he attempted to regain his balance – it was at this point that Adnan and Mateo were nearly hit/trampled by the aggressive bull. I still am amazed that no one in the crowd was hurt from that incident. Nevertheless, we all survived the trip to the market, but the story continues on. Samson – the name we gave to the family bull – was his on the way out of the market when he (apparently, this is all secondhand) went into a mild fit and ran into a BUS! As it was a glancing blow, he was okay, Allah be praised, but he did walk away with a mild limp and bloody nose. The following photo was from an unrelated incident but gives one an idea of the chaos caused from thousands of bulls getting a vibe about their near future :

Before Eid could reach its climax the next morning, a couple more things had to happen. First, we bought a goat, although Mateo and I remained in the car because we feared the price hike that would occur if they saw the white men. Adnan then walked the goats (his cousin bought one as well) back to his home, where we named our goat “Yoda.” Next morning, I went to mosque with the men (notice a pattern here?) where I was the only Caucasian among the crowd of a couple of thousand men. I was grateful for prayers because no one was able to approach me, although I don’t think my presence offended anyone – I was dressed traditionally (in a borrowed punjabe) and wore the Muslim head-covering. Apparently, as Adnan translated the sermon in Bengali at some points, the mosque’s Imam was a relatively liberal man; the sermon was humanist, reminding the parishioners that before they could be good Muslims they had to be good people (e.g., dont pollute the city with your sacrifices and cause someone to fall ill) and may have even paraphrased Oscar Schindler with a sentence or two on the value of life. I asked Adnan if this was normal, and he told me of his old Mosque where one Imam wished that all Americans would die.

Finally, the finale.

Well, the time had finally come for Samson and Yoda to fulfill their purpose. The animals were brought and prepared while we waited for the Imam to come – only the ordained Imams could actually make the sacrafice and the requisite prayers. Our Imam had seen few winters, so he made sure to brush up for the ceremony:

And now, without further ado…

For pictures of the actual act, please proceed to the photoset on Flickr, click here to proceed right to the good stuff.

As for actual event itself, it was not disturbing because its not that hard to imagine. Nevertheless, witnessing the end of life for a large mammal was aweful and depressing. [Warning: gruesome text will follow!]

Samson, who was first to meet the executioner’s blade, had a good idea of what was coming once he saw other bulls sacrificed in close proximity. Without the ingenious method of restraining the bull (where the ankles are tied then the ropes are walked around in a tightening spiral), serious mayhem would ensue thanks to the enormous strength of an full-grown bull. Once restrained, the prayers were recited and the teenage Imam (I would not believe he was older than sixteen) sliced the bull’s throat, releasing a torrent of fire-engine red, arterial blood. What was most upsetting about this particular sacrifice was agonizly long time it took Samson to pass on – it was at least, at least, 2-3 minutes before Samson stopped breathing through the exposed windpipe (which happened to making a gruesome, snoring-like noise).

Yoda was no ignorant of his impending fate either. When both goats were walked to the driveway – the makeshift slaughterhouse – both goats urinated and defecated in sheer terror (I assume). Yoda’s demise was, thankfully, much faster than Samson’s. In any case, both made good dishes that evening, but that, alas, is another post.

As always, please check out the rest of the set on Flickr.