The Emperor Far Away (6 page)

For the officials of Yining, a tiny city by Chinese standards of just 250,000 people, the presence of the fourth most senior politician in the country was the equivalent of the pope, the Queen of England and the president of the USA all arriving at the same time. Over the next few days, crossing roads became a tedious process as the police held up both pedestrians and cars while he moved around Yining in a convoy of police vehicles and black SUVs, all travelling at speeds that contravened even China’s lax traffic laws.

Trailing around town, it took me two hours to find a place to stay. Some hotels were booked out by the officials and media accompanying the special guest from Beijing. Others weren’t licensed to take foreigners, and wouldn’t bend the rules with so many police on duty for the visit. Eventually, I found a home on a road named after Stalin, a legacy of the time when China and the Soviet Union had been allies and Yining sat near the frontier between their respective empires.

Ninety-five kilometres from the border with Kazakhstan, Yining has been fought over for centuries by Russia, China and Mongolia. As late as 1962, Soviet and Chinese soldiers were exchanging fire across the frontier. That history has left it with a muddled identity. To the Chinese it is Yining, but the Uighurs call it Ili, the name of the river that runs through the south of the city. The Russians and Kazakhs refer to it as Gulja, a name it acquired when the tsar’s forces briefly occupied it in the late nineteenth century.

Normally tranquil, with a smattering of faux-Russian architecture and tree-lined streets which provide much-needed shelter from the ferocious summer sun, Yining sits in the Ili Valley. The river that gives the valley its name ensures it is the most fertile part of Xinjiang. Yining’s suburbs are expanding fast, but they give way to fields of wheat, corn, lavender and green pastures full of grazing sheep that stretch all the way to the frontier with Kazakhstan. Looming over them are the snow-tipped Tian Shan Mountains, which divide China from central Asia.

Like many small cities in China, Yining is really just an overgrown country town, the donkey carts that act as taxis in the older districts only adding to the rustic feel. But Yining’s proximity to the border means it and the surrounding area are home to the greatest concentration of the 1.25 million ethnic Kazakhs in Xinjiang. As such, it is the capital of the province’s Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture. It is a title that dates back to the 1950s, when Xinjiang was carved into autonomous areas. Each of the region’s minorities was given a prefecture or county ostensibly run by a local authority staffed by their own people.

Predictably, the Uighurs are not part of this scheme. None of the areas of Xinjiang where they are a majority are designated as Uighur autonomous districts, although the entire province was renamed the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in 1955. This glaringly obvious ruse to restrict Uighur influence verges on the ridiculous in many places. In the vast Mongolian prefecture that extends south from the centre of Xinjiang to the border with neighbouring Qinghai Province, the Uighurs outnumber the Mongols seven to one.

With every senior ethnic minority official shadowed by a Han CCP cadre who holds the real power, the prefectures and counties are merely for show. They are a classic example of divide and rule, a way of separating the Uighurs from the other ethnic groups and preventing any joint rebellion. It has been an effective tactic in Xinjiang, because the Uighurs’ antipathy towards other minorities, even their fellow Muslims, is notable. Whenever I asked why that was I got vague answers blaming their different lifestyles. ‘We are traditionally farmers, while the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz are nomadic people,’ one Uighur told me.

Angelina, a Uighur woman I got to know in Yining, was more honest. ‘A lot of Uighurs are jealous of the Kazakhs and other minorities because they all have their own autonomous areas. They think the other minorities get treated better than we do.’ She said it with a shrug which could have been her way of expressing a view on the boundless capacity of the Uighurs to feel sorry for themselves, or her agreeing with their sentiments. It was hard to tell.

Introduced by a mutual friend, a Uighur living in exile in Australia, we met for the first time outside Yining’s most fashionable department store. The advertising billboards which covered its façade were all of smiling Han faces, something which can’t have been lost on the Uighur and ethnic Kazakh shoppers. Unlike the perpetually late Billy, Angelina was dead on time. She strode confidently up to me, her long hair in a ponytail and slim and elegant in a white dress that showed off her brown legs. She shook my hand and suggested we go to a nearby park to talk.

Despite being born and raised in Yining, Angelina was not your typical small-town girl. At twenty-six, she seemed much older than her years. As we strolled through the park, passing middle-aged Han women pushing their grandchildren in buggies and groups of teenagers in the baggy tracksuits that are school uniforms in China, it became apparent that her experiences were far removed from those of most Uighurs.

Angelina’s divergence from the path of provincial life began when she was fourteen. Her excellent exam results meant she was one of eighty Uighurs selected from across all Xinjiang to attend high school in a big city in the east of China. It was a chance to gain a far better education than she could expect in Yining; the catch was she had to leave her parents and travel more than 3,000 kilometres from home to obtain it.

It had been akin to going to boarding school in a foreign country. ‘I remember when we arrived and one girl from Kashgar started crying immediately. Then we saw the food and we were all unhappy. I really missed Uighur food and I missed not being at home for the Muslim festivals too,’ said Angelina. From the time she arrived at the school, she hardly saw her mother and father. ‘I got to go back home once a year, but my parents weren’t able to come and visit me. It was too far.’

Adapting to her new Chinese classmates was no easier. ‘The Han kids thought we were foreigners when we first arrived. They came and said “Hello” to us in English. They didn’t know anything about Xinjiang except that it was very poor. They would ask us if we went to school on camels and if we had television.’ Nor were there many opportunities to dispel the stereotypes held by their Han counterparts. ‘We didn’t have much contact with the Chinese kids. We were taught on our own, we ate different food because we were Muslims and we lived at the school while they went home each day,’ said Angelina.

Her reward for four years of isolation in Han China was a place at one of the country’s top universities. After graduating, she had not been keen to return to Xinjiang. ‘I wanted to stay and find a job suited to my degree. But my parents didn’t agree. They wanted me to come home because I had been away for eight years and they missed me. So I did. I felt sad for the first few months I was back in Ili. I missed the east and the big cities. I suppose I had got used to the life there.’ Angelina said it in a rueful tone that made it obvious that she still chafed at living in a backwater like Yining.

Now she had a job which although important by local standards, and one I agreed not to reveal, was a poor match for a woman of her intelligence. She was pinning her hopes on being transferred to Urumqi, which was close enough to home to keep her parents happy but would allow her to enjoy urban life again. More importantly perhaps, it would improve Angelina’s chances of finding a husband.

‘Girls who are my age here should be married. My mother says I should be and I want to be, but I don’t have a boyfriend. It’s hard for me to meet someone I can talk to on an equal basis. A lot of the boys here haven’t got much education,’ she said. ‘I’m not interested in looks. I never look at a man because he is handsome. I only want a man with a good heart and someone who has a similar background to me.’

Smart, pretty but single women are an increasingly common phenomenon in China. Girls do better than boys at school and university, and more and more of them are establishing meaningful careers for themselves. But the Chinese concept of face, where preserving one’s dignity and reputation is more important than anything else, along with the way males are traditionally more valued than females, means it is a rare man who is willing to marry a woman with a better degree and a higher salary than his. To do so would mean losing face in front of not just his family and friends, but his wife’s as well.

Many women I knew in Beijing bemoaned their single status. Angelina’s predicament was far worse. Few Uighur men in rural Xinjiang graduate from high school, let alone university, and Angelina, despite her bare legs and uncovered head, was still traditional enough only to be interested in marrying a fellow Uighur. I wondered if I should offer to introduce her to Billy, a fellow graduate, but decided against it. I wasn’t sure feckless Billy and the hard-working and serious Angelina would be a great match.

We walked on in silence; it was hard to know what to say. Angelina deserved to find a decent man and a life outside Yining and I hope she has. Like many Uighur stories I heard, hers was more tragic than anything else. For all her achievements, her time on the east coast had made her as much of an exile as the Uighur in Australia who introduced us, only Angelina was still stuck in her hometown. Now she was regarded as exotic by her own people, yet as a Uighur she remained an outsider in the Han society her education had prepared her for.

At least Angelina was not living in what is essentially a ghetto, like most of the Uighurs in Urumqi. In the Ili Valley, the Chinese make up less than half the population and are outnumbered by the ethnic Kazakhs and Uighurs in the area. For the first time since my arrival in Xinjiang, I was reminded of Kashgar in 1988 and the way both the Han and western visitors had been the foreigners in town.

The main market was a genuine central Asian bazaar. Porters transporting goods on trolleys or their backs pushed through the crowds of shoppers crying out ‘
Boish boish
’, the Uighur equivalent of ‘make way’, while the stalls were a chaotic jumble of gold, carpet and clothes. Some vendors squatted on the floor hawking cheap household items, as well as pirate DVDs from Uzbekistan which were either Bollywood-style musicals or blood-drenched gangster movies.

Surrounding the market were dark, fly-ridden restaurants. The only dishes on offer were
laghman
, the thick noodles found all over central Asia,
polo
and lamb kebabs grilled over glowing coals by young men who fanned the smoke away constantly with pieces of stiff cardboard. Little Mandarin was spoken in those places and I was grateful now for the snippets of Uighur I’d picked up from Jenny in Urumqi.

Some Han shopped for bargains at the market and I noticed how they avoided eye contact with me. Normally, the Chinese are unrestrained when it comes to staring at foreigners they encounter in remote parts of their country. It was my moustache that caused the unusual reticence. The locals might not have been fooled by the hair that sat above my upper lip, but it was a good enough disguise for the Han to assume I was a Uighur and so I was treated as if I was invisible.

I was delighted at not being taken for a foreigner, although such is the diversity in appearance of Yining’s different ethnic groups that a moustache isn’t really necessary to pass as a local. Most men did have a black growth of hair curling around the top of their mouths, while many of the women were dark-skinned, brown-eyed beauties in jeans, T-shirts and headscarves who could have been Turkish or even Pakistani. But there were also people with complexions paler than mine and blue or green eyes topped by blond or red hair, testimony to the wild mix of genes the Uighurs have inherited from their many ancestors.

Yining’s residents were far more religious than Urumqi’s Uighurs, and Ramadan was strictly observed. Outside of the market area, the only restaurants open during the day were Chinese ones. Come sundown and there was a rush of customers to the Uighur places, which made it difficult to find a table. Nor did they serve alcohol, and there are no bars in Yining. Instead, anyone out on a spree heads to the karaoke bars. They are places where one can both croon sentimental love songs and drink, and are staffed by young women who walk a thin line between hostesses and hookers.

One of them was located on the fourth floor of my hotel. Half-cut men breathing fumes of
baijiu
, a noxious white spirit that is China’s equivalent of vodka or tequila, would stagger out, arms around the heavily made-up young Chinese ladies in short skirts and garish high heels. Such girls are called
xiaojie
, literally ‘miss’ but now a China-wide euphemism for a prostitute. At night, some would ride the lifts on their way to make room calls, jabbering into their phones in thick accents from far-off provinces like Henan and Sichuan and spitting the shells of sunflower seeds on to the floor.

Apart from karaoke, the main entertainment option was to head to the banks of the Ili River, where a sad little funfair overlooked the fast-flowing waters. Its rusting rides piped out snatches of patriotic songs like ‘The East is Red’, and were operated by controls straight out of a 1950s science-fiction movie. Most people just perched by the river chatting, flirting, smoking and watching the foolhardy Uighur teenagers who tried to swim to a sandbank in the middle of the river without being swept downstream by the strong current.

After a dismal night by the Ili, which ended when a drunk Uighur threw up over my shoes, I was glad to see Angelina again. This time we met on a street called Ahemaitijiang, the Chinese name for Ahmet Jan. He had been one of the leaders of the East Turkestan Republic (ETR), the short-lived result of the last widespread Uighur uprising in Xinjiang and the only democratic regime ever to run the region.