Keriya (2/9)

I like Keriya
It’s an authentic place, one still shaped by the people and the lives around.

It’s certainly not been developed, like the other places in Southern Xinjiang ivevisited – no massive plans, no huge changes in infrastructure.  Keriya is still a place of small lives.

Most of Ali’s friends lead small lives, small lives struck, rooted, in their hometown: one brother owns a naan shop, a few friends are policemen, his girlfriend works in the government child welfare office in Hotan, he manages his brother-in-law’s car garage, one friend’s wife is a nurse and chemist, another works in this office or that.  Most of them don’t actually do a lot – policemen patrol around and around or sit in their compound training an overly-friendly German shepherd, the chemists sit and gossip behind the medicine cabinet, office workers spend their entire day shopping or chatting online.  It’s not a very busy life. 

A lot of youth, regardless of their education, end up back in Keriya.  If the town doesn’t draw them, their family does.  Their family insists, demands, that they come back and lead their lives, unravel their lives here in their hometown. A job, a spouse, a house, a child, a life.  For some it feels like a cage; for others, it’s just everyday life.  

This afternoon, while Ali (and all the men of town) were away at mosque for Friday prayer, J and I walked around the old part of town, the southern end sprawling behind the mosque. Here Keriya is unchanged, is the same as it was eons before: dusty lanes, old mud brick courtyard houses with colorful carved doors, the occasional motorcycle or kids on bikes, old women selling vegetables by the side of the street, a few small shops, an adolescent girl stringing up laundry on the roof.  It feels like an actual, authentic, glimpse into to Xinjiang that used to be, the Xinjiang that has ceased to exist in many parts, that is just a tourist stop in Kashgar, that’s become dirty and disused in Hotan.  
The sky was a radiant blue, a blue unlike the smog in Kashgar or dust of Hotan.  As we wandered we took dozens of pictures – and attracted the attention of some kids.  So we showed them some of our pictures and zombie videos, and then shot a few more short clips with them (with J actingas a zombie monster emerging from a dark doorway, and the kids laughing in mock terror) before wandering on.  Pictures – and videos – are great breakers of cultural boundaries. 

local graves

Until mosque let out the town was nearly silent.  Ali told me that 100% of men go to mosque, and I didn’t believe him, for this isn’t the case in Urumqi or Kashgar.  But in Keriya the entire town is empty for that one hour, barely a man to be seen on the streets, ‘cept a few policemen, restaurant owners, and entrepreneurs selling sliced fruit and snacks to the mass of hungry men emitted at four pm.  The entire place goes from bustling to deserted in the quarter-hour before three. 
We walked by the brother’s naan shop and talked to the lively worker who makes naans nonstop during the day.  He lived in Beijing – in Shangdi for five years – and yet he too has returned to Keriya, to a small and steady job in a town that speaks his tongue (for there are near no Han Chinese in Keriya – they’re kind of like elephants: out of place and easy to spot). 

Kids by the naan shop

When mosque let out there was first a trickle and then a flood, a veritable flood of men in black coats and tall hats.  For half an hour women were scarce on the street, their numbers overwhelmed by the flow of men from the mosque back into their everyday lives.  I felt baren, almost naked, for not wearing a headscarf.  An object of attention – not critical or aggressive, just slightly startled, unsure attention. as in, HELLO! I’M OUT OF PLACE HERE! Almost all women here wear headscarves of some type, even younger children.  In Aksu I saw one or two women with all but their eyes covered; in Kashgar, perhaps five percent (but some older women also completely cover their faces with loose brown shawls); and here, 99%of women wear headscarves, and in certain areas of town, 15-20% of them are completely covered, with but their eyes showing (though no one wears those brown shawl things). Wearing a headscarf has ceased to be a personal religious decision: it’s a community ultimatum, and there’s enormous unspoken pressure to conform.  

As we made our way toward the mosque to find Ali, J was approached by a boy who wanted to speak English with him.  This guy, it turns out, works as an interpreter in Urumqi and is home for the holiday.  He seemed genial enough, and the two were planning on heading back around the same time, so they exchanged numbers. Which drew a huge crowd – five, then ten, then thirty men encircling them, just looking.  The more men crowded round them the more came over to look and the larger the circle grew. This is a China phenomenon: whenever there are people crowding around something, more people have to go over and look. It’s also true that, until the barrier is broken (by a local interacting with us), people generally won’t intrude, will stare but won’t approach (except for the occasional “hello!”). 

J encircled (before the mob grew to big for me to take photos)

Keriya is noticeably more conservative than Kashgar – it’s like I’ve been traveling along an exponential graph, from Urumqi (comparatively liberal and free) to Aksu (moderate) to Kashgar (conservative but modern) to Hotan (conservative, not very modern) to Keriya (as conservative as rural Texas).  I’m curious to know what happens further down the loop, to the towns no one I know has seen before, no one I know comes from: Niya, Qiemo, Ruoqian. But perhaps that will happen another time, in the summer when I travel to Kashgar once again.  
Another interesting point: everyone in Kashgar thinks of themselves as more cultured (and, for northern Xinjiang, people in Yili/Ili/Gulgha take some pride in their hometown too).  Hotan is seen as a backwater bayou: more crass, less historically significant, less refined (in the same way Savy New Yorkers might view uneducated Bostonians with their impenetrable accents, or the way the rest of the states views Alabama or West Virginia).  But – I still like it, for the town is penetrated with an air of authenticity, like a wild west town that hasn’t been made into a film location.

A short anecdote: when I met them in Hotan, J told me that every meal he’d eaten had some form of mutton in it.  Nothing is without meat (except breakfast, which is generally bread, jam and maybe yogurt). Several weeks back he, C, S and Adil went to a Uighur restaurant together for lunch.  C is a vegetarian, and so she tried to order noodles (laghman) with vegetarian topping.  Adil went to talk to the cook and a few minutes later he came back.  “He can’t do it”. “What?” “He says he can’t make laughman without meat” (as in, it’s literally impossible for the man to not put meat into the vegetable and sauce topping for the noodles).  And, indeed, our meals yesterday were: naan and fruit jam for breakfast, pilaf with yogurt for lunch, and noodles and kebabs for dinner, all chosen for us by our friends and local dietary decision-makers.  

Desert Dunes (2/7)

Jorge mentioned this before I arrive: in this house, the TV is always on.

Always, always. Two or three at one time. People aren’t necessarily watching the TV.  It’s just on, noise.  Comforting for them, terrible for me (as its really hard for me to concentrate on anything when there’s TV or radio noise in the background).
Basically we came back and – did nothing.  I’m not even sure how I spent these last three hours, as I haven’t been able to focus on anything. But the rest of the day was awesome.
The desert dunes here are just an hour’s walk from the edge of town, so this morning we hiked out along the highway, past wasteland and scrub brush – until we were in the desert.  Sand dunes stretching as far as we could see, waves upon waves.  The wind picked up, sweeping sand across the sea, and soon everything we had was covered in tiny grains.  Hair, teeth, nostrils, pockets, camera cases.  We pulled out handkerchiefs to cover our heads and noses – and it’s good we didn’t encounter anyone else, for we would have been mistaken for terrorists if we had (jk).

The entire day we spent trekking in the dunes and shooting silly videos.  Eventually we made our way to one of the larger dunes, a mountain in the desert.  We lamented that we didn’t bring a cardboard box (for dune sledding), but had fun taking stop motion videos of Ali jumping down the dunes nevertheless.  Contrary to Indiana Joneseque movies, it’s actually quite difficult to fall down a dune – the sand sticks, and it’s heavy.  Another curiosity: parts of the desert are covered in dried loess and patches of salty earth.  Apparently there used to be a river here, but what river produces salt?

Saturday we are driving out to the Kun Lun mountains an hour away, and Sunday we depart – J for Urumqi and me for Karghilik, then Yarkand, and then back to Kashgar to take the train first to Korla, and en to Urumqi. Vacation is coming to an end – in another ten days or so.

Marsh Zombies and Too Much Mutton (2/6)

J and I tried to recount the last time we had greens; neither of us could remember.

Vegetables here come in small parcels, hidden underneath mounds of mutton and rice, or thinly sliced onto bread.  Southern Xinjiang in winter is the land of dried fruit and nuts, bread, noodles, rice and mutton.  Bread and jam for breakfast, noodles with meat and slivers of eggplant for lunch, and then kebabs with bread dipped in lamb broth for dinner.  All our food is brown, white, yellow.  I’m going to become a vegetarian when I return to Urumqi, subsiding off vegetables, tofu and egg whites for a month until I get all the mutton out of my system.  

This afternoon we spent with a high school friend of Ali’s named Kardirdin who graduated two years ago and now works as a physics teacher at a high school in Hotan and is a businessman for home appliances on the side.

 I finally figured out why Ali is so old, and yet still in college: he wanted to join his girlfriend in Guangzhou University, so he took the Gao Kao twice – and both times was placed in Xinjiang Medical University.  The second time he went, studied a year, sat for the Gao Kao again, and ended up placed in Xinjiang University.  So he essentially took both his third year of high school and first year of college twice.  Ouch. 
Kardirdin has perhaps one of the best temperaments I’ve encountered so far in Xinjiang – outgoing, endearing, good-humored, easygoing.  We got in his car, a new blue Hyundai, and drove for a half-hour out into the countryside, until we were once more in the wasteland, dry scruff and sand.  We pulled off onto a dirt road and parked in an empty lot outside of the locked and fenced-in “Dragon Lake” reservoir, home to dry bamboo twenty feet tall and some of the world’s oldest trees – desert poplars full of dust and fifteen hundred years old.  

Beyond the grove lies a dry marsh and frozen lake with a half-decayed few reed huts here and there for summer picnickers.  J decided this would be the perfect place for a short zombie film, so we spent an hour or so filming, acting, and getting our hair and clothes full of dust and sand.  The results?  Fantastic, and perhaps Hotan’s first ever zombie flick (even if its a bit short at two minutes). I shot a second clip using stop motion on my iPad, and it frankly turned out fantastic. 

Post-zombie madness we strolled around a local county bazaar where the two boys ran into more of their high school classmates, had dinner at a kebab place (that probably doesn’t even stock vegetables in its kitchen) with another friend and his wife and mother who we now have to dine with (at their home) tomorrow, and then joined Kardirdin’s younger brother for dessert and conversation at a yogurt bar.  Service was slow – the shop proprietors were in the middle of evening prayer when we walked in and came to take our order only when they had finished.  It’s not an uncommon sight in Hotan – men praying  in the middle of work, five men with their shoes off praying by the side of the river at the jade market as everyone continues work around them, shopkeepers with a rug laid out in the back of their shop, oblivious to customers. 

Men praying along the river banks – in the middle of jade-collecting, Hotan

And tomorrow – the desert and sand dunes (and perhaps a sequel to Marsh Zombies of Keriya).
There’s more I could write, about the culture, the people, the place, but perhaps that will come later.

Karakash, Kustoms

There’s money in Karakash, that’s no doubt.

The market itself is in broken squalor, no hired street cleaners here (all those funds in Hotan have gone to feeding the police).  But just beyond the market are stretches of wide boulevards wrapped in the bright light of modern street lamps shaped like strings of twined DNA, an empty square with a giant TV blasting news and stories from the national media, and a pedestrian street as wide as a football field, guarded by fake minarets that look suspiciously like European castle towers. Where the money comes from, however, is not apparent. Oil? Gas? Resources? It’s obviously not coming from the dust and the dates.

First we wandered through the snack market, which was full mostly of things we’ve seen before (there isn’t a lot of variety between one oasis city and another in what they can produce): walnut cake, kebabs of every sort (kidney, river carp, mutton, pigeon, heart, lungs, liver, tofu, mushrooms), hot pot on a stick, liangpi, whole eggs cooked slowly over coals, mutton wonton soup, noodles, whole roasted fish, chickpeas and sauce, uygh hot dogs made of tofu and wheat glutton, and zongzi (rice dumplings stuffed in bamboo or corn leaves) covered in thick, whipped yogurt and caramelized pears soaked in honey.  The last is delicious, and would become an instant hit if imported to the US.

walnut candy

While in Karakash we met up with a high school classmate of Ali’s, who now works as an accountant at some company and limelights as a businessman in his off-time.  And as with everywhere else in Xinjiang, he tried to pay – for our food,for the taxi back.

In Southern Xinjiang, particularly among locals, there’s a custom of giving and giving, treating guests until you’re broke, not letting guests even touch a receipt.  They feel terrible if you pay – its a sense of duty, of even moral obligation.  And yet both of us are fiscally better-off than Ali, who (though a year older than I) is still a college senior, and has to worry about work and the future.  So every time we pay it’s a tussle, a war of words and attempts at persuasion and friendly deception, from taxi rides to dinner.  
We arrived at his sister’s flat a little after midnight. By local standards, they’ve made it: both husband and wife are government workers, they own a spacious flat in a new development, and they have a lively five year old daughter.  This is the life by the standards of security and material comfort.  Everything in their apartment bespeaks of their attainment: the gauze curtains heavy with beadwork brushing against the floor, the spread of dried fruits and nuts in glass goblets on the coffee table covered in lace, the refined white wood carving all around the apartment.  
It’s an interesting abode, their apartment.  The kitchen, living room, and dining room are modern, fit with  full set of furniture and appliances (and lots of lace).  The other three rooms and one dining room/hallway in the house, however, are all fitted in a more traditional manner with carpet-covered raised platforms in place of furniture: bed, table and chair all in one.  The absence of furniture, and the crowding that it induces, actually makes the apartment feel more spacious. There’s certainly space for all of us. 

We crashed after one, and woke up to an empty apartment and breakfast of instant coffee I bought in Kashgar and rose jam spread on hot naan from the street below followed by tea and hard-boiled goose eggs the size of my fist.  Breakfast here is almost always heavy on the carbs, low on protein or vitamins.     Breakfast everywhere across Xinjiang is tea and bread, tea and bread.  The bread may vary – bagel naan covered in sesame seeds, naan baked with walnuts, or the thin-crusted crunchy bread of Hotan – but it’s always bread.  And always tea.  
Post- breakfast the boys watched One Piece, a Japanese carton that’s somehow made it across the world several times over, and then we walked over to Ali’s house to pick up Jorge’s bag and ukelaylay, then sat for an hour while they played Spanish songs on the ukelaylay and guitar.  Oh, small town life (it’s still nice to be out of the city).