The Coffee Shop

I don't have class today (Friday), so I walk toward a coffee shop located across from the largest mosque in the city. Bearded men over 65 and un-bearded men under 65 in suits and doppas carrying prayer mats walk in the opposite direction from me, coming from the mosque having just finished one of the morning prayers.

I walk past the beggars sitting in front of small baskets of 1 kuai bills—cripples with one leg and old women with their faces covered and heads bowed in shame and a man with a rash all over his legs that makes me gag—that sit outside the mosque with prayer rugs piled at the entrance. 

I arrive at the coffee shop and am tempted by this month’s special: a “nutritional breakfast combo” with cheese, cucumbers, tomatoes, olives, feta cheese, bread, butter, honey, and tea for 18 kuai ($2.50 USD). I cave and treat myself to this extravagance. 

The rest of the menu features mochas with towering whipped cream, delectable ice cream of every flavor imaginable, cakes, scones, fruit drinks and teas. A woman with a red headscarf and an iPhone 6S with perfectly manicured nails and a penciled-in unibrow looks up at me as I walk past her towards the back of the coffee shop. I set up my MacBook Air and plug in my iPhone as I eat the cheese and bread while young boys—barely six or seven years old—with dirty faces and hungry eyes and raspy voices trickle in one-by-one, selling packages of Kleenex for 1 kuai. Do I support these boys who should be in school and who are giving the money to who know who for who knows what purpose? Or do I bury my nose in my MacBook munching on my bread and butter and chewing gum imported from Turkey while writing out urban theory and esoteric political ideas while I pretend to ignore the rock in my gut and the stabbing pain in my heart of the poverty side-by-side the extravagant and unnecessary wealth I see surrounding me and within me? 

In each and every moment, but especially now, my white skin and blue eyes and PhD education and mother tongue of English and American bank account and government scholarship, I embody Western privilege in a visceral way that I wish I could ignore but never will forget.

Some people ask me, why don’t I do research in the US? Don’t we have enough of our own problems? Why am I going somewhere else to research urban problems? 

But I don’t see it that way. By studying China’s urban development problems and issues of race and gender, it only allows me to see my own country’s issues more clearly. China has taught me about race, gender, discrimination, and freedom on a personal and visceral level that only further exposes the hypocrisy of American democracy in a new light.

 

We’re not so different, us and China. We are linked in so many ways. Our problems are not isolated, but intertwined. The poverty of Detroit is linked to the wealth and development of China. The poverty of China is linked to the cheap prices we all benefit from at Wal-Mart. We are related in our humanity despite the ideological differences of our governments. We are linked in ways like never before. Sometimes it is only by leaving your home that can you look back and see it clearly without the fog of bias. We were raised on the Communist/Democracy binary that is actually not so different after all. My hope for now is to understand and challenge those layers of privilege that multiply and dissolve in different ways in different contexts.  

Later that night, I invite a couple friends over to my house. I’ve prepared for their arrival by buying fruit, candy, shelled sunflower seeds, and snacks for them. When they arrive, I put on the tea. We watch videos online and laugh and chat easily and freely. I’m happy that I remember enough Uyghur that we don’t switch to English, not even once. Though I do struggle to remember some verbs and I misunderstand them a few times.

I show them the “Stressed Out” song’s music video by Twenty One Pilots, and we marvel about how it’s already gotten almost 300 million views, talk about the pressure of debt and they say, “Damn, Americans too are feeling the pressure of money and family and life and work just as much as us.” We too wish we could turn back time and fly a rocket ship far away.