Water

On one day, I wake up with no electricity and no water in the house. The elevator can’t work without electricity. I live on the 15th floor. This isn’t the first time this has happened and I have run up and down those 15 flights of stairs many times. I resign to staying inside for the day and catching up on work, my house a little warm bubble inside the smoky smog clouds and cold that surround my windows.

To flush the toilet, I use the tap water that S put aside for me that day we had no water, saying that I should always keep some on hand for such occasions.

“How do you say, ‘water put aside in case we run out of water,’ or ‘saved/leftover water’ in English?” He had asked me that day. 

I looked back at him with wide eyes and an awkward, embarrassed smile. “I don’t think we have a name for that in English.”

“Well, what do you call it then? I mean, how do you refer to this jug of water set aside?”

“To tell you the truth, I cannot remember a day in America when we went without water. I don’t think we have a word or a term for it.” M and S stare back and at me, and slowly their mouths turn up in a half smile, half smirk. They shake their heads. “Oh, Amerikilik, Amerikilik…” they say in unison. “Oh, Americans, Americans…”

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The City

Rather than rivers, mountains, and lakes, we are surrounded here by a jungle of concrete and steel, sidewalks covered by highway overpasses of whizzing cars, and skyscrapers.

Red Mountain (a popular park in the center of downtown and not ironically named after the color of the Communist Party) is situated such that when you climb to the top, its scenic overlook faces the Urumqi city skyline of towers puncturing the sky, as if the overlook is set up as a place of worship to the gods of money, concrete, and capitalism.

When you’re walking to the Grand Bazaar, you have to walk under a huge highway overpass, which was built only a few years ago to accommodate the growing demand for individual cars in the city. The overpass blocks the sunlight, creating a damp feel and dusky smell, giving an extra chill to the air. As I wait for the light to change, I can hear the cars rumbling above while the honking of cars underneath reverberate against the concrete ceiling. Even with the new freeways, more and more cars every year make even the freeways clog with bumper to bumper traffic, slowing the cars to snail speed and demanding the subway construction that now exacerbates the traffic even more.

Nonetheless, people continue to praise the god of concrete. People say, our city will be better, more convenient, and more developed once the subway comes. Our city is getting more developed as more movie theaters, clubs, and restaurants move in, satiating the desires of a human race that craves leisure. But only more consumerism can satiate the need, locking us all into an unending cycle of work to exhaustion, work so you can afford leisure to alleviate the exhaustion, leisure that you need because you hate your life and your job. So you spend all your money to fill the empty space in your heart, and then work more so you can afford the leisure that you need.

And yet people continue to worship the concrete gods, who make the city gray and dark and hard and unfriendly, continue to worship the cars that pollute and clog the streets, and pay homage to the buildings that block the sunlight and suck the life and beauty out of the city and its nature that is slowly fading away.

One Day in Urumchi

I look out of the window in my apartment, and the gray smog is oppressive, making the buildings near mine almost impossible to see through the haze. The city looks dark and uninviting as I look out on the streets and buildings that are dirty with the traces of coal smoke and listen to the distant honk of car horns and scream of police sirens. I don’t want to go outside into the cold, the gray, the noise, and the chaos. Every fiber of my being fights against it, wanting to stay inside behind my double-paned windows and hot-water heated home.

But I force myself to leave in the morning, and when I walk outside, the smog is hardly noticeable down on the ground level. Despite the warnings on my phone that today’s Air Quality Index is “hazardous,” the black soot in my air filter at home, and that it looks dark and gray like a big storm is coming even though it’s 11 am and no storm is coming, I don’t register the heavy pollution in the air I’m breathing. 

I’m walking quickly along with everyone else, speed walking with our hands in our pockets and our shoulders tensed upward toward our ears, head bent against the cold wind, and we speed walk together, passing each other as we walk down the street, past women with headscarves, men with fur Russian hats, and women and men with faces covered with masks, students in their uniforms jogging to class, men in suits and women in high heels walking to work. We walk past the bumper to bumper traffic, walking faster than the cars that are at a standstill in traffic. 

When we reach the intersection, cars are honking and weaving around each other, as the roar of a bus engine fills the air. The bus accelerates and the driver changes gears, weaving past cars and barreling through the intersection, almost running into a person and then a car, but no accident occurs. The security guards at the bus stop—one male and one female—are pacing back and forth and bouncing on their toes, periodically going into the shed where a space heater glows orange with heat, and they crouch over it, rubbing their hands together and bouncing with their knees. Street sweepers with face masks and clothes bulky with layers making them waddle under the weight of their wool liners and thick down coats are shoveling the snow next to the sidewalks. 

I stop at TG’s house, and when I walk in, I’m immediately hit with an oppressive, humid heat like a sauna. It is at least 85 degrees in here, a coal stove burning in one corner. My glasses fog up and I take off all my layers—my coat, sweater, hat, scarf, and gloves—and sit for a while despite the taste of coal irritating my throat. The coal stove is leaking fumes into the room. I wonder about her two small children who breathe this toxic air every day, but know better than to say anything. TG has other more pressing concerns on her mind and it’s better to breathe this air than to freeze.  

What does reverse culture shock feel like?

It feels so alone, so isolated, so…comfortable. And that comfort feels wrong. I walk into Trident [a coffee shop in Boulder] and sit down, sipping my Chai tea latte and eating my cream cheese bagel, and I stop to look around me. Everyone is comfortably tapping away on their MacBooks and sipping tea, looking determinedly into their screens, or otherwise chatting and smiling and happy. I walk onto campus and I expect to have to swipe my card to get into every building, and I stop every time I enter a door, expecting to have to go through a security check. But there is nothing.

And I think about the people in XJ, who are doing the best they can to just get through the day in whatever way they can. And here I am, frolicking on the manicured bright green grass and bike paths and walking where I want to go without gates and fences everywhere I go, the gates that in XJ cut the city into bite-sized parcels for easier control and surveillance.

I walk around the grocery store, dizzy and nauseous from the colors and the lights and the excess that surrounds me. I know all too well what will happen when the fruit goes bad, the destruction that is happening to produce and package all of these goods. And that is just one store. There are millions across the US. And we just keep on riding down our green bike paths and typing on our iMacs and playing on our iPhones, and eating our cream cheese bagels and drinking our chai tea lattes and pretending like everything is okay. But it feels so wrong. I don’t want that life. This isn’t me. This isn’t who I am. This isn’t what I want. This isn’t what I want for my life.

Frequently Asked Questions Part II

What surprised you most when you first arrived in Xinjiang? 

When I first moved to Xinjiang in 2014, I was surprised by how little Chinese people spoke. I thought that Chinese would be more common and widespread, but many people didn’t speak Chinese and people who were able to speak Chinese were very reluctant to do so. It took about 3 months before I could start having conversations in Uyghur, and after that it was much easier to make Uyghur friends, ride in taxis, and buy fruit and vegetables.

When I first arrived, it felt in a visceral way that I had moved to another country (which is precisely what makes Xinjiang so interesting: it is a hybrid of two nations at the same time, akin to a colony). Looking back on it, I only now realize how naïve I was to think that just because I had lived in China for 2.5 years at that point, I was even somewhat prepared for life in Urumqi. I was not. It was a completely different world from that I’d experienced in Nanjing, from the language, to the customs, to the lifestyle. I was often shamed by my Uyghur roommate for acting Han, and she once admonished me, “If you’re going to learn our language, you’ve got to learn our customs. We are not Han and the sooner you learn that, the better.” My first four months in Urumqi were especially emotionally and mentally challenging in ways that I had not expected.

I still get flashbacks to those first four months in 2014. When I think about the times I brought non-halal food into the house, or blew my nose at breakfast, or walked around with a skirt and my legs uncovered on the first day of Ramadan, my face burns red with shame and I cringe as though someone just kicked me in the stomach. It didn’t matter that I was a foreigner. Uyghurs were horrified when I did something that a Han would do, like blow my nose, shake my hands after washing them, or eat non-Halal Chinese food.

Many Uyghurs often describe to me their experiences living in Urumqi as though they are living in two different worlds in the same city: A Chinese world, for them usually associated with work or school, and a Uyghur world, usually associated with family and friends. I too have experienced these two different worlds between my Han and Uyghur friends, one that is clearly and obviously marked through the use of two different time zones: Hans use Beijing time and Uyghurs use Urumqi time. I dress differently, talk about different topics, and eat different food depending on the crowd—Han or Uyghur—I am hanging out with. And without a doubt, the crowds never mix, mostly because the Uyghurs eat strictly Halal and sometimes will even stop eating if a Han enters the room. For Uyghurs, the mere mention of the word “pork” (choshqa goshi) is strictly avoided.

Getting in a taxi is always a reminder of these strict divisions: First, one has to take a look at the face, clothes, and radio station before assessing the driver’s ethnicity and engaging in a “你好!” (nihao) or an “essalammu eleykum!” I’ve gotten it wrong more than once, only to be greeted with blank stares (while Uyghurs and Han are obviously two very different ethnicities, biologically they are not easy to tell apart from just a glance at the face). Han drivers never know where I live and without fail get lost in the winding alleys and one-way streets in my Uyghur neighborhood.

What did you like most about Xinjiang?

Despite the oppression there is so much life, so much culture, and so much love, caring and hospitality. There is a lot of curiosity in foreign culture, interest in others’ lives, and caring for one another. I had a lot of really lovely human exchanges of empathy, laughter, tears, struggle and triumphs. I shared in a lot of joy and a lot of sorrow. That is what I like the most—those kinds of personal exchanges of mutual support and empathy with people. Uyghur culture can be closed in a lot of ways (unaccepting of non-Muslim ideas and people, for one), but it is also incredibly loving and accepting to people, especially guests (and, as I discovered, Christians). I also like the way there is such diversity of cultural expression from the music, to the food, to the movies, to the dress: Turkish, Central Asian, Arabic, Persian, Indian, Russian, and Chinese people, languages, food, and cultures were a common sight. Xinjiang is, after all, on the Silk Road and at the nexus and crossroads of a great variety of peoples, languages, religions, histories, and customs.

What was one of the most difficult experiences of culture shock you had? 

Everyone was constantly commenting on your appearance as if they had the authority to police your own body for you: “You have a pimple on your face, you’ve lost weight, you’ve gained weight, you look like a boy, you look cold, you didn’t eat enough.” The commentary never did cease. People were constantly asking if you were too hot or too cold, if you were full or hungry. It was just small talk, a way of greeting, and a way of showing that they cared. But it was jarring at first. I did, however, eventually get used to it.

I didn’t even look that much like a boy all the time (sometimes I did intentionally gender bend and I usually didn’t wear makeup or other characteristically girly things), but even if I was wearing earrings or a scarf people often mistook me for a boy or would comment about how much I looked like a boy. If my friends posted pictures with me on social media, people would immediately and inevitably comment, “Who is that boy you are with?” and my friends would collapse into hysterical giggles. I didn’t mind because I did look somewhat like a boy and so it wasn’t like people were telling me something I didn’t already know. But it took me a while to get used to that.

Then I got used to it and now I sometimes make comments that make people laugh or uncomfortable. The other day I was in a Lyft Line with another girl and I saw someone riding their bike without gloves. “Look at that young man riding his bike without gloves! He must be so cold!” Everyone burst out laughing at this ridiculous comment. There was a girl at the gym who had lost a little bit of weight, and her face was thinner and her chin pointy. She actually looked really different. I pointed it out to her immediately, before I realized that this was an inappropriate comment to make about another woman’s body.

Bravado in the Face of Insecurity

This post was inspired by Ta-Nehisi Coates’ (2015) discussion in Between the World and Me of the “fighting weather of early spring” (page 19), how “the first days of spring were laced with fear” (page 57), and the theme throughout his book about bodily control and policing.

It was about 10:30 am on a weekday, and walking toward me on the sidewalk were 3 teenage boys in school uniforms. Their baby faces and the signature blue track suits with the name of their school printed on the back revealed them to be in high school. One was smoking, his cigarette expertly resting between his forefinger and middle finger, his hoodie pulled up just past his ears so that his delicately gelled and combed hair was exposed. He had a fashionable chin beard—the kind that is not grown on the cheeks, but very thin along the jawline and on his chin. All three were swaggering like gangsters that owned the place, all three with unlaced Timberland-style boots.

In the spring, the teenage boys start showing their faces on the streets late at night again. Walking together in groups, young boys of 13 and 14 swagger past me with cigarettes between their fingers, Nike high tops and leather jackets, laughing with their arms around each other. In their coolness, I see only the cruel need to grow up faster than is age appropriate. Perhaps because their mother is over-burdened—whether from poverty, patriarchy, or state oppression, or all three, it perhaps doesn’t matter why—they exude the need to be cool and independent; to own their space, to own the streets. They show a need to escape somehow the surrounding Chinese oppression of everything else in their life, talking loudly in Uyghur in front of the Chinese police they know can’t understand them, putting on airs of bravado amongst the reality that they have no control over what happens to them or their bodies. They openly make fun of the Kitay: laughing loudly and hysterically at the Chinese soldiers being forced to do push-ups in the street. Perhaps because they know that the Han officers carrying the rifles could take their lives if they wanted to, they cannot help but laugh at their ridiculous appearance, making fun of their slinty eyes, calling them ugly, dirty, godless dogs.

Are displays of teenage masculinity and rebelliousness an important part of creating a distinct culture here? They are definitely different from the more effeminate Han boys. But is this related to trying to create a distinct cultural identity and recognizable social membership, or are they just insecure and rebellious against authority as most teen boys are, especially in the midst of instability and uncertainty in most spheres of life?