S's Home

It was a hot summer day. The sun burned my face as sweat trickled down my back. Dry, dusty air swirled around my face. The dry air made the skin around my knuckles and fingernails crack open and bleed.

I walked down Solidarity Road towards Dawan, a Uyghur neighborhood. I passed the local television station. I held my breath as I tried to avoid staring at one of the the big police stations, its windows covered with metal security bars. The entrance was barricaded with a high, locked fence topped with barbed wire and guarded by a soldier outfitted in camo. I turned left down a side alley.

Young children ages 2-15 filled the alley, some in groups playing tag, some kicking around a soccer ball. One of them kicked a soccer ball and it knocked the purse out of my hand. The group of boys nearby collapsed into hysterical laughter. Some of them called out, “Hello!” in English. A toddler, screaming at the top of his lungs, emerged from the corner store on my right, a small shop selling sugary snacks and drinks. I found S in the crowd, her baseball cap on backwards, kicking around a soccer ball. She saw me and greeted me with a big smile.

“Who is that?” her friends asked, their jaws slack in surprise.

“My English teacher,” S said shyly as she broke away from the crowd, everyone staring after us. We entered her apartment building together.

We walked through the huge ornate wooden doors covered in peeling and fading turquoise paint into a small entrance hall. We were greeted by a courtyard with a concrete floor covered in a layer of mud. On the immediate right side sat a broken couch with torn upholstery on its side, and 3 large box crates. Immediately I noticed the smell of sewage, like we had just walked into a porta potty. The air felt dank and wet, almost chilly inside, with a smell of mildew. I noticed a pile of trash in one corner, and the rank smell of raw sewage offended my nose. Four doors lined this courtyard, each leading to a separate, one-room apartment.

The smell came from the communal toilet tucked in a closet under the stairs to the left. Everyone in the whole three-story building shared one toilet.

I excused myself to go to the toilet and told S to meet me at home upstairs. The toilet did not have plumbing. It was simply a hole in the ground in the middle of the muddy floor. I latched the door and squatted down. As I retrieved one of my pieces of tissue that I carried with me at all times from my pocket, I accidentally dropped it, watching it immediately absorb the dirty wet mud on the floor. I picked the ruined paper up and threw it behind me into the white plastic milk crate that overflowed with dirty toilet paper and bloody sanitary napkins. Plastic wrap and plastic Kleenex pouches also littered the ground.

One doesn’t flush this toilet, but rather, when finished, emerges from the closet and pick up a pink bucket filled with water, using a smaller red pail in the pink bucket to dish out the water into the toilet until the shit goes into the hole.

“No wonder the entire building always smells of rank sewage and it’s even worse in the heat of summer,” I thought to myself. I wondered how often, if ever, they clean it out.

I walked up the almost pitch black flight of stairs, and entered the second floor, where the sun shined through the large square hole in the roof. The hole in the roof was built there intentionally to allow the sun to enter and dry clothes on the clotheslines that hang on the railings under the hole. Small concrete pathways led to the doors of 11 different apartments/dorm rooms sharing the communal toilet downstairs and no shower facilities. I didn’t know if they ever shower.

One of the doors was left open in an effort to circulate air through the hot room. The three Han inhabitants inside revealed skin shiny from sweat, watching television while eating rice and vegetables out of small bows with chopsticks, the television blaring a Han program, their room packed with stuff floor to ceiling on all four sides. They glanced at us quickly and with bored, tired eyes, averting their eyes quickly and returning to the television screen.

We arrived at S’s door, and another long hallway stretched and curved beyond my sight—I was not sure how many rooms remained down the second hallway. I heard a television blasting Uyghur programing in the distance.

When I entered S’s family’s room, the smell of sweaty feet and unwashed bedding slapped me in the face. Their room was small and stuffy, and stifled in the summer heat because the windows were too small to let in any breeze. The room smelled strongly of body odor and faintly of dank mildew.

A dark red carpet adorned with a green and pink flower pattern covered the small room. There was a double bed in the corner, with the blankets folded and pillows stacked neatly on one side and a closet with a mirror in other corner. S’s niece (her 20-year old brother’s 3-year old daughter) played on the floor. Nearest to the door sat a gas stove, a sink, and a refrigerator. In the other corner sat a pile of stuff covered in a sheet. Above the sink was tacked the same pink sheet I had to sign at my neighborhood community center: the rules of renting homes for migrant workers. It was written and signed in Uyghur with the red fingerprints of the landlord and residents.

S and I sat on the ground, and started translating a children’s book written in English into Uyghur. The small windows were open but barely allowed a breeze to enter, and the room was stifling hot. I wondered why they didn’t have a fan.

S’s mother came home from work, complaining about how tired she is after a 12-hour shift of scrubbing the floors and washing dishes in the kitchen of a restaurant. She showed me her hands red, chapped and bleeding from the soup and scrubbing.

Her mother spent the next two hours kneading dough to make the small squares of flat dough for dumplings. She chopped up a small square of meat into tiny squares and mixed it with green onion. They taught me how to make the chuchure (dumplings), putting small dots of the meat filling into the center, wetting one side of the dough, and folding it over. I couldn’t do it at first, but after about 10 tries I finally got the hang of it. With all of us working together, that took about one hour. Then they made the broth with onion and boiled the dumplings in it. 

Four hours after they began, the chuchure were ready, and all of us—SH, her mom, her brother, her aunt, and cousin, sat in a circle around a table cloth set on the ground, a stack of naan in the middle. We passed around the chili peppers and the bag of black vinegar and slurped the soup and ate the dumplings, dipping naan in the broth.

The steam from the bowl made my face tingle and sweat poured off my scalp and dripped down my face and eyebrows, down my neck and back. We were all breathing heavily from the heat of the soup and the spiciness of the chili peppers in the broth. After I finished my bowl, they filled up my bowl a second time, despite my insistence that I was, indeed, full.

I then heard S saying that there was almost nothing left, and they looked at me worried that I might want more. Nonetheless, they asked me anyway if I wanted more. I told them again that I’m full and they insist that they fill up my bowl a third time. I insisted that I was full, and they eventually gave up. We go through this routine even though we all knew there was no more left. It reminded me of the time a friend asked me if I wanted sugar, even though they didn’t have any sugar. Our faces shined with sweat and S’s brother wiped his face with a washcloth.