Kyrgyzstan: Arriving

 Tuesday, June 29, 2021- morning

When I got to KGZ, customs was a breeze. I had to show my COVID test to a woman who was on the phone and barely paying attention. I went through "passport control" and had my passport inspected by an official looking woman in a uniform who stamped my passport. Besides these two stops, I went right through. As soon as I got through customs, I was walking down the hall toward baggage claim and I was reminded of something else in the Global South which I had seen in China but forgotten about: people selling stuff to you with a vigor and desperation not seen in the Czech Republic. 

In the Czech Republic, people joke about how bad the customer service is. Business owners and servers act annoyed if you ask them for anything. There is a joke that someone in the Czech Republic finally realized their dream of opening a pub and all was good. Then people came to the pub and the owner was mad. “I wanted to open a pub, not actually have to serve or interact with people there.” 

I get it from the Czech servers' point of view. I think for them, they feel as though: “I’m not your servant. It is my job to give you food and ring you up, but it is not my job to be nice to you.” But it is an ongoing joke about how hostile customer service people are in the Czech Republic like you are bothering or annoying them with your business. 

Not so in the countries in the Global South I’ve visited. For them, it's more like “Please come buy the thing I’m selling!” In the airport, there were multiple vendors selling SIM cards. 

One of the guys approached me with such vigor, eagerly telling me all the benefits, that I have to say he got me. I don’t know if he ripped me off, but he sold me a SIM card with unlimited Data for one month for $6 USD. I was like, "let’s do it." He put the SIM card in my phone right then and there. I tried to pay with a card but he only took cash, so we had to walk to the ATM down the hall together while I got KGZ som out of the machine. 

When I got out of the airport, a huge crowd of taxi drivers were swarming the entrance. One guy was almost harassing me, following me around saying, “taxi cheap price, taxi cheap price.” I kept shaking my head no because I had pre-arranged a car from the hostel to come get me, but he was getting in my face saying “taxi taxi taxi.” I told him no and walked outside, and it was like I was a celebrity walking through a crowd of paparazzi. They swarmed on me like flies on a pie at a picnic, to the point where I had to use my elbows to push through the crowd. Luckily I was used to this from China, but it reminded me again of the inequalities. These people were desperate for money, for some kind of business. The airport in Prague is literally silent because there is no one there. 

My driver was there with a sign with my name on it and I approached him. He smiled and directed me to the car. 

He looked Chinese but a lot of KGZ people look Chinese and I didn’t want to offend him by asking if he was Chinese. But I heard him say “ai oh” as he reached behind him for something in the seat, which is a very distinctly Chinese thing to say (which means, "oh my" or "oh god."). I waited a few moments. I was nervous and shy, but I wanted to talk to him, already curious for research purposes about the Chinese populations in KGZ. 

So I asked him in English, "Are you Kyrgyz?" 

He said, “No, I’m Dungan.” Which is the word people use in Central Asia for Chinese immigrants, usually of Muslim faith, that moved to Central Asia a long time ago (at least two generations ago). 

I asked him in Mandarin, "Do you speak Chinese?"

He said back in Mandarin, “Oh, hey, yes, yes I do.” 

I could tell he wasn’t fluent in Mandarin—maybe he spoke a dialect with his parents, and he also answered the phone in Russian at a few different points, so maybe he was more fluent having gone to Russian school growing up—but he spoke Mandarin fluently enough for us to have a conversation. 

He was born in KGZ. He said that his mom had moved here when she was two and his dad moved when he was eleven. They were Hui (Chinese Muslim ethnicity) from Xinjiang and had fled to KGZ during the 1950s when there was a famine in China and not enough to eat. He had lived most of his life in KGZ, though he had lived in Russia for two years. He said KGZ is great because it’s very beautiful with the mountains and the farmland and open space, but that the government doesn’t do anything to help the people and that it’s very hard to make money. He said he didn’t speak Kyrgyz, which makes me think he went to Russian school then and spoke Chinese at home. He was really nice and excited that I spoke Chinese, and otherwise very pleasant, not asking me lots of intrusive questions about myself and just having a nice drive through Bishkek. 

We got to the hostel around 9 am on Tuesday morning and I checked in at the front desk. 

To be continued...