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.

Z's Tragedy

I knocked on Z’s door and I heard steps approach.

“Kimmu?” a voice behind the door asked. “Who is it?”

“Men, ingliz tili mu’ellim,” I said. “It’s me, the English teacher.” I heard the steps walk away from the door. Z opened the door, smiling broadly. We greeted each other with an Essalamueleykum and a kiss on both cheeks. I removed my shoes and left them in the hallway.

I entered their house, announcing Essalamueleykum as I crossed the threshold. When I entered the front room, my feet welcomed the soft plush of the carpet. Z’s mother got up to greet me, despite my insistence that she stay sitting. She firmly but gently touched each cheek to mine. The dining room was ornately decorated with plush golden brown curtains along the windows, a chandelier, and other traditional Uyghur dish ornaments in glass cases on both sides of the TV.

I slowly went around the dining room, greeting each person and touching each of the women’s cheeks with both of mine.

I also entered the living room. Pirates of the Caribbean dubbed in Uyghur was playing on the large flat screen TV in the living room. Z’s little brother was sleeping on the carpet in front of the TV. The living room had white lace curtains with a flower design and gold trim, and the living room felt as large as a small movie theater. A couch sat on one end with a coffee table filled with dried fruit and individually wrapped candies in ornately designed glass bowls. Z’s other younger brother was watching TV and her other younger brother is kicking a soccer ball around the house. He ignored his mother telling him to stop, instead releasing a loud cackle. Her younger sister was on the ground making a chocolate desert dish. When I sit on the couch, the large flat screen TV on the other end of the room facing the couch feels so far away. In the middle of the room is a large chandelier. I was quickly ushered back to the dining room, where I noticed a pile of laundry, dirty diapers, and trash—a couple floating plastic bags, and food packaging wrappers, sitting on a pile near the bathroom.

(While the house symbolizes their wealth, the pile of laundry and trash symbolizes the hectic nature of their lives with so many young kids running around. Despite being wealthy, they can still be overwhelmed with the hectic nature of human life and children.)

Their house was huge—two stories of 150 square meters each floor. Not only that, but they owned the house across the hall too, which appeared to me to be a play room, sitting room, and guest room. For us, it was mostly quiet retreat for us to study English in (except for when the kids play with the punching bag out on the balcony during class). The house is adorned with chandeliers and plush carpets all over.

About a month later, I visited the family again for English lessons. When I walked in, I greeted Z’s mother who was sitting on the ground with the baby on a pillow and medicine all around her. The baby was three months old, I was told, but she was so tiny and skinny that she looked like a newborn. Z’s mother was feeding the baby a bottle with a brown liquid that looked like tea.

“It’s her medicine,” she explained.

“Why are feeding her tea when what she needs is formula? Why do you have her resting on a pillow, when what it needs is to be held?” I couldn’t help but judgmentally think to myself.

Z and I completed the English lesson for the week. The lesson was about how to say what country we were from and what nationality we were. I explained to Buzohre that some of my Uyghur friends studying in the US really struggled when people asked them where they were from because they don’t look Chinese. So I wrote it down for her, “I’m Uyghur-Turkish, but I was born in China, in a city called Hoten.” We talked about how Turkic was an umbrella family for other ethnicities underneath it, including Uyhgurs, Uzbeks, and Kirghiz. I talked about how there are Arab-Americans and Chinese-Americans in the US, and how identities can get mixed up like that.

About 2 weeks later on Thursday, September 22, 2016:

This morning I was heading for class at the university when I got in the elevator with my bike and said hello to Z. She had a white headscarf wrapped loosely around her head. She looked sick. Like she was about to throw up. She looked miserable.

“Neme boldi?” I asked her. “What happened?”

“Nijet tugep ketken,” she said. “Nijet passed away.”

I started crying and we hugged each other there, our shoulders shaking and heads buried in each other’s shoulders right there in the elevator.

I told her all the right things, all things you are supposed to say in Uyghur when someone dies. I told her to be patient. And that we all die.

“Konglingizni yerim qilmang,” I said. “Don’t be sad.” It was a common phrase to say in Uyghur, literally meaning, “Don’t break your heart in half.” But I really I hated that phrase in that moment. Like seriously, “YOU’RE GOING TO TELL ME NOT TO BE SAD WHEN SOMEONE JUST DIED??? ARE YOU KIDDING ME?” I imagined her screaming at me. Anyway. I digress.

“This too shall pass,” I added in Uyghur. She just nodded.

Later, I went to pay my respects to the family in their home. I brought doughnuts as a gift, at the suggestion of a friend.

“If they’re poor, take laundry detergent or cooking oil,” my friend suggested.

“They’re rich,” I said.

“Oh. Then take some desserts,” she said. So I went to Z’s with the plate of doughnuts. 

The doors were open. I walked in, and saw Z the living room. I called her name. She saw me and smiled and came up to me. We hugged for a long time. I hugged and kissed her mom. Then E’s mom, another one of our neighbors, came out from the living room. They coaxed me to come and sit down. They fed me lots of meat, which I have to say was delicious, but I was like totally full.

I felt really awkward because I hadn’t covered my head. All the other women were wearing headscarves.

There were three women there, our neighbors, who I know don’t cover their heads normally, who half covered their heads with dark gray, blue, or black scarves, careful not to ruin their perfect perms. They looked awkward with their scarves perched over their fake curly hair.

They made small talk like nothing was wrong.

“Oh, where did you get the doughnuts? Do you have class today? Can you teach me English? My daughter is studying in America, and when we went, we couldn’t go outside because we didn’t know English. Just teach us enough so that we can at least get in a cab and tell him where to go.”

At one point a man came in and sang a prayer in Arabic. It was beautiful and made me cry.

I learned later why one of our neighbors was wearing that ugly yellow t-shirt. Because it was the only thing he had that was appropriate. You are supposed to year yellow, white, or black when mourning apparently.

When I tried to leave, they insisted that I stay. I told them I had to go to class. I felt bad that I didn’t stay for longer. I went out and bought a black headscarf. I used it several more times in the next year.

Z’s family was wealthier than most other migrant families, and they seemed to have resources, such as the ability to buy a home, and shields to getting kicked out and other forms of state oppression. But that still doesn’t mean that they weren’t vulnerable. The death of an infant was an example of that perhaps. Though they clearly had more resources to deal with it than any other family I knew, they still lost their child.  

A little corner outside of the busyness

The air is getting cooler. The wind whips around my face and blows my hair into my mouth. Women with long straw brooms sweep the orange dried leaves that fall on the sidewalk. I pull my hat tighter across my ears and zip up my jacket to my chin, hunching my shoulders against the wind. Red Chinese flags with five yellow stars whip vigorously in the wind. I walk down Friendship Road by Red Mountain Park. High rises jut upward toward the sky like concrete and steel trees. Busses rumble past and cars zip by, an unmarked taxi honking at me and slowing down until I shake my head no.

I approach my little neighborhood and walk down a row of shops amidst the high-rise office buildings showing off rows and rows of glass windows glinting in the sun. I turn down the alley to briefly escape the hustle and bustle—the exhaust fumes, the police stations, the electronic billboards, the cars, the hotels—that surround the row of 3-story shops. I pass the cigarette and alcohol shop, which sells steaming hot dogs and corn on the cob outside.

Inside is a small room where the shop’s entire stock is laid out in full for open observation of whoever walks in—there are no aisles or back rooms, it’s just one small room facing the street. It is stocked full from floor to ceiling with different types of alcohol, beverages, and cigarettes. In the spaces between the wall and where the boss sits are boxes piled on boxes of water, yogurt, energy drinks, soda, and snacks. I dig underneath a pile of boxes for a big bottle of spring water. The cashier sits behind a glass counter with cigarettes underneath. She has dark, wrinkled leathery skin and her straight black hair is pulled back in a pony tail. She pulls out a huge stack of differently colored bills and licks her fingers as she counts my change, smiling and asking me about my studies.

I stop next door for a plate of kungpao chicken with rice, and munch on the peanuts and spicy peppers and perfectly square pieces of chicken to my heart’s delight. I stop at the foot massage parlor and am greeted with smiles and warmth, and invited to sit and relax. They talk amongst each other and I can’t understand their Sichuan dialect. Fat Big Brother (yes, he told me to call him that) gets a video call from his young daughter back in Sichuan, and he excuses himself to talk to her. I can hear her voice and his dialect floating in from the other room. The blind masseuse complains about the salary and the lack of customers, saying that he is going to go back home and look for other work because he can’t fill his stomach on the salary they give him.

Chinese Food

The glass door has the faded markings of two red characters written vertically and reading "noodle shop" (mian guan). Half of the first character has been scraped away. I saw the husband scraping it off yesterday. I think it's because it's not really a noodle shop. Above the door sit large white characters reading "Hangzhou Dumpling Shop" (“Hangzhou Xiaolongbao Guan”).

Inside, I read the menu facing me on the opposite wall. On the top left hand corner, the first item listed is "pork dumplings" (“darou xiaolongbao”). The menu on the wall has at least 40 items on it ranging from dumpling soup to fried pork. On the right side wall is another menu with pictures: fish-flavored eggplant, fish-flavored meat strips, kungpao chicken.

On one side of the room is a “sanitize dishes and chopsticks” machine, which takes up so much space next to the fourth table that only two people can sit at it. Each table has a white porcelain canister for spicy chili peppers and black vinegar.

"Sister!" (jiejie), I call out, but there is no response. Jiejie is the polite address for a woman who is less than 10 years older than oneself, and a common address for servers, service workers or other people you might interact with when you do not know their name.

I get up and walk to the kitchen. There is a small hallway with a large cutting board and a refrigerator with a piece of cardboard on the muddy ground. “Jiejie,” I call out again. Still no response. I peek inside the kitchen: her back is to me at the sink washing dishes, and she is either lost in thought or the water is drowning out my voice. The kitchen is small—just narrow enough for a two range propane stove, a counter, and a sink.

“Jiejie,” I say again, and she turns. Her drooping eyelids are lined in black eyeliner, the bags underneath them puffing out and wrinkled.

“Do you have roast pork"? I ask.

“Certainly,” she replies with a smile and nod, and I turn to return to the table.

As I wait, two young women—who I gather from eavesdropping on a phone call are staying at the fancy five-star hotel next door—ask me questions about myself: Where are you from, why are you here, do you have any siblings, how old are you, are you married, is your sister married?

When jiejie brings out the plate of pork, they scoff, “Why’d you get roast pork here of all places? You could get it much better quality somewhere else.” I want to slap them. I just shrug my shoulders and tell jiejie later that the meal was delicious.

New Tennis Shoes

Around 5:30 pm, I make my way down the street and walk past the tonur oven that usually churns out bagels (girde), but sits quiet and empty today. Next to it rest five middle-aged women in a half circle facing the street. Some are sitting on the concrete steps that lead to the mini-strip of convenience stores, butchers, and restaurants. Some are standing and leaning against the walls of the shop next door. Next to them rest two plastic bags on the raised concrete sidewalk, one full of mangoes and one full of samsa. I wonder if they are waiting to break their fast.

I keep walking, seeing a man yell at another for blocking the sidewalk with his motorbike. Two boys around eight-years-old pass me in soccer cleats, counterfeit Adidas pants, and soccer jerseys arm-in-arm eating popsicles. Two boys about 14-years-old, their heads shaved except for a flop of hair on top brushed to the side that reminds me a little too much of my own haircut, wearing Adidas shoes, skinny black pants, and small striped polo shirts, share a cigarette while they wait at the bus stop, flop their bangs to one side, and look at the large screens of their smart phones.

At one of the blocked entrance/exits of the alley ways branching off from the main drag, one boy about seven-years-old slips through the small space in the door that has been left by the too-loose chain that has been locked and is keeping the gates closed.

I pass a stairwell which has colorful Nike and Adidas (rip-offs) tied to the stairwell banister. I pass, thinking about how important shoes are for students in uniforms and for young boys in proving their dignity and place in fitting in to the world, when I stop. I need new tennis shoes. When I think, “Meh, I’ll buy them later, I don’t want to carry them around with me all day,” another thought crosses my mind: “Who knows how long this shop is going to be around—it could be shut down, or go bankrupt, or the owner could be kicked out of Urumqi tomorrow.” So I turn around and go into the shop.

I try on a couple pairs of shoes, finally deciding on a pair of rip-off Nikes that the woman sitting next to me is also trying on and describing as, “ugly comfortable!” (using the word ugly to mean "super," which is common slang).

The girl accompanying her mom says, “Is that akash over there a foreigner?” Akash means older brother.

“That’s not an akash, my child, that’s an achash.” Achash means older sister.

“Akash!” the little girl insisted.

“No, it’s achash. You see, she’s wearing earrings.”

I laughed.

I asked how much the shoes were. A boy about 10-years-old was sitting behind the front desk doing his math homework in a Chinese textbook.

“80 kuai.”

I was expecting them to be 100 kuai each because that’s what the girl sitting next to me had said, so I tried to disguise my surprise at them being so cheap, knowing that 80 kuai was not petty change for most here.

“Ok, I see on the sign over there that it says that the prices given are reasonable, and don’t bargain, so I won’t bargain with you over this.”

“This is a really cheap price. If you go to the Chinese markets or those kinds of stores, they’ll sell this same shoe to you for 120 kuai. But here we want to establish a loyal customer base and hope that you will come back here next time when you want to buy shoes, knowing that you’ll always find the cheapest shoes here."

I tell her I will come back.

"So I guess you can read Uyghur, huh?” (The sign about no bargaining that I had read was only in Uyghur)

“Yes.”

"Are you American?"

"I am."

“My son [points to the boy doing his homework behind the desk] says he wants to go to America.”

The boy hides his face in shyness.

I try to swallow the pit in my stomach that’s starting to form as a rush of thoughts flood my mind—in a system where Chinese is valued above English, in a system where he is fighting the wind blowing him in the wrong direction, in a system where the yuan is 6.5 times less than the dollar, does he even have any hope of obtaining a passport let alone acceptance in an American university let alone being able to afford the tuition? Do I want to perpetuate the idea that if you work hard, anything is possible?

“Oh, that’s nice,” I manage to sputter.

“Yes, he wants to work and study hard so he can go to America.”

He continues to hide his face, but peaks out from behind the sign he is hiding behind to catch a look at me.

“If you work hard, you will have more opportunities," I finally manage. "Your summer vacation is coming up soon, right? Work hard on your exams, and you’ll be able to rest starting in July,” I try to encourage him, thinking of the radio program I was listening to last night about how we should all sincerely work hard. They had talked to some young students (6-8 years old) who were getting ready for their final exams.