Uyghur Clubbing

On Friday afternoon I get a WeChat from K, a male classmate of mine: “Hi Sarah. Today 7:30 pm local time. 360 music club.”

Huh? I thought to myself. What’s going on?

The message wasn’t clear as to what we would be doing. I knew 360 was a Uyghur club and it was close to my house. But there was no “hope to see you there,” or “my friends are going, would you like to join us?” I sent a message back inquiring about the nature of this gathering, but there was no response.

At 7:15 pm (it is common for everything to happen at the last minute here), I get a call from K. “I know I said 7:30, but actually it starts at 8. So I’ll see you then, yeah?”

“K, sure, but what’s going on? Who is going and what’s this all about?”

“It’s my birthday, so we’re going to party tonight. A bunch of my friends are getting together.”

“Oh! Ok, then. I’ll see you there.”

I arrive fashionably late at 8:15 pm local time (10:15 pm Beijing time), going through the metal detector, opening my purse for inspection, and undergoing the body frisk by the female security guard who pats me down from under my armpits to my thighs. Ahead of me in the lobby is a wall of wooden shelves separated into square cubbies, each holding a different bottle of yangjiu (foreign liquor): Skyy, Ballentine’s, Bacardi, etc. Inside the music is pulsing to an electronic beat.    

I go inside to look, but K isn’t here yet. The security guards are really friendly and helpful, noticing that I was wandering around by myself, they suggest I go to the second floor to check for my friend and asking, “Would you like to sit down?” as they offer me their stools. “Who reserved the table?” I give them K’s name, and the security guard translates K’s name into Chinese—the awkward monosyllabic sounds of a Uyghur name translated into Chinese are clunky in his mouth—for the Han boss who is holding a clipboard. “How the hell should I know?” snaps the boss, “There are two Ks who have a reservation tonight and they both don’t match the phone number she has” (K has a really common Uyghur name).

I hang around in the lobby for the next 45 minutes. I look in the mirrors over the sinks outside the bathroom, and notice my hair is flat and greasy. I fix my hair into a ponytail. The Han bathroom attendant with a pixie cut and gold earrings sitting in the corner stares at me as she lights incense sticks and cracks sunflower seeds, periodically yawning and rubbing her face with her hands.

K calls me twice to apologize for being late, saying that the traffic is really bad. He arrives at 9 pm with two Uyghur girls, one is a Chinese teacher (she spent eight years in Shanghai in Chinese school, so her Chinese is almost better than her Uyghur) with a round face I recognize from a previous event, and one is a girl with a short, pixie cut and red lipstick who greets me with, “Hi” and a small wave. K is wearing a shirt that says, “Istanbul: The City that Never Sleeps.”

I follow them into the dance club. The room is pitch black except for the colorful neon lights and disco balls flashing and rotating around the room at a dizzyingly fast pace. Uyghur music—Turkic style dutar (two-stringed guitar-like instrument) strumming with high-pitched trumpets blasting a cheerful tune—is booming from the surround sound speakers at an ear-splitting volume and the bass beat is thumping so loud the entire room seems to be vibrating. In front of us at the far end of the two-story high ceilinged room, is a stage with its curtains pulled open. A man is standing in the center of the stage holding a microphone and screaming/singing into it about missing his mother and his homeland (a very common theme in Uyghur songs). In the stage background are several Greek-style columned pillars and a soft red light illuminating them. On the two sides of the stage are placed some kind of Roman style statue of a person holding a tray of flowers. On the far right and left inside the walls in the foreground of the stage have a huge built in display case with 4 feet tall matryoshka Russian dolls (the traditional kind you can stack inside one another).    

The remaining three sides of the room are lined with two levels (a first floor and a second floor, the second floor like a loft) of tables surrounded by plush booths, where Uyghurs sit smoking cigarettes or hookah, drinking Red Label Jack mixed with iced tea, and eating dapanji (Big Plate Chicken). I can smell the taste of the spicy peppers and cumin exuding out of the dishes as we walk by. I notice that most of the women are not wearing headscarves, except for a few women wearing stylish Arabic style headscarves, or headscarves that are loosely tied around the forehead to show the front two inches of their hair. The tables encircle the dance floor, which is a raised platform lined with metal banisters, located in front of the stage. On the ceiling hang 4 huge chandeliers, the ceiling decorated with ornate gold trim in a delicate flower pattern.

Here is a picture from inside the club with the two levels of tables and the plushy booths. You can see a woman dancing Uyghur dance on the dance floor on the right. It was so dark it was hard to get good pictures. 

We arrive at our table—K greeting the guy already sitting with two touches on each cheek, a greeting reserved for male relatives or the closest of male friends—with a huge curved couch-like booth that could seat ~15 people, and the women sit on one side of the couch-booth, and the men sit on the other. As we wait for the food to arrive, the tasty smell of fruity and spicy hookah scents surround us. I notice the group at the table behind us has two women in skin-tight sequined black dresses celebrating their birthdays, each wearing a silver princess crown and blowing out the candles on a cake. A huge bouquet of roses sits in the middle of the table, and a 5-year old girl sits next to them wearing a paper crown. Each time a new person arrives at our table, everyone stands to greet them, us ladies touching our hearts and bowing slightly if it’s a guy, or shaking hands and touching each cheek to the other if it’s a lady. One of the guys suggests getting some yangjiu, but K says, “let’s not drink alcohol.”

Otherwise, everyone is distracting themselves by playing on their phones in an effort to seem cool and aloof. One of the guys makes a comment about it, joking that maybe we should open a WeChat group and talk to each other on there. The girls (except for me in a passive effort to avoid perpetuating the patriarchy) periodically stand to pour tea and honey into everyone’s glasses. One of the boys teases the Chinese teacher about being more Chinese than Uyghur (she just came back from Shanghai one year ago), and asks her jokingly in Chinese, “So what do you think of Xinjiang (xinjiang zenmeyang)? You see this food here, it’s all the Xinjiang specialty food (xinjiang techan), you should have a try!” I laugh out loud at his incredibly good impression of a Chinese person.

Performers emerge periodically to dance on the platform. First, a pair of ladies dressed in traditional Uyghur dancing costume dancing traditional Uyghur dance. A little while later, two Uyghur women emerge dressed in Indian costume, dancing to Indian music in traditional form. Lastly there is a Uyghur in short white shorts and a long flowing gown that drags behind her like a wedding veil, which she whips seductively around as the audience catches glimpses of her bare legs.

An American EDM song comes on, and the club patrons flood the dance floor, dancing what in Uyghur is called “disco,” which for them means American wedding free-style dancing to Western pop music. Everyone bobs around like a white guy that can’t dance and I’m thankful for all my years of training at grade school and high school dances. I notice that some of the women on the dance floor are wearing skirts with slits that go above their knee and some are showing the top of their cleavage, and I’m surprised and slightly scandalized as this is a rare sight indeed.

When a Latin pop music song with Spanish lyrics plays in the background, I sit back in the booth and sigh a breath of relaxation. This place, this night feels like a truly global experience, an example of the internationalism that is so alive in this city that sits at the intersection of so many cultures: Arabic, Turkish, Russian, Indian, Uyghur, Chinese, American… Even Latino culture if you count the music, and Greek and Roman if you count the decorations.

The song changes to a slower pace, and pairs of women go up onto the dance platform to “tansa,” the Uyghur version of waltzing. Next, the song changes to Uyghur music and the floor floods again with people dancing “ussul,” Uyghur style dancing that involves twirling your hands and wrists, waving your arms and walking around in a circular pattern without touching your partner. Generally, it’s danced between a man and a woman, but women-women and men-men paired dancing ussul is not uncommon either.

People dancing ussul on the dance floor/platform

I still remember my first foray into Uyghur dance back in 2014, the first time I went to a Uyghur club. E advised me that day, “Just wave your hands in front of your face as if to say, ‘look at my pretty face,’ and wave your hands in front of your chest, torso and hips as if to say, ‘look at my pretty body.’” I felt so awkward and ugly and stupid and clumsy and uncoordinated that day, but I tried my best. I still feel awkward doing it, but I just keep eye contact with my partner and smiling as wide as I can the whole time.

Over the next four songs, a couple of the guys ask me to dance (it’s rude to refuse a dance), and then two of the girls ask me to dance. Ussul is incredibly flirtatious and sexy, and I love that it’s the one time Uyghurs will publically engage in an open display of sexuality and human attraction in an otherwise incredibly repressed society. They are super kind to me, telling me how well I dance and asking me who taught me.

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Before too long, I get up to leave, saying good-bye to everyone and tughulghan kuningizge mubarek (Happy Birthday) to K. I walk home in the mild spring evening, my ears ringing and my clothes and hair smelling of smoke.

Uyghur names are so much better than English names

I did a post on this in 2011 about Chinese names (Chinese names are so awesome), so I thought I'd do one on Uyghur names too, since Uyghur names have really cool meanings.

Just as a preface, a lot of Uyghur people, especially men, have Arabic, Persian, or Turkish names that they may not know the meanings of, or they may just have made-up names that sound nice, like we have for Amy or Taylor. Some also have names of famous people from Islam or the Arab world, just we have for people from the bible. The following list does not include popular Uyghur names from Arabic or the Quran, but only includes the most popular names in Uyghur with meanings in Uyghur.

Female names:

Dilnur- Light of the Soul

Guljennet- Paradise Flower

Aygul- Moon Flower

Aynur- Moonlight

Muqeddes- Sacred

Merhaba- Welcome

Muhebbet- Love and Affection

Mihriban- Kind and Good

Gulbanum- Flower Queen 

Zilala- Pure

Melike- Princess

Male names:

Erkin- Freedom

Adil- Fair/Just

Tursun- Stay (often given to children born after their mother has suffered several miscarriages, it's a wish for this one to stay here on earth). 

Muxterjan- Chosen Life

Kamil- Expert

Hemrahjan- Life companion

I love Uyghur names! They have such deep and beautiful meanings. It's always fun when I learn a new word in Uyghur and realize it is actually a popular name. 

You Got Fat

Growing up, I had thought of myself as skinny.

Now I do remember that during my sophomore year of college I counted my calories, wanted defined abs, and hated my legs (what white girl doesn’t think these things?). But I only started thinking I was fat when I moved to China during my junior year of college. In a country with a recent history of mass starvation combined with modern ideas of a “the skinnier the better” mentality among young, urban girls provided a perfect storm of cognitive dissonance for me. If being “fat” was a compliment, as I had read in some cultural descriptions of China and as some people told me, then why were all of the skinny girls around me plagued with eating disorders and talked non-stop about wanting to lose weight when they were already unnatural twigs? Indeed, one of the most common phrases you will hear out of a Chinese girl’s mouth is, “I’m on a diet” (我在减肥 wo zai jianfei).

China’s recent history of immense food shortages and starvation in living memory of people over the age of 60 remains a part of the everyday culture here, and their anxiety about not having enough to eat is clear; from the common greeting “Have you eaten?” (equivalent to our “how are you”), to the insistence that you eat more and that “no, you are not full yet,” to the habit of putting food in your bowl while you’re eating, to always saying, “I’m full” after eating, to the custom of over-ordering on food in restaurants. There’s no doubt that food anxiety is also part of their habit in commenting on my body weight. Uyghur people, who also experienced the GLF and the CR, are similar.

“You got fat,” people tell me all the time (Ch: 你变胖了 Ni bian pang le, Uy: semirip ketipsiz). When I was in Nanjing, my Chinese mom heartily agreed when I confided in her about people telling me this. “Yes, you’ve gained weight since you first moved here in September,” she told me without hesitation.

With my American ears, what I heard was: “You ARE fat, ugly, and lazy.” I felt like a huge cow walking around.

What they perhaps meant was not “you ARE fat,” but perhaps closer to: “You are comparatively rounder since the last time I saw you,” with a connotation of “you are healthy and living well right now.” Especially for my Chinese mom, this was a point of pride for her. If she had sent me back to America skinnier than before, she mostly certainly would not have done her a good job of taking care of me.

Indeed, these comments that I had gotten fat, which they meant to mean “relatively fat compared to before,” combined with insistence that I “eat more! Eat more! You don’t eat enough!” didn’t help. If they kept telling me that I was fat, why were they asking me to eat more? This confusion combined with the fact that I actually was eating more—the loneliness from being abroad and wanting to try new foods, and cheap, delicious, sweet, and easily available street food meant that I was eating a lot--and certainly not exercising as much as I did in the States.

Suddenly, I was glad when I got food poisoning. “Good,” I thought, “An opportunity to flush my body of food and not eat for a few days.” I grabbed the stomach fat I had and pinched it hard, willing it to disappear. I was convinced that Chinese boys didn’t like me because I was too fat.

A year later, I looked at pictures of myself. I was seriously skinny that year I was in China (2009-2010). 

WHAT? Why were people always telling me I had gotten fat and why did I spend so much of that year obsessing about my weight?

Also, I noticed that people who hadn’t seen me for a week would say that I’d gotten fat. And then the next day, someone would say that I’d gotten skinny.

WHAAAAT??

How was this possible? Clearly, I wasn’t empirically gaining or losing weight in that amount of time. And yet, I couldn’t help but here in those words: You are fat. You are ugly. You are lazy.

This is what we hear as Americans.

It was only with time that I realized: For them, it was merely a greeting, a way of saying that "compared to last time, you are relatively bigger or smaller." And a way of saying, “you are living well” (ie, you’ve gotten fat) versus “You’re overworked” (ie, you’ve gotten skinny).

Now, people did explain this to me and I did intellectually understand that for some older Chinese people, “you’ve gotten fat” was a compliment.

But this intellectual understanding of history and culture was combined with stick skinny girls all around me insisting that they were “too fat” and that they were on a diet to lose weight. It was clear that in the young, urban, modern culture that skinnier was better, especially for girls. All I could think was, if this skinny girl thinks that she’s too fat, then I must be a cow.

And so, my confusion continued. Over the years, I got used to it. I tried my best to ignore it, but still, I couldn’t help but feel a stab of pain in my gut every time someone made a comment about my body. “You got skinny,” they would say. Does that mean I was fat before? I couldn’t help but ask myself. “You got fat,” they would say. Does that mean I’m an ugly pig now? I couldn’t help but think to myself. I knew that empirically I might be the same, but the comments continued about how I’d gotten fat or skinny.

It was similar in Uyghur culture as well.

I decided to investigate this issue by asking people directly: “what do you mean when you say that?” So, the next day, at dinner with two male Uyghur friends, I asked:

“What do you guys mean when you say someone has gotten fat or skinny?”

They laughed, knowing that this was something other Americans and me had struggled with before. They explained, “It’s just something nice (kongulluk xushal) to say to someone, especially when you haven’t seen that person in a while. If you say they are fat, it kind of means, ‘you’ve been living well, huh?’ If you say they are skinny, it kind of means, ‘you’ve been stressed out recently, huh?’ But mostly, it’s just something we say in greeting, like asking, ‘how are you?’ If you look a little sad and tired, we will probably say you’ve gotten skinny. If you’re looking happy and healthy, we will probably say you’ve gotten fat.”

A little while later, another friend arrived, and as an experiment/joke, the other guys asked him, “has Sarah gotten skinny or fat?”

“She got fat (semirip ketiptu),” he said without a moment’s hesitation.

There it was again, that stab in the gut. 

He smiled broadly, knowing that it bothered me, and waved his hand out in front of him, shaking it as if to say “it’s not what you think it means.”

“But but but…” he started. “I don’t mean it in the way that you Americans mean it!” he quickly insisted. Relatively well-versed in Western culture, he didn’t need to elaborate on what we all knew: Americans equate being fat with ugliness and laziness and that’s not what he meant.

“What I meant, was that compared to the last time I saw you, your face has just gotten a little rounder, more filled out.”

“But other people have been telling me that I’ve gotten skinnier,” I said, still just a little bit sad that he had just called me fat.

“They were lying,” he said.

Oh.

“What I mean is, these phrases, you’ve gotten fat or skinny. It doesn’t mean ANYTHING. All it means is that compared to the last time we saw you, you changed in one way or another. But seriously, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s like saying ‘how are you,’ or ‘have you eaten yet,’ or when you bump into someone one the street, ‘where are you going?’ No one actually cares where you are going, but we ask anyway, out of politeness, as a way of greeting. It’s just something we say and it has no literal meaning whatsoever.”

The next day, I went to a blind massage place for a massage. One of the first things my massage therapist said to me after he started massaging me? “You got fat since last time,” he said.

Taking this as another opportunity to pursue my “research” project, I asked him: “When you say that, what do you mean?”

“Do you know Chinese?” he asked, thinking that I literally didn’t understand his Uyghur.

“No, I understood what you said. What I mean is, what do you really mean by that? Because in America we don’t normally say that.”

“It doesn’t have any other meaning besides, ‘your meat has grown in size,’” he said trying to explain.

I laughed. Hoping to go deeper into the matter, I said, “Oh ok. Because in America, when you call someone fat, you’re kind of implying that they are lazy,” I said.

The massage therapist standing at the table next to us agreed, “Yes, it does kind of mean that you are lazy.” But my massage therapist disagreed, “Not necessarily. You could be a really hard worker, but you’re sitting at the computer all day. That would make you fat, but not lazy.”

After a long silence, my massage therapist, who I guess had been pondering it, said, “People from the village really like fat people and think they are pretty, that clothes fit them well, and that they are living comfortably and well. It’s the people from the cities, especially girls, they are trying to lose weight, and they will get angry if you tell them they’ve gotten fat. It’s because in the city physical labor is comparatively less valued, and people here use computers and cars rather than they’re bodies.”

“So, is there a relationship between body weight and being ugly or pretty?” I asked.

“Not necessarily, but in the villages, people think that fat people are good-looking. In America do you think that being fat is ugly?” he asked.

I said yes and he laughed. He said there was no such relationship in Uyghur society. “Well, then is there a relationship between being rich and fat, or being poor and skinny?” I asked. “No,” he said, “Though there might be a relationship, that was not something people thought consciously.”

I know I gained weight while in the States during the winter, and yet more people than ever are insisting that I’m definitely skinnier than last year. So, I still have no idea what is happening.

One night, I went out to dinner with a female friend who is overweight. She mentioned something about herself being fat, and I asked her, “what does it mean when Uyghurs say they’re fat or skinny? I mean, do people in your village think being fat is beautiful? Do girls in the city try to lose weight?”

She said, “Girls like to be skinny, not fat like me. Being fat like me is so ugly. So yeah, girls like to be complimented on being skinny, so we’ll often compliment each other by saying, “you got skinny (oruqlap ketipsiz)” when we see each other. Especially girls in the city feel happy and pretty when you call them skinny, so calling someone skinny is a nice compliment to give someone. It’s just something nice to say. Maybe 20 years ago in the villages girls were thought of as pretty if they were fat, but not anymore.”

“So, what does it mean when people call me fat?” I asked, knowing that I’m empirically pretty skinny, especially compared to her.

“Oh,” she giggled, “In your case they’re just saying you’ve changed since they’ve last seen you; it’s something people say when they haven’t seen you in a while. It's a way of acknowledging that it's been a while since the last time you two have met. It's a way to show that they care about you. Would you bother to tell that to someone you didn't care about? No. You would just say hi and move on with your life. With someone you care about, you want to say something that shows you've recognized a physical change in them. It doesn’t mean you are fat, it means you’re relatively fat since last time.”

“In America, people never comment on such things,” I explained.

“Really?? Why not?” she asked, her eyebrows furrowed in confusion.

“Weight is just not something we talk about.”

She said, “Take me for example. It’s not good to be so fat. It’s not good for my health. So, if I gain some weight, my mom will tell me, ‘you got fat.’ It’s because we can’t always see for ourselves that we are getting fat. Sometimes you don’t realize it yourself, so it’s important for someone else to point out your faults, especially when it comes to being fat for health reasons. Don’t you think it’s good to help someone out be letting them know that they are fat? Then they will lose some weight and be healthier.”

“Nope, still something we would never do.”

“Even your mom??”

“Especially my mom.”

“OK, let’s take this as an example,” she reasoned. “Say you went back to the States and you weighed like 100 kilos. Wouldn’t your mom say something?”

“Never. Especially if I had gained that much weight…”

She looked at me with her jaw hanging open in genuine shock. “Really?” she asked again.

She started to smile and shake her head back and forth in confusion. “Sorry, but that just doesn’t make any sense to not say something that everyone knows and is thinking.”

She then reiterated to me, understanding a little bit more about how sensitive a topic this was for me, “When people say that to you, since you’re not really fat, they’re just saying you’re living well, you are living comfortably, you’re eating enough and you’re probably not too stressed out and japaliq (working hard). But girls everywhere would prefer people to always say they are losing weight.”  

So perhaps saying you got fat or skinny does have different connotations based on whether you are from a village or city, where villages remain impoverished, and meat and oil are scarce luxuries. In the cities, girls have embraced the anorexic culture of self-starvation and insist that being skinny is beautiful. The combination of these two different worlds—as migrants are moving to the city in great numbers—creates a confusing situation where “you’ve gotten fat” is nothing but a common greeting to say, “are you doing well?” and to show that you care about someone. At the same time, girls also get offended by it and continue with their anorexic-like dieting.

In conclusion, the tension between tradition and modernity, between the village and the city, between wealth and poverty, continues to play out in everyday greetings.