A Coffee Shop: Inequality in the City

May 2017. 

When I walked into the Turkish coffee shop today, I felt as though I was attending a romantic and gluttonous party.

The menu featured coffee mochas with towering whipped cream, a delectable selection of 12 different flavors of ice cream, and extravagantly ornate chocolate tiramisu cakes advertised as “Turkish desert” that towered behind the glass.

Uzbek music blasted a little too loud on the speakers, and people spoke loudly to be heard over the music, creating a buzz of laughter and chatter all around me.

I saw a couple feeding each other bites of cake. Teenagers sat together, not talking, but viewing their phones with intense concentration and typing vigorously. Two girls in gray turbans tied in the front of their foreheads sat in a corner sharing a pot of tea and giggling softly. A group of middle-aged men wearing square skullcaps (doppa) sat in a circle the middle of the room, multiple tables pushed together, talking loudly and laughing boisterously with each other.

Another woman sat alone with a red headscarf and an iPhone 6S adorned with shiny rhinestones, face plastered with white foundation, and a thick, dark penciled-in unibrow. She sent voice messages into her phone as she ate a piece of strawberry cake.

The din of people’s laughter and stories mixed with the music like a melodious harmony—a song of love, friendship, and pleasure, a short burst of time in the midst of busy lives. When I listened in on the conversations, I noticed that they never broached the religious or the political, and the kids were speaking in Chinese to each other.

The friend I was with took a selfie of us with our two bowls of ice cream. She airbrushed my pimples and the bags under my eyes, made our skin instantly whiter, put it together in a collage that said ‘best friends’ in English, and posted it on social media.

Our curated image of ourselves and our night out, a night of pleasure and escape through ice cream and cozy coffee shops surrounded by foreign music and huge pictures of cake, was suddenly disrupted by a raspy voice.

“Please, acha [older sister], won’t you buy some? 3 for 10 som [Uyghur word for unit of currency]…”

I turned and a boy no older than five looked up at me. His face was dirty, his eyes were tired. He was wiggling and squirming as he stood next to our table, presenting packages of wet wipes for sale, and staring at our food. We shook our heads no, and went back to burying our heads in our phones, trying to escape this uncomfortable moment of sitting in his need and shameless begging. He pushed, asking us again, and we told him qeghez ba! (we have tissues!) a little too harshly.

The waitresses with black baseball caps and orange sweatshirts bustled around the crowds, clearing trash and returning dishes to the kitchen.

Outside, a military post was monitored by young men in camouflage holding large guns behind a black cage that says in large yellow characters: 请勿靠近 (please don’t get too close).

Across the street, a father stood at the entrance to the mosque, as he did every night, holding two young children in his arms while he rocked back and forth chanting praises to Allah and begging for help and mercy.

A black van reading 公安 (public safety) with bars on its windows rumbled past, its blue and red lights flashing.

We Came with High Hopes for a New Life

Ürümchi.

Huge

Desolate

Angry.

We came with high hopes for a new life

A free life.

We came to find the same tekshurush*

That we already knew so well.

The sun beating down

No jobs

No money

No food

No water to bathe in

No way out.

Just signs that declare the minzu tuanjie** of the pomegranate

And facile security guards sleeping and watching porn.

Not keeping us safe and not giving us freedom either.

Are you my Big Brother?

Closed in like animals

Segregated like criminals

Spied on like traitors

Or maybe we are traitors…

After all, who gives a shit about the Olympics when it’s a bunch of tiny Kitay
with tiny dicks playing ping pong?

All I know is that what happens in this life is not as important as the next.

So I’ll keep praying to Allah.

At least I have my children.

-August 2016, anonymous (a Uyghur research participant’s poem)

*tekshurush means "investigation." It is the Uyghur word used to describe security checks,
such as a metal detector or an ID check.

**minzu tuanjie (民族团结) means "ethnic solidarity." It is the Chinese phrase used in propaganda
messages about all the minority populations coming together in solidarity under the banner of
Chinese nationalism.

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.