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And The Monkey Learned Nothing
Dispatches from a Life in Transit
By Tom Lutz University of Iowa Press
Copyright © 2016 University of Iowa Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60938-450-0
CHAPTER 1
THE CHINESE DON'T BELIEVE IN ANYTHING
Kashgar–Urumqi, Western China
Kashgar lies straight east from the border with Kyrgyzstan, some 150 miles, nothing between the dusty border town of Irkeshtam and the outskirts of the old city but empty landscapes of ochre and taupe, a few freight trucks rolling on the two-lane blacktop. Arid, almost plantless, the landscape is a rehearsal for the thousand-mile Taklamakan Desert to follow. After slamming across the extreme, rutted, medieval mountain roads through the Kyrgyz mountains, the road is remarkably smooth, perfectly maintained asphalt. Some scrub brush clings to the almost dry riverbed. Beyond the road and trucks, human beings have left no trace except a single gleaming, jumbo factory complex, complete with dormitories, dropped by Beijing's social engineers exactly halfway between the city and the border.
The old city of Kashgar has a few Kyrgyz in their tall felt hats, a few Tajiks in embroidered caps, but almost everyone else is Uyghur. Next door, the Han Chinese are building a new city, entirely populated by immigrants from the East — part of Beijing's policy to keep the empire from fraying at the borders. Similar cities, called "developing zones," have been built in Urumqi, Lhasa, Jinghong, Inner Mongolia, and other places where China's ethnic minorities live. In most of these places, there is no attempt at urban renewal, no bulldozing of the old city, no attempt to disrupt local cultures, nothing like ethnic cleansing. The Han prefer, instead, to overwhelm. Xinjiang province, China's far west, is enormous, the size of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California combined, and until the 1950s was almost entirely Uyghur, with a sprinkling of Kyrgyz and others. But Han are now almost half the total population. The new Han city next door to Urumqi is already larger than the Uyghur city and far more outfitted with infrastructure. Kashgar is slated for the same development.
In a café in the old city, one specializing in yak stew at fifty cents a bowl, I asked a cabdriver if the region had changed radically since he was a boy twenty-five years earlier.
Yes, he said. Twenty-five years the Chinese not here.
So you are not Chinese?
He looked confused. We are Uyghur! he said, shrugging his shoulders, arms spread, taking in everyone in the room.
And you are Muslim? I asked.
Of course, he said, matter-of-factly, as if to say, isn't everyone?
Do you think everyone in the world should be Muslim? I asked.
Of course, yes, he said, now looking at me suspiciously.
Forgive me, I said, I grew up in a Christian family, most of my friends grew up Christian or Jewish. How do you explain, to someone like me, why I should embrace Islam?
He got hot fast, like a thin aluminum pan over a high flame.
Because there is one god, he said, steaming. And his name is Allah! His anger grew more intense, and he added, almost viciously, and Mohammed is his messenger!
He had gone from calm to irate in seconds, and then, after a few breaths, as we looked past each other, he just as quickly returned to normal. I didn't mention that I found this a not entirely convincing argument.
And the Chinese? I asked.
Jew and Christian know, he said, one god. But the Chinese — and again he heated up, although this time evincing deep disdain, disgust more than anger — they, he growled, they don't believe in anything.
The yak stew was rich and thick, just a little gamier than beef stew, and very popular. The place was packed, people sitting close. A happy three-generation family of eight was crammed into a four-person booth with a stool on the end, a plump, red-cheeked baby getting passed around among them.
Two days later, I was some thousand miles northeast, in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang province, when fighting broke out. There had been skirmishes between the Uyghurs and the Chinese before, but this was the largest to date. According to official Chinese accounts in the newspapers in the following days, the riots left 197 people dead, the majority of them Han. Uyghur activists claim that more than six hundred died, the majority Uyghur. Mobile phone service was instantaneously curtailed and the internet shut down. No international calls were allowed. Mosques were shut down. A thousand Uyghurs were arrested and hundreds more detained. Eventually, thirty-five received death sentences. Text messaging was restored in the province after six months, but internet service remained blocked for a year. The security services placed forty thousand surveillance cameras in the city. Relations remained tense throughout the region, and in Kashgar two years later, after dozens of deaths in new riots, the Han bulldozed two-thirds of the old city, which had stood for two thousand years along the Silk Road. The official Chinese explanation was that the buildings weren't earthquake safe.
In the Yak Stew Café, as in all businesses, there had been pictures of Han Chinese leaders, but the Uyghur clientele did not seem to notice. I assume the place is now demolished. I had pointed to one and asked the cabdriver what he thought. He looked at it like he had never bothered to see it before.
I also asked him what he thought the future might bring.
Insha'Allah, he said, Allah willing, we will survive.
CHAPTER 2
SEEING THE FUTURE
Seoul, South Korea
Arriving at Incheon International Airport I felt like a kid from the shtetl first seeing New York in the 1890s, or a Hmong tribesman airlifted from the Laotian hills into Minneapolis in 1975. The future lords it over you in the swooping terminal, gleaming, prodigious, awe-inspiring. The subway protrudes into the outsized building as a three-story-high tube of insistent chrome and glass, the front end like an enormous polished bullet. The subway itself glitters with chrome, dozens of TV screens in each car, all showroom-floor spotless. Above ground, the roads are smooth and black, crackless, center lines bright white.
Seoul itself is a mixed bag, with some unreconstructed neighborhoods, a little grime on the older buildings — but even there, the economic vibrancy is palpable. The only real holdovers from the twentieth century or earlier, besides a preserved temple here and there, are the gold hustlers that have an eye out for foreigners and whose mannered friendliness is warning enough. Cranes abound, piling the city higher. "We are very up and coming," a man told me on the subway.
A few days into my trip, also on the subway, I had a chat with a young woman, maybe twenty years old, who said hello, obviously interested in the one foreigner on the train and, like many young people everywhere, interested in practicing her English. She was an odd woman, a little slow to respond when I said something, and it wasn't clear at first whether it was a language problem, or if she was distracted for some reason or on the autism spectrum somewhere. She wore a hodgepodge of clothing items — sweaters and scarves and wraps, all more or less black. I asked her whether she had ever heard of the restaurant I was on my way to, and she said, after a pause, no. I took that as a hint that she was done chatting and opened my notebook and jotted down a few things. After a minute I looked up to see her staring at me. She asked what I was doing, and I said I was a writer — I was just making a few notes about my day.
You are book writer, she said, rather than asked.
Yes, I said. I have one book being translated into Korean.
She looked a little to one side of me, said nothing for ten seconds, and then said, books.
Yes.
When my stop came she had already turned to the door, and I followed her out. As we rode up the escalator, I thanked her for her conversation and said goodbye.
I headed out of the station and noticed she was walking alongside me. I looked over, and she smiled.
You are going this way? I asked.
Yes, she said, and smiled again.
Okay, I said, and scanned the street for my restaurant, quickly seeing it. When we got to the door, I turned to say goodbye once again, and she walked past me, as if I were holding the door for her. I said hello to a waitress in the front of the restaurant, and the young woman talked to her in Korean. She answered and showed us to a table.
I will translate, the young woman said, looking slightly to my left again.
The waitress handed me an English menu and the young woman a Korean one.
I ordered, and the young woman repeated exactly what I said — the names of the dishes were transliterated Korean, and my pronunciation was close enough, which I could tell because she repeated them verbatim.
Are you hungry? I asked.
No.
Do you want to order something small anyway, or we can just share what I've ordered, and a drink?
She turned to the waitress and they had a conversation.
When the food came there were piles of it, and it kept coming. Korean food often has multiple side dishes, and we ended up with twenty or more plates and bowls of various sizes, only some of the food recognizable. The young woman ate with the speed and intensity of a contest eater. She looked up only once, to smile, and then dove back in. Long after I had finished, she was still at it, unrelenting, unconcerned with appearance or really anything but efficient shoveling. It was a remarkable performance, and she was a small person, five feet tall, maybe 105 pounds, maybe less, at least before her dinner.
I tried a few times to have a conversation but got only nods or shakes of her head in response. She was not a student, she did have a job. She shrugged when I asked doing what. Eventually, I quit asking questions and watched. When she was done, the dishes cleared, the check paid, we walked out into the evening, and I thanked her for her help, said goodbye, shook her hand, and started wandering down the street, away from the subway. Once again, she fell into step alongside me.
Do you live this way? I asked.
She took a half block to reply with a shake of the head.
Okay, I said, and stopped.
She stopped.
I said goodbye a fourth time and turned around and started walking back to the subway. She got in step again next to me.
You write books, she said.
I said yes, and started talking about them a bit, until it felt like it had just been a prompt to get me talking. She was not what we call an active listener. For all I knew, she wasn't listening at all.
I decided to try an experiment and didn't say anything for the eight or ten blocks back to the subway. She said nothing. If I looked over at her, she smiled, then looked back ahead. When we got to the station, we went down the escalator, and it was starting to feel, maybe not less strange and unsettling, but funny, like a Mr. Bean episode. I put my ticket in the entry machine, which spit it back out at me, and started walking toward the track.
She had stopped, before the entry, and stood looking at me. I turned and waved, walking backward a few steps, still waving. She waved back, standing still.
I looked back one last time as I turned a corner, and she was still there. I waved. She waved. I walked down the tiled hallway and got on my train. In a minute she was beside me. She must have run.
I asked her what she wanted, where she thought she was going now, and she shrugged, not looking at me.
I'm going back to my hotel now, I said, and need to do some work.
She made no sign she heard me. I looked around the car. It was fairly empty, the day over, and nobody seemed interested in me or us. I wanted some outside read, some sense that this was either as odd as it felt or not.
Getting off the train, I walked with my shadow to the hotel and into the lobby. She followed me in.
Thank you, I said, for accompanying me tonight.
She looked to my left and said nothing. I held out my hand to shake hers, but she didn't lift her arm. I pushed the elevator button. The clerk at the front desk watched us discretely.
Good night, I said, and bowed.
She bowed, almost a reflex, and I backed into the elevator. The bow, perhaps, or perhaps because it was in front of the clerk, had stalled her. She was standing in the same place, looking off in the same direction. I waved as the elevator door closed, but she didn't look up.
As the tiny elevator rose, I wondered whether she'd be there in the morning.
She wasn't.
CHAPTER 3
THE PROSTRATE PILGRIM SLIDES HOME
Jokhang Temple, Lhasa, Tibet
The most strenuous form of pilgrimage in the world begins as a simple standing prayer, after which you lay yourself out full length, face down, kiss your forehead to the ground, and then stand back up where your head just was and do it again. You lower yourself to your knees, fall forward to lie flat once more, and then pull your legs forward and stand back up, moving forward one body length at a time. People in China, India, and Tibet do this around temples, down streets and highways, or overland on rough terrain, sometimes traveling in these five-foot, caterpillar-style movements for a thousand miles, even two thousand miles. An average-size person needs to prostrate himself or herself (almost always himself for the long distances) roughly a thousand times a mile. After a while, kissing the ground with the forehead results in a callus, an enormous crusty, dark callus in the center of the forehead.
Any pilgrimage to the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa, Tibet's holiest site, is supposed to end with three circumambulations of the temple complex, although most people I saw circled many more times than that. Tibetans have a lot of gadgets they use in prayer — the large bronze mounted prayer wheels along the route, which they spin as they pass, or handheld prayer wheels that they keep rotating while they walk or as they sit. There are vajras (or scepters), bells, prayer beads, flags, staffs, mandalas — and all of these come in myriad shapes and sizes and styles. The pilgrims and locals buy incense and herbs to keep the four ovens the size of bedrooms continuously fed, sitting at the cardinal points, keeping their protest visible, palpable.
There were men and women of all ages prostrating themselves before the walls of the temple, laying out a small prayer rug for the purpose, staying in one place. Very few circled while prostrating. One man, though, forty-five or maybe fifty years old or so, dressed in traditional garb, was doing his own version. He had special knee and elbow pads rigged up, each of which was padded inside against his joints and clad in sheet metal on the bottom. He stood up, raised his hands in prayer, and then, as if he were diving into a pool or using himself as a bowling ball, he threw his torso low and headlong down the route, flat-out prostrate, suspended on his metal-clad knee and elbow pads, sliding a dozen feet or more on the smooth stones, trying his best not to ram into the pilgrims walking in front of him. When his momentum died, he touched his forehead to the ground, stood up, and did it again. Instead of one body length for every prostration, he made three or even four.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from And The Monkey Learned Nothing by Tom Lutz. Copyright © 2016 University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
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