The State of My World

It is cool today in Chini Town. I spent the night tossing and turning worrying about whether my lessons are working with the students or not and with a conversation I had with a very good friend of mine, my best friend about life. I issue is this. We were skypeing with each other and we got into a tussle about something I can't even remember. Nothing serious. But I said you have way too much time on your hands you need something to do. Well she bristled at that and reminded me that she has plenty to do that she has her painting and her website and her landscaping and half a dozen other projects she is involved with that are furthering her profession as an art educator. So last night I thought about it and felt uncomfortable with my flippant remarks to her. I was joking but in reality this is no joking matter and I think I need to weigh in on this if nothing more than to be clear about what is really at stake here. She is right. She has a multitude of meaningful things she is doing to stay active and involved with her world. What is not happening for her and for many of us over 50 is gainful employment in this woeful economy. One of the reasons I left the States is because I couldn't find work. My younger counterparts didn't seem to be suffering too much in a crushed economy, yet the older fellas of the business were scrambling to find work. This is my beef, that, in America the workable life span of a contributing member of society spans 30 years. From the age of 20 to 50. After that we are considered useless, throw aways, unless you have your own business or you are in a profession that regards those with experience as mentors. My friend just spent the last 4 years finishing her masters in Art Education. This is no small feat considering she also was raising four children, and struggling with a marriage that did not work any more. This is a woman with a vast amount of knowledge in her field and is constantly updating her professional data base all the time. She has spent countless hours learning about the computer and how to use it as a tool to further her profession. In fact, she is working all the time. She could not only teach but work circles around anyone I know. She has amazing grace and stamina. Yet she is 55 just like me and has been searching for work now for the last 6 months. She has more knowledge more experience more patience and any of her younger constituents. Why then is she not working for a living? She has had a few interviews. Nothing has panned out. She has an impeccable resume and a very impressive portfolio. Yet no one seems to care. She told me on one interview for a teaching position the principal dismissed her never even looking at her portfolio. I think it's her age. America has always been about the young and new and we are not young or new, we are vibrant and experienced. We want to work. We want to belong. We want to see things change and grow. We have a wisdom about life no twenty something could ever have. I am in China learning a whole new skill set to take with me where ever I go. I was wrong to be flippant. She was right to let me have it...... You go girl!

I'm an American and I'm paranoid too!

Well I am back. Back from vacation. Back from the States, back to China. I have moved. I am now living and working in Peizheng College. Peizheng is a stones throw from Chini which is a short drive to Huadu which is a hike to Guangzhou. However no one knows where this place is so I just say I am in Guangzhou. Or if people really do not know I say I am near Hong Kong. That usually works. I am out in the middle of no where, in the jungle far from civilization, rooming with 80 some odd foreign teachers here to teach oral English to the students. I just returned to China four days ago and have been settling in to my apartment trying to make the limited space comfortable. In the meantime I have also been taking in some of the local color. In this case it is all the Americans who have come to China to teach. Out of the 80 or so foreign teachers, roughly around forty or so are American. Out of those a good seventy five percent are male. These guys run the gambit of young and inexperienced to late fifties, sixties, with a wealth of life experience. Some speak Chinese very well the rest just well... not. What some of them do have in common is this intense desire never to return to the States. Everyone has their own reasons. Some of which result from the fear of being watched. Americans love conspiracies. We spend hours, days,years, fixated on our desire to prove the government is behind it all. We love it so much no matter where we go we import this fear of the man in heavy doses. We will tell anyone and everyone willing to be within earshot. Ah the paranoia. I think it's the beer we drink. There is something in those micro brews that makes us so crazy. So we are sitting around a table at one of the smallish restaurants just across the street from the campus and I am listening to everyone talk about their adventures around China and abroad and one of the teachers pipes up and exclaims, they will find you if they want you. They being our government and their ability to ferret out anyone on the planet if they so desire. They have their ways!!! I know I worked in a bank and every time you use a credit card they know where you are! OK I am thinking maybe there is a way to disappear so they can't find you. Well we talked about everything from satellites with powerful telescopes to the computer chip in your passport. I argued that maybe there is a way to "get off the grid". Well that's just not possible, he says. No matter where you are or what you are doing they will find you. They will find you!! The funny part to all this is he doesn't seem to mind that the Chinese Government knows our every whereabouts no matter where we are in China. Oh the hysteria!! Be afraid! It is like a mantra that I was feeling weary of. I love conspiracies I am the first to say that there was more to Dallas than they let you to believe, 9-11 was way too easy for a bunch of foreigners to execute it on their own, you know, the usual stuff. This though bugged me. Who cares whether they can find me or not. The guy is living in a Kafka novel. The bottom line to all this is so what, who cares. Life is way too short to worry about such things. Oops, someone is knocking ....got to run...

It's Just the Chinese Way

I have been a bit distracted this past month. There has been sooo much happening! I was invited to show at the prestigious Wuxi Photographers Association along with seven other local professional photographers. We called the show The Power of the Eye. I was asked to exhibit my work on my impressions on Chinese urban life. I had scads of images that once I started to sift through all of them I started to think Hmmm, nice image but not worthy to hang. I am my most critical judge. I went through everything. I sent some thirty to forty images to them. Some were in black and white, some in color. Some were film and some were digital. They looked through all of them and picked all the color digital images. They picked things that I never would have exhibited and they left out stuff that I thought were worthy of hanging. When the show went up I was one of two photographers showing color work. How odd I thought. The work they chose, some of the images were strong and held there own, others were studies that I was working on, and others were snaps for friends and family. An odd mix. But I have a bunch of huge shots to give away as presents! I am already trying to figure out how to get these things back to the states. Some I will leave here. So for the last three weeks I have been slaving away at my work. having moments of genius mixed in with moments of why am I doing this, refresh my memory please? In retrospect, I do not feel I have finished what I have started here. Admittedly, I have found distractions to take me away from my goals in the last couple of months. Some of it has been the weather. The weather here has been absolutely awful. Some of my distraction has been the news from the States. I am sickened by what I read and see about the BP oil spill in the gulf. It is so very sad to see a country as great as ours run by men and women addicted to their own false sense of power living in denial, unable, paralysed by greed to do what they know to be the right thing. Among other things the wars... notice there are two of them still raging on. The damage to our souls and psyches cannot be measured. Some of it I think, irreparable. Then there is the real estate and the joblessness and the education and health crises that kind of round it all out. We are addicted to our own false sense of entitlement. We believe all the lies we tell ourselves about how great and strong we are, as the proof of who we are stares us in the face every day. Aghhhhh... this whole thing makes me sad. I think with all this happening in the world, people suffering, the oceans dying, what am i doing talking about my stuff. Seems a bit self indulgent to me. Like waking up in the Friendly Hotel the third day of my visit and having my phone cut off by the Secret Police. I couldn't get ahold of anyone, no one could get in touch with me. I spent the day waiting hoping Colin would come by and we could figure this out together. No Colin, This is where knowing a language can be a great asset. I felt so isolated and alone. I thought, maybe this is the signal to get out. I packed my bags just in case I needed a hasty exit. I wondered where they found my phone number since it was under a students name. My my imagination was starting to play games with me. By the time lunch rolled around I decided to walk to the apartment in search of any family member. An hour and a half later I make it to the apartment starving. Then it hit me. Even if I wanted to eat I couldn't communicate what I wanted because I didn't know how to say it. In less frustrating times I could have muddled through it. As it turned out I did end up at a restaurant and the best my waitress and I could do was a plate of potatoes and a bowl of rice. Oh I am much more linguistic now. The frustration of spending thirty minutes buried in a dictionary trying everything understanding nothing and getting no where was taxing. It's then I realized how much I depended on Colins help. With no one home I braved a taxi and pointed my way back to the hotel. I hated this feeling of being totally vulnerable. I ended up at the front desk and got the girl there to call Colins number on her cell. No response. He had changed numbers yesterday and wasn't using the one I had on my phone. Confused and bewildered I went back to my room to devise plan Z what ever that was going to be when the hotel phone rang and it was Colin just as frantic because he could not get in touch with me. I was frantic, frazzled and starving.He told me to wait and he would be there shortly. I suddenly felt relived. I relaxed my life rope had been thrown, I was not going to drown. Lin and Colin picked me up, we went to a restaurant and I ate like it was my last meal. We then went and Colin bought a new sim card for the phone for me under a different name that I still have to this day. He then gave me all the contact numbers I could use incase something like this happened again. They dropped me back off at the hotel. That was my day. In retrospect, neither one of us thought the police would go to these lengths to harass us. We kept telling each other it's ok, this is nothing we have done nothing wrong. In retrospect to what is happening to the world, this really was nothing... and I am ok...

Just Thinking

I have taken to throwing darts. Kiwis and Brit expats against the Americans. 6 against 2 unfair odds but we have a good time. Every Friday we all get together for beers peanuts and team darts. The first time we took to the board, we were a disaster. Lately though we have been holding our own thanks to practice. I broke down and bought a board. Now we have home and away matches. What a hoot! It's a great way to end the week, share stories, and ponder the world outside. So everyday I practice heaving darts at a board. It is a zen thing for me, like yoga. It helps me clear my mind and focus. Well maybe not, but I'd like to think so. One thing it does do for me is it helps me avoid the things I really need to get done. Like this blog entry. I want to finish this adventure to Xinjiang Provence but I am having panic attacks about it. Not that I felt physically threatened, it was more psychological then anything else. I spent long hours in my hotel room waiting. Waiting for Colin, waiting to decide what to do. The time in Yining is the same as it is in Beijing though it is 3000 miles to the west. The time difference and the fact it was the same time as someplace else really messed up schedules. Noon felt like nine am but it also felt like the middle of the day. I never got used to it. I would wake at seven, and it seemed like four in the morning. I would do my yoga and then go down stairs to the restaurant to eat twice tortured eggs. At breakfast the Chinese would stare at me with blank faces. The Arabs, Russians and Uighur would look at me quizzically, like who are you? I haven't seen you around these parts. The last day in Yining I made friends with some Russian Business men at the breakfast table. I couldn't speak Russian and their English was limited to hello. We traded pictures of kids and we were able to tell each other where we were from. They thought I was one of them. That made me feel better. But every breakfast I would try to eat alone. The Chinese made me feel very uncomfortable. The hotel was also a favorite meeting place for the military. Funny it is the only place foreigners can go to get a room too. What's that old saying, keep your friends close, keep your enemy closer. People from the military would eye me up one side and down the other, never saying a word. After three days I just accepted it as part of the territory. After three days I was getting used to everything. Mornings usually ended with me watching the Australian Open on Chinese Government TV and waiting. On this particular day, I was waiting to hear from Colin, we were going to his grandparents house for lunch and to talk. Colins grandfather, a professor of history at the college in Yining is the preeminent authority on the Uighur. We were going to talk about that and to see if we could get grandfather to take us to a Uighur village. I thought what a great photo op. This is exactly what I had come to do and see. I was stoked! ten went by no call. Eleven, nothing. At noon I decided to call Colin. No answer. At noon thirty I called again. The phone was shut off. At one oclock, Colin calls me. His voice is stressed. His English is incomprehensible. The only thing I could understand at the time was policeman, I come to your hotel now. When Colin got to the hotel it was 1:30. He came with his friend we call Big Dog. They came in. Colin was hysterical. He was mixing Chinese and English together. I told him to calm down. Colin described how the police had called him that morning and told him to meet with them alone at an undisclosed hotel. They wanted to talk to him. When Colin arrived at the hotel he was told to go to a room on the second floor that people were waiting for him. When he walked into the room two men in plain clothes met him. They sat Colin down in a chair opposite the two men. One of them asked the questions the other took notes. Colin said this went on for a couple of hours. They would ask Colin a question and thirty minutes later ask him the same question. They asked him about his family what his parents do what he does, if he has brothers or sisters, where they work why, who I am what am I doing in China, why did I come to Xinjiang, did I have family and where are they, on and on. Colin said the questions became very personal and that he was scared. Any time the Chinese Secret Police start asking personal questions about you and your family is not a time to celebrate. You do not want the SP probing into your private life. Enough said. It took Colin a good thirty minutes to calm down. From there we went to see his grandparents on the other side of town. Colin had told his parents and everyone what happened with the police. From that point on, my options became very limited. We went to lunch and it was delicious, but there was no discussion about the Uighurs, there would be no going to the village like I had hoped. Colin's Mother met us there to help with lunch and everyone was a little edgy. The table conversation was light and polite. We ate lunch we left, Colin, Gou Li, and myself. Before we hailed a cab for the ride back to the hotel, Gou Li took Colin to a phone store to get a Xinjiang phone number. In China, you buy the cell phone and then you purchase numbers. Every provence has it's own prefix. Colin had a Jiangsu prefix on his phone which was already being listened to. Gou Li decided to get Colin a Xinjiang number in her name so that the SP couldn't trace the calls. Even Gou Li became suspicious of me. I carryed my photo bag to lunch and she could not believe that all there was in the bag was camera equipment. Right there in the street, she wanted to see what was in the bag, so I opened it for her right in the street. She seemed almost dissatisfied that she didn't catch me with something more than cameras and equipment. The SP had every one freaked out. Now the family thinks I am not who I claim to be. That hurt.
I felt suddenly on the defensive. I felt very alone and very isolated. Funny how a small moment can change so much. When they dropped me off at the hotel all I wanted to do was hide. Now I was concerned.

It was Colin, "My parents want invite to you a huoguo a Xinjiang speciality very delicious." Huoguo loosely translated means hot pot. Hot because the soup is boiled to vapor and the broth is made up of spices and chilies. Meats, vegetables and noodles are brought to the table to be put into the soup and cooked. There are two pots on the fire. one inside the other. the inner pot is a sweet pot where fruits are put to cook. The outer pot is the spicy hot pot. Three days on the road, sleeper bus and train, my system said lets go for it! That night I met Colins' mother father and all of Goulis family. We drank Baijao and ate Huoguo. The baijao is a liquor made of rice. I have tasted some pretty raunchy stuff in my day but nothing compares to baijao. Baijao is a cross between cough syrurp and Saki. At about one hundred proof it proves to be a very intense experience when slamming it down during a toasts. Chinese men like to fill their glasses up and drink it all one time. After three glasses and many toasts to me and I to the family I felt I could conquer anything. I am an easy drunk and three four ounce glasses was, well way too much. Much of what I said I cannot remember. Though, I do remember Colin's father. Dads nickname is Happy. Happy was very happy that night. So happy in fact he wanted to go into business with me to open up a barbecue place in America and me thinking right, sure, must be the alcohol I don't even know this guy. So trusting. . Trust only goes so far as to who you know and how you know them. But tonight I trust everyone!! Colin's mother on the other hand, is a tall handsome woman with reddish wavy hair. She is the serious one in the family. Usually what she said went. She kept looking at me with skepticism. Her sister works for the tourist industry in Yining. A beautifully dark exotic woman. She was the person who got the deal at the Friendly Hotel for me. Her estranged husband joined us and never said much. Colin's aunt sat on one side of me, the estranged husband sat on the other. Colin says the relationship is "complicated" That is an understatement. There was Guoli's brother that sat next to Happy. He kept toasting me and laughing. Colin's brother and his girlfriend came. Nana, is half russian and native of Yining, a lovely gentle person. She is at the university of Beijing studying to be a doctor. Her parents are doctors. Rounding out the table was Colin's cousin who in Chinese culture is referred to as a brother, and Colin's best friend Big Dog. I come to find out later that Big Dog is a big mooch and not such a great friend. Most of what I ate I can't remember. I do remember it being the spiciest meal that has ever crossed my lips. My bald spot was soaked in sweat and my cheeks were burning, my lips were numb and I kept eating. No one spoke English except for Colin and his brother. So I listened and marveled at where I was. I was eating huoguo one hundred km from the border to Kirghistan. I am so drunk now I think I understand Chinese fluently. We all laughed at my Chinese and had a great time eating huoguo. Then they drove me back to the hotel where I poured myself onto my bed and slept, restlessly with the fire extinguisher, and a glass of snow next to me.

My Room the Police and Hot Pot

The hallway on the second floor is dimly lit with two small lights at either end of it. My room sat underneath the stairwell. The passkey lock was always hard to see. I never saw anyone on my floor when I would walk up to my room. Yet, once in my room I could hear voices, people laughing and arguing all around me. Doors would open and shut. I could hear the rush of footsteps in the hallway. But once I stepped out of my room, the hallway was silent. It felt empty. The hotel kept it's rooms coldish, just above what would be thought of as uncomfortable. I wore a fleece pullover all the time. The hallway though was cold. My room was plush in a midgets perspective. Hallway lights were used to light my room with. I thought I was in a twilight episode. The smoking room was big enough to hold a card table and three chairs. Cigarette burns covered cheap carpet the floor. A very dim light overhead lit the room. It felt made for espionage. A lounge chair hid in the other corner of the room. My bedroom was the size of my bed. A semi comfortable twin with a small TV at the end of it and a night stand next to it. My room overlooked the back entrance to a restaurant. Every morning I would stare out the window at the frozen world outside and watch the meat man pull up in his three wheeled motorcycle cart, the back end piled high with animal parts and a scale. The meat steamed in the morning air waiting to be sold. The meat man ran from the restaurant to the cart pulling body parts from the back end weighing and rushing them in. My shower had hot water when it felt like having it. Sometimes, in the early morning I could coax a few minutes of warm water out of it. That first day I felt rode hard and beaten. The room even with all it's quirks and misgivings felt very cosy and warm. I laid down and just as my head hit the pillow, the phone rang.

My experience in Yining was not so dramatic. In fact parts of it were fairly boring. Once off the bus in Yining, Colin and I took a taxi to his parents apartment. The first impression I had of Yining was dense fog and icy breezes. Yet, watching Colin greet his mother and father after months of separation was warming to the soul. Colin is the youngest of two. His brother Lin is four years older and works with his parents at their restaurant in Hohot. It's a barbeque joint called The Little Sheep. The family decided to open the restaurant in Hohot because they could not make a living working in Yining. Hohot is a days bus ride to Urumqi and a days train ride to Hohot. Yining is nestled in the mountains accessible by plane bus or car. There is talk about putting in a train station in Yining which would be great. I find the bus ride dicey at best. Every year the family closes up the restaurant in late December and travels to Yining for the holidays. Colins mother, Gou Li was born and raised in Yining. Her family is Xibo. Xibo settled in the area about three hundred years ago from Northeast China. They were sent to the west to protect the border. Colin father is Han Chinese. Colin grew up in Yining and went to school in Yining and all of Colins family on both sides resides in Yining. So Colins home coming was met with great joy. Yet bringing a foreigner home didn't quite go over the way Colin and I had expected. Colin's entire family was incredibly kind, generous and opened their arms of friendship to me in ways I will cherish forever. However on the flip side to all this were the police and their constant harassment of Colin and myself during my stay. Everyday, the police amped up their presence to the point where it became clear to me that the longer I stayed the riskier things would get. The first day there, Lin drove me around to the police station where I was to register as a foreigner. The police station is located in the middle of the Urgher section of town. It is the Chinese way of saying we are here so deal with it. Psychologically the Chinese are very skilled at being able to place fear into the hearts and minds of anyone they want, that includes even their own people. When they torture someone it is always done in a way that lets others know this is your fate if we feel like it. The point being you do not want the police or the secret service interested in your life. Especially if it is in a politically sensitive place like Yining. So we wanted to play by the rules and keep a low profile. We go to the police station and try to register but the woman behind the desk said when we register at the hotel they will get the information. We went to several hotels that morining with no luck. No one would give a room to a foreigner. We asked around and finally went back to the apartment to try a different strategy. In the meantime, Colins aunt, Gou Li's sister works for the transportation department knew the manager of the only hotel willing to serve foreigners. She secured a great deal for me and while Lin and I were at the apartment, Colin's mother came back from shopping to take me to the hotel. The hotel was aptly named the Friendly Hotel. Foreigners from everywhere stayed there. It was also a very popular spot for the Chinese military. During my stay I met Russians, Kazhaks, and Arabs. I was the only westerner staying at the hotel. Though I must admit that traveling to Xinjiang Provence in the middle of winter is not high season for tourists.
Keeping a low profile in Yining was not an easy task. The moment the girl at the desk found out I was American, word spread around the hotel like fire up a hill. Within a few minutes, everyone knew who I was. When ever I came downstairs to eat or wait for Colin, eyes would follow me. Everyone stared. The security guards watched me from the stairwell to the front door. They never took their eyes off of me. No one ever said hello and when I looked back at someone looking at me they would look away. My first night at the Friendly Hotel was one of relief, exaustion and trepidation.

Yining, Xinjiang Provence China

In Xinjiang the winter wind makes everything bitterly unbearable. Yining sits about as close to the Kazakhstan border as you can be without being told to leave immediately.

I have spent the better part of the last month or so trying to understand what happened to me during my visit last month to Yining. The travel alone was an adventure in itself. But now I find myself grappling with some issues that only surfaced about a week or so ago as I wanted a deeper understanding of why from the moment I stepped off the bus that cold morning to talk to the police in charge of the check point, I felt unease, tense, almost paranoid. I kept thinking this is all in your head. I thought that a police check point at the edge of a city near the frontiers of Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, India and all was a matter of routine considering the trouble China had in Urumqi in July of 2009. What I didn't realize until about a week ago was that Yinning had been the scene of some of the bloodiest Uighur riots to date. Call that naive or just plain lazy for not digging deeper about this area other than wikopedia a lot of what happened and could have happened to me makes a lot of sense now. Had I know then what I found out now, I may have been hesitant to have spent time and resources getting out there. When I left with Colin I had a gut feeling this was going to be different and joked about the Secret Police hauling me off to prison for just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's the kind of joke everyone tells when they are safely no where near the problem. I on the other hand happened to have thrown myself into it with the brazenness of a twenty year old intent on proving something to the world. I knew the Chinese were having problems with the Uighur. I knew the military was out there. What I didn't realize until I got back was how dangerous Xinjiang Provence proved to be and had I misstepped or trusted the wrong situation, things could have gone south for me rapidly. Thanks to part to not throwing caution to the wind this time which is my MO and my acute ability to know when to leave the party, I am here to talk about it.
I'm sitting here in Wuxi now writing this and thinking what an adventure! As I have said before Yining is located along the Ili River a scant hundred kilometers from the border of Kyrgyzstan a very mountainous region that sports at least twenty indigenous peoples the largest of them the Uighur. In order to fully understand Yining I have added a couple of articles that will help enlighten you to the situation that I encountered a month ago.

This article is done as a movie script that I think needs some perusing before I start talking about my experience.
DATE=9/15/2000
TYPE=BACKGROUND REPORT
TITLE=CHINA-YINING RIOTS
NUMBER=5-47006
BYLINE=LETA HONG FINCHER
DATELINE=YINING, XINJIANG PROVINCE
CONTENT=

VOICED AT:

INTRO: China is recovering from a deadly explosion
this month in the capital of its far western province,
Xinjiang - where about the half the population is
Uighur Muslim and there are deep ethnic divisions.
While the government says the blast was an accident,
and has ruled out terrorism, Xinjiang is a place where
the tension and potential for violence is palpable.
Beijing Correspondent Leta Hong Fincher recently
visited one trouble spot in Xinjiang, and brings us a
report from the city of Yining, the scene of ethnic
riots just three years ago.

TEXT:

/// TEENAGER ACT IN CHINESE, THEN FADE ///

This Muslim Kazak teenager, a high school student in
Yining, tells his story slowly at first, and only on
condition of anonymity. He was 14 years old in 1997,
when Xinjiang's border city near Kazakhstan exploded
into riots between its Muslim Uighurs and Chinese
militia.

/// TEENAGER ACT TWO IN CHINESE, THEN FADE ///

He says they were in class the day it all began.
Their teacher told them that the Uighurs had started
rioting, so it was too dangerous to go outside. He
says for three days, the students were kept in school,
waiting for the unrest to subside.

/// TEENAGER ACT THREE IN CHINESE, THEN FADE ///

We were so scared, we didn't dare sleep at night, he
says.

No one knows exactly what happened in Yining three
years ago, but the city remains an open wound.
Xinjiang officials warned reporters on a rare half-day
visit to this troubled city not to venture out alone.

/// BEGIN OPT ///

/// CITY SOUNDS EST, THEN FADE ///

Near the city's central square, young Uighur men
exchange cash over a card game. A Uighur boy who
looks no more than 15 years old quickly sweeps a
pile of pornographic video-CDs off a table in the
street when he sees a Westerner approach.

/// END OPT ///

None of the Uighurs in town will talk about the riot -
possibly the greatest threat to Chinese Communist rule
over its ethnic Muslims in the last decade.

/// ALBASBAI ACT IN CHINESE, THEN FADE ///

The governor of the local prefecture, Albasbai Raham,
says the trouble started on February 5th, 1997, with a
small group of Muslim separatists bent on spreading
chaos. He says they wanted to break up the unity of
the nation, and began anti-Chinese riots that lasted
for two days. He says security forces quickly re-
established control, and fewer than 10 people
were killed.

But human rights groups tell a different story.
Arlette Laduguie is an Asia researcher for Amnesty
International in London. She says the trouble in
Xinjiang can be traced back about 10 years to the
break-up of the Soviet Union and the establishment of
independent Central Asian republics on the border with
Xinjiang. She says Chinese authorities feared that
its ethnic Uighurs would be inspired to create their
own independent state, and therefore started a
campaign to suppress Uighur culture and religion.

/// LADUGUIE ACT ///

What started on that date in February 1997 was
not a riot, but a demonstration by a group of
several hundred mainly young Uighurs, who
marched through the streets chanting slogans and
asking for freedom of
religion. It's only later on that the
demonstration degenerated into rioting and the
circumstances in which this happened, the
responsibility of the security forces for
example is not clear, still now.

/// END ACT///

/// KAZAK TEENAGER FOUR IN CHINESE, THEN FADE ///

The high school student from Yining says his teacher,
who is Han Chinese, told the class that what she
called counter-revolutionary Uighurs were captured by
police, horded into an open place nearby, and frozen
to death.

Because the city has been sealed off from outsiders
for so long, it is impossible to verify what happened
to the demonstrators. But Ms. Laduguie of Amnesty
says between 300 and 500 protesters were arrested
within hours of starting their march, which she says
was initially peaceful. Based on interviews with many
Uighur sources, she says police indeed appear to have
tried to freeze the demonstrators arrested that day.

/// LADUGUIE ACT TWO ///

All accounts say that at some point, they were
hosed with very cold water by soldiers or
policemen, for reasons that are not explained.
One has to bear in mind that this was in
February in the middle of the winter, when it
was freezing cold in that region certainly.

/// END ACT ///

Ms. Laduguie says it's not clear if anyone died from
hypothermia or frostbite, but some of the detainees
had to have their frozen feet, fingers or hands
amputated. She says by February 6th, a large number of
anti-riot troops had been mobilized in the city, and
clashes between Uighurs and security forces lasted for
more than a week.

During the two weeks after the violence subsided, as
many as five-thousand people were arrested, including
relatives and friends of anyone who supported the
initial demonstrators. Ms. Laduguie says Uighur
sources estimate 70 or 80 people died during the
unrest.

/// BEGIN OPT ///

/// LADUGUIE ACT THREE ///

There were reports of people dying after being
taken in police custody as a result of severe
torture and because armed police and the army
were patrolling streets constantly, no one knew
exactly who was in custody, in jail, and who was
just perhaps hiding somewhere or disappeared.
And during that period of time, apparently the bodies
of some people badly beaten up were found in the
street.

/// END ACT /// END OPT ///

Mr. Albasbai, the local governor, dismisses these
unofficial reports.

/// ALBASBAI TWO - LAUGHS, ACT IN CHINESE, FADE ///

What you just said is nothing but hearsay, says the
governor. He says police never took people away and
froze them. He says the government handled what he
calls the February 5th incident according to Chinese
law, and if the same thing happened today, he would
handle it in exactly the same way.

/// UIGHUR MUSIC FROM YINING STREETS, THEN FADE ///

Since the 1997 riots, the Chinese government crackdown
on Uighurs appears to have continued. Amnesty
International says China executed 190 people in the
region between January 1997 and April 1999 alone- -
the vast majority of whom were Uighurs charged with
terrorist or anti-government crimes.

But although some militant Uighurs have agitated for
the creation of an independent state, most of them
just want to practice their religion without
interference from the government.

/// KAZAK TEENAGER FIVE ACT IN CHINESE, THEN FADE ///

The Muslim Kazak student in Yining says that ever
since the riots, students have been forbidden from
going to mosques. His teacher says praying will
interfere with their studies.(signed)

NEB/HK/LHF/JO




15-Sep-2000 02:51 AM EDT (15-Sep-2000 0651 UTC)
NNNN

Source: Voice of America


With China’s crackdown, Muslim religion could be disappeared in 10 years
Posted by chinaview on November 8, 2008
Ryan Anson, Foreign Service, San Francisco Chronicle, USA, Friday, November 7, 2008-
(11-07) 04:00 PST Hotan, China – Following a spate of political violence, security has been so tight around here that a 25-year-old Muslim jade dealer agreed to talk to a reporter only if they met 20 miles outside this historic Silk Road town in remote northwestern China.
“I wanted to study teachings like the Hadith,” said the man who identified himself only as Hussein, referring to a collection of the prophet Muhammad’s sayings. “I’m too old now. It makes me sad.”
As children, Hussein and millions of other young Uighurs never attended the religious schools known as madrassas or prayed at mosques because of a government ban on Islamic education for those under 18. Since Hussein never learned about religious laws governing marriage and family, he feels unprepared to have children, and he wonders whether future generations will be able to practice their faith before adulthood.
“Maybe in 10 years, there will be no more religion in Xinjiang” (province), said Hussein.
Human rights groups and Uighur exile organizations echo such concern.
Since the end of the Olympic Games in late August, the Chinese government’s crackdown on Uighurs with alleged separatist ties in this oil-rich province has escalated, according to Alim Seytoff, general secretary of the Uighur American Association, based in Washington, D.C.
History of tension
Friction between Beijing and China’s largest Muslim minority community is hardly new. Uighurs have long chafed at restrictions on Islam, which include studying Arabic only at government schools, banning government workers from practicing Islam and barring imams from teaching religion in private.
But the latest round of unrest is the worst since an uprising in the town of Yining 11 years ago killed scores of people, observers and residents say. Since August, at least 33 people have been killed in a series of attacks and bombings……. (more details from San Francisco Chronicle)
Posted in China, Human Rights, Law, NW China, News, People, Politics, Religious, Social, World, Xinjiang, Yining, ethnic | 1 Comment »
Human Rights Activist’s Personal Account of China Gulja after Massacre
Posted by chinaview on February 8, 2007
Amnesty International (AI), 1 February 2007-
Rebiya Kadeer, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, is a Uighur human rights activist and former prisoner of conscience. In November 2006, she was also elected president of the World Uighur Congress (WUC) in Munich. She lives in exile in the US. Here is her personal account of Gulja (Yining City) after the massacre on 5 February 1997.
I began hearing about terrible events occurring in Gulja (also called as Yining in China) in early February 1997, and decided – as a Uighur and a member of the Chinese National People’s Congress, that I had to go to see for myself what was happening.
I arrived in Gulja ( Yining ) City in the morning of 7 or 8 February, and went to the home of a Uighur friend of mine.
In the afternoon my friend took me to the home of another Uighur family whose two sons had been killed during the Chinese military crackdown on the peaceful protestors in Gulja ( Yining ) a couple of days earlier. Their daughter had been arrested and her whereabouts were unknown. The parents were pale and highly distraught.
Just as I was trying to talk with them, the Ili Prefectural Police and Chinese Military officers and soldiers burst into the house. The soldiers pulled the parents by the hair and kicked them really hard. The top military officer ordered me to put my hands on my head and to face the wall and said, “if you resist or shout and scream, we will shoot you.” It was clear that it was the Chinese military officer in command, not the prefectural police, who didn’t dare say anything in front of him. They forced me to strip completely naked and searched all my clothes.
After finding nothing I was ordered to put my clothes back on, and was taken to the prefectural police station for further questioning. The police chief warned me not to visit any more homes and to leave the city immediately. He said I would be held responsible for the deaths of any people I visited who passed information on to me, and even my own death if something terrible happened. I was then allowed to leave the police station. I nevertheless resolved to stay in the city to gather more information.
As I left the police station someone dropped a note in front of me which read “Go and visit the Yengi Hayat Neighbourhood.” When I arrived in that neighbourhood I saw a large house with all the doors open, and even some food on the table, but with no one at home.
I knocked at the house next door, but no one answered. I tried another house, and a Hui Muslim opened the door and addressed me in perfect Uighur. I asked him what had happened to the people in the house next door. He said they may have been killed in the demonstration. He said they had been really nice neighbours. When I asked him how many people had lived in the house he was not comfortable answering, but he said many had been killed in that neighbourhood and taken away in military trucks.
I asked him if he could direct me to the home of a Uighur family in the neighbourhood, but he said most Uighurs would be too scared to let me into their homes. But he pointed me to the house of an Uzbek family.
A 60-year old Uzbek woman opened the door. Despite her concern that I was being followed she gave me some tea and spoke to me about the demonstration and the crackdown. She said she had seen numerous Chinese military trucks piled high with dead or beaten Uighurs going into the local Yengi Hayat Prison but had not seen people leaving. She said she was certain that nearly 1000 Uighurs had been taken into the prison, but that the prison could only accommodate 500 prisoners. Furthermore, she said she saw many military trucks leaving the prison that were filled with dirt. Many others I spoke with had also witnessed this. Many suspected that dead bodies were buried in the dirt and were being taken out to be disposed of.
Later, I visited the home of another individual, Abdushukur Hajim, who had not participated in the demonstration but who had witnessed killings by the Chinese military. While at his home, the Ili Prefectural Police broke in and detained me for a second time, again taking me back to the police station. I learned later that this gentleman was subsequently arrested and sentenced to two years in prison for passing “state secrets” to me. When he was released two years later he had had a mental breakdown.
Even after my second detention and warning by the Ili Prefectural Police I did not leave Ghulja. I simply felt it was my responsibility to bear witness to the events there and to gather information. I was eventually detained a third time. When I arrived at the police station they said “we’ve told you repeatedly to leave but you are still here. OK, then, if you are so interested to know what happened here then look at this.”
They then showed me footage they had filmed of the military crack-down in Gulja in the proceeding days. I believe their intention was to terrify me and to intimidate me into silence. I watched the footage in the police station with several other people, including the prefectural police chief. I have never seen such viciousness in my life and it is difficult for me to adequately describe the horror of the scenes in the film. In one part dozens of military dogs were attacking – lunging and biting at, peaceful demonstrators, including women and children. Chinese PLA soldiers were bludgeoning the demonstrators – thrashing at their legs until they buckled and fell to the ground. Those on the ground – some alive, others dead, were then dragged across the ground and dumped all together into dozens of army trucks.
The footage also captured a young Uighur girl screaming, “Semetjan”, then running to a young man who was bleeding and being dragged by a Chinese soldier to a truck. Another soldier knocked her down and shot her dead right on the spot. He then dragged her by the hair and dumped her into the same truck into which the young man had been thrown. In another part of the film gunshots were fired into a group of Uighur children, aged 5 to 6, who were with a woman holding a baby, all were shot. It wasn’t clear where the guns were being fired from, whether from a rooftop or truck-top. There were tanks in the street, and in the film one could see three kinds of PLA soldiers: those with a helmet, baton, and shield; those with automatic weapons; and those with rifles with bayonets. In the film I heard Chinese soldiers shouting, “kill them!, kill them!” I heard one officer shouting to a soldier, “Is he a Uighur or Chinese? Don’t touch the Chinese but kill the Uighur.”
After watching the footage I felt I had done what I could. I had seen enough of the horror. I left Gulja City for Urumchi. Upon arriving at the Gulja airport I was strip-searched by agents of the Chinese National Security Bureau. They confiscated all of my belongings, including my clothing and luggage. They gave me new clothing to wear and escorted me to the airplane.
Approximately ten days after my return to Urumchi, one woman and two young men from Gulja ( Yining ) came to my office. They told me that they hadn’t participated in the demonstration in Gulja ( Yining ) but since the Chinese authorities indiscriminately arresting many Uighurs, including those who hadn’t participated in the demonstration, they decided to flee to Urumchi. One of them said his father was even a communist party member, but he still didn’t feel safe. The woman told me with tears in her eyes that Chinese soldiers fired into a crowd of Uighurs waving goodbye to their relatives who were being paraded through the city streets in trucks on their way to the execution ground. She said when one desperate mother shouted to her son on the truck and raised her hands, Chinese soldiers on a building fired upon her with a machine gun and killed 5-6 Uighurs standing beside her. Some Russians standing nearby saw what happened and shouted “Fascists! Fascists!”
During my stay in Gulja ( Yining ) I visited some 30 Uighur families and met with nearly 100 people. I felt the pain of the Uighur families who lost their sons and daughters in the military crackdown on this peaceful protest. Having been detained and threatened on three occasions, I was able to understand the severity of the situation by experiencing first hand mistreatment at the hands of Chinese military and police.
I am speaking out so that we do not forget those who lost their lives in Gulja ( Yining ) and to call for accountability on the part of the Chinese authorities.
———-_- original report of this story from Amnesty International, 1 February 2007
Related: _- Background of 1997 Gulja (Yining) City Massacre in China
Posted in Activist, Asia, China, City resident, Communist Party, Gulja, Human Rights, Incident, Killing, Law, Life, NW China, News, People, Politics, Report, Social, Speech, World, Xinjiang, Yining, military | Leave a Comment »
Background of 1997 Gulja ( Yining ) City Massacre in China
Posted by chinaview on February 8, 2007
Amnesty International (AI), 1 February 2007-
(10 years ago) On 5 February 1997, dozens of people were killed or seriously injured when the Chinese security forces brutally broke up a peaceful demonstration in the city of Gulja (Yining) in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) of China.
Hundreds, possibly thousands, lost their lives or were seriously injured in the unrest that occurred the following day. Large numbers of people were arrested during the demonstrations and their aftermath. Many detainees were beaten or otherwise tortured. An unknown number remain unaccounted for.
Uighurs are a mainly Muslim ethnic minority who are concentrated primarily in China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR).
Since the 1980s, the Uighurs have been the target of systematic and extensive human rights violations. This includes arbitrary detention and imprisonment, incommunicado detention, and serious restrictions on religious freedom as well as cultural and social rights. Uighur political prisoners have been executed after unfair trials.
In recent years, China has exploited the international “war on terror” to suppress the Uighurs, labelling them “terrorists”, “separatists”, or “religious extremists”.
- extract from Amnesty International’s report here
- more reports about 1997 February Gulja (Yining) city massacre from Amnesty International

Colin, my student, experienced these riots when he was ten.

This is the first part of two parts. Enjoy the reading.
Xinjiang Provence
.

I fumble in the dark looking for my shoes. Earlier I had dropped my passport on the floor of the bus and the little girl below me pointed to where it was. Panicked, I jump out of my cot and searched the floor for my wallet containing my passport and money. I thought what would happen if... Now, I am fumbling to find my shoes and hurry to the front of the bus. I am more than a little nervous. I ask Colin to come with me. I hastily grabbed my coat, put my shoes on and stumble off the bus almost falling into a snow bank. At the door, heavy stale air is met with a dry frigid breeze. If it was not so cold it could feel refreshing. The cop was standing there in his dark blue sub zero jacket with his rabbit skin Cossack hat on. "You speak Chinese?" I'm thinking, I need to get a handle on this language. "No" I said and he starts to interrogate me in Chinese. This is when Colin shows up wearing nothing but jeans and T shirt. " It's cold" He says. The policeman turns from me and starts rapid fire to Colin pointing at my passport and getting agitated. Now I am thinking, maybe a few lessons before I left would have helped. Colin looks at me and says, "the police say you passport is wrong."
"What do you mean, wrong?"
Colin asks the cop to explain and with agitation in his voice he flips the passport open to the visa page and starts tapping on it with his finger, all the while his he is getting louder and speaking faster. Tap tap tap. Colin looks white. I want to know what is transpiring and I ask Colin what the policeman is saying. Colin says, " the police think my visa is expired. He say that visa expire in February." Now I tell the cop in my perfect English no no no, that that can't be! No way! He's looking at me with a quizzical look but not the ha ha look everyone gets when they get the joke. I point at the passport and say that that this visa is not the right visa. Earlier in the week there was some discussion of whether I would be able to go to Xinjiang Provence at all for the holidays. Doris, the foreign teachers liaison sent my passport off to Nanjing to get a resident working visa. When Doris found out where I was planning to go she said, You cannot and will not go anywhere with out your passport. Smart woman that Doris. Time is short and Colin has to get tickets to Urumqi. I tell Colin hold off on my ticket until I know I have my passport in time to travel. Colin worries because he thinks that I will not get a seat. Smart kid that Colin. I tell Colin then go without me and I will follow him the day after. That bothers him. The day after Colin buys his ticket, Doris goes to Nanjing and picks my passport up along with Alli and Andrews, two young American teachers, who couldn't travel without theirs either. The week before we had to buy tickets to travel, we all go to Doris and asked her if we could get our passports. She says that she was not sure when the passports are coming back from Nanjing but that everything will be OK if they come back soon. She does not know when soon was going to happen, and she stops talking about it. Colin has already been to the train station three times to buy tickets. Now I have to tell him I may have to leave later than he does. Colin doesn't like the idea of me traveling alone and he having to spend the night in Urumqi waiting for me. I was not relishing that either. So we wait a day. He decides to buy a ticket for himself on the twenty third. He is anxious. He is afraid if he waits too long he won't get a seat. The day after Doris makes a run to Nanjing and picks the passports up. I tell Colin to go buy my ticket. He is worried now because it is late and there may not be seats left only standing room. I tell him not to worry we get what we get and will work on upgrading later. In the meantime, the passport has to go to the local police for processing. Processing takes five to seven days. I need pictures for the paper work and get the passport to the police that day otherwise the passport will not be ready in time. I asked Doris what kind of picture she needs and she say any would do. So we take with us the shot of me with my glasses on my head and we all head down to the police station to hand in the paper work and answer some questions. The timing of all this has to be right. We drop everything off and everyone is happy. It now looks like all the pieces are falling into place at just the right time. Several days pass and everyone is getting ready to leave. Colin has both our tickets asks everyday if I have my passport. No, I tell him, it's coming. Two days before we are to leave, I go to the office to see if Doris has the passports. Time is short and everyone including myself are starting to stress. Doris tells me that the passports are not ready, end of discussion. I leave. My cell phone rings and it is Colin. "Doris is have a problem with you. You need to see Doris." Great. Why didn't she tell me this when I was there? I call Doris and ask her what the problem is. She says my picture is wrong. She sounds worried. The police will not process my paperwork without the right picture. OMG! Holy Cripe! What now! Knowing that now I must move quickly, I hightail it to the local photography studio and have passport pictures done. I rush the photographer and then I rush to the office with the pictures and Doris and I sprint away in a taxi to the police station downtown to hand them the right photos. When we arrive, we hustle to the visa desk. Doris says something to the policewoman, she yells at Doris. Doris points to a list on the desk with my name on it and says something back to her. There is a brief exchange of words and looks, the lady yells at her again, Doris takes the admonishment without saying anything and hands the woman the pictures. The woman, passes them off to another policeman working at the same desk yells something to Doris then ignores her. Doris head hanging waits. tick tick tick. The other cop finally looks up from what he is doing and says something to Doris and she perks up. He then tells me to stand still, he takes my picture and leaves. Two minutes and a small lifetime later he comes back, papers in hand. He passes them over to Doris and with relief in Doris' eyes, we leave. Upon leaving, Doris looks at me and says "I was not sure whether they reject your visa. I don't know what I do if they had" Ah, a moment of clarity passes between us. What if... Now, I am pointing at the passport and tell the cop the current visa is on another page. He looks at me. I look at him. He turns the pages. Nothing, brainy here forgot to bring his glasses outside with him, now I am desperately searching for the right page. Everything is blurry I can't see a thing. I am not turning around and leaving here after everything I have been through just to get here. He flips a page and I point. A yellow piece of paper marks where the visa is and the paper flutters. "Here it is." I am sweating under my coat. Colin is shivering. The cop looks at the visa and reluctantly nods. "What do you do in China?" I tell him I am a teacher and Colin is my student. He looks at me with suspicion. "A teacher? When you come to China? From where are you? Why you come to China? Why are you here in Xinjiang?" Colin explains to him who I am and that I teach in Wuxi. "Wait here," he says and leaves with my passport.
We're standing in the cold and Colin says, "I need to take a lake. "
I need to too. We crossed the street and climbed into a snow bank and pee.
On our way back, we stop at the check point tent to retrieve my passport. The cop looks up from the desk and asks me how long will I be in Yining. "I don't know." The cop gives me a blank stare. Somehow that is not the right answer. So I say, I would like to be here twenty days. He says nothing, Other policemen were watching me, their hands on their machine guns. He hands the passport back to me and tells Colin to tell me that when we arrive to town I must go to the police station and register. I say I can do that. We thank him and leave. Back on the bus, I feel uneasy. The door closes and the bus driver starts the engine. It startles me.

I step off the train on to the platform in Urumqi, sighing. My muscles ache. The icy air feels good, biting, refreshing upon my face. Colin grabs me and we walk briskly to the exit. Colin keeps telling me, "Watch out, be careful! There are a lot of bad men here they will theft you. Keep your thing to close for you, by your self. I'm not kidding! You will see!" We reach the exit gates. "Hurry. We must go." Exhaustion heightens my paranoia so I switch the backpack from my back to my front. Colin had my other bag along with his. Like waves off the shore. we smash into the crowd through the gates, out into the city. Light snow is falling, it's dusk. People are everywhere all in a hurry. Everyone moving in every direction. A flood of people spill into the streets colliding into hundreds people waiting for their arrival on the other side of the barrier. Cab drivers, thieves, and beggars, converge upon us like a school of piranha. Everyone talking at us all at once. It's confusing. Touching, breathing, grabbing at the bags, Colin says, "This way, now!" He turns and says something very quickly to two bearded men in light faux leather jackets, who are attempting to take our bags. They hesitate and back off. They stare at me. I don't look back. For a moment I feel strange, alone, uncomfortable. We wind our way through the crowded street over the ice to find a cab and head off to the bus station. I'm starving. Colin says, "There are many delicious foods here. Do you like eating sheeps meat? Are you hungry? We must eat before we take the bus. It is a long way maybe fifteen hours, a lot of snow on zhis ground." The cab driver says something to me in Uyghur (Weegar). He stops in front of the bus station and lets us out. We climb over a snow barrier and head off to buy tickets for the night ride to Yining.
In retrospect, now that I am sitting here in the warm comfort of my apartment, I feel, maybe, I let the moment slip by me too quickly. I am on the edge of the knife here. I can feel the tension. Yet there is no time to savor all the sights, sounds and smells. There is no time to take pictures. I passed up many opportunities this trip to document what I saw. Sometimes that happens. I had to keep moving. Colin tells me there will be time to rest when we get to Yining. He is twenty. He forgets I am older and maybe a step slower.Time to man up. Things are now down to minutes. Now, we are moment to moment, minute to minute. Intense. I walk fast trying to keep up with Colin as he makes a bee line to the bus station. He is on a mission. I am just along for the ride.
The bus station is wretched. Sawdust covers the floor. Everyone looks disheveled and beat. Sweaty people smells fill the air. Cigarette smoke mingles with bad breath. People are yelling in ten different languages. It all sounds like static. People are tired. They are tense. It's crowded and stuffy. It's never a matter of wanting to take the bus, it's always about needing to. Comfort is never an option. These people know it, accept it. They stand in a line resigned, waiting for their turn to buy a ticket. Colin buys our tickets and then says, " let us eat." Great! I'm starving!
I left Wuxi with a bit of a stomach bug and now I am needing to fill the beast up. I am hoping to get through the ride before I need the bathroom again. I never learned to squat and now is not the time. It's a damn uncomfortable feeling. But I don't care I am up for delicious sheeps meat and rice. We head on over to Colins favorite Uyghur restaurant across from the bus station. We walk in and all stare at us. I thought for a moment I was back in the middle east. These people could be my long lost relatives! I am being sized up. Colin pays no never mind and begins to order in Urgar. He orders noodles and meat with vegetables. He orders the rice for me. Things then got complicated. The rice came with sheep meat and veggies but it was dry, no sauce. I wanted what Colin had which was noodles with meat and veggies in a tomato sauce that looked more delicious. So I ordered one of his. I couldn't order just the veggies and sauce I have to order the whole plate. He took the noodles I took the vegetables with tomatoes. I liked it so much I had two! Did I mention I was hungry. When we finished we took off to the bus station to wait for our bus.
The place was packed. People heading out for the holidays. Boxes and bags heaped upon the chairs with their owners heaped along side them. We all looked like we had already been some place else and this was the last leg. It felt like the last leg. Now I am full and tired and I'm thinking a quiet bus ride on plush seats, get to watch TV... so says Colin, I am almost looking forward to the trip. Our bus is called we rush to the gate, every one rushes all the time even if they know they are not going anywhere. We wait, and wait, the bus is late, snow is falling. My bags feel like giant bricks. They open the gate and we rush, again to the bus. I step up and whoa! What is this? Cots, Three rows... Oh no, It's a SLEEPER BUS!!! This is not my idea of plush. To make matters worse Colin says, "the bus is dirty." Great... just wonderful... can't wait... geeze... so much for comfort.
Now, all that just seems like a dream. Gone, history, done is done. I wake up. The clock on the bus says eight. We roll to a stop. We are on the outskirts of Yining at the check point. Oh man! we made it!! We are finally here. The journey is over. I can relax. I am excited. No more travel for a while. I feel relived. Colin wakes up and announces we are here. The bus door opens. Colin tells me to give him my passport. He heads to the front and comes back. A moment later, a policeman enters the bus, points his finger at me and says "Steven, Steven, Come with me."

I thought I woke up in the middle of the night but the time on the bus clock said 5:11. 5:11, is that possible? It's so dark. I tilt my head which started a stabbing pain just below my shoulder joint. I see the side of a mountain shrouded in fog. The bus picks up speed and the bus fishtails pulling itself around a corner. I grip the bed rail, tight, the bus tilts my way. I prop myself up enough to see to the front of the bus and I see nothing but fog in the headlights, thick, soupy fog. We fishtail again and the bus makes another hairpin turn. I don't know how fast we are going. I lay back down. I have a headache. Headlights appear out of the fog and it's an eighteen wheeler grinding it's way up the mountain. We pass each other with little room to spare. So close I thought, I can't look. So I close my eyes. My legs hurt. My eyes burn. Someone lights up a cigarette again and the smoke wafts it's way through the bus, and in to my lungs. I want to scream, "some one, put that F'ing cigarette out!! It's disgusting you're disgusting! I've had enough! Get me off this bus!!" I want to curse like a New Yorker. What the __ you __ing __! put the __ing cigarette out already! It's bad enough to smell it outside but smoking in enclosed spaces is mind numbing. To think there are no restrictions to smoking anywhere in China. Everyone who smokes lights up anywhere anytime. It is considered, social and appropriate. Bad enough to light up in a drafty bus but to tolerate this for over forty hours on a sealed train car with the only ventilation at either end of the car where they are coupled is beyond words. It is one of those cultural behaviors I have a hard time coming to grips with. Every fifteen, twenty minutes someone would light up at either end of the car and the air would thicken with the noxious gas. Once in a while several smokers, usually young men would light up, savoring every draw off their stick. They slowly inhale, looking very Dean like, then exhale, their faces disappearing behind a dense impenetrable fog, that eventually drifts apart and snakes it's way down the train corridor, only to be inhaled again by everyone else. Baby faces these boys, acting like men, acting cool, smoking because they can. Smoke it to the butt, fingers stained brown. Seeing them, I see me many years ago. Now I think, and then I stop. Three hours to go. It must be. We're getting close. The fog is lifting. I fall asleep head pounding, thinking about fresh air.

Jolting up. My eyes are wide. Was it a dream I was having or am I really...where we are? The bus pitches back and forth. Ice pops and snaps beneath the weight of the bus. The bus jerks forward tires catching some traction, twisting across the ice. The engine whines but the sound of rubber slipping and scraping across the ice drown the sound out. The driver shifts down and the bus floats for a moment. He is hell bent. I must have been asleep. It's hard to tell at the moment. Colin and I have been traveling now about forty eight hours and I thought I was still on the train to Urumqi. Forty eight hours ago we were boarding a train in Wuxi. Colin worries that the train ride will be very hard for me because I only had a standing room only ticket and Colin had a seat. In retrospect, I now know what he is talking about but didn't understand the consequences of his words. I do now. This time though I left it up to the higher powers to do the right thing and they came up with a compromise. I told Colin before we left that everything will work out the way it needs to. There has to be something said for blissful ignorance. Sometimes you just get lucky. We were hoping for a chance to talk to one of the conductors about upgrading to a sleeper berth so that I could ride the trip out in relative style. Colins worries about me subside for a moment as we are standing on the platform and our car pulls up. Sleepers! Oh how serendipitous! We climb aboard and realize they are using the sleepers as seats and standing room stills applies. People pour on the train like ants to the colony. We get to our berth and Colin tells me to sit. So I sit. The car fills up. People are standing. I think that ought to be me. The train conductor comes by to check tickets and as she examines mine, Colin explains I am his foreign language teacher on my way with him to visit his family for the holidays and asks her to allow me to sit with him. She looks at me, at Colin, hands my ticket back to me and leaves. I climb into the corner of the bottom bunk and relax. Six more people show up and sit with us five women and another man. Our baggage is stored up and under anywhere there is space because during the holidays everyone leaves for extended periods of time and bring with them a lot of luggage. Luggage space is a premium. Anywhere out of the aisle is fair game. I think about that now, much, much later as our bus threatens to careen out of control on a mountain pass three hours outside of Urumqi. I think, how spacious those bunks are now compared to my current lot. Trapped on the top bunk at the back of a sleeper bus. Alice is having a nightmare in Wonderland. Three rows of beds stacked two high, with the top bunks less than half a meter from the top. To get to the top bunk, I had to jump in a prone position. The isles were less than a shoulders width so you had to walk sideways. Tight would be a polite term. The bed is a wood plank with a thin layer of cotton batting covering with a cotton comforter to curl up in, mummy style. The beds are just shy of being long enough for comfort. I stuck my camera bag underneath my knees so that I could fit my feet into the a hole that the top serves as a pillow for the person in front of me. Lying flat is the only option though the bed is shoulder width shy. I stick out over my accommodations. The bed rail drives into my side every time the bus bounces, which is often. No, I am not on the train now. I thought I was. I keep drifting in and out of real time. No, I am on a bus. Exhaustion keeps me from panicking. I am trapped. I am, trapped! I am cornered and no way to escape. Breathe... breathe. I think the roof is closing in on me. The bus is shrinking! I turn my head and peer out the window encased with ice on the inside. Outside, a deep night blue sky caresses snow cover upon the mountain peak. Stars are shining. The wind gently whips snow dust up around us. Snap! pop! The engine screams, grinding gears. It's very cold. The bus continues it's crazy dance across the pass. Ten hours to go. Our destination, Yining, on the Ili River. I go back to dreaming. Sometimes, you do get lucky.

Today is friday. Tomorrow I leave for the western frontier of China with one of my students. He is taking me home to celebrate spring festival with his family. Nothing is packed. I have my train ticket and finally my passport. My passport has been bouncing between Nanjing and Wuxi for the last month or so as Doris was trying to secure a resident visa for my stay here. Yesterday we had a glitch. My picture was not appropriate for the application. They didn't tell us that a week ago when we handed the paper work in. I leave in two days and now I need a new picture of myself. The longer I am here the better I am at understanding the complexities of securing visas. If there is something that can go wrong it will. That is just the way it is. No worries. I went to the corner photo lab and had new pictures done immediately. Then Doris and I went down to the police station where my passport was to exchange pictures on my application. Why they didn't say anything a week ago is a mystery. No big deal. Not!! All they could do is reject my application and then I can't travel. Then my student gets upset, Doris is admonished for screwing things up and I am left in Wuxi with nothing to do. Doris jokes that if that happened I would have to fly to Hong Kong to do the paperwork. Hahahahaha... I told her if I had to do that I would just stay there. However, yesterday was a good day. They accepted the pictures, I got my passport back with a residents visa, good until July, pasted in it. Now I can travel to the far western region of China where I will spend Spring Festival with Colin and his family. I am so excited. I will be in a little place called Yining Xinjiang Uygur Zizhiqi China. It is a village of some thirty thousand inhabitants about one hundred kilometers from the border of Kazakhstan. The temperature today in Yining is a balmy -5f partly cloudy skies with the threat of avalanches. We have planned a forty hour train ride to Urumqi and a ten hour bus ride to his village. My biggest worry is using the infamous chinese toilet. Up to this point it's been western technology all the way. What a thing to worry about. Silly. I'll be back some time in February. Goodbye big city! See ya on the other side! Happy travels! Happy Chinese New Year!

Mr He the Tea Doctor

A rainy day in Wuxi. I started the day emailing people and reading about my beloved Lobos and their lack of defense!! Another defeat, this time at home. Oh woe is me! I decided to make some tea, to console myself. Ever since Wang Jun introduced me to Mr He, pronounced like you are clearing your throat with a hard H and a U, I have developed a whole new appreciation for tea. Drinking tea in China is like drinking wine in Italy. Unlike the teas I used to drink back home, these teas are complex and aromatic. Granted, the teas back in the states were to drink only if I ran out of coffee. Or occasionally I would drink a cup of tea, mostly Earl Grey just for a change. But let's face it. Coffee is king in the States. Sometimes I think about my coffee in the morning. I miss the rich hot syrupy brown drink so thick you could stand a spoon up in it. With a little sugar it's like candy. Oooooh, so good. Now, I am in China. I think, tea here is like coffee is there, different varieties different tastes no biggie. Taste one green tea you pretty much taste them all. I see a wall of teas in glass jars at the local Wall Hell so I buy some green tea because this is what I think Chinese tea is all about, more or less mass produced for the consumer. OMG was I so wrong on so many levels. What a rube, a bumpkin a no nothing! Mr He, he schooled me. Mr He, it turns out, is not only a sculptor of stone and an accomplished zither er, he is a master of teas. Or as Wang Jun likes to call him, the tea doctor! Everyone ought to have someone like this in their home though I think you already know of someone who thinks of him or herself as a self proclaimed expert in what ever they think they are expert in. Yet, now that I have spent some time with the tea doctor I can say he really does know his teas and the vessels he stores and pours his tea from. This is someone that lives and breathes teas. I don't think I have ever met a coffee doctor with as much zeal for coffee as Mr. He has for his teas. I digress though. If it wasn't for Mr He I would have never gone to the bamboo forest, nor drank copious amounts fine tea out of little porcelain cups held tenderly between ones fingers like displaying a butterfly just caught. I never would have met Mr. Wu or Mr. Wang or had an exquisite lunch of snails and chicken feet in a ramshackle building at the top of the bamboo forest. It was Mr. He that introduced me to han cha, Chinese black tea, even though he speaks no English, and my Chinese was just as bad and that even though my Chinese is coming along I was a mute the day we went to the village on the edge of the forest to view Mr. Wu's fine brown clay tea pots he hand crafts for thousands of yuan a piece. We went because of Mr. He. All this time I thought Wang Jun and I were out to shoot pics and He was just along for the ride. Wang Jun, by the way, is one incredible person. He is truly a salt of the earth on top of being a huge Johnny Cash fan. He wagged He and me to look at pots and we all drank teas of various tastes. Red teas, black teas, green teas, oolongs and poors (pronounced purr) you name it we drank it. Wang Jun is a large reason why I am having the time of my life here. Cheers to Wang Jun!
Now, when Mr He serves tea it is an event. The day started out with me going over to Wang Juns' studio to process film. This time I did it myself the film came out looking great, I have yet to see it. I am scanning it tomorrow. I finish developing expecting to go shooting when Wang Jun gets a call from his colleagues inviting him, his wife Yi Fai and their daughter Gege (gogo) it means to chuckle, to lunch to celebrate the end of the year. We end up at a restaurant overlooking a pond where paddle boats of young couples drift through brackish water making colorful patterns with their boats. We sat and were served twenty or so dishes half of them I couldn't pronounce or figure out what was in them. We drank rice wine, terrible stuff, Wang Jun got drunk, I drank enough to satisfy the men at the table that I was not a wimp and we were off to Mr. He and his tea. Every time I meet Mr He it reminds me of the bamboo forest. Hundreds of miles of bamboo thirty feet in the air, shafts of green, thousands of them inches apart from each other swaying in the wind together. Being on top of the mountain, the wind bit in the shadows, We took refuge in a restaurant no bigger than a closet made up of many little closets of tables and chairs. It all seemed so hastily put together these rooms. Nothing connecting them together but the walls they shared. To get from one room to the kitchen you had to walk outside. Bathrooms were an outhouse with a hole in it. no running water. Snails came first. Everyone looked to me to see if the American would dare. I so dare. I popped one in my mouth and tried unsuccessfully to extract the morsel from its domain. It's a tongue and suck thing is how it was explained to me. Push one end of the shell in with your tongue and suck the little guy out from the other end. Nature is just amazing. The snails were wok ed in a spicy chili sauce. Next came vegetables with bamboo shoots and then the chicken soup with feet. Delicious. We had a meat dish and watermelon to finish it all off. We came to see the Buddest Temple there, but I think lunch was much more interesting. I am not really interested in statues and shrines, never have been. But food, that is something all together different and to have the opportunity to eat something odd and exotic that is also delicious, I am right there. If lunch was the end of it, I would have said fine, good time, but we jump back into the car and head down to the village to visit Mr Wu. Mr Wu is a true artisan of brown clay tea pots. He studied the fine art on his own and now is well known in the region as the best brown clay tea pot maker in the area. This part of Juangsu Provence is famous for its tea and tea pots. We sat in Mr Wu's garden for several hours drinking black tea served by Mr. Wu. Sipping out of porcelain cups, Mr He and he waxed poetic about the pots, the tea, the world et all. Wang Jun stopped drinking tea about the twentieth cup of tea. I drank and drank, I didn't know if I would have insulted my host. So i drank tea. We drank and viewed Mr Wu's work and ooood and awed about how light and symmetrical his pots were, and then, drank some more. By the time we left I had been to the bathroom several times for extended visits. If that had been the extent of the day I would have said awesome! No way Mr He had one more place to go that day. The sun was beginning to set and everyone was getting tired and I think we were all ready to go home. However, we stopped in Ying xi at another artisan friend of Mr He's and watched him make a tea pot for us! Incredible! Ok so taking that extra moment was worth it. It usually is. This friend is a teacher and was getting ready to leave to teach the fine art of tea pot making to others at a university in Nanjing. For him to take the time to make a pot for us was a treat! The day was a day of treats for me. It was one of my very first impressions of China and Wangs friends and now I am sitting in Mr He's living room having tea. We drank seven or eight different teas. All different, all with unique tastes and smells. His green teas were light, sweetly aromatic with hints of honeysuckle and flowers. All were oolong teas from different areas of China. Green teas are the energy drink whereas black teas are robust and macho! Fermented and stored sometimes for years, these teas are rich like the earth and are used to warm you and help with your digestion. Medicinal and tasty too! I can not think of a better way to spend the afternoon than drinking wonderful tea inside warm and toasty while watching the winter winds blow outside.

An Ocean of Humanity

Jeez! I am exhausted! It is January second and I'm sleeping off the Shanghai New Years Eve next day oh my god is this for real adventure! Everything leading up to the moment however was conducted in slow motion. I felt distracted. My mind was somewhere else. I could use a number of trite and overused phrases to describe my day but it was long forgotten when we hopped the 77 bus to the train station on our way to Shanghai. From that moment on the mantra was Shanghai! It seemed that the bus driver knew where we were going. He was pedal to the metal all the way to the traffic jam about a mile from our stop. We had calculated a forty minute ride but didn't add in any thing for traffic jams. I am a get there on time kind of guy and traffic jams cause me stress. Suddenly my life, the bus, the world felt mired in traffic jello. An inch a foot, a blast on the horn, the driver looked irritated. Cars swerved with buses, ebikes and people filled the gaps between everything cementing traffic to a stand still. I kept looking at the time then at the traffic then the time. Yikes! Are we ever going to get out of this mess? Our driver maneuvered our bus right almost to the curb and guns it to our stop. We stepped off the bus and holy mackerel! We entered a sea of humanity all heading for the train station. People are pushing and shoving their way in front of us and we are jabbing and jutting to holding our position en route to our train. It felt like cattle to the slaughter. This was not the worst of it though.Thousands of people shuffle through one of many check points along our route to the train platform. From wide open chaotic spaces, to extremely small controlled gangways, people push and wait, then shove then jabbed then shove you out of the way. Stupid foreigners. Everywhere I looked I saw people. Space was a premium. People in front, in back, to my side as far as I could see. Stand in line. Check the bag, up the escalator, Stand in line. Check the ticket, down the escalator. Dancing the train station dance with thousands of others. Stand in line and wait for the train. When the doors opened, people thrust their way out while people thrust their way in, converging in the middle like a confluence. I ended up being twisted and pushed from the back and the front as I entered the train. Then, no sooner had I entered the train started to move. I sat next to Neville and his wife Naita and relaxed.
The train entered Shanghai station and people were already up and jostling about fixing their coats and checking their bags ready for the doors to open. The train stoped, we got up, we stood in line and... nothing happened. No one is moving. What? This is unheard of. There must be a problem. If things stop in China there must be a problem. Everything here is in continual motion. Not to move is not an option.
The line finally starts to move. Stepping out on to the train platform in Shanghai made the previous experience seem like a walk in an empty park. The crowd intensified five fold. Now a sea of people became an ocean, deep, wide and dense. This is the moment that the phrase go with the flow takes on a very real meaning because going against it will only get you trampled. We fight our way through the mass and enter the street to find the subway station that will take us to Nanjing Road and close to our hotel. Down the escalator into the subway station. Shanghai's subway system is very modern, very clean, very efficient, and packed with people. To get on a subway train in Shanghai you mark your territory and dare anyone to violate it. When the doors open you rush on to the train in the hopes of finding a seat. Three stops and change trains. Two stops and we're there. Nanjing Road is Shanghai. Smack in the center of downtown, it offers the best in dining and shopping, with incredible views of mile high skyscrapers. The place it lit up and the street is filled with people. There is an energy about Shanghai that is exciting. Twenty-one million people live and work here. This has been the place to be for centuries. Now, Shanghai is leading the way in China's resurgence as the worlds power broker. It is a port of call for people from all over the world coming here to work and play. It is the most international city I have ever been to. You can feel the history of this place just walking through the streets. New on top of the old. Construction is everywhere. It is just amazing.
So let's dispense with the yak and get into the meat of it.
We found our hotel without a problem. We dropped our stuff off and grabbed a taxi to the Glamor Bar. I took the camera but I did not feel like I wanted to shoot. To me this was a party to enjoy, I was not there to work. So I really didn't care whether I shot well or not. It didn't matter to me, I was enamored with the whole idea of being in a most exotic place with many strange people. The place was lit for ambiance, dark, with colored strobes and pin lights dancing off the walls. People of all nationalities and persuasions filled the room. Smoke covered the air like a blanket and the women and men all felt like Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant. It was a scene out of a movie. Music filled every corner of the joint. I danced with everyone and anyone. Yes, the old man can still put a groove on. I took many strange pictures. I drank some more, became friends with my strange people who i cannot remember a single name now. I danced to Motown and Michael Jackson, hard rock, swing, the DJ was grooving. I felt the new year come... love and good will wafted in the air and then we danced and drank some more! At three, my group decided to look for a place to eat. We left the Glamor Bar and hit the streets in search of the 24 hour McDonald's. Back on Nanjing Road we made a bee line to Micky D's only to discover that the 24 was closed! horrors! It must have been only a 22 or 23 hour place. People stared through the windows in disbelief! We had to move on. Hunger was becoming an issue. Nothing it seemed was open though and of all nights! We came upon an 85 which is a bakery coffee bar started by some french company. Unfortunately the shelves were bare except for a few pieces of bacon cheese bread. They ate, I watched and drank a tea. I felt sticky and stinky. We sat there looking like drowned rats. I mused about my sore thighs and tired feet. We rolled into the hotel at four. I went to my room and turned on the heater and started the shower. The water never got above warm but it felt good to wash the night off. Since the bathrooms have no heat in them I turned the hair dryer on and left it in the sink to warm the room up. I was tired. Crawling into bed I mummied up and the next thing I remember is waking up feeling oh so exhausted, dehydrated and hungry. What an experience! What a blast. Oh so strange! The trip back to Wuxi was the same as coming to Shanghai. Waves and waves and waves of humanity every where we went all wanting the same thing, to go somewhere. It's taken me a day to recover from it all and I have to say that Shanghai may be the bomb but there is no place like home.