ON MAY 9, a high-ranking Chinese official spoke in public for the first time. He was an obscure vice-president named Hu Jintao—black hair, black suit, dark tie. Nervous eyes. It was noon: special nationwide broadcast. In his brief speech, Hu made one reference to the protestors:
“We believe the broad masses will, proceeding from the fundamental interests of the nation and taking the overall situation into account, carry out the activities in good order and in accordance with law.”
Late that evening, the People’s Armed Police surrounded the American and British embassies, and it was clear that the worst was over. The next day, speaking to television cameras in front of the White House, President Clinton publicly used the word “apology” for the first time:
“I have already offered my apologies to President Jiang and the Chinese people. But I think it is very important to draw a clear distinction between a tragic mistake and a deliberate act of ethnic cleansing.”
The following day, at noon, the Chinese national television news ran a clip of Clinton’s apology. But they cut it off after “the Chinese people”—no reference to ethnic cleansing. On the twelfth, the U.S. ambassador was finally able to leave the embassy compound. That day, the ashes of the three victims were returned to Beijing. The news ran footage from the airport: solemn music, sad-faced officials, tearful relatives. The mood in the Chinese media shifted from anger to grief; finally, the incident began to slip into the past. A story appeared on Xinhua, the government’s English-language news agency:
Beijing (Xinhua)—Things left behind by the three Chinese journalists who were killed during the missile attack by U.S.-led NATO last Friday will be collected by the Chinese Revolution Museum, said the Museum’s deputy director Ma Junhai today.
“These things are actually relics that have great significance for education,” he said…. These objects include blood-soaked cotton quilts, bags, pens, notebooks, and recorders. Zhai Huisheng, deputy editor-in-chief of the Guangming Daily, showed two bags of his killed colleagues today. The bags still give off the obvious smell of gunpowder smoke.
I DIDN’T LIKE leaving the bureau for home. Every evening I lingered, trying to find any kind of distraction—another news program to watch, another story to read. But the truth was that I could devote only so much time to a five-hundred-dollar-a-month job, and there were limits to my two-hundred-dollar apartment: no television, no air-conditioning. The kitchen was too small to use; I had brought almost no books from the States. Whether I liked it or not, I had to spend much of my time out in the city.
Meals were the hardest part. In China, I had always liked the intimacy of cheap restaurants, and I had studied Chinese by hanging out in noodle shops and teahouses. But now I had to learn a new body language: I kept my head down, and I smiled and tried to look friendly. I nodded at all the comments, even the most ridiculous ones. Sometimes, people mentioned the Taiwan issue, and they fixated on the 1839-1842 Opium War and the historical mistreatment of China by foreign powers. A few Chinese told me that America was a nation without history, which resulted in the lack of a moral core. Whenever somebody asked my nationality, I told the truth—I intended to live in these neighborhoods, and any lie might become a future complication.
I began eating mostly in Yabaolu, which was halfway between home and the bureau. Yabaolu was the Russian district—traders from the former Soviet Union and Central Asia gathered there to cut wholesale deals for clothes produced in Chinese factories. Of all the places near home, Yabaolu was the best bet for a white man hoping to avoid drawing attention, but I wasn’t going to truly blend in. Most of the Russians were big, with heavy torsos and short skinny legs that scissored along as they stalked the sidewalks. They had tough faces, often with misshapen noses that obviously had been broken in the past. Their eyes sagged under some weight—maybe the pressure of business, maybe the shadow of vodka. They carried their cash in plastic pouches strapped beneath bulging stomachs.
The Russian traders dominated the neighborhood, but there were plenty of other ethnic groups in Yabaolu. The Han Chinese—ethnic Chinese—ran most restaurants and shops, but a few places had been opened by members of native Muslim minorities. After the bombing, I figured that these restaurants were safest; if Chinese ate there, they’d be less likely to cause trouble. And the Muslims probably wouldn’t be angry about NATO’s actions in Kosovo.
One evening, I walked into a small Muslim dumpling joint. The other diners stopped talking when I entered. Three tables were occupied by Han Chinese; at another table sat two Uighurs, members of an ethnic group that is predominately Muslim and originates from the western region of Xinjiang. I vaguely recognized one of the Uighurs—in previous days, I had seen him at other restaurants in the neighborhood, but we had never exchanged more than a quick hello. There were many Uighurs in Yabaolu, usually working as trade middlemen. From a Chinese perspective, some of the Uighurs looked as foreign as I did.
I sat down alone and ordered dumplings and a beer. The waitress smiled when she brought the bottle and the plate. It didn’t take long for one of the Chinese to ask, “What country are you from?”
Everybody looked up after I answered. The man asked why Americans had to act as if they were the world police; another diner muttered something about the Opium War. A third got stuck on the inevitable issue of technology. “If America is such an advanced country, how could it possibly say that the bombing was a mistake?” he said. “They claim that they used an old map—that’s ridiculous.”
I admitted that the events had confused me as well, and then I tried to turn my attention to the dumplings. The man repeated his question. “Americans can see anything from space,” he said. “With such great science, how could they bomb the wrong building?”
I stared at my plate, hoping that he would get bored. The man was about to say something else when the Uighur whom I had recognized spoke up.
“With such great science,” he said, “how could America kill only three Chinese?”
The restaurant became very quiet. The Chinese man asked the Uighur what he meant, and the man smiled. “I’m just saying that if America is such a great country and has such advanced technology,” he said, “they should be able to kill more than three Chinese people when they want to.”
“Feihua!” one of the Chinese shouted. “That’s garbage!”
But the Uighur kept talking. “Don’t be an idiot and believe all that stuff on television,” he said. “If Americans were trying to kill Chinese, you’d be dead right now.”
The others jumped in and an argument swelled for ten minutes. Forgotten, I ate in peace and then settled the bill. As I was preparing to leave, the Uighur walked over and introduced himself. On a scrap of paper, he jotted down his name and cell phone number; he invited me to meet him for dinner sometime. Everybody else watched in silence. The discussion flared up again as I headed off into the night.
THAT SPRING, WE followed a regular routine. I’d call his cell phone and arrange to meet for dinner in Yabaolu. Neither of us ever saw the other’s apartment; we were too proud for that. He rented a room directly next door to the dumpling restaurant, where lodgings were so basic that he had to use the public toilet across the street. I wasn’t much better off; whenever my bathroom acted up, I went down the street to the Swissotel. We never said as much, but our friendship benefited from the fact that both of us dreaded going home at night.
His name was Polat, and he worked the margins in Yabaolu. Like many Uighurs, he was good with languages; Xinjiang is one of the most ethnically diverse parts of the country. There are thirteen non-Chinese ethnicities native to the region, and the Uighurs, who number around eight million, are the largest group. (The name is pronounced “Wee-gur,” and in English it is sometimes written as “Uyghur.”) Polat could converse in Uighur, Chinese, Russian, Uzbek, Kazak, Kyrgyz, and Turkish. He used his language skills to work as a middleman for deals between foreign traders and Chinese wholesalers, and he also changed American currency on the black market. S
ometimes, he converted tens of thousands of dollars in a single deal, earning a commission of a tenth of a percent. But private currency exchange was illegal, and it was dangerous to move that much cash; in 1999, two Uighur money changers were murdered in Yabaolu. Polat preferred dealing in name-brand clothing.
He was in his mid-forties, and he had been doing business since 1990. In the beginning, he traveled internationally, often in Central Asia: Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan. In those years, it was difficult for average Chinese citizens to secure passports and visas, but Polat learned that he could get the right documents for the right bribes. He made trips to Russia, Romania, Bulgaria. He spent a lot of time in Turkey, where the language is close to Uighur, and he went to Pakistan, where business was poor. Once, he tried to transport Xinjiang grapes through Tibet to Kathmandu, but the fruit spoiled when he got caught by the monsoon season on the Nepal side. Iran was another bad memory—a Tehran art dealer convinced Polat that he could make money selling ancient Chinese paintings that had been found in Iran, but the paintings turned out to be neither ancient nor Chinese. After losing money on that deal, Polat generally stuck to wholesale clothing, but there was always a risk when travel was involved. In 1993, after saving ten thousand American dollars, he invested most of that stake in an overland shipment of Chinese-produced clothing bound for Kazakhstan. He lost it all when insects infested the crates.
In 1997, he moved to Beijing and established himself as a middleman in Yabaolu. The neighborhood had become a center for black-market wholesalers who traded clothing that was produced in the factory towns of eastern and southern China. The foreign brands were the most popular: The North Face, Nike, Tommy Hilfiger. Often, the dealers sold fakes and factory rejects, but it didn’t matter as long as the labels looked good. Nautica, Adidas, Timberland. The cheap versions sold well in Russia and Eastern Europe, as well as across the wide swath of Central Asia where borders had always been uncertain and ethnicities were indistinguishable to the untrained eye. Kazaks, Uzbeks, Tatars—all of them came to Yabaolu. There were few women in the neighborhood. The most obvious ones were the prostitutes—Russian, Mongolian, Chinese—who sauntered past restaurants where traders closed deals.
Polat sold just about anything. In 1998, he cleared two thousand dollars by arranging the sale of two truckloads of fake 555-brand shoes to a consortium of traders from Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. On another day, he earned a grand by helping some Russians purchase a shipment of knockoff Nautica clothes from an underground factory in Tianjin. There had been a lot of good days in 1998. That was the year he talked some Russians into buying twenty thousand bogus brassieres, made in Guangdong, with labels that said Pierre Cardin. The margin on that deal was nearly a quarter a bra.
I couldn’t see the money on Polat. He dressed simply, and he didn’t brag after closing a deal, unlike the other Yabaolu traders. They were businessmen of the purest sort, dealing in fakes and playing the margins, and I learned not to take their stories too seriously. But Polat seemed different. He had wavy black hair flecked with white, and his eyes were brown and sad. He didn’t smile much. His skin was dark brown, and he had the solid jaw and prominent nose of a Middle Easterner. When he did smile, his face lit up. He often used the Chinese word jiade—“fake”—and he was deeply scornful of the products that he sold. According to him, the knockoff clothes were garbage, crap, shit—jiade. Not long after we met, he mentioned that he had originally taught Uighur language and literature at a secondary school in Xinjiang. He spoke so disparagingly of his business deals that I couldn’t understand why he had left teaching. He was handsome in a rugged way, but his cheeks had lines so deep they looked like seams. He was slightly overweight. He smoked cigarettes constantly. He often looked tired. I had no idea what he did with his profits.
ONE EVENING IN late May, Polat invited me to dinner with another trader. We met at a small Uighur restaurant on North Ritan Road, which had become my favorite spot. The restaurant was fronted by a broad outdoor platform where we took our meals, watching the traders and the prostitutes walk past. Usually, we ordered Yanjing beer. The restaurant manager would step down from the platform, open a manhole cover on the sidewalk, and pull out two bottles. The cool water inside the manhole served as the restaurant’s beverage refrigeration system. Meals there did not cost very much.
That night, Polat’s companion was a trader from Azerbaijan. He had a very small face, dark long-lashed eyes, and a tiny toylike mustache that played lightly above his lip. He wore a cheap gray suit. He had come to Yabaolu in order to purchase clothes at wholesale, and Polat was providing contacts with Chinese dealers.
“My friend apologizes that he cannot speak to you in English or Chinese,” Polat said, after we had all shaken hands. “And he wants to know if we can drink baijiu tonight instead of beer.”
Baijiu is Chinese grain alcohol, and nobody drinks it for the taste. Reluctantly I agreed, and the restaurant owner set a bottle on the table. I assumed that the young man was Muslim, but most of the Central Asian traders drank anyway. They seemed to leave their religion at home when they traveled for business.
At our table, the languages switched back and forth, with Polat in the middle. He conversed in Turkish with the young man, and then he turned to me and talked in Chinese about the embassy bombing. He was obsessed with it—the protests had died out in less than two weeks, but he continued to bring up the topic, often with strangers. His earlier outburst at the dumpling restaurant hadn’t been unusual; he loved to goad the Han Chinese.
“They have a problem with their brains,” he said, after pouring each of us a second shot of baijiu. “The students are all so stupid—they don’t understand anything.”
“Do you agree with what NATO is doing in Yugoslavia?” I asked.
“Of course I agree with them. The Albanians are being killed because they’re an ethnic minority. I listen to the Voice of America and I know what’s happening there. And I think it’s important because I am a Uighur from Xinjiang. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
I nodded, but he looked hard at me.
“Mingbai le ma?” he said. “Do you understand?”
“I understand,” I said.
“Many things are difficult to talk about openly in Beijing,” he said. “Mingbai le ma?”
“I understand,” I said. He studied me carefully, and then he smiled and raised his glass. All three of us drained our cups and made that face that men make when they drink baijiu. The young Azerbaijani asked, through Polat, if Americans often drank this sort of alcohol. I shook my head and then Polat mentioned the drinking habits of the Russians. This was an easy topic of international conversation; each of us had stories about Russian drunks, which turned out to be remarkably similar regardless of whether seen from the perspective of Uighurs, Azerbaijanis, or Americans. Polat translated the stories back and forth. The young trader remarked that the average Azerbaijani could not drink as much as the average Russian, but the best Azerbaijani drinkers were better than the best Russian drinkers. He made this point carefully and with great pride. The waiter brought us barbecued lamb. The lamb was spicy and quite good; it would have been even better with beer. I glanced longingly at the manhole.
After a while, the conversation turned to the Uighurs, and Polat mentioned how some of them look like Europeans. “One of my closest friends is blond,” he told me. “He looks more foreign than you. He looks so much like a foreigner that he sometimes plays them in Chinese movies. Did you see The Opium War?”
I nodded. The government-financed epic had been released in 1997, shortly before Hong Kong was returned to China. That had been a good year for nationalism and the movie consisted of two hours of evil British imperialists and heroic Chinese resistance.
“Do you remember the scene where the foreigner gets his throat cut by the Chinese person?” Polat asked.
“Not specifically,” I said. “But I probably saw it.”
He said that I couldn’t have missed it—they cu
t his friend’s throat right in the middle of the screen. Later this year the man was scheduled to appear in another government movie that celebrated the return of Macau to the Motherland.
“There’s a group of Uighurs and Kazaks who often play foreigners in those patriotic movies,” Polat explained. “They have real foreigners for the big roles, but they use the Uighurs and Kazaks for the smaller parts.”
“Do they pay them well?”
“Not particularly. My friend made three thousand yuan. But it wasn’t difficult work.”
The money was the equivalent of less than four hundred dollars. Polat laughed when I asked if he had enjoyed the movie.
“Of course not,” he said. “You know what those Chinese history movies are like—everything is jiade. It’s not what really happened.”
The young Azerbaijani sat silently while we spoke in Chinese, but he seemed to be observing me intently. Polat continued. “I prefer American movies,” he said. “The Godfather movies are my favorite. And I like any movie with De Ni Luo.”
The moment he said it, I realized that he vaguely resembled the actor: worn features, a solid jaw, and a certain weight that lurked behind his eyes. He was a Uighur Robert De Niro. The young Azerbaijani was still studying my face and finally he spoke to Polat.
“My friend would like to know something,” Polat said. “Are you a Jew?”
Sitting in the Muslim restaurant, I was taken aback by the question. The young trader leaned forward, and Polat explained: “He says that you look very much like a Jew.”
“I’m not,” I said. “Actually, I’m Catholic. Some of my ancestors were German and some were Italian. De Ni Luo is Italian, too.”
Oracle Bones Page 3
