Down below, the factory lights disappeared in groups. Sometimes, a row of windows along a floor suddenly became dark, or an entire building of illuminated squares shut off at once. It was never a matter of individual lights going out. The workers in the rooms didn’t control the switches; everything followed the set schedules of the curfews.
The last caller was a woman who had been living with a man for years, but she continued to have affairs. She didn’t know why—her boyfriend had money, a good career, good habits. When Hu Xiaomei pressed her to explain the infidelity, the woman asked if the host had read Miao Yong’s novel.
“I don’t like that book,” Hu Xiaomei said sharply. “You shouldn’t base your life on that. The question is, what’s wrong with your principles?”
Emily looked at me and grinned. The show ended at midnight, the static crackling into a rush of advertisements, and then, down below, the last factory lights snapped off. The landscape disappeared into darkness.
For a while, we sat there in silence, and I remembered something else that Emily had said, a few days earlier. She had tried to put some historical perspective on the changes in cities like Shenzhen. “In original society, people lived in groups,” she said. “Eventually, these groups broke down into families, and now they’re breaking down again, into so many different people. Finally, it will be just one single person.”
She paused and looked unhappy. “If you could have some kind of perfect socialism, that would be the best,” she said. “But it’s impossible. That was just a beautiful ideal.”
I asked if she wanted to leave Shenzhen, and she shook her head. In her opinion, the isolation had some good aspects, because it pressured people to make decisions. “The result is that people will have more ability,” she said. “And they’ll have more creativity. Afterward, there will be more different ideas. It won’t be a matter of everybody having the same opinion.”
I said, “How do you think this will change China?”
She fell silent. I had no idea how I would answer the question myself, although I liked to think that once people learned to take care of themselves, the system would naturally improve. But I had seen Shenzhen’s fragmentation—the walled city, the walled factories, the solitary people far from home—and I wondered how all of it could ever be brought together into something coherent.
I looked at Emily and realized that the question wasn’t important to her. Since coming to Shenzhen, she had found a job, left it, and found another. She had fallen in love and she had broken curfew. She had sent a death threat to a factory owner, and she had stood up to her boss. She was twenty-four years old. She was doing fine. She smiled and said, “I don’t know.”
8
Immigration
October 2000
THE LAST TIME POLAT AND I CHANGED MONEY, THE RATE HAD dropped to 8.4 yuan to the dollar. He was smoking heavily now, Hilton after Hilton, and his face was drawn. He wanted to get rid of his Chinese currency, so I brought 450 American dollars. After we finished the transaction, he introduced me to another trustworthy money changer in Yabaolu. It was a nice gesture, but I knew that my black-market days were coming to a close. The street rate had fallen so low that it was hardly worth it, and I didn’t expect to spend much time in Yabaolu after Polat was gone. The neighborhood wouldn’t be the same without him.
That week, we met several times at the Uighur restaurant. Polat told me that he was considering the possibility of settling in four cities in the United States: Los Angeles, New York, Washington, D.C., and Oklahoma City.
“Oklahoma City?” I said.
He saw the look on my face and quickly continued. “I’ve heard that Oklahoma is hot and the wind blows very hard,” he said. “People say it’s a bad place, like the southern parts of Xinjiang.”
I told him that was more or less true. Polat explained that a number of Uighurs had settled near Oklahoma City, where some of them studied at a local college. A small community had also formed around Sidik Haji Rouzi, a Uighur intellectual who was based near Oklahoma City. He often contributed to Uighur-related broadcasts for the Voice of America. His wife, Rebiya Kadeer, had formerly been a successful entrepreneur in Urumqi, and for years the Chinese government had praised her as a model of ethnic minority achievement. But then her husband’s VOA broadcasts crossed some invisible line, and back in Xinjiang, she was arrested on charges of revealing “state secrets.” Most people believed that she had done no more than send Chinese newspaper clippings to her husband. Since the arrest, Rebiya Kadeer had become the most famous Uighur political prisoner, but the efforts of foreign diplomats had failed to win her release (several years later, in 2005, she would finally be allowed to leave China).
Polat said that Oklahoma was just one option; there were also a number of Uighurs around New York City and Washington, D.C. The main thing he worried about was making it through immigration at the Los Angeles Airport. He planned to overstay his visa and then apply for political asylum, and friends had told him that his odds were better if he made it to Oklahoma City or Washington, D.C. In both places there were lawyers who had worked with other Uighurs in the past.
During our conversations, Polat often asked for advice, but he was planning to enter a world that was completely foreign to me as an American-born citizen. I intended to visit the United States in the winter, and I told him that I could introduce him to Chinese-speaking friends in the major cities. But I knew nothing about the asylum process. From the beginning, I had been skeptical of Polat’s American plans, but now I feared serious trouble. I knew that if he failed to get asylum and was deported, there was a chance of his spending time in a Chinese prison. But he trusted the advice he was getting from Uighurs in America.
Often, it sounded like he was preparing for a game with obscure rules and frighteningly high stakes. Uighur safe spots were scattered around the country, from Los Angeles to Oklahoma City to Washington, D.C., and one of the game’s fundamental rules was that making it past immigration at the airport improved one’s odds at asylum. Later, I learned that Polat was actually right about this detail. If an individual requested political asylum at a U.S. airport, he could be placed in “expedited removal,” a process that determined whether his application was credible. Even if the case was accepted for further review, the individual might be detained, which made it harder to consult with a lawyer. Sometimes, detainees were placed in the county jail, along with common criminals. One immigration lawyer told me that he had visited an applicant for political asylum who was being held in leg irons in a Pennsylvania county jail.
TWO NIGHTS BEFORE Polat left Beijing, we met for dinner in the restaurant next to Hollywood, and I wrote out a personal check for two thousand dollars. The visa consulting company had warned Polat not to bring too much cash, which might arouse suspicion in the Beijing airport. I made the check out to a Uighur émigré who had a bank account in the States. At the restaurant, Polat counted out the dollars and handed them over. It was the first time that one of our exchanges had left me with a pocket full of American currency.
“What do you think that I should wear for the flight?” he asked.
“Well, your invitation says that you’re a businessman,” I said. “So you probably should look like a businessman. I’d wear a suit.”
“What about this suit?” he asked. “Does it make me look like a businessman?”
The suit was dark blue, cheaply tailored, and shiny with use. It made him look exactly like a Uighur money changer.
“Do you have another one?” I said, as tactfully as possible.
“This is my best suit.”
Polat’s wife had flown in from Urumqi to see him off. She was a schoolteacher in her late twenties; our conversation was limited because she didn’t speak much Chinese. It was the first time I had ever seen Polat with a woman, and he was solicitous, taking her hand at dinner. She looked even more nervous than he did.
The last night, I met the couple for dinner once more, along with a group of Polat’s Uighur fri
ends. It was a Friday night; the visa consultants had scheduled his trip for Saturday, because they believed that the immigration checks at American airports were looser on weekends. Polat didn’t drink much, but he chain-smoked throughout the meal. Afterward, he made his way around the table, saying farewell to everybody. When he shook my hand, I said, “The next time we see each other, it will be in America.” But I doubted the words even as I spoke.
HE DIDN’T SLEEP on the plane. He had packed only one small bag, a jiade Samsonite that had cost six dollars in Yabaolu. The bag contained his suit, two shirts, one pair of pants, and a few books. The visa consultants had told him to pack lightly (they also advised him against wearing the suit). He dressed in jeans and a new button-down shirt, another knockoff—Caterpillar brand.
After his plane landed in Los Angeles, he gathered his bag and joined the line for immigration. When he reached the front, he handed over his passport and tried to appear as calm as possible. The official took one look and pulled him aside for questioning.
He led Polat into a small room. There were six officials, including a Chinese-speaking interpreter. When asked about the trip’s purpose, Polat told the story of his trade company and produced the jiade letter of invitation. One official left the room to telephone the number on the letterhead.
While Polat waited, another officer escorted a Chinese man into the room. The man had also been a passenger on the flight from Beijing. He was about forty years old, and he did not seem particularly nervous. But the officials appeared upset; they chattered in English to the interpreter, gesturing animatedly. Finally, the interpreter asked the Chinese man what had happened to his passport.
“I tore it up and flushed it down the toilet,” the man said.
“Why did you do that?”
“Because I no longer want to be a citizen of the People’s Republic of China,” the man said calmly. “I am in the United States to apply for political asylum.” He pulled some papers out of his pocket. “This is my testimony.”
The officials left the room in order to discuss the matter. After a while, one of them returned.
“Mr. Polat,” he said, “you can leave now.”
Two Chinese contacts from the visa consulting company were waiting outside the terminal. They said that their colleague had answered the immigration officials’ telephone call. Polat gave them five hundred dollars cash, the final installment of the fee, and they drove him to the Los Angeles Greyhound station. For October, it was unseasonably hot.
At the station, Polat bought a one-way ticket to Oklahoma City. He had a couple of hours to kill, and he spent them in the waiting room, watching people. Having grown up as a member of a minority in the People’s Republic, Polat was naturally attuned to ethnic differences, and this sense had been further sharpened by years of trading. At the Greyhound station, he noticed that some of the people looked a little like Uighurs. He guessed they were probably Hispanic. The bus was not crowded and he found it to be a great improvement over the vehicles that he had known in China.
Polat enjoyed the trip, especially the scenery in New Mexico, but he didn’t like Oklahoma. It was hot and the wind blew very hard. He met Sidik Haji Rouzi, the Uighur correspondent for the Voice of America, and he also spent time in Shawnee, where some Uighurs had settled after receiving scholarships to Oklahoma Baptist University. They hadn’t become Baptists, but some of them worked at a small factory that manufactured credit cards. To Polat, life in Oklahoma seemed bleak; he sensed something unhealthy about the ethnic situation. Months later, he would explain bluntly: “There were lots of Indians in Shawnee. The government gives them houses. They drink every day and they don’t work.”
After ten days in Oklahoma, Polat bought another one-way Greyhound ticket. The bus took him east through Arkansas. There were more trees in Tennessee than he’d ever seen. Back in Beijing, my cell phone rang early one morning.
“I’m in Washington,” Polat said. He told me that he was staying with some other Uighurs in the nation’s capital, and he expected to start English classes the next week. I asked if everything had gone smoothly.
“No big problems,” he said. “There are some things I still have to take care of, but I don’t want to talk about them on the telephone. Mingbai le ma?”
“I understand,” I said. He promised to call back in a couple of weeks, and I told him I’d visit in January. Before hanging up, he asked me to say hello to his Uighur friends in Yabaolu.
9
The Courtyard
October 26, 20008:20A.M.
AFTER A YEAR IN BEIJING, I FINALLY MOVED OUT OF MY OLD APARTMENT. Never in my life had a place been so acutely defined by everything that hadn’t happened there. I had never cooked a meal in my kitchen, and I had never spent an evening watching television. I hadn’t invited any of my Beijing friends to visit me at home. I hadn’t purchased any furniture, or hung anything nice on the walls. I never received any mail there—in fact, I didn’t even know the proper address. I spent most of my evenings out, and I often took long trips into the provinces, equipped with a tent and sleeping bag. It wasn’t unusual for me to be gone for two weeks at a stretch. That was the freelancer’s life—wandering and writing.
I always returned to a changed city. Once, I came back from a reporting trip and went to my favorite noodle restaurant in a neighborhood near my home, only to discover that the whole area had been cleared away to make room for a new apartment complex. Beijing homecomings were jarring: a month-long journey could make me feel like Rip Van Winkle. New districts were constantly springing up throughout the capital, replacing old sections that were demolished one by one. In the past, central Beijing had been characterized by neighborhoods known as hutong. The word originally came from a Mongolian term for “water well,” and it had come to describe alleyways flanked by courtyard homes. By the end of the 1990s, the hutong were fast disappearing, but there wasn’t a word for what replaced them. The pace of development was so intense that speed was always the first priority, and most new buildings were completely undistinguished: quickly designed, cheaply built, badly finished. They looked temporary, like awkward new neighbors who don’t fit in and probably won’t stay for long.
In a floating city, I led a floating life. I lived in an apartment where nothing had happened, in a city that was best defined by what no longer existed. Finally, after a year of being unmoored, I decided to search for a home with some stability. Beijing had recently passed a law protecting twenty-five hutong districts, and I found an apartment in one of these sections: Ju’er Hutong. It wasn’t a legal address for foreign journalists, but I figured that I could dodge the cops whenever an anniversary rolled around. I was willing to do almost anything to live in a part of old Beijing that wouldn’t be demolished.
Ju’er was located along the line of parks and hutong that stretched northward from the Forbidden City all the way to the site of the former Beijing city wall. The neighborhood was quiet—the streets were too small for buses, and big construction projects weren’t allowed. Nothing was taller than a few stories, and many buildings were single-level structures known as siheyuan, or “courtyards.” Unlike the high-rise sections of the city, there weren’t many echoes in Ju’er, whose sounds were few and distinct: wind rustling in the scholartrees, rain slipping across tile roofs. In the mornings, vendors on bicycle carts rode through the alleyways, calling out the names of their products. Beer, vinegar, soy sauce. Rice, rice, rice. Freelance recyclers wheeled through the hutong, looking to purchase Styrofoam or cardboard or old appliances. Once I heard a man calling out, “Long hair! Long hair! Long hair!” He had come to Beijing from Henan province, where he worked for a factory that exported wigs and hair extensions, mostly to be sold to African-Americans. In the hutong, the hair dealer paid as much as fifteen dollars for a good ponytail. One woman came out of her home with twin black braids wrapped in a silk handkerchief—her daughter’s clippings, saved from the last haircut.
Some residents kept makeshift pigeon coops on their ro
ofs, and they tied whistles to the birds, so that the flock sounded when it passed overhead. In the old parts of Beijing, that low-pitched hum, rising and falling as the birds soared across the sky, was the mark of a beautiful clear day. In late afternoons, the trash man pushed his cart through the hutong, blowing a whistle. The sound faded as he made his way out of the neighborhood; usually he was gone just before sunset. Nights were silent. That was my oasis—a desk beneath a window in Ju’er Hutong.
But peace was fleeting in a city like Beijing. Shortly after I moved to Ju’er, a neighbor told me that there was something I should look into. A few blocks away, beyond the border of the protected district, an old man was fighting to keep his courtyard home from being destroyed. The courtyard was possibly four hundred years old; the man was eighty-two. He had filed two lawsuits against the government. The neighbor warned me that these things often moved quickly, and he was right. It took exactly seventy-eight days.
August 9, 2000
The man was old, but he wasn’t frail. He was taller than most young Chinese, and he carried himself like the soldier he once had been, more than half a century ago. At the age of eighty-two, he still played tennis at least twice a week. His eyes were tortoise-like: dark and hooded. But they sparked every time he talked about the doomed neighborhood.
“The hutong and courtyard homes are something that other countries don’t have,” he said. “This house is older than the United States of America!”
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