WAH MEE RESTAURANT
CHINESE-AMERICAN RESTAURANT
POLYNESIAN COCKTAILS
CARRY OUT
“The blacks bully them,” Polat said. “They eat and they don’t pay.”
THE METRO WHISKED us beneath the city’s grid—back through the first alphabet, past the Capitol, and on to the Smithsonian station. We walked out onto the faded lawn of the Mall. The Washington Monument was closed for repairs; scaffolding clambered up the base, marble and metal disappearing into the gun-gray sky. While we stared up at the monument, two Asian men walked past. They were dressed identically: dark suits, khaki overcoats. Polat waited for them to move out of earshot.
“Those guys are North Koreans,” he said.
“I think they’re just Asian Americans,” I said.
The men walked west, toward the reflecting pool. Polat watched intently.
“They’re definitely not Asian Americans,” he said. “I can tell by the way they dress and the way they’re walking. There’s something different about them. I bet they’re North Korean diplomats. They look the same as those guys around the embassy in Yabaolu.”
“Are they wearing Kim Il Sung pins?”
“I didn’t see,” he said. “But in America they might take off the pins anyway.”
We walked down the hill, toward the line of oaks that ran alongside the reflecting pool. Deliberately, I slowed, hoping that the Asian men would disappear. The day was depressing me: the ruined neighborhood, the old Yabaolu conversation about North Koreans. For five years, I had lived on the other side of the world, and so many times in China I had been called upon to talk about the United States—teaching classes, answering questions, holding conversations with curious Chinese. In the Peace Corps, that had literally been my job title: “foreign expert.”
But now that I was finally here with somebody from China, almost nothing about my native country seemed recognizable. Even the monuments looked different, abandoned for the winter. Below the scaffolded obelisk, the reflecting pool was dull as slate. A few white seagulls carved their way across the surface, paddling sluggishly. We stood beside the pool for a moment, and Polat said he wanted to see the Lincoln Memorial. Up ahead, the Asian men had finally disappeared.
We climbed the steps to the memorial. Children’s laughter rang off marble walls; the place was full of school groups. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been here—probably when I was a child myself. Inside, the Gettysburg Address had been inscribed into a wall:
Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal….
The words felt as soothing as a rediscovered Bible verse: half familiar and half new, like anything that was recited long before it was understood. I read the Address slowly, pausing at the rhythm of certain phrases—“the world will little note nor long remember”; “the last full measure of devotion”—and for the first time that day I felt calm. That was my language; this was my home.
Polat and I stood in front of Lincoln’s statue. Children swarmed around us, giggling and talking, and their presence made the seated figure even more stately than he looked in photographs. For a moment we were silent.
“A lot of Uighurs admire Lincoln,” Polat said. “I used to read history books about him. We admire him because of the way he handled the ethnic issues.”
We returned to the cold January afternoon. Outside the monument, a simple wooden shack had been erected, along with a sign:
POW-MIA
You Are Not Forgotten
The Last Firebase Standing Vigil
Until They All Come Home
A middle-aged man in camouflage handed out pamphlets—the last full measure of devotion. I accepted one and thanked him, and then Polat touched my arm.
“There’s the North Koreans,” he said.
They walked side by side: black suits, khaki overcoats. This time I checked—no pins.
“I really don’t think they’re North Koreans,” I said.
“I’m sure of it,” he said.
The men walked to a taxi line. They shook hands and entered separate cabs.
“They’re definitely up to something strange,” Polat said. “Why else would they split up like that?”
The vision came to me as if from above: two men, one from Xinjiang, the other from Missouri, speaking Chinese at the Lincoln Memorial and wearing identical knockoff Caterpillar-brand denim shirts. I said that it was time to leave, and at last we did.
THERE WERE ONLY about five hundred Uighurs in the United States. In the early 1990s, some had arrived as university students, but in recent years there had been an increase in those who came independently. Generally, they applied for political asylum, which differed from the refugee program. Refugees represented a controlled group: every year, the White House determined the refugee numbers and nationalities, which shifted according to world events. Until the early 1980s, the majority of refugees came from Indochina; by the end of that decade, the former Soviet Union took the lead. In 2001, it shifted to Africans: Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone. Typically, refugee candidates applied overseas, and then the State Department provided a loan for transportation and initial resettlement costs.
But asylum was the wild card of American immigration. Unlike refugees, who arrived in the United States under government auspices, candidates for asylum found their own way to the country. Their numbers were low: in 2001, only 20,303 people were granted asylum. (That year, the United States admitted a total of 1,064,318 legal immigrants.) It wasn’t uncommon for asylum applicants to use bogus documents, or sneak across borders, or lie to U.S. immigration officials. None of these acts was held against a candidate who was deemed worthy. This created an odd moral environment: Polat’s first act on American soil had been to deceive officials, but nevertheless he could apply for asylum without worrying about the ramifications of his deception. And the asylum program was notorious for false stories—many applicants actually came to the United States for economic reasons, and they exaggerated the political risks of their home country. Chinese applicants often cited the planned-birth policy, knowing that Americans were concerned about abortion.
By the time I visited in January, Polat had already hired a lawyer, who was preparing the asylum application. If successful, Polat would be allowed to seek employment, and he could also apply for his wife to come from Xinjiang and join him. After asylum, there were other stages: first, permanent-resident status (the “green card”), and then citizenship. Other Uighurs had told Polat that if everything went smoothly, he could become a real American in five years.
He had enrolled in an adult English class, in preparation for finding a job. He told me that at the beginning any employment would probably be unskilled, like driving. But for some reason he liked the idea of working at the post office after his English improved. “It’s stable and you don’t have to have a high degree from an American college,” he explained.
That January, he asked if I would write a letter on behalf of his asylum application. I agreed; I hadn’t directly witnessed Polat’s political problems in Xinjiang, but I was well aware of his economic situation. In the letter, I wrote: “By no means should Mr. [Polat] be identified as an economic refugee who simply wants American job opportunities—as an educated person who speaks both Chinese and Russian, he had plenty of business possibilities in Beijing….”
During one of my subsequent trips to Washington, D.C., I met with Polat’s lawyer, Brian Mezger. In 1998, Mezger had been working for a nonprofit immigration organization in Philadelphia, and a potential client called and explained that he was a Uighur. Mezger responded, “What’s a Uighur?” That year, he started his own practice, which soon became largely dedicated to Uighur clients. Mezger’s office was in Bethesda, Maryland, and virtually every Uighur candidate in the Washington, D.C., area hired him. For each client, he charged fifteen hundred dollars, which was a relatively low rate by i
ndustry standards.
Mezger was a quietly intense thirty-one-year-old who had been born in Vicenza, Italy, to an American father and a Sicilian mother. He told me that his mother’s background had inspired him to pursue immigration law. For Mezger, the melting pot had worked quickly. His mother was a Catholic (“in the Sicilian sense”), but he had attended thirteen years of Quaker school. He voted Republican. At Oberlin College, he had majored in East Asian Studies; in his spare time, he still read Japanese and Chinese poetry. He also studied everything he could find about Uighurs. In 1998, he had attended the World Uighur Youth Congress, a meeting of the exiled community, in Ankara, Turkey. “I have a very high boredom threshold,” he explained. “All the meetings were in Uighur or Russian. I just read books or doodled or whatever.”
He had never traveled to Xinjiang. But even in Maryland, he had become familiar with certain aspects of Uighur culture. At one point, he had considered hiring an ethnic-Chinese secretary, but he realized that the Uighur distrust ran too deep for that. He had learned that many educated Uighurs didn’t care for Islam. He had also become familiar with the Uighur class system, and in particular he was impressed by the resourcefulness of the traders (“you could probably drop them into a jungle and they’ll find a way to do business”). And he had learned to be careful when asking question number five on the United States asylum application:
Do you fear being subjected to torture (severe physical or mental pain, including rape or other sexual abuse) in your home country or any country if you return?
“I’ve had Uighurs say no, because they aren’t afraid,” Mezger told me. “They want to be tough. I have to explain that the question is asking whether there is a possibility of torture in a Chinese jail.”
Of the estimated five hundred Uighurs living in the United States in 2001, nearly one hundred eventually won asylum with Mezger’s help. But he told me that even when cases were successful, he worried about his clients’ future.
“Every once in a while I think, I’m getting these people asylum, but I’m basically helping to destroy Uighur culture,” he said. “Their kids adjust so fast. For the grandkids, it will just be an oddity that they were Uighur. But this happens with all groups in America. I’m sure the descendants of the German revolutionaries who came over in the 1840s weren’t quite as keen on revolution. It’s the same thing with any small, hunted group.”
Every November 12, the Uighur community in the Washington, D.C., area gathered to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of the East Turkestan Republic. One year, I happened to be in town, and I attended with Polat, whose father had fought for the East Turkestan Army. The banquet was held in a rented room at George Mason University. About eighty Uighurs attended, including a few who had come from overseas to mark the occasion. One eighty-year-old had flown in all the way from Kazakhstan. He was one of the few living Uighurs who had personal memories of the independent republic that had been crushed in 1949.
At the banquet, people gave speeches in Uighur, and then the younger members of the community performed dances in traditional costumes. One participant was an eighth-grader from Fairfax, Virginia; she spoke perfect American English and told me that she had agreed to dance only because her friend was doing it, too. When I asked the girl if her Virginia classmates understood what it meant to be a Uighur, she rolled her eyes. “They say I’m Chinese, because I’m from China,” she said. After the dance, four adult Uighurs paraded into the hall dressed in the olive-green military uniform of the East Turkestan Republic. They marched to the front, saluted the crowd, and basked in a wave of applause. At exactly eleven o’clock, the loudspeakers crackled and a security guard announced that the room would be closed immediately, and then the Uighurs shook hands, bade each other farewell, and swept out of George Mason University.
POLAT NEVER MENTIONED the mugging during my visit in January of 2001. I didn’t learn about it for more than a year, when a mutual friend informed me. Afterward, I asked Polat what had happened, and he told the story. He said that both the driver and the gunman were “African.”
“At first I was frightened, but once he told me to get down I wasn’t frightened anymore,” he said. “At that point, he shoots me or he doesn’t shoot me and there isn’t anything to do. I didn’t think he was going to shoot me. He was very skinny and I think he was a drug addict.
“I didn’t tell the police, because I didn’t have asylum yet. It wasn’t worth the bother. That was an ugly scene—down on the ground like that.”
Polat shook his head and laughed ruefully. I realized why he hadn’t told me earlier: the mugging had humiliated him. Several times, he mentioned how ridiculous he must have looked on the ground beside Rhode Island Avenue. I tried to reassure him by saying that he had done the right thing; there was no reason to resist a man with a gun. But Polat disagreed.
“One of my Uighur friends was delivering for Domino’s and a man held him up at gunpoint,” he said. “He was also African. He pointed the gun at my friend, and my friend just grabbed the gun and pulled it away. There weren’t any bullets. They began to fight, and soon a police car came and picked them up. The officer put handcuffs on both of them and took them to the station. My friend called an interpreter, and once the interpreter arrived they let my friend go.”
I told him that the Uighur had been lucky, and that it was always best to assume that guns come with bullets. Polat shook his head.
“It depends on the situation,” he said. “If they don’t seem like they know what they’re doing, you can fight. That happened to me once in Yabaolu. It was in 1997—four money changers were murdered that year. Three guys must have been watching me for a while, and one evening they tried to rob me. The leader stopped me on the street and showed me his knife. He just flashed it and said, ‘Friend, can you loan me some money?’ You know how those guys talk—‘Friend this, Friend that.’ He had a northeastern accent.”
Polat smiled proudly. “I didn’t give him anything,” he said. “I told him, ‘I’m from Xinjiang, from Urumqi, and we know about knives. That knife you have is nothing special. I have friends in this neighborhood.’ After that, they left me alone.”
ARTIFACT G
The Uncracked Bone
AFTER TALKING WITH OLD MR. ZHAO, I SEARCH FOR THE STORY OF Chen Mengjia’s life. The material is thin: no book-length biography of Chen has ever been published, and many of his works are out of print. The end of his life is a complete blank; there are no detailed accounts of the events that led to his suicide. In China, the Cultural Revolution is still a shadowy period. It’s permissible to write critically about those years, but there is a tacit understanding that investigations should not be pushed too far. And few people kept diaries or saved letters during that time.
The beginning of Chen’s life is clearer, because he published so precociously. He was born in 1911, in Nanjing, where his father was a schoolteacher and a Presbyterian minister. Ten Chen siblings lived to adulthood: five men, five women. Each graduated from college—an education level that was particularly unusual for women of that generation. Chen Mengjia was the seventh child, and by far the most brilliant. He published his first poem at the age of eighteen; by twenty, when his debut volume appeared, he was famous. As Chinese poets have traditionally done, he gave himself a pen name: Wanderer.
He became the youngest member of the Crescent Moon Society, a group of romantic poets who eschewed the rigid rules of classical Chinese verse. In 1932, when Japanese and Chinese armies clashed outside of Shanghai, Chen joined the resistance. The young poet sent verses back from the battlefield:
Blood flakes bloom in front of new ghosts’ tombs and drip on muddy snow
There lie our heroes—quietly…
His poetic style was simple and well metered; critics compared him to A. E. Housman and Thomas Hardy. Chen abandoned Christianity after childhood, but he sensed a mysticism about the distant past which he described as an almost religious feeling. One early poem, “Smile of the Tang Dynasty,” describes
a thousand-year-old engraving of a female figure:
I peek at the side of her face
Under her dignified appearance
A cold, silent trace of a smile
Is hidden.
Artifacts have power; written characters breathe life into the distant past. In another poem, the narrator gazes at an old fort:
The tower seems content
With dignity. Listening to the sound of the river
Listening to the wind
As it writes the three-thousand-year script across a sheet of cloud
They inspire me to gratify and respect antiquity.
As a college student in Nanjing, Chen studied law, but after graduation he shifted fields. In 1932, he began to research classical Chinese literature, then religion, and finally he switched to ancient Chinese writing. The past drew closer; poetry drifted away. Verse had always seemed painful for Chen; in one poem he wrote: “I crushed my chest and pulled out a string of songs.” He explained in a book preface that at twenty-three he was already becoming disenchanted with poetry. Later, he wrote:
Since I was seventeen, I have used meter to control myself. Everything I wrote could be measured by a string…. The chain was heavy on me, and in the slavery I learned to make fine words.
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