It was a cold January afternoon, and I was accompanying Polat to work. In October, he had found his first American job: a delivery position at a downtown restaurant called Café Asia. Some of his Uighur friends already worked there, and it was a relatively convenient job for an immigrant who didn’t speak much English. Deliverers worked evenings, which left the days free for language classes. Polat had recently completed a two-month course, and he understood a fair amount of English—he often listened to the radio news while driving. But he still didn’t feel comfortable speaking the language, and he preferred using Chinese when possible.
His driving, though, had already acquired the distinctive fluency of a working immigrant. He knew the quirks of the Washington grid—the one-way streets, the sections that locked down during rush hour—and he also knew how to curb-sneak and pass illegally and slide through stop signs as if he didn’t mean it. He could swing a U-turn pretty much anywhere. He kept an eye out for cops, and he was expert at spotting parking places while making a delivery run. When nothing was available, he improvised: stop the car, flash the hazards, hustle and hope. That was one word he always spoke in English—while driving, he muttered it over and over, like a mantra: “Parking, parking, parking.” Since starting the job, he had paid over six hundred dollars in fines. Thus far, his single-day record was three tickets: a pair of twenty-dollar parking violations and then a fifty-dollar penalty for cruising a yellow that went red. At Café Asia he made seven dollars an hour, plus tips.
He had had one accident. Back in December, while making a delivery, he stopped at a light on Pennsylvania Avenue and got hit from behind. The other driver had been going too fast, and, after they got out of their cars, Polat smelled alcohol on the man’s breath. The man had knocked the back bumper clear off Polat’s Honda.
“When he started talking to me, he was very nice, but once he realized that I was a foreigner with bad English, he intimidated me. He told me, don’t call the police, it will cause too much trouble. He said I could fix the car and he’d pay half. I agreed, although now I realize that I should have called the police. At the time, I was also thinking that if the police came, then I’d have to call a friend who speaks English, and that’s a hassle for him. Afterward all of my friends told me that I should have called the police. I have insurance, a license, and I didn’t break any laws. They told me that I shouldn’t trust any African people.”
A new bumper would have cost one thousand dollars, and the other driver initially offered five hundred. But the check never arrived; when Polat visited the man’s office, the man dropped the figure to three hundred. Reluctantly, Polat agreed, and then he waited—nothing. The next offer was one hundred dollars, and then Polat threatened to get a lawyer. Finally, the man gave him one hundred and fifty, cash, and Polat found a Chinese mechanic who did a cut-rate repair. It cost three hundred.
Polat still had the driver’s card, which listed an address on 13th Street NW.
“I think his business involves cheating people,” Polat told me. “That address is just a normal house where he has a table and a telephone. He doesn’t even have a computer or a printer or anything like that. I think the business supposedly has something to do with construction.”
Nevertheless, Polat hadn’t been tempted to push for more money. He could drive perfectly, but that fluency disappeared once he stepped out of the car. And he knew that his own record wasn’t perfect. In addition to all the tickets, there was always a chance that somebody might look into his Virginia driver’s license and realize that it had been acquired with a bogus affidavit. That particular loophole had been closed ten days after the terrorist attacks, because seven of the nineteen hijackers had boarded the planes with identification cards that had been acquired illegally from the state of Virginia.
THE SIGN IN front of Café Asia advertised EXOTIC CUISINE. The menu was mostly Japanese, but it also listed dishes from all over the East: Singapore Noodle, Thai Basil, Penang Ha Mein, General Tao Chicken. In the kitchen, the cooks were Thai, Indonesian, and South American. Mexicans washed dishes. On the first evening that we delivered, the sushi chefs were Malaysian and Cantonese. The men wore white Japanese happi coats and they worked in a well-lit window that fronted the street. It looked warm from where we were standing.
That night, all of the Café Asia deliverers were Uighur. The temperature was in the twenties, and four of us stood in a huddle, waiting for orders to come in. Like Polat, the two other Uighurs had recently arrived in the United States. One had journeyed from Xinjiang via Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and the other had grown up in Turkey, where his family had settled as refugees.
“I came here because I don’t want to do military service,” he explained. “In Turkey, every man has to do it. Life is not so easy, you know.”
The Uighur said it lightly, grinning at the cold. He was a tall, handsome man with short black hair. I asked him how old he was.
“Twenty-three old years.”
His mistake was unintentional, but I liked the turn of the phrase—the old years of a young émigré. I asked him how long a Turkish citizen was required to serve in the military.
“Two old years,” he said.
“Is it dangerous?”
“It used to be more dangerous, because of the terrorists in the north, but now it’s not so bad. Mostly I do not want to do it because it is boring.”
Polat handed out Marlboro Lights, and the Uighurs turned their backs to the wind and lit up. Inside, the restaurant was busy—most customers were young professionals who had just gotten off work. Couples hurried through the cold, walking past our clump of smoking Uighurs. Next door, there was another Asian restaurant—Star of Siam—and Armand’s Chicago Pizzeria. Each establishment had an American flag: since the attacks, it seemed that anybody doing business had to have at least one.
Polat telephoned a Uighur friend who worked nearby, at Radio Free Asia, and the man joined us. His name was Alim Seytoff, and he told me that he was the only Uighur with an American journalism degree. He had studied broadcast journalism at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (before that, he had attended an Adventist college in Tennessee). He was thirty-two old years: a slight, serious man in a black leather jacket. He spoke bitterly about the international ignorance of the situation in Xinjiang.
“We have more problems in China than any other ethnic group,” he said. “Much more than the Tibetans. But they get more attention because they have the Dalai Lama. My father was a political prisoner for ten years. The first time I saw him, I was eleven. My father knew people who were executed.”
A white woman walked out of Café Asia, carrying takeout boxes. She caught Alim’s last word and snapped her head. She studied the huddled Uighurs for a moment and then continued down the street, walking faster. Alim didn’t seem to notice. “Almost every Uighur family has somebody who has spent some time in jail,” he continued. “It surprises me that they are still so quiet.”
Another Uighur returned from making a delivery. He was in his twenties, a long-nosed man in a Pure Playaz baseball cap. When Polat left to feed the Honda’s meter, Pure Playaz grinned knowingly and said, “Parking.” That was the only English word I ever heard him say. Polat told me that the man had sneaked into America five months ago, from Canada, and he had come from such a remote part of Xinjiang that he didn’t even speak Chinese.
After a while, the men decided that it was time for dinner. They could eat for free at Café Asia but preferred not to. (“If I have Japanese food once a year, that’s enough for me,” said Polat.) We went next door to Armand’s Chicago Pizzeria, which was staffed by Moroccans. They greeted the Uighurs warmly—Islamic immigrant connection—and gave us a discount on slices. Pork-free, just like in Chicago. I asked Alim what he thought of the war in Afghanistan.
“I think it’s great,” he said. “I hate the Taliban more than the Americans do. If they didn’t get rid of the Taliban, then people might have connected that group with the Uighurs. That’s what the Chinese want.
They jumped onto the wagon of this war on terrorism. They were pretty slow to respond; at first I don’t think they knew what to do. Then they thought, how can we take advantage of this opportunity?”
ONE STRATEGY WAS to give a new name to an old problem. After the attacks, Chinese officials and the state-run press began referring to “East Turkestan terrorists” who had trained in Afghanistan and other Central Asian countries. In the past, they had usually described Uighur dissidents as “Xinjiang separatists.” The new term sounded more foreign, and it seemed designed to make Americans more sympathetic to the Chinese: threatened by an Islamic threat from the outside, as opposed to coping with an unhappy native minority. In November of 2001, when the Chinese foreign minister reported on terrorism to the United Nations, he emphasized China’s problem with “East Turkestan terrorists.”
China requested that Uighur groups be listed as enemies in the war on terror, but there was resistance in the United States. Some of the Uighurs’ staunchest allies were conservatives. In October of 2001, the Washington Times published an op-ed by Senator Jesse Helms:
If the U.S. should end up receiving any kind of support from Beijing for our anti-terrorist efforts, it will almost certainly come at the price of acquiescing in China’s crackdown on the Uighurs (as well as its attempts to crush Tibet and isolate Taiwan).
That would be a moral calamity, for there is no justification in lumping the Uighurs with the murderous fanatics who demonstrably mean us harm. The Uighurs are engaged in a just struggle for freedom from Beijing’s tyrannical rule, for the most part peacefully….
Senator Helms was also a major supporter of Radio Free Asia’s Uighur broadcasts. The station was similar to the Voice of America, but much newer; RFA had started broadcasting in 1996, in a range of Asian languages, including Mandarin Chinese. In 1998, the Uighur language service was added. Every day, it broadcast two hours of news and programming, to be picked up by shortwave radios in Xinjiang and other parts of China. Funds for RFA sometimes functioned as a counterweight to the grudging acceptance of China as a world power. In May of 2000, when the House of Representatives passed the bill that established permanent normal trade relations with China, it attached a provision that expanded the funding for RFA and VOA. This helped appease anti-China sentiment in Congress: the Americans accepted the reality of China’s economic power, but they expressed disdain for its political system by supporting independent broadcasts.
One problem, though, was that virtually nobody in America understood what went out over the airwaves. A scholar of Central Asian studies told me that the RFA Uighur broadcasts were far more radical than anything on the Mandarin or Tibetan services, and he worried that such material served only to antagonize the Chinese government. He was also concerned that the Uighurs overestimated the support of leaders like Senator Helms. In Central Asia, that was an old story: A common United States tactic had been to encourage ethnic or religious groups that resisted bigger powers like the Russians or the Chinese. Once the geopolitics shifted, the support ended, and the resistance groups were forgotten. This American pattern of encouragement followed by neglect had contributed to the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
That was one price of obscurity—a small, remote group like the Uighurs were almost never perceived on their own terms. The Chinese saw them as ethnic minorities of the People’s Republic; Turkic groups saw them as Turks; Islamic fundamentalists saw them as Islamic; Senator Helms saw them as anti-China and pro-America. They were like the Xinjiang mummies—there was so little information about them that anybody could remake the ethnic group in his own image. And there were plenty of disaffected Uighurs who were ready to be swayed by any kind of foreign support.
In Washington, D.C., I met with Mehmeh Omer Kanat, an RFA correspondent who had reported on the recent war. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, Kanat had interviewed a half dozen Uighur prisoners who had been captured after fighting alongside the Taliban. He estimated that hundreds of Uighurs may have been trained in Afghanistan at some point. The prisoners whom he spoke to were all young men in their twenties or early thirties, and they came from the full range of traditional Uighur social classes: peasants, traders, intellectuals. One prisoner held a degree in economics from a Chinese university. Eventually, they were to be sent to the American interrogation center at Guantanamo Bay.
“They didn’t want to be known as terrorists,” Kanat told me. “They said they didn’t have anything to do with the Arabs, with Al Qaeda. They said they fought with the Taliban only because they had been training when the war started. They said, this is a civil war and we don’t want to have anything to do with it. We want to fight China. We came here to use the opportunity.”
I asked Kanat what their attitude had been toward the United States.
“They weren’t angry at America; they were happy,” he said. “They told me that maybe America would build bases in Afghanistan, and then America would be a neighbor to China. They were very hopeful. They hoped that America would help fight against China.”
AFTER 7:30 P.M., the Café Asia deliveries picked up. Polat’s first order was for 1900 K Street, an office building whose signboard listed some law offices and a branch of Price Waterhouse. He parked illegally on K and left the lights flashing. The blonde woman who picked up the order was missing part of her right hand. She tipped a little more than two dollars.
“I always feel bad about taking tips from her,” Polat said, as we walked back to the Honda. “She’s always very nice and she’s handicapped.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said. “I think she’s a lawyer. She probably makes a lot of money.”
“I know,” he said. “But I still feel bad.”
The second order took us up L. Polat turned on Thirteenth and checked his mirrors.
“I’m going to break an American rule,” he announced. “There’s a double orange line here. If a cop sees it, he’ll fine me thirty dollars.”
He swung the U-turn and parked illegally in front of the Homer Building. No cops. More law offices: a twelve-story atrium decorated with a huge American flag and a bronze sculpture entitled The Spirit of American Youth. An inscription noted that it had been originally designed for the Omaha Beach Memorial in Normandy, France. The security guard smiled when we entered.
“This guard is nice,” Polat said, while we waited for the customer. “I come here a lot and he’s always very kind to everybody.”
The middle-aged guard chatted with a younger man. The two black men spoke as if we weren’t standing beside them; many Americans talked like that once they heard us speaking a foreign language. At the Homer Building, the men discussed a woman, and the security guard gave advice.
“You play cool,” the older man said.
“I play cool,” the young man agreed.
“You play cool,” the older man said again, with a knowing smile.
The evening became busy, and there was always another order waiting when we returned to Café Asia. California Roll, Lo Mein Beef, and Shrimp Tempura Roll to Nicole Erb. Hot and Sour Soup, General Tao Chicken, and Seaweed Salad to Sophie Kojuch (“that name looks Turkish,” Polat said). At most buildings, he called up on the intercom, using exactly two English words: “Hello, delivery.” Many customers were lawyers working late; they came down, bleary-eyed, fumbling with wallets and purses. None of them looked at us twice. It would have been a lot for them to process if they had known all the baggage that accompanied their General Tao Chicken. That name was a misspelling of General Tso, or Zuo Tongtang, the brilliant and ruthless Qing general who had expanded the Chinese empire. Under Zuo’s command, in 1884, Xinjiang had become a Chinese province; and now Uighurs were delivering his namesake chicken in the American capital. General Tso and Colonel Sanders: great chicken imperialists. Don’t eat Kentucky, Don’t eat Xinjiang.
Our last run took us to 1701 Massachusetts Avenue. Polat parked in front of a NO PARKING ANYTIME sign, and then walked into the lobby, past another sign that said POSITIVELY NO DELIV
ERY THROUGH THE LOBBY. The woman tipped Polat two dollars and twelve cents. On Twenty-fifth Street he left the Honda in the fire lane. Returning on Nineteenth, we were cut off by a cabbie.
“I’ve never seen a white person driving a cab,” Polat remarked. “It’s always foreigners. They have a really bad influence on the city’s traffic. The cabbies drive even worse than I do.”
He clocked out at ten o’clock. It was payday—inside Café Asia, the Mexican dishwashers lined up to collect their checks. The Uighurs pooled their tip money and split it five ways: twenty-six dollars each. Polat’s two-week take was $544.38. We headed outside to a pay phone across the street, so he could call his wife; he was using calling cards because his cell phone bills had been so high lately. The wind was bitterly cold and a wild-eyed black man in a parka stumbled up to us.
“You want some Tylenol?” he said. “Three dolla a box.”
Polat and I stared at the man.
“Tylenol!” he shouted. “Three dolla a box!”
“No, thank you,” I said, as politely as possible. The man staggered down the street, muttering angrily to himself.
“Are you sure this is a safe place to use the phone?” I asked.
“It’s fine,” Polat said. He pressed the numbers—somewhere in Urumqi, a phone rang, but nobody answered. We drove back to his row house, searching the side streets. Parking, parking, parking. Finally Polat found a spot, but the hood of the car remained directly in front of a NO PARKING notice.
He said, “As long as most of the car is behind the sign, it’s OK.”
A huge American flag decorated the front bay window of Polat’s row house. He had invited me to stay in his room; he planned to sleep next door on the couch of his Uighur friend. We walked inside, where the Chinese landlord was sitting in the living room. The man did a double-take once he saw me.
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