September 14-17, 2007
Kashgar, home of the bizarre and the bazaar
We've been in the ethnic boonies since
Beijing. It’s continually
jarring to find ourselves in almost wholly Muslim territory--in China of all
places.
You know, burkahs,
head scarves, mosques, naan bread, donkey carts,
livestock markets, intricately carved knives, Ramadan, prayers six times a
day. And male ascendancy. Women
everywhere lugging bundles and babies—no strollers, no Baby Bjorns. Clutches of grimy men in skullcaps congregating
everywhere—lounging, jawing, and trading everything from cell phones to sheep.
Though I try to lecture myself about
religious and philosophical tolerance I am still horrified and saddened at the
sight of women walking and working in sweltering temperatures, covered head and
shoulders in dark brown shoulder-length knitted scarves—many, in this
particular region, without even eyeholes.
We’re still in the frontier
province of Xinjiang, but from Urumqi we flew some 800 miles further and are
now at the far western end of the Gobi
Desert. We’re in Kashgar, an ancient trading city and key Silk Road gateway
for merchants on camels traveling in caravans, journeying between China and Central Asia.
Kashgar has 5,000 mosques
and 420,000 people, 73% of them Uighurs (pronounced,
OY (just like our grandmas) oy-gars (rhymes with
cars). The Uighur people are descendants of Mongols
who intermarried with Turks, a nomadic people who became Muslims in the year
915 when whoever was king said, “Ix-nay on the Buddhism everyone, I’m into
Islam now.” Today they are Sunnis and, though they dare not speak of it very
loud, politically separatist—they see themselves as a conquered nation and
chafe at living under the Chinese thumb, sneering at the double-speak name of
the province: Xinjiang Autonomous Region.
A stunning reminder of their status is the
giant concrete statue of Mao that towers over the People’s Square.
During the 1990s the Communist monolith
cracked down on the resistance movement, citing several bus bombings. Later the
government used 9/11 as an opportunity to round up and execute what it called
terrorist leaders.
Meanwhile, to stay in control and stem
separatism, for years the central government has been packing the place with
the country’s majority—Han Chinese—but is clever enough to keep the Uighurs in line by cutting them this bit of slack. Despite
the official national ban on religious expression, the government pretty much
looks the other way and lets them practice Islam, as long as they do it quietly
and don’t overtly educate their children in the religion. Children must go to
Chinese schools. And, of course, they can’t join the Communist party in order
to get government jobs if they observe religion.
Their mosques, utterly unlike what we saw in
Beijing—all
that exquisite detailing and ornamentation the Chinese produced many centuries
earlier--are dreary, peeling and uninteresting. Without much
artistic merit.
Kashgar streets, daytime
But oh, those Kashgar streets. For two days we walked constantly, despite
the heat, through dark warrens of ancient adobe (Gary would say mud) dwellings, trying to peek
through curtains strung over open doors hiding the courtyards and busy family
life.
We watched people in street clothes and
ethnic dress shop along the packed neighborhood streets, stopping to bargain
with shoemakers, potmakers, breadmakers,
fruit sellers. We saw piles of chopped salads, mounds
of fruits, tons of flies, and outdoor butchering in scorching heat.
Livestock Market
We traveled to the livestock market
alongside donkey carts and tractors dragging pens of cows and goats and sheep.
There we gawked at prodigiously
bearded old men contemplating the mayhem through faraway eyes;
women on
blankets shearing sheep with scissors; young boys left to daydream on donkeycarts
and
older boys tying long lines of sheep together--side to side, head to head--on
rope tethers. Gary
called this “rack of lamb.”
Sunday Bazaar
We ambled the
monster Sunday bazaar, packed with overkill of unbelievable crap. Toys, sheets,
hats, shoes, tinny trinkets, rugs, sunglasses, even furs. Alongside,
a sprawling second-hand market of exactly the same junk.
Adorable if grubby kids cavort together
while trailing behind their mothers. Big crowds stand around men with
microphones hawking herbal cure-alls and mystery potions for every kind of
dysfunction--but especially sexual. Entire families gather to “dress” the
bride. Women pore over mountains of glitzy fabrics, which they sew into dowdy
coats, frumpy skirts and unattractive blouses, worn in multiple layers and
often clashing violently. Tired pumps and designer-dropout purses finish off
this daily street-wear. The styling may say modest Muslim mama but certainly
not the laces, sequins, tiny mirrors and bold prints.
Kashgar streets, nighttime
After dinner, in the busy square outside the
main mosque, kids sat on their haunches, waiting for their fathers to finish
the final night prayers and watched Donald Duck on an immense outdoor
screen--with bright red Arabic subtitles. Nearby, an even
more colorful assortment of congregants.
We strolled nearby, through a packed
late-night market to the sound of vendors hacking melons and meats on scarred
wooden boards; we inhaled the smells wafting from boiling pots of cooking
foods.
But even I was not tempted by boiled sheep's
heads and lamb intestines,
Bare bones
It is fascinating to observe this
lifestyle—and at the same time give thanks that we don’t have to live it.
Gary on the other
hand, is less than entranced. He tends to rail about filth, poverty and
anything that is not elegant. Has anyone ever noticed this?
He gets particularly pissed about the food. “They have about
four recipes. And they’re all lamb. They chop the lamb into strips or cubes so
that each little chunk has some gristle or bone or fat or something you don't
want to eat. No rack of lamb, no chops, no leg of lamb--just chunks.”
Or bones….
He’s got a point. Though we’ve had two superior Muslim
meals, this was mainly because one featured a sweet-and-sour fish and another
some soy-sauced noodles--without lamb. Otherwise all the meals have been
remarkable in their sameness: lamb kebobs, lamb naan,
lamb pilaf, some kind of soup with bits of lamb, noodles sprinkled with lamb
and not just lamb but my particular bugaboo—cilantro. Pork, of course, is out
of the question. And none of this is helped by the lack of wine or beer.
Good enough for Bill ‘n’ Hill
Despite the poverty and squalor around us,
it didn’t take us long to be complaining about our hotel.
Our months-old Kashgar
hotel, the International, looks perfect—everyone is quick to tell you Bill
and Hillary stayed there. But that doesn’t mean they’d come back.
It’s an Oriental Stepford
wife--the bedding looks all crisply ironed, pristine and white, all tufted and
soft, but, in fact, the beds are so hard they could be kitchen counters. The
rooms present such minor inconveniences as: no drawers—not one; reading lights
directed straight down, tantalizingly lighting everything just behind your
head. Closets so narrow if you hang your shirt (even a wee Chinese shirt) the
doors won’t close. A shower that continues running during your bath. One
lone bottle of white wine at the bar (and a Chinese white wine at that—a
vintage not currently offering the French any competition.) No safe in your
room; however, not unlike the ladies rooms in this country, a communal safe is
available to mix your money in.
No matter who you call, no matter what you
ask for, the answer is a very lilting but firm, “No.” Or, the telephone
variation, “No English, goodbye.”
We all loved the breakfasts in Beijing and Urumqi, which featured both Chinese and Western
breakfast foods, including an omelet maker with the full range of onions,
peppers, hams and cheeses, and a Chinese soup maker steaming cabbage,
dumplings, assorted greens and noodles in clear, boiling broth.
Gary calls
these breakfasts a religious experience--God awful.
For the most part it’s a buffet of maybe 20
Chinese lunch and dinner entrees: delicacies like pallid fried
rice, several kinds of cold noodles (cold even when they’re supposed to be
hot) dry, gristly meats, assorted fiery shredded cabbages, bony chicken
(at least we thought it was chicken) and a vegetable; bony lamb (at least we
thought it was lamb) with (mostly) potato; bony beef (you get the drift) plus
strange looking pickled items--anything from pickled cucumbers to
pickled sheep spleen (just a deduction from items we’ve seen on the
streets)--gummy rice buns, thin gruely porridge and a
whole series of shiny, gelatinous objects that I never have to taste because
they slip through my chopsticks.
The offerings for Western tourists are set out on a tiny
island of table you can barely get near, because it’s so crowded. When you do,
you’ll find (sometimes) some small donut look-alikes that are really corn
bread, a few slices of yellowy white bread, some almond cookies, some
cardboard-like twists, some more white gruel, and an array of condiments
consisting of marmalade and red bean paste. Did I mention butter? There isn’t
any.
Plenty of tea and
lots of sometimes weak and watery, sometimes strong and sludgy, coffee, which
they make at the table from powdered Nescafe.
Just one more thing: nobody’s looking anorexic yet.
