There were so many different ethnic groups in Urumchi I wondered what the Cultural Revolution had been like.
"It was very bad here," Mr. Yang said. "But the minorities were not interested. They did not participate in the Cultural Revolution. Very few of them were Red Guards."
"If they didn't participate, then they must have been persecuted," I said.
"Oh, yes," Mr. Yang said, readily agreeing. "They were persecuted! Islamic religion was declared illegal. Praying was illegal. Mosques were considered bad. The Red Guards went in and smashed up the mosques. And people were punished."
"How did they punish the Muslims?"
"They made them raise pigs."
Typical, I thought; and perfect in its way. It was always said that the Chinese under Mao were a forgiving bunch — believers in redemption and reeducation. But it seemed to me uniquely vindictive to make physicists assemble crappy radios, and to force literature teachers to hoe cabbages or shovel chicken shit, and to put Muslims to work in pigsties. That was on the same order as putting hysterical schoolkids in charge of the middle schools; the result was easily predictable, and in the event the little brats persecuted their teachers and passed in blank examination papers to prove they were good Maoist anti-intellectuals.
"I'll bet the minorities didn't like that very much," I said.
Mr. Yang shrieked with laughter. It was the Chinese laugh that means You said it!
He said, 'They wanted to protest, but they didn't dare. They wanted to have a counterrevolution!"
"Do they want to have a counterrevolution now?" It was a delicate question, because there were always rumors of Uighur discontent; and anyone who saw these frowning, disapproving and uncooperative Uighur faces all over Xinjiang could easily reach the conclusion that here were people who were not entirely sold on the aims of the People's Republic.
Mr. Yang laughed again, a slower warning honk that meant: Do not ask that question. But that particular laugh was also a noise I interpreted as a complex yes.
But I was stuck with Mr. Yang. He asked me what I wanted to see in Urumchi.
I said, "Something memorable."
We drove to Nanshan, the South Mountain Pasture. It was only twenty minutes out of Urumchi but it looked like western Uganda, a great green plain with the "Mountains of the Moon" rising out of it, several snowcapped peaks. What distinguishes these mountainsides from others in China are the spruce forests, tall, cool and blackish-green. On some of the meadows there were goatherds and shepherds with their flocks, and Kazakhs living in mud-smeared huts and log cabins. There were yurts, too, and near them men wearing fur hats with earflaps, and boots and riding breeches; and there were women in shawls and dresses and thick socks. They looked like Russian babushkas, and unlike the Chinese, these women were long nosed and potbellied. They tended vegetable gardens near their cabins, and they had donkeys and cranky dogs and snotty-nosed kids who, because of the cold, also had bright red cheeks.
To avoid talking to Mr. Yang for a while, I walked fast up the slope and found a waterfall. Beneath it, in the stream, there was ice — big yellow crusts of it, and solid thick shelves of it frozen to the rocks. Twenty minutes down the road the townsfolk of Urumchi were perspiring and playing pool under the trees, and here it was freezing.
I found a Uighur, Zhu Ma Hun—Hun means mister and the rest was the Chinese version of the Muslim name Juma (Friday — the Muslim sabbath). He seemed to claim that he had been the Chinese ambassador to Syria, but he may have meant that he worked in that embassy. His Chinese was as limited as mine. On the other hand, he spoke Turkish and Arabic as well as his native Uighur.
He said he came from Tacheng, on the border of Soviet Kazakhstan, about 500 miles from Urumchi and about as far west as anyone can live in China and still be regarded as Chinese. That gave me an idea.
"You're not Chinese, are you?"
"Yes! I'm Chinese!"
He was big and friendly, fat faced. He might have been a Turk, a Smyrna merchant, or a pasha with a big paunch. He said he had been to Mecca on the hajj.
We were strolling along the mountain road. We passed a public toilet — the Chinese tend to erect them in the middle of all beauty spots — and though we were forty feet away, the thing gave off an overpowering stink. Every public toilet I saw in China was so vile it was unusable. Every foreigner mentioned them; the Chinese never did spontaneously — not because they were fastidious but because they were ashamed and phlegmatic, and preferred to suffer in silence.
"I think you don't have many of those in the States," Zhu Ma Hun said.
"Right," I said, thinking he meant the brick shit house, but I saw that he was pointing to a yurt, where an old nomad — possibly a Tadzhik — was lugging a bucket of water.
"But do you have any tents?" he asked.
"Not as many as you," I said.
The Chinese idea of a picnic lunch is an assortment of dry sponge cake and stale cookies. Mr. Yang had given me a box in the car, and I had not realized what was in it until I was some distance up the mountain. I fed the whole thing to some cows.
That afternoon, still hungry, I looked for something to eat in the market at Urumchi. My favorite street food was a kind of stuffed pancake called jiaozi or else fried dumplings. But the treat here was lamb kebabs and flat loaves of bread they called nang, probably from the same root word as the Urdu nan, familiar to anyone who has eaten in an Indian restaurant.
There are so few Western travelers in Urumchi that Uighurs become animated when they see them. They stare, they gabble, they proffer dried fruit and bunches of fresh grapes. One man tried to interest me in his medicines: dried and splayed lizards (for high blood pressure), deer antlers (for potency), snakes, frogs, and birds' beaks, and a hideous little bundle of twiggy things that he said were the umbilical cords of donkeys.
"They are very good for you," he said vaguely, when I asked what they were for.
The traders in the market, selling the carpets which are woven in Urumchi and the clothes that arrive by train, were either bearded men in skullcaps or fat women in brown dresses. They held up their merchandise, they beckoned me over, but whenever I got close they breathed on me and snatched my wrist and spoke the Uighur greeting.
"Shansh marnie?"
There were more dead animals elsewhere in Urumchi. It is a measure of how deep in the hinterland the town is that there are still many wild animals in the surrounding countryside. At one shop I saw the usual snakes and dried lizards and umbilical cords, but also wolf pelts, fox furs, a half a dozen bearskins and the carcass of an eagle — a white-shouldered Imperial Eagle (so my bird book said), with a wingspan of about six feet. This beautiful bird was a great deal bigger than the Uighur woman selling it.
"Do you want to buy it?" she said.
"What would I do with it?"
"You take the feathers and rub them on your skin. It's good medicine."
"What about this?" I said, pointing to the skull of a gazelle, to which two lovely horns were attached.
"Medicine. Grind it into powder. It makes you strong."
There were any number of Western scientists who claimed that traditional Chinese medicine could be efficacious; but what this woman was saying — and the man in the market with his donkeys' umbilical cords — was surely complete nonsense?
I was prepared to believe that the Chinese had the herbal solutions to high blood pressure, and that acupuncture had its practical uses; but when they scrunched up a dead owl and said, Yum, yum — good for your eyes, I wanted to say Bullshit. If I didn't, it was only because I didn't yet know the Chinese word for it.