It feels like ages since I last wrote. Using the internet in Xinjiang is a different ballgame. To gain access you first have to present your passport to the clerk at the internet cafe and then try to weave your way around the abundant firewalls by sneaking through all sorts of proxy servers. I failed at this game and couldn't access blogspot which is part of the reason I've been so long between posts. The other part is that we have been traveling pretty hard for the past few weeks and what access we have had to computers and free-time has been limited. In the past three weeks this group of 12 has found its way through five cities/towns separated by 75 hours of train rides and 22 hours of bus rides and hours of walking pack-laden through foreign streets in search of our home for the night. West across Xinjiang through Urumqi, Turpan, Kashgar, and the border-town ( w/ Tajikistan Pakistan & Afghanistan) Tashkorgan and then back through them all to exit through the south east of the province into Gan Su province, and across that into Qing Hai's capital city Xi Ning where we now rest for a day and reflect on the faces and places and worlds we have shared with our generous, deep-rooted, home-sharing friends of the desert.
This province, mountainous and many-bordered is home to 55 of the 56 ethnic minority groups in China (says China.org, but my cab driver this morning told me there are only 50). The people of these ethnic minority groups make up more than 2.38 million, or 45.5%, of the province's population. Largest in number are the Tibetan people (21.89% of the population) who have been living on the plateau for countless generations. The Dali Lama is was born in what is now Qing Hai. Tomorrow will find us in one of the small Tibetan mountain towns which border the city. A local non-profit organization dedicated to the cultural and ecological preservation of the Qing Hai Tibetan plateau has invited us to teach English and do some translation work in one of the schools where they operate cultural preservation projects including Tibetan language classes and Tangka painting workshops. These are links to the organization's websites, which are mostly in Chinese, some photographs that are quite nice: http://feiyu.tibetcul.com/49422.html and http://www.qtpep.com/. We will spend five days and nights in home-stays with families.
The process of a home-stay, arriving in a strange place at a strange home and then being surrounded by the daily life of strangers, is quite intense. This has especially been the case in the minority villages we have stayed in where Miao, or Tibetan, not Chinese, has been the language spoken. I often find myself feeling useless and helpless... and silent. Silence is not my usual state of being. I think it's really good for me to have no choice but to practice silence. Being moved to a level of communication that consists mainly of observation and miming is an opportunity to focus on the world of doing and being and away from the world of saying and explaining. It's a world where walk matters much more than talk, where the non-verbal arts of expression and perception are sharpened. I hope that I will make time in my life to practice these arts and skills when I'm back in the world where I often rely on my words to do my walking for me.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Finally
One summer before last I spent eight weeks in Southern Indiana learning a language spoken in Central Asia. Uyghur. Not many people have heard of this language, or indeed of this people. About 11 million people in this world are Uyghur, and of those about 8 million live here in Xinjiang Provence of Western China. Why study a language like Uyghur? Virtually unknown to the world... not likely to be appreciated if even recognized on my resume... a language dwindling even in the schools where Uyghur children learn. Why?
Eight years before last I spent a year in Beijing studying a language spoken in China. Mandarin. Everyone has heard of it. A fifth of the world is Chinese. I never have to come up with a reason why I study Chinese, the sheer enormity of the population of speakers provides reason enough. One in every eight people in the world is a Chinese peasant. It looks great on my resume. But is one fifth of the world Chinese... really? In a country roughly the size of the continental United States, there are 56 governmentally recognized ethnic minority groups and 236 distinct languages spoken, along with rich and varied dialects of each. What we think of as China, Kung Pao Chicken and Beijing Olympics, is topical and incomplete- what we think of as China is like the apple pie and baseball myth of America we export.
In December of that 2000 I got on a train in Beijing, hurled westward for 72 hours, and got off in Kashgar- a silk road city near the China-Pakistan border. My eyes opened onto a China that I had never imagined, and my ears opened to a language I had never heard that sounded like the curling twisting Arabic script in which it is written. The people I met personified the desert borderlands they have lived on for more than thirty centuries. Through those thirty centuries a nomadic imperative of kindness to strangers has prevailed; I was welcomed into homes, served raisins, pomegranate seeds and naan bread while the families that hosted me kept to the Ramadan fast- I ate with the children the elderly and the sick. I broke the fast with pool-playing teenagers. I walked in streets empty of men called to prayer, but full of women carrying baskets and chatting with me as I learned the ancient market routes. An American girl in Xinjiang, a month before the inauguration of Bush II.
In the years that have spread between my first visit to Xinjiang and my first return a week ago, I have not been able to erase the place and the warmth from my mind. I watched as the years plowed forward, horrified, as my own nation, my own people, were swept into a culture of aggression and fear. I watched as that fear spread outwards from ground zero in ripples of intolerance- blind to fact and reason and refusing accountability for our own actions. I watched as our terror spread here, to the borderlands of China and Central Asia, to the homes and families that had welcomed me, fed me, opened my mind.
And now I'm back. And in the time that has lapsed I've taken action against the transgressions of my own nation in my own small way. I learned enough of the Uyghur language to say "thank you for your kindness" and "I'm sorry". I've learned enough to go out to dinner with a Uyghur friend and express my admiration and awe of the history and culture of his people. In taking the time and putting forth the effort to learn a small amount of the words and the culture and the sense of context that comes from language learning, I have gained a better understanding of this land and an appetite for further learning.
As my Uyghur friend and I left the restaurant I asked him how to say friend in Uyghur slang. As he pronounced the word I jotted it down in my smudgy Arabic hand in my notebook. He looked at me and said that this was the first time he had ever seen a Uyghur word written by a foreign hand. He said that he felt honored and proud. I felt weepy and grateful and hopefully. We smiled at each other. That was the evening of November 5th. On the walk home I bought a Uyghur language newspaper. On the front page a picture of a beaming Obama glowed above a single Uyghur word; "Finally".
Eight years before last I spent a year in Beijing studying a language spoken in China. Mandarin. Everyone has heard of it. A fifth of the world is Chinese. I never have to come up with a reason why I study Chinese, the sheer enormity of the population of speakers provides reason enough. One in every eight people in the world is a Chinese peasant. It looks great on my resume. But is one fifth of the world Chinese... really? In a country roughly the size of the continental United States, there are 56 governmentally recognized ethnic minority groups and 236 distinct languages spoken, along with rich and varied dialects of each. What we think of as China, Kung Pao Chicken and Beijing Olympics, is topical and incomplete- what we think of as China is like the apple pie and baseball myth of America we export.
In December of that 2000 I got on a train in Beijing, hurled westward for 72 hours, and got off in Kashgar- a silk road city near the China-Pakistan border. My eyes opened onto a China that I had never imagined, and my ears opened to a language I had never heard that sounded like the curling twisting Arabic script in which it is written. The people I met personified the desert borderlands they have lived on for more than thirty centuries. Through those thirty centuries a nomadic imperative of kindness to strangers has prevailed; I was welcomed into homes, served raisins, pomegranate seeds and naan bread while the families that hosted me kept to the Ramadan fast- I ate with the children the elderly and the sick. I broke the fast with pool-playing teenagers. I walked in streets empty of men called to prayer, but full of women carrying baskets and chatting with me as I learned the ancient market routes. An American girl in Xinjiang, a month before the inauguration of Bush II.
In the years that have spread between my first visit to Xinjiang and my first return a week ago, I have not been able to erase the place and the warmth from my mind. I watched as the years plowed forward, horrified, as my own nation, my own people, were swept into a culture of aggression and fear. I watched as that fear spread outwards from ground zero in ripples of intolerance- blind to fact and reason and refusing accountability for our own actions. I watched as our terror spread here, to the borderlands of China and Central Asia, to the homes and families that had welcomed me, fed me, opened my mind.
And now I'm back. And in the time that has lapsed I've taken action against the transgressions of my own nation in my own small way. I learned enough of the Uyghur language to say "thank you for your kindness" and "I'm sorry". I've learned enough to go out to dinner with a Uyghur friend and express my admiration and awe of the history and culture of his people. In taking the time and putting forth the effort to learn a small amount of the words and the culture and the sense of context that comes from language learning, I have gained a better understanding of this land and an appetite for further learning.
As my Uyghur friend and I left the restaurant I asked him how to say friend in Uyghur slang. As he pronounced the word I jotted it down in my smudgy Arabic hand in my notebook. He looked at me and said that this was the first time he had ever seen a Uyghur word written by a foreign hand. He said that he felt honored and proud. I felt weepy and grateful and hopefully. We smiled at each other. That was the evening of November 5th. On the walk home I bought a Uyghur language newspaper. On the front page a picture of a beaming Obama glowed above a single Uyghur word; "Finally".
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