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".