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Past & Future: Xinjiang

 1.  In August, I let my friend dye my fingers blood red.

I was in Kashgar, a small city in the far west of China.

We bought henna powder from the bazaar and went back to my air-conditioned hostel, where she mixed the powder with water until it became a dark brown paste. She then applied it carefully to each finger, up to my first knuckle, and wrapped a strip of plastic around it, tying it tightly. We waited for an hour as the henna soaked into my nails, my skin.

Your fingers will stay a deep red for a few weeks, she said. But then the color will fade from your skin. It will stay on your fingernails until they grow completely out.

How long will that take? I asked her.

My fingers in a Kasghar tea house.

She showed me her hands: light orange crescents at the very tips of her nails. She said, This was three months ago. I nodded, I committed. I remember thinking: this is how long I’ll carry Xinjiang with me. I can remember Xinjiang for at least this long.

Xinjiang is a territory almost four times the size of my home state of California. It’s kind of China’s “wild west.” The Silk Road famously ran through it to the Middle East and Europe. For centuries, it was the empire’s distant frontier, and it remains exotic and romantic in the Chinese imagination today.

I was drawn to Xinjiang because I’d read about the Uyghurs, a Turkic Muslim minority who make up more than 40% of the population there. I learned that over the past few decades, they have been actively assimilated, denied political influence, and restricted from fully expressing their distinct culture. And I read that it was due to the Chinese government’s fear of extremism, terrorism, and instability.

But I wanted to see and feel Xinjiang for myself.

On the bus from Urumqi to Turpan.

So last summer, I took a 47-hour sleeper train from my parents’ hometown on the eastern coast of China to Urumqi.

I don’t know how I expected to see all of Xinjiang in three weeks. I trudged up sand dunes in the eastern Xinjiang desert and touched the walls of ruins baked by the sun. I hiked to the alpine lakes and sprawling grasslands of northern Xinjiang. But more often, I experienced the landscape with my eyes closed, riding in sleeper trains at night. As I fell asleep in my cot, I tried to imagine the scenery that I wasn’t seeing as I fell asleep in my cot.

By the time I arrived in Kashgar, I was nearing the end of my trip. And I was tired.

3.  In Kashgar, I had one friend, a former student of mine. She became my guide and my teacher. I couldn’t speak any Uyghur, and most people in Kasghar don’t speak much Mandarin.

Standing in the Turpan basin.

During the four days we were together, my friend and I took long walks throughout the city. She had never been inside a mosque before. She’d never explored the labyrinthine alleys of the Old Town. She’d never been to the Livestock Bazaar because “that’s not where women normally go.”

During our walks, she talked to me as if she were an old woman recalling the distant past. She told me, We used to use these wooden spoons to eat, but not anymore. Or, When we were children there were many pastries like this, but now they are hard to find, as if she were my grandmother, and not two years younger than me.

We tried not to discuss politics. There’s nothing to be gained from complaining about the political situation—that’s what so many well-educated young Uyghurs seem to believe. There are only personal decisions to be made, mistakes to avoid, brighter futures to be had as a result of achieving just the right balance between caution and courage.

On my last day in Kashgar, before I was to fly back to the eastern Chinese metropolis, my friend said something that confounded me.

She said: It’s interesting, how we identify. I didn’t feel like a Kashgar person until I went to Urumqi. And I didn’t feel like a Xinjiang person until I left to the eastern cities. Maybe if one day I get to leave China, I can start to feel like a Chinese person too.

When I hugged her at the train station, I said I’d see her in America someday. But neither of us knew when that would happen.

4.  Three months and thousands of miles later, I am still thinking about Xinjiang.

I suppose that’s the point of a long journey. Memory can be forgiving. With distance and time, things become easier to accept. They become a part of the past—and I get to move on.

In September, I started as a graduate student in southern California, pursuing an MFA in poetry. I get paid to teach composition to undergrads, and I’m allowed plenty of time to write.

As a poet, I use my past as material. I write about my memories and experiences, but loosely, because I’m not a journalist, and I’m not a historian. I intend for my poems to somehow transform the past, make the political personal. And maybe, then, the personal might take on some more universal meaning.

Last week, I read an article about tightened restrictions on Uyghur travel within China and abroad. I was hit with a pang of guilt. Why haven’t I written about Xinjiang until now?

It’s winter. The henna dye on my fingers has grown out almost completely. What’s left is just a sliver of the original memory, that afternoon in Kashgar, light orange crescents at the tips of my fingernails.

An old earthen wall in Kucha, Xinjiang.

5. I’ve been thinking of a young Uyghur man I met while hiking in northern Xinjiang. An aspiring film director. A funny, intense, and kind young man. Last week, I sent him a message saying: How’s it going, 朋友? Friend.

A few hours later, he responded. It was morning over there, in China, already the next day.

He said,

Justine, I’ve been ok. Spent the past two days in Urumqi, had to take care of some matters. Returning to Shanghai today.

Each time I come back to Xinjiang, I don’t really want to leave. Even though the situation is not so good, when it’s time to leave, I always feel a bit sad.

How about you, sweet girl? You still writing poems?

Yes, friend, I am ok too. Yes, I’m over here, writing poems. And you are over there, missing your home, but unable to stay there.

And Xinjiang might be in my past, but it is your present, and perhaps also your future.  And what could my poems ever mean for you? And what could they ever change?