Friends of the Uyghurs

This is an article I wrote for my Alumni Newsletter (Waterford) about a year after returning home from China.

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The marketplace was a living collage of sights, sounds and colors. There were bright costumes and silk scarves hung across cords that stretched the width of the market. Toothless men sung in foreign tongues to the music of dutars.  Treasures collected dust in the open air. And then there was the overwhelming scent of spices that inspired wars.

The Uyghur (pronounced wee-gr) market was everything one imagines when thinking of the infamous Silk Road.  It was the largest market in Urumqi, the capital of the XinJiang province in Western China. Marco Polo purportedly visited this city in the heart of Asia—the farthest city in the world from any ocean. While Urumqi stands like a mirage in the Gobi desert, the mountains that shadow over it, Tian Shir, (the heavenly mountains) create a contrast in landscape paralleled only by our own Utah.

The history of XinJiang depends on with whom you are speaking. The land consists mainly of two ethnicities—the native Uyghurs, and the ever increasing migrants of Han Chinese. According to the Uyghurs, the province was an independent nation until approximately 60 years ago. According to the Han, it has been part of China for over a millennium. The debate to whom XinJiang belongs is a political web I cannot attempt to untangle here.

Wyatt (my husband) and I spent 6 months living in Urumqi in the spring of 2002. While there we were fortunate to associate and become friends with both Han and Uyghur alike. I want to talk about the Uyghurs here only because I have found that very few people in the U.S. are even aware of their existence.

I first met Raxida and Akrem Yahaksimisas when I spotted a treasure buried beneath a pile of furs in their small stall in the market: traditional, hand-carved Uyghur dowry chests. They were too big to take home, but too beautiful to leave behind. Negotiations were long, weeks went by, and each time we went to the market we would stop by to barter a little more. One evening my husband and I split up for our own adventures, and when he returned that night, surprising me with the chests, he told me of how he had visited to barter once more. When they settled on a price, and the transaction was complete, he was invited to eat dinner (a chicken of his choosing from their small flock outside the apartment building) with the family. Now they wanted us both to visit their home again.

Visits with the Yahaksimisas became a weekly thing, and then twice weekly, and then almost every day. Often we would eat, either at their home or at traditional Uyghur restaurants in the area. Sometimes we would go to the Mosque (Uyghurs are Muslims, and since I studied Islam extensively in college, and Wyatt lived in the Middle East, we were able to respect and understand their religious culture to an extent that I think they found exciting). Sometimes we would just sit in their shop and shoot the breeze. We spoke no Uyghur, and they spoke no English. We both spoke very little Mandarin but between that and some fine-tuned skills at charades, our communication was adequate for daylong visits.

At some point we began to know others in the market as well. There was Ibram, who ran the dutar shop. He spoke some English, and talked to us about how he had been taught since childhood to make the traditional Uyghur musical instrument, hand carving the decorative birds and dragons at the end, and painting each one by hand. He made them during the winter in his hometown of Kashgar, and then returned to the market each spring to sell them through the fall.

Almost everyone in the market was from a town other than Urumqi. Most came from farmer families, who would send one person to run a shop in the market.  The market meant money to a people who survived mainly on subsistence farming.

Finally it came time to return home to the states. On our last day in the market Akrem wanted to give us something.  We understood his pantomimes but pretended not to, wanting to avoid the situation. Not to be deterred, he pulled Ibram from his shop to translate. “You must walk from shop to shop and choose something, and then we will give it to you.” Everyone in the market followed behind as we went through each shop. We chose a dutar from Ibram with a small bird carved at the top. They determined it wasn’t enough, and also gave us a beautiful silk rug. Then Raxida handed us each a Uyghur hat. “You must promise to wear these on the train to Beijing,” Ibram translated. “Then everyone will know you are friends of the Uyghurs.” I saw in Raxida’s eyes what it meant.

Just one week after we left Urumqi, the government closed the market. They opened a new “Uyghur Market” inside a building, with shop rent almost three times what it was before. Most people couldn’t afford the new cost, and planned to return to their native towns to participate in the markets there.

When I think back on the market as I knew it, the sights and smells overcome me, and I remember my friends, the Uyghurs. I want the world to know of them, and that I am their friend.