Dear Mother . . .
If your doctor said you were going to die, what would you
do? For the author, that answer was move to a Muslim province in Chinese
Central Asia.by Michael Riley
1-12-2006
Xinjiang Province, China
Dear Mother,
I want to ask you how
you are but I already know the answer; you are sad. The last six months
have not been easy for any of us. I want to ask what you did today but I
already know; you cried. Then, you probably prayed for a miracle that is
not slated to occur, and cried again. I would ask what Father did today;
he walked for hours, hat pulled low, scuffing his feet in the snow and
thinking.
You need to know what I
did today. It is not what you might expect after the last six months; I
laughed. I lost all fear. I watched my self pity turn into pity for
those who are not with me. I drowned myself in a dutar
—
a local, two stringed mandolin
—
played quickly by a man with dirty hands. I danced with a Uyghur husband
and wife; she twirled her red dress and eight long braids and swung her
head, without moving her torso, from right to left; he wiggled his eye
brows while snapping his fingers and laughing. I smelled the sweet and
salty smell of old mutton, hanging on a hook, covered with flies. Today,
I also decided to not return home. Today, I obtained a year-long visa,
which is far more time then I know I have. Today, I ripped up my return
plane ticket.
I should tell you how I
came to that decision. I was riding across the Taklimakan Desert crushed
between my British friend and a greasy bus window. The sun light lowered
over the rocky ground shimmering through the oily window residue; red
and orange on the horizon, violet and blue as you looked higher into the
sky. Dark mountains in the distance were silhouetted black against the
falling sun, except for the snow on their peaks; the sun dyed the snow
orange.
“Bloody beautiful,” the
Brit said. “Extreme. Extremely beautiful.”
Their beauty is
extreme, and, hidden in the beauty is their extreme lethality. I hiked
to one of the peaks a few days ago. I started on the ridge of the desert
sands, where the Uyghurs and Hui, people groups
—
one of Turkish descent, one of Han Chinese descent
—
who worship Allah, live and thrive. The climb took me on a narrow path
littered with sheep droppings, past rugged brush and sharp drops. A few
thousand feet above the desert live the nomad Kazakhs. They sit outside
their yurts smoking, drinking salty milk tea and watching their children
race horses on the rocky slopes. A thousand feet above the Kazaks live
only the mountain goats and the jagged ridges and the mountain lions and
the thin air and the long drops and the knowledge that you can die. You
cannot forget the certainty of death on a Xinjiang mountain, and
therefore, you cannot escape the deep certainty, and relief, of being
alive.
“Which one did you
climb?” The Brit looked out the window.
“I don’t know. It is
hard to tell. When on the peak, there were many mountains still towering
above me.”
The bus driver dodged a
small pothole, successfully dropping the bus into a larger one. Loosely
strapped luggage bounced on the bus roof drowning out, momentarily, the
Chinese techno-music blaring from a speaker above my head. Diesel fumes
seeped through the dashboard vents spreading an acrid smell through the
bus.
“If we hit another
pothole like the last one I’m gonna wiz in my pants,” the Brit said.
“And I mean it.”
We hit another pothole
and a Uyghur toddler standing in the crowded aisle grabbed my leg in an
attempt to keep his balance. The kid tightened his arms around my leg.
He watched us as we talked, turning from the Brit to me and back to the
Brit. He wore a thick but torn sweater and a filthy cloth hat decorated
with beads.
“Did you wiz?” I asked.
“No.”
The kid laughed at us.
“Did he understand you?” I asked.
Mother, if you could
have seen the kid! His dirt encrusted fingernails felt my soft hands and
jacket, running up and down on the smooth skin and leather. He was
curious, intrigued, about the white men traveling on his Uyghur bus. I
pulled a sugary dumpling bought at the train station out of my pocket
and offered it to him. He grabbed it, bowed his head and smiled. His
mother, as she fought for her balance in the shaking bus, yelped,
reached down and grabbed the dumpling. Sugar grains fell from the
pastry, sprinkling across the boys cap and rolling to the muddy floor.
“You dope!” my Brit
friend said. “That’s not halal.”
“Halal?” I asked.
“Not halal. It is made
in a kitchen that has cooked pork. It is unclean. It’s not proper!”
Nothing is proper in
Xinjiang, Mother, and that is what makes this place so great. Something
proper, by definition, is not harsh. But in Xinjiang’s lack of propriety
I have found the harsh extremes, and from the harsh edges of life I seem
to see so much farther. I do not necessarily see in a more correct
matter, but I certainly see farther. And when I see farther, the bad
cells in my stomach that are eating away at the good and clean cells,
killing them one by one, seem to matter less. I do not think about them.
I do not remember the properly worded reports from the properly
sterilized and white rooms when traveling in an unsterile and colorful
bus.
I watched the boy’s
mother. She gripped a rusting bus handle as the winter wind seeped
through cracked windows and fluttered the handkerchief she wore over her
head. Her browns eyes were moist and large, over a small nose, with thin
lips and a rounded chin. Gold capped teeth contrasted with grey ones as
she rebuked her son for taking the Chinese dumpling. She looked back
down at the floor shaking her head, distressed.
I smiled at her
apologetically and she nodded. A smile flashed across her face, twisting
her lips for a second, and then falling back into a deep frown. Her eyes
narrowed and deepened, teared as harsh Chinese desert dust blew into the
bus and irritated her eyes. She lifted her head, staring at the endless
road ahead of the bus: it bore straight through the desert without end,
cutting through desolation, towards the next oasis city.
The bus came to a stop
and I turned my head left to right, looking for a town. There was
nothing but darkening desert.
“What in the…” I
mumbled.
“Why would that clown
stop here?” the Brit said, referring to the bus driver.
Uyghur men and women
streamed through the aisle, stepped out of the bus and scattered in the
desert. They squatted, lifted their skirts, faced the snow peaked
mountains and went to the bathroom.
“A pit stop? Here? In
the middle of nowhere?” I asked.
“Guessing so,” the Brit
said.
I looked on the right
side of the road; mountains marked the border with Tibet. I looked to
the left side the road; the dune desert moved and scuttled northward,
toward the Tianshan Mountain range and, eventually, Siberia. Ahead was
Yarkaand, behind was Kashgar. I was surrounded by nowhere and it did
seem a good place to go to the bathroom. I joined the Uyghurs in the
desert. They walked like humans, which surprised me. They squatted like
humans, which also surprised me. They are not noble savages; they are
neither noble, nor savages. They are simply, like me, humans who will
one day die, who know they will die and therefore act upon it in anyway
they know how.
We walked out into the
sand. The winter desert was cold and dry and inhospitable. It was easy
to picture the Taklimakan desert in summer
—
baked sand, blinding sun, and scorched bones
—
as inhospitable as in winter. The winter cold froze the deeper sand but
the winter wind kept the upper layers of sand loose. It was extreme. It
was intimidating. Plumes of sand blew from the top of the dunes like
feathered hats. The sand lines wiggled up and down like an ocean wave.
It was beautiful and deadly; the desert’s danger seemed to make it more
beautiful and the beauty seemed to make the desert more dangerous.
We continued ahead. The
bus rambled, shaking over potholes and bumps till the town fires of
Yarkaand cut into the desert night. I grabbed my bag and smiled at the
Uyghur boy still clutching my knee. We arrived, pulled into a night
market. The locals ran to us from their stands carrying armfuls of eggs
boiled in tea, lamb livers and kidneys skewered on kebab sticks and
Uyghur flatbread. I stepped out of the buses stale atmosphere into the
chilled night, breathed deep the smoky and spice-filled air, stretched
my legs and, as I walked to the hotel, cringed at the thought of
breaking my minute-old decision to you.
I know you, being aware
of my state, didn’t want me to visit Xinjiang in the first place. It was
supposed to be a three-week trip to get my mind off of everything else.
But, seeing life’s extremes has been better then medicine. In Xinjiang,
the mountains look taller. The desert sand feels hotter. The salt tastes
saltier and the sugar tastes sweeter. Handshakes are rougher and smiles
are bigger. The edges are sharper in Xinjiang. Death is more obvious,
but so is Life. Here one can feel the entire range of feelings you are
supposed to feel before your account fully runs out; and my account is
running out.
I expect you will not
understand, but I cannot understand falling asleep under any other terms
then my own. I guess it must be yet another one of life’s extremes.
In nothing but love,
Your Son
- - - - -
The doctor's cancer diagnosis
was wrong after all; MICHAEL RILEY was never dying. Today,
healthy, he lives in the province of Xinjiang in western China. |
