Year of the Tiger

I nod and turn to the Uighur. ‘Maybe you’d like some dinner? I brought plenty.’

‘Anything without pork?’ Lao Zhang asks, grabbing chipped bowls from the metal locker he salvaged from the old commune factory.

‘I got mutton, beef, and vegetable.’

‘Thank you,’ Hashim says, bobbing his head. He’s got a lot of gray hair. He starts to reach into his pocket for money.

I wave him off. ‘Please don’t be so polite.’

Lao Zhang dishes out food, and we all sit around the tiny kitchen table. Lao Zhang shovels jiaozi into his mouth in silence. The Uighur stares at his bowl. I try to make small talk.

‘So, Hashim. Do you live in Beijing?’

‘No, not in Beijing,’ he mumbles. ‘Just for a visit.’

‘Oh. Is this your first time here?’

‘Maybe … third time?’ He smiles weakly and falls silent.

I don’t know what to say after that.

‘We’re going to have to eat fast,’ Lao Zhang says. ‘I want to get to the Warehouse early. Okay with you?’

‘Sure,’ I say. I have a few jiaozi and some spicy tofu, and then it’s time to go.

‘Make yourself at home,’ Lao Zhang tells Hashim. ‘Anything you need, call me. TV’s in there if you want to watch.’

‘Oh. Thank you, but …’ Hashim gestures helplessly toward the utility room. ‘I think I’m still very tired.’

He looks tired. His hazel eyes are bloodshot, and the flesh around them is sagging and so dark it looks bruised.

‘Thank you,’ he says to me, bowing his head and backing toward the utility room. ‘Very nice to meet you.’

Chinese is a second language to him. Just like it is to me.

‘So, who’s the Uighur?’ I finally ask Lao Zhang, as we approach the Warehouse.

‘Friend of a friend.’

‘He’s an artist?’

‘Writer or something. Needed a place to stay.’

He’s not telling me everything, I’m pretty sure. His face is tense; we’re walking next to each other, but he feels so separate that we might as well be on different blocks.

A lot of Chinese people don’t trust Uighurs, even though they’re Chinese citizens. As for the Uighurs, a lot of them aren’t crazy about the Chinese.

You’re supposed to say ‘Han,’ not ‘Chinese,’ when you’re talking about the ninety percent of the population that’s, well, Chinese; but hardly anyone does.

The Uighur homeland used to be called East Turkestan. China took it over a couple hundred years ago, and now it’s ‘Xinjiang.’ For the last thirty years or so, the Chinese government’s been encouraging Han people to ‘go west’ and settle there.

The government takes a hard line if the Uighurs try to do anything about it.

Since the riots in Urumqi last year, things have only gotten worse. Gangs of Uighurs burned down shops and buses and went after Han Chinese with hammers and pickaxes. So much for the ‘Harmonious Society.’

This guy Hashim, though, I can’t picture him setting things on fire. He looks like a professor on a bender. A writer or something, like Lao Zhang said. Maybe he’s an activist, some intellectual who got in trouble. It doesn’t take much for a Uighur to get into trouble in China.

‘You should be careful,’ I say.

Lao Zhang grins and squeezes my arm. ‘I know – those Uighurs, they’re all terrorists.’

‘Ha ha.’

The other thing that’s screwed the Uighurs is that they’re Muslims, and you know how that goes in a lot of people’s heads.

The Warehouse is at the east end of Mati Village, close to the jiaozi place. It’s called that because it used to be a warehouse. The building is partitioned into several galleries and one big space, with a café in the corner. The main room has paintings, some sculpture, and, tonight, a band put together by Lao Zhang’s courtyard neighbor. The highlight of the evening is the end of a performance piece where this guy has been sealed up in what looks like a concrete block for forty-eight hours. Tonight’s the night he’s scheduled to break out, and a couple hundred people have gathered to watch.

‘I don’t get it.’

‘Well, you could say it’s about self-imprisonment and breaking free from that,’ Lao Zhang explains. ‘Or breaking free from irrational authority of any kind.’

‘I guess.’

‘Hey, Lao Zhang, nizenmeyang?’ someone asks.

‘Hao, hao. Painting a lot. You?’

Everyone here seems to know Lao Zhang, which isn’t surprising. He’s been in the Beijing art scene since it started, when he was a teenager and hung out at the Old Summer Palace, the first artists’ village in Communist China. After a couple of years, the cops came in and arrested a lot of the artists, and the village got razed. That happened to a lot of the places where Lao Zhang used to hang out. ‘Government doesn’t like it when too many people get together,’ he told me once.

Finally, Lao Zhang gave up on Beijing proper. ‘Tai dade mafan,’ he’d say. Too much hassle. Too expensive. So he led an exodus to Mati Village, a collective farm that had been practically abandoned after the communes broke up. A place where artists who hadn’t made it big could live for cheap.

‘You think they’ll bust you here?’ I asked once.

Lao Zhang shrugged. ‘Who knows? It lasts as long as it lasts.’

I have to wonder. Because even though Mati Village is pretty far away from Beijing proper, far from the villas and townhouses on Beijing’s outer fringes, people still find their way here. Foreigners, art-lovers, journalists.

Me.

And that Prada chick from the jiaozi place tonight. Lucy Wu.

‘Jianli, it’s been a long time.’ Lucy Wu smiles and extends her hand coyly in Lao Zhang’s general direction, having spotted us hanging out by the café, behind the PA speakers where it’s not quite so loud.

‘Luxi,’ Lao Zhang replies. He takes her hand for a moment; it’s dwarfed in his. He stares at her with a look that I can’t quite figure out. ‘You’re well?’

‘Very.’ She takes a step back, like she’s measuring him up. ‘I met your friend Yili earlier this evening. Did she tell you?’

‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I forgot.’