Reflections: How I ended up in a Chinese Hospital

I spent two weeks in August, 2007 backpacking around Xinjiang, the far western Chinese province that covers the same landmass as Western Europe.  Xinjiang is home to the Uighur people, who are Muslim, speak a Turkic language, have more in common with Central Asians than Han Chinese and happen to make really delicious food.   Although they are persecuted much like the Tibetans, their plight -- including that of several fruit sellers who are still detained at Gitmo as part of the "War on Terrorism" -- receives only a fraction of the attention that the Tibetans do, which is a shame (I've written about this here for those of you who are interested.)

The Market in Turpan

Playing Uighur Music

Although this story takes place in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjaing, it does not concern the Uighurs or their plight.  Much like St. Petersburg, which is said to be the most European of cities (even though it is, arguably, not in Europe), Urumqi is the most Chinese of cities even though it's in the homeland of another people -- nondescript off-white apartment buildings and office towers dominate the city.  With the exception of the incredibly imposing internal security building downtown, the city could be plopped down in Hunan, Hubei or Hebei Province and no one would notice.

On one particularly hot day in Urumqi, I decided to head to a small, hole-in-the-wall dumpling house near the center of the city for lunch.  I order noodle soup and baozi (steamed buns that were stuffed with pork and some veggies).  As my food came, an old, half-drunk Han Chinese man sitting at the table next to me struck up a conversation.  As he peered out from over his soup, he began recounting his struggles during the Great Leap Forward.

Kanas Lake, Near Russian and Kazakh Border

"When I was young, we didn't have any meat to eat.  People would literally take the bone out of my bowl as I tried to eat it.  It was a struggle to survive."  As he was talking, he noticed that two young Chinese nearby were snickering at him.  They seemed to be more interested in the most recent fashion craze -- both had crazy, "you-could-only-see-that-hair-in-China" dos, as well as jeans with all sorts of bling on them -- than learning from their elders.  "You see these kids," he said, "they don't give a damn about the past.  They don't understand what Mao did, nor do they really care.  They are only focused on the making money." Throughout our conversation, I continued to eat the baozi, even though they tasted a little off to me.  Sure enough, by the time night fell, I was violently ill.  Instead of finishing my trip off with a few days in Kashgar, I went to the Urumqi hospital, where I was forced to sit in one of 250 recliners pointed towards a tv showing a ridiculously corny sitcom about how smart Mao was as an IV slowly replaced my fluids.  It was not the way I had envisioned my three month odyssey ending, but so it goes.

Near Kanas Lake

As I sat in that hospital and reflected on my conversation in the dumpling house, I thought about how quickly China was changing -- how it was a society hellbent on developing, carving a new future, and forgetting the recent past (the ancient, 5,000 years or "glorious history" were something that people seemed to hold on to).  I instinctively wanted to compare this to the US, where we confront the dark episodes in our history like slavery, Jim Crowism, Japanese internment during the war, etc. Yet I now realize that drawing this kind of distinction between the two countries was far too simplistic.

Because, in reality, the US is a country with an incredible short attention span that doesn't like to look its problems in the eye.  We brush things under the rug.  We dissemble.  We don't make eye contact with homeless people on the street.

For me, the problem with this is that it undermines our ability to be honest with  ourselves.  The old man in the dumpling house was trying to teach his young countrymen a lesson, and they ignored him -- maybe it's because he was old, or wearing peasant garbs, or because he was half-drunk.  Whatever the reason, they ignored him.  And it's hard to gain a real education, and wisdom, if we ignore the people around us who have something valuable to share.

-Grumpus