Oracle Bones (29 page)

TWO NIGHTS BEFORE
Polat left Beijing, we met for dinner in the restaurant next to Hollywood, and I wrote out a personal check for two thousand dollars. The visa consulting company had warned Polat not to bring too much cash, which might arouse suspicion in the Beijing airport. I made the check out to a Uighur émigré who had a bank account in the States. At the restaurant, Polat counted out the dollars and handed them over. It was the first time that one of our exchanges had left me with a pocket full of American currency.

“What do you think that I should wear for the flight?” he asked.

“Well, your invitation says that you’re a businessman,” I said. “So you probably should look like a businessman. I’d wear a suit.”

“What about this suit?” he asked. “Does it make me look like a businessman?”

The suit was dark blue, cheaply tailored, and shiny with use. It made him look exactly like a Uighur money changer.

“Do you have another one?” I said, as tactfully as possible.

“This is my best suit.”

Polat’s wife had flown in from Urumqi to see him off. She was a schoolteacher in her late twenties; our conversation was limited because she didn’t speak much Chinese. It was the first time I had ever seen Polat with a woman, and he was solicitous, taking her hand at dinner. She looked even more nervous than he did.

The last night, I met the couple for dinner once more, along with a group of Polat’s Uighur friends. It was a Friday night; the visa consultants had scheduled his trip for Saturday, because they believed that the immigration checks at American airports were looser on weekends. Polat didn’t drink much, but he chain-smoked throughout the meal. Afterward, he made his way around the table, saying farewell to everybody. When he shook my hand, I said, “The next time we see each other, it will be in America.” But I doubted the words even as I spoke.

HE DIDN’T SLEEP
on the plane. He had packed only one small bag, a
jiade
Samsonite that had cost six dollars in Yabaolu. The bag contained his suit, two shirts, one pair of pants, and a few books. The visa consultants had told him to pack lightly (they also advised him against wearing the suit). He dressed in jeans and a new button-down shirt, another knockoff—Caterpillar brand.

After his plane landed in Los Angeles, he gathered his bag and joined the line for immigration. When he reached the front, he handed over his passport and tried to appear as calm as possible. The official took one look and pulled him aside for questioning.

He led Polat into a small room. There were six officials, including a Chinese-speaking interpreter. When asked about the trip’s purpose, Polat told the story of his trade company and produced the
jiade
letter of invitation. One official left the room to telephone the number on the letterhead.

While Polat waited, another officer escorted a Chinese man into the room. The man had also been a passenger on the flight from Beijing. He was about forty years old, and he did not seem particularly nervous. But the officials appeared upset; they chattered in English to the interpreter, gesturing animatedly. Finally, the interpreter asked the Chinese man what had happened to his passport.

“I tore it up and flushed it down the toilet,” the man said.

“Why did you do that?”

“Because I no longer want to be a citizen of the People’s Republic of China,” the man said calmly. “I am in the United States to apply for political asylum.” He pulled some papers out of his pocket. “This is my testimony.”

The officials left the room in order to discuss the matter. After a while, one of them returned.

“Mr. Polat,” he said, “you can leave now.”

Two Chinese contacts from the visa consulting company were waiting outside the terminal. They said that their colleague had answered the immigration officials’ telephone call. Polat gave them five hundred dollars cash, the final installment of the fee, and they drove him to the Los Angeles Greyhound station. For October, it was unseasonably hot.

At the station, Polat bought a one-way ticket to Oklahoma City. He had a couple of hours to kill, and he spent them in the waiting room, watching people. Having grown up as a member of a minority in the People’s Republic, Polat was naturally attuned to ethnic differences, and this sense had been further sharpened by years of trading. At the Greyhound station, he noticed that some of the people looked a little like Uighurs. He guessed they were probably Hispanic. The bus was not crowded and he found it to be a great improvement over the vehicles that he had known in China.

Polat enjoyed the trip, especially the scenery in New Mexico, but he didn’t like Oklahoma. It was hot and the wind blew very hard. He met Sidik Haji Rouzi, the Uighur correspondent for the Voice of America, and he also spent time in Shawnee, where some Uighurs had settled after receiving scholarships to Oklahoma Baptist University. They hadn’t become Baptists, but some of them worked at a small factory that manufactured credit cards. To Polat, life in Oklahoma seemed bleak; he sensed something unhealthy about the ethnic situation. Months later, he would explain bluntly: “There were lots of Indians
in Shawnee. The government gives them houses. They drink every day and they don’t work.”

After ten days in Oklahoma, Polat bought another one-way Greyhound ticket. The bus took him east through Arkansas. There were more trees in Tennessee than he’d ever seen. Back in Beijing, my cell phone rang early one morning.

“I’m in Washington,” Polat said. He told me that he was staying with some other Uighurs in the nation’s capital, and he expected to start English classes the next week. I asked if everything had gone smoothly.

“No big problems,” he said. “There are some things I still have to take care of, but I don’t want to talk about them on the telephone.
Mingbai le ma
?”

“I understand,” I said. He promised to call back in a couple of weeks, and I told him I’d visit in January. Before hanging up, he asked me to say hello to his Uighur friends in Yabaolu.

9

The Courtyard

October 26, 20008:20
A.M.

AFTER A YEAR IN BEIJING, I FINALLY MOVED OUT OF MY OLD APARTMENT
. Never in my life had a place been so acutely defined by everything that hadn’t happened there. I had never cooked a meal in my kitchen, and I had never spent an evening watching television. I hadn’t invited any of my Beijing friends to visit me at home. I hadn’t purchased any furniture, or hung anything nice on the walls. I never received any mail there—in fact, I didn’t even know the proper address. I spent most of my evenings out, and I often took long trips into the provinces, equipped with a tent and sleeping bag. It wasn’t unusual for me to be gone for two weeks at a stretch. That was the freelancer’s life—wandering and writing.

I always returned to a changed city. Once, I came back from a reporting trip and went to my favorite noodle restaurant in a neighborhood near my home, only to discover that the whole area had been cleared away to make room for a new apartment complex. Beijing homecomings were jarring: a month-long journey could make me feel like Rip Van Winkle. New districts were constantly springing up throughout the capital, replacing old sections that were demolished one by one. In the past, central Beijing had been characterized by neighborhoods known as
hutong
. The word originally came from a Mongolian term for “water well,” and it had come to describe alleyways flanked by courtyard homes. By the end of the 1990s, the
hutong
were fast disappearing, but there
wasn’t a word for what replaced them. The pace of development was so intense that speed was always the first priority, and most new buildings were completely undistinguished: quickly designed, cheaply built, badly finished. They looked temporary, like awkward new neighbors who don’t fit in and probably won’t stay for long.

In a floating city, I led a floating life. I lived in an apartment where nothing had happened, in a city that was best defined by what no longer existed. Finally, after a year of being unmoored, I decided to search for a home with some stability. Beijing had recently passed a law protecting twenty-five
hutong
districts, and I found an apartment in one of these sections: Ju’er Hutong. It wasn’t a legal address for foreign journalists, but I figured that I could dodge the cops whenever an anniversary rolled around. I was willing to do almost anything to live in a part of old Beijing that wouldn’t be demolished.

Ju’er was located along the line of parks and
hutong
that stretched northward from the Forbidden City all the way to the site of the former Beijing city wall. The neighborhood was quiet—the streets were too small for buses, and big construction projects weren’t allowed. Nothing was taller than a few stories, and many buildings were single-level structures known as
siheyuan
, or “courtyards.” Unlike the high-rise sections of the city, there weren’t many echoes in Ju’er, whose sounds were few and distinct: wind rustling in the scholartrees, rain slipping across tile roofs. In the mornings, vendors on bicycle carts rode through the alleyways, calling out the names of their products. Beer, vinegar, soy sauce. Rice, rice, rice. Freelance recyclers wheeled through the
hutong
, looking to purchase Styrofoam or cardboard or old appliances. Once I heard a man calling out, “Long hair! Long hair! Long hair!” He had come to Beijing from Henan province, where he worked for a factory that exported wigs and hair extensions, mostly to be sold to African-Americans. In the
hutong
, the hair dealer paid as much as fifteen dollars for a good ponytail. One woman came out of her home with twin black braids wrapped in a silk handkerchief—her daughter’s clippings, saved from the last haircut.

Some residents kept makeshift pigeon coops on their roofs, and they tied whistles to the birds, so that the flock sounded when it passed overhead. In the old parts of Beijing, that low-pitched hum, rising and falling as the birds soared across the sky, was the mark of a beautiful clear day. In late afternoons, the trash man pushed his cart through the
hutong
, blowing a whistle. The sound faded as he made his way out of the neighborhood; usually he was gone just before sunset. Nights were silent. That was my oasis—a desk beneath a window in Ju’er Hutong.

But peace was fleeting in a city like Beijing. Shortly after I moved to Ju’er,
a neighbor told me that there was something I should look into. A few blocks away, beyond the border of the protected district, an old man was fighting to keep his courtyard home from being destroyed. The courtyard was possibly four hundred years old; the man was eighty-two. He had filed two lawsuits against the government. The neighbor warned me that these things often moved quickly, and he was right. It took exactly seventy-eight days.

August 9, 2000

The man was old, but he wasn’t frail. He was taller than most young Chinese, and he carried himself like the soldier he once had been, more than half a century ago. At the age of eighty-two, he still played tennis at least twice a week. His eyes were tortoise-like: dark and hooded. But they sparked every time he talked about the doomed neighborhood.

“The
hutong
and courtyard homes are something that other countries don’t have,” he said. “This house is older than the United States of America!”

He often spoke in English. His name was Zhao Jingxin, and people called him Zhao Lao, a term of respect that means “Old Mr. Zhao.” He belonged to a generation of the Beijing elite that was disappearing as fast as the
hutong
: the Mandarins of the Kuomintang period, who had grown up in a world both Chinese and Western. Old Mr. Zhao’s father had been a Chinese Baptist theologian with an honorary doctorate from the Princeton Theological Seminary, and he had educated all four of his children in English as well as Chinese. Old Mr. Zhao, like his siblings, had spent time in the United States. During the Second World War, he worked for the U.S. Army in Honolulu, teaching Chinese to American troops who were preparing for an invasion of Japanese-occupied China.

The invasion never happened, and once that war ended, another one picked up—the struggle between the Communists and the Kuomintang. By the late-1940s, it was clear that Mao’s troops would take the nation, and the young foreign-educated Chinese faced a crucial decision. Two of the Zhao brothers stayed in the United States, but Old Mr. Zhao and his sister returned to China. They eventually became English teachers at Beijing universities.

“My father wanted us to come back,” Old Mr. Zhao explained. “He said that China was our home.”

I interviewed him with Ian, who had also heard about the lawsuit. Old Mr. Zhao received us in his living room, where the windows faced south, toward the brick-lined courtyard that baked in the August sun. He shared
the home with his wife, Huang Zhe. They had been married in 1953—forty-seven years together in this patch of old Beijing.

Their home occupied less than a quarter of an acre. It consisted of two small courtyards surrounded by single-story buildings, their roofs topped with interlocking gray tiles. Red pillars of wood flanked the entrance to the main building. Certain details had been modernized: the windows were glass instead of the customary paper, and Old Mr. Zhao had installed plumbing. But the home’s layout still followed the simple lines of tradition. The main compound was arranged on a north-south axis, with four separate buildings standing around a central courtyard. This outdoor space functioned in different ways, according to the season: in winter, when residents had to move from one building to the next, they crossed the courtyard quickly; in warm weather, they shifted some of their daily routines outside, enjoying the square patch of sky.

The outdoors connected the four buildings, but it also divided them. In traditional Beijing homes, that space sometimes defined the way that an extended family occupied a single compound. Old Mr. Zhao told us that, in the past, his father had lived in the western building, while Old Mr. Zhao’s sister had occupied the one to the east. She had gone by the English name of Lucy Chao; her Ph.D. had been from the University of Chicago, where she had written a dissertation on Henry James. In China, she was a prominent translator. In that eastern wing of the courtyard, the woman had spent a decade translating the first complete Chinese version of Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass
. The book had been published in 1991, and Lucy Chao had died seven years later.