Inside the compound are four houses in a row. Sculptures and art supplies litter the narrow courtyards in between. Lao Zhang shares this place with the sculptor, a novelist who also paints, and a musician/Web designer who’s mixing something now, a trance track from the sound of it, all beats and erhu. Not too loud. That’s good. Some loud noises really get to me.
The front door is locked. Maybe Lao Zhang isn’t home. Maybe he’s already over at the Warehouse for the show. I use my key and go inside. I’ll have a few jiaozi, I figure, leave the rest here, and try the Warehouse.
The house is basically a rectangle. You go in the entrance, turn, and there’s the main room, with whitewashed walls and added skylights, remodeled to give Lao Zhang better light for painting.
The lights are off in the studio, but the computer’s on, booted up to the login screen of this online game Lao Zhang likes to play, The Sword of Ill Repute. A snatch of music plays, repeats.
“Lao Zhang, ni zai ma?” I call out. Are you there? No answer.
To the right is the bedroom, which is mostly taken up by a kang, the traditional brick bed you can heat from underneath. Lao Zhang has a futon on top of his. On the left side of the house there’s a tiny kitchen, a toilet, and a little utility room with a spare futon where Lao Zhang’s friends frequently crash.
Which is where the Uighur is.
“Shit!” I almost drop the takeout on the kitchen floor.
Here’s this guy stumbling out of the spare room, blinking uncertainly, rubbing his eyes, which suddenly go wide with fear.
“Ni hao,” I say uncertainly.
He stands there, one leg twitching, like he could bolt at any moment. He’s in his forties, not Chinese, not Han Chinese anyway; his hair is brown, his eyes a light hazel, his face dark and broad with high cheeks-I’m guessing Uighur.
“Ni hao,” he finally says.
“I’m Yili,” I stutter, “a friend of Lao Zhang’s. Is he…?”
His eyes dart around the room. “Oh, yes, I am also friend of Lao Zhang’s. Hashim.”
“Happy to meet you,” I reply automatically.
I put the food and beer down on the little table by the sink, slowly because I get the feeling this guy startles easily. I can’t decide whether I should make small talk or run.
Since I suck at both of these activities, it’s a real relief to hear the front door bang and Lao Zhang yell from the living room: “It’s me. I’m back.”
“We’re in the kitchen,” I call out.
Lao Zhang is frowning when he comes in. He’s a northerner, part Manchu, big for a Chinese guy, and right now his thick shoulders are tense like he’s expecting a fight. “I thought you were going to phone,” he says to me.
“I was-I tried-My phone ran out of minutes, so I just…” I point at the table. “I brought dinner.”
“Thanks.” He gives me a quick one-armed hug, and then everything’s normal again.
Almost.
“You met Hashim?”
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, ni zenmeyang?” 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.