assimacopoulos

An unusually warm and clear evening soothed riot-scarred Ürümqi, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the far northwestern province of the People’s Republic of China, a place known to some as East Turkestan.

It was October, and Rihangül and I were to meet an old friend of hers from college and go out on the town. Rihangül, whose name translated as “fragrant flower,” appeared from her room, fresh, sultry, an edge over thirty, and put together in a flamboyant silk blouse and tapered jeans between sleek black boots, storms of hair, and striking Egyptian eyes that stared right into you.

I paced around in her wake, disorderly in my jacket, shaven, travel-worn, caffeine deprived, a few lines traversing my face, some fat peeking over my belt—otherwise able bodied, but completely unfit for middle age. Rihangül was exuberant and decked out for good reason: her first time back in two years. She was home. I was also excited: it was my first time in Ürümqi.

Since arriving weeks earlier, I had learned that going out on the town in Ürümqi could mean almost anything. Rarely was I informed of any plans before getting stuck in the middle of them. Someone would fetch me—usually Rihangül’s precocious nephew, Abdul—from Rihangül’s apartment and whatever happened, happened. I knew my place as a guest. I handed over my trust and prepared for what came.

Already that week I had dined on boiled sheep’s feet drenched in black vinegar, attended a grisly but moving sheep slaughter at an Uyghur abattoir, survived an Uyghur-style dry shave with a straight-edged razor, enjoyed banana ice cream in an Uyghur creamery sutured into a bombed-out alley, and met the most famous face in Xinjiang: the renowned comedian/actor Abdukerim Abliz—funny at first sight and larger than life, a chain-smoker, and fully present with his bountiful moustache and hilarious wagging finger. We met Mr. Abliz at Ciber Coffee, with its charcoal-fired brew, opulent private rooms, and white piano rotating atop a mirrored pedestal. No-internet-access Ciber Coffee had become my favorite local haunt because it was my one and only reliable source of coffee.

Other outings included convening with Rihangül and her family as they wept over a relative’s death around a table piled high with lamb chops in a parkside Uyghur eatery, haggling at the bazaar with Rihangül and her Uyghur sistahs, and, to soothe the lingering effects of jet lag, visiting a gargantuan Han-owned twenty-four-hour spa with Rihangül’s sinewy teenage brother. There I donned diaphanous underwear—a hairnet for the groin—and enjoyed a hot bath in a subterranean pool populated by black fish who nibbled a subliminal fungus from between my toes while I polished off cans of insipid Chinese beer. I had also opted for a massage—more of a manhandling, really—by two Han Chinese masseurs, who attempted to charge me by the limb as they giggled in their own sheer panties at my attempts to negotiate with them.

Rihangül hadn’t seen her friend, Ahmat, in ten years. Ahmat came from Aksu, a smaller city 669 kilometers to the southwest, half the distance to Kashgar. He had attended the famed and exalted,

glorified and celestial Postal Service University in Beijing, graduated at the top of his class, and was now on the rise in the Escher-like

ranks of China Post, the moniker used by the State Post Bureau of the Postal Service of the People’s Republic of China. I didn’t suspect China Post was a front company for a prison. If it was, it certainly had a less sinister ring to it than the Western Xinjiang Brick Manufacturing Corps or the Eastern Xinjiang Raisin Processing Center.

Rihangül and Ahmat anticipated their reunion with hours of frantic texting and calling back and forth, which had us running all over Rihangül’s flat, then running around on the dark road outside the steel gate to her apartment block. The gate had once served as a barrier between a clash of knives and iron pipes during the bloody Han Chinese and Uyghur riots of July 2009. I didn’t know what their relationship had entailed, but Rihangül had his admiration and, it was rather obvious, his wonder. Ahmat was keen to see her because she had gotten out—out of the Chinese Communist Party and its

all-consuming bureaucracy, out of her cultural mold, out of China. She had become a liberated woman of the world.

Her exit had serendipitously become my entrance, and I couldn’t shake off the suspiciously prosaic way we had met a few months previously in a Manhattan bagel shop where, before I had interrupted her, she had been enjoying a bagel and writing backward, right to left, in flowing Arabic script, creating perfect stanzas—a yin to my yang of desperate scrawls that dwindle out toward the bottom in a torrent of black ink.

I wasn’t looking to add more plaits to my knotty life, but she looked interesting, both severe and ethereal, and was engrossed in another interesting activity: whispering forth in an unknown, rhyming language. And as it turned out, she was tangled in her own knotty life: she had lost both her grandmother and a brother in the same year and was still embroiled in an unhappy arranged marriage. She hoped to pick up the pieces in my hometown and move on.

One evening in the West Village, I recalled, we had attended a screening of Charlie Chaplin’s silent classic, Modern Times. In the film there is a scene where Chaplin, having become mechanized, extricates himself from his conveyor belt to take lunch, his arms still twitching with the mindless tics of an assembly-line hex-wrencher. Contorting along the street, he passes a buxom woman in a tight wool dress, hexagonal buttons deviously placed at the areolas. Your transgressive mind fills in the blanks.

The hilarious scene had put us both in a good mood. After the screening, as we wandered the Village, Rihangül lit a piquant Chinese cigarette and reminisced about the night markets, the mountains and rivers, the grand bazaar, the hospitality, and the delicious foods of her hometown, a place I had never heard of: Ürümqi . . .