In the winter of 2009, I was spending my weekends in the northeast Chinese city of Tangshan, and eating most of my food from the far-western province of Xinjiang. Like many minorities, the Uighur, the native people of Xinjiang, have made their chief impact on mainstream culture through cuisine. I have always favoured their ubiquitous restaurants when travelling.
But there was something unfamiliar about the place I usually ate at in Tangshan; the waiters were young children. Two solemn little girls of about eight, wearing Muslim headscarves, would take my order and relay it to the kitchen, occasionally joined by their plump-cheeked older brother.
Putting the kids out front echoed the Chinese depiction of ethnic minorities, regularly represented—as in the 2008 Olympic opening ceremonies—as children. It created a familiar, comfortable world for the majority Han clientele, especially since the kids, unlike their parents, spoke fluent Mandarin. When the back door opened, I sometimes got a glimpse of another world; a cluster of Uighur men and one woman smoking, cooking, and joking in their own language, entirely isolated from the diners.
After we had gotten on familiar terms—I let them play on my laptop—I asked the girls when they started working as waitresses. “In July,” they said. It wasn’t surprising that the restaurant might have wanted a friendlier face at that point. That was the time that a Uighur mob had tried to murder one of my friends.
I had met “Bruce” Li by chance on the Beijing subway in 2007. I was wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with a Swedish flag, and he greeted me with “God kvell,” then switched to English after my confused “Huh?” A scrawny, smiley Southerner, he had just finished his Master’s degree in linguistics and spoke four foreign languages even though he had never been overseas. We became friends; his careful, sympathetic interest in the world, books, and other cultures was a pleasure. He was leaving Beijing that fall for a Ph.D. at Xinjiang University in the provincial capital of Urumqi.
Language, like so much else, is contentious in Xinjiang, where many Uighur grow up learning, at best, rudimentary Mandarin (Putonghua), China’s official language. For most Chinese citizens, mastery of Mandarin is a priority. Local “dialects” are discouraged in the media and in education, and heavy accents turn many employers off.