Apropos my last piece, my laowai boss in Beijing was another of those people who would hook people up with drugs and get them laid. The single producer I cited previously wasn't the only fellow I knew like that, far from it, it's just that he was just the best at it. Meanwhile in Beijing, whilst I was happy to know someone who could score hash (indeed that first year in Beijing was such a tough gig that had I not been able to get stoned every evening, I'd have run melancholy mad. Or perhaps I did anyway, who can tell?), but that aside, being endlessly dragged off to hooker bars, like the infamous Maggie's (above), was unspeakably tedious - another reason to go home and get stoned.
But whatever! I've been back to China many, many times, mostly to Shanghai, and slowly grew to love it. The ticket is to avoid the expats. But there I was years later, back in Beijing, amongst the expats, and being dragged back to fucking Maggie's. And there, curiously, sitting amongst the tiresome local hostesses and the hard-bitten Mongolian hookers (don't ask me why but all the hookers in Beijing were Mongolian), was a gorgeous round-eye girl. No one was paying her any attention apart from yours truly - "Hello," says I, and we have a conversation. She was a Uighur from Xinjiang. I'd met Uighurs before, mostly selling shish kebab on the street (and to which I am addicted), but also socially, and I'd always gotten on with them dandy.
As I did with this girl. Turns out she was a lawyer, better educated than I was, brilliantly fluent in several languages, and here working as a prostitute. Go figure. I don't know about other people, but I'm not the sort of fellow who would automatically condemn someone for being a prostitute. It's a fucked up world and people end up doing all sorts of disagreeable things in spite of the fact that they wish it were otherwise.
And that was the case with her. In a perfectly clear-eyed fashion she explained to me that the only way she was going to get out of this fucked up country was through hard currency and she could only earn that by hooking. She didn't like it, but in one more year she'd have the $30,000 dollars she needed to get into an Australian university. And yep, I contributed to the cause. Think poorly of me if you like, I really don't care.
Anyway for that single evening, I spent hours spellbound as she told me all about herself and what life was like in Xinjiang. Her law degree, it seemed, was merely a licence to participate in corruption, and that from a position of second class citizen. It was just as bad in Beijing where Uighurs (at least the ones who weren't playing 'mein host' in the numerous Uighur restaurants) were treated like absolute shit. Not that I needed her to tell me about that. I could see it in the laneway out back of where I worked. Neither Beijingers nor Uighurs are shy and disputes and fights are public affairs.
The weirdest part was, she had no time for her own people either - a tuppence for the lot of them. Perhaps her problem was that she was too damn smart? I have no idea. And thinking about it, such sentiments don't augur well. It's my opinion that a person who cannot find happiness at home, probably won't find it anywhere else either. But you never know.
Sure enough, I was only in Beijing for a short-time gig and was on a plane back to Oz a couple of days later and I never saw her again. But had this taken place when I lived there, who knows what might have happened? She was easily the smartest, funniest, and most interesting chick I met the whole time I was in China. And gorgeous with it. In some daydream we might have gotten married and lived happily ever after. Or the whole thing might have crashed and burned. Who knows? Not me.
Anyway, from this brilliant position of having once met a hooker in a bar in Beijing I shall now render my genius and very worthy opinion on the bloody events now taking place in Xinjiang.
Whose side am I on? Whose side was the hooker on? Are there good guys and bad guys? For mine, the answer to this question is 'No'. I'll happily admit that the Han Chinese are as racist as the best of them. Just like they do with the Tibetans, the Chinese view the un-Asian, round-eye Uighurs of Xinjiang with a variety of contempt. Historical assertions aside, the Chinese are nothing more than occupiers. And never was there an occupier who didn't think that the occupied were scum. Always this way.
Have people here been keeping up over at Aangirfan's blog? The schoolgirls there have been doing a brilliant job pointing out the links between the various Uighur separatist leaders and the usual suspects who have the art of destabilisation down pat. The long and short according to nobody - all those 'leaders' who fancy themselves as Uighur versions of Ahmed Chalabi and who are taking the CIA (and their proxies) dollar are at best fooling themselves and at worst motherfuckers happy to profit from their countrymen's misery.
Whether these Uighur 'leaders' seriously believe the CIA's siren song of Uighur independence, or whether they're merely in it for the immediate prospect of filthy lucre, Chalabi-style, either way it will only end in tears. I wonder what odds Ladbrokes are offering as to the possibility of a happy outcome resulting from running amuck and splitting open the heads of the Han Chinese living in Urumqi? Let's just call it 'the bookie's delight'.
But whatever! Let's imagine the million-to-one longshot comes off, and that it all goes swimmingly with the people of Xinjiang ditching their Chinese masters, as well as their Chinese appellation, and calling themselves Uighurstan, or somesuch. Then they could all live happily ever after just like all the other Muslims in all those other Utopian something-stans. Three cheers! Perhaps they'll get their very own Karimov, he of the boiling-people-alive gag. They might even be as lucky as the Afghans where the banker's US military golem has righteously brought them the gifts of democracy, smack, and high-explosive death from above. Speaking of which, do the Uighur people get married and hold wedding parties? Let's hope not.
Sure enough, if you try combining the two sayings 'The enemy of my enemy is my friend' and 'With friends like these, who needs enemies?' you end up disappearing up your own arse. Substituting hyperbole for precise accuracy, in considering the rightness of doing a deal with the CIA and other banking minions, one would be best served by viewing them as 'People Who Eat Their Own Children'. Honestly, you may as well since it's as close to the mark as any other description.
Anyway, back to the polyglot Uighur girl in the bar: imagine if my daydream came true? And since it's my daydream, there's no point being half-arsed about it. Thus we'll take the happily-ever-after as read, and add an image of her as dedicated English-to-Uighur translator of Brice Taylor's Thanks For The Memories. Then we could send it to every Uighur who has an email, with the header - 'This is the truth of the people who declare themselves your friends'.
Whilst for the Uighurs the choice between the Chinese and the 'Americans' might appear to be a no-brainer, it ain't. Or to put it another way, it is. Which is to say, the punchline to 'Better the devil you know' says as much about no-brain as it does about devils. Can you dig it? Can the Uighurs? Let's hope so.
