In Polat’s opinion, immigrants who looked Middle Eastern or Central Asian had it the worst of all the minorities in the District, at least since the attacks of September 11. “It’s gotten harder for Uighurs who are looking for jobs,” he said. “One of my friends is named Mohammad, and he was applying for a position recently. There was a white person taking the application. The white person looked at the form, and then he noticed the name and looked up: ‘Oh—Mohammad.’ He said he’d call, but he never did. This happens a lot.”
I said that it would probably get easier over time, but Polat shook his head.
“Something like this doesn’t just go away,” he said. “I don’t believe that those feelings will just disappear. Actually, they get deeper and deeper over time. Every time that people see the pictures on the television, and every time they hear the words ‘bin Laden’ or ‘Islamic’ on the news, it adds to those feelings.”
He still hadn’t heard anything about his wife’s application for a visa to join him in the United States. The immigration bureaucracy had slowed down, and for months it had been the same—tense late-night phone calls from Chinatown to Xinjiang.
Halfway through lunch, he got up to check the parking meter. After the meal was finished, we sat talking in the sunshine, and I asked if he had any regrets about coming to America.
“There’s a Uighur saying,” he said. “‘A man with regrets is not a real man.’ There’s no use worrying about that. And I believe that every immigrant who comes to America has a difficult time at first. The early years must be difficult for everybody.”
THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT had continued to push for the United States to include Uighur independence groups in the war on terror. In late January, China’s State Council released a report claiming that an organization known as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, or ETIM, had received funding and weapons from Osama bin Laden. According to the Chinese government, the ETIM had been responsible for a number of terrorist acts in Xinjiang during the past few years.
The day after the report appeared, the leader of the ETIM granted a telephone interview to Radio Free Asia. The man’s name was Hasah Mahsum, and he refused to disclose his location; he could have been anywhere in Central Asia. On air, he emphasized that his organization had received no financial assistance from Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda. “We have no organizational relations with the Taliban,” Mahsum said. “We have enough problems to deal with.”
Almost nothing was known about Mahsum, or the ETIM, or many of the other Uighur groups that had been identified by China’s State Council. Over the past decade, attacks in Xinjiang had been sporadic and anonymous; formal organizations didn’t take credit for the violence, which made it difficult to analyze. There were only scattered pieces of information, and often they didn’t make sense. It seemed odd that a supposed Islamic fundamentalist terrorist would choose to make his case on an American-funded station—that was the equivalent of Osama bin Laden sending his tapes to the Voice of America instead of Al Jazeera. The connections didn’t add up: the Chinese claimed that the ETIM was linked to Osama bin Laden; the ETIM made its case on Radio Free Asia; Radio Free Asia was supported by Jesse Helms and other patriotic American conservatives. Something was getting lost in translation.
EVERY TRIP BACK to the United States reminded me that, from my perspective, there would always be a hole in the nation’s history. I saw the new flags, and the increased security at airports, and the barricades that had been erected in cities like New York and Washington, D.C. The language had new phrases: the war on terror, the Axis of Evil, code orange, the Patriot Act. I boarded the plane in the Motherland and disembarked in the Homeland. I had always thought it was a bad sign for nations to use words like that, and living in China had convinced me that it was unhealthy when people became obsessed with days on which terrible things had occurred. But this observation was easily made from a distance. On September 11 of 2001, when history happened in America, I hadn’t been home.
In China, that had always been my perspective as a foreigner. I had arrived in a country that was recovering from trauma, where the people sorted through echoes and memories. The actual events were unknowable but the shadows were alive; artifacts mattered, and so did stories. Coming from the outside, I was often impressed by the arbitrariness: the coincidences and confusions, the events that mattered and the ones that were allowed to disappear. The divide between meaning and chaos often blurred.
My journeys between China and the United States came to feel the same way—a blurring of old boundaries and distinctions. When I first lived in China, I was mostly struck by differences, but over time the similarities became more obvious. Americans and Chinese shared a number of characteristics: they were pragmatic and informal, and they had an easy sense of humor. In both nations, people tended to be optimistic, sometimes to a fault. They worked hard—business success came naturally, and so did materialism. They were deeply patriotic, but it was a patriotism based on faith rather than experience: relatively few people had spent much time abroad, but they still loved their country deeply. When they did leave, they tended to be bad travelers—quick to complain, slow to adjust. Their first question about a foreign country was usually: What do they think of us? Both China and the United States were geographically isolated, and their cultures were so powerful that it was hard for people to imagine other perspectives.
But each nation held together remarkably well. They encompassed a huge range of territory, ethnic groups, and languages, and no strictly military or political force could have achieved this for long. Instead, certain ideas brought people together. When the Han Chinese talked about culture and history, it reminded me of the way Americans talked about democracy and freedom. These were fundamental values, but they also had some quality of faith, because if you actually investigated—if you poked around an archaeological site in Gansu, or an election in Florida—then you saw the element of disorder that lay just beneath the surface. Some of the power of each nation was narrative: they smoothed over the irregularities, creating good stories about themselves.
That was one reason why each country coped so badly with failure. When things went wrong, people were startled by the chaos—the outlandish impact of some boats carrying opium or a few men armed with box cutters. For cultures accustomed to controlling and organizing their world, it was deeply traumatic. And it was probably natural that in extreme crisis, the Americans took steps that undermined democracy and freedom, just as the Chinese had turned against their own history and culture.
Even the worst moments, though, were but a glimpse of how history seemed to a marginal group like the Uighurs. From Polat’s perspective, the world had always been arbitrary and unpredictable, and it always would be. Later that summer, in August, he would telephone me in Beijing and say that his wife had asked for a divorce. She was tired of waiting, and emigration from Central Asia to the United States seemed far less appealing than it had two years before.
Later that same month, the American deputy secretary of state, Richard L. Armitage, would visit Beijing and announce that the United States had named the Uighur group known as the ETIM as an enemy in the war on terror. Many analysts would criticize the decision, believing that it gave the Chinese more license to oppress native groups in Xinjiang. But the United States needed to prepare for the debate on Iraq in the United Nations, where China held a permanent seat on the Security Council. In Beijing, Armitage told reporters, “All in all, I think the counterterrorism cooperation is a pretty good picture for the U.S. and China.”
But that was still in the future on that June afternoon in Washington, D.C. It was a gorgeous day; there wasn’t a cloud in sight. Polat drove the Honda across the Potomac and into Arlington.
WE STOOD FOR a long time at the tomb of John F. Kennedy. The cemetery was crowded, but people grew silent when they saw the eternal flame. There were only whispers and the shuffled sound of footsteps on granite.
After we walked away, Polat’s eyes were bright. “Twenty
years ago, I said that I wanted to visit Kennedy’s tomb, and today I did,” he said proudly. “When I was in Xinjiang, I saw movies about him and read books; I remember reading all those theories about his death. Some people said it was the KGB or the CIA that killed him. But those weren’t the things I cared about. I always felt that Kennedy was a man who believed in freedom. He was a man who shouldn’t have died.”
I asked if he wanted to see anything else at Arlington. He told me that he had always wanted to have his photograph taken next to the tomb of General George S. Patton.
“The Patton movie was translated into Uighur in the early 1990s,” he explained. “It had a big influence on us. There’s one part where Patton talks about how much he hates Communism. He says something about how he wants to destroy every Communist place. That meant a lot to the Uighur intellectuals, because we’d been dealing with it for fifty years. My friends and I used to talk about that part of the movie.”
I found a cemetery employee and asked him for directions to Patton’s tomb. The man stared at us.
“It’s not here,” he said.
“Where is it?”
“Patton is buried in Luxembourg.”
Polat had been following the exchange and now he looked confused. I tried to explain, but I didn’t know how to say Luxembourg in Chinese.
“It’s a small country in Europe,” I said. “It’s near Belgium. Maybe Patton died there—to be honest, I’m not sure.”
Polat shrugged, and we spent the next half hour wandering through the cemetery. The rows of tombstones shone as white as bones in the afternoon sun. We found the Honda in the parking lot and then, as the shadows began to lengthen, we drove back to Chinatown.
ARTIFACT Z
The Sold Words
AS A CHILD, IMRE GALAMBOS LIVED FOR FIVE YEARS IN MOSCOW, WHERE he enjoyed a series of Soviet Westerns. “They were called ‘The Uncatchable Avengers,’” he remembers. “There were three or four of them. They have all the elements of good Western movies: the same cowboys, and they all ride horses. But it’s all about the civil war in Russia, the period from 1918 to 1922. There was shooting, and the good guys always managed to get away. They were kids—teenagers who were sabotaging the White Army’s movement. There was a Gypsy, a girl, an intellectual. They were these archetypes of politically correct people in Russia.”
Galambos was nobody’s archetype: half Hungarian, quarter Kazak, quarter Tatar. He spent most of his childhood in his native Hungary, which was Communist at the time. In college, he went to China to study, and then he attended graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley, where he wrote a Ph.D. dissertation about the development of ancient Chinese writing. He now works at the British Library, curating the Dunhuang manuscripts, a collection of thousand-year-old Buddhist texts that were rediscovered in the west of China during the early 1900s.
For the Chinese, it’s a point of great sensitivity that these documents reside in the British Library. People often describe them as “looted,” but Galambos believes that this word is used too loosely. During the Kuomintang years, when the government was weak and corrupt, officials approved the sale and export of the artifacts to foreigners. Regardless of how one feels about the morality of these acts, they were legal: fully documented exchanges of manuscripts for money. Nowadays, Galambos works in conjunction with the National Library in Beijing, creating a “virtual library” of Dunhuang manuscripts on Web pages. The real artifacts remain in London, but their images can be accessed by a computer anywhere in the world.
Galambos’s interests are not limited to antiquity. He studies texts of all kinds: past and present, formal and informal. He is skilled in computer languages, and he is studying Tangut, a dead language that survives in inscriptions found in the west of China. He is learning Uighur. During his visits to Beijing, he collects restaurant menus, to analyze the ways in which average people write characters. He is particularly interested in departures from the norm—mistakes and miswritings. Sometimes he buys bootleg DVDs and watches the Chinese-made English subtitles, which often create an entirely different narrative from the movie. Galambos once transcribed a Beijing bootleg of Simone, comparing the audio English to the written English:
[audio] “I was the keynote speaker, you must remember my speech: ‘Who Needs Humans?’”
[subtitle] “I was the king of speed, you must my speed means humans.”
[audio] “Simone has the voice of the young Jane Fonda, the body of Sophia Loren, the grace of, well, Grace Kelly, and the face of Audrey Hepburn combined with an angel.”
[subtitle] “Simone has the voice of a young clone flouter, the body of safa-laring, the grace of well grace Kelly, and the face of Artyphapen combined with in angle.”
It’s all connected: menus and bootlegs, history and movies, language and archaeology. Texts create meaning, regardless of how arbitrary the process may seem. “What is reality?” Galambos asks, during one of our conversations in Beijing. “It’s this huge amount of data. There’s this philosopher who had a lot of influence on me, Ernst Cassirer. He wrote this book called Language and Myth. Basically, his idea is that language itself creates reality. For example, in order to have words like nouns, you have to have concepts. When you form concepts, that’s when you’re creating stuff—it’s a creative process. You pick out certain things from the environment, and you give them labels, and you create this reality around you. When you’re a kid, you’re not just learning how to speak; you’re learning how to perceive a reality. It’s almost like a computer language, an internal code that makes you able to think.
“From a linguistic point of view, this is a very old concept, and a lot of people nowadays don’t believe it. But I think it’s probably to some degree true. Perhaps if you don’t have a word for a certain feeling, or a certain color of the sky, then you don’t notice it. It doesn’t stick out from the background. That’s what words do: they make things stick out. Otherwise, it might just be a big haze of data. In a computer language, you’d call it uninterpreted data. So a language is your browser.”
GALAMBOS SPEAKS FIVE languages fluently: Hungarian, English, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. His motivation for new tongues has rarely been academic. He studied Chinese in order to escape the Hungarian army; he learned Japanese when he had a Japanese girlfriend. His English became fluent after he moved to the United States to be with a Chinese wife. Today, those women are gone from his life, but the languages remain.
In his twenties and thirties, Galambos moved around the world, picking up new languages and new skills, and in the meantime the countries of his childhood changed. Russian children no longer watch Soviet Westerns; Hungary isn’t Communist anymore; there is no mandatory military service. In recent years, Galambos began keeping a home in Budapest, where he spends time whenever his job allows him to leave London. In Budapest, he lives with a woman who, twenty years ago, was a high-school classmate. When I ask him why he returned, he says simply, “I haven’t been home for my entire adult life, so I decided to stay home.”
After all the years abroad, he is good at comparing different cultures. He taught both Chinese and American students, and he tells me that Americans don’t have the same relationship to the written word that he noticed among the Chinese. For the Chinese, writing seemed to be the root of their cultural identity, but many of his American students were unfamiliar with their nation’s literary classics. I ask him if anything in American culture might be the rough equivalent of writing in China.
“Maybe it’s movies,” he says. “I think the movies are incredibly important in America. That’s how people acquire information about the world. If you ask an American about a subject—say, Buddha—the answer is always through the movies. They’ll talk about ‘The Little Buddha’ or some movie they saw.”
He continues: “I think the movies create this web that texts traditionally created in China. Within the Chinese texts, there was a view of reality, which was a view of other texts. The scholars who lived in this world,
they saw their culture as a web. They didn’t live in this physical world; they didn’t talk about the physical world. It was all about history and writing. And America is the same way about movies. People in the movies talk about other movies all the time. There’s an enormous reality, like ‘movie space’ or something, in America. By this time, it’s really built up, and it’s a world that exists on its own. A lot of people experience reality through that. It’s true for me when I’m in America. I watch a lot of movies when I’m there, and I feel like reality is American movies. You might say something and then I’ll say, oh, that reminds me of something in a movie. It’s like dreams and realities, all blending together. You have this feeling, this déjà vu feeling about everything.
“The movies are writing. They serve the same purpose; it’s just a different language. In China, they wrote the most in the times when they most needed to redefine themselves. It’s not passivity; it’s creativity. It’s not taking notes. It’s about rethinking the past and creating the present. It’s about justifying the present, creating the ideology. So in America they have these movies that make people feel American. Like Pearl Harbor. It’s similar to writing, to books. But the movies stay in the mind longer, maybe because it’s a more visual language. And it becomes a way that people determine their values. You have these models and patterns that are ready to use. They give you a language, just like books do. They give you a language to parse out your personality, to understand it, or display it, or express it.”
I ORIGINALLY MET Galambos on the Internet. One afternoon, a Google search turned up a Chen Mengjia quote that had been posted at www.logoi. com, and I contacted the editor: Imre Galambos. It turned out that we knew people in common—at Berkeley, he had studied under David N. Keightley, the oracle bone scholar.
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