Wednesday, February 6, 2003

From: Meg Thomsen meginchina@yahoo.com
Subject: The Kashgar Express

Dear Friends and Family,

Kashgar. It's practically hanging off the edge of the battered map of China affixed to my wall, perched at the place where Kyrgyzstan and Pakistan meet the Chinese border at the end of the Taklimakan Desert. Pretty much every volunteer has dreamt about going to that fabled city at some point. Its very name brings up images of Marco Polo leading a dusty caravan down the Silk Road, of the Russian and British empires vying for power, of camels and oases. It practically rolls around on the tongue- KASHHHHHHHHHHHHGAR.

Kashgar is in the far west of Xinjiang Province, and it's so far away that most of my students didn't know where it was. "Are you sure that you want to go there, Tang Mali?" they asked. "Maybe it is not a very good place, especially in the winter. You should go to Hainan Island, or down to Yunnan." Nope, it had to be Kashgar.

School's out for the Chinese New Year, and one cold afternoon, my telephone rang. It was Dustin and Joanne. "Since we can't go to Beijing for the winter break, what about going to Kashgar?" It was an irresistible plan. I hopped on the train in Harbin, in the far northeast. No sleeper tickets, no seat tickets left, so I threw my rucksack in the aisle and sat down for the sixty-nine hour ride to Urumqi. The train got more and more crowded as we headed west from the big cities and out toward the countryside. I was surrounded by boxes of fruit, satchels tied together with string as more and more people crowded on the train.

The westbound train was filled with a raucous crowd, with every available space on the train filled with university students, raisin vendors and prostitutes, all headed back to the countryside for Chinese New Year. Seated in the aisle next to me was Ah Liya, a chain-smoking Uighur lady with a lot of eye liner and a hot temper. She said that she owned a Muslim noodle restaurant in Changchun, but I'm pretty sure that she was a hooker.

Uighur folks tend to stick together, and pretty soon, there were more than ten of us packed into our little space in the aisle of the train. There were Mohammed and Izizi Ahun, two raisin sellers on their way home. There was a guy playing the guitar, a family, a college student, a beautiful woman with reddish hair and handsome Ahmet, who looked as though he should be a Calvin Klein model but instead sold raisins on the streets of Beijing.

"Raisins, walnuts, have some Xinjiang snacks!" they cried out in broken Mandarin as they showered me with delicacies from the desert. They took me to the restaurant car and gave me bottles of local beer until my head was spinning. Izizi Ahun carefully wrote down some words on a piece of paper. "Now read this," he said. I did. "Now, you are a Muslim like us. Allah is great!" he said. "Allah is great," the other Uighurs nodded.

A young Chinese guy came running towards me shouting, "Hey, there is another foreigner on the train!" "Where?" I asked. "In soft sleeper," he said.

I walked out of the chaos of hard seat into the hushed comfort of the soft sleeper compartments. Bob was not hard to spot, his white hair rising like a cock's crow. He was a lawyer, from Newton, Massachusetts. Small world! Bob had a hearty laugh, and I spent a good afternoon sitting in the quiet hallway talking with him about what else? China, of course.

Walking back into the bowels of hard seat, I found Ah Liya sprawled on the floor. "Ay-ah, I've drank too much," she complained. "I've got a headache." She then sprawled into the waiting arms of Ahmet, her eyeliner smeared a bit, her lipstick smudged. Meanwhile, Izizi Ahun as busily determining which direction of the train faced Mecca, and was inciting all of the dutiful Muslims to pray. Many were asleep on the floor, but Izizi Ahun was doing his best to wake them, praying in a loud, booming voice. I excused myself and found a different empty place, this time behind a door next to the garbage bin. I ignored the stench, made myself some instant noodles for dinner, and settled down with a copy of "The Brothers Karamazov," filched from the Foreign Affairs Office of my school.

After days and hours of madness, my train finally pulled into Urumqi, the last city before the real desert begins. Two other volunteers, Dustin and Joanne, met me at the station, and we quickly traipsed off to a Uighur fast food restaurant where we ate large quantities of noodles and plotted our next step. Kashgar. It was going to be Kashgar, for better or for worse, leaving on the next afternoon train.

Another twenty-five hours on the train, but this time I had a berth. On the way to the train, we saw the familiar white hair- it was Bob! I ran to his cabin, where he saw me and let out his low hearty laugh. He came to our cabin, from where we watched hours and hours of desert pass by. No people, no animals, no plants for nearly the entire train ride. Just sand with a light crust of snow, and air that's so cold and crisp and beautiful outside. We watched it all fly by while drinking cheap Russian vodka, Tang and boiled water from the train's samovar- a concoction that Dustin aptly named the Cosmonaut. We breathed in the steam and talked about the stars, the open space and just about anything else that came into our heads. And in that way we arrived in Kashgar, ancient city of the West, where the buildings are made of mud and sticks.

Jim Smith, maintenance man at Lehigh University and poet, once told me something very wise. It was,

"When you travel,
You know you're alive
For it's better to travel
Than it is to arrive."

Truer words never spoken. Have a happy Chinese New Year, everyone!

Love, Meg