If I Were a Uighur
*** A Story from a Friend ***
CIRCA 2017
I’d been working in China for 5 years, at an international company.
On weekends, when time allowed, with coworkers or alone, I’d regularly make runs to a nearby shopping mall to buy food, mostly imported stuff. The sprawling mall, a Wanda Complex, had a massive, warehouse-like grocery store that featured an impressive array of imported products.
On a sunny Sunday afternoon, I’d gone to that mall, by myself, and purchased a block of cheese and some frozen foods. Being summer, the weather was muggy, hot as a furnace, and I was keen to catch a cab back to my apartment, stash my food in the fridge and freezer, cuddle up beside the a/c, and watch a good movie, read a good book before sleep.
Maneuvering through the store’s chaotic checkout, I fended off the queue jumpers, paid, and gathered my bags. Then I rode the escalator up from the basement level.
Initially, I didn’t notice anything amiss, but as I stepped foot onto the escalator’s landing platform, I stopped mid-stride, gasping in shock when a uniformed, pot-bellied police officer, literally, jumped in front of me, blocking my path. The guy had leaped out of nowhere, like a fat tiger. The fat tiger cop was holding a smartphone, an iPhone, and was pointing the phone only a foot or so from my face. Wordlessly, he wrinkled his nose in disgust, began tapping the phone’s screen, snapping multiple pictures of me.
A chill ran through me when I saw the fat tiger cop was flanked by 5 or 6 other officers. The coppers were all in uniform, and the police formed a defensive circle that ringed around me.
One of the policemen, appearing 30ish or so, stepped forward. He had a gaunt face, a weak chin, and a spring to his step. He spoke nearly perfect English, and his voice had an ugly, sharp edge to it, sounded almost like an ice scraper picking at a car window.
The gaunt face asked my nationality and requested to see my passport. I answered, handed over my passport, using both hands, in polite Chinese fashion. He received my passport with only one hand and fished out a smartphone from his front right-hand pocket, snapped a picture of my passport’s picture page. Then he patiently flipped through the document, snapped a picture of my residence permit. Afterward, he requested that I “wait a couple of minute (sic).” Then he sauntered off, dialing a number on his cellphone before lifting and pressing the device to his ear.
Locked inside the perimeter of policemen, all the coppers stood silent, still as statues. All the coppers were brooding, staring intently at me, and I could feel the heat of their blazing eyes. Knots of passersby began gawking, pointing at me, and I heard a lady say loudly, in a scurrilous tone, “laowai!” (foreigner). A sizable audience had soon formed, of local Chinese, of all ages, and they were all staring and pointing at me, watching me with widening eyes and mortified expressions, murmuring amongst themselves. Suddenly I’d found myself the unwelcome object of everyone’s attention.
Honestly, it was humiliating. I felt like an animal in a zoo. I’d never stirred up trouble or picked any quarrels. I’d always kept to myself, never partook in any sort of prohibited political activity or religious activity. Honestly, too, I’ve always been somewhat apolitical, focused on work, business. It was hard for me, as a middle-aged, middle-management cog in an international conglomerate to imagine I’d ever really be in this situation.
My mind, of course, started racing. As the crowd of gawkers grew, I stood motionless, as if my legs had turned to stone pillars. I noticed too that my frozen food was beginning to thaw, beads of water dripping from the bottom of my plastic shopping bag, like incipient drops of a rainstorm. I wondered what the heck the coppers wanted. If maybe there was an incident in the South China Sea, or an attack on Taiwan. I wondered what China would do with its foreigners if an armed conflict, a hot war broke out in the Taiwan Straits…
I was a bundle of nerves. Then I imagined myself in a Chinese prison. I imagined myself in the film Red Corner. I imagined myself in a tiny, stinky, freakishly hot or bloodcurdlingly cold chamber of hell, with rats and cockroaches crawling over me, and the Chinese cops chaining me to a wall, prodding me with medieval torture devices. I recalled the Nazi dentist from the film Marathon Man, that film’s famous line, “IS IT SAFE?” And I envisioned a CCP torture session being far worse than anything the Nazis could do.
Unable to escape the feeling of impending doom, I reconnoitered, panned my gaze. Then I had a wishful fantasy about using my frozen food as a cudgel, beating one of the Chinese cops, smacking him in the face with a frozen steak and making a run for it.
But alas, even my fantasy felt feckless. I knew that, realistically, the chances of escape were slim to none. Not with the ever-present panopticon of surveillance cameras. Not that I’m Rambo, either, or even Jean-Claude Van Damme. Heck, I’m a slightly overweight office worker who’s not been in a fistfight since middle school.
I could see the cops, security organ personnel, swarming, like hornets, descending upon me, blows raining down on me, batons and fists and kicks, and me with a bloodied face and broken bones… So, yeah, no thanks… I certainly wasn’t making any video game moves… Life isn’t a video game, after all. Life doesn’t come with a reset button…
So I just stood pat. I felt pale as a corpse. I stared, morosely, hanging my head, watching the food in my shopping bag slowly dripping and melting.
A few more harrowing minutes later, the gaunt face returned. His thin, bony face was furrowed but his eyes were alert, though a certain light from his eyes had appeared extinguished, and he spoke with a faint smack of disappointment.
Gaunt Face told me everything is “in order.” That I may leave. Then, again with a single hand, he passed me my passport.
I wasn’t going to ask any questions about what had transpired. I just nodded, smiled politely, collected my passport, turned on my heel and briskly walked away. I was looking forward to getting my food into the fridge before it thawed completely. But most of all, I was damn happy to be out of there. Damn happy not to be hauled off to a Chinese prison.
It wasn’t until a year later that the news surfaced, about the Uighurs being rounded up, across China, and herded into “re-education” and “vocational” centers. Being a person of Mediterranean descent, with a somewhat dark complexion, I’d once or twice been asked, by local Chinese, if I was a “Xinjiang” person, a Uighur.
Then it dawned on me. The Uighurs I used to see around my neighborhood in China, they’d all disappeared, around that time, and those policemen from that muggy afternoon, outside the grocery store, they must have been from Communist China’s version of the Stasi, and they were probably conducting a sweep, detaining Uighurs and transporting them back to Xinjiang, where they’d be placed into “vocational” centers.
Then another horrifying revelation dawned on me.
That is what would have happened to me if I were a Uighur.
