Things have been…eventful lately. I've been fully immersed in Ughyur culture for both the good and the bad. First the good. A couple of days ago, one of my friends invited me to her Ughyur dance class. That was fun. We went across campus and up a hill to the arts school where she takes a beginning dance class. The campus is fabulous – like any arts school anywhere, you see students sitting outside jamming, but the difference between here and home is that they're playing traditional instruments from this region. First we saw a group of men with one playing the dutar and the others singing in chorus. The dutar is a two-stringed instrument with a fat gourd-like body and a very long and delicate thin neck. The sound is very evocative of its middle eastern roots. And I think the young men enjoyed the audience. The dance class was fun to watch, since I had been to the big dinner theater here where it was brightly lit with fabulous costumes but a little overly produced. The authentic experience is in watching ordinary people learn and perform because, as I have been told "every Ughyur person knows how to play dance." Dancing and music are integral to the culture, and it's a deep heritage far different from the concept of "dance" in the US. After the dance class, we came upon another group of men playing a traditional hand drum. It's round and flat, much like a tambourine except that it's stretched with sheep skin that has metal rings hanging from the edge. It is played by both shaking and thumping the hands against the sheep skin and has a deep drum-like and metallic rattling sound at the same time. Very cool.
Then today I arranged to meet another friend in the morning to visit her English class. She is an assistant instructor at one of the language centers in town, and when her students learned that she had a new foreign friend, they all wanted to meet me. So we walked toward the center of town into a highrise building, up four flights of stairs into a winding suite of classrooms. They teach English, Chinese, Ughyur, and Russian, and apparently most of their students are Ughyur with a few foreigners from time to time. But not many. Only one of the students had ever spoken with a foreigner, and word spread like wildfire through the school that I was there. Before I knew it I was perched on a stool on a stage with a microphone in my hand. The questions started simply. "What is your name? How old are you? Why are you here? How long have you been here? Do you like Xinjiang? What do you like about Xinjiang? What is your favorite Ughyur food?" And then they got a little more complex as students warmed up and felt more bold. The first challenging question was "Do you believe in God?" Imagine answering that to an audience of about 80 Muslims. I gave a delicate and truthful answer about being raised Christian and yet believing that all religions are cultural interpretations of the same "God". That seemed to go over okay. Their language skills are just about good enough to understand me, but not good enough to carry on a discussion about the topic. Then I got "Is Michael Jackson Muslim?" That was a stumper. Good question. Uh, yes? No? How do you explain that the Michael Jackson version of "Nation of Islam" doesn't really have much to do with the centuries-old Muslim faith.
But the real winner was "Why does America hate Afghanistan?" At first I didn't fully understand his accent well enough to get the question, and my friend started to try to explain it. One of the teachers had a pained look on his face and said "No, no, don't. Don't tell her." I had caught enough to understand the question and said "No, I want to hear what he asked and would like to talk about this." I assured everyone that it was okay, smiled at the very embarrassed student, asked for the question to be repeated, and gave a long but simply worded answer trying to explain a little bit about America. I started by saying that no, Americans don't hate Afghanistan. In fact, the average American can't even find Afghanistan on a map (laughter from the class). I explained that decisions were made by my government that a lot of people in the United States don't agree with. I talked a little bit about the election process and how we all get a chance to vote and change our government and that enough people were unhappy with American policy to vote for someone who will hopefully do things differently. I tried to explain that, contrary to China, the American government can change dramatically in a short amount of time, and that I hope this is one way that we are changing - by having a better relationship with Muslim countries. But at the same time, I explained the concept of "you break it, you buy it" and told them that we have contributed to an unstable situation and now have to stick around until we can make things right and give the countries (both Iraq and Afghanistan) back to their people. He seemed okay with my answer, but I'm not entirely sure how much he understood. He's a beginning English student. Some of the more advanced students clearly understood and were smiling and nodding at points, so I hope that they can at least discuss it with him. In any case, I felt bad because he left soon after that. I'm not sure if he didn't like my answer or if he was embarrassed because the teachers tried to stop him from asking the question. He lost a lot of face in feeling like he had crossed a line, and I feel bad for that even though it was out of my control.
Most importantly, it's one little step in the big goal of "winning hearts and minds". And it's critical if we're going to make progress. People in this part of the world have a narrow view of the Western world – particularly America. They believe what they're told and see in movies and on the news, and most have never seen evidence to the contrary. I hope that through my being open and communicative, I can convince one by one that we're not evil and hateful people bent on a Crusade against the Muslim world. A lot of misconceptions here (and in the US) are due to lack of dialogue and lack of education. At least this experience ranked second in nerve rattling to the guy in Kashgar last year who told me he hates Americans and wants to move to Afghanistan to marry a Taliban woman and raise sons to kill American soldiers. That was an eye-opener as to just how much damage has been done to our reputation and how far we have to go to win back even basic respect.
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