The embryo collections came to completion on Wednesday, and now we are
on to Phase II. We returned to Urumqi on Thursday so I could give a
talk at Xinjiang Normal University and we could pick up Talia at the
airport on Friday. Sarah and I decided to take the public bus back to
the city since we weren't carrying much and were feeling adventurous.
That involves taking a local bus for about 50 cents from 222 to Fukang
and then the long distance bus from Fukang to Urumqi for about $2. By
the way, in past years I thought the town near the field station and
the city 20 minutes away were both Fukang. I always called one Fukang
town and the other Fukang city. But this year I finally learned that
the agricultural community here near the field station is "Regiment
222". There is a long back history that I will leave you to explore
and question for yourself.
Upon returning to Urumqi, Sarah and I met up with our friend from one
of the labs here who is delightful. She spent a couple of years in
Reno as a postdoc, so she's familiar with American culture and
personalities. Sarah wanted to introduce me to Pizza Hut in China,
which is a fancy date destination. We did a sampling of the menu and
stayed until close – cackling so much we probably interfered with a
few romantic evenings. It started because I had been waiting on the
bus while Sarah went to the market in 222 to get water and yogurt for
the trip. To entertain myself, I was looking up the word for "wrench"
that I had learned from a student at the field station when I wanted
to take the regulator off our CO2 tank. Chinese is made up of a lot of
compound words, so the word for wrench is ban (to pull) shou
(manually). I have a dictionary on my phone that gives the meaning for
each character and other compound words that use that character, so I
accidentally discovered another compound word using the character shou
that has a sexual meaning. I had shared this discovery with Sarah who
not so innocently brought it up to our friend in the way of "I learned
a new word", and she intentionally pronounced it with the incorrect
tone so that our friend would puzzle it together to figure out what
she was asking. Her face exploded in shock, and she laughed. So that
started a whole conversation about the worst words in English and
Chinese, and I realized that learning a bad word as an adult doesn't
give it the same meaning. She could throw around some of the worst
words in English as though she was saying "table" and "chair", but
when we asked her to tell us bad words in Chinese it was like we were
asking her to stab her own hand. Likewise, we could toss around those
words playfully in Chinese, but there is no visceral meaning. It's as
if you have to have had your mother threatening to wash your mouth out
with soap to really feel the wrongness of a word.
On Friday morning, I was picked up and delivered to Xinjiang Normal
University to give a talk in the biological sciences department on
invitation from my hosts at the arrival banquet. They are all really
friendly and enthusiastic to have me here. After my talk and tour of
the natural history museum (great teaching resources), we walked
across from the campus to a restaurant for another lunch time banquet.
This was more informal than the baijiu fest from the first night, but
again the fish hit the table and bottles of pijiu (beer) were opened.
Speeches all around. The dean of the college of life sciences couldn't
make it to my talk but made an effort to come for lunch even though
she was only able to join for the last half. She said she likes me. I
joked that it's because she knows I can drink well. She's great. We
talked a little about careers as women, and I asked about the numbers
of women who start careers in biology at the masters level compared to
the number of women who achieve full professorship. The Normal
universities are teacher's schools, so there is a slightly higher
percentage at her institution, but it still hovers around 20% even
though greater than 50% start out at the lower levels. I knew what the
answer would be but asked "Why?" anyway. Of course she said, "Because
they want to devote their time to family." I asked if she thought it
would ever be possible in China for men and women to both contribute
equally to caring for the family so that both could have fulfilling
careers if they want, and she said "No" (even though she later said
that she is married and has a son, and her husband is very supportive
which is what allowed her to reach the position of dean). One of the
young men on the faculty who is recently married loudly protested and
started arguing with her that yes, men will take on a more equal role
and support their wives. I didn't understand the rest of the argument
since it was all in Chinese, but a young woman across the table from
me who is a new professor and has a 15 month old son of her own just
stared at me with amazement at what I'd started. I just gave a little
grin and a wink to let her know I knew exactly what had happened and
watched the debate unfold.
Later that evening, Talia arrived from Boston, and I managed to
successfully retrieve her from the airport even though I hadn't
written down any of her flight info, didn't know her airline, and
didn't know what terminal she was flying into. Thank goodness for
small airports. I'm terrible about doing things like this. We kept her
up the first night and planned outings for Saturday to get her over
the jetlag. Sarah knew of a vegan restaurant she wanted us to try
since Talia is vegetarian, and Xinjiang is the Chinese equivalent of
Texas. We had several of the common Chinese dishes, except that
everything that looked and tasted a lot like meat had no animal
components at all. Really interesting. We then met up with my Uygur
friend to go south to where I've lived before, because I wanted to
show Talia all my favorite places and let her and Sarah get to know my
dear friend. We got out of the cab, and it was an immediate sensory
overload. The food vendors were starting to set up their carts in the
area of the night market, so we wound our way through the rows of
tumeric dusted roast chickens, sheep's heads, and mounds of glass
noodles. Talia and Sarah decided to get some sort of frighteningly
fake sweet beverage because it was a shooting fountain of neon orange.
We darted into a Uygur medicine shop where a man read our health
histories in our pulses. I think he was a bit of a quack though – I've
done this before and felt like the guy who saw me was at least paying
attention to my skin tone and the health of my fingernails. This guy
seemed a little cocky, barely looked at me, and his major comment was
that I don't absorb enough nutrition from my food. Not a startling
discovery.
The narrow side streets are bustling with foot traffic, so we inserted
ourselves in the river and wandered about watching as all the locals
did their evening shopping. The tourist markets were all closing, but
they mostly sell a bunch of kitschy things that aren't made in this
area anyway. It's far more fun to roam the streets with the guys
selling t-shirts and shoes shouting "Besh quai, besh quai, besh
quai!!!" which means 5 RMB in Uygur. I made one guy laugh by joining
in his call and smiling to let him know I wasn't making fun of him. We
found ourselves passing a halal butcher right after they had
decapitated a lamb. It hadn't yet been eviscerated, but the pelt lay
in a pile on the ground, the head and feet were no more, and it was
hanging by a wire cable threaded through the Achilles' tendons over a
bucket of fresh blood. Had we only passed by 10 minutes earlier, we
would have gained a new appreciation for where our food comes from.
Wandering these streets again with my friend brought back a flood of
memories from past years, as he and I reminisced shops we'd been to,
funny things we'd seen, dinners we'd had. It was nice to share
memories and tell Sarah and Talia our stories while watching them
write stories of their own. And I keep learning more and more about
Islam and life in this part of the world that hurts my heart and brain
to think about how little we as Americans really know about this great
big world past our borders. After yet another fantastic meal, the
three of us girls left my friend behind since that neighborhood is his
home and hopped back into a taxi to return north to the institute.
Once we got to the hotel, I kept Talia up another hour sharing my
experiences and observations of the ethnic culture clashes of this
region, and right as we were drifting off to sleep at a quarter to 2
am, I got a text message to my Chinese cell phone. It was a professor
at the institute who wanted to be the one to bring us back to the
field station asking what time he should meet us. Seriously. He sent
me a message at 2 am. Sarah had warned me about this. The phone
culture is strange. They can call or text at any time from anywhere,
and it's all okay. So I replied politely, said I was going to sleep,
and turned off my phone.
This morning after some lengthy discussions and slight political
issues, we arranged for him to pick us up since he really wanted to
take us to the Prezwalski's horse breeding center. That was worth the
2 am text message and ensuing drama. And worth braving the dust storm.
Somehow overnight the temperature dropped about 40 degrees, and the
winds came howling in from Russia. If I wasn't Russian before, I am
now on the inside and out. I feel like my eyeballs, my skin, and the
insides of my nose and ears are coated with the dust carried from the
winds of the north. But it was worth almost being lifted off my feet
to see these amazing horses. Apparently before the breeding center
started in 1985, there were only about 2,000 Prezwalski's horses in
the wild. They are a species of wild horse that is native to Xinjiang,
Inner Mongolia, and Mongolia (Inner Mongolia is a province of China.
Mongolia is a country.) The breeding center started with 18 horses and
now has a population of about 400. They have been reintroducing many
of the captive bred horses into the wild, and have managed to have a
real positive impact on the population of this species. They are truly
wild horses. They are smaller than what you think of as a horse and
look more like a donkey or a mule with a short mane and short flat
tail. They still have most of their thick winter coat, and the younger
horses look like they are wearing leg warmers. And they are mean! They
get really grumpy and fight with each other. They have to be kept in
families of one male and about 5-6 breeding females. Even the females
will fight with each other. When one gets irritable, she backs her
rump into another and just keeps pushing and pushing until the other
gets annoyed. Then they separate just enough to get a good kick it.
But it isn't just a kick. It's an ears back, teeth bared, two-footed
bucking kick. Sarah kept making noise to spook and separate them, but
that's just what they do. They're really truly wild horses.
The rest of the drive was fascinating. All along the mountains is
mining country, so there are great big holes in the earth surrounded
by digging equipment. And even though it isn't a major oil field like
what we wandered into up north, there are pumpjacks dotting the
landscape. In addition to that, it's a major industrial zone, so one
after another we passed by some sort of manufacturing/mining/power
station/etc type of location. The air was thickly brown with the dust,
but not just from the dust. All around are mounds of coal piled high,
and the dust from the coal gets picked up in the wind right along with
the barren earth and sand. So it's no wonder when I scratch my face,
the underside of my nails is black. In fact, I have been writing this
while waiting for my hot water heater to warm up. I think that ought
to be done by now, so I'm going to shower my nasty self and get to
bed.
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