Recently my hometown Urumqi was in the news for all the wrong reasons.

What was initially a protest by the local Uighur community turned into a riot. I didn’t want to get into the details of this incident as I myself was not there and therefore the best I could say about it was how sad this made me feel.

Instead I wanted to tell you my experience growing up in Urumqi, XinJiang. My parents were part of the Chinese government’s initiative at the time to encourage Han Chinese to migrate to XinJiang in the 50′s and 60′s. It was interesting that I saw XinJiang being described as a ‘desolate and arid’ place, because when my parents arrived in XinJiang in their 20′s it was a lot emptier then.

I spent 14 years in Urumqi, and went to primary school and 3 years of high school in this beautiful city. Urumqi the name translates into ‘a beautiful prairie’. It’s laced with the snow-capped TianShan mountain in the backdrop, which you could see in the distance regardless of where you are in the city. Surrounding it were clusters of pine forrests and pristine rivers and lakes that formed from the melting snow.

I remember many fond memories of going on summer camps to escape the heat with my school friends. We would load up on the water-melons and leave them inside fishnet bags and cool in the clear water that runs down from the mountain. This is what I really want to tell you about. My high school class was filled with students from many ethnic groups. One of my best friends is A’setti, he is a Khazak. The photo below was taken when we were in year 8 on a school excursion during the summer. He is the one on the left of the photo. I joked with him that I should call him ‘Lenin’, because I thought the shape of his forehead bore a remarkable resemblance to the leader of the Soviet Russia. We spent a lot of times together, playing soccer, at the local bazaars, in school studying and going on camping trips. All this time, I always knew that A’setti’s background was different to mine. I met his parents, both were school teachers working at the local Khazak high school teaching in their own language.

A'sseti, Zhang Din and me on Summer camp

A recent photo of my friend A'sseti in 1994

There were many others, Ton’nur, a lively girl that shared a desk with me for 2 years, she was Uzbek, their language shared some similarity to Uighur, but with its own very distinct culture and customs. She told me that her grandmother made her learn their alphabets by writing them in an exercise book. She opened the book in front me, and I remembered seeing the familiar cursive Arabic alphabets, and thought how good her hand-writing were. There were Kuza’ti-jian, and Kudu’si-jian, two Uighur brothers with curly brown hair and large eyes. They had relatives living near my home in a small village. They were naughty, taking out their relative’s donkeys, and riding them on the main road. We were just kids doing what kids do and growing up in what we must thought was the best place to be.

There were tensions between the Chinese and the Uighurs. I remembered the odd fights and quarrels in the streets. I dare say it was no more frequent or violent than anywhere else in the world. One thing I would however say that there was always a pang of regret in me for not learning more of other cultures than my own, for the Chinese culture at least in Urumqi was dominant.

In Urumqi, you could get by quite easily if you just spoke Mandarin, apart from the odd swear words that you learn in Arabic, I really didn’t learn other much of other cultures. I think to a large extent, while there were high schools taught in their own languages, there was a tacit recognition that learning Chinese was imperative for the ethnic minorities to do well in the society at large.

I am sad to see the escalating ethnic violence that is going on now in Urumqi, seeing my home going up in flames, I wonder what A’setti would have said about that too. He is now an electrical engineer working in BeiJing, I manage to get in touch with him in 2002 when I was travelling in China. There is no doubt in my mind that we both want to see everyone in XinJiang to live in harmony and peace.

~paul