Xin Jiang, the famed East-meets-West crossroads of the Silk Road, where ancient traditions line the market stalls in the forms of hand-carved knives made of steel and bone and of textiles created to adorn walls or to cover tresses of dark brown hair, and where the ubiquitous aroma of roasting lamb and baking bread greets you at nearly every corner. This region, the northwest most Chinese province, is modern China’s “New Frontier,” but it is my Old Friend, and I revisited her this past summer for the first time in 14 years.
Like many old friends, Xin Jiang greeted me with outstretched—albeit weathered—hands, a familiar and knowing smile, a deluge of youthful memories and inside jokes, and the disappointment that inevitably hovers over an aging loved one who has not reached her dreams. The years had taken its toll on both of us, but sadly, my Old Friend, although still stunning in both beauty and resilience, had suffered far more than I imagined.
In 2003, about the time when I was last in Xin Jiang, most Americans I talked to had never heard of the region, but now, as ethnic tensions – and the media coverage of those tensions – has intensified over the years, the average newspaper reader is aware of the unrest in the region and likens it to Tibet’s struggle to maintain its cultural identity. In the coming weeks, I plan to write about my experience returning to Xin Jiang after all of these years. I am not a news reporter, and my goal is not to provide a definitive report of what is happening in the province. Rather, as with all of my blog posts, I hope to tell my personal experience with the cultures and peoples I encounter on my travels. Yet, with Xin Jiang, the ethnic divide was more than a backdrop to my experience; it was a fundamental part of the kinship that formed between the budding volatile region and the young, free-spirited traveler who befriended it. And like all good old friends, Xin Jiang and I had happy times together, challenged one another, and as any friend should, the region affected me. It changed me. Any attempt at writing about it now, is colored by my past encounters.
With this in mind, before I embarked on the introspective endeavor of blogging about this summer’s journey, I revisited an article that I wrote in 2003 for the now defunct Clamor Magazine. I think it will provide you with the essential back-story to this summer’s visit. It is not a mere description of the “good old days of Xin Jiang;” rather it depicts a snapshot of the region though the sort of incisive eyes that adorn the candor and naiveté of youth. Truth be told, these were not the eyes that greeted Xin Jiang this year.
You can click here to access the article.
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