Muslim brown-skinned faces, all-seeing all-knowing eyes. People so beautiful you want to paint their portraits, the niggling frustration of unartistic hands. Weathered men onweathered motorbikes, creased faces, smiling eyes, women in headscarves rolling by on donkey carts. I'm in love with the picture. The thing about beauty is younever find it where you expect to find it - only in rare moments, satori-like flashes does it take you aback...
(Interlude: donkey hee-haws, motorcycle whizzes by, the clip clop of ladies heels, the clip clop of horses hooves, the rollercoaster voices of Uighur men, the delighted squeals of children)
...The alien has arrived in attire I once saw everywhere, now I'm not hip but just plain weird. And then back onto the main street, an occasional familiar Chinese face in the crowds like an old friend, any port in a storm, no longer foreign but family.
Uighur with its bob-bob-bobs, an intoxicating creaky old rollercoaster of sound, pleasing to the ear when coming from a broad smiling mouth, the old eyes of an ancient culture, the people who belong here. The Chinese as bumbling naive impostors posted out to jobs in this dusty exotic backwater. And they fought and they fought for this land, this scorching wasteland full of soul they didn't understand. The Chinese as my fellow aliens, wandering aimless through foreign streets, feigning ownership, knowing nothing. How am I any different, posted out here through my own device, ignoramus, novice, child.
Eighth Century mummified dumplings in the Kashgar Silk Road Museum.
Xiang Fei (Ik Parhar) led the Uighur Revolution against the invading Chinese, kidnapped by the emperor and made to be his concubine (or Fragrant Concubine, as he liked to call her). Raped by the object of revolt for the rest of her short life, and forced to commit suicide by a jealous empress (for her beauty was second to none, a mind-blowing exotic gorgeousness that caused donkey-cart accidents) and finally, her body carried all the way home to Kashgar, a 3 year journey, to be buried in her family tomb, a martyr to the cause.
Sunday market, sheep, donkeys, horses, cows, yaks, disappointingly no camels. Lamb roasting on skewers only metres from rows of live sheep, whose eyes are downcast, silent, resigned to their fate. Horses being taken for bareback test-drives, a real life western rodeo show. donkeys being shod, young boys taunting tethered bulls with whips, stones thrown at protesting donkeys a stone's throw from the click of tourist cameras.
And now I have to go before my hour on this computer is up and the computer switches off and all this is lost. Bye........................................................................................................................