And I ran, I ran so far away

I just ran, I ran all night and day

I couldn’t get away

 

– Flock of Seagulls

 

If you have not read our account of how we got to Wuqia, where we underwent border processing, check it out here to get some background on what followed.

We went through the border processing center without trouble, with well-dressed Chinese ladies in whitening make-up stamping our passports. This was the last sign of China’s bureaucratic machine. From here, to the border, almost one hundred miles away, the military took over. Bureaucracy was done at the barrel of a gun.

We joined a small caravan of taxis, the passengers being a sprinkling of Han, Kyrgyz and Uighurs being driven to the border. The caravan reached the border at 11:10 local time. The border town looked post-apocalyptic, with hollowed-out buildings rotting, long stretches of apartments torn apart and filled with trash, loose bricks and feces. Our caravan approached a spiked gate that was blocking the road. Immediately, a boy carrying an automatic rifle stumbled out from a small trailer-building that had been set up beside the spiked gate. “We’re already on lunch,” the boy told us, taking all the passports and I.D.’s of our caravan. “Come back in the afternoon,” he waved us away.

 

We were shocked. Guards get a three hour lunch break, from 1130-1430, but we had gotten there twenty minutes before the lunch break.

 

Inside the trailer, there was movement. Something was going on. Perhaps, the guards would let us through, we hoped. A bus full of European tourists came from the Kyrgyz border and was quickly processed.

 

After the Europeans had poured through the border, the boy with the gun came out again. One of the cars in our caravan was allowed to pass through to the border. I hopped into our taxi, but, neither our car nor the cab with the Kyrgyz family was allowed through. It was only the one carrying Han Chinese people through that was allowed to cross to the border.

 

As the car in our caravan carrying the Han Chinese disappeared, three boy guards came from the passport processing trailer. One of them was the boy who had taken our passports. These boys sat beside the trailer kicking dirt, telling us that they were already closed for lunch and that we needed to go away, that we needed to not come back until the afternoon.

 

Then a tall, Han Chinese man, looking something like a never-smiling Yao Ming, marched out of the trailer.

 

“What’s going on?” the Han Chinese man snapped.

 

The three boys told their superior that our drivers did not want to leave.

 

“We’re on lunch,” the superior said. “We’re not working right now. You need to go.”

 

At this point, the driver who had taken the Han Chinese passengers across the border returned. Now all the passengers and drivers were gathered around the never-smiling guard, begging him to let us through.

 

“You let those other guys through.” The head of the Kyrgyz family pointed, sulking. “We were all together. You didn’t let us through.”

 

The guard was now stirred up. “What are you trying to say? What are you trying to say!?” he yelled as the Kyrgyz father bit his lip and looked away.

 

A driver’s phone suddenly went off. Before he could answer it, the guard snapped at him. “Turn that off.”

 

Another man said something in Kyrgyz. Others translated it for the tall Han guard who could not speak Kyrgyz. “You closed before 13:30 Beijing time.”

 

The guard bent down over the man, shoving his finger in his face, “You have no idea how hard it is processing these diplomatic [sic] passports. You need to watch yourself and remember your place.”

 

The driver’s phone rang again. Before he could reach for it, the tall Han Chinese guard barked, “Go ahead, answer it. But if you answer that phone before I am finished talking to all of you, you had better never come back here again. Do you understand me?” the guard threatened.

 

“I was just turning it off,” the fat driver said.

 

“Respect me, and I will respect you. Now, all of you here need to cool down and go have lunch.” The tall guard warned as he disappeared into a chauffeured jeep for lunch.

 

We had three hours with nothing to do, but sit around and think about what happened. I chatted with the Uighur passengers in our car, and their account largely tallied with mine. The guards had claimed that they were closed, but then they checked our passports to determine who they wanted to discriminate against. The one car that they let through was the one with Han Chinese. Our car had Uighurs and the other car was all Kyrgyz, so they decided to dump on us, and delay us for three and a half hours.

 

Throughout our time in Xinjiang, one problem always apparent was the way that the Chinese state discriminates against Uighurs. This instance was the most apparent, the most personalized discrimination that we saw. One man with a gun was able to screw us over, just because he did not like the people we were traveling with. This was a sign of the latent hatred that many Han Chinese feel towards other ethnic groups in Xinjiang and the discrimination that they meted out from positions of authority.

 

As I was eating a bowl of ramen for lunch and trying to type out notes on my tablet, a small boy and girl, local Kyrgyz kids running around with bare feet and shorn heads, came up to me and started trying to play with my tablet. I poked on the icon for Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and we began to play around, crashing helicopters, shooting prostitutes and running over cops on the imaginary streets of early 1980’s Miami. They giggled and clapped and ran in circles watching me make mayhem.

 

What these kids most needed, growing up around Chinese men with guns and an unchallenged sense of their own authority, was a skepticism of that authority. They needed to question whether those authorities were always right, and there was no better way to teach them that than by having them play a little bit of Vice City.

 

At three thirty, I finished teaching the kids not to trust authority and, as soon as the border opened, we ran. We left China.