ABSTRACT
The old man and I sat in the dust of the bazaar, our backs against a whitewashed wall, hiding from the sun in what little shade we could find. Radio Beijing blared from a loudspeaker on a pole nearby, unheeded by the people around us. Like my companion and 95 percent of the people in Turpan, this little oasis town in the Takla Makan Desert in China’s far western borderlands, they were Uygurs.1 Hawk-nosed with slanted eyes and tawny complexions, they spoke a kind of Turkic and very little Chinese. When they talked about their Chinese colonial overlords they spat with contempt and used words like “hate” and “kill.”
