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Travel
Monday, 01 February 2010 05:02 Written by Kristen Parris An American’s experience in rural Xinjiang I was unexpectedly invited to visit Xinjiang in mid-October by a friend. Although he did not have much information about the trip and I was a little bit nervous, given the summer violence and strange ‘syringe’ attacks that followed in September, I was determined to see it through and I began to think of it as my blind date with Xinjiang. In spite of myself, my head filled with National Geographic – like images of minority peoples dressed in colorful costumes, dancing exotic dances and singing folk songs of the region. The first stop on my visit was Shihezi (石河子), 150 kilometers away from Urumqi and with a population of less than 700,000. Although I had not heard of Shihezi, I now know (having heard from many friends upon my return to Hangzhou) that it is a town with considerable reputation among many in China. As nearly anyone in town can tell you, the well-known poet Ai Qing wrote of Shihezi: “I have been to many places, this is the youngest of them all, it is love at first sight…” Founded only in the 1950s, Shihezi is a young city and because of that is carefully planned with broad, straight tree lined streets organized in a clear grid, abundant green parks and clear skies. It appears to be a comfortable place to live, to work, to grow up in. The plan for my visit to Xinjiang, I was surprised to discover, was a weeklong home stay with a farming family in rural Shihezi. I was both pleased and apprehensive. We drove on for an hour or so the next day, until we turned onto a dirt road and stopped at the home of hosts Xu Wei and his wife Fu Shifang and their two daughters. Like other nearby farm houses it was surrounded by white-washed walls trimmed with red brick, while the red front gate of the house was topped with a tiled pavilion roof in a traditional style. The family home was a simple one-story building with white-washed walls with red metal bars on the windows. The living room was large and sunny, maps and scenic posters on the walls above the new sofa, all pink and white with a pretty flower pattern. And then there were the appliances, once unthinkable, lining the living room wall. Beyond the large living room were three bedrooms and a kitchen, as well as an extensive garden; all organic with no chemical pesticides or fertilizers. As we walked through its irrigated channels the vegetables seemed outlandishly large, and what was grown here served not only as the source of almost everything the family ate (they rarely ate meat) but also cash crops, including green and purple grapes and sunflower seeds. While grapes and cabbages were beautiful in the sunny garden, the Xu family’s daily activities were all organized around cotton farming. Xu and his wife leased 120 mu of land, plant it with cotton, and earn a good income from it. I know that cotton picking is backbreaking work, but I found myself surprisingly eager to get into the fields and feel the heat of the sun, the cuts on my hands, the aching muscles under the weight of the gunny sack across my shoulders. However silly, I thought of the sheer physical exhaustion that must come from such work and imagined the pleasure of a rest well-earned. I longed to pick cotton! Only on the last day of our stay with the family did I have the chance to get out there. By this time most of the cotton was harvested. I worked with the women, stuffing the cotton in large bags and then lifting it up to a man on the top of the truck who would drop it in and rake it down. I occasionally drifted back into the field to glean some cotton left on the plants, just to get the feel of it. I was happy to do this, although it was far away from my cotton dream. The desert looms large around you in Xinjiang, and on the third day of my visit I was taken off into it. The landscape was similar to places in eastern Washington where I had gone camping and elsewhere more like Arizona, Nevada, Utah and other desert regions of the American west. There it was, the sand, the dunes, the scrub. But also, unexpectedly rising out of the barren earth, was a steel tower decorated with colored flags flapping in the wind. We were in a newly developed park, a kind of theme park. The theme: desert. In the desert, we found ostriches that had been shipped in from Australia. We also found camels, but they were actually ceramic. To my surprise, I found a swimming pool nestled beside a high dune. It was closed for the winter and it was too cold anyway. I was told when I visited I would be able to go swimming right here in the desert. The water came from ground water and from mountain run off, irrigation tubes fed water to the newly planted trees. There was a surreal feeling to the scene. But I have to say the pool looked inviting against the blue desert sky.
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