Silk Road: Unsettling Security Measures

People walking by a security truck in the hospital compound days before Oct 1

 Being in Kashgar is unsettling.

The first thing you notice are the sirens that are constantly going off. That's because there are police vans with riot screens driving up and down the main streets at around 20km an hour. As we drove by one, I could see the driver so bored that he was looking at his phone placed on the steering wheel while he was driving -- he was that slow.

And then everywhere you go, from hotels to restaurants and even grocery stores and pharmacies have metal detectors you have to walk through, and some have X-ray machines for your bags, or they wand you before you can go in.

Even at the hospital we had to first show our passports, and most of the time they just waved us through. But then there was one time where the staff at the gate were difficult and told us to go to the next door police station.

We went over and explained to the young officer that we just wanted to go to the hospital to see my dad and showed him our passports. He couldn't read English and barked, "What is your name?"

My mom asked, "Do you mean my husband's name or my name?"

Police checking under the hood of a car for explosives

Your name! Don't play games with me? he barked again.

I was so taken aback I couldn't help stopping myself from saying, "Are you serious?"

Luckily he didn't take me too seriously, and we each gave him our Chinese names (which are not on our passports) and radioed to the hospital gate our names. We were then let through.

Oh yes and we had to put our bags through X-ray machines again -- in every hospital building we went into. Those who drove into the hospital compound had their cars checked -- even under the hood by men in bullet-proof vests and helmets. Security is a serious business.

The Chinese government has spent over 30 billion yuan in security last year, a jump of almost 20 percent from 2016. That's from the creation of these neighbourhood police stations and extra police hires as well as equipment.

The other curious thing is that in restaurants, diners aren't given knives, though in our hotel we were, but they were very dull. One time my dad wanted to eat a peeled apple and we asked the Uyghur teenager who was helping us to bring a knife from home.

Security checks in our hotel lobby

He apologized that he could not carry one at all. We were very surprised and expressed our incredulity. He politely said with a smile, "It's different."

We did find a plastic knife and smuggled it in, but it was challenging to peel the apple with it and I gave up after completing half of it. We stuck to grapes after that.

Uyghurs who have either a lot of interaction with foreigners or have a passport and traveled abroad are under a lot of scrutiny.

They can either be disappeared for days or weeks, or they are sent to "school", a room full of men and women from teens to people in their 60s, and they are forced to listen to lectures, learn Chinese, learn more about Chinese law, or propaganda for about two hours everyday.

It is mandatory -- they cannot skip "school" even though they have to work at that time or were planning to be out of town. If not, the consequences could be harsh.

This repression against Uyghurs is tough. Mosques are not allowed to broadcast prayers, while men cannot have very long beards, and women cannot be completely covered.

And as National Day approached, there were more police on the streets, probably part-time police officers who carried riot weapon gear like shields and batons and forks that were more of a deterrent than were actually used. The hospital was even under lock down from 11pm until morning. Is that really necessary?

There were also more check-points on the roads; taxi drivers sometimes preferred to pick up Han Chinese customers because that meant they could easily pass the check-points than be scrutinized by the police.

And by the way, the Uyghur taxi drivers would sometimes take an extra passenger if they were going the same direction as the first customer. Why not if they can make a bit more extra money? We only had one Han Chinese drive the whole time we were there.

Meanwhile, the Uyghurs we met tried to carry on with life the best they could. Women dressed up to go to the hospital, as if they were going out for dinner to a nice restaurant, while some older men wore traditional woven caps.

The Uyghurs we talked to were trying to deal with the situation with as much grace as they could under pressure. To me this was amazing, considering they know there is no way out -- it is near impossible to get a passport nowadays, let alone immigrate.

Many people outside of Kashgar have no idea what is going on here because it's so remote. However, people need to know the situation here. If Hong Kong continues to irritate Beijing, the powers that be could easily punish Hong Kong and turn it into a police state like Kashgar.

It is already happening in many major cities in China, with facial recognition software, security cameras everywhere and bags having to be scanned in every subway station. We can push back, but for how long and how much?

Video of the Day: Chinese Bagpiper

A bagpiper playing tunes to solicit donations for poppies

Yesterday when I was coming out of the MTR in Central, I could hear the distinct sounds of bagpipes being played. What was that about?

When I looked out the window of the station I could see -- two young Chinese men dressed in tartan from head to toe and wore poppies for Remembrance Day and were soliciting donations for the local veterans.

One bagpiper decided to take a break and talk to some gweilos, while the other gave his rendition of Teresa Teng's The Moon Represents My Heart.

I'd never heard it played on bagpipes before!

And as my friend YTSL points out, where else will you hear that, but in Hong Kong!

True that.

It was really nice to see these young people engaging with people, who asked to take pictures with them and they immediately obliged.

Actually it's sad that hardly any Hong Kong people wear poppies on November 11 -- do they not know that Canadian, British, and Indian troops tried to protect the city from the Japanese, but failed in the Battle of Hong Kong December 8-25, 1941?

The soldiers were ill prepared and over 3,000 died. The city surrendered to the Japanese, who then occupied Hong Kong until 1945.

Nowadays Hong Kong people -- Hong Kong and mainland Chinese know November 11 as Singles Day (11-11) -- the biggest online shopping event of the year thanks to Alibaba!

Silk Road: Learning From Uyghurs

In the doctor's office on the seventh floor where most are Uyghurs

Being in Kashgar for 12 days we got to know Uyghurs better than most tourists, and probably most local Han Chinese. It seemed like the two ethnic groups lived in a parallel universe, where they didn't intersect much, unless they had to work together, like in the case of the hospital.

In the neurology ward, practically all the doctors were Uyghurs, the head nurse too, while only a handful of nurses were Han Chinese. Perhaps it was because the demographic of their patients were Uyghur.

Outside the hospital Uyghurs and Han Chinese didn't have much to do with each other. They didn't eat each other's food -- Uyghurs are Muslim and only eat Halal food, and Uyghurs were forced to speak Mandarin to Han Chinese, who hardly knew any Uyghur.

Our first neighbour waiting to be discharged from the hospital

So you can imagine the taxi drivers' surprise when I would say "hello" (yakshimusiz) and "thank you" (rekhmat) in Uyghur, and to my dad's neighbour's family I would say "good bye" (hosh) and they were happy I was trying to be friendly.

There were benefits to being Han Chinese -- you were less scrutinized when it came to going through security. Uyghurs would be subjected to more thorough searches from their ID to the items they were carrying.

When my dad was in the hospital we had three different neighbours. The first was a young couple, with whom we didn't interact much, but we were cordial.

Next came an elderly man, probably younger than my, with his extended family looking after him -- his wife, sister, and daughter-in-law with her children. We spent the most time with the daughter-in-law and her young daughter Madja.

She had very short hair -- it seems young girls have their heads shaved to ensure their hair grows thicker. At first she and we were shy, but after a day or two she warmed up to us, particularly when I gave her a balloon to play with.

Madja didn't know any Mandarin, though her young mother did. She was busy looking after her father-in-law -- constantly hoisting him up, or turning his body periodically for blood circulation.

Then when we came back one evening, the family was gone and my dad had one evening of quiet. The next day another neighbour came in, another man, probably in his 30s, but by then my dad was well enough to be discharged from the hospital and we left a day or two after.

The head nurse who spoke very good Mandarin

During our time in Kashgar, our tour guide was indispensable -- he came to the hospital a few times to visit dad to see if he was OK, and helped us arrange our hotel accommodation through his tour guide friend, who also helped us exchange money, and arrange a car for us to go to the airport.

These people were so warm and hospitable despite the situation they were living in on a daily basis. They were keen to show us another side of Kashgar and we were so glad and lucky to be at the receiving end of their generosity. I won't forget them.

Rahmat (Thank you).

Silk Road: Keeping Tabs on Hospital Costs

A Uyghur sleeping on a cot in the stairwell in the hospital

From a patient's point of view, Xinjiang Kashgar First People's Hospital is very basic. You have to buy everything -- soap, paper towels, toilet paper, water, even soft pillows, tissues, anything you might need.

At first I was relieved that our shared toilet at least had soap -- but then a few days later our neighbour left and took their soap along with them! That's how we found out the hospital didn't even provide soap so that people would have clean hands to handle the patients...

A quaint-looking restaurant, but food wasn't agreeable...

My aunt told us that even when preparing for surgery, a barber came by and shaved my dad's head -- for 20 yuan (US$3). She saw the tour guide pay him, so she quickly gave money back to the tour guide.

We were also told to have someone look after my dad 24 hours a day in the hospital  -- which explained why people slept in cots like the one we were given our room, or people slept on layers of blankets on the floor anywhere. In the evenings the hospital looked like a refugee camp.

Our tour guide suggested hiring a young man to help look after my dad and it turned out he was very young -- a 17-year-old Uyghur, just graduated from high school. He was the younger brother of another tour guide and was keen to get into this line of work too.

Another relative sleeping by the elevators

In a way this was a good training ground for him, to be able to deal with a variety of situations, translating from Uyghur to English, and also knowing where to go in the hospital to get things, particularly CT scans and such.

This saved my mom and I the headache of having to run around the hospital trying to figure out where everything was, and focus on looking after my dad when we visited him.

There was also no hospital food available, nor a cafeteria. That meant having to buy food everyday. We tried a Chinese restaurant at the back of our hotel and it wasn't that hygienic.

The same could be said for the string of Uyghur restaurants in front of the hospital. My mom and I went to one of them for lunch and ordered a bowl of hand-pulled noodles with ratatouille and bits of lamb.

What arrived on our table were two bowls of lukewarm noodles. I started tucking in but then heard the sound of chopping behind me. It turns out there was a man using an axe to chop the raw meat of a carcass. My mom watched him and immediately lost her appetite and her stomach didn't feel well either.

She made the executive decision that we would only eat food from the hotel. That meant having to wait until noon for the Chinese restaurant to open for lunch to buy take out for my dad, and then going back again around 6pm for his dinner.

We saw meat chopped like this in a restaurant by the hospital

Most of the time we wouldn't eat dinner until 8pm or even 9pm. The Chinese restaurant barely had any business, or if it did, the function that evening was already over so we practically had the restaurant to ourselves.

While the tables looked nicely set from a distance, the tablecloths were never changed, and the same oil stains were there...

The menu was quite limited in terms of what we could easily transport to my dad, and not spicy either, which left the only choice of dumplings, which were made to order -- we could even see the thumb prints on them. But after a while you get tired of eating dumplings with chives and egg, or egg and cucumber.

My mom and I liked a tureen of thick sheets of noodles, practically like squares, with tomatoes and vegetables in a slightly sour broth. Another delicious dish was wai san or a white mountain root stir-fried with black-eared fungus, though a bit on the oily side.

Comforting tart noodle soup dish with tomato and vegetables

While food and transportation were cheap, we worried about the mounting hospital bills. Every day a strip of white recycled paper was our bill for the previous day and it listed various items and deducted from the original 10,000 yuan payment.

Some of the items listed were ridiculous, including Chinese medicine and that they moved my dad's body from side to side so that his back wouldn't get tired. We saw no evidence of that. So that was how the hospital would overcharge patients...

A few days into our extended stay in Kashgar we started worrying about having enough cash and I would periodically count the red 100 yuan bills to make sure we were covered. Being away from home and no friends or family to rely on, we had to estimate how much more money we needed. We had American cash, but the bills were considered too old to exchange. Even in Kashgar the banks are picky.