Well, I’ve been back for almost exactly a month now, and nothing has changed here in Australia since I left. But so much is different, if you know what I mean. That’s a story for another time, though. A new blog will shortly become operational, which I’m sure will be nowhere near as exciting as my time in China. My life has become terribly dull since I got back, but in a good way.

However, before we archive this little piece of my history, I should like to share a few things with you. The first is the third and final blog entry in our series of Guest Bloggers, by our very own Michael Rose. You may remember Mikey from the first six months of my stay – he is the one who recruited me originally, and kept me amused with his antics (I’ll never forget the wallet incident. You had to be there. Mikey knows what I mean).

He is a wonderful writer, much better than me, and it is my honour and pleasure to present his blog entry, the final one with any substance to be found at this address. There will be photos of the final week, and the travel from Urumqi to Shanghai, but then you can direct your Charlotte Addiction to my AusBlog, which will go live shortly…

But without further ado, here is the man himself:

Finding Dushanzi was just a lucky fluke, one which I didn�t really deserve. After university I wanted to do something which was different. Not the peer group approved kind different that is smoking pot or backpacking round Thailand or spending six months in Japan, but the sort of thing that most other people don�t do because they think it is impossible, can�t be bothered or are quietly afraid. I�d read about Xinjiang before in National Geographic, a weird out of the way place tottering unsteadily on fault lines cultural and geographic; an occupied country with cowboys, insecure borders, boundless desert, restless natives, lost cities, mountains and gulag archipelagoes; most people (as always) wrote me off as insane, everyone said don�t go, it seemed perfect.

There was only one job I could find advertised Xinjiang, and I assumed it
was in Urumqi, because it was the only town in Xinjiang big enough to register on my map. The people who recruited me in Qingdao (the very wealthy seaside city where handsome Aaron is now set up as a school teacher) didn�t seem to know exactly where they were sending me either except it involved catching
the train to Urumqi.

I very remember clearly getting off the train there. Chinese train platforms are a perpetual steam scented bustle that must be similar to what a world war two evacuation was like, it was about minus ten, the snow was bucketing down (I�d never really seen snow before) and there was Kang Laoshi.

At this point I should make a note about this Kang Laoshi (Teacher Kang) his real name is Kang Shi Cai) who in the end became one of my heroes. He�s one of those guys who gives himself totally to whatever he believes in. In the world of Chinese officialdom, full to the gills with profiteering scum and petty fascists, Kang is a true man of principle- I�ve never seen a person who commanded such genuine respect from everyone around him. He is a man who believes in China, and the Chinese Communist Party (Zhongguo gong chan dang), and has dedicated his entire life its cause. In the 50s he majored in Russian at one of Beijing�s elite universities and came out to Xinjiang when Dushanzi was a few homesick Russian oil technicians and Kazak yurts. God knows what happened to him during the cultural revolution (this was from 66 to 73 or a bit later when teachers and people with his sort of background really coped it as �class enemies� and were beaten, humiliated and sent to labor camps) but it seems almost certain that he spent at least 10 years of his life splitting rocks or something worse. Whatever the case they obviously never broke him. With the reforms he took it upon himself (at age 60) to learn English, visit America, start a private school and start wearing a tailored business suit round everywhere. A incredible shift for an old man who spent most of his life being a Communist in the truest red flag waving sense of the world.

Wow, so much to say so little room. My apologies to this point to 12.2 HSC English who�s practice essays are not getting graded because of Charlotte�s blog.

My life in Dushanzi was quite different from the experience of Charlotte, Pat and Christine. Believe it or not Dushanzi was noticeably smaller when I arrived, in the short time I was there at least two huge factories and a whole new suburb were built from empty desert. The main market area which had been dominated by Uyghur merchants, selling the usual Uyghur merchandise, was unceremoniously demolished and replaced with stock standard, toilet tile, shopping strip run by and for Han Chinese. The roads got busier and foreigners ceased to be quite such a surprise to people (though having said that Xinjiang people sometimes mistook me for a local Uyghur or Russian). I can only imagine that in three or four years time the place will be totally unrecognizable.

Dushanzi is situated at the very edge of what I liked to call (because it�s so very X-Files) �the forbidden zone�. There�s a photo of it at the start of Charlotte�s blog. God how I loved wandering within that wilderness. I always thought Dushanzi was a little like something out of Sim City, a cuboid slice of Communist China grafted onto a desert plain and nourished with imported Kazak oil and its toxic chemical by products. But just walk past the final straight line in the sand, and five kilometers into the forbidden zone (the empty desert the edge of the untamed mountains) you�ve gone back as many hundred years. Nothing but the tweeting of tiny desert birds and the empty wind. Occasionally you would pass by little Kazak homesteads, no electricity, no cars, just a mud hut, two camels, some horses and lots of demented looking goats
that look have escaped from the Old Testement. I used to walk up there every
weekend, even getting attacked by a vicious Kazak sheepdog didn�t put me off, it was the army and police that succeeded in the end. One Monday I arrived at school to find an agitated looking Kang Laoshi who told me he�d just had a visit from the local police and army chief, it was clear that any more trekking expeditions would be done at the risk of my deportation, and even worse, his humiliation, so I stopped.

Of course though it was the people that really made Dushanzi something special. When I arrived it was winter and there was only one other foreigner, a girl from Louisiana named Krystal who always seemed to despise me in a low key sort of way. To add insult to injury I sort of liked her, and although it did seem like a pity at the time, it was probably a good thing as it forced me to learn Chinese faster than I would have and make friends with the locals. I made so many great friends in Dushanzi, and leaving them was the hardest thing about going. Saying goodbye to one especially wonderful girl from Baijiantan was particularly horrendous, chiefly for her (my pathetic indecision didn�t help), although I don�t suppose she and I are the first people in the history of the world to discover the saying goodbye isn�t easy. Zhao Ping Yuan (or xiao Zhao as people call him, it means �little Zhao�, a reference to the fact he�s extremely tall), probably my best friend there is, though extremely restrained, one of the kindest people you would meet anywhere.

Politics? Oh could I give you politics, but I haven�t the space, and probably you haven�t the interest. Suffice to say, in Xinjiang, it�s all about shades of gray and violence isn�t the answer, although it�s easy to see how people might believe it is. Respect is the thing that is lacking, we’re all people after all. As an Australian I can�t help but feel sorry for the underdog, but the best future for Xinjiang (at least the northern bit) is going to be Chinese. It may be unfair, and it certainly doesn�t sit easy with me, but it�s reality.

And so patient audience here I sit dancing a merry procrastinatory jig around those dratted 12.2 essays. I write from that hellish Asian Babylon (or more descriptively, urban death maze) that is Jakarta where I�m selling my teaching degree along with my soul to an international school for an obscene amount of money I don’t deserve. Dushanzi seems like a pretty sweet deal from down here although I know very well it�s the greener grass thing, and at any rate I�ve got a feeling I saw it at its best.

Thanks to everyone foreign (that is to say Charlotte and Krystal) and Uyghur, Uzbek, Kazak, Han and Hui that I meet in Dushanzi I�ll never forget any of you.

Michael