Translated excerpts: “My West Land, Your East Country”
Banned in China, Chinese Non-fiction, My Translations into English Add commentsNeat title for a 473-page tome about the far west of China by a gutsy, if sometimes over-heated Han Chinese who certainly did his fieldwork. The “West Land” of the title conjures up images of the Silk Road, the Taklamakan Desert and Turkic tribes, all part of the Chinese empire. “East Country,” however, is a taboo term in today’s PRC, the abbreviation for the short-lived East Turkestan Republic, whose legacy still gives Beijing splittist migraines. Both of these terms refer, of course, to what is known in the PRC as Xinjiang.
The title implies an even-handed, and therefore very politically incorrect, stance on the “Xinjiang question.” To the best of my knowledge, the book is only available in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and has not been translated from the Chinese. To avoid censorship of my piece here, I have not used the Chinese name of the book (wǒde xī yù, nǐ de dōng tǔ), nor have I provided a graphic of the cover. Sorry!
”No one has ever . . . deciphered Xinjiang and the Uyghurs like this,” says the cover blurb. Author Wang Li-Xiong did travel widely in Xinjiang on several long sojourns during 1999-2007, often in the company of local Uyghurs, but that is hardly impressive. Arguably, it is the time he spent in jail — being interrogated for photocopying secret government documents about Xinjiang, and the friendship he strikes up with his cellmate, a Uyghur political detainee — that sensitized him to the plight of the Turkic minorities in Xinjiang.
After a tough time in detention during which he almost killed himself, and at one point agreed to work as an informer in exchange for his freedom, Wang left jail and resolved to research Xinjiang and write a book about what he saw on the ground, as well as record his political discussions with Mokhtar, his former cellmate and an articulate spokesperson for Uyghur intellectuals.
Rather than writing a book review per se, I’ve translated a handful of excerpts:
- It’s not illegal to be a practicing Muslim in Xinjiang. Well, not exactly. Check out the Student Regulations, Mosque Etiquette Primer and List of Illegal Religious Activities just so you understand the challenges involved.
April 22nd, 2009 at 4:41 pm
This book was fascinating but to my mind it didn’t really hang together as a single unified volume. I enjoyed his introduction and travelogue, but those sections seemed to come out of an entirely different book than the conversations with Mokhtar.
I’m also curious about the book’s intended audience: Wang (or his editor) somehow felt the need to insert a footnote explaining a reference to Ah Q. Is Lu Xun so unknown in non-mainland communities?
August 27th, 2009 at 7:51 am
The Chinese title also alludes to old/historical names for Xinjiang. The standard translation of Xiyu is Western Regions. The area has also been known as Eastern Turkestan. Perhaps a better translation for the title might be ‘My Western Regions, Your Eastern Lands’.
August 27th, 2009 at 8:40 am
Thank you very much!