"The Backstreets" by Perhat Tersun

Perhat Tursun is a writer and poet. To read his short novel The Backstreets is to be reminded of The Plague by Albert Camus, or Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. It’s a disturbing, unsettling kind of book, and it becomes more so when you realize it’s largely autobiographical. 

Tursun (born in 1969) is a Uyghur, the large Muslim minority that for generations were farmers and herdsmen in Xinjiang in western China. Life became difficult under Chinese communist rule, until the death of Mao Zedong. Life became easier, until about the turn of the century. Then began what became a systematic effort by the Chinese government to submerge the Uyghurs into Chinese culture and life and, barring that, eradicate their society. Persecution began in earnest when the Chinese began to borrow the language of the global “War on Terror.” The Chinese deny the charges of genocide, but it’s becoming increasingly impossible to say it’s anything but that. The evidence is too strong, and it’s growing stronger. That the Uyghurs occupied land that contained sizable energy reserves didn’t serve their security in a Chinese state desperate for energy to power factories.

 

Tersun had been one of the favored few to be educated at a Chinese university in Beijing, but he began to arouse the government’s concern with the publication of his work, like his poetry collection One Hundred Love Lyrics, his novella collection Messiah Desert, and his novel The Art of Suicide which led to his blacklisting as a writer for the next 15 years  The manuscript of The Backstreets was completed in 2015 but never published in China.

 

The main character, a man, is never named. Trained at a university in the east, he works in a western Chinese city that is dominated by ethnic Chinese, although it wasn’t always so. His boss is the “smiling man,” whose smile increases the angrier he gets. And he gets very angry with the narrator, who intentionally and unintentionally doesn’t conform to expectations. 

 

Perhat Tersun

The man spends a great deal of the novel walking the backstreets of the city, trying to find his room. He’s frustrated by both a thick, almost impenetrable fog and the fear of the few people he meets. The search for his room symbolizes the search to find (and understand) his place and thus his own identity. But it never happens, and he never learns who he is, because it’s been taken away. He has memories, pleasant and unpleasant of his childhood, but his family seems to exist only in a distant past. 

 

The novel draws from Tursun’s own life – his education, his childhood, and his work in the city of Urumchi in Xinjiang. And he’s lived the experience of the Uyghurs in China. In early 2018, he disappeared. It was heard later that he’d been sentenced to 16 years in prison; the charges were unknown. 

 

The book has its own story. The translator, Darren Byler, teaches at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and has published several books on China. He met with Tursun before the writer’s disappearance, a meeting arranged by a source only known as D.M. Another person, known as A.A., was helping with the translation. Both D.M. and A.A. also disappeared.

 

Reading The Backstreets is a sobering experience. Tursun depicts the alienation, the fear, and the persecution that happens when a person, and a people, are objectified by the state as terrorists or extremists. It’s a difficult book to read, but a necessary one.

 

Related:

 

A Uyghur Author and Translator Were Detained. Now Their Novel Speaks for Them.

Ryan Pile’s “Chinese Turkestan”

Until 1972, my knowledge of China was essentially limited to the Judge Dee mysteries by Robert Van Gulik and American-made Charlie Chan movies based on the books by Earl Derr Biggers. In other words, what I understood was a combination of historical fiction and entertaining stereotypes.

That year, President Nixon made the historic opening to the People’s Republic of China. By the fall, when I was starting my senior year, LSU offered courses in Chinese history for the first time. And I took both that were offered. While I was an irregular class attendee (especially my last semester, when I was managing editor of the student newspaper), I read all of the required books for the courses plus others on my own. The books included Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China, books about Chiang Kai-Chek and his formidable wife, the birth of the Chinese Republic in 1912, China during World War II, and overviews of the China’s long imperial history. I renewed my interest in Chinese history and affairs in the 1990s, even going so far as to try to teach myself Mandarin Chinese.

No, I didn’t succeed in learning the language. I still remember the words for “thank you,” however – pronounced something like “shay-shay.”

Like any large subject, the more you learn, the less you realize you know.

What I do know about China, however, is largely limited to the eastern half of the country. My knowledge and understanding of the western half, and particularly the province of Xinjiang (what we used to call Sinkiang), was limited to knowing it was where the Chinese tested their atomic bombs, and it was part of the territory that included the old Silk Road, the ancient trade route that linked China with India and the Mediterranean.

Along comes a book to help fill some of my ignorance, at least photographically. Chinese Turkestan: A Photographic Journey Through an Ancient Civilization by Ryan Pyle is an eye-opening wonder, filled with black-and-white photographs that capture the region’s character and the face of its people. And its people are only partially ethnic or Han Chinese. Most of the residents of Xinjiang are Muslim Uyghurs, although there has been a significant increase of ethnic Chinese moving to the area. And with that increase comes change.

Pyle uses the old name for the region for his title – Chinese Turkestan. “The old name conjures up a region without physical borders,” he writes in the introduction, “an admixture of an idea rather than a distinct geographical or political entity.” And that idea permeates Chinese Turkestan.

Ryan Pyle

You see the face of the people, young and old. You see them in their daily lives, eating, worshipping, dancing, working. You see their history and culture etched in their faces, and it is indeed an ancient history. 

What is perhaps most surprising about these photographs is their seeming timelessness. Many of the pictures could have been taken when cameras were first invented in the 1800s. What I believe Pyle is emphasizing is the continuity of the people and culture, even as they experience and deal with significant change. What is most suggestive is the people’s resilience, and reliance upon their traditional (and I suspect conservative) culture.

A native of Canada and a graduate of the University of Toronto, Pyle is an award-winning photographer and filmmaker. His Chinese Turkestan is a beautiful book, treating its subject with a light hand and with an engaging respect.

Related:

The China Lens: Ryan Pyle is interviewed by China Today – the USC US-China Institute

The trailer for the book:

Top photograph: Woman picking cotton, from Chinese Turkestan by Ryan Pyle.