A small restaurant offers dried yak meat, popcorn and instant noodles, and three check-in desks are dealing with passengers. An escalator with a notice stating, “Please don’t stay” (meaning “No loitering,” but at this unhealthy altitude the tip is justifiable) leads to the first floor, where there are benches and massage chairs that can be activated via WeChat. Less commonplace is the Oxygen Bar: a simple room with yellow walls that looks like a doctor’s waiting room. Four oxygen dispensers bubble away on the wall. I stay here a while, breathing the air that really does feel less thin. I’m a bit puzzled, however, as it smells like cigarette smoke—an inept interior designer placed the smoking room right next door.

  Surprisingly, just a few passengers use this service. Outside the Oxygen Bar, I can see from the strained faces that many people are struggling with headaches, and as soon as I leave the room, I immediately feel the pressure in my forehead again. So the ensuing one-hour flight to Chengdu offers some relief, even though it is taking me to a megacity, the kind of place that I have intentionally avoided for almost two weeks.

  CHENGDU

  Population: 14.5 million

  Province: Sichuan

  CHILD SUPPORT

  FINALLY, I AM once again in the lowlands. I breathe in greedily, which in a Chinese city is a big mistake. After a couple of minutes, my throat is already raw from the smog.

  “I don’t know what you’re complaining about,” says Huanhai, my thirty-one-year-old host. “In winter, the air gets really bad because all the mountains around act like walls.”

  Huanhai is wearing a deep red shirt, pale red shorts and leather sandals. He holds his nose a little too high, as if he doesn’t want to see the world through his glasses. We meet at the Sanwayao subway station, and from there, he takes me to my accommodation. I have my own apartment, which he usually rents out through Airbnb, and he sleeps somewhere else.

  The apartment, on the eighth floor of a high-rise, looks like something out of a home store catalogue, with details that tell me almost everything about the owner: full book shelves (intellectual), a number of vases with fresh flowers (aesthetic), cat Polaroids fixed to the fridge by panda magnets (fond of animals), five sofa cushions precisely equidistant (orderly to fastidious), exquisite tea service (pensive), designer bathroom with pretty tiles (clean), provocative photo of a male underwear model next to a wall clock (gay).

  One year ago, Huanhai could no longer bear living in this apartment because he used to share it with Shen, his long-term boyfriend. Too many memories. He now lives with friends in a shared apartment. Shen moved to Guangzhou and they see each other once a month. He found a better job there as a construction engineer because soon they will need a lot of money—they dream of having kids.

  “A child costs 1.5 million yuan, and we want two, one from each father, a boy and a girl. We want dai yun, not adoption—how do you say it? Oh yes, we are looking for a surrogate mother in the USA.” He speaks softly, often searching for the right word in English. “Unfortunately, you can’t do it in China, but there are agencies that offer a comprehensive package, including flights and all the paperwork.”

  He hopes that in three years they will have saved up enough money: US$215,000 per child. Shen graduated from Tsinghua University in Beijing, one of the best in the country, which is why he is now earning a decent salary. Huanhai, however, has just quit his job in management of a logistics company.

  “I want to have more time for myself before we have children because I will be the one mostly in charge of their upbringing,” he says. At the moment, he is reading lots of books and overseeing three Airbnb apartments in Chengdu. “Twenty-five to thirty bookings a month, and only five-star ratings in all categories,” he says proudly.

  We arrange to meet the next morning for a bicycle tour, and then he leaves me alone.

  THE NEXT MORNING the doorbell rings. First, only two arms appear, holding out a bag with baozi, or bread-like dumplings, and a plastic bottle with cold strawberry milk tea.

  “Breakfast,” announces a cheerful Huanhai, after following the arms across the threshold.

  A bicycle tour in China means, of course, Mobike or Ofo bike sharing programs. After a couple of subway stops, Huanhai uses his Ofo account to reserve two bikes with clammy handles and extension marks on the seat post that end at a height of six feet.

  The Cutest Panda Videos on Screens at Chengdu Station

  1Panda mom gathers baby panda after climbing down a tree.

  2Zookeeper holds up baby panda with arms and legs spread-eagled.

  3Panda balancing bits of bamboo on its head.

  4Young panda plodding through grass.

  5Baby panda climbing to a fork in a tree.

  You ring the bell by pushing a rotary switch on the left handlebar, so every Ofo beginner accidentally creates a bit of a racket because they think it’s a gear lever.

  Huanhai rides ahead. The print on his backpack reads: “A great bag—a great me,” and somehow, it makes sense. In some moments, he seems so sensitive that he needs encouragement from an item of luggage.

  The first stop is his favorite place in the city—a teahouse in Bauhaus style with twittering birds in the garden. Hot drinks are accompanied by marzipan-like green tea candies in the shape of flowers.

  The Chinese say: “Don’t go to Chengdu too young; it will make you lazy.” In fact, you do get the impression that the people walk slower here than in Shanghai or Beijing and don’t seem to always be in a hurry.

  “I like the city because it’s more liberal than others,” says Huanhai. “My friends here think it’s okay that I’m gay and that I quit my job. My father, however, knows nothing about either. He wouldn’t understand.”

  Huanhai’s father is eighty, and his mother would have been seventy-six but died a couple of years ago. Seventy-six minus thirty-one equals forty-five—Huanhai is not their biological child. He doesn’t know his real parents; he doesn’t even know in which province he was born.

  “Fanzi. What’s it called in English? Oh, yes, child trafficking.”

  He says it so casually, as if it were one of a number of totally normal options for having a baby. It’s quite a twist of fate that his adoptive parents once paid money for him, and now he, too, will pay lots of money for offspring.

  “They bought me from baby kidnappers because they weren’t able to have their own children. It was very common in my village,” he explains.

  Today, there are severe penalties for such transactions. Every year, hundreds of human traffickers are jailed. Huanhai’s relationship with his adopted father, a farmer in the eastern province of Shandong, is more practical than affectionate. “We see each other once a year at the Spring Festival. We don’t talk to each other much. I know that I’m important to him, but we never talk about what I actually want.” Visiting his village is torture for Huanhai, because he is always being asked when he is finally going to bring his wife. “Then I just want to die,” he says.

  Until well into the eighteenth century, same-sex love was not a taboo in China, at least if you believe what was then being written. During Mao’s time, however, homosexuals were persecuted and even executed, even though it was said that the great chairman was rather fond of young male attendants rubbing his back. Quod licet Iovi, etc. Only in 2001 was homosexuality removed from the list of mental illnesses.

  Today, in the big cities there are Pride parades and gay clubs, but there is still a long path ahead to widespread social acceptance. Partners can be found online for so-called lavender marriages to conceal your true sexual orientation from your family. You can also hire a fake girlfriend to present to your parents at the Spring Festival.

  “That’s not for me. I would have to make up too many lies,” says Huanhai. “And what would I do if my father were to visit me in Chengdu? It really does get too complicated.”

  Shen, however, has told his parents that he prefers men. “They cried for five whole years, but now they have come to accept it. And now that they know we plan to have children, they are much more relaxed,” says Huanhai.

  After a tour through a huge flower market—his second-favorite place—Huanhai asks a question that can get you in serious trouble in China: “Do you eat everything?”

  “Yes,” I answer.

  “Even spicy?”

  Again, yes.

  So we ride to a restaurant where the speciality is called ji za, a spicy stew of chicken intestines floating in soup. It doesn’t taste bad at all, but the fiasco comes at the end of the meal. You could compare it to a soccer game in which the goalkeeper has saved every close goal for a full eighty-eight minutes, with no signs of uncertainty, no mistakes, and then misjudges a simple fluffed shot that somehow bobbles through his legs and into the goal, and all the previous heroics are forgotten.

  My fluffed shot is a red chili, none of which I had previously missed; they remained either in the pot or on the plate and didn’t get anywhere near my mouth. But I am not paying attention for one second, and catastrophe happens. I sweat and start to cry.

  “I think it was a bit too spicy for you,” says my considerate companion.

  The next stage of my Tour de Chengdu passes through a park next to the New Century Global Center, which is the world’s largest building in terms of floor space. It is 330 feet tall and has a surface area of 18 million square feet.

  I was here four years earlier and at that time the building marked the southern edges of the city. Now it is surrounded by various tall finished high-rises, and towards the south there are sixteen new subway stations. Recently, the local government announced that they were moving all their offices to the south, probably simply to signal the transformation—there had previously been only wasteland there. Next year they are opening two new subway lines, and Chengdu is hoping to apply for the Summer Olympics soon. China’s laziest city? No way!

  Huanhai thinks the city has also changed socially. “Many people in my age bracket have gay or lesbian friends in their social circle and find out that we are just normal people with normal problems,” he says, on our return to the apartment. This is already progress compared to earlier times, when there was no chance of finding reliable firsthand information about the lived experiences of LGBTQ people. “As a kid in a farming community, I seriously believed that I was the only man in all of China who was into guys,” says Huanhai.

  KASHGAR

  Population: 500,000

  Province: Xinjiang

  NEW BORDER

  ON THE PLANE I read a kind of love story from the Qing dynasty. When Chinese troops conquered the city of Kashgar in 1758, they took a Muslim woman called Iparhan back to Peking, where she became known as the Fragrant Concubine. She was famous for the beguiling aroma that enveloped her, even without perfume. Cloaked in silk and in a sedan chair, she was brought to the capital to be the emperor’s concubine.

  Then something happened, and there are different versions depending on who is telling the story. The Han Chinese say that she was given the most beautiful chambers and even an oasis with a date palm in the Forbidden City and, eventually, thanks to all the splendor, fell for the emperor. Thus, she became a symbol for the unification of Xinjiang with the rest of the empire.

  The Uyghur version of the story goes like this: When she arrived in the Forbidden City, the sweet-smelling woman became terribly depressed. Although in the imperial court it was considered a great honor if the emperor made sexual advances towards you, she gauged the situation differently. She even hid a dagger in her sleeve as defense against the emperor’s hated attentions. In the end, the emperor’s mother suggested she either accept her fate or kill herself. She chose the latter to keep her honor intact.

  This episode in the eighteenth century proves that there has been a strained relationship between Xinjiang and Beijing for a long time. The Uyghurs, the ethnic group native to the Xinjiang region, are a Turkic people with their own language and script, and many of them would like to be independent of China. This has led to fierce conflicts, and in the past fifteen years, hundreds of Han Chinese have been killed in riots and terrorist attacks by Uyghur nationalists. Beijing reacted with a ruthless campaign of surveillance and set up “reeducation” camps for those Uyghur people who appeared “too Muslim.”

  Xinjiang means “new border,” and nowhere else in the country are the nefarious effects of extreme surveillance more evident.

  Let’s start with the holiest place in the province, the Fragrant Concubine’s grave in Kashgar, and then work our way towards the mundane. Her sarcophagus is in the Afaq Khoja Mausoleum, the tomb of an old ruling family that is now an important pilgrimage site. People who come here are reminded that a Chinese emperor kidnapped an upper-class woman from Xinjiang to turn her into his courtesan in a move that was anything but sensible diplomacy. The mausoleum has a square base, four towers and a large cupola in the middle. Metal spires reach up to the heavens, but it looks like they have been trimmed; if half-moons once rested there, they were later cut off. Green-and-blue decorative tiles, a number of which are missing, girdle the facade. The building looks its age; at long last, what I see before me is not a highly polished reproduction but the genuine past. It’s a bit One Thousand and One Nights, a bit Silk Road romanticism. Even the obligatory garlands of high-tech cameras are attached to rotten-looking wooden posts.

  Inside the mausoleum is a stone gallery embedded with some twenty-five sarcophagi. The names on them sound as if they come from another country: Shah Bikem Pasha, Apakhhan Azem Pasha, Turdi Hojam, Borhandin Hojam. Kashgar is China’s westernmost city; the distance to Tashkent, Kabul or Islamabad is considerably less than to Beijing or Shanghai.

  The tomb marked “Iparhan” is hardly visible, far back on the right in the third row, draped with an orange silk cloth with a red flower attached. There is much debate about whether the tomb really contains the mortal remains of the Fragrant Concubine. According to legend, after a three-year honorary procession traversing the country, her body was brought back to Kashgar. Many historians assume she was simply buried in Peking.

  Centuries after the death of Iparhan, Xinjiang is still a region about which diverse tales circulate, depending on to whom you are speaking. Having said that, in Xinjiang it is almost impossible to ask the Uyghurs themselves. All contact with foreigners arouses suspicion. The fear of being sent to a “reeducation” camp forces the people to be extremely cautious.

  So I arrive with very low expectations of having open discussions. I won’t be spending the night with local hosts and won’t be pushing people to talk to me. Also, just to be safe, I have deleted my Facebook and Twitter apps because the authorities sometimes check to see what people have on their cell phones.

  In the cab from the mausoleum to downtown there is a small monitor next to the rearview mirror from which, at first, solemn choir and string music is audible and a Chinese flag can be seen fluttering in the wind. Then comes a video of a Mandarin language course in a classroom. A teacher stands in front of a blackboard and adult students repeat in unison the sentence she has written on the board: “Zhi shi wo de pengyou, renshi ni wo hen gaoxing”—“That is my friend, I am very pleased to meet you.” The cab driver is probably not learning the language because he wants to but out of fear of landing in a camp if he doesn’t.

  In the old part of town, I meet Mei Li at a kebab restaurant. The “old” part of town is a bit misleading because everything here has been newly constructed: row upon row of three-story concrete houses with sand-colored plaster facades made to imitate the look of old clay buildings. The numerous police stations are also housed in traditional-looking buildings. A number of mosque doors are sealed with padlocks, many places of worship closed. Instead, lots of walls are decorated with panels of quotations from the Kutadgu Bilig, an anthology of aphorisms from an eighth-century sage. The quotes that have been chosen sound like Chinese propaganda—most of them are about staying on the straight and narrow and avoiding bad people. Visitors to the old town have to pass checkpoints, and Uyghurs have to show their passports.

  I contacted Mei Li through the Couchsurfing website. She is twenty-six and Han Chinese but born and brought up in Xinjiang. She spent a year studying in Shanghai but, one after the other, her relatives called her begging her to return. She gave in to the family pressure and now works as an elementary school teacher. When she talks about the Uyghurs, it sounds as though she is talking about naughty children; maybe it has something to do with her profession.

  “They are stubborn, always causing trouble,” says Mei Li. “And it’s difficult to communicate with them.”

  “Why?”

  “No education. Most of them quit school after junior high, and then get simple jobs—street cleaners, bus drivers or security guards—because they don’t like learning.”

  “You have no Uyghur colleagues at school?”

  “Yes, we do. I was on vacation in Malaysia with one of them. On our return, she was questioned by the police. They wanted to put her in a camp. When she said she works as a teacher, she was spared. But they arrested her uncle just because he was in Saudi Arabia a couple of years ago, in that big temple for Muslims.”

  “You mean Mecca?”

  “Yes, exactly, Mecca.”

  It doesn’t take much to be a suspect in Xinjiang. People have been arrested just because the clock in their living room wasn’t set to Beijing time but two hours earlier, the unofficial time in Xinjiang.

  “They check all cell phones. If you chat with someone about questions of Islamic faith or use a prayer app, then you are sent to a camp,” Mei Li says.

  “And how long do people normally have to stay there?”

  “Nobody knows. Many months. Only people who pass a test can leave.”

  “What kind of test?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody knows.”

 

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