In 2009, Uighur and Han took to the streets, fighting each other with iron pipes and meat cleavers. More than one hundred people died, and almost two thousand were wounded.
“You see that place?” asked my translator, whom I nicknamed Lil. She was a local girl who happened to be studying English at the university in Shanghai. When she heard about Gobi, she signed up, and right from the start I connected with her.
We had hit traffic and were crawling past a wide patch of open ground bordered by razor-wire fence and guarded by soldiers holding automatic weapons at the entrance. The soldiers were carefully watching people as they lined up to pass through an airport scanner. To me, it looked like a military facility.
“That’s a park,” Lil told me. “Have you been to one of the train stations here?”
“Oh yeah,” I smiled. “That was fun trying to get through. What are there, two layers of security to go through?”
“Three,” said Lil. “Two years ago Uighur separatists launched an attack. They used knives and set off bombs. They killed three and injured seventy-nine. Then, a few weeks later, they killed thirty-one and wounded ninety at a market.”
In the wake of the 2009 violence, the Chinese authorities installed thousands of high-definition closed-circuit TV cameras. And when the knife attacks, bombings, and riots resumed a few years later, they installed even more, as well as putting up scanners and miles of razor wire and flooding the streets with heavily armed soldiers.
Lil pointed out a new police station that was being built on a tiny scrap of land, then another identical one under construction farther down the road. “This month we have a new Communist Party secretary. He was the top official in Tibet, so he knows how to manage ethnic tension. All these new police stations and security checks are thanks to him.”
I didn’t think Lil was being sarcastic, but I couldn’t be sure. As she continued talking, I got the sense that she thought little of the Uighur people.
“When Communist forces arrived in the Xinjiang region sixty years ago, Chairman Mao put the clock forward permanently. He wanted every region to be on the same time as Beijing. But Uighur people resisted, and their restaurants and mosques still run two hours behind. When Han Chinese wake up and start work, most Uighur are still asleep. We’re like two different families living in the same house.”
It was all very interesting, but I hadn’t slept on the flights. All I wanted to do was get to my hotel and hibernate for a few hours.
Lil said there wasn’t time for the hotel.
“Lu Xin wants you to meet the team. They spend the afternoons looking in the streets around where Gobi went missing and handing out posters. We’ll take you to the hotel later.”
Ever since I’d heard about Gobi’s disappearance, I’d been frustrated at what seemed to be a lack of action, so I couldn’t complain now.
“All right,” I said, as we pulled up at a traffic light alongside an armoured vehicle packing enough firepower to take down a bank. “Let’s do it.”
When we parked at the top of a residential street and I finally saw the area where Gobi had gone missing, my heart sank. Blocks of flats eight or ten storeys high lined the street. Traffic surged along the main road behind us, and in the near distance I could see an area of scrubland that looked like it led all the way off to a series of mountains in the distance. Not only was the area densely packed with people and dangerous traffic, but if Gobi had decided to head for familiar territory and run off in the direction of the mountains, she could be miles and miles away. But if she’d stayed in the three-to five-mile radius as Chris had suggested, we’d have to knock on thousands upon thousands of doors.
I’d not talked to Lu Xin much in the car, but as I stared about, she stood beside me and smiled. She started talking, and I looked to Lil for help.
“She is telling you about when she lost her dog. She says that she felt just like you do now. She also says that Gobi is out there. She knows it, and she says that together we will find her.”
I thanked her for her kindness, although I couldn’t share her optimism. The city was even bigger than I remembered, and one look was enough to tell me that the area that Nurali lived in was full of places a dog could go missing. If Gobi was injured and had found somewhere safe to hide, or if she was being kept against her will, we’d never find her.
Lu Xin and Lil were deep in conversation as they led the way down the street. I followed on behind with the rest of the search team: a handful of people about my age, mainly women, all clutching posters and smiling eagerly at me. I nodded back and said nee-how a few times, but conversation was limited. I didn’t mind so much. Somehow the prospect of finally being able to walk the streets and put up some posters—to actually do something for once—made me feel better.
We turned a corner, and I saw my first stray dog of the day. It was bigger than Gobi and looked more like a Labrador than a terrier, with teats hanging low on the ground, like a sow.
“Gobi?” queried one of the ladies next to me. She was wearing a white lab coat and clutching a stack of posters; she smiled and nodded eagerly as I stared back at her. “Gobi?” she asked again.
“What? Oh no. Not Gobi,” I said. I pointed to the pictures of Gobi on the poster. “Gobi small. Not big.”
The woman smiled back and nodded with even more enthusiasm.
I felt the last ounce of hope evaporate like steam.
We spent the rest of the afternoon walking, putting up posters, and trying to calm down the woman in the white coat—who Lil told me was a doctor of Chinese medicine—whenever she saw a dog of any kind.
We must have looked like a strange collection of freaks as we followed behind Lu Xin and Lil—the sensible, normal-looking ones. There was me, the only non-Chinese I’d seen since leaving the airport, standing a foot taller than anyone else, looking worried and sad. Alongside me was Mae-Lin, a particularly glamorous woman (a hairdresser, apparently) who carried herself like a 1950s movie star and was accompanied by a poodle with blue dye on its ears and a summer skirt around its waist. Then there was the woman whom I nicknamed “the doctor”, with her perpetual smile and eager cries of “Gobi? Gobi?” which she shouted as she ran off down random alleys and around the back of blocks of flats. When the strays got close, the doctor would reach into her pocket and pull out some treats.
It was obvious that all of them loved dogs, and as we walked and talked with Lil, I learned why.
“Stray dogs are a problem in China,” she said, translating for Lu Xin. “Some cities will round them up and kill them. That’s how they get into the meat trade. But that doesn’t happen here—at least, not in public. Most Uighur think dogs are unclean, and there’s no way they would have them as a pet in their house, let alone eat them.