A market in Turpan.

I spent two weeks in August 2007 backpacking around Xinjiang, the far western Chinese province that covers the same area as Western Europe. Xinjiang is home to the Uighur people, who are Muslim, speak a Turkic language, and have more in common with Central Asians than Han Chinese. They also happen to make really delicious food. Although they are persecuted much like the Tibetans, their plight—including that of several fruit sellers who are still detained at Gitmo as part of the “War on Terrorism”—receives only a fraction of the attention.

Although this story takes place in Urumqi, the provincial capital of Xinjaing, it does not concern the Uighurs or their plight. Much like St. Petersburg, which is said to be the most European of cities (even though it is, arguably, not in Europe), Urumqi is the most Chinese of cities even though it’s in the homeland of another people. Nondescript off-white apartment buildings and office towers dominate the city and with the exception of the incredibly imposing internal security building downtown, the city could be plopped down in Hunan or Hubei and no one would notice.

On one particularly hot day in Urumqi, I decided to head to a small, hole-in-the-wall dumpling house near the center of the city for lunch. I ordered noodle soup and baozi stuffed with pork and veggies. As my food came, an old, half-drunk Han Chinese man sitting at the table next to me struck up a conversation. As he peered out from over his soup, he began recounting his struggles during the Great Leap Forward.

“When I was young, we didn’t have any meat to eat. People would literally take the bone out of my bowl as I tried to eat it. It was a struggle to survive.” As he was talking, he noticed that two young Chinese nearby were snickering at him. They seemed more interested in the most recent fashion craze than learning from their elders—both had crazy, only-in-China dos, as well as jeans with all sorts of bling on them. “You see these kids,” he said, “they don’t give a damn about the past. They don’t understand what Mao did, nor do they really care. They are only focused on the making money.”

The author at Kanas Lake, near the Russian and Kazakh Border.

Throughout our conversation, I continued to eat the baozi, even though they tasted a little off. Sure enough, by the time night fell, I was violently ill. Instead of finishing my trip off with a few days in Kashgar, I went to the Urumqi hospital, where I was forced to sit in one of 250 recliners pointed towards a TV showing a ridiculously corny sitcom about how smart Mao was as an IV slowly replaced my fluids. It was not the way I had envisioned my three month odyssey ending, but so it goes.

As I sat in that hospital and reflected on my conversation in the dumpling house, I thought about how quickly China was changing—how it was a society hellbent on developing, carving a new future, and forgetting the recent past (the ancient, 5,000 years of “glorious history” were something that people seemed to hold on to). I instinctively wanted to compare this to the U.S., where we confront the dark episodes in our history like slavery, Jim Crowism, Japanese internment, etc. Yet I now realize that drawing this kind of distinction between the two countries was far too simplistic.

In reality, the U.S. is a country with an incredibly short attention span that doesn’t like to look its problems in the eye. We brush things under the rug. We dissemble. We don’t make eye contact with homeless people on the street.

For me, the problem with this is that it undermines our ability to be honest with ourselves. The old man in the dumpling house was trying to teach his young countrymen a lesson, and they ignored him. Maybe it was because he was old, or wearing peasant garb, or because he was half-drunk. Whatever the reason, they ignored him. And it’s hard to gain a new perspective, and wisdom, if we ignore the people around us who have something valuable to share.

J.R. Siegel and Allison Lipps are Boston-based adventurers who met in China. Read this piece and others at The Adventures of Mumpus and Grumpus.

The neighbors who give us roaches.

In daily life in China I am constantly reminded that, no matter how long I’ve lived here or how diligently I study the language, I am in China’s house, and the house always wins. I’m also reminded of this in my interactions with the locals. By far the most frustrating and masochistic relationship I endure in China is that with my landlord.

She disliked me and my roommate from the start. First she refused to rent to us, then refused to negotiate on the price or necessary repairs prior to us moving in. Plus, we had made the rookie mistake of tipping our hand—she knew we wanted the house badly, and therefore called the shots. She had stated from the start: foreigners are messy and loud and she wanted no part of it. Looking around at the dimly-lit kitchens belonging to our neighbors, meat hanging from the windows, walls crawling with cockroaches, it was hard to imagine what mess we could possibly contribute.

We finally settled on a deal. She would continue to hate us but would rent us the house as-is, filthy, in desperate need of repairs, and without a single piece of furniture inside.

My roommate and I signed up for this huge undertaking simply because we had so naively fallen in love with the house. It was an old lane building with antique-looking windows and wood floors—exactly the kind of hidden treasure that foreigners seek out and the locals want to demolish. It was drafty, crumbling, impossible to keep in working order, and completely charming. The repairs needed were constant. Frozen pipes, scorched fuses, broken toilets, and peeling walls were all things that I grew accustomed to encounter at least once a week. There was a silent understanding that whatever help we needed, our landlord would most certainly not provide.

The only other source of inconsistent, unreliable help in our arsenal was our real estate agent. I tap danced between the two women, thinking that surely if I got on one of their good sides, the other would soon follow. Phone calls placed to either woman only resulted in being told, “Why are you calling me? Call her.” After months of asking nicely and speaking to them only in a high-pitched friendly voice, I finally got wise to the Chinese way of doing things and bought the real estate lady a gift.

I had her attention at last. She promptly placed a phone call to the landlord to help me get reimbursed for some repairs I had paid for myself. Not yet being used to the very blunt manner in which Chinese people will often address other, I was appalled to hear my real estate lady screaming at the landlord over the phone: “How are you so dumb? As you get older you just get more and more stupid!” The shouting continued for several minutes until apparently an agreement was reached. Hanging up the phone, the real estate lady once again lowered her voice to speak with me, “Ah, that landlord is so cute. Really adorable.”

As years went on the landlord grew to like me. She even made a trip to the house to help with repairs and, seeing what we had done with the place, seemed grateful for the serious upgrade. I felt secure in our relationship and no longer feared that she would evict me on a whim. Recently, when the power went out in our house, I felt confident that I could call the landlord and have her bring her trusted repairman back around. When I told her of our predicament, she burst out laughing. When her laughter subsided, I asked again what she thought we should do. “Yeah…” she replied, “I can’t help you with that. Call the real estate lady.”

Mr. Ye was born into a wealthy, prominent family in a small city in the middle of the Shan State, which is located in Eastern Myanmar, or Burma as it was then known. After finishing high school, he enrolled in university in Rangoon, the nation’s capital. Almost immediately after he arrived in Rangoon, Mr. Ye met, fell madly in love with, and successfully courted a local nurse. Too preoccupied with his new love to concern himself with his studies, he quit school and returned home with his bride-to-be. Upon returning home, he was not greeted with the congratulations he’d expected, but, rather, the wrath of a father who believed that his son was wasting his talent and ruining his future. His father’s disapproval of the union gradually dissipated and abruptly ended in 1962, the year the military re-seized control of the government and began to nationalize (read: take) land, houses, businesses, and farms throughout the country. With the exception of one of the two houses Mr. Ye’s father owned—the very house in which Mr. Ye, his wife, his son, his daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren still reside—and a gold ring with a large ruby and seven precious stones that Mr. Ye wears to this day, the family lost everything. When the government seized his house, Mr. Ye’s father went into a state of shock from which he never recovered—he spent the last ten years of his life as an invalid, paralyzed and unable to move or speak.

In his youth, Mr. Ye was a great tennis player; he claimed to be the best player in his city, which had a population of roughly 20,000. He further boasted that, because he was such a good player, he was “allowed to play at the Shan Palace, a great honor.” Today, Mr. Ye’s tennis and ping pong skills give him access to something extremely rare in Myanmar—a nonstop supply of electricity. Because he lives across the street from a General with whom he plays tennis and ping pong, the General provides Mr. Ye’s house with electricity from a backyard generator.

For the past nine years Mr. Ye has worked as a trekking guide. Since he spoke very little English when he began leading trips, the insights he provided his clients into the local flora, fauna, and culture were limited at best. Now he speaks near-fluent English and takes most travelers on a two-day, one-night trip up and down a mountain. The headman of a hill tribe with a population of roughly 700 provides travelers with three meals and a night’s accommodation for under $3. The village headman, who owns a hundred-acre farm with seven horses—one for each of his children—is an old friend of Mr. Ye’s. Indeed, Mr. Ye and I were barely able to sit down after our 5-hour trek up the mountain in 100 degree heat before the headman offered us each a glass of moonshine—the locally produced rice wine. Since it was past noon and, therefore, not technically morning, I decide to join the headman and Mr. Ye for a few drinks. The conspicuous lack of women in the village surprised me until I realized that, with the exception of a few men who work with the oxen tilling the land, all of the farm work and child rearing is done by women—the men tend to sit around, smoke, drink, and wait for the women to return from the fields at night. Once we were good and tipsy, the headman prepared a meal, which consisted of rice, bamboo shoots, soup, and small fish that had been fried and mixed in a chili sauce. While the food was copious and edible, it seemed as if we were always eating leftovers—our lunch morphed into that night’s dinner, which then became breakfast the next morning—and new dishes were added only when another was finished.

Drinking before lunch is a bad idea when the afternoon ahead consists of trekking several hours up to, and then back down from, an even more remote village. Yet the booze didn’t seem to effect Mr. Ye as I struggled to keep up with him. Once we arrived, I was greeted by every child in the village, all of whom could only utter a single phrase in English: “bye bye.” As sweet as it is to be greeted by small Burmese children whose faces are covered with Thanakha paste (which serves as both sunscreen and make-up) yelling “bye bye,” I’m always a little on edge because every place has at least one kid who, upon seeing a foreigner, recoils and begins to cry.

Perhaps it was the second bottle of rice wine that put him over the edge, but it was not until after dinner that Mr. Ye began to talk about the government. He knew that he was risking jail time by talking to me, but he was willing because I could “tell my friends about the realities of life in Burma.” Mr. Ye detests the military regime, and guessed that “99.9 percent of the people hate this crazy government.” He continued, “People cannot survive—everything is too expensive. The price of rice has doubled in the past year and the price of an egg had increased from 1 kyat 30 years ago to 200 kyat today.”

Beyond inflation, his main gripe with the government was the discrepancy between the extravagant life led by the Army elite and the destitute poverty in which the majority of the people live. “When General Than Shwe’s [the leader of the junta] daughter was married a year ago, she was given $50 million worth of precious jewels,” he fumed. Even several of Mr. Ye’s friends, all of whom are senior military officials, admitted off-the-record that the government was an institution run for the benefit of the military, not the benefit of the people. Given the number of perks members of the Army enjoy—sending their children to special schools, 24-hour electricity, access to resorts, wealth—most Burmese do not need the corroboration of a top military official to realize that the Government is more interested in self-perpetuation than the welfare of the population.

Even though Mr. Ye makes a good living as a guide, he can barely make ends meet. But he is one of the lucky ones. Later in the evening, Mr. Ye reflected, “Although we do not pay rent, and my son and I are both trekking guides, and my wife is a private English tutor and my daughter-in-law is a Baptist Minister, we barely have enough money to feed and clothe ourselves and my two grandchildren. We barely have enough money to survive.”

“Making Ends Meet” is the second article in a series by J.R. Siegel about his trip to Myanmar.

As the cameras rolled and crowds gathered to stare at the fair-haired American with the local governmental leader, the villagers quietly whispered and joked among themselves. I found out later they were discussing how much time the encounter would take up on the local news programs that evening and if my picture would be in the paper the following day. After stumbling through his welcome speech, confirming that I was an American citizen, and lightly chastising me for not bringing any of my friends along, I was allowed to proceed into a car and travel for several hours past jeeps with large machine guns on my way to Lashio, the first city after the border in which foreigners are allowed. This was my introduction to Myanmar, a land of stunning beauty, crushing poverty, friendly people, and a strong, authoritarian military government.

Mr. Smith, (alias, as will be the case with all names) is a tall, slightly paunchy, and extremely proud man of 48. Although a lawyer by training, he currently owns a successful computer shop in a bustling city in the Shan Province. He lives in the flat above it with his wife, who was an English major but cannot speak the language, and his son. A member of the upper-middle class, he owns a scooter, a jeep, and a cell phone—all of which are signs on wealth in Myanmar, which has one of the most expensive car markets in the world and is in the midst of a period of rampant inflation. In fluent English he explained that after the military junta re-seized control of the government in 1962, “Lawyers such as myself became obsolete.” After spending an hour in his shop drinking coffee and engaging in idle chit-chat, he decided, after consulting with his wife, to invite me upstairs for dinner with his family.

I spent most of dinner talking with his impressive 10-year-old son. The boy speaks fluent English; saves his money in order to buy Harry Potter books in Yangon, which retail for $50; plays piano brilliantly; and has an insatiable thirst for knowledge about America and the West.

“Why didn’t you ride the London Eye when you were in England?” he asked.

“Too Expensive,” I replied.

“Whatever… So, do you believe in aliens?”

“Yeah, I think that there has to be something else out there.”

“Really? I don’t.”

After dinner, Mr. Smith invited me to the living room so that we could continue our discussion which, until then, had been laced with innuendo but had not dealt with politics directly. “You know that I can go to jail for talking to you,” he smiled and silently regarded me, and after he seemed sure that I wouldn’t do anything to endanger him or his family, he continued. “Without duties there can be no rights; without rights there can be no duties. If a man wishes to fix the road in this country, he will not dare to initiate construction nor will he petition the government to fix the problem. The reason is simple: he has no citizenship rights and is afraid that he will be labeled as subversive to the state if he tries to alter the status quo in any way.”

Yet he believed that the lack of political rights did not concern most Burmese people. “Since the majority of the population lives in a hand-to-mouth fashion in which it is a struggle to survive, the common man has no time to think about the government. He has no time or energy to worry about democracy—he is focused solely on his daily survival. This is part of the evil of our government.”

As we sipped from our second glass of imported Whiskey, Mr. Smith’s thoughts turned to his son, who was sitting with us, listening attentively and trying to interject when he could. “I try to give my son a good education, although it is hard to do in this country.” In his mind, a good education is composed three attributes—English, music, and golf—all of which have their roots in the colonial era.

Mr. Smith proceeded to ask his son to play something on the “piano,” which was nothing more than a Casio keyboard. As his son played a range of pieces from Mozart to the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel and Bach, his father swelled with pride. Yet for all of the pride that shown on his face, his eyes also glistened with tears. Mr. Smith knew that, despite all his labor and sacrifice, he would not be able to give his son the future he deserves in Myanmar. In fact, he consistently tells his son to go abroad, to find a better life, to fulfill his promise and leave his country behind. When asked where he wanted his son to go, he immediately responded, “America, because America is the land for dreamers.” As he once again told his son to study hard, forget about his family, and move abroad, it was obvious that saying these things to a 10-year-old child killed him inside. It killed him he could not give his son the life, opportunities, or education he deserved in the country that was his home.

J.R. Siegel lives and works in Beijing. His trip to Myanmar took place in April and May of 2007.