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Posted on January 10, 2003
An American Engineer on the Silk Road -- China
This genleman is a 60s-something American who teaches engineers to use high-end surveying equipment. His work took him often to remote Northwestern China in the early 1980s. This oral history recounts that experience. And here's a great piece from the Economist on Mongolia, just East of but very similar to Urumqi's Xinjiang Uygur province, and a photo of Urumuchi (or Urumqi) commuters and great Turkestan travelogues here and here ...-- J.B.
(points to a National Geographic photo in a magazine on the table) This Mongolian with his slow cap, and his pipe, whatever it's called. They are very gentle, very kind people. Until you make them mad. Then they are probably the scariest warriors on earth. I've seen them get mad.
A bunch of surveyors came to Urumqi for me to train them on survey equipment. It took awhile to establish communications with them because they are stone faced, with a slight smile when they have a pipe. But this fellow is a dead ringer for the fellow who lit his camp stove in the middle of a Bulkan Bulgarian airlines jet, when I was on my way from somewhere to Bulgaria, back in the 80s.
They almost threw him off the airplane. I mean, this is not good sport on an airline in flight. The jet is a Russian Tupolev, sort of like flying in a 727 with the back door open. Its cold, it's noisy; when this happened it was very scary. They did everything but murder him on the plane. They turned it off with a fire extinguisher, then they about turned him off with some clubs. When they got him subdued, boy did that fellow turn into a fighter ...
The anger came in their frustration with themselves trying to learn a technology that was way beyond anything they'd ever dreamed. Most of them spoke three or four languages. If you were very very lucky as a technical instructor, somebody in the room spoke English. In China, they were pretty careful to assign a baby-sitter to you when you travelled in-countyryback in the '80s. This baby-sitter was your interpreter, your guard if you will, your guide, although this is not a totally accurate term..
Urumuchi is on the old Silk Road, in Northwestern China, west of Mongolia, southwest of Russian/Chinese border, up in the very rich oil fields, which was the interest in using the equipment that I was teaching them to use. It's fairly flat, like the Russian steppes, you have a mountain range here, a mountain range there, and maybe 1500 miles of flat in between, and it's high desert.
The strongest memories I have were being helpful to people who truly want to learn. These are top people in their field in the country. For the Chinese at the time, it was a huge effort. Just to stop them in their activities. Some of them travelled by truck, some by yak; I had one ride across Mongolia on a Yak with a piece of equipment he'd wanted fixed when I was in a hotel in Beijing after I completed a trip. So I fixed it. He took the train back, saddled up his Yak, and headed across Mongolia.
The entertainment basically consisted of banquets. This was the greatest entertainment that any of them could enjoy. We'd have 15, maybe 20 people gathered around round tables in the big dining room. The gurney the food in on big lazy susan-type trays, so everyone can have some. You serve yourself. The supply of alcohol is endless. They had excellent Chinese beer. The most dangerous of all the alcohols was a clear, something called 'mahl-thai'. It's not something you forget once you wake up from when the train drives through. When you drink mahl thai and beer you're in for one whale of a ride and so these parties got real jolly real fast and they tended to stay that way for hours. As we got fairly well into the process of getting blasted, they started to teach me Chinese. (talks about numbers, greetings, words which can't be repeated here ...) It was great fun. We were able to share knowledge with each other, and it just inspired us all to keep going, so we kept having banquets.
A lot of lamb. The beef tended to be stringy. Fish, when they had it, was served as a whole fish, which you picked at with sticks. Fresh water fish. More like the fish we caught in Lake Michigan when I was a boy, trout, perch, white fish. Vegetables, potatos, very good sweet potatos, beans. We didn't see any leafy vegetables. Rice of course.
One of the things that was a little spooky was the way I was served lunch. This was all Chinese army. Two dining rooms, one for the students and everybody else on the base, and one for me. So I would go into a separate room, and they would serve the food alone. What I didn't eat I think they kept and served the next day. So I kept seeing things again. But it was good. It was satisfying.
They would always have a guest hotel of some kind. (There's a cylindrical silver Holiday Inn, now -- ed.)The first trip to Urumuchi, they were just building it, and I had at one point been completely lost by the Chinese government and they were panicking. I kept Beijing airport open all night one night. I just sat down on my equipment cases and said "i'm not moving until we find my baby-sitter". The fellow that was supposed to meet me disconnected for some reason. They didn't know what to do, so they finally found an english-speaking executive or Pan Am or United, and he got me a room.
The Chinese may seem to move with the speed of a herd of angry turtles, but they do move. When they want to do something, they will do it.
The first time I arrived at the guest hotel, it was just being built and they put me up in one wing of it. I was the only person there, again, Charlie Solo. As I had just fallen asleep there was a big earthquake, and this hotel started falling down. I mean, really falling down. I got the heck out of there, it was like 10 degrees above zero outside,so I struggled into my arctic clothing as fast as I could. The people who were running the hotel didn't even know I was there. They had no record of anybody ever having stayed there as a guest, because it was so new.
They would send you to the far corners of the planet and expect you to get off the plane and work, and you just can't.
I went outside the building and walked around to see if it was going to completely cave in on itself, and found a worker, and he thought I was an apparition from hell. It's like the time I woke up inside a Weasel up outside Thule, Greenland just before we went up on the cap and we'd had a huge snowstorm overnight, and I sat up and I was just covered with snow inside this Weasel just as some guy came to open the door of the Weasel to see if there was someone alive in there, and I sat up and I looked at him and I had frost all over my face and he screamed and stumbled out of there...
The issue that I had noted about the Chinese is that they will put whatever effort they need to put in as individuals to learn things. They will ask ... I learned a great way to work with them. At the beginning of every class, I would say to them through the interpretor, I know that you are not used to asking questions. But if I say something you do not understand, please, ask me. And I will say it another way.
Boy, was that right. They needed a mutual respect and permission, you know, that's part of honoring, in classes like that. American students generally are, not willing to put out that effort. Nor are there teachers. From what I've seen. And, I've had a pretty good successful career of this sort of thing because I do it that way. And I would recommend it to anyone.
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