My night flight from Chengdu to Urumqi is on a Russian-built plane, roughly the same displacement as a 737. But legroom is lacking, and I stand up towards the end of the flight to save myself from constrained knees. The hostesses on the plane are clearly unfamiliar with Westerners, and eye me as if I'm some strange organism. With the exception of the hostesses, almost everybody on this flight is a male, and most of these guys are Chinese, not so many Turkmen. This is one thing about communist China the uninformed are liable to overlook: while there have been female doctors in China for years, the Communist cadres are still loaded with male bosses, and much as with the Western business world, women are generally dissuaded from ascending to independent positions of authority, wealth and power.

Arriving in Urumqi, a grinning Uigur cabby waits for me by the gate and whisks me straight to the town. But the female clerk in the hotel seems annoyed by me. When faced with chilly receptionists in China - wonders why are they mean like this? It's late at night and she wants a break. I suspect that many individuals in China feel stuck in their places, with little chance for maneuvering about into some new situation, assigned as they are by a fateful decree from heaven: "Thou shalt be a receptionist until death, or until you experience a miracle capable of rising above the state's great unquestionable wisdom." Nobody loves the state in China, but the people have been kept well-practiced in the motions they've had to repeat regularly about having faith in the State's great virtues. So, Chinese communism is basically a lot of memory work - much like having to recite some incomprehensible Old English in high school. Some say that the society evolves positively, with the rule of law gradually coming to the fore. Perhaps, but with it also comes along a vast, socially stratified technocratic machine...

While I sign in, enter three nocturnal wraiths: two Americans and one Japanese, chin stubble growing rife, their expressions weary. All have fallen into the last stage of exhaustion when day and night, even impatience, are forgotten. I think to myself that these guys have just come through some misadventure, and they are more than merely exhausted, exactly as if they have lived through a crime, or perhaps, had to pull one off, in order to reach Urumqi ...because... they say nothing. Experience and the black dirt under their skin silences them. Perhaps they have just come across the Taklamakan Desert... A bitterly hot simoom wind seems still to numb their hasty heels. We go to our separate rooms, and remain unknown to one another.

In the Western world, the Taklamakan Desert is not so well known as the Gobi. The Gobi lies in a plain much further east and forms the corridor into Gansu province. But here, below Urumqi's mountains, lies a big oval depression called the Tarim Basin. This big bowl holds the Taklamakan Desert, one of the world's largest, most formidably dry and hot deserts; it is made of nothing but sand-dunes with few green spots, except along the perimeters. Arrayed about the desert's edge are Xinjiang's oldest and biggest towns, like Kashgar and Hotan.

Tonight, I'm so weary tonight. Taking off my clothes, all I can think of are women and their temperatures. The young women of China seem either cold and mean - or youthful, warm and open to suggestions. Most Chinese women are truly gentle creatures at heart. The fascinating thing is that some women - whether white, blue or red skin - they still want me. This is funny because my prospects, and my body, remain pretty thin. Nobody wants my work. But, I write anyway. You don't know how I see myself: I feel much less verbally witty than I used to be, unless ignited by that rare sense of mutually ingratiating camaraderie. Sometimes that warmth still happens at home with best friends. It happens travelling, if you meet a kindred spirit in need of speech. But women may want you for reasons besides wit. Maybe all men are attractive if the woman can appreciate the balance of your heart and head.

Why do I have the impression that the younger people of China are more pleasant? Older and middle-aged do smile too, but these folks are often likely to give you this look of certainty, as if they believe you're lost. Perhaps the older ones covet your youth, your mobility, and they only wish to be less embittered by the idiocy of their history - an experience you and I can never ever understand. Actually, some Chinese adults are very sympathetic to those who wander: perhaps they sense, with a pinch of irony, that we Westerners are truly lost - spoiled refugees from the "burden" of our freedom. Who knows better that feeling of not belonging anywhere but us, weary travellers in foreign countries, far away from our forgotten homes? Perhaps the need to lose our memory explains why we travel so far.

The traveller is afflicted with forgetfulness of the past and that relaxes us. All the anxieties of routine strife are submerged in a flurry of novel impressions. Away from home, time stretches out and one week seems forever. I think we travel only to escape boredom. Many travellers claim to be in search of themselves. I won't argue with these popular philosophers and their pocket-book lingo: I already know they damn the man who refuses to "think positively" and "compete aggressively but with a smile." But it doesn't matter much what people think about you. As one Frenchman writer has said: to inflate ourselves, we belittle others.

...When I wake up the next day, an aging Japanese man moves into my room. He's babbling about his love of trains, very amiable. There are people everywhere in these cheap hotels. Too many people! How long till I can get to the wilderness!? The Japanese guy is a gentleman, though, and all his thoughts involve solving one mystery, "A toilet problem." This translates into curing himself of the shits. I haven't got them.

The city of Urumqi seems both as old and new, and as half-ordered, as many others in the rest of China. I do not meet anybody to talk to here, so I go to the market alone, eating shish kebabs served by a cheerful, portly chef. Make work with a barbecue. A dagger salesman accosts me as I pause momentarily to glance at his shiny steel blades. Gripping my sleeve, he almost stabs me with his free hand when I decide not to buy one.

I eat Muslim noodles: heavy flour strings with bits of green pepper, red chilies and mutton, and it's tasty. Muslims are everywhere. These Uigur Turkmen recall swarthy, manly featured Greeks and Italians, the kind you expect to see thriving among olive groves on sunny Crete. But they really are Turkmen, and the distance from China is foreshortened by the presence of Han Chinese folk all over town. I even saw one Russian guy strolling through the market!

The big provincial museum across the street is full of mummies hundreds of years old. There I find a good map of Xinjiang and stare at silk carpets way beyond my wallet: they are so dazzling. But nobody to talk to. Huge life-size models of desert tents, one from each of the major tribes, are set-up here, too. The ladies working at the museum ticket counter are Chinese and Uigur both, but they speak Russian to each other! Where am I?

It's raining so much. The plane to Kashgar was grounded. So, I'm lying in bed at Urumqi airport, waiting to leave... It's still pouring, and God's mind is the mirror of my sieve. This hotel costs five times more than the one in town: 20 U.S. dollars instead of four. But I'm thankful I had to pay "too much." It's the first time I've seen Russian tv. In Urumqi, many of the travel agents speak Russian. Some of those fellows are the products of marriages between Russians, Turkmen and Chinese, the offspring of proximity and entente. What's more, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan are just over the hills, and not long ago, they were both controlled by old communist Russia.

On tv, a seriously disgruntled Yeltsin speaks in a slow, deliberately formal way. He's probably talking about how hard it is to have fun in Russia today. Flipping over to the other Russian channel I get a black and white movie. Very good and very recent: it's realistic, yet wonderfully, a very black comedy about the latest in thieves. The premise involves Russian gangsters attempting to smuggle stolen gold out of the country inside cigarettes; the bad guys finally get good, and the money is saved from leaking out of the country. The last scene is a beautiful cinematic kiss between heroine and hero, and one of the very best I've ever seen! Then a news program comes on to show the Duma assembly - the men and women of Russia's central governing body; and as I watch the program I get the feeling that each individual has a particular, personal idea of what to do, and it's quite different from reality as his colleagues imagine it ought to be... Look at poor Ukraine - so many helpless folk stuck in their country gardens. Those few crooks with some leg up in government and business - since they haven't the patience to wait for a real cure nobody can figure out - they simply take what's meant for the people and run away to buy houses in Florida and California! Now, Russia and Ukraine resemble Africa more than they do Europe. Well, at least the people aren't fighting each other too much. They want change, but nobody knows how to start with nothing. Do you realize that before the great empire collapsed, half the economy of Russia was devoted to military enterprises? Those factories are all gone. But so are the ones that used to make computers and chocolate sweets...

...Whenever I think about China, I always imagine a roomful of people who don't know what to do trying to make decisions. But that image may give you the wrong impression: it's the fear of taking responsibility and acting authoritatively that cloys their blood. The average man prefers to be told what to do because that is the history of China, and the only socially safe way of life. Many Chinese people have been well-trained not to think for themselves and to fear their superiors; never act, but always check with your bosses well after the last instant for any possible action has safely passed by - that's the preferred method of Chinese disingenuity. Figuring out China doesn't really involve questions about political stances. Whether you or they are "right" or "left" - that doesn't matter either. There's no point fretting over whether or not the present leadership still believes in the old ideal politics of communism. The fact remains that the manufacture of cheap, shoddy and useless things began by accident; at first, empty forms of behavior impeded further development. This situation was hardly a product of "insufficient resources" or a "third-world economy..." People everywhere have to learn for themselves how to do something well. Imitation and duplication are always a poor beginning for those who want to become truly innovative. Because: even if you study the work of others, your work will only be superlative if it evolves into something new. Your imitative days must be followed by original efforts. It has taken the Chinese some time to realize this, and only now do we see signs of independent and foreign-funded enterprises capable of producing high quality goods. The export economy is supposed to turn into a domestic economy. But that hasn't happened yet either. Maybe it can't. The same situation goes for most other Asian countries. You won't know what I mean till you go there, friend.

The great gap between the slaving peasant farmer and the city rich continues to be the main reason so many Westerners arrive in China only to wonder why the whole society doesn't fall apart completely... It's all too easy for fatuous Western tourists to overlook the fact that most goods produced in China really are exported for cheap sale in dime-stores across America and around the world.

The Chinese are unwillingly retarded by their society and its organization. They are flustered, knowing so. It's easier to pay people to do nothing than learn how to do something new. The modern world comes to China, but not without making a god-awful mess of things. One thing you will notice about China, in stark contrast to a country like India, for example, is how effectively the state has replaced human religion, ostensibly, with political faith: most individuals may not really buy it, but the official lines are still perpetuated, and most people grow up not bothering to ask why they disbelieve in God and favor slogans about democratic communism instead... Theory replaced religion in the old communist universe. Nowadays in China, few speak their minds, except to their closest friends and lovers.

Yet, on the other hand, in the West, how many of us stop and think about how passed by are the foundations of our own beliefs? Jesus, Moses, Muhammad - they all died a long time ago: perhaps communistic ideology, which began in the West, merely represented an attempt to displace the drag of the past with ideas made of the modern day. But nowadays in the West, we see that the so-called liberal elements only pretend to encourage imagination and creativity; really, we do nothing but impose the bonds of school and rules, and so, we choose to administer to the "free imagination" by means of corporations and councils - and each imposes strict forms to act out, and to fill out. So the question must be asked: will you ever be heard if you do what you really want to do, after all? Maybe, but probably not. American magazines only publish Americans. Poor writers, who never question the regime, who pretend to be apolitical, or who appear safely to support the "rhetoric of democracy" - only these malleable mannequins get published in America; oh sure, a few authors have published critiques of civilization in America: but they aren't well-known, or are deliberately left out. As for the barthes and pynchons, the salingers and the hellers and vonneguts, they only got to publish their work after the crimes they critiqued had been committed already; preventative measures are never allowed in America. Safely ensconced in the collective promotion of past forms and dull commercial dross, the publishers in America are proud to prefer stay-at-home and naive authors writing sensationalist tripe to wise poets with real life experience. So, it's small wonder I don't get a chance to air my views. I'm just not there - involved and engaged with the all-important "system." I'm a small rustic Canadian who can't even think of any reason to go back home. I'm silenced and forbidden, by blindness, by that fat-stomached, professional lack of curiosity - that communal fear of developing aesthetic and social discernment. ...Drubbed down small into our skulls. But why and how are our sensibilities so cloyed? Because - the only thing allowed is that which gets sold, you stupid fucks! Sell! Sell everything! And nothing but! Why - why is that? You don't even know why... and you'll never ever be permitted to find out either, kiddies...

Back to China: of course, the average man and woman can be more open than you would be led to expect by the media and even what I wrote above; people who have been isolated become aware of it after awhile, and then they suddenly become curious about others from the outside; so, you will encounter many individuals who are very eager to communicate... All Chinese people are fascinated with the West. There's nothing wrong with that. It's natural - like history at play with its social and developmental inevitabilities...

Look at how all people believe in many things. We carry many dire convictions through life, but many of them we maintain simply because we haven't stopped to wonder what may really be going on... You are reluctant to buy that one? Well, let's just say care must be taken to note that what's really happening is always mingled with the energy and ideas of what men and women try to do... Most of us are sympathetic enough to feel quite blameless as we watch one another "fall into place" like a logical declension. Naturally, one hopes that Destiny is larger than grammar; but the sensation we have for being written remains, as if all character has been set down for us by others - by mothers and fathers and the cultural roots special to each of us. Having to rise above that identity is the same thing as admitting that what's really happening to make us who we are is never the same thing as what we actually want to do, especially in ourselves, as self-determinate beings separate from those exteriorized and acculturated personas of parentage, language and culture that inevitably shape all of us.

What am I really trying to say? That being honest with yourself sometimes involves lying to the world... Usually, because you must persuade yourself to do something, as a means to an end, or because other people expect you to - so you can rationalize your plan sufficiently - until your instincts and drives are subdued, fully conquered by the ready currencies of conventional wisdom; civilization may be defined as a victory over the natural physical, intellectual and even spiritual rebellion inspired by dreams and wishes for an ideal life. The ideal life is the core of imagination, and for some people, it seems possible. But if such a life can come to us, perhaps it usually feels like a gift, and seldom like a goal finally attained.

The heavy rain abates at daybreak. The new silence is effaced by the windy whir of a jet engine. My flight to Kashgar leaves at 10:00 A.M.

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