The Backstreets: A Novel from Xinjiang
Perhat Tursun, Translated by Darren Byler and Anonymous
Columbia University Press: 2022
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The main character in Perhat Tursun’s The Backstreets is a mathematics major obsessed with numbers—which he uses to try to make sense of his life—who arrives in Urumqi to take on a temporary office job. He is nameless. That doesn’t bother me; I don’t find it necessary to know his name, because he represents all the Uyghur youth who struggle to build a life in Urumqi after graduating from university. It’s not easy for young Uyghurs to find employment in the capital of East Turkistan, especially in recent years—many positions are openly reserved for Han Chinese applicants, subjecting Uyghurs to blatant discrimination in their own homeland.

Tursun conveys this sense of alienation in a sentence, repeated multiple times in his novel: “I don’t know anyone in this strange city, so it’s impossible for me to be friends or enemies with anyone.” It is this sentence, accompanied by different symbols, that demarcates the chapters of the book. The setting is largely in Urumqi, with some scenes in Beijing, but the protagonist fits in neither—he does not feel like he belongs in the Chinese capital, but is lonely in East Turkistan too. He struggles to find accommodation in Urumqi. Although the city has always attracted Uyghur graduates, life there has been made increasingly impossible by government regulations preventing Uyghurs not born in the city from renting or buying houses, even while Han Chinese are welcomed to move in. With nowhere to call his own, the young man is left to wander the streets in search of a place he can rest and sleep.

The Backstreets took the author twenty-five years to finish, almost as if he was waiting for the repression of the Uyghurs to come to an end before putting down his pen. Three years after he finally completed his revisions of the volume, Tursun himself was sucked into the horrors faced by hundreds of thousands of other Uyghurs: in 2018, he became a victim of enforced disappearance. It is believed that he has been sentenced to sixteen years in prison. The anonymous translator who worked with the scholar Darren Byler on the English translation has also been detained. With the two pulled into the dystopian system built by the Chinese state to monitor, control and punish Uyghurs in East Turkistan, Byler decided it was time to publish their work.

• Tags: China, Issue 31, Muyesser Abdul’ehed, Perhat Tursun, Uyghur