Incredible generosity, or just really poor judgment of character?

So this Uyghur family adopted me while I was in Xinjiang.

They invited me into their home, fed me, showed me around their hometown and their family's houses.


Why did they do this? I have no idea.

But it was a fantastic way to see the region, to get to know the local culture and to be treated wonderfully by astonishingly (foolishly) kind people who didn't seem to mind that my knowledge of their language was limited to "Thank you," "Hello," "Yes/No" and "Where is the bus station?" (for reasons I needn't expound upon, I also picked up "You are very crazy").


Luckily for me, one of the family's daughters is majoring in English in university and translated for me as I gawped and muttered gratefully and cluelessly around their home. She also showed me around Gulja/Yining, where she and most of her family live (her extended family, though, is scattered around much of the province). It's a city she has seen change drastically since her childhood--some changes she likes, and some that make her visibly uneasy.

I also got to attend a dinner celebrating the end of Ramadan at the family matriarch's house just outside Gulja, which was incredible. The woman lives in a traditional Uyghur house, with a courtyard housing cows and a fruit tree; two of her children and their families live nearby--her daughter's house across the street is piled high with corn left out to dry.


This family had lived in Xinjiang for generations, and could trace their family back hundreds of years. They seemed more culturally than religiously observant, but were staunch defenders of their own language and identity, and feared its assimilation. At the same time, they talked about wanting to go abroad or to Beijing or Shanghai to study, work or travel, and wanted Xinjiang to get the same economic benefits as the rest of the country.


They also see a disconcertingly clear divide between Chinese ethnic groups, which seems to be a trend everywhere I go: Even in cosmopolitan Shanghai, people differentiate between other Chinese based on ethnicity and dialect, which indicates their province of origin. It isn't a big deal in most cases, but in Xinjiang, especially, there seems to be a trust issue when it comes to interactions with people not of one's own origins.





In a weird way, being abysmally foreign actually helps in terms of getting people to trust me, because I'm so idiotically clued-out as to be pleasantly harmless.

Or maybe I just tell myself that to make myself feel better.