Sympathy for the Uighurs

They are around in Shanghai. They cook meat sticks on the charcoal barbecue, sell raisins and dried fruits, try to push you into buying a slice of their sweeties or whole skins of wild foxes. Most of us don't pay much attention for these people that definitely do not look like Han Chinese, and barely speak Chinese anyway. The only time we interact with them is generally around 2 am, when the late night make the smell of grilled meet impossible to ignore. They grill a few meat sticks for us, and we forget them in the night. Most of them are Uighur people, coming from the faraway province of XinJiang.
Like many of the foreigners living in Shanghai, I have heard Xinjiang a lot and I wanted to go there for a long time, so I spent my October holiday there. Ulumuqi was the first shock. In the middle of an uninteresting Chinese city, stands a large Muslim style shopping center... with a Carrefour supermarket in the middle. Walk the street behind, and China disappears for a crowd of central Asian faces, smells and sound. People barely speak Chinese, and prefer broken English to address foreigners. My preferred place was a small square with lot's old guy playing chess under the trees and a supermarket full of products imported from Turkey. This was just the very first time when I had to ironically remind myself that I am in China... otherwise I may simply forget it.
Turpan is another shock altogether. Apart from the People Square and the modern Chinese city, the rest of seems much closer to Tehran or Istanbul than... Beijing. Raisins dry in red brick houses. The muezzin calls for pray several times a day and the most dishes are made of potato and lamb. The deeper you go in Xinjiang, the more you live China behind you. Going to markets in small towns like Yarkan or Markit is just like walking on a market in the middle East or North Africa. Donkey carts are nearly the only available vehicle and women wear various kind of the Islamic veil. By looking around and talking to the local one quickly realize that the local law applied is the Islamic sharia more than anything else.
XinJiang feels like really far from the rest of China, and not only because of the distance. Most people there come from "ethnic minorities" and what you see around does sound, taste,feel and smell very different from the China I am used to.
It's touching to see the proud lords of the desert and mountains of XinJiang province in Shanghai. So far away from their homeland, trying to make a few Yuan selling things but still bringing with them the sun of their province. Now that I have been to their homeland, I appreciate them even more.They bring a lot of colors, sounds and tastes to our all-too-modern and formatted cities. As Shanghai is becoming a world city, I hope they will find a better place here.