LITMIR.BIZ

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barred windows where groceries or appliances were sold, past outside stalls that sold all manner of trinkets, they encountered all manner of people, including Han and Uighur and other ethnic groups. They encountered the indigent who begged for food or money, and the well-to- do who keenly kept their distance from the rest of the souls upon the street.

      If the Cultural Revolution was an astounding change for Zhang Heng and her family, the move into Kashgar proper was no less a revelation. As Han Chinese, they comprised part of the Chinese majority of the Middle Kingdom. But in Kashgar, in western Xinjiang Province, they were simply a minority; in Kashgar, the majority of people were the Uighurs. Praying to a Muslim god, in a country that didn’t officially countenance the notion of a higher being, the Uighurs had different traditions and a way of life that was foreign to Zhang Heng and her family. Shy and reserved, a girl who made few friends on the collective farm with girls her own age, Zhang Heng made even fewer friends among the young Uighur children with whom she attended class. Complaining to her mother that other children didn’t want to play with her, complaining that she didn’t fit in, her mother reassured her that in time, she would have friends; in time, she would enjoy school; in time, the future would be a new and better world. But as time passed, and sixth grade became seventh grade, and seventh grade became eighth, she still felt as much an outsider as ever. Nor did the exciting future that her mother promised her unfold for Zhang Heng. But if she didn’t quite fit in in school or with friends in the neighborhood, the solitude that Zhang Heng endured made her strong, it made her resilient. It gave her insight into what life was all about. Already by the time she had finished middle school, Zhang Heng had seen what life in its cruelties could bring people. Seeing little but destitution about her, finding little solace in friends or family, Zhang swore that someday she would get out of China. She would get out and she would never come back.

      lthough she hated school, although she secretly despised her classmates, Zhang Heng was an exceptional student. She was an exceptional student in spite of herself. Rather than spending her free time playing with classmates, Heng scoured her textbooks, toiling over her homework. There were only one or two in her class that consistently scored higher than her on exams. Because of her scholastic achievements, she was afforded a scholarship upon graduation from high school. The scholarship paid for her four years as an undergraduate at Xinjiang University. Upon the completion of her freshman year in the college, she decided to become a nurse, and entered the nursing program. Rather than dreaming of becoming a nurse, she saw the calling as a means to an end. There would always be a need for nurses wherever she went, and perhaps one day it would safely see her out of China. At the nursing school in Urumqi, she took courses in English as did many of the other nursing students. Having started her English classes in middle school, Heng was already rather fluent in the language by the time she took it as an undergraduate. This was important, for to work overseas as a nurse, one had to be proficient in English. Though she had taken English classes since since she was an adolescent, Heng had never taken an English name. While in nursing school, she assumed the name Sarah. It was an unusual name for a Chinese girl to be taking: most of the other nursing students named themselves Kitty or Li, Iris or Cindy. Having adopted a Western name, she still preferred to be called by her given Chinese name, Heng. The irony of it was lost on her. Like the other nursing students who took English courses, she someday hoped to go to the Middle East, England, Europe, or with luck, the United States. At the time, there was a relative shortage of nurses in these countries, and with the proper credentials she might possibly work overseas. So many of the overseas jobs, though, required previous overseas experience, overseas experience working in English.

      Following graduation, to further her training, to get a little practical experience, Zhang Heng became a nurse at Urumqi Tianshan Hospital. There, she worked on the surgical floor with patients who had their gall bladders or appendixes removed, or their broken bones set. Friendship Hospital was a large hospital, one with over several hundred beds. The work was demanding. Often requiring hours of overtime that she was not compensated for, she soon wearied of work in the overcrowded, fetid, and filthy hospital.

      She had been there for little more than a year, she saw an ad in a nursing journal. The ad promised a well-paying job and good working conditions for foreign nurses – foreign nurses who could speak English – in Saudi Arabia. Though she had hoped to find similar positions in England or the United States, at the time, they were either not available or they required previous work experience overseas working in a hospital where the common language was English. The job in Saudi Arabia required no such overseas experience. Tearing the ad out of the magazine, she soon submitted her curriculum vitae to the nursing placement agency. Within a month, a letter arrived, typed in English, informing her that the job, if she still wanted it, at the King Khalid Hospital, was hers. Her salary in Riyadh would almost be three times what it was in Urumqi.

      Finally, on a particularly cold and windy day, when low, broad, dark clouds closed out the sun, and winter waged its long siege on the western highlands of Xinjiang, she boarded the flight in Urumqi that would deliver her first to Beijing where she would make connections to Riyadh. Where it had been a minus five degrees in Urumqi when she boarded her flight, it was close to forty degrees without a breeze or cloud in the sky when she stepped off the plane onto the concrete tarmac. Seeping up from the asphalt, she felt the desert heat penetrate her denim slacks and cotton blouse she wore getting off the plane. Perspiration glistened on her forehead and dampened the small of her back as she strode across the tarmac into the arrival lounge. A van from the hospital was there to pick her and two other nurses – nurses she had never met – up and take them back to the hospital campus where their apartments were. Arriving at the hospital compound, she found herself assigned to a bedroom with a girl of similar age from Xi’an. Graceful, cheerful, tall and out-going – many of the things that Zhang Heng wasn’t – the nurse’s name was Peng Peng. Despite, or because of, their many differences, they soon became close friends. The day after her arrival in Riyadh, Peng Peng took her shopping for new clothes. At the top of the list was a burka. On the hospital compound the nurses were free to wear any clothes they desired; in Riyadh, however, they had to wear a burka. Whether it was the law or simply the custom, none of the nurses had ever tried going into the city without wearing one. Feeling like she looked like a Halloween witch, Zhang Heng wore her burka as little as possible. Caring little for the restrictions imposed by interacting with the Saudis in the city, caring little to know any of the Saudis except those with whom she worked, Zhang Heng spent most of her time on the hospital compound when she wasn’t working. Almost all the nurses at the hospital were foreigners, many of them being from China or southeast Asia. With Peng Peng she spent hours together on their time off, playing cards, reading young women’s magazines, talking about boys, gossiping about the other nurses, and swimming in the hospital pool. At the pool, they could wear Western-style bathing suits and not worry about offending any of religious customs of their Muslim hosts.

      Working on the medical floor of the hospital, Zhang Heng took care of patients with diabetes and heart and lung disease and cancer. She preferred taking care of medical patients to taking care of surgical patients like she had in the hospital in Urumqi. She performed their blood draws; she bathed and dressed them in their hospital gowns; she doled out their medications; she cleaned their bedpans. Months became years.

      Though already proficient in English, her command of the language steadily improved with time. If she missed her family, she didn’t miss China.

      t the same time, though she didn’t miss China, she didn’t care for the Middle East. Her nursing duties were far easier than they had been in Urumqi, but she had no desire to stay for more than a few years. The customs, the religion, the people were just too foreign to her. She continued to peruse the nursing journal ads looking for work in England or the United States.

      The impetus that finally prompted her to leave Saudi Arabia and return to China was no less than a family cataclysm. It occurred when her father became ill. Although always a stout and hard-working fellow, Zhang Bo had the misfortune of contracting hepatitis when he was born. That stroke of bad luck he shared with one in ten of all Chinese. Eventually the hepatitis turned to cirrhosis, and the cirrhosis turned to liver cancer. Zhang Heng’s father retired from his job at the factory at the relatively young age of forty-nine. When she arrived back in Kashgar, after two and a half years in Saudi Arabia, Zhang Bo was just a jaundiced stick figure with a protuberant belly. The whites

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