An outcast in Xinjiang: The Backstreets, by Perhat Tursun, reviewed

Like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, Perhat Tursun’s unnamed protagonist is an outcast. A young Uighur in an increasingly Han city (Urumchi, the capital of Xinjiang), he is alone, angry, unstable and homeless. The events of The Backstreets take place over one long night, as he looks for somewhere to stay (‘I just wanted a small space – the space a person would need in a graveyard’) or, more accurately, somewhere to belong. In this poignant and disturbing short novel, the influence of Dostoevsky and Camus, among others, is clear. It’s not meant to be comfortable reading.

Identity permeates the book in the same way that a fog forever buries Urumchi. Almost everyone the narrator meets, as he walks through the smog-filled streets, seems terrified of him. At one point, an old man passes, repeatedly muttering ‘pi’, the Mandarin for ‘chop’: ‘Chop, chop, chop, chop... chop the people from the Six Cities’ (the ancestral homeland of the Uighurs). They are not welcome here.

Tursun wrote The Backstreets years before the first internment camp appeared in Xinjiang, so the book is eerie reading for those who know how the story ends. Since 2017, hundreds of thousands of Uighurs have disappeared, either into the Chinese Communist party’s re-education camps or into incarceration proper, as Darren Byler, who translates and introduces this edition, reminds us. Those missing include Byler’s anonymous co-translator, as well as Tursun himself (now reportedly serving a 16-year jail sentence).

To the CCP, all Uighurs are potential terrorists. Our narrator reflects on the self-fulfilling power of this mindset:

“Even though I was the shyest person in the world, I wanted to destroy those fancy buildings… In others, this kind of hatred sometimes turned into action, occasionally pushing some to carry out murders and acts of violence, their depression mixed with fanaticism. Stabbing people randomly in the street came from their resentment towards the city. The thing they were stabbing wasn’t a particular person; they were stabbing the city’s rejection of their love.

Yet this novel shouldn’t be defined by ethnic strife. At its core, Tursun is examining the ‘human experience’, as he told Byler many years ago. So our protagonist also battles his resentment of city life in general and the childhood trauma dealt by his alcoholic father who victimised his mother. This abuse seems to have sexualised his view of women in a Freudian way: ‘I had intimate feelings for all women – as if women were born in this world in order to give the world love.’ Life as a persecuted minority colours the book, but Tursun breaks loose of narrow victimhood. The Backstreets is a compelling read in its own right.