“Mustafa is Mustafa. Mustafa will always be Mustafa. Mustafa can do good things, and he will still be Mustafa. Mustafa does not change. Mustafa can do bad things, and he will still be the same Mustafa.” Mustafa paused and looked at me. “I like doing bad things.”
He smiled. This he was relishing. Yes, there it is, the statement of fact. Good or bad, and who the hell would ever know the difference. And he likes that, just loves it. He can’t stop looking at me and I can’t stop saying how interesting it is that he just wants to damn the whole world. Those eyes, darker than anything you can imagine. We say nothing for a little while. Then he breaks the silence. “What do you know about counterfeiting?”
When I ran into Mustafa near Guangzhou, the only thing I knew about him was that he could dance. When he dances it’s like lightning bolts are hitting his shoulders. His arms swoop down and back up, graceful spasms of someone willing the music into his body. I wasn’t the only one to notice, not by far. He had a crowd around him, cell phone cameras pointed as before a rock star. None of the others here evoked peals from slender girls clutching their boyfriends’ arms, not the two young Muslims from the west, looking 10 and 14, themselves also roasting lamb and dancing next to their mother, but terribly, not the baozi minders, the oyster grillers, the sugar cane dispensers, the water vendors, the squid basters, not the coconut drillers, nor the purveyors of pocket knives, handmade pink chickens, Buddhist chanting cds, live rabbits, fortunes, electric trains and pinwheels, who stand yelling out prices to people who stare at them for a second and then yell right back. No, he was alone in this show. His frosted hair (deep and almost reddish under the crown of artificial blonde) was back in a ponytail and his shirt, white with a multi-colored quasi ascot astride the scores of brown oil stains, was loose and open to let the air flow in so everything was good and he could just ride the beat for a while. I asked him why he danced. He said he loved to dance, always had since his childhood in that faraway place. He grinned a massive grin, and twiddled his shoulders a bit, just to show off.
He’s a hard man to forget. When he’s roasting meat and dancing he can be resplendent in his sunglasses, electric energy amidst the smoke of endless rows of grills. I first saw him far to the north of the province, in an old industrial town called Lianzhou that, a few years ago, was seized on by urban photographers who turned abandoned factories into gallery space for an international photo festival. Of course, the vanguard of the new great Chinese cultural awakening needed snacks. Outside of the main town building, next to a replica of a Soviet MiG fighter jet, the food court had set up shop. In the middle of it all, crowds gathered in an arc around this dark skinned wonder, flipping and brushing and flipping and brushing the lamb. Some left with meat but most of them were there just to stare. They were too intimidated by the gyrations to approach and select a skewer, the most expensive meat on offer, thick and rich and nothing like the tiny slivers of flesh his competitors were grilling all around him. No bother. He picked up the roasting sticks of lamb and danced with them, luring the stunned Chinese onlookers to approach the hypnotic, simmering flesh. The breathless intensity reigned for hours.
We talked briefly then, enough for me to wonder how a giddy dancing Pakistani came to grill meat in some now avant-garde artistically reclaimed Chinese backwater derelict town, hours and hours from the economic boom areas that might draw those from afar. I never thought I’d see him again. In the intervening four months, I learned later, he swiveled and bopped through thirteen festivals, temple fairs, gatherings and performances. Every day, it seems, there’s a festival in this country, and, in Guangdong at least, Mustafa and the others were there for almost all of them, grills in tow.
Mustafa is, above all else, a griller of meat. A roaster of the highest order with secrets the Chinese he serves would never begin to understand. These Chinese. People, in fact, not only lacking, utterly, in appreciation for how to grill meat but the unfortunate inheritors of a culture and a country so eager to do things the fast way that they wouldn’t even recognize real meat if it was handed to them on a skewer. The west, where he’s from (well Pakistan by way of Turkey and Xinjiang, but save the details for later) feeds the soon to be speared and charred animals grass and only grass. The Chinese feed their animals trash, literally, oblivious to the fact that a few years down the line they get to eat that same trash themselves. If you ask him, Chinese people are like pigs, exactly like pigs. They don’t get angry, and it’s really hard to piss them off. But when you do piss them off, man they are annoying as hell. Also, they eat whatever you give them.
Mustafa also drinks. He’s a drug smuggler and an orphan, of sorts, and a failing entrepreneur with no thoughts on next week. He’s a wannabe counterfeiter and a smoker and the son of a man, he says, that killed one of his three mothers (but that would take a long time to explain). He’s the twelfth of seventeen siblings. He’s a self-sufficient vagrant set up, for now, in the immigrant-filled, built-from-nothing fantasy land of Shenzhen. He’ll turn 20 soon.
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