Guangzhou Dispatches

“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.

*

When Mustafa first arrived in China as a child, Shenzhen, a former fishing village and his future home, was turning eleven. The city was the darling brainchild of the universally admired Deng Xiaoping, who launched the reform and opening that sent the Chinese economy soaring stratospheric. He is the “to get rich is glorious” man, the “it doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white as long as it catches the mouse” harbinger of wealth. (The city now has a stock exchange.) But it would be years before Mustafa found himself installed in China’s new economic machinery. Mustafa has been in China since he was three. He came after rolling across Pakistan into Xinjiang, the vast, predominantly Muslim desert region in China’s west. He said he has three mothers, a Turk, a Pakistani, and a woman from Xinjiang. I asked him where he was from. “My birthplace is Pakistan. The place I grew up is Xinjiang. I am Pakistani.”

He didn’t arrive in China alone. His dad brought him here, a father-son trip that began all those years ago after things started falling apart at home. He dropped his son off at the farm of Mustafa’s third mother, a mother he had never met and who had sons of her own, before turning around and disappearing. Mustafa’s been a vagrant ever since.

After Lianzhou, we crossed paths again at another fair. It was a massive affair, an epic temple festival to the old god of the southern sea. Many of the same faces were there, in the south sea food court. The water vendors were the official Lianzhou water vendors, and many others, oyster people, meatball people and on and on, were on the same circuit, a traveling snack circus, each vendor with his or her own unique bit of flare. Some wear costumes. Some dance. Some yell at you. Some wave food. Some do nothing at all. But I could tell something was up with Mustafa. This was it, the biggest temple festival of the year yet the crowd around him, when it was there, barely maintained a solid arc. At Lianzhou, the hip city slickers cavorting in the hinterlands were packed four or five deep, watching those rhythmic shoulders.

A few days after we were reunited at the temple fair, we met up again. I had gotten a call from him – well, four actually, never a good sign – saying he was leaving today, and could I come now, because he was leaving tonight, early, he said, had to leave this place today. It was hard to understand him sometimes (he doesn’t speak English and I don’t speak Arabic or Urdu, so we speak Mandarin together) but something was wrong because the temple fair wasn’t scheduled to close for three more days. I learned later, in the two hours it took me to travel to the city outskirts, he and a friend downed twenty bottles of beer.

I had only ever seen him in his grilling outfit, that flowing white shirt mostly unbuttoned and soaked through with sweat. When we finally met to talk, he was done up like a college freshman, backwards baseball cap astride his bushy locks, black t-shirt, tattered shorts and basketball sneakers. His left cheek was dominated by a zit. He was boisterous, happy to see me, but he was agitated. Business had not been good. “It’s the old people. They don’t eat! Just come to the temple, pray, come by to look and look and they go home and eat.” Last year, man, how location changes everything, last year his booth was right by the damn entrance. And that is where all the young people go. Because what young person needs to see a temple and pray and all that stuff? No. They want to eat stuff. They want to buy stuff. They want to shoot balloons with bb guns. They want to get inside giant inflatable things and literally walk on water. They don’t even go inside. Mustafa went inside yesterday, inside the temple drawing people by the tens of thousands and found nothing at all of interest there.

As we walked to another food court area to talk, he readjusted his baseball cap, placing it backwards atop his dyed mane. He was done with dancing. 18,000 yuan in meat just wasted. He turned his grill and his meat over to his friend. Let the friend grill. Mustafa was done. Done losing money. Done roasting meat. Did he tell me about that one festival where it rained the whole damn time? As though he had this kind of money to lose. Fuck it. It was time for the life of an upstanding dancing Pakistani meat griller marooned in China to change.

We sat at a table in the corner of a large courtyard interspersed with picnic tables topped by red umbrellas emblazoned with beer logos. Slender young Chinese girls in tight red skirts, the beer girls, flitted around laden with fresh bottles. Behind us a small bit of Mustafa’s meat sat grilling on a long black metal box. A wiry teenager had taken over flipping duty. This was an illegal grilling site, a mobile side grill to pocket what extra cash was possible while getting drunk and waiting for the American kid to show up. The friend laid about a dozen heavy spiced skewers of meat in front of us and we touched Dixie cups and drank beer. Mustafa looked at me and was grinning. He moved my tape recorder closer.

The two of us were alone. We drank. A slim Chinese man with a walkie-talkie came over.
“Excuse me, is this your grill?”
“It’s mine.”
“You know you can’t put it here.”
“What is it to you? What does it have anything to do with you!”
“Well, a lot sir. I’m the manager in charge of this area. It’s not safe, to have a grill here and no one standing next to it. You have to move it.”
“What does this have to do with you? Worry about your own shit. Don’t bother me, don’t bother me, worry about your own shit.”
The Chinese man stared at Mustafa, who was incensed. Yet another indignity this old people laden shit festival was throwing at him. The Chinese man left.

It was a rare moment of fury. Mustafa, in general, is a man of smiles. His dancing is that rare one of total commitment and damn if he’s not drunk during the day because it just feels good. I ask him what he does with his time and he just waves me away. Friends, I love making friends, every day a new friend. He even knows some other American, Harry, good friend of his, and he reaches into the small black pack strapped across the front of his chest. The bag disgorges a giant stack of business cards. Mustafa rifles through. And, then, there it is, a brightly colored card laden with English. A teacher. For a time they would drink together on an off, about six months. Great guy. They drank for all those months and parted vowing never to forget the other. And that is fine because it’s not like he ever stays in one place for long. He can’t tolerate the static life so he’s always just going, moving, dancing.

I ask him why. Some of the fury returns. From the age of nine he lived with his third mother, and her three kids. He was a late addition to the family, and he just wasn’t well liked. “My father gave my third mother money to buy, for the kids. And she bought clothes for her real kids and gave me nothing.” When he was in Xinjiang he had no shoes. His pants were torn. So was his shirt. His brothers, though, had new everything. Cinderella-like, he was squired in the backyard, raising goats. He’s angry now.

“I am a man. Before, I was little and I didn’t know anything. And now I’ve grown up. I’m 20, grown up. I can make money. One day I can make money.” At fourteen, he made a decision. His father, who had shunted him across the border into China all those years ago, was now proposing an ambitious business trip. The plan was to return to Pakistan, gather up a herd of goats and then set off, like the 1,300 years that had passed since the Silk Road was at it’s height had never happened. But Mustafa was tired of toiling for the sake of a family that sacrificed his ability to go to school in favor of using his labor to finance the futures of his young cousins. Swollen with the wounded pride of a self-aware teenager, he turned his back and left.

“He gave me a call and said we have this place and this house and all those goats are ours. He said he wanted me to sell them and return to Pakistan. And I said no. Why? Now, you can accomplish something, you lose money, you make money, it’s no difference, but you do it for yourself. You’re a man, no? Who questions a man?” His father, taken aback by his son’s rashness, gave his son some seed money and dispatched him from the family to ply his skills roasting the animals he refused to sell. It was a final gesture, as the family began the process of disowning its recalcitrant 14-year-old son. For the last six years, Mustafa has been on his own. His resentment hardened, and he broke off ties.

He came of age an incredibly social loner, a voluble dancing fiend forced by circumstance, or choice, to bounce around a convulsing China that was undergoing changes enough of his own. A svelte girl clutching a shimmering handbag walked by and I asked Mustafa if he was into Chinese women. He said no, never had been. He never understands what they’re saying (not just the words, you know) and they never get him.

Marriage? No he doesn’t want to get married now. Before, before he really wanted to. He had money then (before his life was stolen out from under him on some street in Hunan, his whole car and savings just gone). He’s got no money now, and no business bringing a kid into the world. “I don’t want to raise a kid to have a life like mine.”

What’s enough money? “Who knows. You’re a man, I’m a man, and everyday we cry, but one day we will know when we have enough money. When I was sixteen I cried everyday. For a year now I haven’t cried. I drink beer. When my mind is a little heavy, I drink some beer, and my mind doesn’t know what’s going on. With my family, my parents, there is no one I like….I, right now, I hate my family, hate my mother and father.” The family outsider, he was tasked to the raising of goats and cows while siblings went to school. We took a break and toasted.

Our tabletop dining options have expanded. Roasted meat has given way to fried vegetables, some radish, and a couple of crabs. He takes a bite of a crab and spits it out after the putrid smell of something long dead reaches his nose. He laughs as he spits on the floor.

He’s tried to live by a code of goodness, something to separate himself from his father. Once, not all that long ago in fact, this woman was walking along and someone just reached in, just took the damn purse and made off and he, he! Mustafa! chased the guy down. But the code of good doesn’t exactly treat its practitioners well. He ended up surrounded by men who took turns beating him. Hauled to the doctor, he was eventually out 3,000 kuai.

It proved impossible to escape his father’s shadow. Prosperous and promiscuous, his father managed to sire nearly two baseball teams worth of kids while running a company out of Turkey. The cast-off child, Mustafa still bears his father’s name, a name well known to the other drifters and fortune-seeking Turks in Shenzhen. The calls pour in constantly from people claiming to know his father, people hard up on cash and needing just a little bit to get some promising idea off the ground. His claims of poverty are written off as stinginess, and the only community in town with some understanding of the context he came from has largely turned its back on him until he decides to open the wallet that everyone is certain is fat with cash. This all despite the fact that the Turks are wearing fancy new clothes while Mustafa hauls around in cheap duds. They have mostly turned to drug distribution, something Mustafa has resisted in favor of meat grilling. Not that he hasn’t done that before. Swallow a packet of cocaine or heroin sealed in some pouch, stroll across the border into China take some medicine and shit the drugs out. Thousands of kuai are suddenly yours. But that was in the past. If he wanted to, wanted to wear good clothes, he’d haul the stuff willingly. But he’s not sure. “I am Mustafa. If I have money, I am Mustafa. If I don’t have money, I am the same Mustafa.”

He’s come back around, though, come back to not giving a shit. The refrain: “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.” And the look he gives is so cold, so devilish, and I feel like I’ve wandered into something I shouldn’t have. Dancing grinning grilling man, friend to the world and a friend of none. So it all becomes the same. He asks me what I know about counterfeiting, and he smiles when I say I know nothing.

This temple fair, all temple fairs, were done and here was the thing. I wasn’t even eating lamb. The dozen or so skewers were thick with charred flesh and the plastic bag below them was pooling with oil and juice. No, that was a bad thing, Mustafa admits, a small bad thing, but it’s not like the Chinese would ever know. Would ever ask why they were being asked to pay more, per skewer, for some thick juicy meat that was not lamb. Well, he said, it’s duck. About seven kuai cheaper by the pound to buy and just say it’s lamb and charge a premium and how could a money-strapped young guy even do business if some corners weren’t cut. He smiled. “Huai shi,” he said, bad things.

We never advance beyond sips of beer, Mustafa, perhaps, because he’s already well gone and me because of a lingering fear of this unpredictable man in front of me. Then we start talking about all the bad stuff he’s going to do, grill-free how he’s going to tear up the world and his list ends after three things. We sit and don’t really say much. It feels like the scene from Office Space, where the main characters look up laundering money in the dictionary.

He told me what actually happened in Lianzhou, that cash cow of a place where he raked in money. He came across some guy, a couple of guys, probably Korean. And they said, dancing man, you must come out with us tonight! And Mustafa went, because he had nothing else planned. And then, that dark thumping club and the men got the waitress to bring beer and cocaine (did you know you could ask for that at a club?) and then, one by one, they evaporated. Night was threatening to give way to day, and there was Mustafa, holding the bill, handing over his profits.

Last night, not long after he made the decision to cut his losses and retreat back to Shenzhen, his sister called him. It had been years since they had last spoken, but this was important – a brother was in the hospital. This was back in Pakistan, where his brother, a truck driver, careened off a cliff and ended up in the hospital. This wasn’t a call of reconnection in a time of grief, just a courtesy, the last unbreakable bond of family to prodigal son. He called his other sister for more information and she demanded to know what business he had calling her. “It’s Mustafa, your brother Mustafa.” “I have no brother Mustafa, stop calling here.” He called back. And again. And again. And finally she said, “It’s been so long, six years. You aren’t family anymore.” His dad, when Mustafa called him, just wanted to know if he had any money. Mustafa asked me how it was possible to hate your family so much, and never be able to stop thinking about them.

Afternoon turned to evening and it soon became clear that, though he rushed me across town to see him, Mustafa had nowhere to go and no one to see. Sometime later, I heard a story about this temple, where thousands of people streamed in with their pinwheels for a day of fun. Legend has it a ship of Indian traders once landed at the place, a calm deep water port. One sailor, a romantic, meandered off the boat while others were loading merchandise, and took a stroll to the top of a tiny hill near the temple grounds. He was so taken by the scenery that he failed to heed the calls from his shipmates, and didn’t notice the boat, unmoored, drifting off to the horizon. The hill still exists, a minuscule protruding nipple on the flat landscape. The view is still partly visible behind the trees. It’s hard to imagine anyone being so struck as to miss out on their one chance to ever return home because the vista now opens up onto a massive power plant. Up the channel that presumably carried his comrades off, a modern fleet sits anchored in dry docks. The colossal metal hulks have names like Paradiso and Magpie, container ships from everywhere getting repaired in China on the cheap. It is said that the Indian went to that hill every day for the rest of his life, willing the ship to come back for him. It never did, but, the southern sea god noticed the man’s plight and either to commemorate his misery or eternally prolong his suffering, turned him into stone.

I told him I had to go because I did, because he said he was going to Shenzhen at any time, and I hadn’t planned to stick around. He looked at me straight on and told me it was dinner time, and wouldn’t I come, I had to go. He’d call two friends and we’d eat, straight-up Arabic style. Or. Or we’d get a couple of hotel rooms just here, nearby, and he’d go to Shenzhen tomorrow. And Hong Kong sometime after that, and he’d have it all figured out by then. I turned to go and he grabbed my hands and brought me in for a lingering, awkward embrace.

As we walked out, we stopped by a lamb roasting cart. Uighurs. The ones who started in Xinjiang and didn’t come from anywhere else. Little slivers of meat. Mustafa and the vendors chatted in Arabic and he pointed the fibrous meat to me and said “real lamb” and slid the meat off the skewer with his teeth.

He tried one last time, as I was walking towards the bus, to direct me away from leaving. Just dinner, dinner and then you can go. It’s so nice talking to you. I promised him next time, and he asked me when that would be. I told him that was up to him, and when he’s done with Shenzhen and Hong Kong and drifts back through Guangzhou to look me up. We promised to chat on QQ, China’s top instant messaging service. He can’t write anything other than Arabic, but we could talk. I told him we could. Our hands unlocked and I moved towards the buses. He walked away like a man with time, over to his friend, who was managing his grill.