Not Gonna Get Us

“Don’t eat pigs,” she said. “So I can kiss you, if we meet again.” That was how she said it, in Mandarin. Pigs, not pork. The line went dead. I was out of calling-card credits again.

We’d met a year earlier, in 2002, at the Shanghai Municipal Physical Sports School. She was fourteen, I was fifteen. She played soccer, I played softball. She was a Uighur Muslim who’d never heard of metropolitan Singapore, I was a Straits Chinese atheist who didn’t know pastoral Xinjiang existed.

A soccer coach, trawling rural northwestern China for athletic girls from underprivileged backgrounds, lied to their parents: If your daughter trains hard, she might be selected for the 2008 Beijing Olympics! In truth, the girls were only ever intended as a minority Xinjiang team for his majority Han Chinese girls to spar against in Shanghai. My Singaporean all-girls softball team was visiting their facility for a training trip. We were from a tiny Southeast Asian city-state that desalinated its seawater and had the highest number of millionaires per capita.

Mandarin was the only common tongue we had between us, but unlike for the Han Chinese, it was the first language for neither of us. We spoke slangy Singlish; the Uighurs spoke Turkic Uighur. When the Uighur girls began singing a traditional folk song to a clapped beat, it was clearly a cultural performance rather than a social invitation, but I took my chances. I’d never once used Mandarin this way as I walked up