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Chinese, you’d be dead right now.”
    The others jumped in and an argument swelled for ten minutes. Forgotten, I ate in peace and then settled the bill. As I was preparing to leave, the Uighur walked over and introduced himself. On a scrap of paper, he jotted down his name and cell phone number; he invited me to meet him for dinner sometime. Everybody else watched in silence. The discussion flared up again as I headed off into the night.
     
    THAT SPRING, WE followed a regular routine. I’d call his cell phone and arrange to meet for dinner in Yabaolu. Neither of us ever saw the other’s apartment; we were too proud for that. He rented a room directly next door to the dumpling restaurant, where lodgings were so basic that he had to use the public toilet across the street. I wasn’t much better off; whenever my bathroom acted up, I went down the street to the Swissotel. We never said as much, but our friendship benefited from the fact that both of us dreaded going home at night.
    His name was Polat, and he worked the margins in Yabaolu. Like many Uighurs, he was good with languages; Xinjiang is one of the most ethnically diverse parts of the country. There are thirteen non-Chinese ethnicities native to the region, and the Uighurs, who number around eight million, are the largest group. (The name is pronounced “Wee-gur,” and in English it is sometimes written as “Uyghur.”) Polat could converse in Uighur, Chinese, Russian, Uzbek, Kazak, Kyrgyz, and Turkish. He used his language skills to work as a middleman for deals between foreign traders and Chinese wholesalers, and he also changed American currency on the black market. Sometimes, he converted tens of thousands of dollars in a single deal, earning a commission of a tenth of a percent. But private currency exchange was illegal, and it was dangerous to move that much cash; in 1999, two Uighur money changers were murdered in Yabaolu. Polat preferred dealing in name-brand clothing.

    He was in his mid-forties, and he had been doing business since 1990. In the beginning, he traveled internationally, often in Central Asia: Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan. In those years, it was difficult for average Chinese citizens to secure passports and visas, but Polat learned that he could get the right documents for the right bribes. He made trips to Russia, Romania, Bulgaria. He spent a lot of time in Turkey, where the language is close to Uighur, and he went to Pakistan, where business was poor. Once, he tried to transport Xinjiang grapes through Tibet to Kathmandu, but the fruit spoiled when he got caught by the monsoon season on the Nepal side. Iran was another bad memory—a Tehran art dealer convinced Polat that he could make money selling ancient Chinese paintings that had been found in Iran, but the paintings turned out to be neither ancient nor Chinese. After losing money on that deal, Polat generally stuck to wholesale clothing, but there was always a risk when travel was involved. In 1993, after saving ten thousand American dollars, he invested most of that stake in an overland shipment of Chinese-produced clothing bound for Kazakhstan. He lost it all when insects infested the crates.
    In 1997, he moved to Beijing and established himself as a middleman in Yabaolu. The neighborhood had become a center for black-market wholesalers who traded clothing that was produced in the factory towns of eastern and southern China. The foreign brands were the most popular: The North Face, Nike, Tommy Hilfiger. Often, the dealers sold fakes and factory rejects, but it didn’t matter as long as the labels looked good. Nautica, Adidas, Timberland. The cheap versions sold well in Russia and Eastern Europe, as well as across the wide swath of Central Asia where borders had always been uncertain and ethnicities were indistinguishable to the untrained eye. Kazaks, Uzbeks, Tatars—all of them came to Yabaolu. There were few women in the neighborhood. The most obvious ones