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were the prostitutes—Russian, Mongolian, Chinese—who sauntered past restaurants where traders closed deals.
    Polat sold just about anything. In 1998, he cleared two thousand dollars by arranging the sale of two truckloads of fake 555-brand shoes to a consortium of traders from Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. On another day, he earned a grand by helping some Russians purchase a shipment of knockoff Nautica clothes from an underground factory in Tianjin. There had been a lot of good days in 1998. That was the year he talked some Russians into buying twenty thousand bogus brassieres, made in Guangdong, with labels that said Pierre Cardin. The margin on that deal was nearly a quarter a bra.
    I couldn’t see the money on Polat. He dressed simply, and he didn’t brag after closing a deal, unlike the other Yabaolu traders. They were businessmenof the purest sort, dealing in fakes and playing the margins, and I learned not to take their stories too seriously. But Polat seemed different. He had wavy black hair flecked with white, and his eyes were brown and sad. He didn’t smile much. His skin was dark brown, and he had the solid jaw and prominent nose of a Middle Easterner. When he did smile, his face lit up. He often used the Chinese word jiade —“fake”—and he was deeply scornful of the products that he sold. According to him, the knockoff clothes were garbage, crap, shit— jiade . Not long after we met, he mentioned that he had originally taught Uighur language and literature at a secondary school in Xinjiang. He spoke so disparagingly of his business deals that I couldn’t understand why he had left teaching. He was handsome in a rugged way, but his cheeks had lines so deep they looked like seams. He was slightly overweight. He smoked cigarettes constantly. He often looked tired. I had no idea what he did with his profits.
     
    ONE EVENING IN late May, Polat invited me to dinner with another trader. We met at a small Uighur restaurant on North Ritan Road, which had become my favorite spot. The restaurant was fronted by a broad outdoor platform where we took our meals, watching the traders and the prostitutes walk past. Usually, we ordered Yanjing beer. The restaurant manager would step down from the platform, open a manhole cover on the sidewalk, and pull out two bottles. The cool water inside the manhole served as the restaurant’s beverage refrigeration system. Meals there did not cost very much.
    That night, Polat’s companion was a trader from Azerbaijan. He had a very small face, dark long-lashed eyes, and a tiny toylike mustache that played lightly above his lip. He wore a cheap gray suit. He had come to Yabaolu in order to purchase clothes at wholesale, and Polat was providing contacts with Chinese dealers.
    “My friend apologizes that he cannot speak to you in English or Chinese,” Polat said, after we had all shaken hands. “And he wants to know if we can drink baijiu tonight instead of beer.”
    Baijiu is Chinese grain alcohol, and nobody drinks it for the taste. Reluctantly I agreed, and the restaurant owner set a bottle on the table. I assumed that the young man was Muslim, but most of the Central Asian traders drank anyway. They seemed to leave their religion at home when they traveled for business.
    At our table, the languages switched back and forth, with Polat in the middle. He conversed in Turkish with the young man, and then he turned to me and talked in Chinese about the embassy bombing. He was obsessed with it—the protests had died out in less than two weeks, but he continued to bringup the topic, often with strangers. His earlier outburst at the dumpling restaurant hadn’t been unusual; he loved to goad the Han Chinese.
    “They have a problem with their brains,” he said, after pouring each of us a second shot of baijiu . “The students are all so stupid—they don’t understand anything.”
    “Do you agree with what NATO is doing in Yugoslavia?” I asked.
    “Of course I agree