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Uighur at a local university. She was a hard taskmaster. In China, teachers are used to being obeyed, and students at both schools and colleges are much more respectful than they are in the West. As she rattled through a basic primer of Uighur words, phrases and numbers so quickly I didn’t have time to write them down, my constant interruptions to get her to repeat what I had missed made her both cross and scornful.
    ‘You’re not concentrating. I thought you wanted to learn,’ she admonished me. I asked her not to speak so fast. Jenny responded by enunciating the strange sounds so slowly that I felt like the stupid boy in class again. Unsure of the spelling of some of the words, I asked her to write them for me. She did so, but in Arabic script. I told her I had enough trouble with Chinese characters, so she could forget me learning Arabic.
    I was as keen to hear about her life as I was to study her language. Uighur society is far less strict than the Middle East, but it is still a Muslim culture and most women don’t speak to men they don’t know. Nor are Uighur males happy with foreigners talking to them. Jenny, though, didn’t wear a headscarf and was used to dealing with overseas students, so I thought it was a good opportunity to hear a Uighur woman’s point of view.
    First, I asked why she didn’t cover her head. ‘I am a member of the CCP, so I don’t follow Islam,’ she said. The eighty-two million-odd members of the CCP are a self-electing elite; you are invited to join. Jenny had been recruited while she was a student. She was the first Uighur in the party I had met and a rarity, because only 6 per cent of the CCP are from ethnic minorities. ‘I was asked to join when I was nineteen. You can’t really say no. It’s helped me get tenure at my university. I wouldn’t have got that if I wasn’t a member.’
    Tenure for Chinese academics means the chance to buy a cheap apartment on campus, subsidised healthcare and a guaranteed salary whether you are teaching or not. In China, those are coveted benefits. Despite its professed socialist policies, the CCP does not provide its citizens with free education or healthcare, while the cost of buying a flat has spiralled in recent years as China’s economy has boomed. School fees, medical bills and mortgages swallow up a large part of people’s incomes.
    Jenny had paid a high price for her relatively comfortable life too, even if she claimed it didn’t matter to her that the party’s rules meant she wasn’t allowed to wear a headscarf or pray in the mosque with her family. ‘It’s not a problem. Maybe it would be if I came from the countryside, where people don’t have much education and believe in Islam much more,’ she said.
    She was still single at twenty-eight, an age when most women in Xinjiang are married. I wondered if her adoption of a more liberal lifestyle made it harder for her to find a partner. ‘I had a boyfriend, but we split up,’ said Jenny with a fierce glare. ‘Was he Uighur?’ I asked. ‘Of course, I wouldn’t go out with or marry a Chinese guy. It’s not that I think they’re worse than Uighur guys – I think all men are quite similar. It’s because I come from a different culture.’
    We had wandered far from the reason for our meeting, and Jenny was growing more disaffected by the minute. I had jotted down a few notes of our conversation. Jenny snatched my notebook from me, ripped out the page where they were written and tore it into little pieces which she tossed into an ashtray. Not content with that, she took my lighter and set fire to the scraps. ‘We’re here to study Uighur,’ she told me. ‘Not to get me into trouble.’
    Ever polite, Billy smiled when I told him about my combative lesson and resisted interrupting as I attempted to order dinner in Uighur. But he was also single. He had a different problem to Jenny: his lack of regular work and cash didn’t make him a great catch. It was a rare night out for