farm, the seasons came and went by slowly for Heng and her sister, Hui. The summers on the desert could be blazingly hot, heat waves shimmering above the brown and red parched earth; the winters bitterly cold with the cold breath of frigid, Siberian winds seeping through the chinks of the clapboard walls of the modest dormitory where the Party housed her family. While her parents toiled in the fields of wheat and hay and barley, she and her sister attended class in the one large room of the collective farm in the same brick building as the cafeteria. Too young to work alongside their parents, the children of the collective farm were taught to speak and write Mandarin, taught to calculate mathematical problems, taught geography, while at the same time being inculcated into the correct way of political thinking. During the Cultural Revolution, no one was too young not to be imbued with the teachings of the Great Leader.
Then, like a slowly receding tide retreating from the shingle, the Cultural Revolution withdrew. It withdrew and never came back. Having imploded upon itself, the Red Guard, whose sole existence was to carry out the policies of the Cultural Revolution, disbanded. Life returned to some sense of normalcy for her family and the millions of Chinese who had endured the years of turmoil and upheaval. Following its demise, her father petitioned and received permission from the local Party leader of the collective farm to leave if he so desired. For months, her father looked for work elsewhere. Finally, finding a job in a factory that manufactured farming implements in Kashgar, Zhang Bo moved his family to Kashgar where they found a small two-bedroom apartment in the ancient part of the city. Unable to find more gainful employment, her mother took in laundry and labored as a seamstress. In winter sitting by the stove, and in summer sitting by the open door to catch a refreshing breeze, her mother sewed with her needle and thread under the dim light of a sixty watt bulb that dangled from the ceiling. There, in the dim light, her mother slowly stitched together the dresses and blouses for the neighborhood women, who often paid her in live chickens or freshly-laid eggs.
With her father employed at the local factory, it was time for Zhang Heng and Zhang Hui to enter middle school. Holding hands, Heng and Hui, walked the six blocks together to the school. Walking past dilapidated stores with barred windows where groceries or appliances were sold, past outside stalls that sold all manner of trinkets, they encountered all manner of people, including Han and Uighur and other ethnic groups. They encountered the indigent who begged for food or money, and the well-to- do who keenly kept their distance from the rest of the souls upon the street.
If the Cultural Revolution was an astounding change for Zhang Heng and her family, the move into Kashgar proper was no less a revelation. As Han Chinese, they comprised part of the Chinese majority of the Middle Kingdom. But in Kashgar, in western Xinjiang Province, they were simply a minority; in Kashgar, the majority of people were the Uighurs. Praying to a Muslim god, in a country that didn’t officially countenance the notion of a higher being, the Uighurs had different traditions and a way of life that was foreign to Zhang Heng and her family. Shy and reserved, a girl who made few friends on the collective farm with girls her own age, Zhang Heng made even fewer friends among the young Uighur children with whom she attended class. Complaining to her mother that other children didn’t want to play with her, complaining that she didn’t fit in, her mother reassured her that in time, she would have friends; in time, she would enjoy school; in time, the future would be a new and better world. But as time passed, and sixth grade became seventh grade, and seventh grade became eighth, she still felt as much an outsider as ever. Nor did the exciting future that her mother promised her unfold for Zhang Heng. But if she didn’t quite fit in in school or with friends in the neighborhood, the solitude that Zhang Heng endured made her strong, it made her resilient. It gave her insight into what life was all about. Already by the time she had finished middle school, Zhang Heng had seen what life in its cruelties could bring people. Seeing little but destitution about her, finding little solace in friends or family, Zhang swore that someday she would get out of China. She would get out and she would never come back.
lthough she hated school, although she secretly despised her classmates, Zhang Heng was an exceptional student. She was an exceptional student in spite of herself. Rather than spending her free time playing with classmates, Heng scoured her textbooks, toiling over her homework. There were only one or two in her class that consistently scored higher than her on exams. Because of her scholastic achievements, she was afforded a scholarship upon graduation from high school. The scholarship paid for her four years as an undergraduate at Xinjiang University. Upon the completion of her freshman year in the college, she decided to become a nurse, and entered the nursing program. Rather than dreaming of becoming a nurse, she saw the calling as a means to an end. There would always be a need for nurses wherever she went, and perhaps one day it would safely see her out of China. At the nursing school in Urumqi, she took courses in English as did many of the other nursing students. Having started her English classes in middle school, Heng was already rather fluent in the language by the time she took it as an undergraduate. This was important, for to work overseas as a nurse, one had to be proficient in English. Though she had taken English classes since since she was an adolescent, Heng had never taken an English name. While in nursing school, she assumed the name Sarah. It was an unusual name for a Chinese girl to be taking: most of the other nursing students named themselves Kitty or Li, Iris or Cindy. Having adopted a Western name, she still preferred to be called by her given Chinese name, Heng. The irony of it was lost on her. Like the other nursing students who took English courses, she someday hoped to go to the Middle East, England, Europe, or with luck, the United States. At the time, there was a relative shortage of nurses in these countries, and with the proper credentials she might possibly work overseas. So many of the overseas jobs, though, required previous overseas experience, overseas experience working in English.
Following graduation, to further her training, to get a little practical experience, Zhang Heng became a nurse at Urumqi Tianshan Hospital. There, she worked on the surgical floor with patients who had their gall bladders or appendixes removed, or their broken bones set. Friendship Hospital was a large hospital, one with over several hundred beds. The work was demanding. Often requiring hours of overtime that she was not compensated for, she soon wearied of work in the overcrowded, fetid, and filthy hospital.
She had been there for little more than a year, she saw an ad in a nursing journal. The ad promised a well-paying job and good working conditions for foreign nurses – foreign nurses who could speak English – in Saudi Arabia. Though she had hoped to find similar positions in England or the United States, at the time, they were either not available or they required previous work experience overseas working in a hospital where the common language was English. The job in Saudi Arabia required no such overseas experience. Tearing the ad out of the magazine, she soon submitted her curriculum vitae to the nursing placement agency. Within a month, a letter arrived, typed in English, informing her that the job, if she still wanted it, at the King Khalid Hospital, was hers. Her salary in Riyadh would almost be three times what it was in Urumqi.
Finally, on a particularly cold and windy day, when low, broad, dark clouds closed out the sun, and winter waged its long siege on the western highlands of Xinjiang, she boarded the flight in Urumqi that would deliver her first to Beijing where she would make connections to Riyadh. Where it had been a minus five degrees in Urumqi when she boarded her flight, it was close to forty degrees without a breeze or cloud in the sky when she stepped off the plane onto the concrete tarmac. Seeping up from the asphalt, she felt the desert heat penetrate her denim slacks and cotton blouse she wore getting off the plane. Perspiration glistened on her forehead and dampened the small of her back as she strode across the tarmac into the arrival lounge. A van from the hospital was there to pick her and two other nurses – nurses she had never met – up and take them back to the hospital campus where their apartments were. Arriving at the hospital compound, she found herself assigned to a bedroom with a girl of similar age from Xi’an. Graceful, cheerful, tall and out-going – many of the things that Zhang Heng wasn’t – the nurse’s name was Peng Peng. Despite, or because of, their many differences, they soon became close friends. The day after her arrival in Riyadh, Peng Peng took her shopping for new clothes. At the top of the list was a burka. On the hospital compound the nurses were free to wear any clothes they desired; in Riyadh, however, they had to wear a burka. Whether it was the law or simply
