M A C V A Y S I A

Yesterday after work I ventured out on my own to get some groceries and also to pick up something yummy for Leen and me at Subway. That meant taking the 862b to the Garden Hotel, which meant I might encounter that Uyghur again. I did my shopping and got a couple of sandwiches and then made my way through the hotel lobby and out along the main street towards the bus stop, and there–in the same place as the other night–was the Uyghur.

He was a young man, maybe barely out of his teens, if he’d left them at all. He looked more Pakistani than Chinese and had soft brown eyes. As I approached he looked at me and once again greeted me as a Muslim: “Assalamualaikum.”

“Walaikumsalam,” I said, this time stopping dead in my tracks. I looked at him for a moment and he almost looked uncomfortable. Finally I asked him, in broken Chinese, “How did you know I’m a Muslim?”

He seemed surprised by the question but never stopped smiling a little smile that reminded me of the way my Yemeni students in Malaysia often smile. I’m pretty sure his reply didn’t contain any Chinese. I recognized some Arabic words but otherwise I couldn’t tell if he was speaking Arabic or his own language, which sounds a lot like Turkish. “Blahblahblahblah Allahu-Akhbar Alhamdulillah,” he said. I repeated my question in Chinese and he repeated his answer. I then asked him again, this time adding that nobody else knew I was a Muslim. He just gave me a blank look (but kept smiling) and then said something else in whatever language he was speaking. I think the only word I could distinguish from the others was the Arabic word kitib, which he repeated several times, and which I knew to have the same root as kitab. Other than that I didn’t have a clue, and he seemed a little confused that I didn’t understand what he was saying. I said to him that I’d seen him before, and finally he spoke Chinese: “Sunday,” he said. But when I asked him again how he knew I was Muslim, he just replied in that other language.

Eventually I gave up, smiled, bade him farewell–and peace, of course–and continued on my way, politely waving off his offer of some of the bread he was selling. As I walked away, I felt no closer to solving the mystery. In fact, now it all seemed even more mysterious.