Guardian weekly: letter from 620

China: the secrets of Xinjiang

In Xinjiang, one cramped public loo is kept by Ezizgul, a feisty young woman determined to forge an independent life. Ruth Ingram describes a unique place where roll-ups are smoked and secrets are shared

Our public loo in Xinjiang is cramped at the best of times. It is kept by Ezizgul and her compliant baby, who recline together on the bed of a smelly kiosk astride the men's and women's cubicles. You pay five cents, for which you get a square of pink one-ply and the right to use one of the two channels dug out for the purpose, each facility separated unusually by a high partition, but of course no door.

My Chinese work colleagues refuse to use Ezizgul's facilities. They prefer to walk several blocks to the more upmarket version at the edge of the campus. As for me, they're convenient for the office and I rather like the mêlée of shoe repairers, bag and umbrella menders and pen sellers that have sprung up around them. There's the added bonus, too, of Ezizgul.

Ezizgul herself takes a bit of getting to know. She's ashamed of her job, which puts her pretty low in the Uighur Muslim pecking order. Only her very closest friends know where she works. It's probably the lowest job you can do here, next to working with pigs. But she's a feisty young woman who's determined to forge an independent life.

To those who don't know her, her husband works away from home; to those closer to her, he drinks, sleeps around and beat her so badly that she has left him and moved here to the big city permanently.

I frequently arrive to find plumes of smoke drifting above the divide, the smell of illicit inhaling completely eclipsed by the other pungent aromas. Often two, even three girls will be squidged, teetering in a line over the one-metre-long pit sharing a single roll-up. Shiny high heels, miniskirts clinging to their finely honed, skinny 40kg torsos, sporting tops fit for the evening disco, but highly incongruous here in Ezizgul's dingy parlour.

They say it's fun and western and believe they are the new generation of liberated Uighur Muslim girls who should be able to live as they choose.

Like Ezizgul, they lead a double life, but unlike her are not brave enough yet to do it in public. They take a couple of drags each of the newspaper-rolled locally grown tobacco, flick the stub into the latrine, splash their skirts with cologne, and stride out into the sunshine as if nothing had happened. Only Ezizgul knows their secret and she's not about to tell anyone.

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