International Man of Lunacy

If you're like me and have an unhealthy obsession with Xinjiang, you've probably read Ahmad Kamal's narrative of Silk Road derring-do, Land without laughter (1940). I've debated with myself and others countless times whether the book is a work of complete fiction or a very real narrative of travel and adventure in 1930s Xinjiang from the perspective of a deranged individual. Land without laughter has the most improbable of protagonists and narrators, Ahmad Kamal, the son of Tatarstan, the crypto-Muslim, born on a Colorado reservation, who learned military tactics at the knee of a banished Prussian officer, an American Muslim liberating the homeland of his brothers. It's full of the good old tropes of pop-orientalist fiction, right down to a dusky-skinned, green-eyed "temporary wife" whose eyes beg for his caress.

It turns out to be authentic, at least more or less.

Ahmad Kamal turns up again in A mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Muslim Brotherhood in the West (2010), a new book by journalist Ian Johnson recounting the CIA's role in fostering Islamist groups as a counter to Soviet influence. Kamal, as it turns out, was born Cimarron Hathaway in 1914 to a well-off family in a Denver suburb. Some storm in his head, as his children will tell you, drove him to become "Qara Yusuf," son of Kara Yakub, a man in search of his long-lost Turkic father. The rest of his life combined literary endeavors in both Arabic and English with a strange and still mysterious intelligence career.

I won't cut into Johnson's book sales, nor could I summarize this story in a blog post. If you locate the book for yourself, go straight to chapter 10 ("The novelist's tale") and beyond. It's worth a read.

As for Land without laughter itself, if you haven't read it, you should, and, if you have, you should re-read it with a little less caution. Ahmad Kamal has been easy to dismiss because his stories seem so unlikely, but, since his CIA file says he was in Xinjiang in 1935, this could be a good source for the history of the Sheng Shicai period. I, for one, am going to try to get through the rest of his ouevre.

Who Was Du Tong?!

Du Tong (1864-1929), courtesy name Zidan, style name Yangzi, was, in my estimation, a historically significant human being. Du, apparently of Manchu descent, came from a prominent clan in Yangliuqing township near Tianjin. Not only is Du known even today as a fine calligrapher, he also passed the imperial exam in 1892 and went on to be a compiler at the Hanlin Academy, whence emerged the cream of Qing China's official class. He associated with reformists and modernizers like Zhang Jian, toured Japan to assess its school system, and, in 1906, was appointed one of the first provincial Commissioners of Education. His tenure in Xinjiang province from 1906 to 1911 saw a tremendous expansion of the school system there on the model of the program then being implemented hurriedly all over the Qing empire. In short, Du Tong was a scholar, a transformative official, and an artist.

At this point, Du Tong pretty much disappears. From three wives, Du Tong left seven children, many of them well-educated and accomplished. The memoirs of his daughter, Du Lianhe, herself an important scholar of late Imperial Chinese history in her own right, note only his death in 1929.

It took me countless man-hours to figure even this much out. Dozens of biographical dictionaries of the Qing and of the Republic and another half-dozen works on artists turned up nothing on Du Tong beyond what I could get from Wikipedia. The great MQNAF (Ming-Qing Name Authority File), usually a go-to for biographies of officials, had nothing. It took a random, desperate search in a book produced in 2004 by the Shaanxi Travel Press to find anything new, at which point I considered my victory nearly achieved. Soon, I hope, I will have some more scraps of his personal writings, contained in an obscure and minor text held, luckily, by my university's library depository.

As I must wait until Monday for this book to arrive in my hands, I have determined to start a blog to document my travails. I join the ranks, then, of graduate students with blogs, and commit myself to a little more time each week in front of the LCD screen on my loyal old Toshiba Satellite.

Here, I am hoping to do two things: First of all, I want to discuss the problems of working on my favorite region of the world, Xinjiang, as a budding historian. Studying Xinjiang, as I was once told, "takes a certain kind of nut." Several years of graduate school and eight or so languages later, I face a task that expands exponentially even as it narrows day by day. How does one go about studying Xinjiang history? Central Asian history? Chinese history? Should I even be doing this?

Second, this space will present my life in montage. I am from the generation, I feel, where ritual broke down and the master narratives that are meant to guide us all drifted out the window. What is there left but to assemble the scraps and snippets and fit them back together like a local gazetteer?