Dear Friends,
I’m sharing a “travel” post on Kyrgyzstan. These are meant to be somewhere between travel writing and personal essays.
Best,
Sam
FENDING OFF SELENA GOMEZ IN BISHKEK
I don’t exactly know how Kyrgyzstan turned out to be such a character in my life. I went for a summer, when I was 20, because I wanted to work on my Russian — and my uncle knew someone who knew someone who had a job for $200 a month at the English-language newspaper.
It was a formative summer. I remember being achingly, impossibly lonely for long stretches of it; and then I had a girlfriend and some community and talked about it a lot when I got back to America but didn’t particularly expect to go back.
And then I was back when I was 24, trying to break into journalism by covering a popular revolution against the president followed by a round of ethnic violence.
If the first visit was about walks after work through a crumbling ex-Soviet amusement park and the smiley teenager on the street who always talked me into letting him shine my shoes and the kebab man (missing several fingers of his left hand as part of the hazards of his trade) who had potato vareniki to sell me as the only vegetarian food anywhere near my office, the next visit was about the burned-out hulks of cars and the memorial wall outside the White House to those who’d been shot by snipers posted on the White House roof and the looting of whole Uzbek neighborhoods in Osh. This third visit was very different. I had a job at the university and I wanted to play around with digital nomadism — write my novel from Kyrgyz coffee shops and take advantage of the exchange rate.
I’d been thinking about finding some kind of retreat outside the city to work for a bit, so it felt like it just happened to be in Bishkek, and, basically, that was the three months I spent there. Three days a week I taught. Whenever I didn’t have to teach, I got a taxi and went into the city center and spent all day at a coffee shop. The bane of my existence was the canned American music on the playlist — not just shitty pop music (Harry Styles, Selena Gomez, Rihanna were very popular) but covers of shitty pop music. In a couple of the nicer places, a singer would come on in the evening — and then they would sing their version of the same shitty pop music.
That was my only real complaint. My idea in Bishkek was that I wouldn’t read a ton about it, wouldn’t make a lot of plans, I would just live there and let it wash over me and accumulate my impressions that way. And I guess the surprise was how easy it was to be there. In the 2000s, the city had an edge to it. I was jumped once in a smaller town, and in Bishkek different people looked at me like they were thinking about it. If I was out with friends they would always tell me to hide — keep my foreignness from showing — while they negotiated with the cab driver; and cab drivers occasionally pulled over mid-route and tried to shake me down for a higher fare. But now Bishkek was part of the Yandex empire. The cab drivers sometimes pleaded at the end of a ride for a “fifth star.” They didn’t expect to be tipped and if there was a matter of rounding up or rounding down sometimes liked to “leave a tip for the passenger” and forgive the change.
When I had been in Bishkek before, it was the era of track suits and gold teeth; now, it was the era of selfies and adult braces. A couple of times I saw women in cafes spend literally entire meals taking pictures of themselves. In the 2000s, the engrossing question had been which way Kyrgyzstan would turn. Russian influence was of course very diminished after the fall of the USSR — and the Russians in Bishkek had this vibe to them of fish being caught on shore after the tide has gone out. (I stayed with one Russian family and have this indelible memory of the door being double-locked, bolted, double-checked every single night.) America had inserted itself into the region with an Air Force base in Kyrgyzstan — and soldiers would sometimes get drunk and get themselves into trouble. And the Chinese influence was a big question mark. And then people talked about surprising things like Indian or pan-Turkic spheres of influence. But what had prevailed, it seemed, was first of all a Kyrgyz nationalism — there was a pride in the nation’s institutions that seemed to be all the greater for the three uprisings that had thrown out presidents since 2005. And then there was a Dubaization — gleaming mosques that had come from Gulf money, and gleaming shopping malls, and so there was hijabs and selfies and chaste dancing at teahouses and the sort of best-of-all-worlds idea, hedonism plus Islam, that Dubai liked to push.
This was the list of elements of Kyrgyz culture, in ranked order, as I saw it:
Meat
Family
Gatherings
Soccer
Tea
Cars
Jai-loo
Islam
Volleyball
Karaoke
Manas
Pro-democracy movements
Walks in parks
Alcohol
Ping-pong
Decolonization
Chingiz Aitmatov
International friendship
Fundamentally, everything was pleasant. The edge wasn’t there. Kyrgyz tended to think of themselves as being sweet and a little simple — “we come from the mountains,” my department head said — and when my class wandered in five or ten minutes past the scheduled time, the explanation was, “we’re Kyrgyz so we’re always a bit late.” The school had a welcome lunch for professors and everybody sang karaoke together. There seemed to be endless gatherings, endless holidays and occasions.
The idea with Kyrgyzstan always was that it was a developing country, that something or other would happen in its trajectory. With the different revolutions, it acquired a reputation for spirited violence. “It is third world country, they will kill him there,” a Russian cab driver said in the 2000s to the terrified mother of a college classmate of mine who was also doing a summer program in Bishkek. But, probably, I was getting a bit of the Kyrgyz in me — now, I wasn’t sure why it should change or if it really had to change all that much.
The roads weren’t great but everything was functional. The elites were always moving abroad and people kept asking me wistfully about America, but others were skeptical of this mania for emigration. “It’s nice here, there’s work, it’s cheap,” I was told, “I don’t know why people would go to Mexico so they can cross the border and then be drivers in America.”
Meanwhile, the cab drivers had all these horror stories about working in Russia where the Kyrgyz diaspora centered. “They do not like us there,” I was told. It seemed to be sort of a similar relationship that Central Americans have to the US, but the consensus about Russia was that Russians were unbelievably and unabashedly racist — and even if the pay was better, it just wasn’t worth it.
That was my verdict as well. I couldn’t judge what it was like to be Kyrgyz because I was on a western salary and maybe there just wasn’t enough work to go around for the Kyrgyz, but, for me, it seemed sort of hard to picture a better setup. An apartment cost $400 — and everybody complained about the uptick in prices, with so many Russians fleeing the draft. A visit to a doctor (attentive and competent) was $7. A cab ride was around $2. A package of Kleenexes around a quarter of a cent. I had no problems with cops or anything like that. When I got sick, a doctor, like in some med school fairy tale, actually came to my apartment at 10pm and examined me for $20. And if that wasn’t miracle enough, when the toilet clogged, a plumber showed up at midnight and took $30.
I was aware that there was probably a lot that I was missing. Towards the end of the semester, the school’s bureaucracy started catching up with me. In order to be pronounced fit to teach journalism, I had to get a blood test and an x-ray of my lungs. The deadline for grade submissions always seemed to be announced on the day of and with the insistence that grades be turned in urgently. It was all a legacy of the Soviet system, I was assured, the totalitarian mindset alive and well.
But it all seemed much better than when I had been here before — when I’d driven with a friend in the south and been stopped about six times for cops’ bribes (one set of cops just sitting under a parasol by the side of the road and waiting for motorists to come a little too fast on a downhill). But now, not. It was functioning and was cheap and safe and not obviously corrupt. Maybe there wasn’t a ton of wealth — “we have nothing, no oil and gas, no resources, just people,” my department head said — but I had the impression that people were getting by. Most people I knew in the US had this sense of the West being livable and the rest of the world not, and they were wrong. Kyrgyzstan was a very different place — out of the orbit of Europe and America — and it had made things work. I had no criticisms and no complaints.
Would love to go to Kyrgyzstan one day. Sounds like life for them isn't that different from Armenia, but without a regional war. Having worked with Czech wages, however, what is cheap for us does tend to be pricey for locals in these countries. I reckon that if the Kyrgyz are saying it's expensive for them, it probably is. But some cultures do like to exaggerate.
This essay reminds me of Robert Byron's "Road to Oxiana". It was part of my first purchase from Amazon (in 2000) but only finally read it last year. It's a fun travelogue in Persia and Afghanistan between the World Wars.
I hope you take this as a compliment (as it is meant to be). Both you hand Byron have a similar tone. There is an inescapable chauvinism when someone from the world's superpower wanders a developing nation, but your essay and his book tries hard to avoid the worst of such prejudice but without patronizing the locals. It's a delicate, delectable balancing act when done well.