The Backstreets follows an unnamed Uyghur man in Ürümchi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Though he finds a temporary job after arriving in the city, he is unable to find housing, largely due to discrimination exercised by the increasingly Han Chinese population. Throughout the book, this unnamed narrator wanders the streets, seeking meaning in numbers—in license plates, scraps of paper on the streets, street addresses, and even in the clouds—and getting lost among alleyways, hostile people, memories, and madness.
Tursun, as rendered into English by Byler and Anonymous, writes with the ease and confidence of some of the greatest philosophical and absurdist writers of the twentieth century. He has cited Camus, Kafka, Faulkner, and Rumi as his influences and has been described by Foreign Policy magazine as “China’s Salman Rushdie.” These references and comparisons are not surprising given Tursun’s affinity for philosophical musings. The book’s first-person narrative is filled with poetic observations on the universal human desire to find meaning in chaos, as well as quotable nuggets that read in equal parts as wisdom and questioning.
People always dream of having things that never change. This is not due to a fear of aging or because of missing the past; it comes from a fear of uncertainty. Perhaps this is one reason that people hate the city. The city changes too quickly; sometimes you can’t find a huge building that you just saw yesterday, no matter where you look. You can’t know what the world will bring tomorrow. People in the city have a tremendous amount of difficulty imagining tomorrow, because buildings surround them on all sides, and they don’t have the space to imagine. But I, on the contrary, enjoy the variability that makes so many other people anxious and uneasy. It gives me solace because it indicates that everything will disappear.
These fragmented reflections appear as isolated paragraphs within the larger narrative, serving as insight into both the state of the narrator’s mind and his past, as his social isolation chips away at his sanity:
When we were kids and heard myths told by others, I thought that the objects in them, such as carpets, gold, bronze, and pearls, were edible. Later, as I grew up, and I realized that those things weren’t edible, I was surprised. Why did people see those things as so valuable even though they weren’t edible?
The narrative offers only glimpses of the characters beyond the narrator himself and none of those characters have names or thorough descriptions. Thus, Tursun relies heavily on flashbacks and repetition, weaving in several thematic refrains to dimensionalize and complexify both the setting and narrator. Fog, for example, is so very present within the novel—more so than any human other than the narrator—that it functions almost as a secondary character. While in a literal sense, Tursun uses the word “fog” to refer to the industrial pollution of Ürümchi, the fog, which is described as suffocating, choking, numbing, and permeating, also alludes to the narrator’s mental fog and to the permeating presence of government-sponsored Han culture in a historically minority-held region. The fog also indicates ever-present and growing uncertainty. As the narrator wanders the backstreets of Ürümchi, he sinks further into darkness, pollution, and obscurity. As he veers from the relative safety and conventionality of routine, he moves into the opaque and infinite fog of the unknown.
Numbers similarly play a crucial role throughout the novel, serving as a crutch the narrator relies on to make sense of the absurdity of life. While initially he looks for coincidences in numbers, making remarks about his height or a familiar date, his desperation for order and logic lead him to make arbitrary decisions, where the search for numbers blurs with the search for order. For instance, as the narrator is on the lookout for the manifestation of a particular number, he muses:
I decided that if the ninth person to pass me were a man then I would turn back. If it were a woman, I would continue on.
His reliance on numbers is perhaps an attempt at asserting his humanness. Since only humans rely on numbers as a way of understanding the world, clinging to calculations, even if illogical, proves, even if only to himself, that he is still human.
The narrator’s identity as a human being presents something of a paradox as he both clings to this knowledge intentionally and accepts it as a matter of fate. He has learned to see himself as inferior to the vermin hiding in the streets, yet when given the opportunity, he also fails to conform to conventional societal norms. In fact, the narrator is tormented by the fabricated nature of the social conventions upon which one’s humanity is usually constructed.
I realized that the root of the fears that humans have is just this: infinity. The infinity of the sky, of time, of not knowing what comes after death, threatens humans. To eradicate the threat that comes from the infinity of the universe, humans have broken it up into the small parts where they live—giving it borders and standards. In order to eradicate the threat that comes from the infinity of time, they have broken it up into parts like hours, days, and months, giving it limits. In order to give a limit to the things confined to the afterlife, they draw the floor designs and maps of another world.
While he understands the arbitrary divisions of time, property ownership, and even funerary traditions to be a means of making sense of an infinitely absurd world, he is frustrated by his own resigned participation in those rules and aware that he has been assigned a persecuted identity. He reflects:
Since I am also human, I am forced to accept the concept of identity that others manufacture for me.
This recognition of the division between himself and the rest of society and of his identity as a Uyghur man shifts his understanding of what it means to be human into an increasingly clinical definition. He muses that even vermin secretly make “a holy crime of living,” by finding places to sleep and mate with the opposite sex. Without housing or privacy—things he has been denied due to his ethnic identity—even these fundamental biological functions have been denied him.
As the story escalates, the narrator begins to repeat the following refrain, returning to it with greater frequency as his grounding in reality seems to fade:
I don’t know anyone in this strange city, so it’s impossible for me to be friends or enemies with anyone.
This repeated sentence emphasizes both his disconnect from the people around him as well as his lack of blame toward them, for he exists beneath their radar, unacknowledged by those around him. The narrator seemingly suggests that this complete lack of recognition renders bystanders innocent, yet this image of total social isolation is haunting and dehumanizing, blatantly prejudiced and reminiscent of the “nonperson” status of Jewish and Romani peoples in Nazi extermination camps. To truly be seen by others is to have your humanness acknowledged. Without friends or enemies, we lack even the social supports of street vermin. The narrator’s involuntary remove from society is an uncanny reminder that dehumanization can creep into the everyday actions of average people. His invisibility not only takes away his identity and his humanity but also his hold on reality.
The Backstreets is an account of survival and a reminder that even the cruelest elements of humanity are fabricated out of absurdity and fear of the uncertain. Though Tursun specifically writes about the disillusionment and degradation of the Uyghur population, he extends incredible empathy to humanity as a whole. His writing is devoid of easy culprits. It is only through its existence in the current political context (as a publication that was, notably, originally published in the Uyghur language, and which was banned in Chinese schools in 2017) and its interpretation by others that the book could be said to point fingers, rather than through the content itself.
I realized that everyone becomes a homeless wanderer after they are born and has difficulty finding a proper place for themselves as soon as they touch the ground and let out their initial cry. They will spend their whole life trying to determine their position—becoming anxious and griping about its vagueness. Everyone is a wanderer in space.
In recognizing all people as “wanderer[s] in space,” the narrator makes the argument that human lives are shaped both by the need to survive and the need to give meaning to their lives. He understands that his outward appearance does not make him fundamentally different from those who persecute him—yet he can also see that their persecution is not formed out of hatred for him but rather out of fear for their lives being meaningless.
The Backstreets illuminates the shared instincts of humanity. The ways in which cruelty, and even dehumanization, can sneak up on us in the everyday, and also the responsibility we all have to prevent that happening. Tursun acknowledges that we humans operate in fear of uncertainty and our inability to really, truly understand life. And this fear, along with the lessons we’ve been taught, and the ways in which we’ve been socialized, shapes the way we navigate the world—and also who we hurt, even if by our own inaction.
This means that, despite its largesse, The Backstreets is also a warning of the ways that operating in fear impacts the most marginalized and most persecuted: the narrator has been failed by the conventions of society that have labeled him as an “other,” conventions built on fear. While he does not blame the society that has doomed him to a dark fate, he turns his gaze toward the corrupting power of uncertainty with the hope that maybe something about the unknown could save him.
The reason people fear darkness is because the limits of objects—the
dimensions and volume of individual things—are totally subsumed in darkness and become a single infinity.
Because society has nothing to offer him, the narrator is left with no other option but to walk toward that darkness, towards that infinity and into the fog. While most people fear uncertainty, for the narrator, uncertainty is the only remaining hope, the only alternative to endlessly suffering in a society that was designed to exclude him, a society that has been hostile toward his basic physical necessities. Logic, order, and structure, however arbitrary, are the things that separate humanity from the rest of the animal kingdom; in abandoning those social conventions for the sake of his bodily survival, the narrator gives up the very things that truly made him human.
