the art of getting lost
Uyghur food in Osaka
Hanging out in a small alley off the main tourist neighbourhood in Osaka; we found an Uyghur restaurant. The Uyghurs are residents of Xinjiang, a Western province of China. Many years back, I had a friend from there. Those days I used to spend time in Chengdu. My friend was a “double minority”. She was a Kazakh from Xinjiang who was studying at the nationalities university in Chengdu. We would sometimes head to a Tibetan cafe for salty tea or buy naan from street vendors from Xinjiang and talk about her home for hours. Around the mid-2000s, she left China for higher studies, and we lost contact.
My friend’s home was the extreme North of Xinjiang, near where the borders of Russia, Kazakhstan and Xinjiang meet. Just look at the number of international borders that Xinjiang has. Kind of gives you an idea of how much the culture is influenced by and in turn influenced the neighbours.
Anyways back to the Uyghur cafe in Osaka. We ate the Xinjiang staple, the big pan chicken (大盘鸡, da pan ji) while the Uzbek singer Ziyoda’s rendition of Bollywood songs played in the background. If I had not adopted South East Asia, I would have perhaps become a Central Asian.
These songs remain popular in Russia and Central Asia.