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Payzulla Polat. Photo by Brent Crane.<\/p>\n
The Uyghurs are among the world\u2019s most persecuted minorities. Many of them desire an independent state, though they might not say it to your face; security forces in China regularly imprison outspoken Uyghurs, oftentimes on baseless charges of \u201cseparatism\u201d and \u201cextremism.\u201d Tensions between Uyghurs and the Chinese government remain high and sometimes result in violence, which erupted when I was there last summer.<\/a> In our post-9\/11 world, the Uyghurs are China\u2019s terrorist scapegoats, the Islamic boogeymen with dark skin and scary beards.<\/p>\n But Polat doesn\u2019t have a beard or any apparent political agenda. He has a brand-new food truck and a chalkboard menu offering rice pilaf dishes, kebabs, and chicken and lamb wraps filled with tomato, onions, lettuce, and yogurt sauce. It\u2019s a small slice of home in a place nothing like it.<\/p>\n Photo courtesy of Uyghur Kitchen.<\/p>\n We are squeezed into his food truck after a busy lunch rush outside a tech startup in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His food truck partner and longtime friend Kamil, a Uyghur artist recently arrived from Xinjiang, packs up the metalware around us as Polat tells me about his life before Uyghur Kitchen.<\/p>\n Polat left China in 2008 at the age of 27 and relocated to Los Angeles to attend the LA Music Academy. A music virtuoso, he got his first professional gig as a teenager, playing bass in Beijing for a flamenco-rhumba-Uyghur fusion band called Afangi. \u201cThe other bandmates were like 35,\u201d he recalls. \u201cI was kind of the son of the band.\u201d He speaks English\u2014his third language after Uyghur and Mandarin\u2014with a slightly Californian accent.<\/p>\n Photo courtesy of Uyghur Kitchen.<\/p>\n As a kid, Polat was enamored by tape cassettes of Metallica and Poison brought in from Russia\u2014rare finds in China then. \u201cOne day it was like, \u2018Look at these dudes, they\u2019ve got long hair and a jacket and chains, but they\u2019re cool, man!\u2019\u201d He was hooked. The son of a painter and a musician, Polat was sent to art school as an adolescent to study bass in the music department, and then relocated to Beijing to play with Afangi. \u201cIt was a good time. We had a lot of success; a lot of festivals and touring.\u201d<\/p>\n Polat\u2019s reputation as a reliable bass player spread, and people began offering him projects, including a spot in the Uyghur rock band Gray Wolf. They garnered a significant degree of fame as they appeared on TV shows, played festivals, and toured through Asia and Europe. (Here\u2019s a video of Grey Wolf playing in Beijing.<\/a> Polat can be seen slapping the bass around the 4:00 mark.)<\/p>\n Photo courtesy of Uyghur Kitchen.<\/p>\n The musician-turned-food-trucker sees similarities between his two trades. \u201cIt\u2019s the same thing. When you mix a song, you put in reverb, delay, EQ, compression, whatever; it\u2019s just like you put salt and pepper on food. If you put in too much, that\u2019s gonna ruin the whole thing. And if the tune itself is good, you don\u2019t need to put anything on it, you know?\u201d<\/p>\n Polat also sees himself as a cultural ambassador. \u201cA lot of people are getting to know Uyghurs through my food. They didn\u2019t know us before,\u201d he says, \u201cMost of the time they pronounce Uyghur \u2018yogurt.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n When I ask the final customer of the lunch rush, a well-dressed twenty-something from the tech startup nearby, if he\u2019s ever heard of the Uyghurs, he chuckles, \u201cNo. What, are they from Turkey or something?\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s not a bad guess; Uyghur food is similar to Turkish. They are both generally halal, and contain a lot of spiced and roasted lamb, beef, and chicken kebabs. But it is Xinjiang\u2019s geographical location that makes its food stand out. With Russia to the north, Central Asia to the west, Tibet to the south, and China to the east, Uyghur cuisine carries elements from all of its neighbors. Its meaty noodle soups show Chinese influence. Its flatbread (called nang <\/em>in Uyghur), baked on the inside wall of a circular oven, shows influence from the Arab world, brought to Xinjiang through Central Asia. And its samsa<\/em>, mutton-stuffed bread dumplings cooked in the nang<\/em> ovens, point north to Russia.<\/p>\n Photo by Brent Crane.<\/p>\n Due to strict food regulations, Polat\u2019s only allowed to serve a limited menu in Boston, so he sticks to kebabs and wraps. He had come up with the idea for a Uyghur food truck years ago while out in California. \u201cIn Los Angeles, there\u2019s a lot of food trucks down there, you know?\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s where I got the idea to start my own food truck with Uyghur food.\u201d After he graduated music school in LA, he came to Boston in 2009 to attend the Berklee College of Music on a scholarship. At the time, the food truck scene was virtually nonexistent. But after a couple years, more and more of them began to appear, going from just a handful in 2011 to around 100 today, according to Polat. He finally decided to get in on the action last spring.<\/p>\n Now a year in, the business is going well. Setting up outside corporate offices and festivals is making Polat good money to support his wife and two kids. He\u2019s heading into his final semester at Berklee, and a month ago began playing in a jazz-rock band called Background Orcs<\/a>.<\/p>\n In the cramped Uyghur Kitchen truck, Polat starts preparing a lamb wrap for me. Being an annoying reporter, I ask him once more about the political situation in his homeland. \u201cI don\u2019t want to talk about politics man,\u201d he says, \u201cJust music, food, and my culture.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Payzulla Polat doesn\u2019t want to talk about politics. And who can blame him? If his homeland of Xinjiang\u2014a massive frontier province in northwest China\u2014is ever in the news, it\u2019s for terrorist attacks and human rights violations. He prefers to talk about music and food.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1729,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"topic":[],"class_list":["post-1730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1730"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1730\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1730"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=1730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"http:\/\/docs.uyghuramerican.org\/images\/\/uyghur5.jpg\")
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