All posts tagged: Adil Hoshur

The Dreams of Uyghur Kids and the Film On A Tightrope

As the coils of economic development have tightened around the cities of Southern Xinjiang over the past dozen years, many Uyghur parents have increasingly found themselves without land, jobs and stable futures. In many cases the strain of existential insecurity is most sharply expressed in the lives of children. Kids who grow up in extreme poverty, speaking a minor language, are often left to fend for themselves as one or more of their parents leave to find odd and rare jobs in the city. If they are lucky these kids will stay with grandparents or uncles, but in some cases particularly if a father dies or disappears these children end up in orphanages or, per a dominant stereotype regarding Uyghur children born in the “balinghou” generation, they will be forced to join gangs of roving pickpockets. Trinh Min Ha once wrote that a stereotype is an “arrested representation of a changing reality,” that is, they are stories which have an element of truth but don’t necessarily neatly match the lived experience of those they address. …

Adil, “Prince of the Sky,” Uyghur Diplomat

Last month Adil Hushor (Ch: Adili Wuxor) pulled off his latest feat– walking over the Pearl River on a wire suspended 116 meters in the air. Over the past decades he has walked between skyscrapers, over China’s most iconic valleys, canyons, stadiums, lakes and rivers. He’s broken multiple world records by doing it faster andlonger, higher and weirder. As a nineteen year-old he broke 12 bones when a rotten rope broke in Shanghai and he fell 15 meters. But the everyday trauma of risking his life has not stopped him from tackling bigger and more dangerous feats. Above is Adil’s biography as shown on CCTV 9: Adil brings the Uyghur tradition of dawaz-style tightrope walking forward into global spotlight of Asian cities. According to the Uyghur oral tradition, dawaz or darwazliq (Edit: see comments below) – a kind of dashing, court-performance, dance-style of tightrope walking – has played a role in Uyghur society for 2000 years. It was first noted as a Uyghur cultural feature in Mahmud Kashgari’s authoritative dictionary of Turkic languages in Kashgar in …