I was showering in the bathroom of our high-rise hotel in Urumqi, China—a Muslim-majority city in the restive Xinjiang region—when Nonna and my stepson, Sergei, banged on the door.
“Russ, come here, hurry!” they called.
Wrapped in a towel, I rushed out to see the TV showing what I mistook for a Chinese disaster movie of particularly bad taste. Grainy footage showed a plane flying into one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The skyscraper dissolved like a sugar cube in a glass of water. We couldn’t understand the narration. My first thought was, Who comes up with these outlandish plots?
The people we met were uniformly sympathetic, as I report below. Not all Chinese felt that way, however. Writer Liuyu Ivy Chen, later a Chinese immigrant to the U.S., wrote last year about her shame as she recalled the perspective on the catastrophe which she learned as an 11-year-old in central Zhejiang Province.
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The Elephant Box 