A Few Nights in Bishkek

by Alita Putnam

I fell in love with the idea of Kyrgyzstan—about the size of South Dakota, hunkered down amongst Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and China—when I was twelve. My family was visiting an international-themed church in Loveland, CO, where a hundred flags hung from the ceiling. Pick one, said the pastor, and pray for it. I picked the prettiest one: bright red with a golden yurt in the center surrounded by 40 rays of the sun, that is, the 40 tribes united by the medieval hero Manas.

Some girls rebel by hooking up with a cigarette-smoking delinquent with a mousy mustache and attitude. I chose a country no one had ever heard of, that didn’t even exist on most maps because it was so newly independent from the Soviet empire.

Even when I quit praying for anything but a reprieve from junior high gym, the sheer mystery of the faraway fascinated me. Then, in high school, the first U.S. government studies on Kyrgyzstan began to be published—fat, ugly books concerned with failing infrastructure, mortality rates, unemployment, and poverty. I waded through pages of Poly Sci-speak for the infrequent references to the country’s natural beauty.

I announced that I was going to go there some day.

My family said, Ky-where?

My decision was considered on par with my dad’s promise to sail around the world (or hunt big game in Africa), which is to say it was condescendingly indulged with the tangible knowledge that hell would freeze into a red ice cube before either of us got on a plane.

For the most part, I accepted that. By the time I entered college, I joked that I’d go to Kyrgyzstan as soon as I could afford to pay for my own funeral—just one more of my eccentricities.

Then one night in the spring of 2003, my senior year of college, with three graduate school rejection letters stacked on the desk in front of me and a massive case of insomnia, I was surfing the Web, looking for jobs, for internships, for other grad programs...when I stumbled across the American University of Kyrgyzstan. (It’s now the American University of Central Asia—funded by George Soros, and red-ribbon-scissored in the late nineties by Hillary Clinton herself.)

I scrolled through their faculty and paused at Mark Jackson’s bio. He was teaching Comp II with a B.A. from Oregon State. If he could do it, I decided, then I could, and, with the sheer mental presence of insomnia, I sent an e-mail to the English department head, one Nurilla Sharshekeeva: Do you ever take faculty assistants? I asked, dropping Mark’s name shamelessly.

I sat back and thumbed though the unread class readings I was supposed to have completed, trying to settle my mind so I could sleep.

My e-mail beeped. It was Nurilla, from 13 time zones away: We have a place for you next year.

Three days before I got on the plane, on New Year’s Eve in a hostel in Budapest, I got an e-mail from an American University secretary that said she had found an apartment with two Kyrgyz women who would forgo rent for language practice. I said great.

By Soviet standards, ours wasn’t a bad apartment. It was ugly, sure, and would have been condemned in the States. It had central heat and central water, which meant the heater started up on the prescribed autumnal day and stayed on until spring, and all hot water was turned off on May 5. The toilet ran incessantly, making it hard to flush. The oven didn’t work. The stairwell was deliciously ghetto, and the building itself butted against the police station. Concertina wire and a guard tower overlooked the packed-dirt courtyard.

My flatmates took me in hand. They warned me of all the terrible things that could happen to me. The list of things I shouldn’t do was a mile long:

I shouldn’t be outside after dark on my own.

I shouldn’t look Kyrgyz men in the eyes.

I shouldn’t speak to any local men at all.

I shouldn’t wear my shoes in the house.

I shouldn’t speak English at the bazaar, or anywhere, really.

I should never pay over six som for a loaf of bread.

I should never carry American money if someone could possibly see it.

I shouldn’t take my camera to the bazaar. (Max predicted I’d be conked over the head and mugged before I even got there.)

I should never go to an exchange point that didn’t have an inside office.

I shouldn’t carry anything important on me, except a copy of my passport, and I should expect to be harassed by the police.

I shouldn’t even think about going outside of the city by myself, or even wandering outside the two-mile stretch of Chui that ran from Tsum down to the American Pub.(When I told one of my classes that I intended to travel solo to Lake Issyk-Kul, the students took a collective breath and broke into loud laughter.)

When the language barrier became too difficult, they flatly forbid me to go out after dark. It was too unsafe. If I found myself elsewhere after dark, I was to call and one of them would come escort me home.

I only did that once. In January, twilight fell at four p.m. I sat in Fatboy’s, an expat café, for four long hours, waiting for my roommate to collect me. When she did, breathless from the walk and the cold, I asked her why it was O.K. for her, but for not me.

You are too American, she said, and I resigned myself to house arrest.

Alita Putnam wrote this memoir while in the M.F.A. program at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks; she is now at Penn State. This is her first time in print. E-mail: alitabeth@yahoo.com