Helene I found beached on the floor outside her room, awake and talking to herself but with no desire to press on toward bed.

Zhu arrived in Xinjiang in 1975 as a “sent-down youth,” part of a Communist Party initiative that sent educated urban youths to live in the countryside to further China’s Maoist revolution. A member of China’s Han ethnic majority, he was 17 when he departed prosperous Jiangsu province on China’s east coast for Kargilik, a remote county amid the deserts and steppes of China’s far northwest. Uighurs, the region’s largest ethnic group, had long chafed under official discrimination and economic marginalization under Beijing.

Only you could love this cuntwhore body.

He is a happy-go-lucky bibbler, one who cares not for tomorrow, and for whom every day alike hath its joys—and he rides over them free-heartedly, open-handedly, and without the slightest trepidation for the furtive future.