William Horberg

Dying Young

Lily Burk 1992 - 2009

There is nothing more unsettling and haunting in human experience than the death of a child. The recent murder of 17 year old Lily Burk was reported to me by my son Miro, who was her school classmate up through the 6th grade. It has gripped me since I heard the news when I arrived back in Los Angeles for a brief stop home last week, before returning to my job here in Melbourne.

Elsa and I remembered Lily's funny, smart and sophisticated 6th grade graduation speech to her class - she was a unique personality whose wit and style set her apart from her classmates. The tragic circumstances of her untimely murder at the hands of a mentally-disturbed man have also made her a news story, and no less than James Ellroy wrote a very passionate and poetic eulogy for her which was published here in Newsweek.

Her death also brought back to me my own experiences with young death. 

I think the first time I was aware of it was when a boy named Hippolito Vega was killed in a gang-related murder while I was a student at our neighborhood public school in Chicago. It was rumored that he had been beaten to death in the schoolyard with a baseball bat, which was a vivid, nightmare-inducing image to carry around as a second or third grader.

As a 17 year old junior in high school, another tragic event claimed the lives of several people including two young men from my school. Ellroy writes that "the dead claim the living through the imagined repetition of the horror they endured", and the events of that night have certainly repeated themselves in my imagination over the years.

It was a Friday night, and as it happened it was the night before our class was scheduled to take the dreaded SAT or scholastic aptitude test, a key rite of passage in American schools related to the college admission process. You'd think that most students would be home getting in some last minute cramming for the test, and perhaps most of them in my class were, but it was a Friday night after all, and we were teenagers, and I found myself waiting at home for some friends who had promised to come over and pick me up and join them in what we called cruisin'  or joy-riding around as the young, recently licensed-to-drive teens that we were.

As is always the case when you are stuck waiting on someone else and anticipating the events to come, minutes pass like hours, but in this case hours did pass, and my friends did not show up, and did not respond to my calls in those days before personal cell phones. Finally, restless and curious I decided to go out driving myself and see if I could find them and hook up with them, sure that whatever they were doing was infinitely more interesting than whatever I was doing.

As I drove north down Lake Shore Drive at about 9 p.m. the traffic was really heavy and I gradually discerned that there was an accident ahead that was clogging things up. In one of those slow dawning moments of realization wherein your perception seems not lifelike but cinematographic and slowed down, I arrived upon the scene of a major collision of two cars. Fire trucks and police cars and ambulances were already there by the time I got close, and I could tell from the mangled smoldering wreckage that this was an extraordinarily catastrophic event. 

But it wasn't until I caught a glimpse out of the corner of my eye of a person walking like a zombie by the side of the road, and in that instant recognized that person as one of the friends I had been waiting for at home, that the whole scene came into sharp focus at warp speed, and I had the sickening epiphany that one of the cars involved was their car, that one of the drivers involved was my friend, and that the bodies on the side of the road were what was left of my other two friends.

The coincidence of the timing of my arrival was surreal, and the chance events that lead to my having born witness to just this moment has haunted me over the years; as has the sudden loss of two young boys; as has the tragic death of an innocent person in another family involved in the crash. Things went on at my school that year, but they were never quite the same for any of us, and as teenagers we couldn't really begin to imagine how never-the-same they were and would forever be for the parents of the children who were killed in the accident - the imagined repetition of the horror they endured.

I imagine many of you have your own stories of being touched by tragedy and the sudden loss of young people close to you growing up. It is an inevitable part of life. But no less painful and unforgettable for being so common. 

Our hearts go out to Lily's parents and family and friends. No one should have to endure what you have.

william

Remembering Old Kashgar

What an outrage! That is what I felt last week when a friend sent me an email with this disturbing news from China. 

China razes the cradle of a culture

Paul Mooney, Foreign Corresponden

• Last Updated: May 03. 2009 8:27PM UAE / May 3. 2009 4:27PM GMT

An Uighur man sits on the pavement in the Old Town of Kashgar, under threat of demolition from the Chinese.Paul Mooney for The National

KASHGAR, CHINA // An old way of life is coming to a crashing end in north-western China with two-thirds of Kashgar’s Old City being bulldozed over the past few weeks under a government plan to “modernise” the area.

The few remaining houses still standing are marked with an ominous-looking Chinese character written in red with a circle drawn around it. The character, pronounced “chai” in Chinese, means demolish. 

A government plan worth US$440 million (Dh1.6 billion) calls for the relocation of 65,000 Uighur households, about 220,000 people, whose families have lived in the Old City for centuries. Until a few weeks ago, the area housed 40 per cent of the city’s residents in its labyrinth-like alleyways, where the naturalness of the life made it a popular tourist destination and one that was not ruined by tourism.

For centuries, children played on the cobblestone streets of the Old City, mothers standing in the doorways of their mud-brick dwellings chatting with neighbours, their faces covered by scarves. Bearded men wearing embroidered doppas (skullcaps) have walked daily to the many small neighbourhood mosques that pepper the area for prayers, passing by coppersmiths hammering pieces of metal into shiny pots, butchers cutting lamb in the open air and bakers slapping traditional flatbreads on to the sides of a tandoor, a makeshift clay oven.

Irritated residents claim the government made no attempt to discuss the demolition plan with them or to consider other ways of dealing with the problems.

The Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim group, have long resented Chinese rule of Xinjiang, which they call East Turkestan. Wang Lequan, the Xinjiang party secretary, announced in March during a visit to Kashgar and Hotan that the two cities were at the “forefront of the fight against the three evil forces of terrorism, extremism and separatism”.

Some Uighurs argue the demolition is part of an orchestrated campaign by the Chinese government to destroy Uighur culture.

“The Old City in Kashgar represents the very essence of Uighur civilisation for thousands of years,” said Rebiya Kadeer, the president of the Uyghur American Association. “The Uighurs consider Kashgar the cradle of Uighur civilisation.

“By destroying Kashgar, the Chinese government will make all East Turkestan cities and towns look just like all other Chinese cities and towns along the east coast. Once Kashgar is destroyed, the unique Uighur and Central Asian character of East Turkestan will become history.”

Kashgar is on the old silk road that connected East to West and was one of the major trading routes of the world at one time. I first arrived there in May of 2006 as we scouted locations for filming The Kite Runner. We were looking for someplace to stand in for Kabul, Afghanistan in the 1970's, and since we could not film in the actual city of Kabul for security reasons at that time, our line producer Bennett Walsh, who had produced "Kill Bill" for Quentin Tarantino in China, had lead us to explore this ancient city with its small alley ways and mud homes and old mosques in this uniquely Muslim area in the Xinjaing Autonomous Region which is home to the Uighur ethnic minority.
The Uighurs were at one time the majority population of this remote corner of northwest China. But long simmering tensions with the dominant Han Chinese after demands of autonomy and threats of secession over the years, have resulted in a conflict that has seen a massive resettlement of Han to the region, making the Uighurs a minority in their own homeland.Now this latest act, which is characterized by the Chinese government as a kind of urban renewal project to clean up a leaky old slum, has demolished this unique and beautiful old city, and displaced the resident population. But more than that, it has cut the heart out of the culture.It was impossible to imagine when we were filming The Kite Runner that the movie would become any kind of historical record of a place on the verge of eradication. Now, among all the other reasons that I am glad it exists in the world, it is also a way to remember and honor Old Kashgar, not as a stand-in for Kabul, but for the special place that it was.Here are some images of Uighurs in old town Kashgar I took on the scout.




How sad. How shameful that we continue to plow under traditional cultures in the name of security or development around the world. What an outrage!
william