In this case, my mission was personal: I was seeking records in Altay's Civil Affairs Bureau on my father's service in a Chinese army unit six decades earlier. I knew police officers would soon be trailing me, as they did whenever foreign journalists turned up in Xinjiang. It was 2014. President Xi Jinping had begun enacting much harsher policies in the region, home to Uyghur and Kazakh Muslims.
For centuries, control of the area, a vast land of people from myriad ethnic groups living among mountains, deserts and high steppe has been central to Chinese rulers' conception of empire.
I knew that finding anything about my father, Yook Kearn Wong, was a long shot. But at the Civil Affairs Bureau, I struck up a conversation in a second-floor office with Wei Yangxuan, a young woman who happened to be an army veteran and helped organize activities for military retirees.
Suddenly I realized it was just past 7 a.m. in suburban Virginia, where my parents had lived for decades. Maybe if I called from my cellphone, Dad could tell Ms. Wei about the Kazakh base. He answered.
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