As you will have noticed, I can't be bothered to post anything really serious about Guantanamo: the moral 'issues' are not hard enough to be intellectually interesting, and you can always go read Glenn Greenwald to get good and fired up. But I would like to offer up a brief prayer to the fickle gods of immigration that (instead of/in addition to Omar Khadr) Canada gets sent some of the Guantanamo Uighurs. They've been treated atrociously, to put it mildly; the probability of there being an Al-Qaeda mastermind among them is close to zero; it would deeply, deeply piss off the tyrannical and racist Chinese regime they made the mistake of standing up to, which is an intrinsically good thing to do; and the Uighurs make noodles.
A fascinating Silk Road culture, a burbling hotpot of East and Western culinary influences, the Uighurs may be the most significant noodle-making culture still unrepresented domestically. Canada has a proud tradition of noodle- and dumpling-oriented refugee policy: we welcomed the Hungarians in '56, the Vietnamese boat people decades later, and the Tibetans more recently (momos!). But so far as I can tell, still no significant Uighur presence (except for this poor guy). It is time that this un-Canadian injustice was rectified, and we got us some of them flung noodles that Alford and Duguid keep going on about.
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And flatbreads. Uighurs make a mean flatbread. BTW, you'd like Alford and Duguid's "Beyond the Great Wall" if you don't already own it. More dumplings, noodles, and flatbreads than you can shake a stick at.
Are there any Uighur restaurants in Chicago?
Sadly, no. But there seems to be one in Montreal called, appropriately enough "Uighur Restaurant."
http://www.meshrep.com/Foods/restaurant/restaurant.html
We have some near misses.
By the way, I made Uighur nan the other night after reading this thread. You see what you've started? next time you're in Chicago we're going to have an entire Uighur meal.
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