On May 13, 2005, a popular uprising in the city of Andijan within the Central Asian nation of Uzbekistan led to a repressive crackdown. Security forces from the Uzbek National Security Service fired into a crowd killing—at least, according to an official government count—187 people. Estimates by Western governments put the toll at well over 1000. The Andijan massacre led to major sanctions against Uzbekistan by many Western governments, including the United States. Uzbekistan responded by closing off access to the Karshi-Khanabad Air Base, which was being used by the U.S. Air Force for support missions during Operation Enduring Freedom in neighboring Afghanistan. (Uzbekistan shares an 89 mile border with Afghanistan, with the Amu Darya river being the geographic barrier between the two countries.) Also caught up in the aftermath of the crackdown were numerous Western-based organizations that were forced to shut down, many of which were working on democratic, political and human rights projects such as Freedom House, the BBC World Service, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. In addition to these organizations was the entire Peace Corps Uzbekistan mission, which just happened to be where I was serving as a volunteer. The diplomatic crisis that unfolded saw me and my fellow volunteers on edge during several weeks of tense back-and-forth communication between the U.S. Embassy in Tashkent and Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In early June 2005, the Uzbek government informed the Peace Corps that it would decline to reissue visas for the newest group of volunteers who had only just recently arrived as well as the Peace Corps country director. With our country director labeled a persona-non-grata by the Uzbek government and given the tenuous nature of the visas for the 150 volunteers still living in the country, the Peace Corps announced they would suspend its program in Uzbekistan, and with that my service was abruptly terminated.

At the time of our mission’s closure I was living in Khiva, a 1500 year-old city that was first established as a trading post along the Silk Road, a system of Eurasian caravaning routes that linked Asia with the European world for centuries. In Khiva, caravans would stop for rest, shelter and provisioning before crossing the vast expanses of the Central Asian desert. Later in its history, the city would grow to become the seat of the Khanate of Khiva, a political entity that existed from 1511 to 1920 before it was absorbed fully into the Soviet Union after decades of Russian influence. Khiva is ensconced within the Amu Darya river watershed between the Kyzylum (Red Sand) and Karakum (Black Sand) deserts, where the city’s mud-brick walls and earth-colored stone mosques and madrasas—adorned with ornate green, teal and turquoise tiles—bake in the midday summer sun.

In 2005, I had an ostensible position as a health extension volunteer, where I was supposed to build out and support health education for a local hospital. However, my first meeting with the region’s public health director was fruitless; he was confused as to why the Peace Corps hadn’t sent a doctor, as opposed to a 26-year old with a bachelor’s degree in English literature. (I had worked at the National Institutes of Health in a communications office; my first job out of college, but the health director was unfazed.) Besides, he explained, Khiva didn’t need a health volunteer—a denial of the existence of any sort of public health problems in the city, despite government reports that signaled chronic issues with respiratory diseases, water sanitation, and basic hygiene.

I ignored the hospital completely and focused my efforts on meeting locals and exploring their needs from their perspectives. I fell in with members of the tourism industry, who were desperate to improve their English language skills so they could communicate with travelers who were, paradoxically, mostly from Germany, France, and Italy, and not necessarily English-speaking countries. Just before the Peace Corps program closed, I had started an English language club at a local school with the help of my friend Inobat and her mother Adolat, who was the school’s principal; I was mentoring a young local entrepreneur, Mirzo, who desperately wanted to study in the United States; and I was studying the feasibility of reopening a defunct community center to serve local children with an ambitious young man whose parents expected him to work in agriculture, even though he wanted to go to medical school and become a community leader. I also just finished volunteering at an arts and crafts camp with Inobat’s younger sister, Dinara—a shy but sharp young woman who had a budding talent for portraiture.

I spent my last day in Uzbekistan as a Peace Corps Volunteer with Inobat and a few other Uzbek friends. Though we knew the end was coming, we held out a glimmer of hope that, somehow, the visa issues would be resolved and we would be allowed to continue our service. Over ice cream, I tried to gently convey the factors that led to our quick departure from the country, but it was impossible to square my understanding of the political situation into words that my two friends would understand. Within 48 hours of the evacuation orders, we were packed, moved to a staging area near the airport in Tashkent, and booked on an Uzbekistan Airways flight to New York City. I promised host families, friends and colleagues that I would try to return quickly, as soon as I could secure a visa, save for a flight, take time off work—ambitious plans that are easy to express in words until the reality of time fades them away. Uzbekistan went from being my number one priority, to top five, to top ten. I was still committed to the Third Goal of Peace Corps mission—to help promote a better understanding of other peoples of the world on the part of Americans. But I resigned myself to reflecting on Uzbekistan from a distance; stumbling upon an Uzbek restaurant in Denver and trying so desperately to communicate with the proprietors using long faded language skills, or identifying the accent and name of a New York City cab driver as Uzbek, and steeling myself to ask him his name, in the Uzbek language while knowing full well I am committing a necessary microaggression.

The humorist John Hodgman once described nostalgia as being the most toxic of impulses. In his collection of essays titled Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches, Hodgman said of nostalgia, “it is the twinned, yearning delusion that (a) the past was better (it wasn´t) and (b) it can be recaptured (it can´t).” I’ve often considered the notion of nostalgia in my own reflections on serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Uzbekistan. In the 17 years since I lived in Uzbekistan, I found myself keeping an eye out, or even seeking, aspects of Uzbek culture during travel or local excursions. Is there an Uzbek restaurant in the vicinity? Do Uzbek locals shop at that new Russian market? Was that couple speaking Uzbek to each other at the airport? All of these questions were exercises in trying to recapture the personal association many volunteers almost have with their countries of service.

When the Peace Corps program in Uzbekistan closed, volunteers were forced to return home by an Uzbekistan which at the time was led by its autocratic dictator Islom Karimov, the former First Secretary of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan during the Soviet Union who eventually ruled the newly independent Uzbekistan from 1991 until his death in 2016. Old Uzbekistan, the Uzbekistan I lived in as a volunteer, was paranoid, stagnant, and repressive—in essence, a nearly closed society for which few people would be particularly nostalgic.

The Tashkent Metro, for example, was a classic example of the regime’s paranoia on display in 2005. The system, a stunning mix of Soviet architecture and Uzbek history constructed each of the line’s stations, was completely off-limits to photography and foreign visitors (volunteers included) were often subject to questioning by local authorities who were fishing for a bribe. Tourists were welcomed, cautiously, but were discouraged from venturing off the main tourist trail that followed the expansive Great Silk Road—now designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site—linking the ancient cities of Khiva, Bukhara, and Samarkand. Living in Old Uzbekistan felt as if you were living through communist hangover—a stagnancy that manifested itself in fading apartment buildings built during the Soviet era, crumbling infrastructure, limited economic options, and high unemployment. In 2005, one of the primary modes of transportation for anyone looking to travel from one city to another was via an informal network of privately-owned vehicles. These “taxis” would cluster in a particular spot, usually near a local bazaar or train station, and solicit passengers through a complex process of haggling. A common refrain I heard from many of these drivers during my time as a volunteer was “gaz qimmat, pul kam”—gasoline is expensive, and there’s little money. Layered in between these feelings of paranoia and stagnancy was a pervasive air of repression. The insidiousness of repression in Uzbekistan in 2005 meant there was little use of engaging in deep discussions about stagnant economic conditions or the opportunities for political change, lest someone clash with the regime’s paranoia and be sentenced to a long term in prison.

There now exists a literal slogan that describes the change that has occurred in the seventeen years since the country isolated itself, politically and economically, following the Andjian protest: "Yangi Uzbekistan" which directly translates as "New Uzbekistan." For a country that was under the yoke of a hardliner ex-communist leader during the better part of 25 years, New Uzbekistan is a calculated departure from Old Uzbekistan. New Uzbekistan is led by Shavkat Mirziyoyev— the successor to Islom Karimov and the chief architect of the country’s new vision.

New Uzbekistan is attempting to move past Old Uzbekistan except for, of course, the country's rich historical sites which are critical to its economic potential in the form of tourist dollars and the extraction of natural resources such as gold-bearing minerals and cotton cultivation. New Uzbekistan means the ability to use ATMs instead of waiting at the bank and negotiating with the teller to release funds from your bank account, and hoping that the central bank issued your local bank Uzbek som, the national currency. New Uzbekistan means access to modern, drive-thru gas stations and facsimiles of Western-style convenience stores and supermarkets instead of unreliable pumps and ad-hoc roadside black market sellers or the classic but unregulated open-air bazaar. New Uzbekistan means house numbers on every dwelling, even down to the smallest village (In 2005, finding someone’s house in a village often relied on an almost preternatural sense of vague local landmarks.) New Uzbekistan means a different approach to one's storefront that is meant to attract customers: modern signage, warm lighting, foreign imports, and refrigerated beverages to-go, an irony in a country where many people scold anyone who drinks ice cold water for a fear of getting sick. New Uzbekistan means the ability to freely take pictures inside the Tashkent Metro without the fear of being detained by the local police. It also has the potential to signify a serious effort at a detente among those who seek a more democratic future, as opposed to continued repression, especially in the eyes of external observers who see Uzbekistan as a participant in the global economy.

And that participating means adapting to the inexorable march of globalization and capitalism after pivoting away from the stagnancy of a planned economy. It means New Uzbekistan must be aspirational, which is manifested in the countless number of English, Arabic, Japanese, or Korean language schools and IELTS testing centers—a language proficiency test administered by the British Council that is one of the major English-language tests in the world—everywhere. New Uzbekistan needs to leverage its newfound national identity, arguably the country’s strongest characteristic and influenced by thousands of years of intermingling ethnic groups, foreign conquerors, curious travelers, and would-be colonizers, now on display through a culture where guests are revered as if they are visiting kings and queens. New Uzbekistan (particularly the government), with cautious confidence, feels compelled to invite the outside world in. But how do Uzbeks feel about this change and their place in the world both at home and beyond the desert and steppe of Central Asia?

In early 2019, the New York Times published its yearly interactive list of 52 places to visit around the world, and Uzbekistan was number 34, between Orcas Island, Washington and Vestlandet, Norway. “Visa-free travel and reopened borders along the Silk Road” the blurb said, while going on to claim that Uzbekistan was “finally going through its own perestroika.” The Times sent a travel columnist to write up a dispatch from Central Asia and he filed a story titled “In Uzbekistan, Encounters With a Dead Goat. But in a Good Way.” The animal was in reference to a game called buzkashi, a sport in which several hundred riders jockey to pick up a stuffed goat carcass and haul it toward a target. The title and the article suggested a kind of exoticism that can only exist halfway around the globe on the Central Asian steppe: witnessing an ancient game that uses a dead carcass as its focal point; sampling the local cuisine in the city of Bukhara in front of a bemused staff; tying together the artisans and craftspeople to a lived history of over 1000 years—while at the same time suggesting that calling Uzbekistan exotic is “an easy trap.” Even though I hadn’t witnessed a game of buzkashi in person, the columnist's descriptions of what I had witnessed were mostly accurate, if not painted in broad brush strokes.

I had been following news stories about Uzbekistan for the better part of a decade and began to rely on social media to get back in touch with long lost connections. My goal was, eventually, to plan a reunion trip to see for myself how much the country had changed since I was evacuated in 2005. I connected with old host family members, friends, and colleagues across various social media platforms. The host family I first stayed with during training were still living in a suburb of Tashkent, with both boys now grown men working for overseas multinationals. Another friend had lived in Japan for a number of years, spent six months in San Diego on a tourist visa where he also made some under-the-table profits selling used cars with a friend who had permanent residency, and then moved back before his visa expired to his home in Kitob—a small city in southern Uzbekistan. My friend Dinara gave up her art career and was now working as an English teacher and earning a master’s degree in English education. Mirzo, the ambitious entrepreneur, entered Anglia Ruskin University in the United Kingdom and returned home to manage a hotel in Khiva.

In Old Uzbekistan, getting a visa to Uzbekistan was a bureaucratic headache for anyone who wanted to visit. A Soviet-era paper application existed to question would-be travelers of their intentions while visiting, where they planned to stay, and—the biggest hurdle of all, particularly for independent-minded travelers—a form of lodging registration filed by each hotel or guesthouse with the local police. Yet another Soviet-era policy designed to monitor and control the population.

My first glimpse of Uzbekistan since the Peace Corps program’s suspension was applying for a visa just after the country had lifted almost all travel restrictions following the pandemic in 2022. I applied on a Tuesday, via the Ministry of Foreign Affairs online portal, with my name, a passport photo that I took straight from my phone, my passport details, and my intended “first destination” which was boutique hotel near downtown Tashkent that I had reserved online, even though my host family, the Khusanovs, would not hear of it since they planned to pick me up at Tashkent International Airport when my flight landed. By Friday, I received an email with the subject line “your visa is finished” and a link to my electronic entry form.

The ease of acquiring a visa led to a cascade of events that eventually found me sitting inside the international terminal at Istanbul Airport waiting for a Turkish Airlines flight to Tashkent. On the four hour flight, I overheard a group of tourists in the bulkhead row chatting excitedly about their travel plans, while vocalizing concern about one key detail. The week prior, a vestige of Old Uzbekistan appeared in the news. Thousands of protestors took to the streets in the city of Nukus, the capital of the autonomous region of Karakalpakstan in western Uzbekistan. The protestors expressed anger at several proposed constitutional amendments, including one that would limit Karakalpakstan’s autonomy and the region’s right to secede via referendum. President Mirziyoyev, who proposed the amendments to the Uzbek constitution, agreed to withdraw the amendments the day after the protests, although security forces continued to clash with civilians in the following days. At least 21 people were killed and hundreds injured, although opposition groups claim the toll was much higher. The Uzbek government put a state of emergency in place for the entire Karakalpak region, essentially cutting off access to Nukus to everyone.

While off the main route of the Great Silk Road, Nukus serves as an important launch point for two destinations. The first is for tours of remnants of the Aral Sea, which at one time was one of the largest inland bodies of water in the world. Soviet agricultural planning siphoned water from two major rivers that fed the sea, the Amu Darya to the south, and the Syr Darya to the north, and the Aral shrunk to a fraction of its former size leading to large-scale desertification in the region.

The town of Mo’ynoq on the former shores of the Aral Sea was once home to a thriving fishery, but now, stranded several hundred kilometers from the new shoreline, is the gateway to witness an ecological disaster up close. The second is Nukus Museum of Art, also known as the Savitsky Museum after the museum’s first curator, Igor Savitsky. The museum possesses some 80,000 items, including antiquities, Karakalpak artwork, and one of the largest collections of Soviet avant-garde artwork, all housed in the geographic heart of Central Asia.

The tourists on the Turkish flight remained cautiously optimistic they could enter Karakalpakstan. They struck up a conversation with a middle-aged Uzbek man in a gray puffy jacket and jeans in hopes of gaining information. I approached the man later on in the flight, greeted him in Uzbek and asked him if he knew anything about the situation in Nukus. Surprised, he replied in accented English and told me he was as uninformed as the rest of us.“I live in Miami Beach,” the man said. “I’m just going home to visit my father in Tashkent, but as tourists you can probably go anywhere you like.”

We landed about an hour late into Tashkent: close to two in the morning. I switched on my phone, hoping for service as promised by my carrier and success—the LTE signal appeared along with a torrent of WhatsApp messages, including one from my eldest host brother, Dilshod Khusanov. “Your flight is delayed, but don’t worry. I’m outside customs.” Standing between me and entry to New Uzbekistan was an immigration officer who scanned my documents, looked at me, and asked me where I’m from.

“I’m from the United States.”

“You’re not American; your name is not American. What is your nationality?”

Uzbek passports, like many citizenship documents from the Commonwealth of Independent States—a group of nations that once formed the Soviet Union—have both citizenship and nationality, or ancestral origin, on the information page. A person could hold citizenship from Uzbekistan, but identify as Tajik, Kyrgyz or Russian as their nationality. It was unlikely the agent was confused by my passport, but instead was pressing me to be as truthful as possible. In one breath, I said:

“My name is Pakistani because my father is originally from Pakistan, but immigrated to the United States. My mother is of European ancestry, but we are all American citizens.”

“Have you been to Uzbekistan before?

“No,” I lied, and then added, “I mean not recently. I was last here in 2005.”

I thought about my previous experience entering and exiting Uzbekistan as a Peace Corps Volunteer, when the country was far stricter as to who it would admit or let leave the country. Still, when dealing with border crossings, honesty always feels like the best policy.“Welcome to Uzbekistan,” the agent said as he stamped my passport.

I exited the airport and saw a crowd of people waiting earnestly for their arriving passengers, including Dilshod who smiled broadly as I approached. “17 years is too long!” he exclaimed as we embraced. A wave of catharsis came over me as we elbowed our way through a group of taxi drivers soliciting for fares. We reached Dilshod’s car and drove off into the night toward the first home I ever knew during my Peace Corps training in Uzbekistan.

Even though as a Peace Corps Volunteer I had spent a lot of time in Tashkent, it was difficult to get a sense of how much the city had changed as we cruised through the mostly empty streets at three in the morning. There was an unmistakable odor to the air quality that immediately brought me back to 2004 when our group of Americans first arrived in the country; perhaps the smell of nitrogen oxide from the burning of fuel or nearby industry mixed with smoke. Cutting through the hazy night air were large modern advertising displays on the road leading out of the airport perimeter, all using digital displays to promote mobile carrier services, banking, and Uzbekistan Airways, which was promoting the acquisition of its sleek new flagship Boeing 787 Dreamliner. On the streets of Tashkent that evening, ATMs were brightly lit and abundant and nestled next to rows of retail stores that occupied the bottom floor of block-long, newly-renovated apartment buildings.

By the time we arrived at Dilshod’s home, which is also the home for the entire Khusanov family, it was close to 4am. Dilshod, his brother Davron and their sister Nargiza (who passed away in 2008) were raised by their parents, Ravshan and Miassar, in a small two-story cinder block home along a quiet tree-lined street located in the suburb of Ulugbek less than 20 miles from downtown Tashkent. Uzbek homes are typically surrounded by a high wall called a pakhsa and secured with a darvoza, or a metal gate. Enter the metal gate, and you find yourself in the hovli, or courtyard, where families grow seasonal crops—grapes, cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, carrots, and pomegranates. Almost all homes have a raised platform called a tapchan where families often spend time cooling themselves off during the summer, or where men host other male guests without having to invite them inside the home. Uzbekistan is a majority Muslim country where traditional practices of separating individuals by gender still exists, despite efforts to purge religion and promote atheism in the 67 years it existed as the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. Influenced by both religion and cultural norms is arguably the strongest and most inescapable tenant of Uzbek society, especially as a foreigner: the mexmon or, pluralized, mexmonlar, which translates as guest, visitor, or even caller. Mexmonlar are doted on by their hosts and to not offer hospitality in the form of tea or food is an insult to the guest and grave dishonor for a family.

Because the Khusanovs were my host family, I occupied a strange position. I was seen as both a guest but also an older brother to my host siblings, and as a son to my host parents. Still, when I dragged myself into their home in the early hours of the morning, Ravshan and Miassar were sitting at their dining table in a dining room that had certainly been renovated since I was last in Uzbekistan—flashes of Old and New Uzbekistan merged together in my memory as I tried to process this homecoming. At the center of the room was a long dining table, topped with an embroidered white tablecloth and a clear vinyl covering. Uzbek ceramic bowls designed with traditional images of cotton bolls, the chief agricultural product of Uzbekistan, were placed carefully around the table, filled with pistachios, salted almonds, raisins, various candies and fresh cream. In between the bowls were small plates of various cheeses, sliced meats and Uzbek non—a traditional flatbread that is ubiquitous on all dining tables in Central Asia. Standing up to greet me, Ravshan shook my hand and Miassar gave me a light familial hug, patting me gently on the shoulders and echoing exactly what Dilshod said to me at the table, “17 years is too long, Zain.”

The Khusanov family outside their home in Ulugbek, Uzbekistan. From left, DIlshod, Ravshan, Miassar, and Davron.

Miassar poured black tea for all of us, and insisted I eat while at the same time noting that I had put on weight. I snacked on non and cheese while Dilshod served as our translator, as I strained to communicate using my diminished Uzbek language skills. In the two weeks I spent in Uzbekistan, I noticed my language skills gradually returned, even though I encountered far more English-language speakers than I had in 2004 and 2005. Our early morning conversation ranged from polite inquiries about family and work to direct questions about politics—why did we elect an elderly president in Biden—to the strangely curious, such as comparing the cost of a Chervolet to a Mercedes in the United States.

Ravshan had a preternatural curiosity about all things from America. He grew up in the Soviet Union to an Uzbek family in Tashkent and served in the Soviet Navy in the early 1980s where he was stationed in Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave that sits on the Baltic Sea, and was stationed aboard the cruiser October Revolution. After military service, he married Miassar through a family arrangement and was moved to Ulugbek by the state to work at an institute for nuclear research. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, Ravshan was laid off and worked as a taxi driver. Despite their diminished economic prospects, he and Miassar, who worked at the local school all three Khusanov children attended, devoted their full energy to making sure their children were in a position to succeed in New Uzbekistan. This meant giving them access to the best educational opportunities available to them and making sure they had the chance to learn English. At some point in the late 1990s the Khusanovs began to host Peace Corps trainees and exposed their children to an American organization and, by extension, American volunteers who had access to resources. Uzbek host families were offered compensation for housing volunteers and, from what I could tell, the Khusanovs probably invested 100% of that money toward education.

Aspirations of academic and economic success in 2004 paid off for the Khusanovs. In the light of day of my first full morning back in Uzbekistan, Dilshod explained the renovations that he and Davron financed over the years to create a livable space for his entire family to live more comfortably than they did years ago. The kitchen was updated and modernized, and a stainless steel refrigerator replaced the Soviet-style fridge, which was decommissioned from its kitchen duties and given a renewed life as a storage space in the living room where it housed important business documents and cash, both dollars and Uzbek som. A lacquered pinewood staircase with wooden balusters curved up and around a chandelier that hung over the main living room, and into a remodeled second floor—my old bedroom. The old Soviet army mesh cot I crashed into each night after language and technical training during my volunteer days was replaced with an actual mattress. The bathroom was modernized, with the new addition of a washing machine manufactured in Korea. In another corner of the upstairs was a small room with a prayer rug pointed in the direction of Mecca. This room doubled as a storage space for Nargiza’s personal items which Miassar couldn’t bring herself to dispose of after she died.

Nargiza, the most ambitious of the three children, wanted to move to the United States to study, work and possibly emigrate. As a university student, she attained an H1B visa and was offered a guest worker position in Saratoga Springs, NY, where she spent a summer working at a McDonalds. Her health, however, declined rapidly upon returning to Uzbekistan and she died of a heart-related illness after a long stay at home.

Outside the comfort of the Khusanov’s home, I took some time to explore Tashkent—Uzbekistan’s rapidly developing capital. The skyline, like many emerging cities, was dotted with construction cranes that signaled the development of massive urban expansion. Open air bazaars, once the focus for almost all kinds of local commerce, were discouraged by government officials in favor of clean, air-conditioned stores reminiscent of a shopping experience at the German chain Aldi—all of the amenities of a modern grocer: air conditioning, brightly-lit aisles, branded ad promotions, but with food and produce still stacked neatly in their individual cardboard boxes, evincing a no-frills approach to discount shopping.

Traditional open air markets still existed such as the famous Chorsu Bazaar near the old town of Tashkent, where you could buy groceries, household goods, textiles, jewelry, wood and metalwork, and a range of gifts appropriate for weddings and newborn babies. Moneychangers also roamed the bazaar, following tourists around to solicit black market exchanges.

Like any growing metropolis, traffic could be a bit of a nightmare. Dilshod, driving his white Chervolet, weaved in and out of a sea of other white Chevrolets as we drove around the city. For every one Honda or Mercedes, Ravshan had joked, there were 100 Chevrolets. For every one Tesla, there were 1000 Chevys. The transportation hierarchy in Tashkent, and throughout Uzbekistan for that matter, featured the car at the apex. Everyone else was encouraged to get out of the way, although I did notice a stricter adherence to crosswalks, especially as I traveled further into the tourist destinations along the Great Silk Road where tourist police were hypervigilant in protecting visitors.

I found a local guide who offered to take me on a tour of the Tashkent Metro during rush hour. As we entered the station, I asked my guide if photographs were allowed. Even though I had read numerous travelogs that clearly stated photography was permitted, my past experience still haunted me. My guide asked a police officer at the entrance to the famous Kosmonautlar station—whose architecture celebrated Soviet achievements in space exploration—if I could shoot inside, pointing to the large Nikon slung around my neck. The officer asked me where I was from and then said to my guide, “He can take pictures of anything he likes. He can video, he can record, the mexmon can do anything.”

During my time with the Khusanovs, I noticed that my host brothers put in exceptionally long hours at work. Dilshod spent most days during my visit in his “office” which consisted of two monitors, a laptop, two phones, and the old Soviet army cot that was once my bed that now served as his desk chair. He also had several side gigs. One of them was to facilitate reservations at hotels for large groups of Uzbek tourists on behalf of travel agencies while front large amounts of cash to local agents in a complex form of arbitrage. While some agents honored the deal, others confessed that they had used the cash for other business purposes, but that they promised to repay him in a few weeks, leaving Dilshod exasperated and muttering that business was too risky as he whipped his Chevrolet back home. One day when I asked to see some of Tashkent’s newest development, Dilshod instead took me from travel agency to travel agency, where he negotiated, pleaded, and begged for the return on his investment, plus commission. In a second gig, he bought new cars at a discount and sold them to willing buyers who met him at a notary public where documents were signed, large amounts of U.S. dollars were exchanged, hands were shaken, and Chervolets were sold.

After spending five days in Tashkent, Dilshod and Miassar took me to the train station in Tashkent, where I boarded a packed car the day after Eid al-Adha—the “Feast of the Sacrifice and one of the most important holidays celebrated in Islam. Everyone was leaving Tashkent to go south and west: to Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva.

During my Peace Corps days, train travel consisted of traveling to the ticket office, elbowing your way into a group of people huddled in front of a window, and hoping your Uzbek was passable enough that you got the time, date and seat correct on your ticket. In New Uzbekistan, you were encouraged to log onto an online system that allowed you to make a reservation within five minutes using any credit card from around the world. Many Soviet-era train cars were refurbished and modernized, and now featured recliners and USB ports. A high speed rail network was under construction throughout Uzbekistan, and the first operational phase that ran between Tashkent and Samarkand was sold out for weeks on account of the holiday.

From Tashkent, I made a series of hops along the Great Silk Road to reunite with more old friends and acquaintances. In Samarkand, I soaked in the grandeur of the Registon, a large plaza consisting of three towering madrasas built throughout the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries—one of the most distinctive examples of Timurid and Islamic architecture in all of Central Asia. The Registon served as a backdrop for lunch with my friend Sherzod, his brother Mohammed and their mutual friend Jahongir. We ate shashlik, a type of kebab that is a mix of meat and seasoned cubes of fat from the sheep’s enormous tail, and Samarkand non, the region’s distinctive version of flatbread, and drank Coca-Cola while a dutiful young waiter took orders for refills and more food on his iPhone.

From Samarkand, we drove south in Jahongir’s Chervolet. We accelerated up a windy mountain pass that separated the Samarkand region from the Kashkadarya region and passed freshly printed signs that advertised places to rest away from the dusty flatland basins. As we stopped for fuel at a gleaming new gas station, a group of Uzbek tourists took selfies in front of a large Pepsi billboard which advertised more opportunities for rest, more tea, more shashlik. A square two-story structure with glass windows, architecture out of Dwell magazine in the middle of Uzbekistan, jutted out from the mountainside and overlooked the valley—a destination venue for weddings and celebrations. As we approached the small city of Kitob, Sherzod and Muhammed’s home, I saw a billboard that stated “YANGI O’ZBEKISTON—INSON QADRI ULUG’LANGAN YURT!” Translation: The New Uzbekistan is a Country In Which Human Values Are Glorified. The billboard depicted popular Uzbek motifs, such as a camel caravan in the desert, a basket of fresh produce, and artisans working on their craft. In one picture, President Mirziyoyev was depicted standing next to one of Uzbekistan’s female athletes from the Tokyo Summer Olympics. An image just below the messaging about human values depicted, quite unironically, the Uzbek and Chinese flags flanked by two other flags from Conch Cement, one of the largest concrete manufacturers in China.

Sherzod had returned home from his brief stint in the United States a few years ago and, with his brother Mohammed, started a small language school. Both brothers had previously lived in Japan and both worked as retail clerks at 7-Eleven and both, naturally, were fluent in Japanese. Sherzod expressed an interest in staying in Japan, but he felt a familial duty to come back to Uzbekistan so he could be close to his aging parents. He also felt a sense of duty toward his nation. Though he possesses an innate ability for language, Sherzod felt a desire to give younger generations the opportunity to learn. LevelUp Language School occupied two floors of a brand new business complex which, when I was there in 2004, was a small dust-choked lot occupied by one dingy teahouse that sat next to a dusty road leading south out of town to the desert of southern Uzbekistan. Marketing decals on the outside of the building advertised lessons in English, Russian, Arabic, Japanese, Korean, and a subject called “mental arithmetic” which Sherzod described as instruction in critical thinking and confidence-building. I told Sherzod I would volunteer as a guest speaker at the school, if the students were interested.

The next day, I faced an eager, chatty group of 40 Uzbek students ranging from age 12 to age 32. Sherzod and one of his co-teachers, Bekzod, introduced me to the group and announced that I was an American and a former teacher in Uzbekistan and that I would be glad to answer any questions they had—and that we had two hours to spend in conversation. I fielded questions about America. I was asked my opinion about Uzbekistan and its culture. I presented a slideshow using old photos from my days as a Peace Corps Volunteer, with most of the older students expressing surprise at the changes between 2004 and 2022. As more students entered, standing room only at this point, I pressed Sherzod and Bekzod into service to help me facilitate games. I talked about regional accents and, in a moment of desperation, led students on a tour of my neighborhood near downtown Denver using Google Maps. One group of students in particular saved me from burning out before my two hours was up: a group of women who occupied all the desks at the front of the classroom and were consistently engaged for two hours while the rest of the class lost interest. Two of the women were English teachers in nearby villages who hoped to improve their conversation skills. The rest of the women in the front row were ready to attend university. A handful wanted to become teachers, but one wanted to become a doctor. Except for the two English teachers, all of them had aspirations to work and study in the United States someday, and all of them asked hard questions about how to achieve their dreams. In the back of my mind, I thought about the cost of university for international students in the United States who weren’t supported through government grants or scholarship funding. These women came from a relatively poor province by Uzbek standards and would probably not be able to finance an opportunity in higher education in America. I told them to continue to study hard and to do their best, and largely avoided the subject.

From Kitob I planned on a short stop in Bukhara before heading further to Khiva. It started with a haggle and a negotiation in a dusty parking lot on a road, where I was forced to draw upon my long dormant Uzbek language skills to negotiate for a seat in a long-haul taxi. Instead of holding out for more passengers like I would have as a Peace Corps Volunteer, where I had plenty of time and little money, this time I had plenty of money, but limited time. I forked over 300,000 Uzbek som (or about $30) for the whole car, which eased the anxiety hanging over my head about crossing the desert. My driver was also anxious to get home to Bukhara, and the six hour desert crossing was uneventful, if not exceptionally hot as he opted keep the Chervolet’s air conditioning off in an effort to save on gas. From the road, I saw camels tied to a fence next to the highway that probably belonged to a herder who lived in a newly constructed village nearby. Each home featured a satellite dish and an air conditioning compressor on the outside walls. On one side of the road, I identified a new textile plant by the stylized cotton logo on its exterior wall. On the other, a dilapidated natural gas refinery from the Soviet era.

In Bukhara, I immersed myself in the Uzbekistan that I was intimately familiar with during my Peace Corps days. I wandered through the maze-like stone alleyways of Bukhara’s old quarter and toured the Bukharan Jewish Synagogue—one of the last vestiges of a once thriving Jewish community. The 80-year old caretaker, Isaak Davidovich Gulamov, pointed out pictures of foreign dignitaries who had visited—Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, and a number of famous rabbis—and explained the origins of an ancient Torah housed within the synagogue. Isaak encouraged me to visit the Bukharan Jewish Cemetery, an expansive memorial occupying several acres of land with gigantic headstones carved in black granite. As I wandered among the headstones, a gravedigger approached and sat me down to ask me a number of questions, including my salary and the cost of my house.

Further into the heart of Bukhara, a woman named Leila wearing a large pair of sunglasses and brightly colored hijab pointed a large megaphone in my direction and said, “mexmon, keling!” (Translation: please come here, visitor.) Lelia was shocked when I was able to speak with her in conversational Uzbek, and then tried to sell me a tour for $80. She was accompanied by a young man named Timur, who took me aside and offered to give me a tour of Bukhara for free that evening. I accepted. He told me that he was a Russian tour guide, but wanted to practice giving a tour in English because he expected more English-speaking tourists would arrive in the future. To illustrate his point, he gestured toward the countless number of guesthouses, homestays, and hotels that were clustered near the entrance to the Old City, including my hotel which was a renovated madrasa. We wandered from the Jewish Quarter to the Ark, an earthen fortress that once served as a bulwark for the Khanate of Bukhara. He explained why ancient wooden doors had two knockers; men used the top ring, which had a different tone than the bottom ring so the household could distinguish the gender of the visitor. We explored the Lab-i-Hauz complex, a pond and lodging area where traveling Sufi mystics sought rest and relaxation after long stretches in the desert by caravan. We explored the perimeter of a former Zoroastrian temple ruin from the 9th or 10th century that was converted to a mosque following the spread of Islam into the region. We saw what Timur described as the “perfection” of the Mirzo Ulugh Beg madrasa with its Persian script and elegant geometry juxtaposed across the street from the Abdulaziz Khan madrasa; ornate, rich, but perhaps flawed from a design perspective. We wrapped up the tour near the 150 foot tall Kalon Minaret, a towering landmark so impressive that Genghis Khan ordered it spared as his Mongol troops laid waste to the city and its inhabitants in 1220.

The next day after a sweltering six-hour train trip across the Kyzylkum Desert from Bukhara, I arrived in Khiva. The architecture of the sparkling new train station consisted of an opaque glass edifice, reminiscent of the windows in a faceless suburban office park mixed with tall stone arches that were a nod to Khiva’s ancient history. At the entrance to the train station, you could look down a wide promenade approximately a mile and a half in length and catch a glimpse of the minarets in the Old City of Khiva through the haze of the oppressive 95℉ heat. Along the promenade were several large hotels, the Diamonds Gold Khiva, the Khiva Lokomotiv, the Hotel Khiva Palace—all of which looked eerily unoccupied.

My friend Mirzo, the young local entrepreneur turned hotel manager, picked me up at the airport with his driver, Azamat. In anticipation of our long-awaited reunion, Mirzo and Azamat drove me to one of Khiva’s newer restaurants for a celebratory meal of plov—a lamb or mutton rice pilaf that is the national dish of Uzbekistan. The restaurant was so new, it didn’t have visible signage and it looked as if they had just finished pouring the concrete patio outside its entrance. Wheelbarrows with hardened cement basked in the sun and misting systems sprayed empty tables where it was too hot to eat outdoors. Mirzo clicked his tongue at this sight and muttered that tourists will develop a negative impression of such sloppiness.

Unlike my familial relationship with the Khusanovs and my close friendships with other Uzbeks, Mirzo treated me as a guest, first and foremost—in spite of the fact that we had kept in closer touch than I had with almost any of my other friends in Uzbekistan and he often considered and referred to me as an older brother. When the Peace Corps program shut down, I was able to communicate with Mirzo via email. I later relied on his range of contacts in Khiva to reconnect with other friends with whom I had lost touch. I helped edit a few of his papers while he was getting his degree in business administration in the UK, and when he was in difficult financial straits during the COVID-19 pandemic due to the shutdown of Khiva’s entire tourism industry, I provided him with a small loan. Mirzo would always refer to me as “his best bro” on WhatsApp, but our reunion was a different story altogether.

As we ate plov in this nameless Uzbek restaurant, Mirzo spoke to me in clear, practically fluent English, but using the formal familiarities found in spoken Uzbek. “How is your family, bro? How is your work?” Mirzo would ask, even though he spent the last five days asking me for progress updates from Tashkent, Samarkand, and Bukhara on WhatsApp. When I paused to take a rest from the enormous amount of plov I had eaten, Mirzo insisted that I eat more—a staple of Uzbek guesting culture that some visitors can find off-putting: imploring a guest to eat more when they are already full. Just as Azamat was about to order yet another dish, I interjected with a nervous laugh.

“Mirzo, you don’t have to treat me like a mexmon. I’m just a regular old friend.”

“No bro, you’re an honored guest,” he replied. “You came a long way to see us, and we need to treat you right.”

After lunch, Azamat drove us to my hotel, the New Star Khiva, which Mirzo owned with his brother Doniyor. As Azamat unloaded my bags, Mirzo gave me a formal tour of his property, which was located inside a former madrasa, or Islamic educational center. He pointed out the breakfast buffet and the kitchen, where I could order anything I wanted whenever I wanted it. He led me to the staircase from which you could climb to the top of the hotel’s minaret; not for other guests, Mirzo said, but just for me. He pointed to a refrigerator in the lobby that was stocked with cold water, juice, beer, and wine. Finally, he directed me to my room, which was located right near the front office just in case I needed anything, day or night. Then, without a warning, Mirzo told me he, Azamat and Doniyor would pick me up later for dinner. He had to supervise a shift at another hotel, the Orient Star Khiva, where he was an employee and do some paperwork for his own property.

At dinner that night inside a bustling Turkish restaurant near the train station that was filled with Uzbek families as opposed to tourists, Mirzo and Doniyor asked me the same formal questions I had heard at lunch. They asked me about the quality of my room just as I was thinking about how to gently tell them the air conditioning unit had a terrible rattle and the showerhead wasted water because of a faulty gasket. I noticed the three men eyeing me as I slowed my consumption because I was still full from lunch, so I attempted to chat my way out of eating more by answering their questions about the tourism business. Their main concern, a theme that would come up over and over again with Mirzo and his brother, was how to draw more tourists, specifically American tourists, to Khiva.

“Americans have money,” Doniyor would say in broken English. “How can we get them to come here?”

“Yes, Americans do have money, but unfortunately the United States is far from Khiva.”

“How long is your flight?”

“It’s at least 10 or 12 hours to Istanbul, followed by another four hours to Tashkent, not including transit.”

“But many Americans are rich. I see this on Instagram. How can I go to America?

I volunteered that Uzbekistan had been popular with tourists from Western Europe and Japan for a long time, and now Korean tourists were able to take a direct flight from Seoul. (I even encountered a trio of middle-aged Korean tourists on the train from Bukhara.) Why not tap into that market?

Doniyor, however, was unconvinced. It had to be Americans. The distortions of American culture and wealth and power seen throughout the world on social media platforms are as powerful in Uzbekistan as they are in any other country. Questions about real social issues such as mass shootings or manufactured political issues such as President Biden’s age were of great interest to many people I met in Uzbekistan, but how to be a part of the vast amount of wealth that all Americans possessed, as made clearly evident on social media, was at the top of their minds.

Mirzo was more reflective than his brother on the issue of American tourists, but in the five days I spent with him in Khiva, his questions would often turn to the idea of how to make money; how to survive in this highly competitive world of tourism. He would state flatly as if reading from a business school textbook, “we must build our capacity for tourism and invite tourists to enjoy our Khiva and our Uzbekistan,” while always adding “bro, it’s our duty.”

Out of all my stops of the Great Silk Road tourist train, Khiva appeared to have the most investment. Dozens of new hotels, a gleaming new train station, modernized restaurants and cafes, and electronic gates at the entrances to the Old City of Khiva to make sure that foreign tourists were paying their daily fee to enter. But if it is unclear how these businesses are supposed to compete for the same tourist dollars, it might be because the system was designed that way. Taking a page from a consultant in supply-side economics, the current model for tourism in Khiva—and in many other parts of Uzbekistan—is to see if small businesses like Mirzo’s can compete with larger well-financed entities that are funded by Uzbek’s business elite.

My weeklong stay in Khiva was a combination of revisiting the past and revelations of the present. In spite of the heat, which now regularly topped 100℉, I spent most days in and around the Ichan-Kala, or Old City of Khiva. The Ichan-Kala, or inner fortress, is an open-air museum and home to dozens of mosques, madrasas, minarets, galleries, and many more storefronts for merchants and artisans. Tourists can buy everything from handmade textiles woven from locally harvested cotton and silk to cheap, mass-produced miniatures of some of the more famous landmarks.

Mirzo arranged for me to take a tour with one of his friends, Alisher, who works as a professional, English-language guide in the city of Khiva. I hadn’t taken a tour of Khiva during my time in the Peace Corps, partly because it was difficult to find an English-language guide but mostly because I strived to communicate only in Uzbek while I was a volunteer. Alisher related a story to me that I had heard many years ago, but just partly understood. In the mid 1800s the ruler of Khiva, Mohammed Amin Khan, commissioned an architect to build a minaret so impressive it would rival and overshadow the Kalon Minaret in Bukhara. Just as the minaret was about one-third finished, the architect heard a rumor that the Khan had planned on killing him once the tower was complete, so the Khan of Bukhara could not try to commission an even larger minaret in a 19th-century game of antagonism between two egotistical rulers. The architect fled into the desert, and to this day the minaret, named the Kalta Minor or “short tower,” stands at a mere 85 feet tall—145 feet shorter than its planned height.

Digging further into the history of Khiva reveals that many of these stories are apocryphal, and even guides like Alisher tell them with a wink and a nod of the head. But in spite of their questionable historical accuracy, they convey a mythology that has since been revived in the two-and-a-half decades since Uzbekistan became an independent country, during which time many historical sites were left to ruin by the Soviet state. (Another mythical story that most natives of Khiva, including Alisher, love to tell is the story of the city’s founding. A caravan from an ancient era, lost in the desert and in desperate need of water, used a divining rod to find a source. The caravan’s leader plunged the rod into the ground and found a well. Upon tasting it, they proclaimed “Khi-wa” or roughly translated from an unknown language as “sweet water.”)

Apart from myths Alisher pointed out elements of Khiva’s actual history, which fascinated me because of the archaeology and research that has been resurrected as part of Uzbekistan’s embrace of its historical past. The Zororostrian influence in the artwork found in the tiles inlaid on the outside of the Kalta Minor; the utter brutality of the khans, who executed their enemies and punished their citizens in draconian style, while at the same time cherishing and nurturing the development of Islamic art and architecture; the caravanserai, a cavernous domed structure that served as a rest stop and trading post for caravans traveling through the desert located tantalizingly close to the hammam, or bathhouse, and the Khan’s harem—the latter of which was completely off-limits to anyone outside the Khan’s inner circle.

I asked Mirzo, who joined Alisher and me on our walking tour, if he had been on a tour of Khiva, and he sheepishly shrugged and said no. Alisher laughed and told his friend with a knowing but polite jab that history was important, especially if he wants to make it in the tourism industry.

The following day, I took a solo tour of the Khan’s former harem and met three women who greeted me politely at the ticket counter. When I greeted them back in Uzbek, their expressions lit up and they invited me inside a small side room off the main entrance for tea, non, and a type of local stew called shurpa made with mutton, root vegetables, and homemade noodles. Since they spoke little English, they laughed as I struggled to communicate with them in my improving but still broken Uzbek on topics such as my salary, how much a house costs in the United States, and what is the “national dish” of America. When they asked if I was married and had children, I politely explained that while I had a partner, I did not have children. One of the older women smiled, but chided me for not having a family. But the youngest scolded her friend back, and referenced my point about the amount of money it cost to live in America. If it was so expensive, she concluded, then I was smart to save my money. The conversation quickly outpaced my understanding, but there was an overall sense of a generation gap among the three. From the perspective of the older women, not having children was unthinkable. But the younger woman felt that having children for the sake of having a family was an older way of thinking, and one that was not as popular among her generation.

Later that evening I encountered yet another set of perspectives, but this time from two tourists. A young Russian couple, Fatima and Grigory from St. Petersburg, staying at my hotel approached me for polite conversation, and asked me if I wanted to have a beer. Fatima was a trilingual translator and Grigory was a conductor and band leader in the Russian Army. They told me they had both been born in small mining cities in Siberia, and both were identified by the Russian education system for their intellectual aptitude, which led them to study in the same city. My conversation with Fatima and Grigory was limited in small talk, and instead explored a range of issues as we drank cold beers atop a restaurant patio in warm evening air. We compared how Russians and Americans identify creativity within our respective school systems. We gave each other geography lessons on the United States and the former Soviet Union; Grigory admitted that part of his family was of Ukrainian origin and Fatima was from North Ossetia on the border of Georgia. We spoke about travel and the lack of opportunities for Russian citizens now that their country was considered a pariah in many parts of the world, and we discussed the doors that were closed to them, even though they stated in clear terms that they were against the current state of affairs in Russia. Fatima and Grigory became more open with their dissatisfaction as our conversation continued and the bottles started to collect on the table, until Fatima mentioned, with a sardonic tone in her voice. “You know, Uzbekistan used to be a closed country and we could never offer such criticisms in public, even against our own leaders. Now, to us, Uzbekistan feels like it is a safe space for Russians who disagree with our terrible situation.”

My final night in Khiva was one of my most anticipated reunions: meeting Dinara, the artist-turned English teacher, along with her mother Adolat, her youngest sister, her nieces, nephew, and daughter. Now in her mid-thirties, Dinara was not only willing to meet with me at her family home without her husband, she was willing to be completely open with me about almost every detail of her life since we parted ways when I left Uzbekistan in 2005. She picked me up in a taxi near my hotel, and greeted me with a handshake—and a hug: an exceptionally rare greeting from a married Uzbek woman toward a man, especially a foreigner.

Dinara showed no signs of the shy young woman I met at the arts and crafts camp some 17 years ago. We sat down to eat in her family’s hosting room as the older children hurried back and forth from the kitchen with plates of xonim, a type of steamed dumpling made from cabbage and mutton, and shivit-oshi, a regional specialty made with dill-infused noodles and topped with a lamb ragu, all served with a flatbread the size of a large pizza. “You remember our non the best,” Dinara said as she smiled and encouraged me to eat. “But don’t worry, we won’t force you to eat too much like other Uzbeks,” she added with a sly grin.

As I ate, Dinara vocalized a range of opinions, from her dissatisfaction with her work and her family’s unique and intricate dynamics to openly criticizing the government. Aside from her complaints about work (she's not hesitant to call her boss "a cruel woman" even though she likes her colleagues and feels supported by her school in her efforts to earn a master's degree), her revelations about her family and the state of affairs in Uzbekistan were a completely novel experience out of all my conversations, past and present.

Dinara reluctantly fulfills her role as a "kelin”— an Uzbek word that describes being a dutiful housewife to both husband and mother-in-law and mother to her children, all of whom she regards with a sort of exasperation. She describes her husband as a successful businessman, but also a rough, cold, disinterested man who, from past conversations with Dinara even before I arrived in Uzbekistan, is prone to domestic violence; at least until Dinara’s mother threatened to remove her from the situation, which would have caused her husband’s family great shame. She's even mystified by the behavior of her own children, whom she says demonstrate strange habits similar to their father.

She added that mother-in-law is jealous of the dynamics of her family, which ties into the circumstances of her upbringing in a house with exceptionally strong women and little support from any men. Dinara told me her father, who was from Samarkand, left the family when she and her sisters were young. He claimed he didn't want to be a family man, but ended up building another family. Now, he wants to reconnect with Dinara and her sisters, but Dinara is reluctant. I suggested that he might feel regretful, but Dinara described him as manipulative. “He’s only interested in having someone to support him in his old age,” she said. “I am not interested in that.”

I asked Dinara about her older sister, Inobat, who now works in Moscow as a catering and staff manager at a luxury hotel. She left Uzbekistan to help pay for their mother’s brain surgery after her doctor discovered a tumor about seven years ago, and to pay for her daughter’s private school. Dinara opened her Telegram app, and showed me a video message from Inobat that wished me safe travels. In the message, Inobat mentioned how glad she was that I could meet her daughter, especially since she had a recent birthday, but was off in stating her daughter’s correct age by a couple of years. Dinara laughed at this and told me, "she can't even remember the age of her daughter!" It wasn't a cruel or mocking laugh, but one of melancholy since Inobat, like many Uzbeks, are so removed from family life—many of whom live and work in Russia or Kazakhstan. Dinara says Inobat never wants to come back to Uzbekistan because she finds life in Khiva boring and dull. Dinara admits that life doesn't change much, then looked at me and said, “My dream is to see America, even if it’s just for two weeks. I know I can’t leave my family, but I want to see a little bit of the world outside what I see on social media.”

The day following my reunion with Dinara I went to one last lunch with Mirzo, Doniyor, and Azamat. Instead of the two hour flight from the regional airport back to Tashkent, I opted to take the new long-haul, overnight train—a 14 hour journey in a train car leftover from the Soviet era. Doniyor gave me an incredulous stare when I told him I was taking the train.

“Why don’t you fly?” he asked me. “The train is dirty and hot.”

“I just enjoy traveling by train,” I said, “and besides I’m not in a rush to get back to Tashkent. My flight home doesn’t leave for another two days. Have you ever taken the train?”

Instead of a verbal reply, Doniyor sucked his teeth and shook his head as he dug into a piece of chicken. As usual, my friends had ordered too much off the menu and, because I had a long train journey ahead, expected me to eat most of it. Azamat pushed a platter toward me that looked like raw, hamburger meat. While he didn’t speak much English, he uttered two words through a sinister grin: “Uzbek tartare.” I laughed and told him it looked tasty, and lied (again) by saying I was feeling full. Azamat declined to challenge me on the issue, poured more tea, and shook my hand. “Next time,” he added, this time with a warm smile.

Mirzo helped me lug my bags to the train station, and we said our farewells. With Doniyor out of earshot, he pulled me aside and suggested I take the flight. “Bro, it really will be hot and uncomfortable for you,” he said, grabbing my shoulder. Mirzo’s mindset was to still act like a gracious host, and that meant warning me of potential discomforts and keeping my best interests in mind—even if I disagreed with them. I returned his embrace and reminded him that adventure travel was what I did best.

Train travel was one of my favorite ways to see Uzbekistan during the Peace Corps. It was inexpensive and safe and gave me plenty of time to think, journal or meet other travelers. Mirzo and Doniyor were right, though: it was exceptionally hot on this particular day. I splurged $35 on a ticket in a first class berth, so my compartment would be air conditioned once the diesel engine started up. In the meantime, fellow travelers in my train car stowed their luggage and sat on their beds, avoiding any unneeded exertion until the train started moving. I shared my compartment with a solo female traveler from Indonesia who told me she spent much of the pandemic working remotely in Dubai. She was polite, but focused on the glow of her smartphone for most of the journey. Next to our compartment was a young Russian family. The father introduced himself as Sergei and told me they were traveling throughout Central Asia, the Caucacus region, Turkey—anywhere but Russia. They spent the last eight years teaching English and Russian in China, and he had performed some additional online work for a Ukrainian company, adding the last detail in a hushed whisper. “China is the safest country on earth,” Sergei said. “But it was impossible to live comfortably during the pandemic.” As Sergei took his leave to run after his toddler who made a break for the exit, an Uzbek couple dressed in stylish Western fashion asked me, in Uzbek, if the air conditioning was working. When I responded in English that it would cool down once we started moving, they smiled at me in surprise. They were both from Tashkent, and they were on their way home after their first-ever tour of the western part of Uzbekistan.

As the train lurched out of the station, most passengers retired to their compartments for respite in the air conditioning. My train car seemed virtually unchanged from the ones I took as a Peace Corps Volunteer, which were probably unchanged since the fall of the Soviet Union, and I knew that the desert air would make the temperature inside the car plunge by nightfall. As the train slowly crept east, I watched the sun set toward the horizon in the west and observed the landscape slide past me. A group of boys tending sheep saw the train, and left their herds to briefly run alongside a frontage road near the tracks—some waved, a few gesticulated with far less polite gestures. We passed by dozens of whitewashed houses in small villages near the tracks, crossed small irrigation channels and fields of young cotton plants with leaves still light green in color. Virtually all the water in the region of Khorezm where Khiva is located feeds these thirsty crops. Like many of the homes I saw on my road trip from Kitob to Bukhara, almost all of the newer structures in this region had air conditioning units attached to their exterior walls, helping keep cool the same people who saw this region become less temperate during the region’s desertification during the Soviet era, and who are now experiencing the global effects of climate change. We made several stops at rural train depots. Passengers on the platforms squinted at the train coming out of the western sun, now low on the horizon with everything awash with the soft light of the golden hour. A young Uzbek man began moving from compartment to compartment, announcing provisions for sale in both Russian and Uzbek: “cold beer, cold water, chocolate, cookies, potato chips, tea, coffee.” I purchased a beer, headed to the dining car, and ordered a dish consisting of an unidentifiable meat patty topped with a fried egg and served over buckwheat. The only other foreign traveler in the dining car was a solo traveler from California. I struck up a conversation with him as we dined on the same mystery dish. He couldn’t have been more than 20 years old, but felt compelled to explore a part of the world that feels unsafe or off-limits to many Americans, particularly Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Now, he was spending his last three weeks in Uzbekistan before his university opened back up for the fall semester.

I retreated to my cabin to read as the train made its way across the desert. The sleeper car’s rail dampers did an effective job of limiting any vibrations, and I was lulled into sleep by the soft but steady hum of the train as it crawled east. However, I was jolted awake at each stop during the night when the train came to a halt, the engine’s hydraulic pressure released with a hiss; a brief silence, and then the sound of more passengers boarding the train in Bukhara, Navoiy, Samarkand, Jizzakh and Gulistan.

As we approached Tashkent station, I exited my compartment to fetch some hot water from the car’s samovar for morning tea—a staple on any long-distance train in Central Asia—I noticed our conductor was leaning out of the window to smoke a cigarette. I exchanged some pleasantries with him in Uzbek, and asked him how long he had been working on this line. He told me he started working for the railroad as a young man just before the Soviet Union broke apart in 1991, and was lucky to have kept his job for all these years.

“Do they pay you enough?” I asked.

“Yes, very well,” he said, without actually revealing his salary. “I work two, sometimes three days on and three days off. I still get to live in Tashkent with my family.”

As more bleary-eyed passengers emerged from compartments, he sighed and continued to stare out the window before we arrived at the station. I gathered my belongings and straightened up the cabin, in order to give the conductor a little less work. I joined the line to exit the train, hopped off onto the platform, and said a formal goodbye and thank you to him in Uzbek. He solemnly nodded his head, took one last drag off his cigarette and flicked it away, disappearing into the car to prepare for the return journey across the desert.

The day I was departing Uzbekistan I was waiting for Dilshod in the lobby of my hotel when his father, Ravshan, arrived. The Khusanovs had planned for me to come to their house one last time for a meal of plov before my flight home that evening. Ravshan told me that Miassar and Davron’s wife were both sick with fevers, and so he came to wish me goodbye since they had to cancel dinner. Also, Dilshod was going to be late; he was negotiating a deal for one of his side businesses.

I asked Ravshan if he thought they had contracted the coronavirus. He shook his head. I asked him if they were vaccinated. He shook his head again, and then looked at me with a wide grin and told me, “I had corona.” Dilshod had told me Ravshan was hospitalized with COVID-19 for several weeks earlier in the year. The doctors at the military hospital had treated him with remdesivir, but he was clearly still in recovery. He walked with a cane and spent a lot of time resting in his room, only emerging for meals or to spend time with his grandchildren. We compared notes on our vaccines—both of us received Pfizer—and he joked that I should have considered getting Russia’s Sputnik jab as a souvenir. We spent the next hour and a half revisiting topics from some of our early conversations: the war in Ukraine and NATO, Chervolet’s monopoly in Uzbekistan, the cost of a Tesla (Ravshan’s favorite quip, something that I heard him say several times during our conversations, was that Teslas were so smart they would ask their driver if they were ok after the autopilot crashed.) I relied on Google Translator as our topics became more complex: the price of Coca-Cola in America and cost of my hotel room; the assassination of Shinzo Abe, who was killed the day after I arrived in Uzbekistan; why guns were so widely available in America; why Americans liked or did not like Donald Trump; why elements of the Russian mafia ran rampant in Uzbekistan following the collapse of the Soviet Union. At one point, a group of Russian tourists entered the lobby. Ravshan pointed at them and said, “See? Putin. No war, no tourists come.” I asked him what he thought of Putin, and he shrugged. “All politicians are the same.” I asked him if Uzbekistan’s current president was better than Karimov. “He’s the same. He has a different face, but he’s the same person underneath.”

Dilshod finally entered the lobby and I said goodbye to Ravshan. Almost all of my other Uzbek friends and counterparts asked me when I was coming back, and I always gave a vague answer. Ravshan did not ask nor did he press the issue of a future reunion. He just asked me how long my flight was back to the United States.

“I have a layover in Korea, so probably 16 hours total,” I said.

“I hope you don’t get bored,” he replied, laughing. “Say hello to America for me.”

Dilshod insisted on treating me to dinner before my flight, even though the reason for canceling our dinner was completely understandable. I did not protest. Had I left without a final meal with Dilshod, he would have seen it as a grievous display of bad conduct on his part. “Do you want shashlik?” Dilshod asked. “I want to go to my favorite place.” We parked near the Oloy Bazaar, located near Tashkent’s central business district, and walked past rows of tidy stalls where merchants sold spices, nuts, grains, and other produce. Oloy Bazaar was, according to Dilshod, regulated by city officials to give it a cleaner appearance than other open-air markets, and more inviting and accessible to tourists. Unlike almost every bazaar in Uzbekistan, the merchants in Oloy Bazaar displayed prices on all their items, which eliminated the need for haggling. “But tourists still pay tourist prices,” Dilshod explained.

Deeper into the bazaar district, my gaze fell upon a cheese shop, with wheels of brie and gouda proudly displayed prominently behind a polished window and a glossy new restaurant called Z’or Tovuq, or translated simply as “Great Chicken.” As I gazed at these Western-style storefronts, so out of place from my previous experience in Uzbekistan, Dilshod looked at me quizzically. “These stores are too expensive. Why would anyone buy this?” Beyond these shops laid a large, square building built during the Soviet era with a marble and limestone facade. What was once Tashkent’s central hub for the distribution of state-produced dairy, meat and seafood products now housed a stationary store, an optometrist, and importer of Italian clothes, shoes, and accessories, and a Korzinka—the brand name of Uzbekistan’s new Western-style supermarket chain. All the stores were privately owned.

Dilshod’s focus, however, was on a plume of barbeque smoke that beckoned to us from around the corner. “This is real Tashkent-style shashlik,” he said, practically beaming. “You can’t find places like these anymore.” The open-air shashlik stand was called Kamol Kebab, but there was no signage that indicated it had a name. Several cooks tended to dozens of shashlik skewers set on long, rectangular braziers that were filled with glowing embers of charcoal. Next to the braziers, a woman stood by a large tandoor—a clay oven used to bake bread—and stuck pieces of round pieces of dough to its interior. In a small, unlit prep kitchen two other women, squatting on their heels, sliced onions and tomatoes by hand into large buckets.

We sat down at one of the tables and a server came up to us with some Tashkent non. There was no menu to speak of. You could order two types of lamb shashlik or chicken, each with a side of raw onions, or a cucumber and tomato salad. To drink, they offered hot tea, water, and Coca-cola. Dilshod ordered one dish for each of us, and a water for himself; I asked for the Coke. It was still hot in Tashkent, but a series of misting fans staved off the worst of it. Dilshod immediately opened his phone to answer a message while I took pictures of the cooks and people-watched.

After a short while Dilshod smiled and pointed towards a server who brought plates of shashlik and the salads to our table. “Real Tashkent-style shasklik!” he repeated as the server arranged the plates and took his leave. I could tell Dilshod held a sort of pride in bringing me to his favorite restaurant. “Yoqimli ishtaha,” he said to me in Uzbek—bon appetit. As we ate our shashlik, Dilshod reflected on some of our previous conversations: work, entrepreneurship, providing for his family, getting his son into a good school while managing the delicate relationship he now had with his ex-wife and former in-laws. Dilshod had divorced shortly after he had his first and only son. He had come to terms with the arrangement of seeing his son once a week, on Sundays. In Uzbekistan, courts often default to giving a mother full custody, and Dilshod accepted his role as a divorcé in order to keep the family peace. He brought up the idea of remarrying, perhaps a practicing Muslim woman who liked the idea of staying at home with the family—a tacit admission that his ex-wife was more independent and came from a more secular family, hence the reason for their divorce. There was even a woman he had in mind; a young professional within his entrepreneurial circle who worked at one of the travel agencies he frequented. They exchanged a lot of messages over text, and Dilshod said she was always so kind. “And so smart,” he added. “And a hijabi [a woman who prefers wearing a hijab in her daily life]. Really the perfect girl.”

We continued to eat and talk in this proverbial safe space for Dilshod; a shashlik stand that was symbolic of his strong roots to Tashkent, unchanging in the face of the wider changes within Uzbekistan and the outside world as well as within his professional and personal life; a place that served as a sort of confessional for thoughts he could share with his older American “brother” who, in his eyes, had not changed much in the years since we had last shared a meal together. I begged to disagree, but Dilshod was insistent. “You are the same Zain-aka,” using a familiar Uzbek term for older brother. I argued that he and his brother, and especially his parents, hadn’t also changed much since I last saw them. Uzbekistan had changed and their world had changed, but there was a comfort in feeling at home with the same people who welcomed me into their lives some 17 years ago—a comfort that resonated throughout most of my reunions in Uzbekistan.

“We should get to the airport,” Dilshod said, looking at his phone. “Now that you know what Uzbekistan is like again, you can come back soon,” adding in Uzbek, tez-tez keling which roughly translates as “don’t stay away too long.” I lingered for a moment, and then replied, “of course, I’ll try my best.”