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About 10 years ago, I traveled through parts of northwest China, including the Uyghur region of Xinjiang. The Chinese government had recently begun to crack down on ethnic minorities in the area, and I was the only non–Han Chinese or white passenger on our bus, so I expected some attention.
Sure enough, as our bus entered Xinjiang, security officers stopped it and specifically asked for my passport or identity documents.
My small indignity on the bus was the subtlest of foreshadowing for what was to come in Xinjiang. In the following years, the region would be turned into among the most oppressive surveillance states on Earth. Uyghurs are being taken away, in many instances without any pretense, and sent to concentration camps. The Chinese government insists that they are voluntarily submitting to reeducation, but a mounting pile of evidence makes clear that this is not the case.
Perhaps no account of this repression is more eloquent, more humane, or more shocking than Tahir Hamut Izgil’s five-part series, “
One by One, My Friends Were Sent to the Camps.” Izgil, one of the world’s greatest Uyghur poets, cataloged his final months in Xinjiang in astonishing granularity, narrating with clarity and care the worsening situation for his people in their homeland.
His chronicles, beautifully translated and introduced by the Princeton historian Joshua L. Freeman, illustrate the urgent humanitarian crisis in Xinjiang, but do so by telling particularly human stories. It is a searing tale, and one you will not easily forget. I certainly won’t.
I was running for my life. Five or six armed Chinese police officers chased after me, barely a step behind. But this was the neighborhood where I was born, roads I knew like my five fingers. I rounded corners as lightly as a bird, leaped nimbly over the low mud walls between houses. But the cops were right on my heels. Just then, a siren sounded nearby. A police car careened toward me. My steps grew heavier. The officers caught up with me and pressed me to the ground. I struggled with everything in me. The police car’s siren wailed ceaselessly.
I awoke with a start. My body was covered in sweat. I had been dreaming.
An ambulance was passing by, its siren blaring, in front of our apartment complex in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. That was what I had just heard in my sleep.
From the day I arrived in America, I have had numerous dreams like this, in slightly different forms. In one, for example, I would be at border control preparing to leave China. Police would arrest me and rip up my passport, and I would wake up howling.
After I had begun to adjust to life in the United States, my dreams changed somewhat. I would be returning to Xinjiang, to the Uyghur homeland. With dear friends and family I would eat in familiar restaurants, stroll through beautiful orchards, gather in broad courtyards to sing and feast and talk. I would tell them about America. But at precisely these joyful moments, the police would arrive and confiscate my passport. I would be overcome with pain and regret. Now I can’t get back to the U.S., I’d lament. I would awaken, my heart aching.
Every time I woke from one of these awful dreams, I would sigh with relief. “Thank God,” I would whisper.
I wouldn’t speak of the dreams in front of my daughters; I told only my wife, Merhaba, who would tell me she had dreamed the same things. “Our bodies might be here,” she would say, “but our souls are still back home.”
It has been four years since I arrived here in America, but I still often have these dreams. Perhaps I always will.
—
Tahir Hamut Izgil
Living through—and escaping—the Uyghur genocide
‘I Never Thought China Could Ever Be This Dark,’ by Melissa Chan
Leaving Xinjiang has not meant Uyghur women are free of Beijing’s grasp.
Saving Uighur Culture From Genocide, by Yasmeen Serhan
China’s repression of the Uighurs in Xinjiang has forced those in the diaspora to protect their identity from afar.
The Panopticon Is Already Here, by Ross Andersen
Xi Jinping is using artificial intelligence to enhance his government’s totalitarian control—and he’s exporting this technology to regimes around the globe.