On March 31, about mid-afternoon, I was concentrating on organizing papers in my office when my cell phone suddenly rang, and when I picked it up, it was a reporter from The New Yorker magazine.
After exchanging pleasantries, the reporter seemed a bit hesitant, and then he said, “There is something I want to tell you before the article is published, so that your mind can be prepared.” I felt my heart in my throat, did not speak, and listened quietly. The reporter paused for a moment: “Are you listening?”
“I’m listening, go ahead.”
“Here’s the thing, according to our investigation and interviews with witnesses, it was confirmed that your eldest sister, second sister and her husband and eldest daughter, were all in the Kuitun concentration camp. Your second sister had a heart condition and often fainted; each time, the police wouldn’t let any relatives get close enough to help and just dragged your sister away; your oldest sister also seemed to have broken down mentally. Are you listening?”
“I’m listening,” I could feel my voice change and tremble a little.
“According to witnesses, the camp leaders said to your sister in public: ‘Your problem is your brother. When your brother dies, your problems will end.'”
The reporter’s reassuring words followed, and I just replied mechanically: fine, nothing is wrong, don’t worry. Putting down the phone, I don’t know how long I sat there, wanting to cry, but unable to cry; my heart was aching, it was a heavy heartache.
The police officer’s words kept ringing in my ears: “Your problem, is your brother. When your brother dies, your problems will end.” While I was alive, my parents and relatives were hostages of the Chinese government, and my family was broken; while the Chinese government imprisoned and tortured my parents and relatives, it also mentally imprisoned and tortured me as a fugitive!
My eldest sister and I were the best of friends. When I was in China, every time I visited her, she would put some money in my pocket, saying, “You are not well paid for a teacher; I know you like to read, so here is some money for you to buy books. I fled for more than a year, she and her husband were divorced, and it was particularly difficult for her to bring up two children alone.
Thus, after I arrived in the United States and my income stabilized, I sent her money and packages a few times. By the end of the day, she politely told me that it was becoming very troublesome to get the money. I understood. Then her daughter wanted a laptop computer, and she couldn’t resist her daughter’s plea, so she asked if I could send her a computer. I said yes.
I asked around and found out that a friend in Texas was returning to visit his family and I asked him to bring it to me. I ordered a laptop computer online and sent it directly to my friend’s house in Texas. My friend took the computer and brought it to Urumqi without even opening the package.
Later on, I tossed around and learned that after my niece, who was waiting at the airport, took the computer and thanked my friend for walking out of the airport, two police officers took my niece somewhere. I only learned that my niece stayed there for a while. Whether the period of time was a few hours, or a day or two, or a week or two, I don’t know.
On August 15, 2014, my sister was taken from her home. All I know is that her home was turned upside down and even my youngest nephew’s desktop computer was taken away; and, the police brought word to me through my second sister: tell your brother to stop his activities or ……. Since then, my contact with my three sisters has been completely cut off.
My second sister is dry and spirited, the kind of person who will not be spared. Her Chinese is also very good, and her personality is similar to mine, with no room for sand in her eyes, and once she encounters injustice she will stand up for it regardless of the consequences. She worked on the railroad, which was a centralized enterprise completely monopolized by the Han Chinese, and discrimination was naked, thus the second sister offended many people, including the leaders.
My guess is that one of her biggest sins was that she did everything she could to try to protect her older sister, who was timid and afraid of trouble but got into a big political mess because of me, and that she was very proud to have a brother who dared to challenge authority, and she had expressed this pride publicly on many occasions.
Ever since my oldest sister was arrested, I have felt a sense of guilt, always feeling that I had ruined the family that my oldest sister was trying to keep together in her difficult struggle!
In 2016, when my mother told me on the phone for the last time: none of your three sisters’ children have found jobs even after graduating from college; your eldest niece found a job and was inexplicably fired a few months later; we have too much trouble, son, your father died early because he couldn’t bear the double blow of your brother’s murder and your sister’s arrest! Don’t call us anymore, may Allah bless you, son.
My mother’s last call tormented me with remorse and guilt, and even though I knew that it was the Chinese colonial government that was shameless and that it was the colonial government that kidnapped my relatives like gangsters and took them hostage, I could not shake the guilt I felt for my relatives. This guilt was eating me up from the inside.
A few months ago I saw a film about the Jewish Holocaust, entitled “Sarah’s Key,” about the French police who began to arrest and evict Jews under German occupation in 1942. When the police came to Sarah’s house to take them away, Sarah naively hid her young brother in a closet, locked it, with the key in her hand, thinking they would come back. But unfortunately, after escaping from the children’s camp with the help of good Samaritans, Sarah’s only remaining relative, her brother, had long since starved to death in the closet.
Although Sarah eventually escaped Nazi persecution and survived the liberation of Paris with the help of a kind-hearted French family, she could never forgive herself and lived in depression. The guilt, remorse and guilt tormented her.
Later, probably to escape the shadow of her life in France, she left her adoptive parents and immigrated to the United States, where she also found a good husband and had children. But she was unable to escape the guilt, remorse, and guilt that tormented her, and she finally chose to drive her car and kill herself, leaving forever a world that was so cruel and unforgiving to her, in search of her loving brother and her parents who disappeared in the Holocaust camps.
Unfortunately, today’s Uyghurs are being forced to experience the tragedy of the Jewish Sarah in a different form. Although there have been no reports of tragic cases of Uyghurs whose younger brothers were locked in closets and starved to death, there have been several reports of Uyghur children freezing and drowning to death because their parents were captured and imprisoned and left unattended to their young children.
My three sisters, my oldest sister has two children, and I don’t know where they are or if they are still alive; all I know is that since my oldest sister was arrested in 2014, her two children have struggled to survive the hardships and suffering of losing their parents.
My second sister’s two children know through a New Yorker reporter that her oldest daughter is with them in a concentration camp; the youngest is unaccounted for.
My youngest sister, also two children, lives with her mother in Hami. Now, neither the adults nor the children know the whereabouts or if they are still alive.
Although I know that my parents’ and my younger siblings’ families are broken first and foremost because they were born Uighurs, even if I had obeyed the Chinese government, today’s indiscriminate mass arrest and detention of Uighurs, including those who had been loyal to the Communist Party, proves once again that it is highly likely that I, along with my relatives, will not escape the concentration camps and death as well.
Just as the Jewish Sarah, her brother, even if he did not starve to death in the closet where Sarah hid, could certainly not escape the Nazi concentration camps, the gas chambers.
However, all of us Uyghurs abroad, like Sarah, the Holocaust survivor in the film, are still unable to shake off that deep-seated sense of guilt, remorse and guilt. The disappearance and arrest of our relatives have made us overseas Uyghurs live in the sadness of broken families; and being accused by the Chinese colonial government of the arrest of their relatives as a complaint of overseas Uyghurs’ pursuit of freedom, dignity and family search has become salt in the wound, deepening the mental torture of every Uyghur.
During the long night, how many Uyghur sons and daughters and parents are crying in silence; during the long night, how many Uyghur sons and daughters and parents are tossing and turning and find it hard to sleep; during the long night, how many Uyghur sons and daughters and parents are struggling with self-blame and guilt in the sense of guilt that they cannot get rid of. This pain, this torture, this feeling, only those who experience it know.
I will not kill myself by crashing my car like Sarah, a Holocaust survivor, but this mental torture of guilt, remorse and guilt is slowly consuming my energy and my life. We fugitives, survivors, and in my case, I live only for the final miracle of being reunited with my family in anticipation!
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