This book opens with the author recounting a house visit by plainclothes police officers. “We wanted to talk to you about your household registration. Would you mind coming with us to the police station?”
I was listening to this audiobook while doing laundry, and my heart skipped a beat on those opening lines. The ubiquitous pieces of paper that detailed who lived in each house, called household registrations; plainclothes police knocking on your door at night politely asking to follow them to the station. These are things etched into every Burmese person’s psyche, because they are the touchpoints that can determine your fate. A few months back I remember kicking myself on a flight back from Singapore to Yangon, because I had forgotten to pack our family’s Yangon household registration, and I sank into a well of guilt and worry. What if there’s an inspection? If my dad can’t present the household registration he might get into trouble. Many get arrested for not being able to show this piece of paper. Before 2021, I wouldn’t have needed to worry about it, but now, things back home have gone back to the dark old days of decades past.
Some friends of mine had organized a book club of sorts and this was the inaugural book that we were going to discuss. I didn’t know much about the genocide of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang beyond what was in the news, and was keen to learn more about it from this personal account of a renowned exiled Uyghur poet and filmmaker. I expected this book to be harrowing, which it was. I did not expect it to be so eerily familiar, which it also was at so many turns.
Izgil lived in Ürümqi, the capital of China’s Xinjiang Province, and this book is a personal account of living through the ever growing restrictions on civil liberties and the chipping away of the Uyghurs’ way of life and sense of dignity by the Chinese government over the past decade.
He and his family were some of the lucky few who had managed to escape the worst of the violence as the totalitarian grip tightened and practically everyone he knew disappeared into prisons and “re-education camps”, a plight euphemistically called being brought to “study”.
It is often said that one of the hallmarks of genocide is the gradual erosion of one’s humanity. When we wonder how one group of people can inflict the most gruesome acts of violence on another, it’s only because there’s been a long ramp up of desensitization to inflicting violence from the side of the perpetrators on one hand — until they wholeheartedly believe narratives like “they deserve it”, “they brought it on themselves”, “there are extremists among them that need to be eradicated from the roots”, etc. On the other hand, for the victims, it is mirrored with a slow bleeding out of hope, ability and will to defy.
One thread that really struck me in the ramp up of oppression that Izgil recounts is the parallel increase in technological sophistication of the Chinese police state. One of the early chapters tells a story of how Izgil had two ID numbers because of some bureaucratic mix up: one based in his hometown of Ürümqi, and one based in Beijing where he went to university. This oddity was incomprehensible to the bureaucracy and it became something that was brought up every time he had to encounter a government official. “This is wrong. Each person has only one ID number”, one police woman said. Bureaucracies are built to be blind to their own cracks, and Izgil had to write a letter of apology to the government office for “not noticing the problem”, but it came with the upside that when he eventually reconciled his dual ID numbers, one of them that kept records of a previous three year prison sentence, was completely expunged from his personal history. The local government offices had no way of cross-checking to find out what his real records were, and only knew the ones tied to a single ID number. I found it funny because it exactly mirrored encounters with government bureaucrats back home.
This stood in contrast with a frighteningly dystopian experience of a biometric scan that he and his wife, alongside every other Uyghur, was subjected to several years later — digital fingerprint scans of every digit, alongside a full 3D scan of their faces. We all know from media reports now about how comprehensive the digital surveillance systems in China are, and their no holes barred approach to collecting every possible data point about everyones’ lives. For Izgil, who came from a background that was foreign to these technologies, it was something he learned about first hand from this encounter. For his wife, Maharba, this was interestingly the turning point which made her decide that their family should leave their beloved homeland to migrate to the United States.
This was one of the parts of the book where I could clearly see the difference between the authoritarianism I lived with in Myanmar and the all encompassing hi-tech totalitarianism of the Chinese state. If you feel like you can’t find safety in the blindspots of their bureaucracy, that’s when you really feel like there is nowhere to hide.
Totalitarian systems also rely on populations policing themselves, partly with carrots and sticks to lure people into becoming informants on their own kin, and partly with ideology. For the Chinese Communist Party, ideology came in the form of a complete intolerance of religion. Uyghurs were made to change the everyday words they used. Over time, saying simple greetings, like “As-salamu alaykum”, was seen as suspect. Visiting a muslim majority country automatically meant that you were contacting terrorists. Residents of the city of Kashgar were given three days to get rid of every religious item in their homes, leading people to have to throw Quarans into potholes. I can’t imagine how traumatic this erasure must feel, to be forced to get rid of something that is at the core of personal and communal identities.
All of this was enforced by Uyghurs who had joined the civil service and police. Twice a week, a neighborhood committee official would come around your house and check if you still possessed religious items. Cameras were installed at the doors of every apartment, with young men from the neighborhood watching the feeds. There were public denunciation events where people were encouraged to snitch on each other.
Izgil recounts how he was initially naive about the extent to which the state would re-write their own directives to justify oppression. Friends who had academic positions at university thought they were well within the legal fold, but then got arrested. Books that were once sanctioned by state censorship became contraband. Any form of contact with friends or family abroad brought a knock on your door by the secret police. Passports were confiscated.
Izgil and his family were definitely more privileged than the average Uyghur. Since he owned his own company for his film productions, this created a loophole that allowed his family to apply for passports, although it took them months to get them. They had enough money and connections to travel to Europe and the United States before the worst of the oppression set in, but that was not easy either. Escaping oppression of the Chinese state meant coming face to face with the ordeal of being an immigrant.
Some of my earliest memories were of my parents going through a very similar ordeal trying to leave Myanmar for Singapore, back in the days of the old dictatorship that closed the country off to the world. Just like Izgil and his family, my parents had to fake various medical reasons to be allowed to quit their jobs as civil servants, pull every string to go through the labyrinth of passport and visa application procedures, and risk it all to start a new life abroad. Izgil’s account of applying for a US visa brought back memories of my own US visa applications for college. Immigration offices still give me anxiety after a lifetime of having to deal with them, and having to put your entire life’s plan on the line every time you come face to face with an official who can arbitrarily decide your fate.
After enduring many months of hoping against hope, ready to be arrested at any moment, Izgil’s family finally were able to get passports and visas to go to the US. They had to be very discreet when they left so as not to draw any suspicion. “In this life perhaps it was my fate to leave those closest to me with no goodbyes”, Izgil laments, as he never got to say proper goodbyes to his parents and best friends, especially because he knew he would probably never see them again.
What happens when you escape from oppression knowing that you had to leave behind all your loved ones in a hopeless place? Survivor’s guilt of course. In the final chapters, Izgil writes about recurring dreams where he was running from Chinese police. Their family was physically safe but obviously living with a boatload of trauma. One final seed of hope came in the form of his wife Maharba conceiving their third child in the States, a boy they named Tarim, after the largest river that runs through their homeland.
The chapters of the book are interspersed with Izgil’s beautiful poetry. His prose is written in a very detached, matter-of-fact style but his poems are soaked in emotion, and I kept reading them over and over again. This one below especially stuck with me.
Your Unknown Place
Here people’s names were not contagious,
we said they were, it came to be.
There was no sand here growing roots,
we said there was, it came to be.
Here time did not drip from the walls,
we said it did, it came to be.
Here loneliness did not multiply,
we said it did, it came to be.
Here a thousand eyes did not fleck the skies,
we said they did, it came to be.
Here there were no fugitive forgettings,
we said there were, it came to be.
Yet our words could undo nothing here,
even the things we brought to be.
This book hit me in so many ways that I don’t even know where to start and where to end. Writing this review helped me process not just my feelings and thoughts about the book but also everything I’ve gone through that resonated with Izgil’s stories. I’m sorry this was so long. If you read all the way up to here, please let me know if it would be better for me to write these reviews in a more long-form friendly format, like Substack or something.
Burnout, depression and survivor’s guilt have been a constant in my life for the past three years. I have been slowly crawling out of it to orient myself towards hope. Those of us who are privileged enough to be able to be exiles, migrants, immigrants, expats, or even morph between those categories — we have to do what we can to undo so many things. It’s a long road ahead.