A group of Uyghur friends are having a late-night chat. “I wish the Chinese would just conquer the world,” one says suddenly. “Why do you say that?” another asks, surprised. “The world doesn’t care what happens to us,” the first man replies. “Since we can’t have freedom anyway, let the whole world taste subjugation. Then we would all be the same. We wouldn’t be alone in our suffering.”
It is an understandable outburst of bitterness. The Uyghurs are a Muslim minority who live mainly in China’s north-western Xinjiang region. They have long faced discrimination and persecution. Since 2016, the repression has greatly intensified, with mass detention, forced sterilization and abortion, the separation of thousands of children from their parents, and the razing of thousands of mosques. Yet support for Uighurs has been equivocal, not least from Muslim-majority countries, many of which are outraged by the burning of a Koran in Sweden but remain silent about the detention of more than 1 million Uighurs in Xinjiang, for fear of upsetting Beijing.
Tahir Hamut Izgil’s Waiting to Be Arrested at Night, which recounts that conversation, is not, however, a bitter book. It is suffused, rather, by a deep sense of sadness, and of despondency even amid hope.
“Yet our words could undo nothing here,/even the things we brought to be,” as one of Izgil’s poems laments.
A poet and film-maker, Izgil is famed for bringing a modernist sensibility to Uighur poetry. He did not set out to be a political activist. The very fact of being a Uighur, though, in a country that seeks to erase Uighur existence, both culturally and physically, turns everyday life into a political act. And for a poet living in a culture within which “verse is woven into daily life,” writing is necessarily also an act of witness and of resistance.
Despite the subtitle of the book — “A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide” — there are no depictions here of genocide, or of torture, or even of violence. We know all these things are happening, but off-page. Izgil’s memoir is a story about how to survive in, and to negotiate one’s way through, a society in which repression has become routine, and the power of the state is unfettered. The book’s restraint is also its strength. The tension in the narrative flows from the dread captured in the title — the dread of waiting to be arrested, to be vanished into detention, a dread no Uighur can escape.
Beijing’s strategy has been, over the past decade, to cut Uighurs off from the rest of the world and from one another, too. When censorship and surveillance made it impossible to link to the Internet beyond the Chinese firewall, many Uighurs took to keeping in touch with the outside world through shortwave radios. Until, that is, the government banned the sale of such radios and organized mass raids into people’s homes to confiscate them.
“We suddenly found ourselves living like frogs at the bottom of a well,” Izgil observes.
Beijing seeks to cut off Uighurs from their past and their traditions, too. Qur’ans are seized and history books banned, including many previously authorized by the state. Even personal names become part of the assault on Uighur culture. Beijing’s list of prohibited names tells Uighurs what they cannot call their children. Some names are apparently too “Muslim” — Aisha, Fatima, Saifuddin; others, such as Arafat, too political. When the list was first introduced, newspapers carried announcements such as: “My son’s birth name was Arafat Ablikim. From now on he will be known as Bekhtiyar Ablikim.”
The greatest dread is of the physical repression wreaked upon Uighurs: mass detentions, torture, violence. We get a glimpse of the horror when Izgil and his wife, Marhaba, attend a police station to have their biometric details collected — fingerprints, blood samples, facial scans. Along a basement corridor, they see a cell fitted out with iron restraints and a notorious “tiger chair,” used to force detainees into agonizing stress positions. On the floor are bloodstains.
People start disappearing, first in small numbers, eventually up to 1 million. They are taken to “study centres” — the code for mass detention camps — though nobody knows which one.
“They simply vanished,” Izgil writes.
The police knocked on the door when “your name was on the list.” There was, though, “no way to know if or when your name would show up on the list. We all lived within this frightening uncertainty.” It spawned a climate in which people feared one another as much as they feared the authorities.
Eventually, Tahir and Marhaba realize that their only option is to leave China. Emigration, though, is fiendishly difficult, especially for Uighurs, whose passports are held by the authorities. Somehow, they manage to negotiate the hurdles — though only after bribing doctors to certify one of their daughters as suffering from a form of epilepsy that has to be treated abroad. They escape to America to claim political asylum.
Relief at escape from tyranny is interwoven with the anguish of exile and of survivor’s guilt: “While we know the joy of those lucky few who boarded Noah’s ark, we live with the coward’s shame hidden in that word ‘escape.’” There is a sense of bleakness that bursts out in What Is It, Izgil’s first poem written after his escape to America: “These days/are crowded with shattered horizons,/shattered!” It is the pain of knowing that too many remain crushed by tyranny.
Nov. 11 to Nov. 17 People may call Taipei a “living hell for pedestrians,” but back in the 1960s and 1970s, citizens were even discouraged from crossing major roads on foot. And there weren’t crosswalks or pedestrian signals at busy intersections. A 1978 editorial in the China Times (中國時報) reflected the government’s car-centric attitude: “Pedestrians too often risk their lives to compete with vehicles over road use instead of using an overpass. If they get hit by a car, who can they blame?” Taipei’s car traffic was growing exponentially during the 1960s, and along with it the frequency of accidents. The policy
While Americans face the upcoming second Donald Trump presidency with bright optimism/existential dread in Taiwan there are also varying opinions on what the impact will be here. Regardless of what one thinks of Trump personally and his first administration, US-Taiwan relations blossomed. Relative to the previous Obama administration, arms sales rocketed from US$14 billion during Obama’s eight years to US$18 billion in four years under Trump. High-profile visits by administration officials, bipartisan Congressional delegations, more and higher-level government-to-government direct contacts were all increased under Trump, setting the stage and example for the Biden administration to follow. However, Trump administration secretary
The room glows vibrant pink, the floor flooded with hundreds of tiny pink marbles. As I approach the two chairs and a plush baroque sofa of matching fuchsia, what at first appears to be a scene of domestic bliss reveals itself to be anything but as gnarled metal nails and sharp spikes protrude from the cushions. An eerie cutout of a woman recoils into the armrest. This mixed-media installation captures generations of female anguish in Yun Suknam’s native South Korea, reflecting her observations and lived experience of the subjugated and serviceable housewife. The marbles are the mother’s sweat and tears,
In mid-1949 George Kennan, the famed geopolitical thinker and analyst, wrote a memorandum on US policy towards Taiwan and Penghu, then known as, respectively, Formosa and the Pescadores. In it he argued that Formosa and Pescadores would be lost to the Chine communists in a few years, or even months, because of the deteriorating situation on the islands, defeating the US goal of keeping them out of Communist Chinese hands. Kennan contended that “the only reasonably sure chance of denying Formosa and the Pescadores to the Communists” would be to remove the current Chinese administration, establish a neutral administration and