Unfailing resilience
Contrary to the gruesome and repressive events that unfold in How I Survived a Chinese “Re-education” Camp: A Uyghur Woman’s Story, the memoir opens on a pleasant note. It is 2016, the wedding night of Gulhumar, the daughter of Gulbahar Haitiwaji, and friends and family are gathered to celebrate the joyous ceremony in Paris.
However, although it is a period of merriment for the Haitiwajis, thousands of miles away, Chen Quanguo assumes leadership in Xinjiang as Secretary of Tibet. Known for having instituted harsh surveillance methods during his previous years as secretary, his repression of Uyghurs — a Turkic ethnic group — takes on a tragic scope in the following years. (Since 2017, the Chinese government has reportedly imprisoned more than one million Uyghurs and subjected those not detained to intense surveillance, religious restrictions, forced labour and forced sterilisations. It is said Chinese officials were concerned that Uyghurs held extremist and separatist ideas, and they viewed the camps as a way of eliminating threats to China’s territorial integrity, government and population.)
It has been a decade since Gulbahar and her family arrived in France. During the process of assimilation into their new environment, explanations about the cultural conflict from where they come from are often met with indifference.
“To Westerners, there was something exotic about the repression we were undergoing. It was like a Chinese version of David and Goliath. Except in this version, David still hasn’t won. He’s been fighting the giant for generations, to no avail,” Gulbahar says in the book.
After the wedding, she gets a call from Karamay, the oil company where she had worked at with her husband, Kerim. An accountant from the firm calls to summon her back to China to resolve a pension matter. Gulbahar eventually flies back to her hometown, albeit hesitantly, and oblivious to the horrific years that awaits her.
A few days after her arrival, Gulbahar is hoaxed into confessing to having participated in activities that “conspired to stir up trouble”, all on the basis of a photo of her holding a flag representing Uyghur independence at a Paris protest. This accusation leads to her detainment in the Karamay County Jail.
In her next few years there, Gulbahar is subjected to hundreds of hours of brutal treatment including further police interrogation, physical and mental torture, malnutrition, violence and brainwashing. Later, she is transferred to re-education camps — concealed under the term “schools”.
In the seventh chapter, Gulbahar highlights the difference between the time spent in both places. At the county jail, the women are often bored, other than having their schedules interrupted with police interrogation. They are also forced to remember mind-numbing rules and are addressed in numerical order, a few of the countless tactics used to strip them of their sense of identity.
At the re-education camps, the detainees endure 11 hours of “education” daily, which include reciting the glories of the Communist Party and “physical education” — the equivalent of military training. “Here, the military rules were designed to break us. Sheer physical fatigue robbed us of the desire to speak. Our days were punctuated by the screech of whistles: on waking, at mealtime, at bedtime.”
While this eye-opening and candid memoir — structured like a diary — uncovers the horrific reality of genocide, which is still prevalent in our world today, it is also about the unfailing resilience of an Uyghur woman — the first to escape from these camps and dare to speak out about them. —