The cruel reality of Uyghur life under China’s blood-red fist
A STONE IS MOST PRECIOUS WHERE IT BELONGS by Gulchehra Hoja
320pp, Virago, £16.99 (0844 871 T 1514), RRP£18.99, ebook £11.99 ★★★★★
If you haven’t heard of East Turkestan, that’s understandable. It’s a vast desert-swathed territory, north of Tibet, east of Afghanistan, and, crucially, rich in minerals, gas and coal. Yet it’s found on few maps, other than that in this book, because it was absorbed into China in the 18th century and renamed “Xinjiang” (“New Territory”) in 1894. In China today, to own such a map, never mind such a book, would risk imprisonment, quite possibly without end, as the government seeks to “re-educate” the region’s Uyghur people out of existence.
Uyghur journalist Gulchehra Hoja’s A Stone is Most Precious Where It Belongs reclaims her home region’s place on the map. This revelatory memoir pulses with energy and beauty, making us care about what is being erased at mass scale by telling a deeply personal tale. It begins with a blissful childhood in the city of Ürümchi, once a staging post on the Silk Road, “flanked to the west by the breathtaking mountains of the Tengri Tagh and surrounded by vast desert landscapes punctuated with startling green oases filled with grape and melon vines”. There, her grandmother would dole out noodles to hungry neighbours. It was a warm, loving community: the sort of place where everyone knew the lyrics to medieval songs.
During the Cultural Revolution, Hoja’s newly married parents were separated, but not before her father had to lop off her mother’s long hair, considered a mark of Uyghur backwardness and outlawed by Chinese authorities. This would be the first but not last time her mother saw him cry. Then Hoja’s mother, a professor of pharmacology, was stranded for eight years as the sole medic in a remote oasis, while he, an archaeologist, and Hoja’s grandfather (who ran the esteemed Uyghur Arts Centre) were sent to toil in a coal mine.
Reunited, the couple resumed a prestigious if precarious social position. Their daughter, whose name means “bearer of hope”, reaped the benefits, excelling in the arts, even being cast as the star in a movie. Her grandparents lived in the former US consulate, a haven of dance and music until it was razed in 1982 and the family were shunted into a tower block.
Such riches also spelled danger, as the young Hoja began noticing falsehoods in official school
Hoja’s father wept as he was forced to cut off his wife’s long hair, which had been deemed ‘backward’
textbooks. Few spoke of the abortions that her mother and others suffered, as well as sterilisations, owing to the government’s strict familyplanning policies, but the miserable consequences were difficult to ignore.
Then Hoja’s 19-year-old brother was caught stealing. This idiotic act, conflated with a litany of bogus accusations – routine in policing of Uyghurs – resulted in a 10-year sentence.
What follows is an account of fame, struggle and heartbreak. Hoja became a children’s TV presenter, determined to burnish the Uyghur heritage by stealth. But, unable to stomach life as a propaganda tool, she fled to Washington to work for Radio Free Asia, breaking stories such as the mass incarcerations begun in 2017. Today, an estimated 1.8million Uyghurs are captives in 1,000 camps. Hoja remains in the US, cut off from her family, steeped in guilt for the proxy punishments meted out to them.
Often this memoir reads more like a novel, with Hoja a compelling heroine, versed in dance, with a love of poetry and amulets. Her account is not just timely but timeless. It carries echoes of countless other instances of people persecuted by colonists bent on importing their version of civilisation while exporting a country’s riches. The instruments of oppression have simply diversified, with ancient methods – torture, child kidnapping and slave labour – augmented by surveillance on street corners, inside homes, online.
How is all this justified? By the claim that Uyghurs are Islamic terrorists. The 9/11 attack was utilised by the Chinese government as a pretext without any basis in fact. In reality, the form of Islam once prevalent in East Turkestan draws on the gentle mystical tradition, Sufism. Hoja’s own family, far from zealots, were appalled when their daughter began wearing a hijab in America.
She did so because she could not in her homeland, and because that outward expression of faith offers solace and a connection with those she cannot touch.
Hoja does not shy away from oppressive aspects of Uyghur tradition. Conflict between family honour and love led to years in an unhappy marriage. Her perspective on the Han Chinese is also unremittingly hostile, which can feel ugly at times, such as when Hoja contrasts her beauty with an older Han woman. Still, this mild narcissism is forgivable and illuminating. She is not a saint, just a brave woman. The particulars of her story speak for the losses of a people.