One by One, My Friends Were Sent to the Camps

I keep returning to New Year’s Day 2013.

That evening, I received an unexpected call from Ilham Tohti, an economics professor at Central Nationalities University in Beijing. After exchanging pleasantries, Ilham declared: “Xi Jinping has taken power. Things will get better for us now; don’t lose heart. Tell our other friends in Urumqi that now is the time for

While today it is clear how absurd it was to expect any good to come from Xi’s rise, at the time such hopes were cherished by numerous Uyghur intellectuals. These were hopes born of desperation, a battered community’s daydream of better treatment by its rulers.

I had met Ilham when I was an undergraduate and Ilham was studying for his master’s in economics. He would go on to become one of the most prominent Uyghur critics of Communist Party policy. In the mid-2000s, he founded a Chinese-language website, where he began publishing articles defending Uyghurs’ legal rights.

llham was placed under police surveillance, but he always believed that the government would not arrest or imprison him. He was, after all, a professor at a university in the national capital, and considered himself to be operating entirely within the law.

But things did not turn out as Ilham thought they would. In mid-January 2014, news of Ilham’s arrest at his Beijing apartment reached us in Urumqi. I heard from a friend that he had not been arrested by the Beijing police alone; instead, officers had arrived from Urumqi to take him away. The involvement of the Urumqi police, traveling 1,700 miles to make the arrest, meant that this was a decision made at the highest levels.

Ilham’s detention affected me profoundly. I had obtained my own passport the year prior, when the opportunity presented itself, but we had not yet gotten passports for Merhaba and our two daughters. To an American or a European, a passport is simply a travel document, a perfunctory booklet that helps one go on vacation or on business trips. To a Uyghur, though, a passport is a precious letter of admission to the outside world. At the time I applied for my passport, most Uyghurs had never even laid eyes on one—for the most part, they were held only by prosperous merchants who did business abroad.

For Han, the process had been streamlined. All they needed was an application form and a photo. For Uyghurs and other minority citizens, applying remained an arduous process. In addition to all the standard materials, I had to provide a company guarantee. Written in Chinese and stamped with the company’s seal, this document included my name, ID number, responsibilities at work, and monthly salary, as well as the reason I needed a passport, the dates I planned to be abroad, the destination country, my reason for traveling there, the company’s promise that I would return by the specified date, and the company’s name, address, telephone number, and contact person.

Once I had prepared the guarantee, our neighborhood police officer, Adile, inspected my paperwork. Then, after looking through the police station’s files, she prepared a letter certifying that I had no criminal record, was not prohibited from traveling abroad, had not participated in the violence of 2009, and was eligible for a passport.

After that, my application had to be approved by both the neighborhood committee and the before I could go to the National and Religious Affairs Office, where I had to promise not to make an unauthorized pilgrimage to Mecca. Just gathering everything I needed took two weeks of ferrying around Urumqi on a near-daily basis.

Armed with all my documents, I headed to the Public Security Bureau office responsible for border control. An officer there took my files and told me that they would call me once the national-security unit had concluded its examination. About six weeks later, I received my passport.

After Ilham’s arrest, we repeated these steps for the rest of the family. The entire process took months, but by July 2014, we all had our passports.

Any sense of elation over obtaining the documents was short-lived, though. In September, Ilham was found and sentenced to life in prison. The Uyghur intellectual world was deeply shaken by the news. This was an early warning that a catastrophe lay ahead.

Soon after, I was at a Central Nationalities University reunion in Beijing. Merhaba, who had never been to Beijing, joined me. She wanted to see the city, and especially the university where I had studied.

A friend came to see us at our hotel. He asked me to speak with him outside, where he relayed a message from Jüret, a close friend of mine who had moved to the U.S. some years before: Our family must leave for America immediately. Jüret was deeply worried by the rapid deterioration of conditions for Uyghurs in China. Wary of saying any of this over the phone, he had sent the message through this mutual friend, who had recently visited America.

I resolved then to apply for American visas for all four of us. We weren’t sure if we wanted to leave the country permanently, but it would be good to have the visas in any case.

We contacted a Beijing travel agent, Li, who had helped a number of other Uyghurs procure visas. He understood the situation in Xinjiang and the circumstances Uyghurs currently faced. I paid the required fees and sent Li the necessary documents, and he got us an appointment at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing for the following March.

When the date of the interview came around, Merhaba and I traveled again to Beijing. The materials Li Yang told us we might need for the interview—our ID cards, household registrations, wedding license, daughters’ birth certificates, company’s registration, apartment registration, a bank statement, my college diploma, and even the book I had published—filled a knapsack.

It was only in Beijing that Li told us our chances of receiving American visas were quite low. But it was still worth trying, he continued, given that our circumstances—we were doing well financially, I owned a company—were good. And besides, we figured, we had no better option.

The next day we arrived at the American embassy two hours before our appointment. A line of perhaps a thousand people snaked through four rows, each a hundred meters long. A trickle of people walked past, coming out of the embassy. Some trudged by wearily, white slips of paper in their hands; others grinned triumphantly, ostentatiously clasping blue slips of paper.

After passing through embassy security and having our fingerprints taken, my wife and I handed our materials to an official, a young blond woman. From among our four passports she selected mine, and compared it with the files on her computer. Then she placed two white slips atop the passports and slid them back along the counter to me. “I’m sorry,” she said in Chinese. “Our visa policy is currently very strict. We are unable to give you visas.”

Though Merhaba and I had discussed many times the possibility that this could happen, for a moment I was at a loss for words. I tried explaining that our daughters had their hearts set on a trip to America, but I knew how pathetic I sounded. The woman rose from her chair and apologized repeatedly. We were ushered out of the building.

I called Li and told him we had been rejected. He offered some words of sympathy. Then he told me that if we were intent on getting American visas, we should first visit some other Western countries and then wait a year or so before applying again.

So we began planning a trip to Europe. Eventually we settled on a Uyghur tour group organized by an Urumqi travel agency. Over 15 days, the group would make the rounds of Italy, Germany, Belgium, Holland, France, and Turkey. Although the tour was quite expensive—about $8,000 for Merhaba and myself—it was well worth it for the possibility of obtaining American visas.

We left for Istanbul in April. This was the first time Merhaba or I had set foot on foreign soil. It was an exciting moment for us both. The trip itself was more of a marathon than a vacation. Our tour bus traveled from Rome to Northern Europe, then west to Paris. In each city we would hurriedly view a couple of the most important tourist sites, take a few photos, and continue on our voyage. Even so, we thoroughly enjoyed it. We were now seeing with our own eyes places we had only read about in books or viewed in films.

Not long after we returned to Urumqi, I had dinner with some friends. Fresh from my travels, I regaled them with my impressions of Europe. suddenly spoke up. “Can’t we talk about something else? It stings every time I hear people talk about traveling abroad, like I’m hearing a conversation about a woman I was in love with but couldn’t marry.” We all cracked up. “You should get a passport too,” I told him. With a pained expression, he explained that the government wouldn’t let him leave the country. We all fell silent.

As Li had advised, we waited a full year before applying again for American visas. In June 2016, Merhaba and I flew to Beijing with our older daughter, Aséna. Having turned 14, she now had to apply for her visa in person.

Upon landing, we hailed a cab to a neighborhood where the hotels tended to be

It was almost 1 a.m. when we arrived. There were no free rooms in the hotel we had stayed at during our last visit, though. It was tourist season, and demand was high; one had to book in advance.

We walked over to another hotel. Its doors were already locked. Further along, the lobby of the upscale Xinjiang Suites was open, but the guard there waved his hand to indicate that there were no free rooms.

There wasn’t a soul in sight. With our suitcases clattering behind us, the three of us wandered like ghosts in search of a hotel. A few small inns were open, but at each one, before we could finish asking about vacancies, the employees saw that we were Uyghur and answered us with a curt “No.”

Our options exhausted, we took a cab back to the first hotel, where we inquired once more about vacancies in the foolish hope that a room might have opened up. The concierge told us some would become available at daybreak.

There was nothing for us to do now but sit on a stone bench under a copse of trees in front of the building and wait for morning. It was the most humid time of the year in Beijing. The city’s mosquitos were hungry. The cicadas sang incessantly. Merhaba and Aséna, never having experienced this kind of humidity, felt like they were in a greenhouse. Merhaba was breathing heavily. Again and again, I tried to offer words of comfort.

“Tahir Hamut,” Merhaba said bitterly, “if they don’t give us visas this time, don’t mention the word America in front of me again!”

“Okay,” I said guiltily.

In the morning we checked into a hotel room. The next day we went to the American embassy. After standing in line for two hours, we had our fingerprints taken and were directed to a visa official’s window. She was pretty and blond like the official we had met last time, but younger. I handed her our passports. I held the rest of our materials at the ready in case she requested them.

“Why are you planning to go to America?” she asked in Chinese.

“A family trip,” I responded calmly.

From the four passports, the woman selected mine. She typed something into the computer. Then she picked up my passport again and opened it to the page with the visa from our European trip. She took a pen-shaped device from a lanyard and pressed it to the visa; the device emitted a blue light. She must be verifying that the visa is authentic, I thought.

The woman put the passport down. “Is your company based in Urumqi?” she asked. I told her that it was. “Do you live in Urumqi?” she continued. I told her that we did.

She typed some more on her computer. Then, not lifting her eyes from the computer screen, she reached across the counter for the other three passports.

Moments later, she looked up at us and smiled. “Congratulations! You have been issued American tourist visas.” I breathed a deep sigh of relief. Aséna squirmed with happiness. Merhaba’s face opened like a flower. After expressing our heartfelt gratitude to the visa official, we headed outside.

We hailed a taxi back to the hotel. “Dad,” Aséna said, “while that visa official was checking our passports, I could hear your heart pounding.”

Much as when we had received our passports, however, the moment of happiness was soon darkened by political storm clouds. A month after we received our American visas, a new, hard-line party secretary was When the mass internments commenced the following spring, we made up our minds that leaving for America was our best option. Kamil’s arrest confirmed that this decision was the right one. We purchased round-trip tickets to the U.S., leaving on July 10, 2017, and returning the following month—we needed the return tickets to convince the authorities that we were traveling as tourists.

Leaving would not be easy, though.

One afternoon about two weeks before we were set to depart, my cellphone rang. It was Adile, our neighborhood police officer, who had approved all of our passports years earlier. She informed us that our family must turn them over to her the next morning. Her tone was adamant.

All of us were crushed. “Why?” Aséna asked in frustration. She broke down crying.

“They gave us the passports, so they can take them away whenever they want,” I said, mostly to myself.

That night I couldn’t sleep. I had to find a way to keep our passports. I eventually decided that traveling to America for medical care would be our most convincing and effective pretext. Still lying in bed, I searched on my phone for information about Chinese citizens seeking medical care in America. Something caught my attention: A significant number of Chinese parents bring their epileptic children to the U.S. for treatment.

If we told the police that we were traveling to America to have Aséna treated for epilepsy, and that we had already purchased plane tickets, we might be able to keep our passports. We could say that her epilepsy flared up at night. To prevent people from gossiping, we had kept it from everyone, even our relatives, and had arranged for her to be treated privately. In Uyghur society, people tend to keep medical matters private. The authorities might believe us.

The next morning, I told Merhaba about my plan. She was hesitant.

“We have to try,” I said emphatically. Otherwise, “we might as well just sit and await our fate.”

Merhaba and I walked over to meet with Adile. We told her that we planned to go to the U.S. in July to seek treatment for Aséna’s illness, and that we had already purchased plane tickets. We implored her not to take our passports. Adile told us that collecting passports was an order from above. She added, though, that she understood our situation, and that in a few weeks, we could obtain a doctor’s verification and try applying to retrieve our passports. In other words, the light of hope had not yet gone out completely.

I canceled our original flights to the U.S., and sought out practically everyone I knew who worked in Urumqi’s hospitals. When I couldn’t find people to help me, I spoke with the doctor acquaintances of our close relatives and friends. Of course, if I told them I needed a physician’s confirmation of my daughter’s illness in order to get our passports back, they would be too frightened to help me. Numerous people had been taken to the camps simply for having a passport. Some Uyghurs had been so scared that they had voluntarily turned theirs in to the police or the neighborhood committee without even having been asked. Those who had never applied for passports boasted that they had been right all along, that in permitting Uyghurs to get passports, the government had merely spread its nets to catch more fish. I told people Aséna needed a doctor’s note for school.

There’s a saying in China: “A problem that money can solve is not a problem.” I eventually found three people willing to help me, for a fee. One was a neurologist, the second was a brain-scan technician, and the third was a hospital administrator. We needed the services of all three. Finally, after spending nearly $10,000, we had the necessary documents.

In mid-July 2017, I met again with Adile. The police had prepared special forms for people applying to get their passports back. I filled them out and returned them to Adile, along with the medical documentation.

I grew anxious as time passed with no word from the authorities. In late July, I called Adile to ask her where things stood. It turned out that a directive had been issued: No one with a history of foreign travel could get their passport back.

I felt sick. There was nothing for us now but to give up.

About 10 days later, I called Adile to ask about at least getting our application materials back. She told me, “We’ve gotten a new directive. Those with urgent business can now apply to have their passports returned to them.”

Hope flickered into view once more.

The next day I went to Adile’s office, and again filled out the forms requesting the return of our passports.

Merhaba took a trip to her hometown, while my daughters and I stayed in Urumqi and waited. The days felt endless. The three of us ate mostly in restaurants. Aside from meals, Aséna and our younger daughter, Almila, didn’t leave the apartment. Every evening I’d go out walking for an hour or so.

On August 22, my cellphone rang. It was Merhaba.

“I got a call,” she said. “They told me we could come get the passports.”

My exclamation woke up Aséna and Almila, who had been sleeping on the living-room sofa next to me. They jumped up and down on the couch and yelped with joy.

Moments later I was on my way to Urumqi’s Administrative Services Building. I walked in and told the policewoman at the counter that I had come for my passport. She directed me to an office, where a middle-aged Han Chinese officer leafed through a register book, searching for our names. She found them on the third page, and then carefully compared the name on my ID card with the one in the register. At her request, I signed my name next to my entry in the register. She then rummaged through a drawer packed with passports until she found ours. She handed them to me. It was a miracle.

In my excitement, I didn’t even think to put the passports in my bag. Two Uyghur youths, waiting on a bench in the middle of the lobby, stared with undisguised fear in their eyes when they saw what was in my hand.

I walked out of the building with steps so quick, I couldn’t tell whether my feet touched the ground or not.

As soon as I got back in the car, I called Li, our travel agent, and asked him to purchase four tickets to America, departing in three days, with return tickets for a month later. He told me there was a flight from Urumqi to Beijing on August 24, and from Beijing to Boston on August 25. I instructed him to buy the tickets on the spot. We had one day to make our preparations. Merhaba returned home that night, and the next day we packed up what we could of our lives.

Around noon, we left for the Urumqi airport. The atmosphere there was tense. Armed police scrutinized the people passing through, particularly Uyghurs. After dropping off our luggage, we headed to the security check. I was first in line, and when I emerged from the checkpoint, two Han security officers led me over to a separate room. Inside was a jerry-rigged conveyer belt that orbited a pillar. I was told to stand atop the conveyer belt and hold my hands up high as it carried me around the pillar, which appeared to be scanning my body and sending readouts to a computer nearby. There had been no such inspection at this airport when we’d traveled to Beijing the previous year. While I waited for Merhaba and our daughters to undergo the same check, I watched Han passengers pass through the normal security check and hurry off to their gates. The security officials paid them no mind. This extra inspection was just for Uyghurs, I thought with renewed humiliation.

Finally, we walked over to the gate and sat by the window. Watching the planes on the runway through the glass, I turned to Merhaba. “Take it all in. These may be our final moments in this land.”

“Don’t say that.” Her voice was trembling. “God willing, we will return.” As soon as the words left her mouth, she started weeping. “God willing,” I whispered. Tears were rolling down my cheeks as well.

The next day, we were standing in line at border control in Beijing. My turn came first. I handed my passport to an agent. The young uniformed officer opened the document and looked long and hard at me, comparing me with my photo. Then she motioned another officer over, this one wearing civilian clothing. Leaning in close, they looked at the computer screen and spoke briefly. Then the plainclothes officer left. The border-control agent stamped my passport and returned it to me. Merhaba and our daughters likewise moved swiftly through the process. We had been approved to leave China.

Seventeen hours later, our plane began its descent over Boston. We landed on American soil. Our passage through customs went smoothly.

As we waited in Boston’s Logan Airport for our connecting flight to Washington, D.C., I tried to imagine our new life in America. My thoughts, though, kept returning to our home. The people we cared for most were suffering still, left behind in that tortured land. We would never be free from the guilt of our survival.

Once I arrived in America, time passed quickly as I busied myself starting a new life. I wrote little. Even in quiet moments, poetry wouldn’t come to me. In my mind’s eye, I would see Almas in the camp, Munire left alone at home, Perhat hurrying away into the night.

A few months passed. As I lay in bed one night, waiting for sleep and letting my mind wander, suddenly a poem came. I reached over to the nightstand, picked up my phone, and began writing.

Besieged by these discolored words
within all these disordered moments
the target on my forehead
could not bring me to my knees
and also
night after night
one after another
I spoke the names of ants I’ve known

I thought of staying whole
by the road or somewhere else
Even
cliffs grow tired staring into the distance
But
in my thoughts I trimmed your ragged hair
with two fingers for scissors
I splashed your chest with a handful of water
to douse a distant forest fire

Of course
I too can only stare
for a moment into the distance