This poet’s account of life under intense surveillance in Urumqi, the capital of the Uyghur autonomous region of Xingjian, between 2009 and 2017, is crystalline and urgent. The author learns early on that his people’s “customs and beliefs” will not survive, purely because they have been “cherished for a thousand years”. His warning should resonate with any person of faith.
The book follows Izgil and his wife’s gradual reluctant acceptance that they cannot survive unscathed amid intensifying mass arrests, which begin in 2015. Interlaced with his own story are the parallel stories of friends and family. He has changed the names of most of the characters we encounter: they remain either under surveillance or lost somewhere in the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “study centres”. The sentences of those already caught are indefinite: it is not clear that they can ever go home.
The translation of this work preserves the simplicity of the poet’s style and, as far as possible, an economy of words, which the translator has said, characterise the Uyghur language. Small details convey life in the shadow of the CCP’s “strike hard” campaign, launched against the Uyghur people in 2009 to target what they called “religious extremism, ethnic separatism and violent terrorism”.
Izgil and his family’s life diminishes slowly: “as the danger grew, life continued”. Until, in June 2017, stuck at home unable to work, he carefully piles folded winter clothes and sturdy shoes by his bedroom door in case he is taken at night to a cell with a “chilly cement floor”. He discovers that many of his acquaintances keep such clothes at the ready. He and a friend are, briefly, able to laugh at the thought.
There are many moments of humour in the book. Izgil and another writer joke about their bookshop-owning friend, whom they have nicknamed “The Mystic”, forced to buy a truncheon and whistle and wear a regulation CCP armband with his long hair.
Towards the end of the book, humour falls away. Through a run of miraculous luck and complex manoeuvres, Izgil is able to get his family to America. But he and his wife remain tormented by dreams of home and the people they have left behind. Symbolic free verse poetry, which punctuates the chapters, conveys something of the depth of their emotional desolation.
We are left with a sense that, under such a regime, the future for faith and free thought is dark. The Uyghur people’s plight, though extreme, is analogous to other religious groups in China. Since Xi Jinping’s 2015 call for the “Sinicization of religions”, underground Catholic churches not allied to the authorised Catholic Church in China have been demolished. China Aid reports that Catholic leaders and lay believers have been charged, detained and sentenced.
In a handwritten letter to Religion Unplugged in 2020, Cardinal Joseph Zen warned that Catholics in China had faced greater repression since the Vatican’s 2018 deal with Beijing. He says that “minors under 18 years of age are not allowed to enter church or take part in religious activities”. Cardinal Zen is concerned that Pope Francis’ experience of “Communists as the good guys” may hinder his ability to recognise how the CCP’s policies have “destroyed many traditional virtues”.
Meanwhile, as Benedict Rogers has observed, Zen’s successor, Cardinal Stephen Chow, is now talking in just those terms. Rogers’s view is that the deal struck between China and the Vatican in 2018 isn’t working, but people pretend that it is. The lessons of the CCP’s treatment of the Uyghurs may soon ring true for China’s underground Catholics. Reading Izgil’s account, it’s clear that no one under China’s regime of surveillance can assume their beliefs will not be eradicated because they have been cherished for centuries.
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