Waiting to Be Arrested at Night by Tahir Hamut Izgil

Author:Tahir Hamut Izgil [Izgil, Tahir Hamut]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

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Given Uyghurs’ increasing marginalization in our own homeland, Marhaba and I had long worried about our daughters’ futures. It was hard to be optimistic. “What’s happened to us has happened,” we would say to each other, “but our girls’ prospects shouldn’t be so dark.” Even if our daughters graduated from China’s top universities, as Uyghurs they would inevitably face constant discrimination in their careers and in daily life.

Around this time, we learned that some affluent Uyghur acquaintances of ours had sent their children to study in American high schools. Following some family discussion, we decided to begin preparing for Aséna and Almila to study abroad. To begin with, Aséna would take a year off from school to study English full-time. Our plan was to send her to the United States as soon as she finished middle school. Marhaba and I resolved to work as hard as we could to save money and ensure our daughters an education abroad.

Now it was time to obtain passports for Marhaba and the girls. Unless they owned their own businesses, Uyghurs and other minority citizens had to obtain a letter of invitation from abroad in order to apply for a passport. Once Marhaba and our daughters obtained such a letter, they would need to navigate the same bureaucratic maze that I had.

For the invitation letter, Marhaba and I considered each one of our friends and acquaintances abroad. It had to be someone reliable; in other words, someone who was a citizen of the country they lived in, who wanted to help us, and who was not on the Chinese government’s blacklist. The invitation letter had to clearly state the inviter’s name, citizenship, and address, as well as the invited party’s name, birth date, ID number, and intended time of visit. In addition, the letter had to guarantee that the inviter would take responsibility for the visitor’s expenses during their trip. The envelope had to bear the invited party’s home address in Chinese.

We decided that our best option was to ask our friends Mirshat and Gülnar, a couple who lived in Sweden and had taken Swedish citizenship. Mirshat was a writer whom I knew from literary circles; Gülnar and I had been classmates in college, and had later worked briefly at the same school in Urumchi. They were eager to help, and Gülnar volunteered to take care of it herself.

Once we received Gülnar’s invitation, protocol required that we have it officially translated from English to Chinese. Then, after several weeks gathering paperwork, filling out forms, and acquiring red stamps, I took the invitation, the application form, and the other materials to the service center of the District Public Security Bureau’s Border Control Office. The Han police officer flipped through the materials and announced that I needed to provide evidence that Gülnar had renounced her Chinese citizenship. I replied that Gülnar had already become a citizen of Sweden. But the officer merely repeated that, according to regulations, Chinese people who took up foreign citizenship needed to carry out the official procedure for giving up their Chinese citizenship.

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