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The New Yorker just published an essay I wrote. This is the first time I have written about my family story. Words can not express my gratitude, especially to @RohdeD
newyorker.com/culture/person…
我们连哭的权利都没有。
👇🏽
几年前，一份包含约450名明星身份证号码的名单遭到泄露（scribd.com/document/79559383…），其中有8人来自新疆。我们据此进行了进一步核查，并发现演员迪丽热巴·迪力木拉提、古力娜扎·拜合提亚尔以及韩国流行音乐歌手吾木提·吐尔逊也均被标记为“涉恐人员”。
to eat a good meal and imagine a future, is not standing where my mother, my father, my cousin, my friends, my people stand. He never was.
He can be useful without being absolved. He can have suffered without his suffering being laid on the same scale as ours, because the scale itself is the lie. A man who was paid, promoted, and privileged to help imprison a people, and who could go home afterward to eat
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He can be useful without being absolved. He can have suffered without his suffering being laid on the same scale as ours, because the scale itself is the lie. A man who was paid, promoted, and privileged to help imprison a people, and who could go home afterward to eat
he provides is real. Coming forward carried genuine risk, and I will not pretend it didn't. Speaking is the one useful thing he can do, and he should keep doing it. What I refuse is the sentence that comes after - and he too is a victim. He can be a witness without being a martyr
That standing is not Germany's to lend him. It is not a scholar's, or a journalist's, or mine to give away on behalf of the disappeared.
Let me be exact, so I cannot be dismissed as only angry: I do not say Zhang should be silent. His testimony has value; the ground-level detail
one it prefers, and the preference is not innocent. To recognize him as a fellow-sufferer, before we have even finished counting our dead, is to let the machine's operator borrow the moral standing of the people it crushed.
He has an arc: darkness, awakening, tears, baptism, exile, testimony. Ours has no arc. Ours is just the same grief, continuing, in villages you will never visit. Between a Han officer who saw the light and a Uyghur grandmother who simply goes on losing, the audience knows which
has arrived in Europe and asked: why do you write about the Uyghurs and not about me. Jesus
That question should have no answer, and yet an answer is being assembled for him, NOT by Uyghurs. A perpetrator's redemption is a better story than a victim's endurance. His has an arc:
Fuzzy on screams, the deaths, the things done in the interrogation rooms he stood outside of. This is what the system does to the people it uses, it removes the organ that would let them see Uyghurs. And a man in that condition, hollowed out precisely there,
I think something worse is true, and the journalists who pressed him seem to think so as well: that he is genuinely unable to see his place in what was done to us. He can remember every form, every insult from a superior, every freezing hour at a checkpoint. He goes fuzzy on the
It is the whole horror, reproduced in miniature, standing in front of you and asking for your tears.
And this is where I ask the harder question, the one about WHO is speaking.
Genocide is not carried out by monsters in sufficient number; there are never enough monsters. It is carried out by unremarkable men seeking promotion who tell themselves they are logistics. That Zhang cannot see this about himself is not a mitigating detail.
Every serious reckoning with mass murder the one Germany itself conducted, in the very country now weighing his asylum,arrived at the same conclusion: the ordinariness of the functionary is not his defense. It is the mechanism.
I want the people repeating this to understand what they are saying, because the world has heard it before. It is the oldest sentence in the literature of atrocity. It is the clerk, the conscript, the man who only drove the train.
I am told, sympathetically, that he was only a small cog that he filled out forms, guarded facilities, handled logistics, that the Uyghur assistants did the direct and ugly work, that low-level Han officers like him were victims. My God…
When he says his suffering was "equal to, or in some respects greater than" ours, he is not exaggerating a real pain. He is erasing the one fact that organizes everything: he was on the side of the wall that could leave.
My mother's prayer, my father's beard, my friend's exercise in a courtyard, these were the "symptoms" that could make a uyghur disappear. Zhang was never at risk of disappearing for doing push-ups.