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I had lunch with an Uighur friend in Virginia today - someone whose extended family in China has been "missing" for more than a year - and two things she said were especially haunting. 1/
First, on her initial trip to the US about 8 years ago - before the Chinese government built concentration camps in the western Xinjiang region to detain and "reeducate" more than a million of her people - she visited a Native American museum in New Mexico. 2/
The idea of a people who are memorialized in museums according to their headdresses, jewelry and the kinds of homes they once lived in, but whose contemporary people are largely powerless in their own country felt eerie to her then - and much more so today. 3/
Second, every morning she wakes up and checks the news, which today means she's seeing daily images of protests in Hong Kong, of police tear-gassing demonstrators, and lately even opening fire. 4/
We know what's happening daily because the people who live in Hong Kong can still speak (relatively) freely, and because the international media can still go there, she observed. But what is happening daily in her hometown of Kashgar, how many people are dying or resisting? 5/
She wondered this aloud. No one can go there unwatched, or freely speak about what they know. 6/ END
