Journalists estimate that between 1 and three million Uyghur persons are at present being held in detention camps by the Chinese language authorities as an act of cultural genocide. That we within the U.S. find out about that is largely as a result of brave reporting of Uyghur American journalists reminiscent of Gulchehra Hoja. In her beautiful memoir, A Stone Is Most Treasured The place It Belongs: A Memoir of Uyghur Exile, Hope, and Survival, Hoja recounts her childhood and schooling in East Turkestan, in addition to her love for her household, language and tradition, valuable issues that she has needed to go away behind as an activist in exile within the U.S.
Situated within the northwestern nook of mainland China, East Turkestan is the homeland of the primarily Muslim Uyghur, whose tradition is wealthy with ancestral traditions in music and dance. Coming of age in an informed and musical household, Hoja skilled as a dancer earlier than turning to appearing. She produced and hosted the primary Uyghur language kids’s TV present, step by step changing into conscious of the growing censorship and management the Chinese language authorities exerted over each Uyghur folks and the media. A visit to Europe in 2001, and a primary glimpse of an uncensored web, led Hoja to immigrate to the US, the place her journalistic abilities shortly landed her a place at Radio Free Asia.
Hoja’s exile within the U.S. and persistence in reporting on the suppression of the Uyghur folks by the Chinese language authorities has resulted in grave penalties for her household again house. A Stone Is Most Treasured The place It Belongs dramatizes the violation of Uyghur human rights by grounding the political within the private. Household and friendship are as a lot part of Hoja’s story because the bigger nationwide and political context, reminding readers that each lacking Uyghur is an individual with a narrative of their very own.
