Not much fiction set in Xinjiang being published these days, but Dara Passano, who has worked in human rights and international aid for more than 20 years, relates:
Six months from now I’ll be publishing a novel I started writing in 2003, when I was living on two dollars a day in western China and traveling under an alias to avoid detention for talking about “the minority issue.” Titled There Is and There Isn’t (bir bor ekan, bir yoq ekan), the novel is about Xinjiang and the lead-up to what is now called “the Uyghur genocide.”
But when I first drafted it, no one was saying the g-word. The year 2003 was long before the New York Times covered the internment camps, long before the U.S. passed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, and long before the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights issued their Assessment of human rights concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, People’s Republic of China—a report that was very nearly buried and that the commissioner didn’t publish until she was leaving office, she was that afraid of China’s reaction to it.
In those days I was living in a small oil town in the Kazakh prefecture of Xinjiang and writing long-hand, using my own peculiar system of abbreviations and trickery—whole passages in the Cyrillic alphabet, for example — so that when the Security Police did their regular snooping in my flat they wouldn’t know what I was writing about. It took me a good two years to get my ideas down because I was both voracious and indiscriminate in my research.
I spoke with Sufis, labourers, underground imams, Red imams, Uyghur revolutionaries, Uyghur intelligentsia, Communist Party members, Chinese military intelligence operatives, sex workers, movie stars, nomads, farmers, drug dealers, Christian missionaries, Chinese mafia, prison guards, musicians, historians, artists, former political prisoners, and spies of all kinds — for Kazakhstan, China, Russia, Israel, and other entities I could only guess at.
If you had a story, I was listening. If you had a spare room (or a spare floor mat), I was your house guest (or yurt guest). I completed the first draft of the novel while entirely horizontal, laid up for two weeks in hospital with pneumonia after hitchhiking (semi-legally) through western Tibet. When the doctors released me, I was detained by the police and put under house arrest.
For full text, visit Substack here.
Altaic Storytelling 