How I Survived a Chinese "Reeducation" Camp: A Uyghur Woman's Story

by Gulbahar Haitiwaji, Rozenn Morgat, Edward Gauvin (Translator)

Overview

The first memoir about the "reeducation" camps by a Uyghur woman, describing the insidious nature of oppression, the dehumanizing effects of torture and brainwashing, and the human drive to survive—and resist—under even the most horrific circumstances.

This new paperback edition features a new introduction by the author.

“I have written what I lived. The atrocious reality.”
— Gulbahar Haitiwaji to Paris Match

For three years Gulbahar Haitiwaji was held in Chinese detention centers and “reeducation” camps, enduring interrogations, torture, hunger, police violence, brainwashing, forced sterilization, freezing cold, rats, and nights under the blinding fluorescent lights of her prison cell. Her only crime? Being a Uyghur.

China’s brutal repression of Uyghurs, a Turkish-speaking Muslim ethnic group, has been denounced as genocide and reported widely in media around the world. In 2019, the New York Times published the “Xinjiang Papers,” leaked documents exposing the forced detention of more than one million Uyghurs in Chinese “reeducation” camps. The Chinese government denies that these camps are concentration camps, seeking to legitimize their existence in the name of the “total fight against Islamic terrorism, infiltration and separatism” and calling them “schools.” But none of this is true. Gulbahar only escaped thanks to the relentless efforts of her daughter, with the help of the French diplomatic corps. Others have not been so fortunate.

In How I Survived a Chinese “Reeducation” Camp, Gulbahar tells her story, describing the insidious nature of oppression, the dehumanizing effects of torture and brainwashing, and the human drive to survive—and resist—under even the most horrific circumstances. This new paperback edition includes a new introduction by the author.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644213889
Publisher:	Seven Stories Press
Publication date:	07/30/2024
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.48(w) x 8.24(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

Born in 1966 in Ghulja in the Xinjiang region, GULBAHAR HAITIWAJI was an executive in the Chinese oil industry before leaving for France in 2006 with her husband and chil dren, who obtained the status of political refugees. In 2017 she was summoned to China for an admin-istrative issue. Once there, she was arrested and spent three years in “reeducation” camps. Thanks to the efforts of her family and the French foreign ministry, she was freed and was able to return to France, where she currently resides.

ROZENN MORGAT is a journalist at Le Figaro and a specialist reporting on the Uyghurs. Working directly with Haitiwaji, she gathered together her account of her experiences in Xinjiang, and together they turned Haitiwaji’s story into this book.

A 2021 Guggenheim fellow, EDWARD GAUVIN has translated in various fields from film to fiction. His work has twice won the British Comparative Literature Association’s John Dryden Translation Competition and been shortlisted for several major awards, including the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Albertine Prize, the Best Translated Book Award, and the National Translation Award. The translator of over four hundred graphic novels, he is a contributing editor for comics at Words Without Borders.

Table of Contents

Preface 15

Chapter 1 August 28, 2016 (Paris) 21

Chapter 2 November 19, 2016 (Paris-Boulogne) 35

Chapter 3 January 20, 2017 (Karamay County Jail) 45

Chapter 4 January 30, 2017 (Karamay County Jail) 55

Chapter 5 April 15, 2017 (Karamay County Jail) 61

Chapter 6 June 5, 2017 (Karamay County Jail) 71

Chapter 7 June 10, 2017 (Baijiantan, Karamay) 77

Chapter 8 June 20, 2017 (Baijiantan, Karamay) 85

Chapter 9 July 14, 2017 (Baijiantan, Karamay) 91

Chapter 10 September 3, 2027 (Baijiantan, Karamay) 99

Chapter 11 November 20, 2017 (Baijiantan, Karamay) 103

Chapter 12 Late 2017 to early 2018 (Baijiantan, Karamay) 111

Chapter 13 Spring 2018 121

Chapter 14 November 5, 2018 (Somewbere in Northern Xinjiang) 131

Chapter 15 November 23, 2018 (Somewhere in Northern Xinjiang) 137

Chapter 16 February 19, 2019 (Paris) 145

Chapter 17 March 3, 2019 (Karamay) 153

Chapter 18 March 11, 2019 (Karamay) March 12, 2019 163

Chapter 19 March 15, 2019 (Karamay) 173

Chapter 20 April 2, 2019 (Karamay) April 6, 2019 179

Chapter 21 April 12, 2019 (Karamay) 191

Chapter 22 June 6, 2019 (Karamay) 199

Chapter 23 June 22, 2019 (Karamay) 203

Chapter 24 August 13, 2019 (Ghulja) 213

Chapter 25 August 21, 2019 (Paris) 225

Afterword: January 2021 229

Acknowledgments 235

Editorial Reviews

"The book is most valuable as testimony. For Uyghurs, Haitiwaji explains, the camps are “a kind of urban legend,” made mythic by silence: “If no one talks about them, then the camps aren’t real.” Her memoir, dedicated “to all those who didn’t make it out,” contributes to a rich and painful body of memory-keeping that grows all the time."
—Jamie Fisher, The New York Times

"[A] powerful, heart-wrenching memoir."
—Elizabeth M. Lynch, Commonweal

"A viscerally affecting memoir from a Uyghur woman who “endured hundreds of hours of interrogation, torture, malnutrition, police violence, and brainwashing. . . . A taut, moving, powerful account of an ongoing human rights disaster." 
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"After being imprisoned for nearly three years, Haitiwaji, a member of the Uighur community, details in this rousing and courageous debut the brutal treatment she survived in one of China’s “reeducation” camps. Structured like a diary, her narrative begins in August 2016 at her daughter’s wedding in Paris, a celebration that’s tinged with sadness because those in attendance are living in exile, having left China after a crackdown against a growing movement for Uighur autonomy. A few months later, Haitiwaji was summoned to China, ostensibly to resolve a pension matter, and detained by government authorities. With her daughter accused of terrorism (she was seen holding a flag representing Uighur independence at a Paris protest), Haitiwaji was imprisoned, shackled to her bed for 20 days, and relentlessly interrogated. Her story grows more disturbing when she recalls the repeated violence and 11 hours of daily “education” she received over the next two years once she was sent to “school”: “this was brainwashing, whole days spent repeating the same idiot phrases.” Haitiwaji’s forthright descriptions of her harrowing experience at a modern-day concentration camp—before she was released in 2019 with the help of her daughter—offers a sobering look at the horrific ways genocide is still being enacted today. This urgent testimony will serve as a wake-up call to Western readers."
—Publishers Weekly

"Of this urgent first memoir about the 'reeducation' camps by a Uyghur woman, the author confirms: 'I have written what I lived. The atrocious reality.'"
—Ms.

"A current and deeply disturbing personal account of being targeted as a Muslim Uyghur . . . This memoir puts a much-needed face on abstract world news about the upwards of one million men and women estimated to have been taken from their families and jobs, imprisoned in camps, and 'reeducated' in western China. . . . Gulbahar’s is a brave and important voice; her choice to lay her name and face bare to speak as loudly as possible calls us, in turn, to witness, to amplify, to not look away."
—World Literature Today

"Gulbahar’s story is a truly powerful representation of resilience. As the Chinese Communist regime is actively seeking to undermine the values of freedom and democracy across the globe, we need only read testimonies like this one to know what the future world order will look like if the Chinese Communist regime is allowed to continue unchecked. Despite her suffering, her courage in the face of genocide shines through. May every person who reads it be inspired to confront these modern-day horrors and be an upstander just as Gulbahar has been."
—Rushan Abbas, Executive Director, Campaign For Uyghurs

"Gulbahar Haitiwaji’s beautifully written account of brutality in the Chinese government’s “reeducation camps” is a remarkable feat—accessible to all readers, deeply human despite the inhumanity detailed, and unsparing in its details of bleak efforts to destroy Uyghur identity. One constant throughout the book, and clearly throughout her life: Haitiwaji’s extraordinary courage."
—Sophie Richardson, China Director, Human Rights Watch. 

From the Publisher

01/24/2022

After being imprisoned for nearly three years, Haitiwaji, a member of the Uighur community, details in this rousing and courageous debut the brutal treatment she survived in one of China’s “reeducation” camps. Structured like a diary, her narrative begins in August 2016 at her daughter’s wedding in Paris, a celebration that’s tinged with sadness because those in attendance are living in exile, having left China after a crackdown against a growing movement for Uighur autonomy. A few months later, Haitiwaji was summoned to China, ostensibly to resolve a pension matter, and detained by government authorities. With her daughter accused of terrorism (she was seen holding a flag representing Uighur independence at a Paris protest), Haitiwaji was imprisoned, shackled to her bed for 20 days, and relentlessly interrogated. Her story grows more disturbing when she recalls the repeated violence and 11 hours of daily “education” she received over the next two years once she was sent to “school”: “this was brainwashing, whole days spent repeating the same idiot phrases.” Haitiwaji’s forthright descriptions of her harrowing experience at a modern-day concentration camp—before she was released in 2019 with the help of her daughter—offers a sobering look at the horrific ways genocide is still being enacted today. This urgent testimony will serve as a wake-up call to Western readers. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2021-12-14
A viscerally affecting memoir from a Uyghur woman who “endured hundreds of hours of interrogation, torture, malnutrition, police violence, and brainwashing.”

By 2006, Haitiwaji and her husband, Kerim, began to realize that she and her fellow Uyghurs were being incrementally stripped of their civil rights in her native region of Xinjiang. They moved to France, where life was difficult but livable. Although the couple had been well-paid engineers at an oil company in Xinjiang, they scraped by in Paris, with Kerim working as an Uber driver and the author as a baker and cook. In 2017, pressure by her former employer about her work pension convinced them that it was safe for her to return to sign required paperwork. Not long after she arrived, she was apprehended and interrogated. Photos of her adult daughter in Paris at an anti-Chinese protest for Uyghurs convinced police that she was dangerous. She was branded as a “terrorist,” a fate that has befallen many Uyghurs, who are Muslim and fiercely wary of Chinese authoritarianism. Languishing without a trial for a year, she was eventually sentenced to seven years of “reeducation.” In this urgent and eloquent narrative, the author fashions harrowing depictions of daily humiliations at the camps (so-called “schools”), including rote memorization, senseless interrogation, and violence. After more than two years, pressure by her daughter, who publicized her mother’s ordeal, raising alarm to the highest levels of the French government, agitated Xinjiang authorities. In order to secure her release, Haitiwaji was forced to confess to crimes she hadn’t committed. Despite her courage in the face of a brutal ordeal, it appears that she was one of the lucky ones: Many of the women she met in prison never made it out, and thousands still suffer based on the flimsiest of charges simply because of their ethnicity.

A taut, moving, powerful account of an ongoing human rights disaster.

Kirkus Reviews