The ‘patriotism’ of not speaking Uyghur
January 02, 2019I spoke recently to a Uyghur contact about the pressure her mother felt to learn Chinese, a retiree who lives in a rural Uyghur village. My contact said that the last time she was able to get some news from her home village, she said it had become the primary focus of her mother’s life. She said, “I asked my cousin, ‘How is my mom?’ She said that every day my mom is learning ‘the language of the country,’ and writes a few thousand Chinese characters from a book as her homework. She said, ‘She is busy, don’t worry.’ I am happy she is not in the camp, but basically she is spending the whole day mimicking characters, as she doesn’t know any Chinese. Every week at the (village) flag raising, she has to bring her ‘homework’ to show the leaders.”