Review of Waiting to Be Arrested at Night by Tahir Hamut Izgil, translated by Joshua Freeman

*Waiting to Be Arrested At Night* by Tahir Hamut Izgil. Published by Penguin Press.

For the life of me, I cannot remember where I first saw that this book was going to be published, but I do remember that when I saw it was going to be published, I had put an order into my local library system to loan it immediately.

The genocide going on in China when it comes to Xinjiang and the Uyghurs has been something I’ve been following for years, and when I was a fashion student all these years ago, I was really interested in supply chains and how a lot of materials we were receiving for certain companies and products were from the enslaved Uyghurs being forced into camps.

When in New York, I also spent some time in the Uyghur restaurant Nurlan in Flushing, as well as Tengri Tagh in Times Square, which has led me to some interesting conversations and eavesdropping about the state of Uyghurs in the United States and their loved ones. Their food is delicious and one of my favorites, by the way.

The lagman at Nurlan is some of the best I’ve ever tried. But I devoured this memoir when I got my hands on it because of how haunting it was—it’s a must-read in my eyes and I will be buying a personal copy for my own collection.

Let’s get into the review.

A Uyghur poet describes the crackdown of his people, culture, and language.

Before we get into the weeds of this, I think it’s important to mention who Tahir Hamut Izgil is. He was a poet in Xinjiang, and when I saw was, I mean he no longer inhabits that space. Poetry and the reiteration of it was a part of the cultural crackdown imposed by the Chinese, and as he mentions in one point of the novel, a group of his writer friends and he realized they could no longer come together to recite poems after police officers showed up without the risk of being arrested.

Izgil now is an Uber driver in Washington D.C., as he mentions in the end the lengths his family has to take to get passports (Uyghurs are denied passports).

Izgil had been arrested before all of this and sent to the camps after he tried to study abroad as a youth, so he knew the consequences of being Uyghur in contemporary China. He describes live in Urumchi, from the man who runs the bookstore to the relatives they visited on a daily basis.

Life as a Uyghur was not easy from the beginning, as they were tracked with ID cards, not given passports, and it takes a lot to even go anywhere without being watched. It was hard to even get an apartment building in their native lands compared to the Han, despite the Uyghurs being the indigenous people here.

But when the CCP began to crack down on the Uyghurs, the fear intensifies, as seen with Izgil. People began disappearing one by one, summoned to their hometowns.

The mass arrests were only the beginning. The Qu’ran and Islamic texts were banned, and if you were caught with them, that would spark you being arrested on the spot. People began to be watched, and life was harder. One by one, Izgil’s friends began to disappear, many of them leaving coded messages about how they were going off to study.

Studying meant that you were arrested and going to the reeducation camps run by the government. The government also took fingerprints, face scans, and blood samples—so if they wanted to find you, they would and could.

Slowly, Izgil and his wife realized they needed to get out. First they spent a ton of money booking a trip to Turkey, as they knew international travel would be necessary if they could get an international via somewhere else. Then they began applying to go to America under the guise that their younger daughter needed medical treatment.

Their overseer was a Chinese Han, so they had to be extremely careful about everything lest they, too, end up in the camps.

Despite keeping boots and a coat at the door, waiting for his arrest, the family flees to America under the guise of treatment. They tell no one, but the grandparents had an inkling for what was to come.

They leave their belongings with a relative, who, not long after they flee, is sent to the camps. Around the two month mark, it becomes obvious they are not coming back, and those who remain in Xinjiang no longer contact them out of fear. But through the grapevine, Izgil finds out even more people have disappeared, including many of his friends and relatives.

Overall Thoughts

This is such a haunting memoir for me, and because of that, it’s a must-read. We don’t often hear these perspectives due to them being obviously smothered by governments in the grand scheme of things, and when we get books like this, it’s so incredible to read about the bravery and lengths they took to get out.

It’s something us Westerners take for granted with our powerful passports, and I wish more people would read these kinds of books.

They’re incredibly humbling and keep us knowing that we’re privileged and spoiled if from countries like the United States. Izgil is a poet, and it shows in his writing—it’s very lyrical with its mourning and diction.

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