They urged her to move there, too, but she resisted their pleas, believing that China was a more powerful country, more forward-leaning. While Sabit was in Shanghai, her parents immigrated to Kazakhstan. The work was exciting-involving travel to places like Russia, Laos, and Hong Kong-and she liked her boss and her colleagues. She found a well-paying job with an investment company. Sabit brushed off this kind of prejudice, and became adept at eliding her background when circumstances allowed, she fibbed and said that she was from some other region. She was the only one not offered an interview-because of her origins, she was sure. Just before she completed her degree, the tech company Huawei hosted a job fair, and Sabit and her friends applied. Some people, believing that “barbarians” lived in Xinjiang, expressed surprise that she spoke Mandarin fluently. But she was still an “ethnic person.” If she told a new acquaintance where she was from, it usually derailed the conversation. She loved Shanghai, which thrummed with the promise of glamorous, fast-paced living. Sabit excelled as a student, and after graduating from high school, in 2004, she moved to Shanghai, to study Russian, hoping that it would open up career opportunities in other parts of the world.
Her mother told her that the work built character. In middle school, she picked cotton, which she hated: you had to spend hours bent over, or else with your knees ground into the dirt. When Sabit was in elementary school, she and her classmates picked tomatoes for the bingtuan. Her parents, a doctor and a chemistry professor, never spoke of their experiences of discrimination they enrolled her in schools where classes were held in Mandarin, and they taught her to embrace what she learned there. Han residents of Kuytun often called Kazakhs and Uyghurs “ethnic persons,” as if their specific culture made no difference. In southern Xinjiang, indigenous peoples were still prevalent, but in Kuytun they had become a vestigial presence.Īs a child, Sabit imbibed Communist Party teachings and considered herself a committed Chinese citizen, even as the bingtuan maintained a colonialist attitude toward people like her. For decades, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps-a state-run paramilitary development organization, known as the bingtuan-had helped usher in millions of Han Chinese migrants, many of them former revolutionary soldiers, to work on enormous farms. But, by the time Sabit was born, Kuytun, like other parts of Xinjiang’s north, had dramatically changed.
Its population was originally dominated by Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other indigenous Turkic peoples. Xinjiang is the size of Alaska, its borders spanning eight countries. Growing up in this remote part of Asia, a child like Sabit, an ethnic Kazakh, could find the legacy of conquest all around her.
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