The Conversation Article

I was in China doing research when I saw my Uighur friends disappear

I had this article published in The Conversation, an independent and not-for-profit global network of newsrooms. I hope you enjoy!

Jiu-Jitsu: A Universal Language

I wrote a blog post about training jiujitsu in China and published it on my gym's website. Here is the link! I hope you enjoy it.

https://eastonbjj.com/brazilian-jiu-jitsu/2019/jiu-jitsu-a-universal-language/

Letter to My 16-Year-Old Self

I have a confession to make. I have a compulsion. No, it's not diagnosed OCD. But it's a need to do something even when I know I don't need to, or even when I don't want to. I make lists.

All kinds of lists. Daily lists. Weekly lists. Monthly lists. Yearly lists.

I have a job task list. A life task list. An errand list. A grocery list. A people-to-text list. A books-to-read list. A fun-things-to-do list. A things-to-do-in-my-free-time list. A self-care list. A 2020 resolutions list.

Sounds nice, right? These lists are what keep me ultra-focused. These lists are what keep me efficient and always--ALWAYS--intentional with my time. These lists keep me always doing things with my time that put me closer to my goals. These lists keep me on TOP OF MY SHIT. NO MATTER WHAT. WHETHER I LIKE IT OR NOT.

These lists embody my need for order and control in my life at all times.

When I'm not paying attention, these lists start to control me and my life. I stop being present. I start being a robot. I start doing things mindlessly with no other goal than to check it off the list. I have let whole days go by without enjoying the sunshine or the world around me because I am so focused on the list in front of me.

What if I don't want to be intentional with my time? What if I want to just BE instead of DO? I will start to feel a balloon of anxiety welling up in my chest. My breathing will increase and my face gets hot. I'll start to feel like the world is starting to cave in around me, and I can hardly handle the chaos.

"When did this compulsion start?" asked my therapist.

My junior year of high school.

One of my high school besties said it best in a text to me one day: "I started at a new OCD therapist today. He said perfectionism is at the root of my issues. I was like, 'if you think I'm a perfectionist, you should see my friends!' #oaklandcatholic disorder. He was like, what if we made your therapy goal to be more mediocre and disorganized? I was like...genuinely triggered."

I laughed hard! And then added "be more mediocre and disorganized" to my most recent list.

My therapist suggested I write a letter to my junior year self. What would you say to that person? Here is my letter. I pull this out often when I find myself losing touch with what's really important in the present moment.

Dear 16-year-old Sarah,

I would rather that you enjoy this time in Pittsburgh with friends and be in the moment--and as a result go to a public college--than get into an Ivy League.

Enjoy this time you have in your carefree youth. Cherish this time being surrounded by loving family and friends. Laugh hard. Laugh often. Take the humor in every situation.

Getting into a good college cannot replace that love and that time and presence. That love is priceless but also temporary. This is the last time you’re going to be able to live in Pittsburgh with your friends and family in this way. This is the last time you will spend significant time with your caring and supportive grandfather. There is nothing that is more valuable than spending quality time and being present with them, supporting them and letting them support you.

Trying to get into an Ivy League college is a waste of time. Spending time being present with loved ones is never a waste.

You won’t even remember this year. You will completely block it out of your memory because it will be a blur of pulling all-nighters and stress over a couple of points lost here and there. Just forget about that trivial stuff.

Be present for the changing of the seasons. Taste the Trader Joe's Macaroni and Cheese. Smell the morning mist as you walk to the bus. Breathe in the air of Schenley Park and feel the leaves crunch under your feet as you run. Be present for the love of your family and friends surrounding you every single day. That kind of love and support you will never have again, at least not for the next 15 years.

You will be loved and supported, for sure. Family and friends will only be a phone call away. But having so many loving people around you and present with you in that way will never happen again.

Be a kid.

You are doing a great job. You are enough. You don't need to get into a fancy college. You just need to love yourself and others and everything else will fall into place.

Grieving Xinjiang

Grief has a way of bringing up old regrets. Those places and times and people that we can never have back. As a way to feel better, we tell ourselves, “I will never take that for granted again.” We promise to do more to reach out to the people we love.

Grief hit me like a ton of bricks one night. I was listening to the CECC Congressional Testimony on forced labor and mass internment in Xinjiang. As soon as I heard "Urumchi” being pronounced in Uyghur, my chest tightened. A knife dug into my heart and I couldn’t breathe for a moment. That word, “Urumchi”--the name of the city where I lived from 2014-2017--took me back.

The memories from Xinjiang flooded my vision. My body rocked with grief like I was trying to dry-heave the memories out of me. But they stayed.

I grieve the love that I came to know in Xinjiang. The love that connected me to the people I met there. The love that flowed and vibrated between us as static pulses of energy. I grieve the laughter and sadness and the talks and exchanges we shared.

I gave them two years of my life. I wish I could give more.

I will give more.

That experience changed me. To experience that love and openness between people from two different cultures and languages and backgrounds. I vow to never take love and energy for granted again.

I just hope the people of Xinjiang know how much they meant to me. I wish I had told them more. I wish I had told them every day how awesome they are and how much they helped me, and how much I love them, and how much they mean to me. You can’t say that enough. And now I have no way of telling them that. This is what grief teaches us—that we can do better next time.

Tell people how much they mean to you.

Tell people how awesome they are.

Trust that they know how much they meant to you.

Trust to know how much you meant to them.

The Uyghurs and Han that I met in Xinjiang: I will love you more than you will ever know.

The dissertation I wrote about my experiences is important, but what is even more important is keeping alive the love that will prevent this—gross human rights violations and genocide—from happening again.

We have the power to change the world. Little by little, through every interaction we have. The more we connect and care and love, and the less we drown ourselves in our phones and screens, the more we can help make people feel loved and included and cared for. Then the less this kind of stuff—racism and hatred that keeps people locked up—will happen. We can change the world, one piece at a time, one day at a time, one person at a time, one smile at a time.

Your presence makes a difference. You can invoke change in the world through ripples. We touch lives every day and it’s the little things that matter.

We can and will make a difference by recognizing we are all one in the universe.

A Coffee Shop: Inequality in the City

May 2017. 

When I walked into the Turkish coffee shop today, I felt as though I was attending a romantic and gluttonous party.

The menu featured coffee mochas with towering whipped cream, a delectable selection of 12 different flavors of ice cream, and extravagantly ornate chocolate tiramisu cakes advertised as “Turkish desert” that towered behind the glass.

Uzbek music blasted a little too loud on the speakers, and people spoke loudly to be heard over the music, creating a buzz of laughter and chatter all around me.

I saw a couple feeding each other bites of cake. Teenagers sat together, not talking, but viewing their phones with intense concentration and typing vigorously. Two girls in gray turbans tied in the front of their foreheads sat in a corner sharing a pot of tea and giggling softly. A group of middle-aged men wearing square skullcaps (doppa) sat in a circle the middle of the room, multiple tables pushed together, talking loudly and laughing boisterously with each other.

Another woman sat alone with a red headscarf and an iPhone 6S adorned with shiny rhinestones, face plastered with white foundation, and a thick, dark penciled-in unibrow. She sent voice messages into her phone as she ate a piece of strawberry cake.

The din of people’s laughter and stories mixed with the music like a melodious harmony—a song of love, friendship, and pleasure, a short burst of time in the midst of busy lives. When I listened in on the conversations, I noticed that they never broached the religious or the political, and the kids were speaking in Chinese to each other.

The friend I was with took a selfie of us with our two bowls of ice cream. She airbrushed my pimples and the bags under my eyes, made our skin instantly whiter, put it together in a collage that said ‘best friends’ in English, and posted it on social media.

Our curated image of ourselves and our night out, a night of pleasure and escape through ice cream and cozy coffee shops surrounded by foreign music and huge pictures of cake, was suddenly disrupted by a raspy voice.

“Please, acha [older sister], won’t you buy some? 3 for 10 som [Uyghur word for unit of currency]…”

I turned and a boy no older than five looked up at me. His face was dirty, his eyes were tired. He was wiggling and squirming as he stood next to our table, presenting packages of wet wipes for sale, and staring at our food. We shook our heads no, and went back to burying our heads in our phones, trying to escape this uncomfortable moment of sitting in his need and shameless begging. He pushed, asking us again, and we told him qeghez ba! (we have tissues!) a little too harshly.

The waitresses with black baseball caps and orange sweatshirts bustled around the crowds, clearing trash and returning dishes to the kitchen.

Outside, a military post was monitored by young men in camouflage holding large guns behind a black cage that says in large yellow characters: 请勿靠近 (please don’t get too close).

Across the street, a father stood at the entrance to the mosque, as he did every night, holding two young children in his arms while he rocked back and forth chanting praises to Allah and begging for help and mercy.

A black van reading 公安 (public safety) with bars on its windows rumbled past, its blue and red lights flashing.

We Came with High Hopes for a New Life

Ürümchi.

Huge

Desolate

Angry.

We came with high hopes for a new life

A free life.

We came to find the same tekshurush*

That we already knew so well.

The sun beating down

No jobs

No money

No food

No water to bathe in

No way out.

Just signs that declare the minzu tuanjie** of the pomegranate

And facile security guards sleeping and watching porn.

Not keeping us safe and not giving us freedom either.

Are you my Big Brother?

Closed in like animals

Segregated like criminals

Spied on like traitors

Or maybe we are traitors…

After all, who gives a shit about the Olympics when it’s a bunch of tiny Kitay
with tiny dicks playing ping pong?

All I know is that what happens in this life is not as important as the next.

So I’ll keep praying to Allah.

At least I have my children.

-August 2016, anonymous (a Uyghur research participant’s poem)

*tekshurush means "investigation." It is the Uyghur word used to describe security checks,
such as a metal detector or an ID check.

**minzu tuanjie (民族团结) means "ethnic solidarity." It is the Chinese phrase used in propaganda
messages about all the minority populations coming together in solidarity under the banner of
Chinese nationalism.

S's Home

It was a hot summer day. The sun burned my face as sweat trickled down my back. Dry, dusty air swirled around my face. The dry air made the skin around my knuckles and fingernails crack open and bleed.

I walked down Solidarity Road towards Dawan, a Uyghur neighborhood. I passed the local television station. I held my breath as I tried to avoid staring at one of the the big police stations, its windows covered with metal security bars. The entrance was barricaded with a high, locked fence topped with barbed wire and guarded by a soldier outfitted in camo. I turned left down a side alley.

Young children ages 2-15 filled the alley, some in groups playing tag, some kicking around a soccer ball. One of them kicked a soccer ball and it knocked the purse out of my hand. The group of boys nearby collapsed into hysterical laughter. Some of them called out, “Hello!” in English. A toddler, screaming at the top of his lungs, emerged from the corner store on my right, a small shop selling sugary snacks and drinks. I found S in the crowd, her baseball cap on backwards, kicking around a soccer ball. She saw me and greeted me with a big smile.

“Who is that?” her friends asked, their jaws slack in surprise.

“My English teacher,” S said shyly as she broke away from the crowd, everyone staring after us. We entered her apartment building together.

We walked through the huge ornate wooden doors covered in peeling and fading turquoise paint into a small entrance hall. We were greeted by a courtyard with a concrete floor covered in a layer of mud. On the immediate right side sat a broken couch with torn upholstery on its side, and 3 large box crates. Immediately I noticed the smell of sewage, like we had just walked into a porta potty. The air felt dank and wet, almost chilly inside, with a smell of mildew. I noticed a pile of trash in one corner, and the rank smell of raw sewage offended my nose. Four doors lined this courtyard, each leading to a separate, one-room apartment.

The smell came from the communal toilet tucked in a closet under the stairs to the left. Everyone in the whole three-story building shared one toilet.

I excused myself to go to the toilet and told S to meet me at home upstairs. The toilet did not have plumbing. It was simply a hole in the ground in the middle of the muddy floor. I latched the door and squatted down. As I retrieved one of my pieces of tissue that I carried with me at all times from my pocket, I accidentally dropped it, watching it immediately absorb the dirty wet mud on the floor. I picked the ruined paper up and threw it behind me into the white plastic milk crate that overflowed with dirty toilet paper and bloody sanitary napkins. Plastic wrap and plastic Kleenex pouches also littered the ground.

One doesn’t flush this toilet, but rather, when finished, emerges from the closet and pick up a pink bucket filled with water, using a smaller red pail in the pink bucket to dish out the water into the toilet until the shit goes into the hole.

“No wonder the entire building always smells of rank sewage and it’s even worse in the heat of summer,” I thought to myself. I wondered how often, if ever, they clean it out.

I walked up the almost pitch black flight of stairs, and entered the second floor, where the sun shined through the large square hole in the roof. The hole in the roof was built there intentionally to allow the sun to enter and dry clothes on the clotheslines that hang on the railings under the hole. Small concrete pathways led to the doors of 11 different apartments/dorm rooms sharing the communal toilet downstairs and no shower facilities. I didn’t know if they ever shower.

One of the doors was left open in an effort to circulate air through the hot room. The three Han inhabitants inside revealed skin shiny from sweat, watching television while eating rice and vegetables out of small bows with chopsticks, the television blaring a Han program, their room packed with stuff floor to ceiling on all four sides. They glanced at us quickly and with bored, tired eyes, averting their eyes quickly and returning to the television screen.

We arrived at S’s door, and another long hallway stretched and curved beyond my sight—I was not sure how many rooms remained down the second hallway. I heard a television blasting Uyghur programing in the distance.

When I entered S’s family’s room, the smell of sweaty feet and unwashed bedding slapped me in the face. Their room was small and stuffy, and stifled in the summer heat because the windows were too small to let in any breeze. The room smelled strongly of body odor and faintly of dank mildew.

A dark red carpet adorned with a green and pink flower pattern covered the small room. There was a double bed in the corner, with the blankets folded and pillows stacked neatly on one side and a closet with a mirror in other corner. S’s niece (her 20-year old brother’s 3-year old daughter) played on the floor. Nearest to the door sat a gas stove, a sink, and a refrigerator. In the other corner sat a pile of stuff covered in a sheet. Above the sink was tacked the same pink sheet I had to sign at my neighborhood community center: the rules of renting homes for migrant workers. It was written and signed in Uyghur with the red fingerprints of the landlord and residents.

S and I sat on the ground, and started translating a children’s book written in English into Uyghur. The small windows were open but barely allowed a breeze to enter, and the room was stifling hot. I wondered why they didn’t have a fan.

S’s mother came home from work, complaining about how tired she is after a 12-hour shift of scrubbing the floors and washing dishes in the kitchen of a restaurant. She showed me her hands red, chapped and bleeding from the soup and scrubbing.

Her mother spent the next two hours kneading dough to make the small squares of flat dough for dumplings. She chopped up a small square of meat into tiny squares and mixed it with green onion. They taught me how to make the chuchure (dumplings), putting small dots of the meat filling into the center, wetting one side of the dough, and folding it over. I couldn’t do it at first, but after about 10 tries I finally got the hang of it. With all of us working together, that took about one hour. Then they made the broth with onion and boiled the dumplings in it. 

Four hours after they began, the chuchure were ready, and all of us—SH, her mom, her brother, her aunt, and cousin, sat in a circle around a table cloth set on the ground, a stack of naan in the middle. We passed around the chili peppers and the bag of black vinegar and slurped the soup and ate the dumplings, dipping naan in the broth.

The steam from the bowl made my face tingle and sweat poured off my scalp and dripped down my face and eyebrows, down my neck and back. We were all breathing heavily from the heat of the soup and the spiciness of the chili peppers in the broth. After I finished my bowl, they filled up my bowl a second time, despite my insistence that I was, indeed, full.

I then heard S saying that there was almost nothing left, and they looked at me worried that I might want more. Nonetheless, they asked me anyway if I wanted more. I told them again that I’m full and they insist that they fill up my bowl a third time. I insisted that I was full, and they eventually gave up. We go through this routine even though we all knew there was no more left. It reminded me of the time a friend asked me if I wanted sugar, even though they didn’t have any sugar. Our faces shined with sweat and S’s brother wiped his face with a washcloth.