Solace and Solidarity in Exile

Short of a death sentence, the gravest punishment in the Great Qing Legal Code was life in exile. While the provision was initially adapted in 1646 from its Ming-era precursor, the court in Beijing amended it over time so convicts could be sent to ever farther-flung corners of the swelling empire, in Manchuria or Mongolia beyond the Great Wall. After the Zunghar Wars concluded in the late 1750s with the conquest of what later would be named Xinjiang, that vast territory became the perfect destination, serving three purposes at once: “To clear the crowded heartland, to settle the new frontier, and, through punishment, to offer criminals a means of redeeming themselves.”1 The most famous man to undergo this ordeal was Lin Zexu, whose failure to clamp down on the opium trade in Canton spiraled into an embarrassing conflict with the British that the Daoguang emperor never wanted—followed by Hong Kong's 1841 colonization.2 Indeed, Xinjiang was envisioned from its inception as an untamed periphery for undesirables (and strangers).The words “exile” and “Xinjiang” in conjunction carry a very different meaning today. As Under the Mulberry Tree shows, this “autonomous region” in the People's Republic is not a terminus of gruesome expeditions but an origin, a place inaccessible to generations of Uyghurs who call it home. Maidina Kadeer envisages being in a garden with her grandmother's “head resting on [her] lap and the mountain air caressing [their] skin in sweet tenderness” (1). Elminur Mahpirof recalls “the sounds of the birds and the townspeople walking by” (13) from visits to her grandfather's farm. Ayesha Erkin, suggesting that “food is political” (42), enjoys the taste of a yeast-free bread known as toqatch and deep-fried dumplings known as khoshang. Mirshad Ghalip conjures up “soccer games in the street without a ball” with friends and “the fire station shouting in [their] young ears” (58).Exile is likewise the thread that runs through the Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays. In fact, its editor, Tenzin Dickie, deems Tsewang Yishey Pemba's 1957 autobiography the foundational text of an entire genre, described as “a literary exercise in recovering the lost land” (xv).3 Tenzin Dorjee embodies this ethos in his dramatic account of a 2007 pilgrimage during which he slipped into Lhasa for a nonviolent direct action ahead of the following year's Summer Olympics. Although overwhelmed by the Potala Palace, the Students for a Free Tibet campaigner had to stay in character as a Sikkimese-American tourist with a fellow activist as his fake girlfriend. The price of setting foot there was to not make acquaintances for risk of getting them in trouble with authorities later, to not speak back in his mother tongue at shops and restaurants. “He swears he's not Tibetan,” a waitress was overheard exclaiming to another, “but he's been drinking pot after pot of butter tea!” (161).At the precise moment when the lost land was no longer, his identity must first be lost—before literally also getting lost himself in the old town's winding alleyways as he searched for a torch. Desperate to return to his hotel, he approached an old lady (who sold trinkets on a makeshift bed) for directions, with a mixed-dialects accent distinct to the diaspora. “She didn't look at me with curiosity,” he recalls. “As far as she was concerned, I might have been . . . temporarily out of place in the city but permanently at home in the country, among my own people” (163). Then he disappeared into the evening mist. He would reemerge again on Mount Everest, holding a banner with bold words—“One World, One Dream: Free Tibet”—that reverberated everywhere.Dickie's collection is retrospective. Tenzing Sonam fondly harks back to spending Losar as a child in the 1960s in Darjeeling; Topden Tsering reminisces about ghostwriting letters in 1991 for his friends at school in Dharmsala to the girls they adored. These essays are polished, appealing to readers with or without background knowledge of Tibet. Munawwar Abdulla, Sonya Imin, and Maidina Kadeer, on the other hand, convey raw emotions and dire urgency. They launched their venture in 2021 for recent memories to be “recorded, testified, and witnessed” (viii) in response to “the ongoing oppression and genocide of the Uyghur people” (vii). An online compilation grew into the present revised and expanded edition in print. It contains fiction and nonfiction compositions, along with poems, photographs, paintings, cartoons, video and sculpture installations, and, in one notable instance, iPhone screenshots of diary entries jotted down in the Notes app. Experimenting with form, with structure, with medium, the works are subject to interpretation.Indigenous terms are explained in the margins. Selected pieces are each accompanied by a “Conversation with Contributor” in an extended endnote. But if Under the Mulberry Tree seems at times to be hastily put together, the editors do not bear sole responsibility. The Tarim Network, after all, is a small nonprofit (one that also hosts a podcast and runs an online history seminar) instead of a dedicated publishing house. Among the additions that should be considered in a future second volume are one-paragraph bios to better promote the project's participants. In comparison, the Tibetan collection, produced by an international imprint, meets a higher professional standard and evinces greater cohesion. The chapters are far from monolithic, of course. Some are solemn, others angry; some are heartwarming, others heart-wrenching.The Uyghur writers tackle specific and ongoing developments in Xinjiang head-on. Ali Sibir's short story features a protagonist forced to utter, in Mandarin, various patriotic slogans to his teacher: “I love the motherland. I love the people. I love the party. I am Chinese!” (16). Merdan Eheteli's draws inspiration from “the saturation of surveillance cameras” (78) at almost every block. “I always think of the time when I initially started to unpack my survivors’ guilt,” Kabir Qurban confides. “I was camping in the Pacific Northwest, in the most beautiful scenery, wondering how I could allow myself to enjoy moments as such when I have family missing” (51). The self-reproach reflects the sheer scale, severity, and speed of the ongoing Uyghur genocide that has shocked the world since irrefutable reports of Xinjiang's internment camps were unveiled a half-decade or so ago.4The human-rights situation in Tibet remains dire as well, in light of long-standing programs that enable nomad relocation, land redistribution, resource extraction, and monolingual education. Whereas exiled Uyghurs, for all their anguish, regard themselves relatively fortunate to be abroad, the Tibetan writers are eager to explore how their unique plight is compounded by Orientalism. While attending Eton College in England, Chhimi Tenduf-la found himself so exoticized that he was reckoned to be a royal prince; his friends’ parents would bow and call him, “Your Highness” (153). Years later, after the protracted civil war in Sri Lanka ended in 2009, a woman he met foisted her yearning for national unity—that people would identify not as Tamil, Sinhalese, Muslim, or Burgher, but as Sri Lankan—on him when she corrected his self-introduction to insist that he was “Chinese” (154), not Tibetan. Chime Lama shares her struggles to repudiate an unamused white professor who advised her against chronicling Tibet so she could reach a “wider audience” (166) and an ignorant white classmate who lauded Mao Zedong as a serious poet and revolutionary “hero” (168).The two books do not just amplify voices within marginalized communities but also reveal the transnational dimensions of their manifold experiences. Istanbul and Almaty appear throughout the Uyghur anthology; such metropolises as Delhi and Calcutta in India, like remote Nepalese towns and villages, do in the Tibetan anthology. This fascinating presence helps to map the two diasporas and challenges Sinocentric assumptions that Chinese imperial possessions are mere extensions of the mainland. Portrayals of the topography, too, are vivid. In a series of photographs, Sonya Imin lays down the doppa—a traditional Uyghur hat made of cotton or silk—in the Sonoran Desert near the US-Mexico border to facilitate “a visual dialogue from the standpoint of a guest in one desert, while invoking memories and connections to [her] desert homeland” (30) in the Taklamakan. Yaks, horses, antelopes, and gazelles come to life in the pages of Dickie's text.Another unmistakable motif is the tyranny of overlapping regulatory apparatuses that make an already-difficult journey of displacement and despair even less bearable—whether it is manifested in the form of paperwork that requires approval from the French embassy or the American lottery system that must comply with strict quotas outlined in a 1990 law. “The elders,” Tsering Wangmo Dhompa laments, “had never needed to prove their identity in nomadic Tibet. The very idea of a nation-state was new to them as was the concept of formal citizenship” (6). Bhuchung D. Sonam concedes that survival in exile is often contingent upon untruths: “If a policeman refuses to thump his official stamp . . . or an immigration officer asks too many questions, we back up our lies with more fabrications” (27). Abdushukur Muhammet bemoans the lines that “an ant can cross, but a person can't” (93) without a passport. “My body is a sacred geography / And I recognize myself before any country,” Jangul Baurjan adds. “I recognize my people before any government” (94).Not all voices are so universalist, however. Many Tibetans and Uyghurs believe that despite having a nation, they have no state. And with each successive generation, an inherited dream of liberating somewhere increasingly unfamiliar grows vaguer. In the face of incessant Chinese repression, asserting sovereignty arises as perhaps the most tangible tool to organize anti-imperial resistance. Yet endorsements of strident nation-state frameworks might strike specialists as anachronistic. Tibetan advocates delineate a unified country comprising Ü-Tsang, Kham, and Amdo, although the last of these has not been ruled by the Dalai Lama or the kashag since the Yongzheng emperor ordered direct military administration of it in 1724 to quell a Zunghar uprising. Tibet declared independence in 1913. The contested region—now inhabited also by Han, Hui, Mongol, and other non-Tibetan groups—fell under the control of warlords allied with Chiang Kai-Shek, who in 1928 converted it into Qinghai Province.5 A passing reference to its capital as “Xining in Amdo” (72) glosses over these complexities of a cosmopolitan space along the Silk Road and at the edge of empires.The Uyghur case is more intricate still. During the nineteenth-century Dungan Revolt, when Xinjiang broke off from a Qing Empire dwindled by the Second Opium War and the Taiping Rebellion, three major centers of power vied for influence: a pro-Ottoman Khoqandi emirate in Kashgar; a sultan favored (and then overthrown) by Russia in the Ili Valley; and a Sufi order, associated with northwestern Chinese Muslim leaders, in Ürümqi. Zuo Zongtang crushed the rebel regimes, and their alternative political imaginations gave way to Xinjiang's provincialization in 1884. Uyghur nationalism materialized only later.6 It evolved into statehood two decades after the Qing collapse, when the fleeting First Republic was established in the Tarim Basin, the Tarim Network's namesake. Replacing “Xinjiang” with “East Turkestan” altogether, the anthology culminates in a translated excerpt of Ana Yurt (Motherland), from which the mulberry-tree imagery is taken. But this trilogy of historical novels is set in Zungharia, where the Second Republic in the 1940s existed out of its predecessor's reach. Even for those sympathetic to rejecting a colonial epithet devised by the Qianlong emperor, East Turkestan comes across as aspirational rather than instructive.The tragic legacy of Qing policy on the frontiers continues to loom large; its latest casualty is Hong Kong.Until the Communist Party imposed the sweeping National Security Law in 2020, the notion of indefinite banishment had barely registered in our public consciousness. Since then, up to 210,000 residents have fled to the United Kingdom alone, with other uprooted lives dispersed across Taiwan, Japan, Australia, Canada, and elsewhere.7 How to be useful overseas? How to fight for an unrecognizable place? How to define membership of a scattered people? How to realize self-determination? How not to lose hope? These are thorny questions confronting the exiled Hong Kong community in our infancy, but for Tibetans and Uyghurs, they are not unprecedented. As this review goes to press, my own US immigration status is in limbo. With an expired student visa and protected only by a temporary presidential directive, I do not know when my travel document application, stuck in a massive bureaucratic backlog, will be processed for me to see loved ones.8 “You're not my homeland anymore,” I sometimes wonder on long, isolated nights. “So what am I defending now?”9 If books do not provide answers, they at least do solace and solidarity.

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