Sayragul Sauytbay
Autor de The Chief Witness: escape from China’s modern-day concentration camps
Obras de Sayragul Sauytbay
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Estadísticas
- Obras
- 2
- También por
- 1
- Miembros
- 21
- Popularidad
- #570,576
- Valoración
- 4.2
- Reseñas
- 3
- ISBNs
- 7
- Idiomas
- 1
In the first part, Sauytbay recalls her idyllic childhood as the daughter of Kazakhs who used to be herders until they were settled in a town where they maintained a farm. Sauytbay recalls several near-death experiences that she had which seemed to give a mystic or pre-destined air to her as a child. During this time of her life, Han Chinese are increasingly moving to the west of China and Sauytbay paints them in a very poor light: they are greedy, making money at the expense of the environment and off the backs of Turkish workers, all the while treating the minority populations with disdain. Sauytbay works hard to become a doctor and then a teacher, but continues to blame the Han majority for her difficulties.
In the second part of the book, Sauytbay is imprisoned in a prison for Muslims. Her job is to teach other Muslims about how to behave in a Han culture, but she and her fellow prisoners are tortured for slight infractions of the inhumane rules. Although she admits to being treated slightly better than the other prisoners, it is a bleak, terrible existence. She occasionally gets to do paperwork in a prison office where a Han woman tells her that she and the prisoners are being given poisonous sedatives.
When she is released at the beginning of the third part of the book, Sauytbay plans her escape from China to Kazakhstan where her husband and two children are living. Through various smugglers and intermediaries, she develops a plan to leave the country and miraculously slips through a border post. Even in Kazakhstan, a country whose autocratic ruler maintains cordial relations with China, she fears that she will be remanded back to China and her family therefore flees again.
Like many contemporary memoirs, "Chief Witness" cannot be fact-checked; however, Sauytbay's account meshes with what is in reputable news reports coming from western China which mostly provide astronomical statistics about the number of prisons and camps, and the people who may imprisoned. Sauytbay provides a needed human context to what is happening to Muslims and ethnic minorities in the west of China.… (más)