When Hasan Imam was a child, living on his parents’ farm, he would sometimes hide inside a haystack. The farm was scattered across a few acres of a small village. Behind the family house was a cowshed and, next to it, a hay barn. Inside the barn, each haystack was identical to its neighbor, and in the stack farthest from the door his father had arranged some bedding. It was invisible unless you went looking for it.
The village was in Kargilik, a rural county in Xinjiang, China, between the Kunlun Mountains and the Taklamakan desert, across the border from India and Pakistan. The family grew whatever the government told them to from year to year, mostly wheat and corn. There were many rules to follow. When Communist Party cadres from the village visited the house, Imam knew to take his younger brother and run to their hiding place. He tried to lie still and breathe slowly. The smallest movement would send spiders scurrying out from the depths of hay. Sometimes the cadres left quickly, and Imam could return to the house before the TV show he was watching ended. But sometimes the visits lasted hours, and the boys would fall asleep. When that happened, their father would carry them both to bed.
Visits from cadres were a frequent occurrence in southern Xinjiang. One objective of the visits was to discover unregistered Uyghur children. Although the region was exempt from China’s one-child policy, in 1988 the government issued a new directive limiting urban Uyghur families to two children and rural families to three. Parents who violated the policy were fined and could be subject to imprisonment or forced birth control.
When he was older, Imam understood why his family had kept him hidden: He was born a fugitive. He and his brother were the youngest of five children, and neither was registered with the government. Imam never received a birth certificate or the all-important household registration required for nearly every facet of life in China, like opening a bank account or obtaining a driver’s license. Because he was unregistered, he was never enrolled in an official school. He was educated at home until he was 10, when his father took him into town to live at an underground Islamic school, or madrasa. It was the only place where an unregistered Uyghur child could study.
For decades, the Chinese government had treated Uyghurs as a troublesome population with separatist tendencies. Leaders sought to increase Xinjiang’s ethnic Han population through settlement programs. After 9/11 and the start of the United States War on Terror, China declared its own “global war on terror,” which intensified the targeting of Uyghurs and other Muslim populations in Xinjiang. When the madrasa was shut down, Imam came home. He helped his parents plant crops in the spring and bundle and thresh the wheat during harvest.
