Like so many Uyghurs living in exile, Hemragul still has family in East Turkistan, and so grief and fear are sewn into her reality. She used to speak to her family on Skype regularly. Now that she has been cut off from them completely, she regrets the phone calls that she put off because she was busy. She last spoke to her brother a year ago – the conversation lasted one minute, she asked him how he was, and that was all they could manage.

Hemragul’s stepfather died after spending a year and a half in a concentration camp. Her niece has been taken to mainland China to work in a textile factory and live with a Han ‘family,’ despite previously being a medical student. Hemragul’s oldest brother had been held in a camp, but 6-7 months ago she heard news of his release. She found out, as is often the case, via embers of information from Chinese social networking apps. Her brother changed his photograph on Douyin (Chinese Tiktok) after his release, in which he was half the size of the brother that Hemragul knew. He has now disappeared again, and Hemragul suspects he may be back inside a detention facility.

When we spoke about Uyghurs being forced to live with Han Chinese ‘relatives,’ her body visibly stiffened. She said that when she was living in the region, she could at least close the door of her own home to the discrimination she experienced outside. But now her fellow Uyghurs are forced to endure surveillance and invasion in their most intimate spaces.

The Uyghur diaspora live with pain for their people back home, but many also with their own memories of the Chinese government’s repression. Back in East Turkistan, Uyghur people never discussed what was being done to them. Hemragul drew a striking parallel between this fear and a book she read about how they teach bears to dance. First, they put hot metal bars under their feet until they jump in pain while the trainer plays music. Eventually, whenever the bear hears the music, he jumps. To the audience the bear is dancing, but really he is responding to the memory of pain. Hemragul says that this is like what the Chinese government is doing to her people. This fear, Hemragul tells me, has “settled like a sickness,” even for Uyghurs in exile thousands of miles away.

Despite the immediate struggles faced by the community, there is an insistence not just on survival, but on building back Uyghur identity with strength. Hemragul embodies this resilience as a young woman that was barred from secondary education now completing a second degree, all whilst working two jobs and bringing up four children. But her favourite part of the week is Sunday, when she teaches at the Uyghur school in North London. The school is run and staffed almost entirely by women, and children go once a week to learn Uyghur language, eat and play music. All of one week’s stress flows away on a Sunday, when mothers sit together, share food, and talk about their lives. Hemragul feels that her children have been robbed of the days sat around the table with family and friends in East Turkistan. But I can see that the community are finding a way to give their children a sense of that from this corner of London.

At the end of our conversation, I asked Hemragul what she wants the rest of the world to do. Her main ask is for us to learn about the Uyghurs and what is happening in their homeland. She says, “I want people to know that this is not a story that we have just come up with, this is reality. It sounds like a story, but it is real.” She also asks us to boycott Chinese products, and to support the work of those in exile – including Rahima and the Uyghur community school – through donations if possible.