This is Beijing...

This was written by someone living in China. They do no want their name on it, for obvious reasons but it is powerful. I want more people to read it, so I'm reposting it with permission.

“This is Beijing, so I can’t talk about it.”

That’s what the man in the green shirt says right before he starts talking about it.

He says he is a soldier. Just back from Xinjiang.

“It’s cultural genocide out there. We go into a village. The next day, there’s no village. But we can’t talk about it.”

And yet he keeps talking. He seems to need to say this to someone. Maybe that’s why he came for the foot rub.

I won’t recap here the issues in Xinjiang. Take advantage of the free media and educate yourself from the direct sources. Suffice to say that here on the eve of passover, the contradictions of being a Jew in a country where people are being rounded into camps becomes something between infuriating and unbearable.

I am getting a foot rub two chairs down from a soldier in the Pharaoh’s army.

At Passover we tell the story of the Jews and their exodus from Egypt and bondage. We discuss slavery and ethnic conflict. We like to say, “Never Again,” and feel righteous in our cause.

Yet I am getting a foot rub two chairs down from a soldier in the Pharaoh’s army. How do I enforce “Never Again?” What action do I take?

I feel humiliated and powerless. Every option seems petty and useless. I can’t confront this man. I can’t attack this man.

I don’t feel like there’s any right option.

I have to feel content with composing a note in my phone and trying to sort through a rage of emotion.

I wonder whether making this post will come back to harm me. My career. My life I’ve built as a stranger in a strange land.

I want to message some of my Uighur friends, see if they are ok, if their family is ok. Then I remember a friend of mine who researched in Xinjiang and told me a message from a foreigner can be enough to get people in trouble.

I sit and I do nothing, and every moment of nothing feels worse.

In the background on the TV is one of the biggest comedy shows in the country. Guo Degang is performing Xiangsheng. Nobody is watching is the comedy. The man keeps talking.

“They’re all scared. They’re not having kids. That may be how they all disappear. One missed generation.”

A missed generation. Blood on the lintels. An exodus.

Before the Jews left Egypt, we too were a people aggregated together, not of our own free will. Our exodus has happened. Others’s has not.

I am reminded of the words of William Faulkner: “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”

Perhaps we keep retelling the same story each year because it isn’t over.