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Shockingly unethical to start a jolly food jaunt in Kashgar. Will there be a side trip to concentration camp kitchens? https://wildchina.com/tour/2021-gastronomic-tour-central-asia-anissa-helou/
Maybe they’ll visit Kashgar’s ancient Gaotai dwellings, 200m from the main tourist area, now emptied of the Uyghurs whose families lived there for 600 years, or the 60-acre detention camp opened last year, at the city limits with 14-metre-high walls and 10-metre watchtowers?
Nobody should be wafting around Xinjiang now with the intention of high times. It is completely morally wrong and reprehensible.
Wild China - the tour company - will no doubt give it the full propaganda works in Kashgar - but to take naive tourists to Xinjiang, no doubt take a sizeable fee as an ‘expert’ (although no real expert on Central Asia would go near this), is beyond terrible.
I’m confused, too, here. Someone fucks with a sandwich and it’s outrage until next month, a celebrated and awarded food writer leads a tour to Xinjiang and, what, that’s okay? Do Uyghur lives not matter? Fellow food writers... I hear ... silence.
Autumn 2019, in Kazakhstan, grown men weeped telling me their stories of how they cannot reach their relatives across the border in Xinjiang. How they’d “lost them forever” to camps.
Leading a food tour to Kashgar normalises the horror and plays straight into China’s propaganda.
Leading a food tour to Kashgar normalises the horror and plays straight into China’s propaganda.
I wrote those men into RED SANDS. I told their stories (they asked me to) and I changed their names. I begged my publisher to print not in China, but in Italy - which they agreed to - so that I, in a small way, could write the Uyghur tragedy into my Central Asia food book.
It is possible to do the right thing. Writers and authors have a huge responsibility. Words matter. Your influence and authority matters.
Whitewashing what is happening in Xinjiang is brutal.
Whitewashing what is happening in Xinjiang is brutal.
