A stone is most precious where it belongs : a memoir of Uyghur exile, hope, and survival

First Title Value for Searching:

Personal Author:

Hoja, Gulchehra

Edition:

First edition.

Physical Description:

xvi, 303 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (chiefly color), map ; 24 cm

Summary:

"In February 2018, twenty-four members of Gulchehra Hoja's family disappeared overnight. Her crime – and thus that of her family – was her award-winning investigations on the plight of her people, the Uyghurs, whose existence and culture is being systematically destroyed by the Chinese government. A Stone is Most Precious Where it Belongs is Gulchehra’s stunning memoir, taking us into the everyday world of life under Chinese rule in East Turkestan (more formally as the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China), from her idyllic childhood to its modern nightmare. The grandchild of a renowned musician and the daughter of an esteemed archaeologist, Gulchehra grew up with her people’s culture and history running through her veins. She showed her gifts early on as a dancer, actress, and storyteller, putting her on a path to success as a major television star. Slowly though, she began to understand what China was doing to her people, as well as her own complicity as a journalist. As her rising fame and growing political awakening coincided, she made it her mission to expose the crimes Beijing is committing in the far reaches of its nation, no matter the cost. Reveling in the beauty of East Turkestan and its people – its music, its culture, its heritage, and above all its emphasis on community and family – this groundbreaking memoir gives us a glimpse beyond what the Chinese state wants us to see, showcasing a woman who was willing to risk not just her own life, but also that of everyone she loves, to expose her people’s story to the world." --publisher's website

Contents:

Prologue -- Growing up in the Uyghur homeland -- A fall to earth -- The seeds of disillusionment -- A new start and a new low -- A sense of purpose -- Epilogue.

Subject Term:

Women journalists -- China -- Xinjiang Uygur Zizhiqu -- Biography

Uighur (Turkic people) -- China -- Xinjiang Uygur Zizhiqu -- Biography

Uighur (Turkic people) -- Crimes against -- China -- Xinjiang Uygur Zizhiqu

Uighur (Turkic people) -- United States -- Biography

Uighur (Turkic people) -- Social conditions.

Publication Info:

New York : Hachette Books, 2023.

Subject:

Women journalists -- China -- Xinjiang Uygur Zizhiqu -- Biography

Uighur (Turkic people) -- China -- Xinjiang Uygur Zizhiqu -- Biography

Uighur (Turkic people) -- Crimes against -- China -- Xinjiang Uygur Zizhiqu

Uighur (Turkic people) -- United States -- Biography

Uighur (Turkic people) -- Social conditions.

Xinjiang Uygur Zizhiqu (China) -- Biography

Hoja, Gulchehra

Women as journalists

Taranchi (Turkic people)

Uighurs

Uigur (Turkic people)

Uigurs

Uyghur (Turkic people)

Uyghurs

Uygur (Turkic people)

Weiwu'er (Turkic people)

新疆维吾尔自治区 (China)

Xinjiang Weiwu'er Zizhiqu (China)

Hsin-chiang Wei-wu-erh tzu chih chʻü (China)

Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (China)

Sinjiyang-un Uyiġur Ȯbertegen Jasaqu Orun (China)

Shinzhaan Uĭgur Ȯȯrtȯȯ Zasakh Oron (China)

Autonomes Gebiet Xinjiang der Uiguren (China)

Xinjiang Uigur Autonomous Region (China)

XUAR (China)

East Turkestan (China)

Chinese Turkestan (China)

Turkistān al-Sharqīyah (China)

Sinčhīang (China : Autonomous region)

Khēt Kānpokkhrō̜ngtonʻēng Sinčhīang ʻUikū (China)

Sinʹt͡szi͡anskiĭ uĭgurskiĭ avtonomnyĭ raĭon (China)

Sinʹt͡szi͡an-uĭgurskiĭ avtonomnyĭ raĭon (China)

Sinʹt͡szi͡an-uĭgurskiĭ avtonomnyĭ raĭon KNP (China)

Sinʹt͡szi͡an (China)

Xin Jiang Uygur Autonomous Region (China)

Sinkiang Uigur Autonomous Region (China)

Shinkyō Uiguru Jichiku (China)

Hsin-chiang (China : Autonomous region)

Xinjiang (China : Autonomous region)

Shyn͡gzhan͡g (China : Autonomous region)

Uyghur Autonomous Region (China)

Sinkiang Uighur Autonomous Region (China)

Uygur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang (China)

Xinjiang weiwu'er zizhiqu ren min zheng fu (China)

Sinjiyang (China : Autonomous region)

SUAR (China)

SUAR KNP (China)

Doğu Türkistan (China)

Sinʹt͡szi͡an-Uĭgurii͡a (China)

Vostochnyĭ Turkestan (China)

Dzhungarii͡a (China)

Kashgarii͡a (China)

東突厥斯坦 (China)

Dong Tujuesitan (China)

East Turkistan (China)

Eastern Turkistan (China)

Uyghurstan (China)

Uyghuristan (China)

Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (China)

Uĭgurii͡a

Уйгурия

Kashkarii͡a

Кашгария

I͡arkendskoe gosudarstvo Saidii͡a

Яркендское государство Саидия

I͡arkend state of Saidi͡a

Malai͡a Bukharii͡a

Малая Бухария

Small Bukharii͡a,

Altyshar

Алтышар

Ĭettishar

Йеттишар

Dzhungarii͡a

Джунгария

Vostochnyĭ Turkestan

Восточный Туркестан

Eastern Turkestan

Vostochno-Turkestanskai͡a Respublika

Восточно-Туркестанская Республика

Eastern-Turkestan Republic

Sinʹt͡szi͡an-Uĭgur Avtonomnyĭ Raiʹon (China)

Синьцзян-Уйгур Автономный Район (China)

Sinʹt͡szi͡an-Uĭgur Autonomous Region

SAILS ISBN:

9780306828843

Available:

Library	Shelf Number	Shelf Location	Status
Searching... Fairhaven-Millicent	B HOJA (GUL) HOJ 2023	NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Foxboro - Boyden Library	B HOJA	BIOGRAPHY	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Pembroke Public Library	BIO HOJA, G.	BIOGRAPHY	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Seekonk Public Library	920 HOJA	NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 BY THE NEW YORKER

WOMEN'S NATIONAL BOOK ASSOCIATION 2023 Great Group Read

This extraordinary memoir shares an insight into the lives of the Uyghurs, a people and culture being systematically destroyed by China--and a woman who gave up everything to help her people.

In February 2018, twenty-four members of Gulchehra Hoja's family disappeared overnight. Her crime - and thus that of her family - was her award-winning investigations on the plight of her people, the Uyghurs, whose existence and culture is being systematically destroyed by the Chinese government.

A Stone is Most Precious Where it Belongs is Gulchehra's stunning memoir, taking us into the everyday world of life under Chinese rule in East Turkestan (more formally known as the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China), from her idyllic childhood to its modern nightmare. The grandchild of a renowned musician and the daughter of an esteemed archaeologist, Gulchehra grew up with her people's culture and history running through her veins. She showed her gifts early on as a dancer, actress, and storyteller, putting her on a path to success as a major television star. Slowly though, she began to understand what China was doing to her people, as well as her own complicity as a journalist. As her rising fame and growing political awakening coincided, she made it her mission to expose the crimes Beijing is committing in the far reaches of its nation, no matter the cost.

Reveling in the beauty of East Turkestan and its people - its music, its culture, its heritage, and above all its emphasis on community and family - this groundbreaking memoir gives us a glimpse beyond what the Chinese state wants us to see, showcasing a woman who was willing to risk not just her own life, but also that of everyone she loves, to expose her people's story to the world.

Reviews (5)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Uyghur journalist Hoja debuts with an inspiring account of her path to prominence as a voice against the Chinese Communist Party's oppression of the Uyghur people. Hoja's childhood in Umruchi, East Turkestan, was steeped in Uyghur culture and history; her father, an archaeologist, ran the local Uyghur arts center. Following her graduation from Xinjiang Normal University, Hoja produced Uyghur children's programs for television that were heavily censored by the Chinese government. This precipitated her immigration to the U.S. to work for Radio Free Asia beginning in 2001, where she reported on the horrific events occurring in her homeland, though not without repercussions for her family, many of whom are still missing after being detained by the Chinese government. "In this Orwellian system of authoritarianism, with a complete lack of privacy and its swift, brutal racialized state violence, my beautiful homeland has been turned into an enormous open-air jail," she writes. Hoja masterfully weaves harrowing national history and her own experience, enhancing the reader's investment in both. It's a powerful take on what it means to survive, and inspiring and infuriating in equal measure. Agent: Max Edwards, Aevitas Creative Management. (Feb.)

Guardian Review

As a beautiful young TV star at the turn of the millennium, Gulchehra Hoja was highly valued by the Chinese state. She presented popular children's programmes, was lavishly paid and mingled with influential media figures in Beijing. But by 2017, she had been designated a terrorist and placed on China's most wanted list. The next year, 24 of her family members disappeared in a single night, into the black hole of state detention. A Stone Is Most Precious Where It Belongs is Hoja's account of that dizzying journey from local celebrity to exiled activist living in the permanent shadow of a superpower's revenge. It's also a first-hand testimony of China's persecution of its Uyghur Muslim minority, which rights groups have described as constituting "crimes against humanity" and which the US designated a genocide in 2021. Hoja grew up at China's north-westernmost limits, in the vast arid territory that the state calls the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, but that Hoja and many other Uyghurs know as East Turkestan. In the regional capital of Urumqi, her family were "much closer to Kazakhstan than to Beijing"; they spoke Uyghur, a Turkic language written in an Arabic-derived script; followed Islam; and gathered for evenings of traditional music, dance and communal feasting. But even as a young girl, Hoja realised that "there were always two lessons to be learned: what was in the CCP-issued schoolbooks, and then the real history, literature and culture, which could only be learned from people like my father, in private settings and in low voices". The facts of that history were so politically dangerous that within China they were erased altogether. Though the Uyghur homeland had been under Chinese military control since the 1750s, through the 19th and early 20th centuries it remained a turbulent and contested frontier. When the People's Republic of China was established in 1949, the state launched a programme of colonisation by Han majority settlers. Uyghurs were portrayed as culturally and economically backward, exotic curiosities in need of first "civilisation", then assimilation into the Chinese nation proper. As a talented musician, dancer and actor from a prominent Uyghur family, in the 1990s Hoja became the attractive face of the minority on Chinese state media. At first, despite her father's warnings about "good comrades" - Uyghurs who had sold out to the government - she was determined to use her profile to benefit her community. Her memoir describes the horrifying, inexorable realisation, as time went on, that she was complicit in its destruction. In 2001, at the age of 28, she fled to the US and began to work for Radio Free Asia, reporting on human rights abuses in Xinjiang. The first wave of retaliation against the family she left behind - arrests, interrogation, intimidation - was swift. It also coincided with the Chinese state's leveraging of the "global war on terror" to frame Uyghur dissent as Islamist terrorism. After Xi Jinping took power in 2012, the repression intensified. By 2018 up to one million people had been detained in camps euphemised as "vocational skills education training centres", with Uyghurs - among them Hoja's parents and brother - subjected to abuses including torture, arbitrary arrest and enforced disappearances, sterilisation, family separation, forced labour, religious persecution and hi-tech mass surveillance. The international response has been complicated by China's far-reaching influence, but the abuses publicised by activists and journalists such as Hoja have increasingly become a PR liability for Beijing. In the past few years, China's policy in the province has shown modest signs of change. It has claimed since 2019 that the detention camps have been closed; and in late 2021 the party official who oversaw the worst of the crackdown was removed. A recent report found the Chinese government was using Uyghur social media influencers - "young women from ethnic minority communities sharing positive lifestyle content" - to whitewash human rights violations. Twenty-five years ago, Hoja was unwittingly one of their forerunners. This gripping memoir conveys the courage and cost of telling a truer story.

Kirkus Review

A Uyghur journalist from East Turkestan recounts her family's suffering at the hands of Chinese authorities. In this moving, deeply personal account of a family's collective anguish, Hoja, a reporter for Radio Free Asia, re-creates in intimate detail her life story within the tight Uyghur community and their ultimate persecution and imprisonment in "reeducation camps." Once the thriving Uyghur capital of East Turkestan--designated by the Chinese Communist Party in the 1950s as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region--Ürümchi was gradually inundated in the early 1990s by the majority Han Chinese. CCP authorities sought to dilute the ethnic Uyghur population and "modernize" their cultural ways, which were deemed "backward" and "uncivilized." The Han were favored for jobs and extraction of natural resources, leaving the Uyghurs impoverished and marginalized. Hoja came from a remarkable lineage of scholars and musicians, and her own passion for dance helped propel her to prominence in both school and cultural performances. Outspoken about the repressive tactics of the Chinese government, the author landed a job producing a children's program at Xinjiang TV when she was 22. Regarding an early program she helped create, Hoja writes, "we hadn't put in any political content, but at that point, in the mid-1990s, even existing as a Uyghur had begun to seem political….I was determined to counteract that as much as I could, while still remaining under the radar. After all, how much trouble could a children's program cause?" Gradually, as the author shows, the Chinese authorities began heavily censoring content related to the Uyghur experience. While visiting her estranged husband in Vienna, Hoja applied to Radio Free Asia and began working to expose the ongoing Chinese suppression of the Uyghurs from the outside. The widespread effects on her family were devastating, but we are lucky to have this important historical record of what she--and so many others--endured. A heartfelt, accessible story of a determined warrior for her oppressed people. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

Hoja carries with her a stone from her homeland, in remembrance of her life before her family was torn apart. While working as a television host for the Chinese official media, the author realized that the government that employed her was actually destroying her. During this time period, there were known efforts to spread Chinese propaganda through bilingual reeducation programs in the country's Uyghur region--in reality, a step towards the annihilation of Uyghur culture. By forcing Han traditions and ideals on the Uyghur people, Chinese officials effectively backed the region into a corner. The author defected and published a story through Radio Free Asia about internment camps that were being used to forcibly eradicate the Uyghur people, language, and culture, starting a chain reaction that couldn't be stopped. All members of Hoja's family were removed from their homes and put into internment camps in an act of retaliation. Debut memoirist Hoja balances detailed writing with the well-related emotions of her painful experiences. Her story is one that needs to be shared.

Library Journal Review

Award-winning journalist Hoja offers a moving memoir of growing up as part of East Turkestan's Uyghur community and becoming an advocate for her people. Narrator Sarah Suzuk deftly captures Hoja's emotions as she grows up immersed in Uyghur culture, religion, and history, enters into a loveless marriage, becomes a TV celebrity while educating Uyghur children about their culture, leaves her family and friends to work as a journalist for Radio Free Asia, and finally, with her true love, raises her children in the United States. Though she remains in control of her emotions throughout, an edge of uncertainty and horror informs Suzuk's performance when Hoja learns that the Chinese Communist Party imprisoned her parents and 24 family members because of how she spoke out against the genocide of the Uyghur people. A sense of relief is made palpable when Hoja learns that many family members were released after she testified before a U.S. Congressional commission on human-rights abuses. VERDICT An illuminating and inspirational memoir, laying bare the present-day horrors of genocide and calling for action.--Stephanie Bange

Prologue	xi
Part I Growing Up in the Uyghur Homeland	1
Part II A Fall to Earth	61
Part III The Seeds of Disillusionment	113
Part IV A New Start and a New Low	169
Part V A Sense of Purpose	229
Epilogue	291
Acknowledgments	303

Available:

Bound With These Titles

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Summary

Summary

Reviews (5)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Guardian Review

Kirkus Review

Booklist Review

Library Journal Review

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