“I felt really sad,” the girl said about when her parents starting telling her about the crackdown.
The girl, who spoke on condition of anonymity and did not want to identify her parents to avoid endangering relatives in Xinjiang, said that the pain hit home with her when schoolmates would talk about where they were from originally. When the girl thought about her family coming from Xinjiang, other questions would arise, such as why her grandmother would never come to visit her family in the U.S.
Her voice grows weaker and begins to trail off whenever she is asked about her hometown.