When the 37-year-old Chinese woman stepped over China's border into Kazakhstan last July, she felt free. The woman — who doesn't want NPR to use
When the 37-year-old Chinese woman stepped over China’s border into Kazakhstan last July, she felt free.
The woman — who doesn’t want NPR to use her name for fear of retaliation by Chinese authorities — says after her husband died in 2015, she was left with two children, a tiny house in the countryside of China’s Xinjiang region, and little else. She despaired of her future.
Then she met the man who changed her life. Like her, he was an ethnic Kazakh. Unlike her, he was a citizen of Kazakhstan, from across the border.
They married last summer, and she and her children left China. They moved to a small town outside Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, and the children enrolled in Kazakh schools.
The couple’s life together as husband and wife was established. The only thing left for the woman to do was to complete the paperwork to cancel Chinese citizenship for her and her children, so that they could become Kazakh citizens. For this, she had to return to her hometown in China.
When she crossed back alone into Xinjiang last year, the problems began.
«The police in my hometown told me that I needed to return to China with my two children in a month to complete the process,» she says. «I told them my children are at school, and that I’d return on my own. They said I needed to bring my children as well, or my brother would bear the consequences.»
She said she didn’t want to get her brother — a Chinese citizen and the leader of a local mosque — in trouble, so she did as she was told. She waited for a Kazakh holiday, when the kids had a break from school, and they all returned to China and stayed in their old family home while they took care of canceling their citizenship.
«When we returned, the police collected our passports, checked my phone and seized it because I had WhatsApp on my phone,» she says. «They told me the app was illegal.»
She got her phone back, but not the passports. As she waited, she says, village police invited her to the hospital for a health check. They visited her every two or three days, asking why she wanted to leave China, who she knew in Kazakhstan — interrogations that lasted hours.
«They’d call me nearly every night after midnight, asking me to come back to the station,» she recalls. «They told me my phone should always be on, because they could call me anytime.»
She says last Dec. 28, police showed up at her house at midnight.
«I thought they wanted to interrogate me again,» she says. «But they took me to the hospital instead.
