Teenage Life After Genocide

The Experiment

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4.5 • 2.8K Ratings

🗓️ 12 May 2022

⏱️ 48 minutes

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Summary

At 19 years old, Aséna Tahir Izgil feels wise beyond her years. She is Uyghur, an ethnic minority persecuted in China, and few of her people have escaped to bear witness. After narrowly securing refuge in the United States, Aséna’s now tasked with adjusting to life in a new country and fitting in with her teenage peers.

This week on The Experiment, Aséna shares her family’s story of fleeing to the U.S., navigating newfound freedom, and raising her baby brother away from the shadows of a genocide.

This episode’s guests include Aséna Tahir Izgil and her father, Tahir Hamut Izgil, a Uyghur poet and author.

This episode of The Experiment originally ran on August 19, 2021.

A transcript of this episode is available.

Further reading: “One by One, My Friends Were Sent to the Camps,” “Saving Uighur Culture From Genocide,” “‘I Never Thought China Could Ever Be This Dark,’” “China’s Xinjiang Policy: Less About Births, More About Control”

Be part of The Experiment. Use the hashtag #TheExperimentPodcast, or write to us at [email protected].

This episode was produced by Julia Longoria, with help from Gabrielle Berbey and editing by Katherine Wells and Emily Botein. Fact-check by Yvonne Rolzhausen. Sound design by David Herman, with additional engineering by Joe Plourde. Translations by Joshua L. Freeman.

Music by Keyboard (“Over the Moon,” “Mu,” “Water Decanter,” and “World View”), Laundry (“Lawn Feeling”), Water Feature (“Richard III (Duke of Gloucester)” and “Ancient Morsel”), Parish Council (“New Apt.”), and H Hunt (“C U Soon), provided by Tasty Morsels.

A translation of Tahir Hamut Izgil’s poem “Aséna” is presented below.

Aséna

By Tahir Hamut Izgil

Translation by Joshua L. Freeman

A piece of my flesh

torn away.

A piece of my bone

broken off.

A piece of my soul

remade.

A piece of my thought

set free.

In her thin hands

the lines of time grow long.

In her black eyes

float the truths of stone tablets.

Round her slender neck

a dusky hair lies knotted.

On her dark skin

the map of fruit is drawn.

She

is a raindrop on my cheek, translucent

as the future I can’t see.

She

is a knot that need not to be untied

like the formula my blood traced from the sky,

an omen trickling from history.

She

kisses the stone on my grave

that holds down my corpse

and entrusts me to it.

She

is a luckless spell

who made me a creator

and carried on my creation.

She is my daughter.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, everyone. Julia here. The experiment is coming back next week with new
0:06.0	episodes. But in the meantime, we wanted to replay one of our favorite episodes
0:12.0	we've ever made. At a time when a massive refugee crisis is breaking records
0:18.0	around the world where Syrians, Ukrainians, and Afghans are arriving to the US
0:23.0	in large numbers. Here's our conversation with a young
0:27.5	U.S. refugee recently arrived to the United States.
0:32.5	Okay, good morning. So are you with a lot of family right now? Yes. Yes, how many people? So there is five people in my family? Okay, cool. This is like the
1:01.5	basic question I learned when I am learning English with my teacher. Oh yeah.
1:06.5	What you're hearing is a mic check between producer Natalia Ramirez and our guest, a
1:13.5	new young immigrant to the US. I remember my favorite phrase in like whole
1:19.5	English language was, I don't know. Why was that your favorite? Because it just
1:25.5	a way to be from a lot of troubles like my teacher asked me like complicated questions.
1:31.5	I don't know. And then it's done. So I still love until this day.
1:36.5	Okay, perfect. Now you can stop recording. So when I finally sat down to talk to her, you can go ahead and click record.
1:46.5	Okay. Hello, my name is Asina. I first asked Asina, Tahir Eastgill, 19 years old, about the things she did not know when she first got here from China four years ago.
2:01.5	I didn't know what cafeteria means. It was like right before lunch and the teacher was like, okay, kids, let's go to
2:07.5	cafeteria and you're lunch and I was like, what the hell is cafeteria? Sounds so fancy to me. You know, it's like a friend or something.
2:16.5	Where are we going now? Yeah, like expensive, you know? It's like art gallery or something. Only thing like
2:24.5	learning from my British English that I learned from my teacher in a year was restaurant.
2:30.5	There were a lot of basic words she didn't know. Like instead of restroom, she would say toilet. Instead of excuse me, she'd say pardon me.
2:40.5	It's the one day a girl is following me. She turned her pad bag. She looked at me and she was like, hey, I said, hey, she said, you know what you sound like old lady?
2:50.5	I was like, really? She said yes. I was like, okay. A scene says she didn't really mind being called an old lady.
	...

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