Samira Imin can’t stop thinking about the times her father took her horseback riding.
She remembers how her father, a prominent Uighur publisher and historian named Iminjan Seydin, would always spoil her and shelter her from her mother’s scoldings. She thinks of the time she went out alone as a teen living in China’s Xinjiang region and became lost, and Seydin began frantically calling around to find her, then cried when she finally returned home.
“He was like a mountain to me, so strong,” said Imin, who works as a research assistant at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital. “He was always my protector.”
Now, months after she learned that Chinese officials were holding her father in a detention camp for Uighur Muslims before arresting him over charges of extremism, Imin says it’s her turn to become her father’s protector and bring him back home.
This is the second story I’ve read this week about exiled Uighur children desperately seeking information about their imprisoned parents back in Xinjiang. Just heartbreaking: https://t.co/kj0WPnXC7G @ayshabkhan
— Yonat Shimron (@YonatShimron) February 14, 2020