Seeds of a pomegranate

September 28, 2022·39 min·3 clips

A Uyghur linguist in Norway teaches his daughter his language so she can still call him Dada.

It begins with a warning. The host prepares listeners for painful testimony, then puts Abdueli Ayup beside his young daughter, where language becomes the first proof of what is at stake. Xinjiang is named directly. About 12 million Uyghurs live there, and the host sketches decades of pressure from the Communist Party's attempts to assimilate them. Kashgar feels far from Beijing. Abdueli now lives in Norway, where teaching Uyghur to his daughter is both memory work and a guard against disappearance. His daughter asks why it matters. His answer goes back to his own mother, who kept teaching him even when usefulness was beside the point. The family story widens fast. The episode connects Abdueli's lesson to schools and minority languages being pushed down. Then the scene shifts hard. American basketball becomes the example of what foreign institutions can say when China is listening. The NBA had made room for political speech. Adam Silver encouraged players not to stick to sports, and the league made space for Black Lives Matter messages after COVID interruptions. China showed the limit. Daryl Morey's support for Hong Kong protesters drew anger from China and made that speech expensive. The argument lands plainly. This was not only about a Warriors limited investor's comments on Uyghurs. It was about whose pain gets treated as sayable. Abdueli returns at the end. His daughter's lesson stands in for millions of families trying to pass on mother tongues while official pressure makes inheritance feel breakable.

As heard by us

A sharp China story linking Uyghur language survival to the limits of political speech around the NBA.

The Prince anchors Uyghur persecution in Abdueli Ayup teaching his young daughter a language he worries may not survive, then follows that fear outward into the ways China shapes what people and institutions say about Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and minority identity.

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Why you'd press play

A Uyghur father's lesson turns a family language into a view of pressure in and around China.

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