As family lore has it, Humar herself demanded to attend a Mandarin school, so she could watch more channels on TV. At the time, most Uighurs attended school in their own Turkic language, with Mandarin taught as a foreign language. By 1996, when Humar was 8, the proportion of Han in Xinjiang had risen to about 40 percent, up from 6.7 percent at the founding of the Communist Chinese state in 1949 - one of the largest demographic changes in China’s modern era.Īs a child, Humar was precocious and stubborn - “big headed,” the clan collectively called her. Over her grandmother’s lifetime, the Chinese state encouraged wave upon wave of migration of the ethnic Han majority to Xinjiang, which means “new frontier” in Mandarin, partly to dilute the Uighur presence while also cementing Communist Party rule in the natural-resource-rich region. Humar’s grandmother lived in a farming town that had once been outside Hami city, but as the city stretched out, subsuming the countryside, town and city merged. Humar loved to watch the women knead and turn the dough, their hands and forearms covered in patterns of oil and flour. Clustered around her grandmother’s outdoor oven, the matrons of the family made nan bread and other dishes traditional to their community, the Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim Turkic group that called an immense territory of deserts and oases home long before it became the northwestern part of China. For a week each spring, the tree burst with dark, sweet mulberries, and Humar and her whole family gathered to pick them, the purple juices staining everyone’s fingers for days. Behind Zulhumar Isaac’s grandmother’s house, there was a large mulberry tree, so vast the branches covered the roof of the garage like a second ceiling.

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