“Their friends stopped communicating with them. She had no one to share pictures of her children with. Her children had grown withdrawn. They no longer wanted to leave the house, because police were always waiting for them outside their school. It continued like this until Meryem’s husband decided to move the family to Turkey, where others like them, Uyghur Muslims, had made lives for themselves. He decided to send her first while he waited for their children’s passports to be approved. On the day she left, he was arrested. When she arrived in Turkey, her phone stopped working.” The hologram of a phone reappears, and the once-glowing screen snaps to black. Dead. “By the time she had the phone repaired, everyone had deleted her from their WeChat contacts. They feared she was contagious. Like a disease. If the government could do this to her, maybe it would punish them for communicating with her.”

I am knowing that some of the girls here are red-bloods, but none of them is making to go to the bathroom or to eat something. All of their attention is focused on Xifeng and her story.

“Others like Meryem arrived in Turkey. Women who had escaped while their husbands were trapped in Xinjiang. They were called the Widows because they did not know if their husbands were dead, alive, still in prison. They had no way of knowing. So they banded together, to protect themselves.” Xifeng is looking at all of us—child of war and red-blood—and smiling like she is talking about the women in her story but all of us too, and I am beginning to lose myself in the story, looking for pieces of myself in it. I am thinking this is how Xifeng is having power over us, how she is being able to tell us to do things. She is giving us purpose, but she is also showing how we are being connected. Not connected like knowing what the other person is thinking or being able to hack into satellite but connected like sharing heart. Like how I am feeling with other child of war. “The Widows shared apartments. They helped each other attain jobs as seamstresses and tailors, making clothes for other people.

“Some of the women still spoke with their families, but the messages became shorter and shorter. A brother would say, ‘We’re okay. Safe,’ then the Widow would hear nothing for months. Others spoke in code. If someone was arrested, the other person would say that they had been ‘admitted to the hospital.’ Then they only spoke in emojis.” And here, Xifeng presses a button on her wrist again, but instead of seeing changing faces, we are seeing rose. “A half-fallen rose for when someone was arrested. A dark moon to say that someone had been sent to the camps. A sun emoji meant ‘I am alive.’ A flower: ‘I have been released.’