For the story that Xifeng tells in Chapter 28, I relied upon the “China cables” series in The Guardian on the efforts by the government of the People’s Republic of China geared toward the repression of Uyghur Muslims, specifically their detention in camps in Xinjiang. Among the reporters in the series detailing the conditions in which that minority community is forced to live are Emma Graham-Harrison and Juliette Garside, Kate Lyons, Lily Kuo, and Tahir imin Uighurian, who, in one report, provides harrowing first-person testimony. Sarah Topol writes of the devastating toll of governmental policies on one family in particular in The New York Times Magazine. Ben Mauk, in a September 2019 issue of the London Review of Books, tells the story of several Kazakhs and Uyghur Muslims who suffered legal consequences not just as a result of their activism but also because of their ethnic identities. His work on the subject can also be found in The Believer. Matt Rivers and Lily Lee have written about the Xinjiang internment camps for CNN, and Isobel Cockerell’s exposé in Wired was immensely instructive regarding the ways in which the Chinese government’s surveillance apparatus has been utilized to facilitate the oppression faced by these communities in the Uyghur autonomous region. For how a surveillance apparatus may be similarly used in the United States, I recommend Mark Harris’s reporting on Palantir in Wired. All of the aforementioned writers were invaluable resources in my research, in ways both obvious and less so, and to them, I am grateful.

The Jungle referred to in Rebel Sisters takes its name from the Calais Jungle, a former migrant and refugee encampment in northern France whose population swelled in 2015 as a result of the European migrant crisis. Prior to its demolition in 2016, it was estimated to have held 8,143 people, according to a census conducted by UK-based NGO “Help Refugees.” The Jungle features in Gulwali Passarlay’s memoir The Lightless Sky and the documentary film L’héroïque lande, la frontière brûle (English title: The Wild Frontier). Additionally, filmmaker Sue Clayton made a film, Calais Children, which follows the lives of several children before and after the final camp eviction. Another invaluable piece of storytelling that informed some of the decisions I made in Rebel Sisters was the film L’escale (English title: Stop-Over), directed by Kaveh Bakhtiari. In it, Amir, an Iranian immigrant in Athens, owns a flat that other migrants pass through on their way to Western countries. Bakhtiari stayed in the flat of one of the characters and smuggled footage out to Switzerland every month to tell these stories.

What I’ve done with this book isn’t nearly as perilous and not nearly as brave, but I hope it is done in the same spirit: to draw attention to the plight suffered by so many who want simply what we—what I—have for so long taken for granted. A home.