China Cannot Silence Me

December 21, 2021

The New Yorker Nyrola Elimä

My cousin, Mayila Yakufu, is an insurance saleswoman and a Mandarin tutor. She is forty-four years old, and she has languished in various forms of detention for three and a half years. In March, 2018, government cadres took her to a camp without warning. Then she was moved to a pretrial detention center. I kept silent to protect my parents and my cousin’s three children. That was a mistake; my silence made no difference. Mayila was released twice and then rearrested. On December 12, 2020, the government sentenced her to six and a half years in prison. Her mistake, we finally learned, was sending her parents money to help them purchase a house in Australia, in 2013. The government called it “financing terrorist activities.”