Looking at a Blindspot: The Re-Education Camps of Xinjiang, China

(1)

Your eyes open awake but it doesn’t feel like you’ve slept. The sleep was dreamless and restless. It’s morning, roughly two hours since you managed to pass out. Last night was your turn on the floor: you’ll have to sleep standing up — or not at all — for the next five nights until you get the floor again. It feels like you’ve wasted your go, like it always does.

Your nostrils fill with the stink of sweaty, unwashed bodies until your nose acclimatises once again. Your back aches. You mutter morning to those nearby.

You need to use the toilet so start edging through the bodies, nudging people passed like you’re in a packed nightclub. You reach the toilet and sit: it isn’t separated from the rest of the living quarters. One person’s leg hovers unintentionally touching yours as you lower your pants and squat and struggle to take a shit. The camera eyes you. But it is the other people, not the cameras, that makes you struggle — the quarters being gendered doesn’t help. There remains something wrong with sharing your sounds and smells and shit with everybody.

The paper is rationed and you use what’s allotted to you, unsure if it’s all clean down there when you’re done.