read it from NYT: On Thanksgiving eve, U.S. diplomats reunited family members who had not seen each other in years because of China’s harsh policies on the ethnic group.
The police officers came for Ayshem Mamut a week ago at her home in northwest China.
They told her to pack her bags. She could have been taken to a prison, a detention center or an internment camp, just like many other ethnic Uyghur Muslims who have vanished, sometimes for years.
But four days later, the 73-year-old Chinese citizen was in Virginia having a Thanksgiving meal with two sons she had not seen in 20 years and four grandchildren she had never met.
She sometimes talked, sometimes cried, as they ate traditional Uyghur dishes of noodle soup, lamb stew, broiled chicken, salad and rice with chickpeas.
Last week, U.S. officials said that China had freed three American men, one of them an F.B.I. informant, in exchange for two imprisoned Chinese spies and at least one other Chinese citizen. But as part of that deal, China also quietly agreed to allow Ms. Mamut and two other Uyghurs, one an American citizen, to leave the country for the United States.
