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In Transit
A Uyghur Restaurant in D.C. Weathers the Pandemic
Why Dolan Uyghur opted to stay open amid the lockdown
Welcome to In Transit, a column from the writer Mayukh Sen focusing on how immigrant-owned restaurants across America are coping with the Covid-19 pandemic. Read the first installment, on Guelaguetza in Los Angeles, here.
On his last night in the city of Ürümqi, Abduhemit Abdukeyum didn’t have much time. He couldn’t say goodbye to his friends, his relatives, not even his own mother. All he could do was buy a plane ticket and leave.
It was April 2017. Abdukeyum, who is now the owner of the Dolan Uyghur restaurant in Washington, D.C., was dodging persecution by the Chinese government. He’d lived in the territory he knew as East Turkestan, called the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region by the Chinese state, for his entire life. Abdukeyum had worked in medical research before starting a business of his own, but by 2017, the government put his company “upside down,” as he put it one day in September. “So I had to flee to another country and then start over again,” he said, speaking through his translator, Sabit Jelil (who is also the restaurant’s manager), in his mother tongue of Uyghur.
He couldn’t say goodbye to his friends, his relatives, not even his own mother. All he could do was buy a plane ticket and leave.
As a Uyghur man, Abdukeyum belongs to a minority Turkic, primarily Muslim population that has faced a history of state-sponsored suppression and maltreatment within China. Xinjiang is home to at least 11 million Uyghurs, according to a figure from 2019. In recent years, an estimated 1 million of those Uyghurs have been subject to mass detention in re-education camps.
In recent years, an estimated 1 million of those Uyghurs have been subject to mass detention in re-education camps.
On that night three years ago, Abdukeyum drove to the airport and left his car there. The endgame was America, where he, his wife, and two children planned to seek asylum. He arrived in the United States later that…
