One of the sponsors of this years festival we are proud to bring americas most beloved riders to this room. To do the work of the sort that youre hearing about at todays National Book festival. I want to welcome everyone joining on cspan today as well. We are proud to partner with cspan. The next panel is escaping genocide and Human Trafficking and features Joshua Freeman and jason. One of the foremost poets and writings in the language his new book is waiting to be arrested at night. A labor organizer and human rights strategist and director of the first book titled the great escape. The moderator writes for the Washington Post section and is the author of prisoner my 544 days in an iranian prison, solitary confinement, high stick highstakes diplomacy and the extraordinary efforts. Please join me in welcoming them. [applause] at homeybody watching its an extraordinary honor and privilege for me over the last couple of weeks ive gotten to know through these incredible books. Tragedy, loss and so much more that illuminates the human experience. We hear about sometimes superficially but they take us inside. Ive been through my own a share of hardship and i try to think about things in a positive way whenth i can. I want to start off with because theres a lot of heavy stuff as well. There is an incredible moment that stuck out for me when they are arriving in the United States for the first time and trying to pass through customs they brought with them to sustain them in the United States and asking whats in the box. Why dont you just tell them its not. Its become pretty internationally known. Theres many great scenes around food and i would like to start by talking about the comfort food brings to you both, to the characters in your book and the people of your communities. As first generation americans food is an important thing in our lives. When we first came to america we took a lot withen us and figured if we had anything to eat we would solve it by eating not and in addition, we have a saying that it is a companion and wherever you should go you should take it with you. I arrived in the United States at the age of 20 not knowing how to boil an egg or even how to warm water up. My cooking lessons started when i met the characters in this book in particular a man who lived behind a labor camp but would freak outar to meet with. It would teach me how to make the simplest of indian dishes. There were all the things i grew up with, all the things that were mysteries to me. Starvation was a rule of the labor camp. It started my relationship with of these extraordinary characters in the book and im happy to report it only went up from there. It is an incredible line. I also want to talk about the allure of america and the realities people face when they get here. We can come from the experience of new immigrants and i just want to read a quick quote from the book. He was telling one of his friends he intended to travel with his family and he said it would be best if you didnt come to america. I didnt ask him why he said this and he left without explaining further. To do more for our people by remaining in our homeland. I think sometimes of the look when he said this to me and i want to point out a moment from the book as well if i can find it. They are kind of reminiscing about the experience of getting out of the labor camp years later and it says we are americans now. Why do we need to remember and i think it is so indicative of fastmoving countries that have its own past but doesnt think about it very much. Id like you to illuminate a little bit about the mystique of america from a far away and the realities when people are actually confronted with it. Originally we had no plans to come to the United States or desire to leave our homeland. The most we had originally thought about for our daughters future we hoped they would be able to study in the United States. Of course we know that america is a great country and we knew we would be free. We knew that. We came to the United States not by our own choice and because of that since weveou been here evn stronger than the sense of receiving freedom hass been our suffering from having to leave our homeland. Since weve come here our daughters are enjoying a lot of things in the United States and we are safe but back home, so many friends of ours are in prison for confinement and we are unable to have contact with our relatives back home and all of this has made it difficult to fully enjoy what we would have enjoyed here. I think that experience of immigrating from a hostile environment where you are constantly under threat and the hope that going to a new land will change all that, the harsh realities of being cut off from your community is something i see a lot with iranians, cubans and many othern groups and i jt want to say and i will say this again and again, we hear about the genocide and concentration camps and parts of china. Hehe really brought it to life d i think its a remarkable story. I want to continue along that theme. In the quest to free the workers from india, and then the subsequent quest to be integrated legally into u. S. Society, there was a moment where most of these men had worked in other countries before and had figured out how to work the system and move from one job to another. One of them sort of perplexed that in dubai and in bahrain, we know how to get free, but how to get free in america. Talk about the struggle of these men who believe they were coming to the u. S. , completely legally and above, made incredible sacrifices, took on great debt only to find themselves in servitude when they arrived. The question, how to get free in america was a practical one asked by an indian worker who had been brought to the United States and held in captivity in a labor camp. He snuck out of the camp to meet with me and asked me that question come out to get free in america. He was asking about the bureaucratic process in bahrain there was a way to move from one to another, not in the United States. The story starts with of this mysterious midnight phone call i got one night a month after Hurricane Katrina hit the gulf coast. The gulf coast had become the largest construction site and was seething with cash and construction. I was a labor organizer and a man who was too scared to tell me his name told me he needed help. Hock, selling his successful land, taking high interest loans to get to the United States. These men were being held in debt servitude trapped in labor camp and asking me to trace a way out. The interesting thing jason about their views on america, though, were that, you know, they had more faith in america than most people born in the United States of america. They were from india where you bribe a cop to get through a traffic light or you bribe a judge. They thought here a company eymight have enslaved them but f they petitioned the u. S. Government it would protect them. What we didnt realize, they didnt realize at the time was that escaping from the labor camp in the style of a heist movie was the first step. They would have to fight three years for freedom. And i will tell you that the story takes many, many twists and turns and, you know, the characters who are on the other side of the equation who you think of evil turn out sometimes not be inherently evil. And i wanted to follow up by asking you about the reporting on this. I think its incredible reporting. You get all sides of this story through first person accounts that you actually were able to to get personally. I wanted you the talk about how you get perspective, i dont want to say objectivity. You dont need to be objective to write this story, but you came at it with an openness that is rare. Im thinking in particular Alvin Gardner and your relationship with him towards the end of the book. Just talk about how it was to report, the things that you wanted to know. Well, first of all, thank leyou, coming from you is an extraordinary complement and im very honored. You know, writing the book when i thought about the main character, immigrants themselves, the ways that immigrants are portrayed in the news and the way americans understand immigrants is the story that immigrants are the problem or people who need to be saved. By the same token, when i thought about the people at the center of trafficking scheme and thought about my initial reaction to those characters, i initially thought they must be evil and so writing about them would be b evil. Then i started the process of reporting. Alvin was a particular character. He was the immigration agent who was colluding with the company that was holding the workers in forced labor when workers would run away, this is the ice agent along with others who would go catch them and bring them back to the labor camp. Later on, he wines up in an extraordinary coverup. He wines up appointing himself as the lead Law Enforcement officer in the department of justices investigation of that company. Their investigation of him, essentially. And all of this unfolded as i was writing so i decided to find this alvin if he was still around and i found an extraordinary manuscript deep in the st. Louis library called the ladner odyssey. Over thousand page volume about the long history of ladners who started with an early immigrant and his family included, you know, confederate soldiers and slave captures and i called mr. Ladner and he agreed to meet with me in the steps of church in mississippi, a library in mississippi and what i met with him and what i wasnt ready for, to understand his role in this saga, i had to treat him like a human being. I had to be there, understand incentivesis and what was life s around the time and as often happens when you meet someone else as a human being, you know, you start to have a certain amount of empathy towards them. They are not just any more the face of an institution, an institution that ive spent most of my career fighting. Theyre now an individual often used by that institution and so remarkably mr. Ladner and i ended up in hours listening summit on the steps of the library in a kind of rapport and we continued our relationship. We bonded over food. Being far i teamed him in order to fight him. I left with my own world view, expanded by him. I was i was returning to a different reality than i had left. I want too reiterate is an incredible feed of reporting, you know, i think will be caught in journalism classes for a long time. Thank you. Great. Thank you. You bring this city to life for us and oftentimes when we think about life in an aught authoritarian parts away from the capital, be it russia, china, north korea. We think about these places where life is very orderly organized and controlled. But there are clearly cracks in the system, there are differences of opinion among people in the system, there are good guys, there are bad guys. Its a 3dimensional place. Id like you to talk about life there and the slide towards surveillance that it became . Tahr language] translator i left before the mass internments. Even though there were all kind of controls and pressure, life went on. Just like there is no such thing theres no such thing as perfect control. Translator evee was surveillance all over the place, and it seeped into every aspect of life, one gets used to it. One of the most important part of being human is our ability to get used to things. Tahir [speaking another language] translator these different kinds of control and different kinds of repression, when we spent time with our friends we would make jokes and turn them into humor. That was important way for us to deal with them and go forward in our lives. Tahir [speaking another language] translator we would invent all kinds of ways to deal spiritually with what was going on. We would find our own language to express what was going on. If somebody sent us to prison, we would say that they were in the hospital. If a Police Officer was in our home we would say we have a guest in our home. Tahir [speaking another language] translator this kind of repression seeped into every aspect of our lives. The only way to deal with it was to get used to it and to find ways to allow ourselves to continue day by day. Tahir [speaking another language] translator before the mass internments began, the repression in our country increased stepbystep. It wasnt a sudden process. Tahir [speaking another language] translator there are many examples but just one of them. They would come to our homes and ask questions about religious observance or whether we were following the governments policies about whether guests had come to our home. Tahir [speaking another language] translator for those who have not been through things like this it is difficult to imagine. In the book i try to bring this home to people with small details, by focusing on different aspects of this and how it manifests in your daily life. Jason you talked about the importance of humor. There was an early chapter about your hubris and really acknowledging it is a selfaware book. You didnt think that it could go this way or would go this way. In states like china, iran, other authoritarian countries, the grounding out,t he killing of humor is such an important part of the systems agenda. To scare you into not being able to laugh, even as the things that they are doing or are forcing you to do become more comical and farcical. Id like you to talk about that and i would like to know, the book gets increasingly fewer jokes and more serious. Can you laugh again . Translator [speaking another language] tahir [speaking another language] it is true. In earlier chapters, humor is a big part of our lives. Making jokes about everything happening around us and making jokes. It is important. [speaking another language] translator of course, the government does not like humor and looks for all sorts of real or imagined antigovernment messages even in poets or sonnets. If the state manages to find something or make something up, one can be in trouble. Tahir [speaking another language] translator humor is something that makes reality in reality even clearer. It gives reality back to us. Reality is what an oppressive government is afraid of. [applause] tahir [speaking another language] translator it is true, there is more humor in earlier chapters of the books. After mass interments began, we felt humor was lost. It was even hard to imagine beautiful things like writing poetry. Tahir [speaking another language] translator in a situation like that, we all chose silence. Tahir [speaking another language] translator and after we came to america, we got the you were back. Josh is an old friend of ours. With him and many of our other friends here, we humor as a way to deal with it all. Jason i am glads to hear that. Saket, i wanted to ask a similar question. The men in your book were facing extraordinary things. Everything was backed against them. They gave up everything to be here. But the ability to continue laughing and making fun of their own circumstances seems to never fully run out except for the case of one character. I would like to know where some of these folks are now. Do you still have gatherings with them from time to time . Are the memories even more funny as the years have passed . Saket while the men were trapped in the labor camps in mississippi and texas, humor and play were sort of the necessary antidotes to these extraordinary pressures that were building up. Inside the labor camp, the men lived 24 people to a trailer. In a trailer park built in a toxic dump on Company Property behind barbed wire fences. The men were forced to eat frozen rice for months on end as their only sustenance. They worked a credible 12 hour shifts around inredible 12 hour shifts around the clock in starvation. Outside the labor camp in india, moneylenders were circling. These enormous pressures built up. When i met the men, they suddenly found in me an extraordinary source of comic relief. They wanted the person who helped them to be a harvardeducated attorney wearing a suit. I was a 27yearold labor organizer who do not own a suit. They wanted someone who could litigate their case. I was talking to them in the catechisms of labor organizing. I think it helps them to make merciless fun of me at first. [laughter] over time, they grew to trust me. Particularly with my friend raj on rajan who was my partner. There were acts of necessary humor. The great escape itself is at the center of the book. Not to give anything away but it involves a loss turkey whiskey and flavored cigars as bribes to guards. We created this extraordinary pretext of a fictitious indian wedding as the way to get 500 men out from under the labor camp, out from under the noses of the guards. Rajan would call me secretly and he would say, how is the wedding going . How is the horoscope . I would say stars are aligned which meant the department of justice would get ready to hear our complaint. There was a lot of code. Wonderfully, now, we can all sit, eat, and make jokes in the freedom of america. The men escape from the labor camp. I was able to attend their citizenship ceremonies year after year. We still have thanksgiving gatherings to commemorate those dark days in the labor camps when men were starving and would dream about food. Jason do you make dao for that . Saket i now do with the thanksgivings are more extravagant than that. Jason i want to encourage folks that have questions. We have microphones. I have a couple more questions i would like to ask but we should maybe start lining up. I hope there is many. This is a good crowd. Tahir, a times we look to these countries and these situations of oppression. We think of these societies as somehow antiquated or behind. One thing that struck me was the way the Chinese Communist party uses technology in very sophisticated ways to track the movements of uighurs. There are scenes where you talk about the equipment and tools they use to do this. We think of technology as a sort of benefits of living in the modern world. In many ways, it feels like an enemy in your book. Has that gotten progressively worse . Is there any hope that the use of technology in china could be for the benefit of people, rather than for the overall impression . Oppression . Translator [speaking another language] tahir [speaking another language] translator of course, technology was invented to be useful for humanity. There are all sorts of positive effects that are advantages to us. Tahir [speaking another language] translator in many dictatorships, notably the peoples republic of china, the government is using technology to surveilled the people. Tahir [speaking another language] translator of course, this is a really depressing reality and also makes one think about the implement the implications of technology. Tahir [speaking another language] translator the conversations and debates about the relationship between technology and morality have been going on a long time. These debates are really relevant to all of our lives. Tahir [speaking another language] translator these are problems that need to be solved by the rule of law, whether in dictatorships or other contexts. The rule of laws the way to deal with them. As someone who was personally and negatively affected by the misuse of Tech Knowledge he, i want to misuse of technology, i want to emphasize that point. I have your book but i have not read it yet. I know you are a poet and it is translated. I am not a poet but i have tried to translate poetry and it is usually for poets that have long been dead. I have to track down people who speak the language. What i learned through translation is sometimes you are missing or have to transcribe orientation. Because language also holds context and history and relationships with things like gender or politics. Going forward, is there something that maybe you felt could not be translated from the uighur version to the English Version . May be, color, an aesthetic or mood that you would encourage me or anyone reading your book to keep in mind when reading . Translator [speaking another language] tahir [speaking another language] translator thank you for saying that. He says just knows uighur very well. Whether it is translating poetry or translating my memoir, he is concerned with translating the text in bringing the healing out. Throughout the process of writing and the translation, we talked a lot about how things may be expressed. I feel fortunate about that. Between any two languages, there are some things are harder to get across and some things easier. Have a running list in my mind and concepts that do not exist in english or take more words to express in english. Maybe the biggest thing for me is the uighur bird system is incredibly rich and you can put one after another until it gets to be 15 words. He has a real economy of words but in his poetry and prose. That is sometimes challenging to convey fully in english. You can find one word turning into five words. That is one thing i think about. You are talking about context. There are words in uyghur that i call something you would use for anyone significantly older than you. It would be rude not to use them. But we do not use these words. In the book, there is one explanation early on in english of what these words mean, like older brother were older sister so after that i just put them in italics. You mentioned you were a labor organizer and the work you did with them was clearly black and white. What about highly skilled workers in america who are x are taking advantage of by companies sponsor their visas. Do you think there is a parallel . Saket the approach i took in my book is it is actually not black and white or good and evil. Among the workers who arrived in the labor camps, there were people who were allied with me. There were people who allied with the company. The company had goals all over the labor camp, including workers. The great escape really rested on my ability to convince the main company bowl company mole, who is now a very deep and dear friend to mine, to break his ties with the company. The company fundamentally stole the story the workers believed and had no choice to believe, which was that they paid all this money to come to the United States and would get green cards which would make their servitude worth it. That turned out to be a lie but workers had to find their own way to the truth. I could only take them so far. Some workers did not change their minds and fought against our campaign. Similarly, i came to look at the people at the center of the scheme as people with motivations and incentives, not purely evil. That is harder for us to accept because when people are neither good or evil, and are part of an economy of motives and incentives, it motivates all of us. We are all parts of the culture that allows immigrants to be treated the way they are treated in the United States. Your point about things being a good one, at the end of the day, there is a character in the book named emmy raju who expresses longing for people who live in the United States and find it attractive. What is the world the word for older brother, again . Translator [speaking another language] saket my ears caught this word that echoed in handy. [speaking another language] it is a powerful word that exists somewhere between obligation and desperation. The way raju put it is you become a migrant because you need to leave the world you love to help them live. I think any migrants would rather stay at home and have family, community, language and culture. But you leave the ones you love to help them live. Whether in the hightech industry or anywhere else, that is a big part of why people leave. Jason thank you very much. [applause] we have time for a few more questions but if we do not get to all of them, i want to encourage everybody to visit their book signing booths after this session. My question is for saket. As an organizer, i often find myself struggling between two warring ideas. That the system we are living in in the political context is inherently flawed and we should be working to dismantle or radically change it. But i also think there are ways we can work within the system to gain small victories. How do you wrestle with these two ideas in recognizing that you have to sometimes work within this inherently flawed and exploited tainted system exploitative system . Saket thank you for your work as an organizer and thank you for carrying on. I struggle with this myself. I think that it is important when you are an organizer to have time to really understand the interior lives of the people you are organizing. They are not pliant and not people with a problem. They are people with sometimes more complex motivations than a simple press release, or a Straight Line story about why an immigrant came, or why someone needs asylum. Ideally, the laws of the United States would be updated to reflect humanity and its passions and complexity. Unfortunately, we are always having to shift people into decadesold rubrics. I tell is story in the book about how i was sitting with one of the main characters and helping him fill out an application for a humanitarian visa metaphor victims of trafficking. I said, what is the most important being you need to tell them . It was, i missed the birth of my son. I left india and my pregnant wife. My son was born and i have not seen the birth of my child. I said that is really important to you but there is no visa for that. Sometimes you have to fit people into constructs that are not the most important thing in their lives. It is about thinking as an organizer that you are going back and helping people update the system so the system is more humane. [applause] thank you. Sean carberry. Similar, i did a lot of journalism dealing with traumatic, difficult topics. I am curious about your psychological and Mental Health approach to having dealt with the stories you were dealing with, seeing things, hearing things. How you compartmentalize how this experience changed you . How do you work with this aspect of absorbing a lot of things that are painful and also because a law of anger about what any sick people are going through. How do you process that aspect of the experience . Saket thank you for this question. In the book, i am a character in the book. I am writing about my 29yearold and 30yearold self. This organizer did a terrible job of being kind to himself and being kind to others and connecting deeply with the complexities of trauma. All of this made for a much better character in a much better book. This character did a bad job of it. One of the things that changed me was, surprisingly, in the midst of this very intense campaign, the thing that sustained me was my friendships with these men. They were really transformative. When i met them, i was a 20 somethingyearold organizer who lived in the United States for a long time. I was estranged from home, from my parents. I had not called home in months. My handy was rusty and my connection to my origins my hindi was rusty and my connection to my origins was strained. The last thing i expected to meet in the old coast was people from my hometown. It helped me return home into something that can sustain all of us in a life of making change. Being connected to your own home, whatever that may be for you. A hope that for those of you out there, whether you are librarians fighting public rank or, or labor organizers, that you have a way of coming home at the end of the day to connect with things that sustain you and make you maybe you. I love to log loved your epilogue. I loved the whole book but i also really loved the epilogue. I have read it over and over. Saket are you talking to me . Yes, sorry. Saket that is amazing. I bought your book as well. I hadnt found it before. But i thought could you expand on when we choose to remember something, we might be choosing to remember a false narrative or forget where it is in pieces. I would love to read an entire book of your expanded epilogue. Saket thank you so much. The idea for the epilogue was handed to me in conversation. When i would go back to the workers after many years and say i want to write a book about. Some would say, absolutely, we have so many stories. But some would say, as jason quoted, we are americans now, why would we want to remember all that . It seemed like something that would come with the american passport was the right to forget history. That is so much of what we think that america is. The right to have a fresh beginning. That that is unfounded in any history. I wanted to write an epilogue that went into the mysteries of that. Thank you for reading that. This is a question to tahir. I wanted to ask about adapting from living in an oppressive state and the role of hiding reality as reality is the greatest threat to an oppressive state. I was wondering, can you explain how much this is a function and role of an oppressive state to make active decisions to make things like you can still adapt to this and still live here instead of trying to escape out of the system completely . Translator [speaking another language] tahir [speaking another language] translator you put your finger on something important that is at the center of it. The Chinese Government does not want uyghurs to know what is happening outside, does not want people to have a picture and does not want people contacting those outside. It is an important part of controlling that. Because of that, many uyghurs have been punished for simply having , everyone for coming. I want to encourage you to buy these books and read them. Now more from the 2023 library of congress National Book