Imagine waking up and calling your mother on the phone to say good morning. The phone keeps ringing, but no one answers. After repeated calls, emotions begin to heighten, anxiety sets in, and then panic. That’s how I felt on September 10, 2018, when my mother disappeared. Over seven years later, those feelings still course through my body like it was yesterday.

My mother, Dr. Gulshan Abbas, is a 63-year-old Uyghur retired physician, a woman of deep kindness who devoted her life to healing others. Since 2018, she has been unjustly imprisoned in Xinjiang by the Chinese government, cut off from her family. She is a mother of two American daughters and grandmother to four beautiful granddaughters.

Her disappearance came less than a week after her sister Rushan Abbas, a U.S. citizen and prominent Uyghur human rights activist, spoke publicly about Beijing’s persecution and mass detention of Uyghurs. Soon after, the Chinese authorities sentenced her to 20 years in prison for fabricated crimes. This retaliation for my aunt’s advocacy in the United States is a stark example of Beijing’s growing campaign of transnational repression — punishing individuals in China for the actions of their relatives abroad.

While families across America gather to celebrate Mother’s Day, my world will remain quiet. There will be no morning phone call to hear my mother’s voice, no chance to tell her how much I love her, and no opportunity for my daughter and nieces to sit in their grandmother’s lap. She has missed first steps, first words, first days of school — years of a family growing up without her.

This is my eighth Mother’s Day marked by a physical ache to see my mother’s face and hear her voice.

Living in this reality is hard. Every statement from Beijing or Washington, D.C. leaves me wondering if this will finally be the moment of her release. That day has not yet come. In the meantime, I am left to answer an impossible question from my seven-year-old daughter and three nieces, who have never met their grandmother: “Why isn’t she here?”

I don’t have a good answer. I tell them that she is good and kind, brave, that she loves them, and wants nothing more than to be here with them.

There are moments when the world seems to notice, when hope feels closer. And then those moments pass. But for families like mine, the reality never changes. We are still waiting. Still hoping she is not forgotten.

As President Donald Trump and Xi Jinping meet in Beijing, I’ll be glued to the news. President Trump should boldly raise my mother’s case and secure her unconditional release and safe return home. I also call on Beijing to act first. As a priority political prisoner, releasing her would be a gesture of good faith that costs nothing and restores a family.

Her release would not only reunite our family — it would send a powerful message that American families should not bear the cost of Beijing’s transnational repression.

My mother is enduring hardships we cannot fully see or understand. We worry about the mental strain of this ordeal and the toll on her body, which suffers from several chronic health conditions. The fragments of information we receive are never enough to ease our pain or change the reality that she is still not home. Instead, they have only deepened my resolve, because staying silent would mean accepting she doesn’t matter. She does.

Whatever steadiness and strength that keep me going come from my mother herself — from her quiet courage, her compassion, and the love with which she raised me. I hold on to the hope that one day, we will be reunited. Until then, I will keep speaking and advocating, because she taught me that love is not passive; it shows up again and again, across the years and oceans.

If your mom answers the phone this Mother’s Day, please don’t take that for granted. I would give anything to hear that line pick up, and her voice on the other end.

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Ziba Murat is a Uyghur American advocate whose mother, Dr. Gulshan Abbas, has been imprisoned in Xinjiang since 2018.

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