How Russian Lessons, Phone Calls, and a Corps of Volunteers Helped a Grad Student Endure 3 Years in an Iranian Prison

A few times a month for the last three years, a song rose from a narrow field outside Iran’s notorious Evin prison in Tehran. The song was the 19th-century revolutionary anthem “The Internationale,” and its singer, Xiyue Wang, belted it out while jogging back and forth across the eight-meter plot.

For Wang, a Princeton Ph.D. student in history who was held in the Iranian prison since 2016, “The Internationale” and his infrequent jogs outside the cold, dim basement cell where he spent most of his days became opportunities to keep his mind active and, in some small way, reclaim a feeling of control and freedom. Wang already knew the song in his native language, Chinese, and was learning it in Russian and French. He liked it because it reminded him to stay resilient.

“He was born in Beijing in the ’80s. ‘The Internationale’ meant a lot to Chinese people of his age,” Xuyang Mi, who was introduced to Wang via phone while he was in Evin, said in July. “Now that he’s in prison, it has a different meaning as well, because people would sing it in prison in China before they were executed.”

Wang faced a happier fate. He was released in early December in a prisoner swap with the U.S., and was reunited with his wife, Hua Qu, and their 6-year-old son, Shaofan. He’d been detained in Evin — where Iran holds most of its political prisoners — since his arrest on charges of espionage in 2016, when the fourth-year doctoral student who specializes in late-19th- and early-20th-century Eurasian history had arrived in the country to conduct research for his dissertation.

“Our family is complete once again,” Qu wrote in a statement released earlier this month. “It’s hard to express in words how excited we are to be reunited with Xiyue.”

Neither Wang nor Qu were available for an interview. The Chronicle reached out to a spokesperson for the family who declined to comment on the record.

The story of how Wang endured life behind bars 10,000 miles away from home is, at least in part, one of the academic community rallying around one of their own, and of a scholar seeking solace in the life of the mind. His support network consisted of friends and family he knew before his arrest, colleagues around the world that he connected with after his imprisonment, and scholars at Princeton who organized to support him. Volunteers regularly made themselves available to talk to Wang on the phone. They sent him books or read them to him when he couldn’t wait. They read him articles from his favorite publications and research papers that debuted at conferences he would have attended. They taught him new languages and new art forms. They sang together. And, in some cases, they formed deep friendships that have outlasted his imprisonment.

Reconnecting, and Finding a Network

Wang, who moved to the U.S. in 2001 and became a naturalized citizen in 2009, disappeared in Iran in 2016 after the Iranian government accused him of being an “infiltrating American agent.” In truth, he was there to conduct research on the Qajar dynasty and 19th-century governance in central Asia.

He was held at Evin, a secretive facility at which human-rights advocates have documented inhumane and unsanitary conditions including overcrowding, poor ventilation, and shortages of beds and hot water.

It took a toll, he later confided in Mi and Yuan Gao, Mi’s wife, on his faltering mental and physical health. For the first 18 days of his stay, Wang told the couple, he was in solitary confinement in a cell with no chair or bed, only a hard concrete floor to kneel on. He developed arthritis, which made it difficult for him to walk or go to the bathroom.

“He said his knees looked like watermelon,” Mi recalled.

Over time he was granted more leeway — he was released from solitary, and eventually he was able to place phone calls to the outside world. One of his first points of contact was Zhan Zhang, a friend from Harvard, where Wang earned his master’s degree. Zhang got his Ph.D. there and lived in the dorm next to Wang’s before moving back to China, his home country.

Zhang, a self-described “nomadic independent scholar,” is also a central-Asian studies specialist. His focus is ancient Iranian languages like Khotanese, and he has a podcast where a few thousand listeners tune in to hear him talk about ancient tongues. Wang appeared on the podcast twice in 2015, and was a fan favorite before his arrest.

Zhang also had several thousand followers on Douban, a Chinese social-media website that is frequented by liberals and academics. (The site has been under government scrutiny before, and in October its user functions were temporarily disabled; Zhang has since been banned from it). After Wang was arrested, he asked Zhang to use his network to find people who might want to help him continue his dissertation research.

Wang had already recruited people to help him keep his mind engaged. A fellow inmate at Evin who had lived in France for many years became his French tutor, assigning him homework and giving him lessons. But Wang needed help to continue his dissertation work, a project that eased his mind as he coped with life in Evin.

“Academics is a very large part of his life,” Zhang said in July. “Continuing that [in prison] made him happy, and that’s the ultimate goal that we have.”

As his time in captivity continued, Wang also grew increasingly interested in finding a way to make sense of his experience, perhaps by writing about it.

Through a mutual friend, Wang connected with Peter Hessler, a nonfiction author whose writing has been published in The New Yorker and National Geographic. Wang had read Hessler’s book Oracle Bones from his cell in Evin and wanted to ask his advice on storytelling and the writing process.

“I think that what he’s doing is giving himself some agency in a situation where from the outside, he really has none,” Hessler told The Chronicle this summer.

Hessler said Wang told him that he wanted to use writing to process his experience. It also helped him find humor in the injustice and pain of his situation.

“[Wang] said, My experiences are overwhelmingly bitter and difficult, but it’s kind of hard to write about things in this way,” Hessler said. “And he finds that when he writes, there’s often more humor than you might expect.”

From Colleagues to Confidants

Before he’d been imprisoned, Wang had learned to speak and write in 10 languages. He told Zhang that he wanted to pick up another one: Russian. Zhang put him in touch with two Douban users: Xuyang Mi, a Russianist, and Yuan Gao, Mi’s wife and a fellow central-Asian-studies scholar.

The first time the three of them spoke was almost two years ago, on Wang’s 37th birthday in December 2017. For the better part of the next year, Gao or Mi, or both of them, talked to Wang on the phone, sometimes several times a month on calls that could last for hours. Though they had never met in person, the three would become close friends through their regular phone calls, their long conversations punctuated by laughter, tears, and music.

At first, they mainly spoke about academics. Wang would ask Gao, who is earning her Ph.D. from Georgetown University, to give him updates on the newest central-Asian-studies scholarship. She related recent research and journal articles and sent him books when she could. After Gao attended the Central Eurasian Studies Society conference in October 2018, she told Wang about it — who she met, what research caught her eye, who was on what exciting panel. When she mentioned that Scott Levi, a history professor at the Ohio State University, had presented a new paper about his most-recent book, he asked her to get the full text and read it to him over the phone.

Mi, who has a Ph.D. in Russian literature, taught Wang Russian, reading him Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and the poetry of Osip Mandelstam. Mi said Wang connected deeply to the literature, most of it written by Soviet dissidents who faced unjust imprisonment themselves.

“Mandelstam is a poet who died in Stalin’s gulag,” Mi said. Wang, he said, “kind of understands his poems better than anyone else.”

Gao and Mi said they had grown to greatly admire Wang for his dedication to continue learning in his dismal cell. “Although he’s living in this physical confinement,” she said, “he’s trying to find these things to bring him intellectual and mental freedom.”

Over time, their conversations became more personal. Wang told them about the hardships of living at Evin in his cramped basement cell. Gao said that when the guards first let Wang step outside after months of captivity, “he saw the moon, and he started crying.”

“That’s the first time he shared a very vulnerable moment with me,” Gao said. “I think by just talking to us, it was helping him relieve a little bit of his concerns, or even just to feel less alone.”

Gao and Mi fondly recalled memories of singing with and to Wang. Once, Wang started singing “La vie en rose,” which he was using to help him learn French. Gao said she took out her ukulele and asked if he’d like her to sing it for him.

“We sang to each other for maybe one hour,” she recalled. A week later, on another call, he brought up that moment. “He called me and said, ‘I still remember singing together.’ It was very touching.”

Gao and Mi knew that many others had also volunteered their time to talk to Wang, to help him with his studies and academic projects and just keep him company. But, other than Zhang, they didn’t really know the rest of his support network.

“I think it’s really like a web, and we’re just one end of it. And there’s another end that we don’t know,” Gao said.

A Princeton Support System

Most of the other end of that web was back at Princeton, where Wang’s wife, Hua Qu, still lived with their son, Shaofan. After Wang’s arrest, a group of Princeton graduate students and friends of Qu’s from the university preschool formed a group, which they called Free Xiyue Wang, to spread awareness of Wang’s situation and advocate for his release.

About a dozen of those students also volunteered their time to speak with Wang on the phone. They would put their availability on a shared Google calendar that that one Princeton volunteer would communicate to Wang each week. When Wang wanted to, he would call them at around midnight (Princeton time) and talk for a few hours.

One of the Princeton grad students was Taylor Zajicek, who said he got involved because Wang was part of the reason he chose to attend Princeton. Zajicek had met Wang as a visiting student. After a short conversation, Wang had spoken so highly of the program that Zajicek was persuaded to attend. Wang’s intellectual passion continued, Zajicek said, even when he was in prison.

“Xiyue is really a consummate academic,” Zajicek said. “So many people kind of struggle to keep the flame burning, but to him, it seems to burn extremely naturally.”

Zajicek and the other volunteers helped Wang continue studying material related to his dissertation. They found articles and books from university libraries and read them to him over the phone and discussed them in detail.

But Wang’s interests went beyond his core research. Zajicek said students, at Wang’s request, read him parts of a Joseph Conrad biography, articles on translation and language learning, a piece about boundary drawing in Africa, and more. He added that he and other students felt enriched by their conversations with Wang, and found themselves asking for his advice on their own research.

Zajicek spoke with Wang semi-regularly for the past 14 months and said that, like Gao and Mi, his academic relationship with him evolved into a friendship. He and the other volunteers, many of whom entered the program after his arrest, are anxious to build on those relationships when he returns.

An irony also struck Zajicek: Wang was condemned to spend years in a basement cell away from his family for entering the country whose history and culture meant so much to him.

“That’s part of the tragedy of what happened to him,” Zajicek said. “He wasn’t led there through any kind of antipathy or malicious intent, but the opposite: a love for Persian history and Persian culture, and I think that continues despite his experience.”

A Reunion — and, Maybe, a Dinner Party

What neither Wang nor his friends knew was that negotiations were occurring behind the scenes. On December 7, the U.S. government announced that Wang would be released in exchange for an Iranian scientist, Masoud Soleimani, who was arrested last year for allegedly violating trade sanctions. The prisoner exchange, which was negotiated by Brian Hook, the U.S. special representative for Iran, and brokered by the Swiss government, took place in Zurich, Switzerland.

After a brief stay in an American military hospital in Germany, where his family met him last week, Wang will return to his home in Princeton, and to friends and colleagues celebrating his freedom, just in time for his 39th birthday.

“The mood is pretty jubilant among the whole university community,” said Zajicek. “It really feels like our department is made whole again, and we’re glad our friend is returning from this arduous experience he didn’t deserve.”

Wang’s adviser, Stephen Kotkin, told The Daily Princetonian that his joy was “beyond words.” Wang, he said, plans to resume his Ph.D. full time. He had never really stopped.

People across campus and in the history department have been collecting Christmas gifts and holiday cards in anticipation of Wang’s arrival. Others are excited to meet him face to face after so many conversations over the phone.

This summer, when Wang’s release still seemed like a dim fantasy, Gao, the doctoral student at Georgetown, teared up when she contemplated meeting him in person. Wang told her that he sometimes fantasized that, one day, after he was released, he would invite her and others who helped him get through his time in prison to his home for dinner. He wanted to serve dishes, like soup dumplings and stir-fried shredded potatoes, that he struggled to make in Evin because of the poor conditions there. He would prepare the entire meal himself.

No formal dinner plans have been made yet. But the couple is looking forward to meeting him in person.

“In the beginning of this year, while he was hoping that he could be released, he was saying, ‘Yuan, you should come to Princeton after I get released.’ And then I started dreaming about seeing him too,” Gao said in July. She looked at her husband and removed her glasses to pat her eyes dry. “When I think about it, it will be such an emotional moment when I will be able to see him in person.”

Correction (12/24/2019, 9:02 a.m.): This article originally stated that Xiyue Wang “had a love for Persian antiquities” in a quote from Taylor Zajicek. Wang studied Persian history, not antiquities. Also, Zajicek spoke with Wang semiregularly for the past 14 months, not two years. This article has been updated to reflect those changes.

Liam Knox is a freelance writer and former Chronicle editorial intern. Follow him on Twitter @liamhknox.

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