Free Resistance by Barry Lopez Page A

us say—as it was imagined in eleven different languages.
    Within the boundaries of the politically defined nation of “China,” eighteen languages are spoken by at least 500,000 people each; another thirty-seven are spoken by lesser numbers, including Lahu (270,000), She (330,000), Uzbek (7,500), and Xibe (44,000). No one language is enough. No one can speak for all. Further, across these many borders of expression—Naxi or Salar or Dong— most cannot make themselves understood. Each of these tongues seeks to corral some bit of the fundamentally incomprehensible nature of the world— shadings of smell in the forest as they might be known to a dog, the intention behind a stranger’s gesture, the origin of any single thing, the reason the heart breaks.
    It is wondrous but also frightening to consider.
    At the age of thirty I realized that without meaning to, I had decided against taking a permanent companion. Such a person, I thought, might too easily slow me down or misdirect my efforts. I couldn’t allow myself to stop learning.
    After graduate school, as I internalized more of the meaning of Chinese languages—I was fluent now in eight—I felt not only an acute appetite for unrestricted movement but a desire for unbounded physical space, an open geography. With yet another loan from my parents I moved out of my very cramped quarters in Shanghai and traveled west by train and bus, aiming for the Autonomous Region of Xinjiang, the country of Uygur and Kasak tribespeople. Given the usual mechanical breakdowns and bureaucratic interruptions, it took ten days to cross Henan, Shaanxi, and Gansu provinces. I learned to accommodate the delays, but they intensified the anxiety I felt about the fate of my books and notes, which I had shipped ahead. I often recalled the story of the
Homo erectus
fossils from Zhoukoudian Cave near Beijing, the original evidence for Peking man, all of which disappeared in a transfer between trains during World War II, never to be found.
    When we finally reached the high tableland of Xinjiang, I did feel a physical relief. Here was a region larger than Alaska, bounded by great mountain ranges on three sides, with the Takla Makan, a desert as big as New Mexico, at its center. I was eager to take up my life again in this far outland, with no clear idea of what I would do. I was basically a gifted juggler of Sino-Tibetan languages. In periodic states of delirium, I believed I could actually speak the unspeakable, know the unknowable. In more practical moments I knew I was bound for employment in Urumchi, the capital city of half a million, set in the foothills of the central mountain range of the region, the Tian Shan. I could teach Mandarin Chinese to these subjects of China and translate English technical manuals into local Uygur. In a matter of months, I believed, I could learn the other local tongue, Kasak.
    In some way, I would prove useful.
    Shanghai, during my years there, was much more open to the West than Urumchi was or had ever been. Urumchi had been a crossroads for Turkish, Mongol, and Tibetan traders for probably two thousand years and for other overlanders nearly as long. I was a late arrival, emblematic of the modern era, coming at a time when the city was shifting from horses and camels to assembly lines and department stores. Urumchi, though, was not as provincial as I’d initially assumed; rippling beneath the coarse bedsheets of ordinary life here, rural enough, were the strong countercurrents of its original tenants, that always fascinating and odd acumen of a truly foreign people.
    I easily found work teaching at the university, also work as a translator. After settling into these routines, and an apartment, I began to tease apart the convolutions of life around me in the streets, in the newspapers, in the university, and in the manufacturing culture. I pried open life in Urumchi with confidence and ordered it, using Mandarin, Uygur, and Manchu, a language I fell into more