Free Resistance by Barry Lopez Page B

naturally than I did Kasak (though I would eventually become fluent in that Turkic tongue).
    Being able to speak so many languages well made me, very obviously, a queer fish, even a sort of trickster figure (not to mention being Caucasian, and a woman from the West). I quickly became irritable from being stared at too long and then being called after in inappropriate ways. I missed the civility of Shanghai, where I blended in better. I tried to remind myself, of course, that I had opted for the frontier, that I just needed to develop that famous second skin, a way of knowing the world that was in keeping with speaking Manchu, Uygur, and Kasak.
    My irritation at not being deferred to when it was appropriate, with not being respected, encouraged fleeting thoughts of self-doubt, which were never really far off anyway, a sense that, beyond my erudition, I had no purpose. My learning did not automatically send a signal here about the wisdom I thought I possessed. Instead it stood for self-importance, and for some probably it signaled madness. Confronted like this, I worked to keep at bay the familiar enemies of my equilibrium: loneliness, the fear that I was undesirable, the suspicion that, like a wind-up toy’s, my performance would just end and people would leave.
    I continued to teach language and literature, but after five months let go the translation, which had become tedious. I’d been doing most of it for local industrial concerns—oil refineries, cement plants, mining operations. Moreover, as I saw it, I was only reinforcing my employers’ weirdly distorted passion for growth and material wealth. Their devotion to increased production was aggressive and humorless, menacing almost. Worker safety, pollution control, maternity leave—all this was a nuisance to them, a series of impediments to production. What was wrong with me, they asked, that I didn’t work more hours? Where was my loyalty? Had I no pride?
    For my employers, work had replaced the family as the locus of identity. They affected an air of tolerance with me, backward as I seemed to be, and ticked off the lists of things they had bought their families, which families were now superior to other men’s.
    This singular quest for expansion and personal material gain seemed a grotesque fit with general Urumchi culture outside the university and the factories. Every neighborhood was a different bolt of cloth—another color, another pattern, another weave. Tribally mixed as it was, however, and had been for centuries, life in Urumchi appeared to me everywhere a frugal (as opposed to impoverished), small-scale existence, from people’s house gardens to their shops. Employment was an occasional necessity, not a defining activity.
    The striving for more barrels of oil, new lodes of ore in the mountains, more deep reservoirs of water was wreaking environmental havoc in the region. It did not take me long to understand that, despite its long history as a pastoral country, northern Xinjiang Region had come to be regarded by its absentee Chinese landlords as a wasteland. As such, it was deemed best suited to mineral extraction, to gargantuan irrigation projects, and to military experiments with pathogens and poisons. It was here in dry lake depressions in the Takla Makan that the Beijing government chose to conduct nuclear weapons tests. What happened to the people of the region, to what they were attached to or aspired to be, was of no more importance to the Chinese in Beijing than it was to the local managers of the chemical plants and oil refineries.
    In order to keep myself busy after I dropped the translation work, I hosted small lunches for women with traditional Turkic and Mongol backgrounds and recorded and translated their stories. They were usually older women I met on my daily walks, people I chose because they were matriarchs or had come to the city from far away, had never married, or were otherwise interesting to me. I also began compiling dictionaries,