At Home: Urumqi

This year I landed in Urumqi on my head, homeless and upside-down. I didn't know whether to face east or west, as I had applied for a job in D.C. but was happily in sticky stuff up to my knees in Xinjiang and not totally willing to extricate myself.

After it became clear I wasn't getting the job (turned down in favor of a candidate not living halfway across the world, who had half the qualifications I do), I found an apartment with Logan and Nurmira.

Logan is an American graduate student here for a year on a Boren Fellowship. Nurmira is an undergrad from Kyrgyzstan majoring in Chinese, originally planning to stay here for a year then return to her country to complete her degree.

We made a happy household. The language of the house was Chinese, as that was the most fluent common language between the three of us. When Logan and I were alone we generally spoke in English, but if Nurmira was around we'd switch to Chinese to include her. At a few points, Logan and I forgot which language was which and would start conversations in Chinese with each other. Sometimes I couldn't figure out which language I should speak so just didn't say anything at all.

There was the added confusion that Nurmira speaks some English and I speak some Kazakh (which is mutually intelligible with Kyrgyz), but mostly we just stuck to Chinese.


We were on a main street, just down the way from Xinjiang University and about a 20 minute walk from the Art College. We had the blessings and the curses of living on a large thoroughfare: convenience and noise. All of us enjoyed the views, at least. Occasionally on quiet mornings, the sound of the call to prayer would float over from the mosque just across the street from us but it was mostly drowned out by the din of the city. It is illegal for mullahs to amplify the call in China.