By Lisa Carducci

Naturally, since we were passing through Altay Prefecture the girl who accompanied me would definitely want to visit her mother, who lived in the city of the same name. I had half a day to spare on my schedule; I could shorten my nights a little and find a reason not to go out for dinner, so we could spend a day in Altay.

The prefecture is all water and mountains, and four Chinese characters written in many places serve to identify it, even from the air: Jin shan yin shui, meaning "Golden mountains, silver waters," because long ago, the gold-diggers came here to make a fortune.

Dalia(L) and Lisa(R) [Foreign Languages Press]

Dalia also has a Chinese name – Fang Ling – and not only for a practical reason but because her maternal grandfather was a Han. However, she identifies herself as a Russian ethnic Chinese, and so do her two daughters. In her youth, she studied Russian for six years, but as she has little occasion to use it, except with her mother on the phone, she has forgotten much of it.

Though Russian ethnics number 15,600 in China and have settled mostly in Ili Prefecture and Tacheng and Urumqi cities in Xinjiang, as well as in Heilongjiang Province and in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, there is no Russian autonomous prefecture in Xinjiang because the Russian don't live in a compact community. Dalia speaks perfect Chinese, as she was born in and studied in China, in addition to Kazak, which is the official language of the Autonomous Kazak Prefecture. In fact, here, all commercial inscriptions and road signs are bilingual: Chinese and Kazak.

Dalia has been a teacher, first for five years at a middle school in Burqin, where she was born, and then, following her marriage and her settlement in Altay in 1981, at a primary school. She lives in an apartment on the campus of the largest Altay primary school, with 2,500 students and over 100 teachers. The campus is deserted now – being the end of July – and the surroundings are perfectly calm. Moreover, this calm seems characteristic of all the places I visited in Xinjiang until now, except, obviously, Urumqi.

Dalia's apartment on the fourth floor is spotlessly clean and well lit by large windows in the three bedrooms and even in the washroom and the kitchen, which is not common for Chinese houses. On the living room windowsill, three pots of fuchsia geraniums brighten up the atmosphere, behind an elegant white muslin curtain against a background of mountains. Like many Chinese women, Dalia loves plush animals and several can be found around her apartment. Santa Claus also fascinates her and this character is also a part of her decor – in many variations! This is an aspect of Dalia's Chinese taste. In fact, since the house reflects the person, I can imagine the character of the woman with whom I will spend 24 hours.

She was almost as happy to embrace me as she was to embrace her younger daughter, who works in Urumqi, when we arrived. The older one used to work in Beijing. She recently returned to Altay to complete the formalities regarding her going to Kazakhstan. There, she will study Russian for two years. Hearing the news, I was surprised and thought, 'Why doesn't she go to Russia instead?' "Studying in Kazakhstan is less expensive," Sonia thinks it is closer, and the quality is the same. She told her mother, "Society requires skills; I am still young, it is time for me to return to school."

Dalia is only 53, but she retired in 2001; work was taking too much of a toll on her health. With two daughters who needed her, in her heart she could not bear teaching two 50-pupil classes at the same time. Her daughters became boarding students in Urumqi at the respective ages of 18 and 16; one in university, the other in high school. It is at that moment that the loving mother quit teaching and went to live in Urumqi "to cook for her," she explained, pointing to Yira, who then lived with her in a rented apartment. Dalia worried about the younger one mostly, who was timid and would easily withdraw when others would assert themselves. She worked hard to make a "sturdy woman" out of her fragile daughter. "Sonia was stronger; I didn't have to worry," she added.