Friendship is Radioactive

XIHAI, China - I'm warming up to this industrial outpost on the far end of China. My first impressions, that this might be a sneak peek at the world during a nuclear winter, are slowly changing, and it's not because of a sudden love for Soviet block-housing. A Mongolian, Tibetan and Muslim changed my mind.

The Mongolian prefers to be called Xiao Tian. He lives in a guesthouse near Xihai's main outdoor market, an works as an independent truck driver. Because he's self employed he works everyday, hauling supplies and food around town. He started talking to me as I was registering at the hotel, and looked at my Tsinghua student card with interest.

"You're from Tsinghua?" he said. "Then I'll have to take you out to a bar tonight, my treat."

We left the guesthouse around 9:30. Xiao Tian wore a crisp button down shirt with brown vertical stripes. His shoulder length hair was freshly comed. We walked through the center of the market, now deserted.

"Don't worry," he said. "Xihai is a safe place." This made me more nervous, as I was trying to forget that I was in the middle of the Tibetan Plateau, 100 miles from the nearest foreigner in a strange town. The only people who knew I'd come here were Rebecca, now back in Changsha, and my father back in New York. I hoped Xiao Tian was right, and this was a safe town.

We went to a small club, a multi-purpose place setup to handle all of the town's entertainment needs. On the back wall was a small bar, covered in Christmas lights. At the front was a stage and a microphone for crooning karaoke songs. The middle served as a dancefloor, and it was ringed by tables and chairs.

"There's not too many people here!" my host said, apologetically. It didn't matter, I wanted to watch the town have fun, and there were enough people to do that. The DJ played mostly slow Chinese pop songs, occasionally letting a person in the bar sing the vocals live. At a song's beginning, the dancefloor would be clear. Slowly four or five couples would come dance, each holding hands and doing some that resembled a waltz. Many of the couples were single sex, men who I had seen carrying wood through the market were now dancing with a colleague, slowly moving to the beat.

A Tibetan woman came over to our table, a high school student celebrating the final night of her May Break. Tomorrow she'd go back to school, and there could be no more trip to the bar for some time. Her friend went to the stage and sung a song in Tibetan. People seemed excited, and Chinese and Tibetan couples took the dancefloor.

The Tibetan girl wasn't terribly happy about living in Xihai, things were boring here, she said, but it seemed like not a bad place to be. The different ethnic groups seemed to mix relatively well, sharing public spaces and enjoying songs of different cultures.

Toward the end of the evening, after several bottles of Yellow River Beer, the DJ switched the hard Chinese trance music. The couples on the dance floor broke up, and finally Xiao Tian, the Tibetan and I stood up and started handbanging.

The next morning I took my still ringing head to a small Muslim restaurant several blocks from the hotel. The restaurant occupied an enclosed patio off a four-story block-house, and was run by a young Muslim man with a small son, who watched him make my noodles and fried dough. When serving the meal, the Muslim brought over a small bowl with a thick white liquid in it. He told me to try some of his yogurt, which I did, at first with small spoonfuls but then with bigger bites.

"It's horse milk," he said, and I had fight not to spit out the piece in mouth.

"What?" I said.

"This yogurt. It's made from yak milk."

I'd heard incorrectly.

When I finished, the owner refused payment.

It was a great final meal in Nuclear City. While the physical city remained ugly, my encounters with the town's people meant it's a place I might come back to even before the next nuclear holocaust.