Four. Out on a Limb

We left the concrete tents immediately and took a room in town where our two friends were staying with their families. They were returning to Machu the next day and had promised us a lift. The upstairs rooms overlooked the street, providing an interesting perspective on the scurrying life beneath the smeared window. Ours was a simple room with a linoleum floor, three single beds with cleanish sheets and pillows stuffed with what appeared to be sand. On the wall was a mirror, and underneath the window, a table. A bare lightbulb hung from the ceiling and an old-fashioned washstand, containing a tin bowl, stood sentry by the door.

In the courtyard lurked the public toilet; its putrid stench provoked convulsive retching at a distance of ten yards. It was becoming clear to me that, for all their striving for development, public sanitation was not high on the Chinese list for improvement. In fact, I had not been aware of a drainage system since leaving Lanzhou. Obviously the Tibetans had got it right: wandering off inconspicuously into a field had its merits.

We joined Sortsay, Tsorsungchab and their families in a room down the hallway. They had just got back from the Tibetan hospital across the road. It was my first time in the company of Tibetan townswomen, who were quite different from the nomad women. These women's appearance owed more to Chinese dress sense. Sortsay's wife, Dolma, sat on the bed looking pale and ill. She wore black polyester trousers, a white patterned blouse under a pink cardigan and a large gold ring. On her feet were high-heeled black shoes, and her long hair was woven into one thick plait, not two tied at the bottom, as the nomads wore it. She smiled weakly at me, then scolded her eight-year-old son, Tenzin, as he hit her knee with a small plastic gun. Meanwhile Tsorsungchab's wife, Tashintso, who needed treatment for a blood disorder, sat on a chair splitting melon seeds between her teeth and spitting the husks into a plastic bucket. She was beautiful, with a soft face and large, slightly drooping eyes, and was dressed in a similar fashion to Dolma. She had a curious indigo tattoo on her left hand: a series of dots in a circle. I wondered whether it related to some form of treatment or if it was a symbol of something. In the corner of the room sat Sortsay's mother, who was a true nomad and was dressed accordingly in her tsarer and jewellery. She seemed incongruous in this setting and was the only reminder that, despite these families' adoption of modern dress and all the trappings of 'civilisation', they were nomads, who had been born in tents.

It began to rain outside, the first drops heavy. The air was cooling after days of scorching heat. We sat in the crowded room and the smoke from the Chinese cigarettes hung torpidly in the fug. I was feeling a bit alienated. With Mum and Dad gone, I was beginning to grasp that Tsedup was the only person with whom I could communicate effectively. I wanted desperately to be able to talk to these women, but they seemed as embarrassed as I was to initiate a conversation, which would inevitably grind to an abrupt halt after the first sentence. We just giggled as Tsedup attempted to start things off by teasing Tashintso and trying to make her talk to me. I hoped they liked me. Perhaps they thought I was strange. I felt as if I was under a microscope.

The atmosphere lifted, however, when Tashintso's four-year-old son, Lhamochab, who had inherited the lovely brown eyes of his mother, was cajoled into performing a dance for us in the centre of the room. He was the most cherubic-looking child you could imagine, with a cheeky plump face and a quizzical smile. He strutted around, flailing his arms, in his bright yellow and black striped jumper, like a distressed bee, while singing at the top of his voice the words of the only Tibetan song he knew:' Ah latze, ah latze, ahhh latze, ah latze, ah latze, ahh latze.…' Needless to say, it was somewhat repetitive, but had the whole room in uproar. Lhamochab was pleased with his new-found fame and spun round and round, until Tenzin poked him in the eye and it was curtains for the show. He sat grizzling on his mother's lap as Tenzin gloated, then ran out of the door screeching. His parents were obviously used to such behaviour for they made no attempt to discipline him. Dolma continued to smile weakly and Sortsay chuckled and smoked some more.

That evening I sampled my first karaoke. We had all dined on broth, cooked by a young Muslim man over the open fire at his street stall, under a plastic awning out of the drizzle. We slurped in unison from the clay pots that contained various ingredients, such as furry, tentacled stomach, which I ignored. Then we went back to our hotel and up the steep staircase at the other side of the courtyard to a glass-fronted room. Inside was a dimly lit bar with Formica tables and chairs and a dance-floor. A Chinese man sat at a table fiddling with the knobs on the karaoke machine, which winked synchronised neon blue lights out of the darkness, while the barmaid leant lethargically over the counter. The only customer so far was an inebriated Chinese man talking to himself by the wall. From the ceiling hung coloured lights, flashing brazenly like a school disco, and an enormous television screen that was belting out Chinese pop music. On the screen a bikini-clad girl wandered around a park, followed by a cameraman, who was wasting no time with his zoom lens. Sex on TV is censored in China, but there seemed to be an awful lot of sublimation going on. Karaoke is big in China, and even in remote parts, the locals take it seriously.

As the men fetched some drinks and we sat down at a table, the barmaid came to life. She took the microphone stand and began howling in a pseudo-operatic whine. She was loving it. Tashintso looked at me, attempting to suppress her mirth, but we burst into fits of giggles that were drowned, none the less, by the cacophony. The men joined us and we sipped our drinks and surveyed the menu of songs. I was lucky: there was nothing in English, so I would not have to humiliate myself. But I was soon invited to dance, and reluctantly joined Sortsay on the floor for a quick turn. He was remarkably gentlemanly and guided me in some kind of waltz to the strains of a love song, singing along to the words. I struggled not to stand on his feet as I wrestled with the intricacies of the steps and he smiled encouragingly. This was a world away from a club night in the West End, not that I was ever a fervent party-goer. Soon everyone took their turn at the mike, and their familiarity with Chinese popular culture became evident in that they knew every word and inflection to every song. The best songs were those about Tibet, in Chinese, of course, but sung to evocative images of nomadic life on the video screen: yaks and sheep, festivals and horse-racing, dancing and monks.

The inevitable happened later. The song list changed and I found myself with no excuse to avoid singing an English song. I stood blushing under the glitterball that rotated in the disco lights and trembled my way through the Beatles' 'Yesterday', as the drunk man shimmied around in his blue Mao suit and cap, splashing beer over the lino. When I finished the whole room cheered and clapped, and I have to say that in some strange way I found the experience quite liberating, if surreal.

When we returned to our room, bleary-eyed and a little the worse for beer, someone was in one of the beds. Aka Tenzin had found his way in and was snoring in the lamplight. I guessed he fancied a change from the monastery. I felt most uncomfortable with the idea of undressing in front of a monk, so climbed into my bed on the other side of the room fully clothed as Tsedup woke him to chat. I fell asleep to the rise and fall of their voices and the barmaid's final song.