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:'
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.
The next morning we left in another Beijing jeep, as Aka Tenzin waved from the noodle shop where we had breakfasted. I sat in the back with Tsorsungchab and Tashintso, who held Lhamochab on her knee. Tsedup sat in the front next to the driver as he was prone to travel sickness. It wasn't him that we had to worry about this time, however; we had gone only fifty yards when Lhamochab was sick over his father's legs. Many Tibetans are not used to motorised vehicles, especially the nomads who traditionally prefer the horse if they have any distance to travel, but for these townsfolk the vibration of the engine, the smell of the petrol and the sense of claustrophobia were an unfamiliar hazard. Tsorsungchab did not drive because of the car crash that had damaged his eyesight. When he took off his dark glasses to wipe his weeping eye I saw the two-inch scar that ran beneath it. He told me, quite cheerily, that beer had caused the crash and ruined his sight. Now he didn't drink.
We had been five hours on the road and the weather was inclement. An all too familiar English grey had dissolved the sky, and I searched the smudged landscape through the steamy windows for signs of home: a curve of a mountain, the sweep of the grassland that fell from the Wild Yak range. I had missed my surrogate family and the tribe. The few days of drifting in Labrang had left me feeling displaced and I craved a sense of being rooted. I had never been much of a pioneer; too much a suburban girl at heart. However, now that his role as tour guide was officially over, Tsedup was desperate to return to Machu town to be reunited with his friends. He still hadn't seen many and was as keen to make contact with them as he had been to meet his family again.
First, though, we went to Tashintso's house. It transpired that she and Tsorsungchab also had a daughter, Tsepharchab, who must have been about eight and had been staying with her grandmother while they were in Labrang. She burst into tears as soon as she saw her parents and clung to them, in her yellow dress and pink socks, as we got out of the stuffy car. Their house was in the heart of the town, among the sprawl of concrete dwellings and courtyards divided by a grid of narrow alleyways and high walls. They unlocked their metal gate and we made our way into the courtyard, up the little path, past the tap -a much-coveted item – and round to the back of a shambles of outbuildings. In front of a red-brick inner courtyard was a gaily painted house with a conservatory of fashionable blue glass displaying potted plants. We sat at the table under the glass roof and Tashintso brought us some beer.
They had just finished building the house. It was simple, with a lounge area and two bedrooms all with wooden floors. In the front room sat two armchairs, a coffee table, wardrobe and dresser with silk flowers and a clock on it; otherwise the room was bare. The bedrooms contained only a bed with a neatly folded shiny pink quilt and a small cupboard. The house looked as if they had never set foot inside it.
The outbuilding crouching opposite in the yard was their real home and had been for years. It consisted of a parlour, with an electric cooker and glass-fronted cupboards, a bedroom with a small stove and television, and a back room for eating and for the children to sleep in. Its walls were decorated with newspaper but it was clear that Tashintso and Tsorsungchab had all the mod cons – except a fridge; that was the ultimate goal. If you had a fridge, you were someone. Tashintso's brother had a fridge; one day she would have one.
As we sat and drank our beer, Tsorsungchab busied himself. Something trilled shrilly from under the table and I was astonished to see that he had a mobile phone, which he answered proudly. I could see that he was fond of gadgetry – a land-line telephone sat on a small table in the corner, covered by a handkerchief to protect it from dust. Whether the calls were work-related or not was difficult to say. He looked important anyway, as he puffed on his cigarette and grunted loudly and repeatedly into the mouthpiece,
Tashintso busied herself with the children and unpacking. Lhamochab was turning circles on his tricycle in the yard, while his sister grizzled on the flower-bed wall. She had been abandoned and was not going to let her parents forget it. Her mother cooed comfortingly as she simultaneously swept the floor, put away
