T A B L E_T A L K Traveling on a tight budget? Share your money-saving travel tips in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk ___________________ Check out barnesannoble.com's fabulous selection of travel book bargains! ___________________   R E C E N T L Y This week in travel Wanderlust's selective guide to travel-related news from across the globe (01/08/99) Mother load By Tanya Shaffer An invitation to stay with a woman's family in West Africa opens the door to more than her home (01/07/99) The men who moil for gold By J. Kingston Pierce A century after the race for the Klondike gold fields, a hiker traces the argonauts' northward course (01/06/99) Vive la roller blade! By Susan Hack In Paris, Friday night has an all-new rite (01/05/99) Death in Antigua By Steve Kettmann A host family's tragedy tweaks the conscience of a traveler in Guatemala (01/04/99)   Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives     Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner		BEHIND THE RED CURTAIN | PAGE 1, 2, 3 - - - - - - - - - - Later in the week, after dining on kebab at the Night Market, I returned to the Melon and found it glittering like a Las Vegas casino, its red and green bulbs twinkling, its chrome-and-faux-silver lobby ablaze as if it were, as the brochure led one to believe, the site of an atomic explosion. The Leader, loitering by the front door, nodded hello: "Check out the wu ting, why don't you!" He flicked his ashes into the grass and jiggled his eyebrows. I followed the trajectory of his jiggle: the wu ting, it turned out, was accessible from the lobby as well as the side of the Melon, where an illuminated sign showed a ballerina pirouetting over the characters "wu ting." Brilliantined teens in platform heels were rolling up two to a bike from all corners of Hami. What the heck, I thought, and followed them down the stairs. "Gao bizi" ("high-nosed one") rippled through the crowd -- I was the only non-Chinese. A scrum of red-vested waiters set upon me, but the place was better lit than before. At the bar I asked for a Coke and was handed a liter-bottle of Qindao Beer. The bartender, a spry woman with an impish grin and perky bust, pointed to an enclosure on the side. "Will you not go to the house?" "The what? No, I'm fine," I said, and sipped my beer. The "house," I saw, was a walled-off table next to the dance floor. "Meiguoren?" American? A middle-aged Chinese woman in a blue uniform introduced herself as the bar manager. We began to chat. As I was explaining what brought me to Hami I noticed her nostrils rippling. Her lips began twitching, her sinuses burbled, her cheeks bulged. She nodded distractedly at my last remark, then, her eyes on mine, hawked up a bolus of phlegm. In no great haste, perhaps even out of respect, she held it in her mouth until I had finished my sentence. Then she leaned over and let it ker-plunk into the spittoon near my feet. She smiled at me. I forgot what we were talking about. "Please, darling, come to house!" A tiny woman clutched my arm. "To house! To house!" The manager's nose started rippling again. I grabbed Wan Shu Ling, as the tiny one introduced herself, and spirited her away from the nose and toward the house. Immediately three waiters swept in from the corners offering matches, cigarettes, peanuts, condoms, beers. I pushed past them into the house. A waiter, repocketing his Trojans, plugged a cord into the wall and a mini-Christmas tree on the table began blinking. He flung shut the curtains. Another waiter flung them open and, as if presenting us with the finest escargot, handed me a tray of peanuts and genuflected his way out. With the utmost discrimination, Wan chose the plumpest nuts, and, looking me soulfully in the eyes, cracked them open with her molars, spitting out the husks over her shoulder, and hand-fed them to me. "I am piaoliang, no?" she said, tilting her head. "Beautiful, no?" Again the curtains flew open: The waiter, undulating toward us, held out a bottle of Qingdao Beer for my approval as if it were the finest Chablis. I nodded. He produced his bottle-opener. She was pretty, in a way, with her paste-on eyelashes and paste-on breasts, her rosy mouth and lustrous black hair, but the scene grew tiresome. I handed her some money for her time and crunched through the compost of peanut shells and out of the house. Things in the wu ting were heating up, but I found myself scrutinizing Chinese characters the bartender was writing out for me on napkins: tree-like scribbles meant forests, curvy slashes signified women, and a splayed stick figure, unsurprisingly, stood for a person. I had been studying Chinese, but in the Latin alphabet; her introduction to characters was fascinating and easy to grasp. When I finally tired of the evening -- I was, after all, compelled to stand next to the wildly popular barside spittoon -- I thanked her, and as a gesture of chivalry kissed her hand. It turned out that this was not the way to a Hami woman's heart: The waiters erupted into shrieking laughter, the manager expectorated a humongous plug of nasal matter, the assembled teens tittered and the bartender herself shot behind the counter out of embarrassment. Later that night, just as I was falling to sleep, the phone rang. I heard snippets of the Bee Gees and a plaintive voice against the din of the wu ting: "Please, come back to house! To house!" - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The next morning I brought my suitcase to the front desk and paid my bill. The door to the office was open: The women were applying their pencils and powder, plucking their eyebrows and preening their lashes. One of them was bringing a buzzing depilator to bear on a fat black hair growing out of a chin mole. But there was no scent of cinnamon, no Ying. Why, really, should I see her again? I thought, content to let the gem of hope and life-clarity she had given me remain untarnished by awkward goodbyes. I said farewell to the Leader, who was standing at the bar, picked up my bag and walked out of the Melon and into the razor-sharp sunshine. An hour later a train was carrying me onward into the desert, toward the rust-red west and another Silk Road town. SALON | Jan. 10, 1999 Jeffrey Tayler is a journalist based in Moscow. He has previously written for Salon Wanderlust about Nigeria, the Congo, the Sahara and Moscow.