On the second day of Eid al-Fitr, Karim Turdi and his family were up early. Besides prayers and gathering with fellow clan members, this day was also special because they were welcoming Zhang Jinrong and his family, friends of Turdi for 46 years. In their minds, for any festival, only a family reunion makes sense. It is hard for either side to forget the days when the two families first helped each other after Zhang came to Xinjiang in the early 1970s. While learning to plant melons and cultivate cotton from Zhang, they shared whatever they had in those years of poverty, as they both witnessed the transformation of the Gobi Desert into a green grassland of abundance.