My grandfather, who is a nuclear scientist, and my mom also come from a small closed-off city in Siberia (Russia).

Visiting my grandparents I remember we had to go through a sort of border control to get there.

My mom told stories of how the government would change the asphalt every year in that city to cover the nuclear dust.

My father-in-law worked there as a programmer during the Cultural Revolution. There were always guards on the other side of the (locked) office door. Sometimes they’d shoot at random things to remind the nerds just who was in charge.

When I worked at Microsoft the biggest complaints were parking and the variety of subsidized foods at the cafeteria.

Hi HN, OP here.

I grew up in "Factory 404," a secret nuclear industrial city in the Gobi Desert that officially didn't exist on public maps. This is a memoir about my childhood there.

It was a surreal place: we had elite scientists living next to laborers, a zoo in the middle of the desert, and distinct "communist" welfare, all hidden behind a classified code.

This is Part 1 of the story. I'm happy to answer any questions about life in a Chinese nuclear base!

404 does sound a bit like a nightmare posting, and God knows what the adults felt like. They probably couldn't say much. But children see things very differently. I forwarded this on to several people.

Nice read!

Cool post!

Always interesting to read about people's lived realities that are completely different

nice read. interesting experience and great writing. looking forward to the next part.

> I was born in 1991, thirty years after China’s first atomic bomb explosion, and right around the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

I smell cooked