LIVE FROM MONGOLIA
LIVE FROM MONGOLIA
FROM WALL STREET BANKER TO
MONGOLIAN NEWS ANCHOR
PATRICIA SEXTON
Copyright © 2013 by Patricia Sexton
FIRST EDITION
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sexton, Patricia
Live from Mongolia : from Wall Street banker to Mongolian news anchor / Patricia
Sexton. — First edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8253-0697-6 (hardcover : alkaline paper)
1. Sexton, Patricia. 2. Women television news anchors—Mongolia—Ulaanbaatar—Biography. 3. Americans—Mongolia—Ulaanbaatar—Biography. 4. Television news anchors—Mongolia—Ulaanbaatar—Biography. 5. Foreign correspondents—Mongolia—Ulaanbaatar—Biography. 6. Bankers—New York (State—New York—Biography. 7. Career changes—Case studies. 8. Sexton, Patricia—Travel—Mongolia. 9. Mongolia—Description and travel. 10. Ulaanbaatar (Mongolia—Biography. I. Title.
PN5449.M662S38 2013
070.4’3092—dc23
[B]
2013024833
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Cover Design by Oliver Munday
For anyone out there who’s got a dream, is following it, or isn’t quite following it but might one day follow it
But most especially—for Bunkle and our little copilot
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1 Making It and Breaking It
CHAPTER 2 Taking the Leap
CHAPTER 3 The Fortune-Teller
CHAPTER 4 The Arrival
CHAPTER 5 The Unlit Spark
CHAPTER 6 The Land of the Blue Sky
CHAPTER 7 “Frenemies”
CHAPTER 8 The First Day of the Rest of My Life
CHAPTER 9 Butchering Goats and Vowels
CHAPTER 10 Currying Flavor
CHAPTER 11 Off the Beaten Puddle
CHAPTER 12 Dreams Come True
CHAPTER 13 A “Washing Vagina”
CHAPTER 14 The Steppe
CHAPTER 15 Another Dream, Another Dreamer
CHAPTER 16 As Bold as Breasts
CHAPTER 17 Consonant Omelet
CHAPTER 18 Time Travel
CHAPTER 19 Price Tag
CHAPTER 20 Betting the Ranch
CHAPTER 21 No
CHAPTER 22 Yes
CHAPTER 23 A Mormon Picnic
CHAPTER 24 Anniversary Crashers
CHAPTER 25 Fashion Means Forward
CHAPTER 26 Chance of a Lifetime
CHAPTER 27 Mongolian Heimlich
CHAPTER 28 The Gobi
CHAPTER 29 Homeward Bound
CHAPTER 30 One Step Backward, Two Steps Forward
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Dear Readers,
I’ve done my best to sift through incredibly complicated Mongolian history and summarize it. However I am no historian and I hope you’ll pardon my best efforts! If you do find an error, contact me or Beaufort Books.
Some names have been changed.
LIVE FROM MONGOLIA
PROLOGUE
The anchor called in sick at the last minute. My boss, Gandima, head of English News, was desperate. The backup presenters were on vacation or not answering their phones; no one else was available. In desperation, she told me to comb my hair and put on some makeup. I was a summer intern for Mongolia National Broadcaster, and I’d just been tapped to present the evening broadcast to an audience of more than two million people.
There’d been no time for a rehearsal, so I muttered my lines over and over to myself as I was led into the basement studio. Mongolia National TV has been around since before the fall of Communism, and it’s the oldest and most respected network in the country. Fully three-quarters of the Mongolian population tunes in to its broadcasts. As I ducked under the studio’s low doorway, I let my eyes adjust to the bright lights. Once they did, I gasped.
None other than the station’s top brass was waiting for me. Gandima was there with her boss, Enkhtuya, the network’s news director. On either side of them stood a cavalry of senior producers, editors, and a handful of technicians. All eyes were on me, the summer intern, and nobody was smiling. Never before had this storied station allowed a foreigner to be promoted to anchor so quickly, even just temporarily, and Gandima had reminded me of just that before issuing a chilly command.
“Patricia,” she said, “you will do a good job tonight.”
To the crew standing solemnly alongside the network’s bosses, I dipped my head in a slight nod, but their silence offered little encouragement.
“Come,” Gandima said, a bit more softly, breaking the ice. She showed me to my seat in the anchor’s chair, helped affix a mike to my lapel, and gently smoothed my hair. One by one, the spotlights snapped on. There I sat, frozen in the hot blaze, wondering how on earth I’d ended up here, anchoring a national news broadcast. Just a few months earlier, I’d been working at a bank in New York, wondering what might happen if I quit my job of nearly ten years to pursue a lifelong dream to become a foreign correspondent. I was about to find out!
CHAPTER 1
Making It and Breaking It
Mr. Ng stated that his organization’s goal is to assist Mongolian labor organizations. He invited Prime Minister Enkhbold to participate in the deliberations of the Asia-Pacific meeting being held in the Korean city of Busan.
—MM Today lead story
“Are you deaf or just stupid?” a cantankerous senior bond salesman barked at me one morning my first year working on Wall Street. “I said peanut butter on well-done toast! This is not well done!” he raged, flipping his medium-rare toast into the trashcan beside him.
Fresh out of college, I’d been hired by Salomon Brothers as an analyst trainee. Like every other twenty-two-year-old on Wall Street, I’d come there for the money. But the big bucks were a long way off; first I’d have to pay my dues like everyone else there who’d already “made it.” Wall Street’s pecking order works something like a school playground: you’re bullied until you become the bully or until you figure out how to outsmart the bully.
And “making it” was just what I was determined to do. Whatever it took—making well-done toast, picking up dry cleaning, fetching dozens of lunch orders, working dawn to dusk—this was the price I would willingly pay to make it on Wall Street. It wasn’t the allure of opulence and glitzy excess that I was seeking, not then anyway. It was freedom I sought, something that my parents had never been able to afford. If I couldn’t make it here in New York, I wouldn’t have anywhere to go but home.
In Cincinnati, Ohio, on a salary of $15,000, they had raised four children. That they’d been able to do so at all left me feeling a mixture of awe and fear. I was in awe that they even could. And it was my greatest fear that I, too, would end up trapped.
In fact, my parents could have done better for themselves; they weren’t simply vict
ims of circumstance. Both of them had pursued something they were passionate about, and both of them had paid a price. My mom taught part-time and spent weekends with the local newspaper spread out in front of her, clipping and stacking coupons. On top of a full-time teaching job, my dad spent weekends and summers cleaning gutters, cutting lawns, and painting houses to make ends meet. And all that was before he got fired.
I was fourteen years old when my dad’s boss, a nun, insisted he change a student’s grade. It was a small request but an immoral one, since the student simply didn’t deserve the better mark. My dad took a stand and refused to change it. His boss insisted, threatening to fire him for insubordination if he didn’t follow her orders. This went on for months, with the nun visiting my dad’s classroom to remind him that he had to comply—or else. Eventually, their disagreement erupted into a screaming match in the middle of the school hallway. That was when it became clear that this sweet little old lady, who belonged to an order of nuns so religious they still wore the traditional black-and-white habit, was holding my dad by the balls.
With three kids in school, a second mortgage on the house, a used car that had just died, and only $10,000 in savings, my dad reluctantly agreed to make the change. And when he did, the nun fired him anyway. Worse still, she refused to give him an official reason, which made it impossible for him to get another teaching job. No one hires a veteran teacher who comes without a recommendation and who has been fired without cause. In the end, my dad had fought for something he’d believed in, and he’d lost everything.
So it seemed, anyway.
Now, more than twenty years later, I still reflect on that story with the same admiration that I felt as a teenager. I admired my dad’s passion for what he believed in and my mom’s staunch commitment to him. I always longed for a career that I was so devoted to I’d be willing to risk everything to honor my commitment to its principles.
Instead, I chose a career that would pay the bills. Of course, this makes perfect sense when you consider what happened to my family next.
And what happened next was what happens to the lucky people who slide into poverty with the benefit of a support network made up of close family members. At first, we found bags of groceries left on the front porch. At the time, my mom was forty years old and had gotten pregnant again, just as their insurance was running out.
Being uninsured in America is certainly not ideal, but being uninsured in America with four young kids is just an ER visit away from financial ruin. So the groceries arrived anonymously to help my parents take the edge off their bills. Then it was money, tucked discreetly into an unmarked envelope and left in our mailbox when we were away. We never knew for sure who was helping us, because the anonymous benefactors would always deposit their gifts when we weren’t home.
The only way my mom could express her gratitude was to create an enormous paper banner and hang it from the railing of our porch. In huge script, it read, “Thank you, Santa Claus!”
It was this experience that sent me to Wall Street and, eventually, from Wall Street to, of all places, Mongolia. If my greatest fear was of being trapped, I was willing to do anything at all to be free—financially free. But the funny thing about having money is that it creates its own sort of prison. It would take me nearly a decade to realize this.
“Two dozen burgers, fries, and milkshakes,” a head trader at Salomon Brothers instructed me on summer Fridays. I loved summer Fridays because I knew exactly what to do to do my job right. The burgers had to come from Burger King, the fries from McDonald’s, and the shakes from either, as long as the hot food arrived hot, the shakes were still cold, and the fries hadn’t wilted. Wearing secondhand suits that my grandmother had tailored to fit me, I raced out of the office at 7 World Trade Center into the scorching city heat and then back again, eagerly lugging heavy shopping bags of food. When the traders ordered in bulk like this, they always let me keep the change. And on summer Fridays, there was a lot of change. Besides, getting a food order right was the best part of the job because it was the easiest.
There were eleven other trainees in my group, and we were competing against each other for a few coveted roles at the bottom of the totem pole on various trading desks: mortgages, equities, government bonds, and so on. Most of the trainees had majored in finance. I’d “concentrated” in finance, a slight distinction but an important one when facing down a series of bond math tests.
“Think you’ll pass?” Tyrone asked me one afternoon, and I was instantly annoyed. It wasn’t just because my fellow twenty-two-year-old trainee impressed everyone in the firm with his quiet confidence. And it wasn’t because he’d graduated somewhere near the top of his class at Georgetown. It wasn’t even that he wore navy blue dress shirts to work, which we’d been told specifically not to wear, for it was a mark of seniority to wear blue on the trading floor.
It was because Tyrone had asked if I thought I’d pass the coming bond math test. Of course I’d pass! I’d just have to study—a lot more than he’d have to study. But I wasn’t going to tell him that.
“I’ll pass,” I said firmly.
That week, I committed myself to learning bond math from scratch. I had to be at work at Salomon by six–thirty each morning, so I studied on the subway to work, studied while I made coffee and photocopies for the traders, studied on the subway from work, and I stayed up late, studying. The morning of the test was one of the hottest on record in New York City. I couldn’t afford air-conditioning, so I chilled my suit in the freezer and dressed in front of the open fridge. I simply could not be distracted by the discomfort of a hot summer’s day.
“How did you do?” Tyrone asked, after we’d gotten our scores back.
“I got a hundred,” I said, trying to contain my own excitement. “What about you?”
“Ninety-eight,” he said, and slapped me on the back as he added, “Good job!” Tyrone wasn’t the only one who was impressed. That afternoon, Susan stopped by my desk. The head of Salomon’s training program, she had the power to make or break our nascent careers. “Well done,” was all she said, and I knew I’d aced more than just the bond math test.
But the going wasn’t so good for some of the other trainees, who were being mercilessly hazed. Salespeople and traders made it their mission to “break” the juniors in order to see who could really make it in their world. “Survival of the fittest!” someone would remind us first-years, every single day. Often, the hazing some of the trainees were subjected to was almost diabolical.
One afternoon while the market was quiet, a salesman sauntered up to Gimp, one of the trainees. It should have been the kind of moment every junior was waiting for—being chosen by someone senior. Getting noticed. Getting a shot.
Instead, the salesman wore a smirk, but Gimp didn’t see that. That’s probably why his nickname was Gimp. Eager and desperate to please, he was always ready to show just how submissive he could be.
“I’ll bet you a hundred dollars that you can’t drink a dozen quarts of milk within exactly one hour,” the salesman said, knowing all too well that, although the task was almost impossible to complete, Gimp wouldn’t say no, for two reasons.
First, for a trainee earning barely enough to make ends meet in New York City, one hundred dollars was a princely sum, enough to pay for a month of groceries, a decent suit, or even an air-conditioning unit.
But far more important, this was Gimp’s chance to prove his worth, to position himself as one of the “fittest.” On a trading floor where bets are made professionally all day long, a personal wager was a junior’s chance to show his mettle. And because it was customary for a senior guy to try to break a junior kid just for sport, absolutely everyone would be watching. From secretaries to senior bankers, side bets were already being wagered: if Gimp didn’t finish the dozen quarts, how many would he finish? At precisely what time would he begin to vomit? If anyone was willing to measure how sick he got, how much vomit would there be? In other words, there was actually a derivatives
market on Gimp’s future performance.
“Done!” Gimp said earnestly, making use of his first opportunity to speak in official market vernacular. Accepting the unnecessarily large fifty-dollar bill to buy milk, Gimp set off for the cafeteria.
“Keep the change,” the salesman shouted after him.
By the time Gimp returned, the crowd had gathered. One by one, he put the dozen quarts of milk on his desk and sat down, nervously wiping his hands on his suit pants. Fingers trembling, Gimp opened the first container. Around him, everyone was silent. Arms folded, they watched, their faces a mixture of pity, amusement, and anticipation of the foregone conclusion.
“Clock’s ticking,” the salesman goaded.
Gimp started drinking. Quart after quart he chugged, occasionally leaking dribbles of liquid out of the corners of his mouth. By the fifth quart, Gimp’s eyes were squeezed tightly shut, and he was emitting malodorous milky-wet burps. I would know; I sat right next to him. It wasn’t long before he vomited into the trashcan next to him. Not once, but over and over again. And not only did he regurgitate the milk he’d drunk, but we also witnessed his lunch follow suit.
“Don’t worry about the hundred bucks,” the salesman said with phony generosity as Gimp was heaving. “Keep it.”
The next morning, the mail cart stopped in front of Gimp’s desk. Charlie, the stooped old man who delivered packages to the traders and salespeople, was about to deliver some terrible news. Handing Gimp a manila envelope, Charlie nodded innocently and shuffled away, unaware of his role in the cruel prank that was unfolding. While the traders peered over the tops of their computers, sneaking furtive glances at their victim, Gimp tore into the envelope with his typical zeal. In it, he found a memo announcing that he’d been fired. In vain, he tried to compose himself, but the betrayal proved too much. As he burst into tears, clutching the memo in his hand, Gimp ran off the trading floor.
Live From Mongolia Page 1
