Live From Mongolia

by Patricia Sexton

Obviously, the driver wanted more, but how much more I wasn’t sure. His impatience was quickly turning to aggression, so I offered him double the fare in hopes of placating his fury. After all, he’d spent at least double the time trying to locate my destination. In fact, he’d probably spent three times as long as he should have spent to help me find my apartment. But at this point, he’d grabbed my arm and begun to twist. As a woman, I happen to have a stubborn policy of refusing to negotiate with men who use their physical strength to negotiate with me.

  “Naim, naim!” he repeated, twisting ever harder.

  Suddenly, I realized what he was demanding. During my long delay when flying into Ulaanbaatar, I’d made use of my time learning the basics of the Mongolian language. First, I’d taught myself to sound out Cyrillic script so that I could look up translations in my Mongolian-English dictionary. Then, I’d memorized how to say hello, good-bye, thank you—and numbers. From one to ten, I could count. Finally, I realized what the driver was saying; he was asking for “eight,” or 8,000 tugrug, the equivalent of less than eight US dollars.

  Now, eight dollars is nothing to get your knickers in a knot over, certainly not in a foreign country in an empty parking lot late at night with an angry man. But I was no longer just frightened; I was angry, angry that this man was using his physical strength to get what he wanted from me. And being angry usually results in the next move being reckless. So, I did what I probably shouldn’t have done—I swore indignantly. Peeling off a second 1,000-tugrug note, I deposited 2,000 tugrugs on the dash in front of me and fumbled for the door handle. This took some effort; the driver’s grasp was firm, and I was shaking. But at that moment, it felt like my life depended on it. So I gave it my all, finally breaking free of him, and ran off.

  Shaking and frantic, I was terrified. Leaping over puddles, I fled his car toward the safety of my sea foam apartment building, not daring to look back. I felt just like I’d always felt in nightmares featuring me being chased, like I was running in a viscous slow motion. Just for a moment, I paused to listen for the driver’s footsteps behind me. There was no sign of him. I didn’t have a flashlight, and I wouldn’t have used one if I did, so I had to count my steps in between each landing until I’d made it to the fourth landing, where my host family lived.

  Once there, it was so pitch-black that I couldn’t quite make out where their front door was. Blindly feeling around the perimeter of the hallway and the neighbors’ doors, I managed to locate the right one and its keyhole. I was home!

  Unlocking the door, I let myself in and locked it behind me. Once I did so, I bent over double, heaving and gulping for air. As I caught my breath, I leaned back against the door, sliding down it until I was resting on my haunches. Shimmering moonlight streamed into the hallway and sitting room. Quietly, I removed my shoes and placed them neatly next to Batma’s.

  “Patricia?” a sleepy voice called out gently. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes, Batma,” I whispered, still gasping. Gathering my thoughts and my breath, I decided that, from this point on, I’d have to be more careful. I’d made a rookie mistake and I’d acted foolishly. I couldn’t let it happen again; this journey was far too important to me.

  I tiptoed past the sitting room and the softly snoring outlines of Batma’s husband and their children. They’d converted the entire room into a makeshift bedroom, and it was here that they’d sleep until I would depart at the end of that summer.

  The next morning, I rose early to an empty apartment. Enjoying solitude and a hot shower, I dressed and made myself a cup of instant coffee. On a plate at the kitchen table, Batma had left a single fried egg for me next to a basket of Post-it–size slices of brown bread. As I tucked into my breakfast, I thought about Evan, pondering the evening before and the spark that hadn’t lit.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Land of the Blue Sky

  In addition to the construction projects, gers were distributed to twenty homeless families, greenhouses were built, and two Porter cars were donated to families who privately mine coal. During the summer months, the children of Nailakh are even able to attend Korean language classes, and participate in Korean cultural activities.

  —Voiceover, MM Today broadcast

  Mongolia is nicknamed the “Land of the Blue Sky” for one very good reason: the sky there is usually very, very blue. Mix cobalt with a pinch of turquoise, stretch out a wad of cotton until it’s streaky and extend it over an endlessly vast horizon, and you have your Mongolian sky. The country is home to some of the highest atmospheric pressure in the world, which is the reason for its unusually sunny disposition.

  Explained to me by a NASA ecologist, who also happens to be one of my little brothers, this pressure is due to the weight of the air above pushing down on it. Heavy, high-pressure systems tend to force air to sink. And in order for water to be released from air as rain, snow, dew, or even sweat on a beer mug, it has to cool. Short of a simple cold front, this would require the water-laden air to rise to an ear-popping altitude where the pressure is finally relieved.

  Of course, in places like Mongolia, it can’t do that with all that weight bearing down on it, so clouds and rain don’t often form. During winter, this effect is even more pronounced because cold air is denser than warm air. That’s why, on New Year’s Eve in 1968 in neighboring Siberia, when the temperature dropped to an eye-popping minus fifty-eight Fahrenheit (minus fifty Celsius) and skies were crystal clear, scientists recorded the world’s highest-ever reading of air pressure. That’s also why the sun is forecast to shine in Mongolia for no less than two-thirds of the year. Basically, Mongolia’s disposition is as sunny as a tropical island’s, minus the beach and warm weather.

  During spring and summer, the skies are just as dramatically blue, but navy—and ominous. In 2008, a violent snowstorm hit Mongolia. Hurricane winds whipped through at ninety miles per hour, destroying homes and killing dozens of people and an estimated quarter of a million animals. And that was at the end of May, when temperatures in most other places in the northern hemisphere are inching into summer!

  I finished my breakfast and peeled back the curtains from the kitchen window to see heavy clouds hanging low in a leaden sky. Although it was early June, it was still cold, as if the seasons had simply stopped advancing back in February. Unfortunately, I’d packed only for spring and summer, so I bundled up in as many layers of T-shirts as I could find and set out to explore my new neighborhood. Into the blunt wind I walked, bent at an angle, burying my head in a pair of leggings I’d wrapped around my neck to use as a scarf. Picking my way through an alleyway, I navigated around last night’s yawning pothole puddles until I came to the main road. At midmorning, it wasn’t exactly early, but the streets were completely empty.

  I crossed through the gravel lot, past the swing set, and headed for the same street where I’d caught a taxi the night before. Once I got my bearings, I headed east toward downtown Ulaanbaatar. On my way, shuttered shops promised Turkish kebabs, discount clothing, and something called pivo, which I’d later learn was the Mongolian word for beer. Few of the shops advertised their wares in English, and I retrieved my translation dictionary to look up everything from pivo to makh, or meat. So far, my first thorough glimpse of Mongolia by daylight suggested a capital city only recently free of Soviet Communism. Apartment buildings were monolithic and utilitarian; almost every sign was written in Cyrillic, and wide, crumbling concrete boulevards wrapped like fat ribbon around absolutely everything.

  And then I saw it. Just ahead was Gandantegchenling, Mongolia’s largest and most famous monastery—and surely its most resplendent. Sitting regally atop a low hill, Gandan Khiid, as it’s commonly referred to, is what Mongolia used to be all about before the Russians came and insisted otherwise about their sense of identity.

  Around the turn of the twentieth century, there were approximately nine hundred monasteries all over Mongolia, and tens of thousands of Buddhist monks—but not for long. Because Mongolian revolutionaries had teamed up
with the Soviet Red Army to throw out the Chinese and the Russian tsarists, they’d made a pact with the devil, which wouldn’t bode well for the country’s faithful.

  In 1938, in an effort to consolidate his power base, Stalin went on a rampage, making sure he eliminated his enemies, even if they were in distant Mongolia and especially if they were monks. So he bullied Mongolian officials into closing every monastery in the country, burning many of them to the ground for good measure.

  And if that message wasn’t clear enough, Stalin had most of the monks killed, jailed, or forced to join the army. Of course, because genocide is messy work, the monks were forced to dig their own graves and kneel in front of them before they were shot to death. Thus, when they died, they’d conveniently collapse into the graves they’d just dug. Few were spared, and by 1990 there were only 110 monks left in all of Mongolia. Incredibly, one monastery would be allowed to reopen and would even land itself a pretty snazzy paint job but only as a ruse.

  In 1944, American President Roosevelt sent his vice president on an excursion to China and to what he referred to as “Soviet Asia.” A grainy old video of his trip to Mongolia shows him smiling and shaking hands with officials and visiting with locals and their children, apparently oblivious to the genocide that had been taking place behind-the-scenes. It had been hidden so well that Vice President Wallace knew nothing about it.

  Rushing to put on a dog and pony show that would cover their tracks of destroying most of the other monasteries in the country, the Mongolian prime minister ordered builders and artisans to reopen and refurbish just one monastery to show to the American vice president. At warp speed, they painted and polished Ulaanbaatar’s Gandan Khiid, just in time for Wallace’s visit to the monastery. Of course, around the same time, the United States and its allies were at war with Nazi Germany over the Holocaust. So it’s incredible to think that the American vice president was on a friendly visit with a country in the middle of its own holocaust.

  I made my way closer to Gandan Khiid. It was surrounded by the “ger districts,” which couldn’t provide a greater contrast to the monastery’s glory. Ger districts in the capital are where some of Mongolia’s poorest live. The gers, or yurts, much like rounder versions of tents, are set up in a haphazard fashion by families moving to the capital from the countryside, looking for a better life. There is no plumbing, other than a water pump, and few gers have electricity. In other words, they’re makeshift tenements.

  Gers don’t have windows and feature just one door to help keep the elements out during extreme weather. As I walked through the district, I peered curiously into an open doorway. A young boy with roughly shorn hair and rosy cheeks peered back at me. He was neither smiling nor frowning, but he seemed just as curious about me as I was about him. I nodded at him as I passed and continued to make my way toward the monastery just ahead.

  At the gate I paused, aware that I was about to set foot on hallowed ground. An old woman extended her knobby and wrinkled arthritic claw toward me, pushing a bag of birdseed into my hand. Slowly and silently, I passed beneath the ornate wooden entrance gate.

  Once inside the main grounds, I could only stop and stare in breathless awe. At the edge of the cobblestone square, majestically overlooking the entire city, stood a cross between a temple and a palace. Carved into the whitewashed base of the building were tiny rectangular windows framed by intricately carved wooden awnings, neatly outlined in a deep blood red. Resting on top of the building’s white base was a two-story wooden tower, painted and stained banana yellow, chocolate brown, and a wind-worn cherry red. Topping its mighty grandeur was a green-tarnished copper roof, pinched into ridges and tipped at its points with golden ornaments.

  As I crouched down into a patch of shade, I made a point of noticing this moment, this now—so far from home, so far from what I’d known all my life.

  Eyeing the palatial temple’s main doorways, flanked on either side by Buddhist prayer wheels, I decided against entering the temple proper. Something told me to do so only when I’d had a special moment, when I’d earned it and could digest its history and its grandeur a little bit better. Lugging heavy camera equipment, a couple of tourists snapped a few photos and went inside. But I had a whole summer in Mongolia ahead of me, and it thrilled me to think that I’d be able to savor, at just the right moment, a visit to this storied old institution.

  I’d end up waiting for that moment until the day I left Mongolia.

  I stood to leave, and a flock of resident pigeons took flight, flapping away into the sky. Heading toward the eastern gate of the monastery, I threaded my way through another ger district on the monastery’s edge, dotted with pint-size shops and tiny eateries. Just as I did so, I was mugged.

  My would-be muggers, two teenage boys observing me with calculated scowls that easily betrayed their faux disinterest, approached me from either side. With military efficiency (although lacking military precision), one of them pulled a knife from a sheath while his friend held my bag steady. In a single swift motion, the boy wielding the blade poked its tip into the bottom of my knapsack to slice open its underside. Of course, all of this happened too quickly for me to react, or I would have—well, honestly—done nothing at all. Not with a knife staring me in the face!

  Anyway, what was supposed to happen—eviscerated handbag spills its contents into muggers’ palms, muggers take off with booty—didn’t happen. And that was because I was wearing an old friend—a trusty, worn leather backpack that some manufacturer long ago had ingeniously fortified with rubber and kitted out with nylon. It was durable and wasn’t about to end its long life at the point of a dull, rust-worn knife. In other words, the boys were going to have to do better if they wanted to relieve me of my wallet and everything else inside my bag. At this point though, I thought it would be best to run, full-tilt, toward Peace Avenue, where I’d been headed anyway. It seems the muggers had the same idea, and ran off in the opposite direction.

  Peace Avenue is Ulaanbaatar’s main street, the biggest and busiest thoroughfare in the entire country. Although Mongolia’s capital is one of the most remote capital cities in the world, its main street certainly doesn’t feel that way. Bustling with pizzerias, bars, Internet café, and one enormous department store, it’s just as congested, cramped, and noisy as any other big city. There’s no McDonald’s or any other foreign fast-food chain, at least not yet, and rumor has it that there are no fences in the entire country. But there’s plenty of commerce, traffic, smog, litter, and people.

  Consulting my map, I located the French café where Evan and I had agreed to meet the night before. It was just before ten o’clock in the morning, and the city was slowly rousing itself from a deep slumber. Shopkeepers unlocked doors, produce sellers began to display their wares, and locals appeared here and there in the streets.

  On the bite-sized porch of Michele’s French Café and Bakery, Evan was sipping a cappuccino. I said hello and went inside to order a coffee, only to discover that real Parisian pastries were also on offer. This study in contrasts seemed entirely out of place with our surroundings, but I was only too happy to tuck into a buttery, flaky pain au chocolat while sipping a creamy latte.

  “Best croissants and cappuccinos in the entire country, maybe even Central Asia,” Evan said when I sat down. For just a moment, we regarded each other curiously, as if we both knew that something should’ve happened the night before but didn’t.

  Evan wanted to know why I’d come to Mongolia, so I told him all about my banking career and why I’d decided to leave it behind. If nothing else, I thought, we had our dreams in common. Together, we sat on the porch of this Mongolian Parisian café, two people bound by circumstances but maybe not destiny.

  Now, not quite noon, the ominous sky had turned a shade of dusk, so I said good-bye to Evan to go shopping for a coat at Ulaanbaatar’s most famous department store.

  CHAPTER 7

  “Frenemies”

  Several projects are under way, or have already been comp
leted. A children’s library was built at a cost of twenty-seven million tugrugs, or twenty-three thousand dollars. Construction workers were hired to pave the road that would reach the library; these workers also dug a deep-ground well.

  —Voiceover for lead story, MM Today broadcast

  From skinny jeans to Dr. Zhivago-style fur hats that fold lengthwise like an envelope, Ulaanbaatar’s State Department Store is the Bloomingdale’s of Mongolia. Named Ikh Delghuur, or “really big shop,” it sells an assortment of everything from Korean face creams to high heels, business suits, fur boots, and Genghis Khan knickknacks.

  The Ikh Delghuur even offers an impressive array of knock-off North Face parkas, which was just the thing I was looking for. Like most good knock offs, these weren’t immediately identifiable as such, and when I tried on a sky-blue parka, I was convinced I was wearing the real thing. Everything about it was authentic—the quality of the material, the colors, even the logo. And it fit like a glove. That is, until I tried to pull the hood over my head. It seemed to have been tailored for a head the size of a kitten’s.

  Since I’d already spent a weekend shivering in Ulaanbaatar, I made my purchase and, outside the Ikh Delghuur, cozy from the neck down in my new waterproof replica, I noticed an enormous sign tucked alongside the store that simply read “1921.” I was curious, so I did some reading.

  In 1911, China’s last dynasty collapsed. For more than two centuries, the Qing dynasty had cleverly managed its relationship with its neighbors, the Mongolians. At first, the Chinese had needed the Mongolians because they were hoping to overthrow their own ruling Ming party, and there was no better enemy of their enemy whom they could befriend. In 1644, they succeeded, and the Chinese emperor hanged himself on a tree after a troop of peasants stormed the Forbidden City.

  For the next two centuries, there was relative peace. Well, there were the Opium Wars, an outbreak of the bubonic plague, a few revolts, and some subjugation of neighboring lands, but still, there was some semblance of peace.