Live From Mongolia

by Patricia Sexton

  As we drove past a series of tiny shops with names like “Moscow” in bright, bold letters, outdoor beer cafés, gers, and Soviet apartment complexes painted in tropical pastels, I jotted down local landmarks, creating a second makeshift map for myself. When we passed Gandan Khiid and the grassy knoll that is its giant curb, I was finally able to recognize where I was and how to get from there to home and back. There’s nothing quite like being able to connect the dots in new surroundings in a foreign land.

  The oldest and largest broadcaster in the country, Mongolia National Broadcaster (MNB) is the biggest building in the district, towering over the tiny gers gathered at its base. Stretching nearly the length of a city block and with the administrative and clinical air of a hospital building, the station is planted on the flat top of a dusty hillside, its exterior the color of worn cardboard and its boxy windows patterned like a three-dimensional checkerboard.

  Poking out from the roof and higher than anything else in the entire city, maybe even the entire country, its antenna spire is visible for miles around, something of a beacon reminding local residents just who is running the show when it comes to Mongolian news services. It has been around since long before the other half dozen or so private networks that sprouted up after Communism fell, and MNB has the implicit support of the government. Its patriarchal status affords its employees a certain kind of old-school respect around town. In fact, the station was responsible for live coverage of a February 1990 convention at which Mongolia’s then-Communist government allowed the formation of the country’s first opposition party. Just think, the second-oldest Communist regime in the world, which had been in power for nearly seven decades, was actually allowing live coverage of its own demise. If there’s a better example of a smooth transition to democracy, I’d like to hear what it is.

  “We are here,” Urna announced matter-of-factly as she parked. She said this as if she drove a Wall Street banker to her new TV job every day. But I was damp with perspiration, facing one of the greatest life changes I’d ever undertaken.

  “Thank you,” I said to Urna, and she shrugged.

  “Sain bain uu,” Urna said, “Hello,” greeting the security guard seated behind a moon-shaped desk.

  “Sain, sain,” he responded slowly and deliberately, as if he had to think about whether or not he’d go to the trouble of heaving himself out of his chair. With the broad, neatly lined face of a turtle and operating at a pace to match, the guard nodded idly and politely and remained seated.

  “Sain, sain,” he repeated, eyeing me curiously.

  “Sain bain uu,” I returned, wondering just how long it was going to take us to get past both the greeting stage and this dusty old man.

  Turning his attention to Urna, he began to shout at her. Of course, I’d learned my first night in Mongolia to expand my definition of shouting, and so while they discussed my passage, I had a look around. The lobby was dark, shrouded in a permanent dusk. On the far wall was a set of old television screens featuring whatever was airing in Mongolia at that moment. The programs seemed to be heavy on soap operas. Behind the security gate was a wide staircase that I would soon find out led to the cafeteria. In between the televisions and the staircase was a dark and narrow corridor with low ceilings, which wound a circuitous route through the belly of the station.

  Suddenly, Urna turned her attention to me. “Passport photographs?”

  Uh-oh.

  “I don’t have any with me,” I said, hoping I wouldn’t have to wait until tomorrow to do this whole first-day thing again. “But I have my passport,” I said hopefully.

  Urna turned back to the guard and began actually barking at him, consonants tumbling from her mouth. Pretty and bossy, she appeared as if she were used to getting her way. And that’s exactly what happened. She pleaded my case with such vehemence that the guard opened the latch on the gate and let us in.

  I followed her down the long corridor. A single lightbulb dangled from the ceiling, giving the hallway a sort of Hollywood-thriller illumination. Several flights of stairs later, I was standing in my new boss’s office.

  “Patricia, Gandima is now your boss,” Urna said, introducing us in very few syllables before she left. And just like that, my first day began.

  Gandima, the director of the English news and of the MM Today English broadcast, was a seasoned journalist and her office showed it. Bursting with papers, magazines, books, and used cups, her desk and shelves looked as if they’d spent time in a blender. Trim and tall with sparkling, cheery eyes, Gandima wore a neatly pressed, conservative business suit and sported a carefully coiffed hairdo that was at odds with her cluttered office.

  “Pleasure to meet you,” she said, smiling warmly, sticking out her hand. “Our English broadcast is very important to us,” Gandima began gravely, and proceeded to explain to me just how important.

  In 1990, when Mongolia transitioned from socialism to a market economy, most of the local society’s elite spoke only Russian as a foreign language. After a rather tumultuous past with the Russians, the Mongolian government set about changing this. In 2004, under the direction of a new prime minister, English was introduced as an official second language. The only trouble was, nobody really spoke it. Of course, the government had to do something about this if they wanted their decree to have any teeth. Luckily, the British embassy had already been helping MNB set up a news program broadcast entirely in English. With Parliament’s support, it made air and the broadcast became a sort of surrogate English teacher for locals both in the capital and in the hinterlands. Of course, Gandima didn’t tell me all of this right away, but she did spend the entire summer explaining the importance of these facts and thus filling in the blanks with the station’s history. It was the reason she had a job and I had an internship.

  “And then there are the tourists,” Gandima added, explaining that MNB’s secondary goal was to tap the growing market of foreign tourists visiting Mongolia. Fascinated that a national news broadcast took into account its foreign guests, I nodded, now very eager to begin doing whatever it was I was going to be doing.

  “So, now you will meet my boss,” Gandima said carefully after she’d finished her introduction. The director of the entire network, a woman named Enkhtuya, was the only person with the authority to give me a real shot at the station. Gandima could support me, but, ultimately, Enkhtuya called the shots.

  Short and stout with broad, rounded shoulders, Enkhtuya was built like a British bulldog and leaned forward like one too. Her body tilted toward me, and resting on her knuckles at an angle on her impeccable desk, she welcomed me into her office and to my internship at her station.

  “How do you do?” Enkhtuya asked, smiling heartily. She spoke in the throaty, husky voice of a longtime smoker and beckoned me to sit. Her office was very tidy and very dark. A shamrock-green table lamp glowed softly, the kind of fixture you’d expect to see in a library or cigar bar. Casting shadows on the neatly arranged contents of her desk, it created the hushed effect of a dimly lit movie theater.

  “Patricia, do tell me about your previous work experience,” Enkhtuya commanded, launching right into an interview I hadn’t exactly expected. Although I’d been hired sight-unseen as an intern, Gandima and Enkhtuya still needed to place me in a suitable role.

  “My experience in banking?” I asked hopefully.

  “No, your experience at CBS.”

  “Yes, I interned at CBS,” I said. “A few months ago, briefly,” I added, murmuring that last word very softly. I wasn’t sure how much experience they wanted me to have had already, and I knew enough to neither overstate my abilities nor understate them. The only thing worse than starting a new job for which you’re overqualified is starting a new job for which you’re woefully underprepared.

  “Wonderful,” Enkhtuya said. “We’ve partnered with CBS in the past.”

  Months earlier, I’d been put in touch with Magee Hickey, then a veteran reporter for New York’s local WCBS. Taking me under her wing, Magee
had invited me to join her for a few of her predawn reporting gigs that were being broadcast live. While she covered breaking news on camera, I watched and took instruction. Before I left for Mongolia, Magee was giving me one shot to learn what I should’ve spent several years in journalism school learning.

  “Have you brought your show reel?”

  No, I hadn’t. I did have one; I just hadn’t brought it. Although Magee had helped me create a show reel, it was the kind of reel I was pretty sure I shouldn’t be showing. I’d spent a lot of time looking like a deer caught in headlights, reciting copy I’d written for myself for stories that Magee was about to report. And just once, at the scene of a smoldering blaze on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Magee had put the microphone in my hand and told me to ask the fire chief one pertinent question.

  “Sir, were there any casualties?” I’d asked. On live TV, with the camera pointed straight at my hand holding the mike, I’d had my first brush with my dream. But it had only been that once.

  “Never mind,” Enkhtuya said when I admitted I hadn’t brought my show reel. “You can correct spelling errors in the news scripts.”

  Now, this wasn’t at all what I’d had in mind, but I wasn’t about to tell Enkhtuya and Gandima that.

  “Bayarlaa,” I said. “Thank you.” I was grateful for any opportunity to get my foot in the door. I was nothing if not determined to do this, and if it took me all day and night to be given a shot at reporting by correcting spelling errors in news copy, that’s just what I’d do. Enkhtuya turned back to her work, effectively ending our meeting, and Gandima rose from her seat next to mine.

  “Let’s go meet Tobie.”

  Down the hall, we filed into a small office looking out over the station’s parking lot. A brass plaque on the door read “MM Today English News.”

  Lanky and blond with bright blue eyes and gangling, bony features, Tobie had a mop of tight curls that barely shifted when he cocked his head to say hello. Eighteen years old and from London, he’d come to Mongolia for just the same reason I had—to intern for the television station. I’d soon find out that Tobie was extraordinarily gifted at all things technical. From editing video to speaking French and even writing computer code, he was just the kind of ally you want in your corner. But he was polite and shy, and I’d have to figure out later what to make of him.

  “Yeah, hey,” Tobie said gently with a posh British accent, sticking out his hand to meet mine. He smiled a distracted smile and went straight back to work.

  “Tobie, from now on, Patricia will be taking over the spell-check,” Gandima said after introducing us, adding that he ought to spend his time focusing on producing content. Now, this was quite a promotion for an eighteen-year-old intern. It would have been quite a promotion for anyone, but Tobie took it in stride. Barely looking up from whatever he was editing, his muted reaction suggested he was used to this sort of thing happening to him.

  “So, how long have you been in Mongolia?” I asked Tobie after Gandima left.

  “A week,” he murmured.

  A week? And he was already producing? My mind raced with possibilities. If a teenage intern had been capable of pulling off the role of producer in a single week, wouldn’t I have a shot at reporting?

  “Where should I sit?” I asked.

  “Dunno, really,” he said. “Maybe at the other desk, but the computer doesn’t work.”

  I sat down at the only other desk anyway, taking my time unpacking the contents of my backpack and slowly arranging the items on the desk. There were two desks in the room, three chairs, one computer, and no telephone. I’d brought nothing more than a pen and a notebook, so it didn’t take me long to arrange everything. Eyeing Tobie’s fleet of electronics, which included his own broadcast-quality Sony DV Camcorder and compatible MacBook Pro, I wished I’d at least brought a cell phone.

  “So, what are you working on?” I asked him.

  “Roaring Hooves,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “A music festival in the countryside.” Clearly distracted, he didn’t expand further.

  An international music festival and music academy, Roaring Hooves is Mongolia’s Woodstock, if Woodstock had offered classes. Musicians and scholars travel from all over the world to spend a couple of weeks doing what they do best but in a very unusual setting. Although the festival opens and closes in Ulaanbaatar in typical stately philharmonic fashion, most of the events are held in the countryside beneath the expansive blue sky. It’s just the kind of event you’d never think of yourself—Mongolian fiddlers playing alongside Azerbaijani vocalists smack in the middle of the enormous Gobi Desert, attended by a crowd of nomads and their tethered horses.

  But Tobie hadn’t just attended Roaring Hooves. He’d actually been invited by Gandima to produce a story for the station on the event. With a photojournalist friend, he’d filmed and now was editing the piece.

  “So are you in school? Or are you working? Or …?” I asked. I needed a hint as to how he’d made such a good impression on Gandima, other than by the impressive fleet of electronics by his side.

  “I’m starting university in the fall,” Tobie said. “But I’ve worked for the Children’s BBC. I was commissioned to produce two short pieces for them on remote foreign cultures. What about you?” he asked, pronouncing “what” like “wot” and drawing out “you” for several seconds.

  “I interned for a little bit for CBS,” I said, and suddenly I had his attention.

  “What did you do there?”

  “Mainly on-camera stuff,” I said, even though the truth was a lie so white it could have been an advertisement for bleach.

  “Wow, wicked!” Tobie said with sincere appreciation. “How long were you there?”

  “Not too long,” I said carefully.

  “You’re in my seat,” a voice said from behind me. I turned around to see a handsome man with a round face and narrow eyes, the kind of face that looks like it might have a sense of humor hidden away. Unfortunately, the face wasn’t smiling.

  “Hi, I’m Patricia,” I said, introducing myself. “I’m the new intern.”

  “I’m Chinzo, the anchor,” he said. “And you’re still in my seat.” He stared at me wordlessly until I’d removed myself. Retreating to an extra chair leaning against the wall, I began shuffling and reshuffling scripts, neatly arranging them in and out of order.

  “Hey, Tobie, why don’t I get started on these script translations for tonight’s news?” I suggested.

  “I already did them.”

  Well, it was shaping up to be a long day. Tilting my head back against the wall, I wondered how I would make anything of all this, without much work experience or even a MacBook Pro.

  Years before I’d ever contemplated leaving my banking job, I met a woman on a plane. A decade or so my senior, she’d left her banking job at Morgan Stanley to pursue her dream of becoming a photographer. While she told me her story, I scoffed, but wistfully. “What if it hadn’t worked out for you?” I’d asked her. “What if you’d lost everything?”

  Turning the tables on my own questions, she asked me, “What is it you’re most afraid of?”

  “Flipping burgers and cutting coupons,” I’d responded. Terrified of leading the kind of life my parents had been forced to lead years earlier, I’d made financial security my top priority. But the funny thing about that sort of security is that it gets to be so secure it ends up imprisoning you. In other words, the things you own begin to own you.

  “Then get a job at McDonald’s,” the ex-banker/photographer told me. I should embrace my fears, she said, encouraging me to realize that the things you fear are sometimes far worse than fear itself.

  Many years later, with the best of intentions, I excitedly relayed my plans to my mother when I told her why I was leaving my paying job for an unpaid internship in a place as distant as Mongolia. She paused just long enough to let me know I wasn’t going to like what I was about to hear.

  “But what about your a
partment and your mortgage?” she asked, stoking the flames beneath the steadily simmering worries that I’d spent years trying to cool.

  Worse, my father’s reaction had been one of abject disbelief.

  “Mon-go-li-a?” he’d said, stretching out the word into four separate ones. “Why the hell are you going there?”

  “What’s wrong with your life in New York?” he wanted to know.

  “Dad, I have a dream,” I’d countered, wondering for the first time if I really believed what I was telling everyone else. Of course I knew that my dad, of all people, would eventually understand all this on a very cellular level. After all, it was he who’d skipped Christmas 1971 to hitchhike alone to Central America. And that was in the days before it was a good idea to hitchhike alone in Central America.

  “O-kay,” he’d finally said, emphasizing the word as if he were talking to me, the little girl, in what seemed to be half alarm at my reaction, half disbelief that I could do anything so foolish as to abandon all that I’d created for myself.

  Now, as I sat across from Tobie and Chinzo in our tiny office, I made two decisions. One, I’d make the most of this. I’d have to. If it took correcting grammatical errors in scripts as if my entire life were staked on punctuation, then so be it. And two, it was time to have a look around the station to see what my work life was going to be all about.

  Across the hall was the editing room, which Gandima had pointed out to me during her brief tour of the building. The door was heavy and wooden and shut tightly, so I knocked. No one answered, so I tried again.

  “Hello?” I said, rapping a little louder. There was no answer, so I turned the doorknob and peered inside. Four faces looked up, all women.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m Patricia, Gandima’s intern.”

  None of the women said anything, so I went on. “Gandima said the computer in this room works? Can I …,” I began, trailing off. One of the women pointed to the computer and returned to whatever she was working on. I pulled up a chair and began to surf a few news Web sites. Occasionally, I’d glance out of the corner of my eye to see if anyone was watching and perhaps noticing just how interested I was in current affairs.