Open Mic Night in Moscow

by Audrey Murray

  Darima grew up in post–Soviet Russia, in a Siberian city not far from the Mongolian border. “Not far” means something different in this part of the world, where two cities separated by “only” a two-day train journey are “close,” but Darima’s hometown is only about 150 miles from Mongolia.

  Darima is Buryat, an ethnic subgroup of Mongols indigenous to Siberia. Buryats share many cultural and linguistic similarities with Mongolians, and when their homeland, Buryatia, was incorporated into the Soviet Union, it was done so under the name Buryat-Mongolian Autonomous SSR. Few Buryats were excited about joining the USSR, and even fewer were on board with Soviet-imposed collectivization, which forced people to give up their livestock and land to form collectivized state farms. Many Buryats still lived as nomadic herders, as their ancestors had for centuries, and when the state ordered them to turn in their animals, thousands rebelled. Fearing that further Buryat rebellions could achieve their intended effect, Moscow quickly redrew borders so that Buryats would be spread out across multiple SSRs (which would make it difficult for a rebellion to organize or nationalize using state infrastructure) and removed Mongolian from the name. It’s in the Russian Federation’s interest to continue to downplay the ties between Buryatis and Mongolians, because Buryatis could start wondering if they might prefer to be part of Mongolia.

  The first place Darima takes me is a war memorial up on a hill on the outskirts of town. In the taxi there, she points to all of the development that’s taken place in the last five years. Shopping malls, apartment buildings, entire neighborhoods—all of this, she says, was empty land a decade ago.

  The money came from the mining boom, which brought foreign money in as coal, copper, and gold flowed out. For a while, Mongolia was the hot new thing—its economy grew 17 percent in 2011—but then commodities prices fell, followed by demand from China, which purchased three-quarters of Mongolia’s exports. Now the currency is plummeting, and Darima says many of the brand-new apartments we pass sit empty.

  I like Darima immediately. She’s warm, curious, and interesting, and most important, she likes comedy.

  “My husband and I went to a show a few months ago!” she exclaims when I mention stand-up. She insists that I bring a group of Shanghai comedians up to Ulaanbaatar for a show. “It’s so easy to get here—only two days on the train!”

  Though Darima speaks basic Mongolian, we’re both technically foreigners. We notice similar things.

  “It’s crazy that everyone here speaks English!” I exclaim. Because Mongolia is surrounded by Russia and China, I expected those languages, and not English, to be prevalent. But when I had to communicate while wandering around this morning, Russian and Chinese did me no good. If waiters and taxi drivers had to use a second language, it seemed most preferred English.

  “I know,” Darima replies. “When I first got here, it was strange for me, too.”

  She, too, notes the casual ease with which Mongolians seem to live abroad. The woman running my hostel has a sister living in Chicago—everyone, it seems, has a relative in the U.S., and they’ve lived in Asia, Australia, the Middle East.

  “Some people say it’s because Mongolians are nomads,” Darima tells me as we hike up the path to the hilltop. “So they’re used to moving around, and they adapt to new places.”

  Around us, brown hills gently rise and fall in waves that remind me of Central Asia. In New England, our prominences are covered with trees, and even in winter, topography is obscured by bare trunks and branches. Here, with nothing to block the view, every dip and boulder is exposed.

  “That was strange about Americans, too,” Darima is saying. “How much you move around.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “For example, you grow up in one city, and then you go to university in another city, and then you move to another city just because you want to live there. And so the city your parents live in is not the city your grandparents live in, and the city you live in is new, too.” She shakes her head. “In Russia, it’s not like that.”

  We reach the top of the hill, where a mural memorializing the victims of the Second World War wraps around an eternal flame (encased in glass because of the wind). It’s so Soviet. All the major laborers are represented—soldiers, doctors, astronauts. (Ah yes—who can forget the brave astronauts of the Eastern Front?) Members of different ethnic groups hold hands. It’s a reminder of how close the two countries were, and also maybe reassurance that my Whoops, I thought Mongolia was part of the Soviet Union snafu was an honest mistake.

  The memorial provides a panoramic view of Ulaanbaatar, and I notice that at the bottom of the hill we just climbed, someone has erected a ninety-foot gold statue of Buddha. That’s so strange, I tell her. I never thought there would be Buddhism in Mongolia.

  Darima stares at me. “You didn’t know that Mongolians are Buddhist?” she asks.

  My knowledge of Mongolian history pretty much begins and ends with Genghis Khan, which is probably why I pictured modern-day Mongolians as possessing more of a warrior spirit than a penchant for mindfulness. I try to delicately explain this to Darima.

  It turns out that after Mongolia finished conquering the world, the country got really into spirituality. Before World War II, Darima tells me, half of the men in Mongolia were monks. This just does not square with any of my preconceived notions, which is maybe the point of travel, but anyway, tomorrow, Darima is taking me to a Buddhist temple.

  Much of travel can be tedious and unpleasant in the moment: you’re tired, you’re lost, you’re cranky, you’re hungry. You’re alone and you can’t find your brand of granola. And as evangelists throughout the ages have found, spirituality shines brightest in times of suffering.

  I often find myself killing an afternoon in a foreign country in a church, which feels like a betrayal of my lifelong distrust of religion. But when you’re worn down from a day of decision-making and navigating an unfamiliar place, you can warm to the idea of a way of outsourcing your problems.

  The Gandantegchinlen Monastery, in downtown Ulaanbaatar, is the only Buddhist temple to have made it through the communist years as an active temple and monastery.

  The Soviet Union helped install a communist government in Mongolia in the 1920s and, as it did in many satellite states, provided Soviet “advisors” who “encouraged” the nominally independent leaders to do Moscow’s bidding. The Mongolian People’s Party quickly set about murdering monks and burning temples, but the Gandantegchinlen Monastery was, bizarrely, kept open as a kind of tourist attraction.

  Inside is the world’s tallest indoor statue, an oddly specific record that reminds me a little of Ashgabat’s record for highest concentration of marble buildings. But it’s dark and quiet. In the distance, we can hear bells ringing and faint chanting. The air is perfumed with incense.

  A maze of prayer wheels—large, brass cylinders inscribed with Mongolian script—leads you through the temple, and Darima whispers for me to wish for something and spin them as we pass. Something about the whole thing clicks. While I’d normally roll my eyes but also cover my bases with shallow wishes for things like astounding financial success derived from minimal effort and a metabolism that allows me to maintain a hot bod while eating mostly ice cream, I’m swept up in a wave of sincerity. I find myself playing the best version of myself, wishing for things that seem simple and honorable and true. I wish for love and happiness, whatever shape that takes. I wish that I might do good work.

  Maybe I’m a Buddhist, I think.

  Outside of the temple is a stake where monks were supposedly burned alive in communist times. Today, it’s a sacred talisman. Babies are brought here to touch the splinters for good luck; adults whisper their wishes into the wood. There’s a crowd gathered around it, but Darima decides we should wait in line and ask for the things we want. There’s something humbling about watching young men in trendy sneakers display such naked vulnerability as they lean in to whisper their desires, about realizing that everyone has wishes
. “It feels like ancient times,” Darima murmurs, and I know what she means. I’m all in; I’m ready to convert.

  As we leave, Darima buys a bag of bird feed from people selling them outside the gate. Everything attached to the temple is auspicious, even the pigeons who land here, and Darima tells me to feed them for good luck. The pigeons swarm and I squeal, but Darima laughs.

  “It’s good!” she says. “They can tell you’re a good person.”

  That feeling stays with me for the rest of the day. Maybe the pigeons are right, and I am a good person, deep down. Sure, I have some issues to work through. But maybe there’s hope?

  Later in the afternoon, as Darima takes me on a tour of old busts of Lenin that remain from the communist period, I mention something about the pigeons knowing I was a good person.

  “Oh, that!” She laughs. “No, I was just joking—I don’t really know everything about Buddhism.” She sees my face and quickly changes her tune. “But maybe it’s true!”

  That night, Darima wants to take me to Ulaanbaatar’s North Korean restaurant.

  Many large cities in countries that have diplomatic relations with North Korea have restaurants run by the North Korean government. They’re staffed by North Korean citizens and serve traditional dishes with heavily inflated prices and tend to be frequented by members of the Hermit Kingdom’s diplomatic missions.

  The restaurant is difficult to find, so Julia’s brother, Arthur, agrees to take us, along with his wife, Sasha, and their young daughter. We walk into a nondescript office building and ride the elevator up to the third floor.

  The restaurant is dark and empty, and the staff is practicing karaoke. When they see us, they calmly turn off the karaoke machine, turn on the lights, and seat us.

  “That was interesting,” I say nervously.

  “Very interesting,” Darima agrees.

  There’s a stage at the front of the restaurant with equipment set up for a full band. Neon Christmas lights trace flowers on the backdrop.

  The waitresses all wear the same black dress and keep their hair pulled back in identical buns. My head spins each time they hand us menus or take our orders. I can’t imagine the world they come from. I’m brimming with questions I want to ask about their lives—what did you study in school, what does your house look like, what do you do for fun—but I also realize that they’re people, not a fascinating museum exhibit, and, anyway, I get the sense that personal conversation would be a terrible idea. The strangest part is their mannerisms. They’re all are eerily quiet and their faces make no expressions. But in some sense, they’re just people working in a restaurant. I have been a person working in a restaurant.

  Three hundred North Koreans work in Ulaanbaatar, Arthur and Darima tell me.

  Muzak covers of Simon & Garfunkel play softly from hidden speakers. I notice that all the potted trees are plastic. A few tables over, a waiter silently studies an English textbook I’ve used with my students in China.

  The restaurant has a gift shop that sells flowers, pins, and embroidered paintings. All of the prices are exorbitant and listed in U.S. dollars. The profits are likely funneled directly back to the regime, and the choice of paintings is odd. Some are copies of well-known works like da Vinci’s Last Supper, while others appear to be original compositions. There’s one of two lions licking each other like cats, and I’m floored by the symbolism. Was this composed by a North Korean artist, trying to encode some message of peace? Like, this animal we normally think of as ferocious can also express affection? And is that maybe the lesson of my trip to Mongolia, too? That this country that terrified me in theory ended up being something else?

  Or maybe that’s just the pattern they had?

  I join Darima next to an innocuous, though, admittedly not great, embroidered painting of clams. Darima shakes her head. “It must have taken years to finish this,” she says. I’m about to object when I realize she’s right. I had imagined these canvases coming out of a factory of sewing machines, but I realize it’s far more likely they were hand-stitched. I flip through translated books of Kim Jong-Un’s sayings. The English is terrifyingly flawless and natural. The North Korean who translated this knew what he was doing.

  After dinner, the room goes dark, except for spotlights on the stage. Our waitresses appear and perform a highly choreographed song and dance, complete with costume changes and live accompaniment. Throughout the performance, their faces are frozen in plastic smiles.

  We stay late, and when we go to leave, the doors to get out of the restaurant are locked. For a moment, my blood runs cold—are we about to be taken hostage? But then a man appears and calmly opens the door. He shakes our hands as we leave.

  “Where are you from?” he asks in English with barely a trace of an accent.

  “Russia,” Darima says.

  “Russia,” Arthur says.

  “Russia,” Sasha says.

  I swallow. “America.”

  He nods and thanks us for coming.

  I keep saying I want to make changes in my life, but I keep going on horse treks and waking up in yurts.

  Actually, this isn’t a yurt; it’s a ger, which is the Mongolian word for yurt. The Mongolians, like their southern Central Asian brethren, were traditionally nomadic herders who hunkered down in the winter and in warmer months moved to pastures for grazing. Today, many continue this practice, both in the cities and out in the countryside, where I am.

  The gers are most striking in the cities, where they often form districts around the edge of town. The fact that homes can be disassembled and easily moved once allowed herders to head off in search of greener pastures, and today allows similar movement for employment prospects.

  Urban ger districts aren’t always filled exclusively with gers—some families erect more permanent structures—but they generally don’t have heat or running water. It’s hard to tell much of this, walking through them, because the homes are surrounded by tall wooden fences. The districts themselves are further concealed by strategically placed billboards the government “happened to” erect in a path that directly blocks views of the settlements, which the government, eager to attract foreign investment and rebrand Mongolia as a modern country, sees as an unsightly embarrassment.

  The gers shape life in Ulaanbaatar in more ways than one. In addition to allowing newly minted urbanites—many of whom moved to the city after a devastating cold snap killed ten million animals—to retain their traditional ways of living, the ger districts also shape the environment in winter. Lacking gas or indoor heating, ger residents burn coal for cooking and warmth, which contributes to Ulaanbaatar’s notoriously noxious winter pollution. The city sits in a bowl, and in winter, a layer of thick smog hangs over it, blocking the view and leaving a sharp taste in your mouth, even if the scent can be oddly homey.

  While the city is crowded and bustling, the countryside is a blank, empty slate of barren grassland beneath an endless blue sky, and the weather changes quickly. In my first thirty minutes in Gorkhi-Terelj National Park, it snowed, hailed, and then cleared into a blue sky with blinding sunlight, and if the takeaway is anything, it’s that life out here must be hard.

  The gers, are therefore, similarly versatile. We pass a ger that offers karaoke and stop in another that serves as a restaurant. As we eat a mercifully warm stew, a television plays a music video in which a man in traditional Mongolian dress gets drunk and goes hunting with automatic weapons. If the takeaway is anything here, it’s that hunting is more efficient when you’re emotional.

  My guide is a perpetually smiling woman named Mogi who has given us a few colorful interpretations of Mongolian history.

  “You know, Mongolia is trapped between the two most powerful countries on Earth,” Mogi says, echoing a sentiment I hear multiple times a day in Mongolia. “In the 1960s, Mongolia gave Lake Baikal to Russia as a gift,” Mogi continues. The Dutch couple I’m traveling with and I exchange glances. “But it was like, you know, a gift you always give back.” More exchanged gl
ances. “So actually,” Mogi continues, her voice rising with emotion, “Russia stole Lake Baikal from Mongolia!”

  We’re on a two-day trip through the park that includes a horse trek and a ger stay with a nomadic family, but so far we have primarily visited rocks.

  “This cave, yeah, the monks are hiding here,” Mogi says, after making us climb a slippery pile of rocks and wedge ourselves into a crevice between them. “But the army found them,” she continues, “and they are all dead.”

  After this unexpected dark turn in the story, she is quiet, leaving us to picture the horrible deaths that must have befallen people in the exact place we’re crouching.

  The next rock looks like a turtle. “You see?” Mogi says, pointing out the shell and head that do kind of resemble a turtle, though to me, it primarily looks like a rock. Does it have any religious significance? No, it looks like a turtle. Do I want to climb it? After the dead monk rock, I’m good.

  In the afternoon, we ride horses up to a Buddhist temple high in the mountains. As we cross icy streams and circle up the hillsides, it starts to snow. Wet, heavy flakes drop from the sky and drift through the pine trees, and although it is freezing, it’s also stunningly quiet and beautiful. The temple complex, too, is dreamy: a series of red pagodas and statues of Buddhas overlooking the valley below. We cross a rickety wooden bridge to reach the highest building, a brightly painted wooden pagoda with intricate carvings and a sloping roof made of tiles. Mogi doesn’t tell us to make a wish, but I close my eyes and do anyway.

  In early evening we arrive at the camp of a goat-herding family, with whom we’ll be spending the night. Their gers are located beside a dry riverbed that will fill with water in a few weeks when the snow begins to melt.

  The women are inside making fried dough while the men finish their afternoon chores. As we warm up with tea, the father pops into the ger and asks Mogi a question; she looks uncertain but asks us if we want to help him feed the baby goats.