Live From Mongolia

by Patricia Sexton

  And, I had only an address to rely on. Weeks earlier, the British company had provided me with the address of the host family with whom I’d spend my summer in Ulaanbaatar. I’d carefully tucked it into my knapsack, along with cash and toiletries. Of course, I’d never expected to actually need it, because they’d arranged for my transportation with Urna, their ambassador. In the end, though, it wouldn’t have mattered because the address they’d sent me was the wrong one anyway. But I didn’t know that yet.

  Patiently, even graciously, the old man smiled a big, gummy grin at me. “Ger?” he asked again. So, I thought I’d give him a shot at helping me find my home. Surely I could try to pay him to take me there. Pointing at the address printed on my information packet, I shrugged and flashed him a shamelessly flirtatious damsel-in-distress grin.

  “Bish,” he said. “No.” Pointing from me to himself and back again, he repeated, “Ger.” Gers, commonly referred to outside Mongolia as yurts, are small portable homes. Built like a softer, rounder teepee, they have just a single room, which serves as the dining area as well as the bedroom. So, either I was jumping to conclusions, or this old man was asking me to spend the night with him. Generous as his offer was, I declined. After all, I had Evan to meet.

  “Bish,” I said, repeating back to him what he’d said to me. During my brief study of the Mongolian language, I’d learned what was proving so far to be one very useful word: no. As I backed away from the toothless old man, I eyed the women’s bathroom, expecting to sleep there until daylight.

  As if on cue, I dropped the folder containing my information packet, and its contents slid onto the floor beneath me. My arrival was going from momentous to comical. Just then, a small group of men rushed over and helped me collect the papers, examining each article carefully before returning it to me.

  “Ger?” one of them asked, concentrating hard on one of my documents, reading it upside down.

  Pointing at the same address I’d shown the first man, I made a big deal of pulling my shoulders up to my ears, miming a delayed flight, and acting the part of a missing Urna.

  “My friend!” another one of the men suddenly cried out in English, peering over my shoulder, pointing at the address typed on the information packet. “Yes, it is my friend!” he declared with conviction.

  “The man who lives at this address is your friend?” I asked. I was absolutely incredulous. In a capital city of about a million people, stuck in an airport at three o’clock in the morning, had I just happened to run into someone who personally knew my Mongolian host-father?

  “Bish,” he said, shaking his head. “Ger?” he asked, repeating his offer.

  I gave up. Retreating from the men, I imagined how funny this would be—much later. Not only was I short a ride, but I was short any ride, and there wasn’t a money changer in sight, even if I could find a taxi who knew where to take me. I had no Mongolian tugrugs, the local currency, and I had no place to go.

  “Excuse me, miss?” a soft-spoken woman called out as she made her way toward me. “Do you need some help?”

  Did I ever.

  Smartly dressed in a crisp black business suit and high heels, Magvan, as she introduced herself, was the vice-chairwoman of the Mongolian Chamber of Commerce. She had coiffed hair, wore sensible rimless glasses, and had just the sort of matronly look that you’re hoping for when you’re in a real bind. Magvan peered at me over her spectacles and asked me to explain just what had happened.

  “I’ve come from New York. My flight was delayed. And I got this internship here in Mongolia. And then—”

  “Never mind. Where are you actually supposed to be?” she asked, cutting to the chase.

  “Here,” I said, pointing to the same address I’d shown the men earlier.

  “Let’s go,” she said. “My husband and I will drive you.”

  Let’s go? As in, You’re taking me there? I thought, amazed by this woman’s late-night generosity.

  Eagerly, I accepted Magvan’s offer to help, which wasn’t so much an offer as it was an order. But either way, I was happy to oblige. In silence, she led me outside to her waiting car. Although it was June, it was cold, and I deeply inhaled my first impression of dust and car oil and a subtle fragrance that would take me a few weeks to identify as thyme.

  Magvan opened the car door and began to vociferously address the man inside. Speaking like an auctioneer, she rattled off a long list of consonants, pausing only briefly to introduce me. “My husband,” she said to me before resuming her dictating to the skinny, disheveled man sitting at the wheel. As we sped off over pockmarked roads, he finally interjected, returning fire with rounds of consonants. Both of them sounded as if they were speaking through semiautomatic machine–gun fire. It seemed pretty obvious to me that they were having an argument until Magvan explained that they weren’t.

  “The Mongolian language,” she said when she turned around and saw the surprise on my face. “I know, it sounds like a quarrel, even when you’re telling someone that you love them.”

  Through the stillness and into the night, we fell in a tired silence and drove in darkness so complete it was hard to believe that this capital city was not a sleepy countryside. At a gravel lot skirting a bare concrete building, we parked. Soviet-era architecture is imposing in the best of times, and this whitewashed structure didn’t disappoint. Standing tall next to its dozen or so neighbors, it looked more utilitarian than home. Shivering in my shorts and T-shirt, I stepped out of the car into fresh frost and leftover snow. Even though it was already June and technically summer, it was wintry cold. Mongolia experiences some of the world’s greatest temperature extremes, sometimes as much as sixty or seventy degrees in a single day, just enough to guarantee you’ll leave behind a few vital wardrobe items when packing for just one summer.

  “Fourth floor, third door,” Magvan said, taking time to explain the numbering system for Mongolian addresses. Holding down a key on her phone, she used it as a flashlight, shining a weak light to illuminate a faint path inside the building.

  Quietly, we climbed the crumbling staircase until we reached the fourth floor. At the third door on the landing, Magvan rapped loudly, as if it were anything but the middle of the night. Beside her, her husband offered me a mischievous smile, like he was used to his wife doing this sort of thing.

  “What the hell do you want?” a middle-aged fat woman roared, poking her head just far enough outside the door to place her face an inch from Magvan’s. Of course, I don’t really know what the woman said, but at that hour it seemed a good guess that she wasn’t offering us a cup of tea. After another heady exchange of thick consonants, the fat woman slammed the door in our faces. The good news was that she was not my host-mother.

  “So, that is not your apartment,” Magvan said with a measure of irony. “Shall we try the next?” Without any hesitation, she banged on all the doors on that landing, one by one. At the last door, a man with a bald paunch, dressed only in his underwear, looked completely bewildered. With steeply arched eyebrows and a tiny O-shaped mouth, he wore that surprised look that on some people seems permanent.

  “Yes, this is the right apartment,” Magvan translated what the man was saying, “but the family that lived here moved away a long time ago.” By now, I’d realized that the address the British company had provided me was wrong.

  At a loss and without a plan, it was about time to go to a hotel. It isn’t often that you find yourself in a foreign country in the middle of the night, sneaking up crumbling stairwells and relying on complete strangers to help you locate your new home.

  “It is time to take you to a hotel,” Magvan said, as if she’d read my mind.

  Magvan and her husband dropped me off at the Bayangol Hotel, in the heart of downtown Ulaanbaatar. After checking in, I rode a tiny, coffin-size wooden elevator to a lushly carpeted landing. Inserting my key into the lock, I pushed open a heavy wooden door to reveal a spacious room with a king-size bed, large TV, and generous bathtub. Too anxious to sl
eep, I switched on the tap and drew a hot bath, soaking in the steaming water until my fingertips and toes wrinkled into soft white creases.

  I was already feeling a little homesick, wondering what Netta, Meghan, and my other friends were doing while I was traipsing around the Mongolian capital in a pair of shorts in the unseasonable June snow, searching in the dark for lodging for the night. I gave up thinking about what would happen the next morning, tucking myself into freshly laundered sheets, and fell fast asleep.

  Just a few hours later, I woke to blazing sunshine, a golden yolk set against the backdrop of an eggshell-blue sky. Outside my window several floors below, children played tag in a dusty lot. I watched them for awhile and then unpacked my luggage, dressed, and headed downstairs to the hotel dining room for breakfast. I’d need a strong cup of coffee before making contact with Urna’s boss at the British company. After all, at this point—without anyone to meet me at the airport, without an address where I’d be staying—I was beginning to wonder if I’d actually been taken for a ride.

  The dining room was completely empty. Heavy white linen dressed several tables set for eight apiece, and a young Mongolian waitress offered me toast and a plate of scrambled eggs. It was just what I needed. Apparently, I was just what they needed too; the staff made sure to anticipate the needs of their only guest, refilling my coffee cup after each sip. Fully caffeinated, I returned to my room to make a few phone calls. Actually, I had only one telephone number, but I called it half a dozen times, leaving half a dozen messages, each one a little bit angrier than the last.

  “Hi, this is Patricia Sexton—again,” I said for the sixth and final time to the British company’s answering machine. “As I said, I’ve just arrived from New York. I’m here in Ulaanbaatar, and I believe Urna, from your company, was due to pick me up. Well, she never showed, as I may have mentioned. I expect you’ll be paying this hotel bill for me.”

  It was late on a Saturday morning, and no one was answering. So I gave up and bundled up, packed a daypack, and set out to explore Ulaanbaatar.

  “Patricia?” a young voice called out from the hotel lobby, just as I was about to make my way outside.

  “Urna?” I responded, squinting into the brightness at a young woman sitting on a sofa. “Is that you?”

  She was thin, shy, and petite. With straight brown hair, brown eyes, and a fair complexion, she was pretty in an economical, nondescript sense. Nothing in particular about her stood out.

  “Yes, I am Urna,” the young woman said with a wan smile. “About last night,” she offered, “I am sorry, but your airplane was many hours late. So I fell asleep. You will get your bags now. I will take you to your new home.”

  “Wait, you were what?” I asked.

  “I was asleep,” Urna said, as if I’d simply misheard her.

  “Asleep?” I repeated.

  “Yes,” she said, actually managing to sound annoyed that I was reconfirming this detail.

  “Do you know where I nearly spent the night? In a toilet,” I spat. I didn’t even bother to ask Urna how she’d managed to find me, although I suspected someone at the British company had checked their voice mail and she’d been dispatched.

  “I hope you’ll be paying for my hotel room,” I said, and Urna just stared angrily back at me, as if a mere apology should make everything okay for leaving someone stranded in the middle of the night. I mean, this wasn’t a case of accidentally oversleeping—Urna had actually chosen to turn off her alarm clock!

  While I squared off with her, she said nothing, which was incredibly unsatisfying, so I stormed off to retrieve my bags from the hotel room. By the time I’d returned to the lobby, she had paid my hotel bill.

  “Let’s go,” Urna said without looking at me. Walking outside into the cold wind and clear blue sky, we nestled ourselves between my luggage and drove to Sükhbaatar Square in the center of Ulaanbaatar. For decades, Sükhbaatar has witnessed some of Mongolia’s most potent historical moments.

  In 1921, under the military tutelage of a burly, handsome Mongolian general (who looked like a cross between Chow Yun Fat and Colin Firth), Mongolia stood up to China. Of course, it wasn’t the first time this had happened, and it wouldn’t be the last. For a decade, ever since the Qing dynasty collapsed and Mongolia demanded independence from China in 1911, the Chinese had been hoping to reestablish sovereignty over Mongolia. They’d even signed a treaty granting autonomy to the Mongolians, but the conditions of the autonomy granted considerable power to the Chinese.

  Really though, the Chinese and the Mongolians had been at odds for a long, long time. A millennium earlier, their rivalry had begun in one of those stories that you can’t make up even if you try.

  A thousand or so years ago, wary of his powerful adversary, the Chinese emperor invited the Mongolian chief to dinner at his palace to get on good terms with him. Hoping to get his cooperation on a few important issues, he plied him with fine food and drink. After awhile, the Mongolian chief became a little tipsy, so he did what any inebriated man would do. Clapping his hands, he lurched toward the emperor, grabbed his beard, and tickled his ear. Ironically, the emperor didn’t seem too upset about this (afterward, he gave the Mongolian a flashy robe and a gold belt!), but the rest of the dinner guests were outraged, and they all happened to be high-ranking Chinese ministers who insisted that justice must be served to this barbaric dinner guest. By this time though, the Mongolian chief had already made his way home, so he had to be summoned back to the Chinese court. Of course, knowing the fate he faced, he refused to return, so the Chinese found him and poisoned him to death.

  But that lesson wasn’t quite clear enough, so the Chinese bided their time until they were able to capture one of the chief’s nephews. Once they did, they nailed him to a wooden donkey and chopped him into tiny pieces—beginning with his fingers and toes—while he was still alive.

  With a backdrop that spiteful, you can probably imagine that the Mongolians had harbored resentment toward their neighbors for some time. And so it was with a measure of this pent-up irritation that the dashing General Sükhbaatar teamed up with the Soviets, who didn’t exactly have the Mongolians’ best interests in mind. Together, they kicked out their common enemy. In return for the general’s heroic leadership, the Mongolian government named the city’s square after him. Better still, they built a statue in his honor, erecting it on a site considered to be auspicious because the general’s horse may have urinated on the very same spot during a rally in the summer of 1921.

  Now, still silent, Urna parked and led me to the square, as if she were paying homage to the general himself. The relentless brilliance of high noon sunlight reflected off the granite tiles, and I squinted into the distance at the rosewood-colored statue towering over the square. Next to it, a man stood on a makeshift stage and recited poetry to an audience of three, which included Urna, me, and himself.

  “Let’s love each other while we’re alive,” Urna translated. “It’s about a father and a son,” she added absent-mindedly, as if lost in a moment with only my presence dragging her back.

  “What does that mean, though?” I pressed, musing aloud that maybe the poem was a riff on Genghis Khan’s relationship with his father. It’s impossible to overstate the reverence with which the Mongolians regard Genghis Khan, so I was hoping to invoke his name in order to curry favor with my new guide. It might have worked; although she didn’t respond, she did buy me lunch.

  “You are hungry,” Urna pointed out. Her question sounded like a statement, but either way, she was right.

  “Buuz,” she said to the waiter, who hadn’t come to take our order so much as he’d come to get a number. As in, “How many buuz do you want to eat,” instead of, “What’ll you have?” At the most famous Mongolian fast-food restaurant in the country, which could have been named “Mong-Donald’s” for its popularity, Urna and I were about to tuck into the nation’s most popular snack. And at this particular restaurant, no one ever ordered anything but its namesake, buuz.


  Greasy, hot, and savory, buuz are mutton dumplings. A little bigger than a Ping-Pong ball and about the same pale color, these pillows of chopped sheep meat are stuffed into miniature pillowcases of steamed dough, creating a pocket of salty succulence. Buuz are eaten year-round, but they’re eaten with reckless abandon during the New Year, when matrons of the household make hundreds and hundreds of them.

  It isn’t immediately clear how to politely consume buuz, especially when you’re the lone foreigner in a restaurant and at risk of making a spectacle of yourself in a lunchtime crowd. They’re too big to eat whole, although I gave that method a try, and they’re too hot and juicy to nibble. Eventually though, I hit my stride. Biting the buuz in half, decisively so, I tipped my head back and sucked the liquid out of the remaining half before it dribbled onto my plate. It was then that I noticed Urna looking off into the very important distance, as if I’d embarrassed her, but I wasn’t about to quit while I was ahead.

  When I finished, I peppered Urna with questions about my new home and my host family.

  “So what’s my host family like?” I broached.

  “You will see,” Urna responded.

  “Have they hosted any other foreigners before?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “Foreign people.”

  “What kind of foreign people?”

  “People who are foreign.”

  “Interesting,” I said, not meaning it, wondering how on earth it was my fault for having gotten off on such a bad foot with my very first acquaintance in Mongolia.

  Urna said nothing, and we drove in silence to meet my host family. About a mile west of downtown Ulaanbaatar, we found ourselves in an expressionless neighborhood dotted with shops advertising in boxy Cyrillic letters. Soon, we turned left into a dusty lot alongside a stray dog, a series of nondescript apartment blocks, and a convenience store. Above us, stretching endlessly from horizon to horizon, the eggshell blue sky glimmered. Finally, we stopped and Urna got out of the car. I followed dutifully behind her.