Live From Mongolia

by Patricia Sexton

  At most of the television networks I’ve visited, editing rooms are divided into little dens. A producer and correspondent work with an editor to cut a piece down to size. Each den is equipped with a lot of electronics: a miniature TV for playback, audio equipment, a microphone for voiceovers, and so on. At MNB, there was only one editing room, and it was big, the size of several dens, or maybe a school classroom. All four of the station’s editors seemed to work together on almost everything. This wasn’t immediately clear, but over the course of the summer, I’d watch them confer with each other over pretty much every piece, even when it came to the English news reports. And Gandima would always help out, especially when it came to the English news. Although it seemed unusual for someone as senior as she to discuss the particulars of a translation, or even to come into the editing room at all, she always participated, often staying late at night to do so.

  The door to the editing room opened and a beautiful, heavily made up woman entered. I recognized her as one of the Mongolian-language anchors. Earlier that day, on one of the TV screens in the lobby, I’d watched her report. There was a lot of discussion among the editors and the anchor, and they were all looking at me. I had no idea what they were saying.

  “I need to use this computer … now,” the anchor finally said to me in English.

  “Of course,” I said, gathering my belongings and thanking the women before I left. No one said anything, so I shut the door behind me and headed down the hall, to the newsroom.

  There is nowhere more exciting than a newsroom. Breaking news, the very latest in what’s happening around the world, steadily filters in over the wires. When a story is big, reporters and producers will shout back and forth, trying to figure out the pulse of just what is going on and who will be sent to cover it. And beside all this, often on a large dais and always surrounded by lights, cameras, and action, is the anchor seat.

  When Scott Pelley reports live from CBS’s broadcast center in New York, he’s sitting right beside all that action. If news breaks in the middle of the broadcast, he’s right there in the thick of it to decipher what’s going on and report on it.

  However, things were very different in the newsroom at MNB. For one thing, it was silent. Usually a silent newsroom means a broadcast is being taped or is even live. But the anchor seat at Mongolia TV was on a completely separate floor, in a studio in the basement. The silence seemed to be due to people working diligently, but it had all the effect of being in a congressional library rather than in a bustling television station.

  I poked my head in long enough to know I’d make a major disturbance by even trying to find myself a seat, and poked my head straight back out. During that entire summer, Tobie and I would get a chance to work in the newsroom just once, when we needed to use a working telephone.

  I checked my watch and realized that it was a respectable time to leave for the day, so I began to head home. Outside, it was oppressive and moody. Although it was only dusk, the heavy-lidded sky forecast an early nightfall.

  Walking alone in Ulaanbaatar at night is not exactly discouraged, but it’s certainly not encouraged. The city is not the sort of place where you go for an evening stroll; it’s the sort of place where you walk with purpose to arrive at your destination. Whether this was a cultural nuance or not, I never quite understood. Fact is, I never saw anyone, ever, meandering in this capital city.

  Ignoring a persistent gut feeling that I shouldn’t be doing what even the locals weren’t, I cut through back roads and side streets, passing the Gandan Khiid monastery to get to the Soviet microdistrict where I lived. After awhile, and without any trouble, I arrived home, pleased with myself in that way you are when you manage to find your way in a new neighborhood. I still hadn’t bought a flashlight, and by this point it was growing dark, so I felt around the stairwell’s landing and counted each step as I climbed in the pitch-black. While I fished for my keys, Batma opened the front door a crack, peering out from behind the chain lock.

  “Patricia?” she asked. Her voice sounded hesitant and unusually timid as she whispered into the dark.

  “Yes, Batma, it’s me,” I said. “Is something wrong?”

  Shutting the door, she unchained the lock and opened it up again to let me inside. And when she did, I realized she’d been hurt. Badly. Blood had dripped from her chin to her earlobe and was drying on her neck and blouse.

  “Mongol book,” Batma said, pressing her palms together, like she was opening and shutting an imaginary tome. Smiling at me nervously, as if to reassure me that, really, everything was fine, she giggled sheepishly. I took the translation dictionary out of my bag and gave it to her. Flipping through the Cyrillic section that translates to English, she sounded out one word at a time.

  “Men.”

  “Four.” She held up four fingers.

  “Rob.”

  “Wound.”

  With that, she drew her fingers across her neck in an off-with-his-head cutting motion.

  “Jewelry, bish,” she said finally, showing me where her necklace and earrings had been.

  Apparently, four men armed with knives had mugged Batma in our stairwell. They’d stolen her jewelry, and from the looks of the dried blood crusted on her neck, they’d tried to slit her throat as a parting gift. Batma would later explain to me that because she’d turned her head trying to break free, they’d missed her throat and instead had “only” cut off a sliver of her chin.

  “Police?” I asked.

  “Bish, bish,” she said, dismissively batting her hand at me as if I were crazy to have even asked.

  “You are okay?” I felt impotent asking her this, but I didn’t really know what else to say.

  Pointing at me, Batma ignored my question. “You,” she said, switching between Mongolian and halting English. “Those men were waiting for you.”

  Now, wait a minute. What on earth had I done wrong? Yet, I knew exactly what I’d done wrong. Some of it was naïveté; some of it was circumstantial. For one thing, ever since I’d arrived in Mongolia and plopped myself down in this working-class neighborhood, I’d been grinning at my new neighbors as if I had some sort of affliction. Nodding my head, greeting them in my feeble attempts at their own language, I’d allowed myself to arrive at the comfortable conclusion that I belonged here, that an affable grin was all it would take to undo the disparity in our situations.

  And that was the other thing. Although the disparity was neither my fault nor necessarily my responsibility, it was the common ground my neighbors and I were forced to share. And in the end, really, wasn’t this just a game for me? Couldn’t I go back to New York, to Wall Street, to a life of preposterous excess? Of course I could. Would my neighbors know this or even care? No, but they’d notice the disparity in our circumstances. And it takes only one person noticing to grow resentful enough to, say, commit a robbery.

  Later that evening, Badaa returned home from work. Expecting to see shock and concern, I was disappointed. With one look at the bloodied bandage on his wife’s neck, he merely grunted. Whether he was expressing disapproval or stoicism, I couldn’t tell, and I wondered what they said privately to each other, this bubbly, charming woman and her dour, quiet man.

  Retiring early, I shut my bedroom door behind me and leaned out the window, peering at the ground just a few floors below, wondering if intruders could scale the wall to break into our apartment. Cooking up unpleasant and improbable scenarios, I shut the window tight to the sudden summer heat wave outside, locking myself in the sauna I created. I lay down on top of the soft rug blanket Batma had given me and tried to fall asleep. Sweating all night, I slept only fitfully.

  Just before sunrise, I woke to banging and hammering coming from the construction site next door. In the dim light of very early morning, I lay completely still, not wanting to disturb the muffled peace of the day’s first sounds outside my locked window.

  You can either stay, or you can go, I thought, reminded of the advice my best friend, Meghan, had delivered
just months ago, before I’d quit my banking job. Ironically, the last time we’d had this conversation, it was the going that was supposed to lead to endless possibilities. This time, it was the staying.

  And with that, I decided to stay. Sometimes the best way to make an important decision is not to make it at all. Besides, it was either that or leave Mongolia to return to a banking job where I’d spend the rest of my life with my tail between my legs.

  So I got dressed and paid a visit to the tiny supermarket sandwiched between the neighboring cement apartment blocks. If staying was going to be what I’d do, there was no better place to start than with breakfast.

  Later that afternoon, at an Internet café, I checked my e-mail. There I found a message from CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, the woman who’d been so instrumental in inspiring me to pursue my dream. In the e-mail, she wished me well and told me I had the motivation it would take to follow this path. And that was all it took to make me forget about leaving.

  CHAPTER 9

  Butchering Goats and Vowels

  Our aid project has been working with the people of Nailakh since 2004. We found that the most immediate need for the district was creating temporary employment. During this fiscal period, a total of one-hundred-fifty-thousand dollars has been donated to the cause.

  —Interview clip, MM Today broadcast

  During the winter months, it can be very difficult to get fresh fruits and vegetables in Mongolia. A quick glance at the CIA World Factbook reveals that most countries in the world that experience four seasons (instead of countries in the tropics with just rainy and dry seasons) have about a fifth of their land available for decent farming. A third of both France and Germany is fit for farming, about of a fifth of the United States, and even a tenth in mountainous Japan. By comparison, less than one percent of land in Mongolia is suitable for raising crops, which can be a big concern for a country whose livelihood depends on its pastures having good fodder for the cattle to eat.

  To add insult to injury, those who do work the pastures, called “the steppe,” must endure some of the harshest weather conditions on earth. Sometime between 1999 and 2009, Mongolia experienced a few winters that were so long and so cold that many herders lost their entire herd of livestock due to starvation; six million died in the winter of 2009 alone. It didn’t help that just a decade earlier, when the Soviet Union had gone, they’d taken their aid money with them.

  This was a real problem; they’d contributed as much as a third to the Mongolian GDP. Basically, Mongolia was weaned almost overnight; aggressive economic reforms taken on by the fledgling democracy caused a serious recession. By the time the current century had rolled around, they weren’t in good enough shape to be weathering another catastrophe. Over the years, Mongolians learned to rely on themselves and on what they could produce at home in the steppe. Which is to say, they tend to eat a lot of meat, at least from what I was seeing in the capital.

  I crossed the lot adjacent to my host family’s apartment building and made for the local grocery store. Inside, I discovered an arrangement not unlike any other grocery store I’ve ever been to. There were rice and grains and produce and meat and liquor. It’s just that the process was a little different from what I was used to.

  Rice didn’t come in its own prepackaged box; it came in enormous burlap sacks, and you chose how much you wanted. Eggs weren’t sold by the dozen in their own crates; you selected the number of eggs you wanted, at about ten cents apiece, and they were deposited into a clear plastic sack drawn shut with a knot. It was as if each section in the store had a product, but not necessarily a brand.

  Then, I came to the butcher, who seemed to be an entity all his own. As I may have mentioned, Mongolians living in the country’s capital seem to have something of a penchant for meat. So it came as no great surprise to me that there was a line waiting for his services. But what did surprise me was just how intimate his job actually was. Right in front of me and the other shoppers, without the usual panes of display-case glass between us and the butcher’s victim, lay a dead goat. The goat lay on top of a Formica table, and seemed to have a warm look about him, like he’d only recently lost his life. I wondered if I looked hard enough, if I could see his heart still beating. Up and down, in a very methodical fashion, the butcher brought his cleaver to and from the goat. Staring straight ahead, rather than at his work, he whacked and whacked. Little bloody bits of flesh and bone landed on the floor all around us, but no one seemed to mind or even notice. It was like witnessing a live murder scene.

  Then, one by one, the butcher handed each customer plastic bags filled with bones and diced fatty flesh. I moved aside before it was my turn and headed straight for the produce section, where I bought a couple of bananas.

  “Khoyor banahn,” I said to the cashier, putting my goods on the counter in front of her.

  I’d practiced this a few times in my head and was sure I had the pronunciation just right. There’s something intoxicating about traveling to a new country, learning to speak fragments of the local language, and finally, one day, experiencing the moment where you achieve the mundane without incident. In other words, you blend in.

  “Khoyor banahn?” I repeated, pointing at the “two bananas” I thought I was asking for. Of course, the outcome in these situations is strictly binary: either the cashier ringing up your purchase goes about ringing up your purchase as if you’re a regular, or she looks at you as if you’re crazy.

  Squinting disapprovingly like a strict schoolmarm, the cashier looked at me as if I were crazy and repeated back to me what I should have said, sounding it out slowly. “Kh-yr-bn-n,” she said, waiting patiently for me to get it right before releasing my breakfast to me.

  “Khoyor bin-in?” I mimicked, amputating the vowels just as she had.

  “Bish, bish,” she chided, slowly sounding out the words one more time as she rang me up and handed me my purchases anyway.

  “I’m covering the Roaring Hooves festival again today,” Tobie said as soon as I arrived at work that morning.

  I tucked into my bananas and nodded approvingly. I’d just begun to look over the scripts for grammatical and spelling errors, and I had my work cut out for me.

  “Want to come with?” Tobie asked.

  “Really? Why?” I asked.

  “Gandima’s busy, and I need a reporter.”

  “You mean,” I said as I put my peels in the trash. “You need a reporter?”

  “That’s right,” Tobie said, and I took a deep breath. This was it. This was my first shot. It had come earlier than I’d expected, but I was ready … sort of … almost. But that was good enough. When does the opportunity of a lifetime ever come at just the right time? I’d had just enough schooling under Magee Hickey to make do, and that’s just what I’d do. Tobie was already packing his camera and gear.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  “Where are you two going?” Gandima asked as we made to leave. She seemed like the type of manager who wanted to be asked first, rather than told.

  “Patricia is coming with me to cover the Roaring Hooves concert,” Tobie responded. The way he said it was the way he said everything else—with simple logic that trumped any misgivings about his age. “Besides, there’s no one else who speaks English to cover the story.”

  “Patricia, do you even know anything about the festival?” Gandima asked, looking at me skeptically.

  “I do,” I said, and I actually did. Although our office didn’t have an Internet connection, I’d managed to find some old news scripts that had run the story a year earlier, which I’d already dug up in order to write that evening’s script.

  “I hope so,” she said, as she turned on her heel and left.

  In a taxi with Tobie, I read through the old scripts, jotted down some notes, tried memorizing them, put on another coat of mascara, and did my best to exhibit the grace under pressure I wasn’t feeling. Although I wasn’t about to tell Tobie this, I had an old childhood fear nagging at me.
r />   In primary school, I’d been given the part of narrator in a rather verbose production of a play. One night, while delivering my opening lines to a packed lunchroom auditorium, I promptly forgot the rest. From behind the curtain, the director whispered, quietly at first. Although I could hear her and the lines I was supposed to be reciting, my lips were frozen. Even after her quiet whispers turned into stage whispers, I remained completely immobile and mute, and the show went on without me. At eleven years old, I’d experienced public shame for the first time, and I’d never forgotten it. My opening line, the only one I’d not clammed up on, has always been an indelible reminder of my embarrassment: “There’s a but; there’s always a but.”

  I didn’t mention to Tobie how nervous I was. This was my first chance to really make something of my dream, and I wanted to keep it that way. Besides, the stage fright I had experienced as an eleven-year-old had happened two decades earlier. Whatever had happened to him when he was eleven hadn’t happened very long ago. Obviously, I didn’t need to remind him of that. Besides, we’d arrived.

  The State Philharmonic is grand. It’s decked out with columns and arches and elaborate moldings, and you almost feel as if you’ve walked into another epoch, a time when a dapper gentleman would dress for a performance in a freshly pressed waistcoat, smoking a pipe, holding the elbow of his impeccably dressed female companion. Inside, the Philharmonic is just as stuffy as any other concert hall and nearly as grand, despite its worn carpet and peeling paint.

  At the door, we furnished our TV ID badges and were suddenly shown a considerable amount of deference. The security guards led Tobie and me to a quiet corner where we’d be allowed to film. It occurred to me that I was already a foregone conclusion, at least to those guards and the curious crowd who’d begun to gather around us. The only difference between success and failure was, simply, taking action.