“Come,” Tem said as he led me to his office. The manager of TV5, Tem, was tall and dapper and had that self-possessed air required to wear sharp-edged German eyeglasses. His persona seemed a perfect fit for the station.
As I followed him down a brightly lit wood-paneled corridor, he paused for a moment to point out Tobie’s office space. In it were three computers, and Tobie was already making use of at least two of them, shuttling between one and then the other to upload video files from his computer to the TV5 network.
“The computers are yours to use,” Tem said, as if he’d read my mind. If his intention was to go to work on my practical side alone, he was doing a fine job of it. The office I’d shared with Tobie at MNB had just one computer, it was short a desk, and its Internet didn’t work.
“And the Internet connection is high-speed,” he added. “We will talk in my office,” Tem promised after he’d shown me around.
We sat down in his office, and for exactly one minute, he told me about the job I was interviewing for. It was as if he’d already made an offer, I’d already accepted, and this meeting was just a formality.
“You and Tobie will have your own talk show. You’ll interview subjects in English, and we’ll air it.”
“Our own talk show?”
“Yes, of course.” He said “of course” as if this was a foregone conclusion, and I’d simply missed a beat.
“You should get to work, then,” Tem said, and I did as I was told, although I was definitely going to have to make it up as I went along. A talk show? On air? Who would we interview? And how? Although I was really out of my depth this time, I was too excited to care. Surely I could figure it out along the way. Besides, back in the steppe, I’d made a commitment that it was time to cross my own intersection. And once again, it was now or never.
“Our own talk show?” I said to Tobie, still in disbelief, once I’d returned to what was now our office.
“Yeah, good move to come work here, I think,” he said as he organized a spaghetti pile of computer wires. From the looks of it, Tobie hadn’t thought twice about his decision to switch stations.
Looking at him quizzically but getting no reaction, I sat down at my desk and unpacked. If there had been a better idea about what to do with my morning, I didn’t know what it was. Since I worked only late afternoons and evenings at Mongolia TV, it wouldn’t be hard for me to do both jobs. Sure, the workload would be a lot to manage, but I hadn’t come all the way to Mongolia to relax. I’d come all this way to find a new career, to discover and pursue my passion, and suddenly it seemed as if it had found me.
“A talk show. With our own interviews,” I said, still amazed by our good fortune.
“Yup.”
“Like, on television?”
“Yup.”
“High-speed Internet access?”
“The best part,” he said, resuming his organizing.
“But what about Gandima?” I said finally.
“What about Gandima?” Tobie said in such a matter-of-fact way that I felt silly for even asking. “If we air our segments on Asiavision, they won’t air here in Mongolia. They’ll air in … Bhutan.”
He was right. In our corner, Tobie and I had a technicality, one that we would use to absolutely no avail when Gandima found out what we’d been doing behind her back. And what we were doing behind her back was starting up, theoretically anyway, a talk show that Tobie would produce and I would host while still working for Gandima at the state-owned television station. Perhaps this should’ve given us more pause than it did. Not to mention the fact that Tobie had not yet even informed Gandima of his decision to quit MNB.
Pamela Slutz, I said suddenly to myself. My hesitation had stuck around for only as long as it had taken me to get online, where I’d found the name of the American ambassador to Mongolia, who’d lived all over Asia, participated in nuke talks with the old USSR, and had helped set up Ulaanbaatar’s first shelter for abused women. Landing an interview with Ambassador Slutz would be ideal for our talk show, and the very best part about it might be the timing.
In just a few weeks, Naadam would begin. Every summer, Mongolia throws itself a massive party steeped in ancient traditions. Called Naadam, meaning “festival” or “games,” it is a carnival of Olympic sporting events, theatrical dance, knucklebone fortune-telling, and copious amounts of sliced sheep meat and vodka. And the Naadam of that summer was particularly important. Celebrating the eight hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Mongol Republic by Genghis Khan, the Mongolian prime minister had invited dignitaries and royalty from around the world to attend the opening ceremony.
Surely Pamela Slutz, who by then had been in Mongolia for several years, would lend our debut talk show the credibility it would need. And, if we managed to get her on air, we’d have a shot at getting other highprofile guests on air. Prince Andrew had also been invited to Naadam, and he’d surely be hanging in the same circle as Ambassador Slutz.
Right away, I marched to Tem’s office to get his approval for the interview request we’d have to put through the American Embassy.
“Of course,” Tem said without any hesitation. Just as I was about to get up, he stopped me. “There’s just one thing,” Tem went on. He wore an expression that suggested there might very well be a catch to the job that Tobie and I had just landed.
“Sure, anything,” I said.
“I understand you come from the banking world in New York City?” he asked. Tem spoke in flawless, crisp English with a hint of a British accent.
“Yes, that’s right,” I said evenly, wondering what on earth my banking background could lend to a talk show.
“A portion of TV5 is privately funded,” Tem began to explain. When he said, “funded,” I understood right away where this was headed. Rumor had it that Tem wasn’t just running TV5, but that he was also the finance director for a venture capital holding company that happened to have TV5 in its portfolio. He explained that a contact of his was hoping to build Mongolia’s first five-star hotel, then got right to the point.
“We need about a million dollars to make this happen.” Here Tem paused and my mental cogs went to work. “Do you think you can find someone on Wall Street to invest?”
“Possibly,” I said carefully, imagining how I might pitch to an old hedge fund client why he should be interested in building deluxe accommodation in the Mongolian steppe.
“Oh, and the Slutz interview?” Tem said. “Just type it up on official letterhead, and I’ll sign it right away.”
The thing is, I thought as I walked back to our office, this was all getting a bit complicated. Not only had I taken a second job behind Gandima’s back, but I’d just agreed to host a talk show that seemed to have one large and rather expensive string attached.
“Well,” Tobie said when I’d returned to our office. “What did Tem say?”
“He gave us the green light to interview the ambassador,” I said. There didn’t seem to be any point in telling Tobie the rest. Instead, I e-mailed a few contacts about Tem’s investment offer. After all, it couldn’t hurt to try to broker a deal for him, but it certainly could help my budding career in television.
CHAPTER 20
Betting The Ranch
For the first time since Mongolia became a market economy, budget income will decline in the coming fiscal year. If we do not make appropriate changes in reducing budget expenditures, the new tax law will yield no positive results. So, we have decided to begin work to reduce expenditures.
—Interview, Finance Minister N. Bayartsaikhan, MM Today broadcast
I’d heard it was Evan’s last week in the country, but I had more important things to think about. After all, I had a new job and an old job, and the old job didn’t know about the new job. It felt as if I were cheating on myself, with myself.
Hello Mongolia!, the name Tem had chosen for our talk show, was getting under way. Although I hadn’t heard back from any of my clients about investing in Tem’s project, Tobie and
I had been busy. While we waited for the American Embassy to respond to our request for an interview with Ambassador Slutz, Tobie and I decided to produce a feature on food. Mongolian food is something of a mystery to the outside world, and TV5’s partnership with Asiavision would give us the opportunity to tell seventeen member countries just what a typical Mongolian lunch was all about. Provided, of course, that a local restaurant manager would allow us to interview him and his staff.
So far, things were really looking up. Tem had hired a translator and driver to assist us in the interview process. And even though neither of them had shown up, Tem had loved our pitch, which was the most important thing.
Tobie and I hailed a cab and made it downtown just as lunch hour was beginning. Traffic had slowed to a crawl in the choking haze of the high noon sun, and the restaurants lining Peace Avenue were packed. We agreed the best way to approach our unannounced interview would be to find the busiest restaurant, which usually has the very best food, and wing it. It would take a few trial runs, surely, but eventually we’d get it done.
“Sain bain uu!” I said to a restaurant manager, who’d rushed to the door as soon as he’d seen Tobie’s camera. “We are from TV5 and—” I stopped talking when he shut the door in my face.
“Bish!” the next manager said, catching us before we’d even managed to get anywhere near the front door.
“Bish!” another said, crossing his hands in front of his face in an X.
Did these managers suspect we were from the Mongolian Health Department? Tobie and I were getting nowhere, and obviously we needed a different strategy. Sometimes the best thing to do in situations where you haven’t exactly been invited is to pretend the opposite. And that’s just what we did next.
“Sain bain uu!” I said, greeting another restaurant manager with an especially effusive hello. “We are here for a TV5 interview.”
At the mention of TV5, he seemed excited. At the mention of an interview, he seemed bewildered—exactly what Tobie and I had been hoping for. Spying our TV5 identification badges, the manager shrugged his shoulders as if he should’ve been expecting us all along, smoothed his tousled hair, and led us into the steaming heat of his restaurant’s chaotic kitchen. After he barked some orders at his cooks, one of them dutifully made her way toward us, wiping her hands on her apron as she did.
Tobie switched on the camera and started filming. While he panned the kitchen and food preparation, I memorized the new words I’d need to interview the chef standing beside me.
“You, cook, food, what?” I began.
“Eh?”
“Food, you, cook, what?” I said. Holding my Mongolian pronunciation dictionary at arm’s length, just outside the camera’s shot, I snuck a glance at it and tried again.
“You, buuz, cook?” I asked, using the Mongolian word for “dumpling.”
“Bish,” she said, puzzled. Tobie was still filming; I really needed to get to the point!
“Buuz?” I said finally, resorting to the one word I was sure we could communicate.
“Buuz!” she shouted, and cracked a wide grin. Pointing from a cook rolling out long sheaths of dough to another lifting the enormous round tin lid of a steam bath, the dumpling chef launched into a lengthy explanation as I nodded vigorously. With a jumble of consonants, she finished and looked at me expectantly.
“And that, everyone, is how Mongolian buuz dumplings are prepared,” I said, smiling into the camera.
“Maybe we can use those shots as B-roll,” Tobie said politely. “Best we get an interview with an English speaker from now on.”
There was one perfect place to do just that. Not only was there a restaurant inside an actual ger, right in the middle of downtown city life, but it served up a wide variety of dishes, and the staff did so in English. Mongolian cuisine offered up some pretty unusual items, and Tobie and I knew we could either labor over a stew of boiled organs for viewers, or we could showcase our absolute favorite dish, deep-fried meat pancakes. We chose the pancakes and decided to start filming with me drinking a bowl of salt-milk tea, a staple in homes from deep in the country to the heart of the capital.
“You made a face,” Tobie said. “Do it again.”
Unfortunately, I hate milk and always have. This has nothing to do with Mongolia and everything to do with the stale-breath aftertaste milk leaves behind. I’ve never willingly drunk it, not even as a baby, but I was determined to do so now—even if it was warm and salted.
“And this,” I gestured excitedly to the camera, “is salt-milk tea, famous in Tibet and here in Mongolia, made from hot water, salt, and milk!” With that, I took the tiniest sip I could from the steaming bowl in front of me and smiled cheerfully.
“Good enough,” Tobie said as the rest of our food order arrived. We’d ordered a cornucopia of our favorite Mongolian foods: deep-fried salty meat pancakes, roasted mutton, and pickled purple cabbage. We weren’t just working—we were feasting. Relishing the savory succulence, Tobie and I filmed and interviewed staff while diving greedily into our lunch.
As we walked out of the restaurant, we finally broached the subject of what we might say to Gandima. Tobie still hadn’t officially quit, although he hadn’t even stopped by MNB in more than a week, and I had been working both jobs without mentioning any of this to Gandima.
Although we were technically free agents, and we technically hadn’t done anything wrong by agreeing to work for TV5, we were absolutely moonlighting for Gandima’s competitor. It wasn’t right. Besides, I certainly didn’t want to be betting the ranch on a technicality.
“We’re going to get caught,” I said finally to Tobie, knowing that Gandima was never going to see our side of it, which barely made sense even to us.
That afternoon, with just an hour to spare before we had to be at work at MNB, Tobie and I decided to film one last interview. It would be our undoing. The just-one-more usually is. More specifically, it would be an orange microphone that would be our undoing.
The head brewmaster and his deputy greeted us warmly at the entrance to the Chinggis Khan Brewery. Named after Genghis Khan in the English transliteration of his name, the brewery was the only one in the country to officially carry the namesake of the country’s hero and founder. After the Soviets left, naming a product or an establishment after Genghis Khan became something of a hit. Pretty much everything had the Genghis Khan stamp, from streets to a brewery to vodka and chocolate brands to, supposedly anyway, toilet paper—until Parliament put its foot down and banned such a reference.
An old expat, Guenther Lengefeld was an unlikely brewmaster. Face scrubbed red-raw and clothing ironed to perfection, he seemed like an earnest man, maybe somebody’s doting grandfather. Years earlier, passionate about the process of making good lager, Guenther had left his life in Germany to travel to Ulaanbaatar to oversee beer production at Chinggis Khan Brewery. Aside from occasional visits back home, he had left pretty much everything behind in order to pursue his dream … to make beer.
Tobie and I were staring in silence at Guenther and Babbu, Guenther’s Mongolian deputy. Chattering at us in a combination of German and Mongolian, it was clear something that had been lost in translation, because we barely had a common language between the four of us.
“I studied German back at school,” Tobie said apprehensively. “I could try to translate into English what Guenther is saying in German while I’m filming.”
“And,” Babbu added, “I could help by translating the Mongolian words into English.”
By now, Tobie and I had grown accustomed to rolling with some pretty unusual punches while filming. Guenther and I looked at each other, shrugged our shoulders, and got started.
Presenting us with white smocks, shoe covers, and plastic shower caps, Guenther and Babbu instructed us to put them on before entering the sterile environment of the brewery. Grinning with infectious pride, Guenther barely waited for the red “on” light to flash on Tobie’s camera before telling us about how he makes Mongolia’s most f
amous brew.
“The hops,” Guenther said in German.
“Grain? Hops? I think?” Tobie translated.
“ … do not come from Mongolia,” Guenther went on, offering me a crunchy hop to taste.
Suddenly Guenther’s eyes shone wet as he choked back a swell of pride. This wasn’t the first time this had happened while I was asking someone about a subject he was passionate about. First, it had been Anne and Jonny O’Brien, the Irish cyclists. Then it was Bold, Quiza’s manager, and Quiza himself. It was the same even with Valerie, the melancholy French horse tracker. Each of them had been simply captivated. With Guenther and the rest, I’d begun to notice an unmistakable pattern of bald, exposed emotion, the look of someone so magnetically drawn to whatever it was they were doing in life that they simply couldn’t hold back their own raw reaction.
Guenther went on and nearly wept as he did so.
“The water,” Guenther added, pausing for Tobie to translate.
“The water …,” Tobie said.
“Is what makes Chinggis beer the finest in the country. It is from the Tuul, very cold.”
The Tuul splits Ulaanbaatar in two, carving a frigid path between its northern and southern halves. It’s a stream so cold and so fast that, even at a depth of just a few inches, it’s almost impossible to cross on foot. Attempting to walk across it is like trying to tiptoe across the raging path of a fully released fire hydrant.
While Guenther displayed an impressive array of dials, switches, levers, and cranks, I repeated back to him what Tobie told me he’d said.
“So, it’s all in the water then?”
Guenther looked at me blankly, so Babbu jumped in, explaining in Mongolian. They both looked at me and shrugged their shoulders, so Tobie tried again to bridge the divide.
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