Live From Mongolia

by Patricia Sexton

  It had been a long time since I’d had an entire plate of roughage, and I wasn’t about to get hung up on details. Throwing caution to the wind, I ate every last shred of the three enormous mounds of beet, cabbage, and carrot slaws—but in just a few hours, I’d meet them all again on their way back up. The slaw dressing had spoiled and I was about to come down with an unforgettable, whirlwind case of food poisoning.

  “Meg, I’m suddenly exhausted,” I gasped as we walked the few short blocks from the restaurant to the opera house. Feeling as if I were wading through wet cement, my every motion required effort. Chalking it up to heat and fatigue, I displayed my ticket to the usher and located our seats. We were going to see Three Fateful Hills, a local production. At least, I thought that was what we were seeing, and someone had told us that’s what we’d be seeing, but the translations we’d been given ranged anywhere from “Almond Hill of Sorrows” to “Among Three Hills of Sorrow” to “Three Fateful Lives.”

  No one we asked could seem to agree who had authored the production, but we’d overheard whispers of a certain Mr. Natsagdorj, Mongolia’s most famous playwright. But by this point, I was so confused and disoriented, I wasn’t even sure if we were seeing a ballet, an opera, or a play. Clutching my midsection, I swallowed deeply and shut my eyes tight.

  Just then an announcement over the loudspeaker caused two waves of commotion, first, after it was made in Mongolian, then, after it was made in English. The orchestra that had been scheduled to accompany the performance was unavailable that evening; a recording would replace it. Everyone in the audience seemed miffed, but as I grew foggier and drowsier, I hardly cared.

  It took awhile for the sound engineers to adjust the volume for the building’s acoustics, and while they did, I fell fast asleep. Midway through the first half, I woke up to the granular sound of scratching and shrill high notes, and at first I thought it was coming from my stomach. Instead, it seemed the engineers had employed the use of an old gramophone to replace the live orchestra.

  A few feet away, the usher’s cell phone rang persistently. Staring angrily at its screen while it continued to ring, she ignored it. All around us, there was a lot of noise and a lot of disturbance.

  “Meg, I don’t know how much you’re enjoying this, but I feel terrible. Maybe I’m just hungry?” Growling and burbling, my stomach was sending a message that I was completely misinterpreting.

  At intermission, we left.

  “How about the ‘spicy fried lamp’?” I suggested to Meg as we sat down at a nearby Chinese restaurant. Of course “lamp” meant “lamb,” and we ordered a plate of it to share. Spicy, greasy, and savory, we ate every bit. Afterward, the clawing in my stomach grew worse.

  “Maybe you need something cold, like ice cream,” Meg suggested.

  “Now that is a great idea,” I said. “Let’s get a brownie sundae at the American restaurant.” Explaining away the newer, more urgent pain as a reaction to the spicy lamb we’d eaten, I ordered a brownie sundae and two spoons.

  But then, suddenly, I knew. We needed to get home, now. Quickly, we paid for our ice cream and raced out of the restaurant and into a taxi, whose driver proceeded to extort our vulnerability for seven times the regular fare.

  “Batma,” I gasped as we flung open the front door of the apartment. “Sick!”

  She’d been chatting with friends and knitting, but immediately flew into action. Just as quickly, her friends left, Meg was sent to her room, and I was escorted into the bathroom and onto my knees. While I clutched the rim of the toilet, my head hanging inside, choking for breath between purges so violent that they made a rushing sound coming out of my mouth, Batma went to work in the kitchen.

  Boiling rice just long enough to soften it, she stirred in a spoonful of salt until it dissolved. Back in the bathroom, she strained the solids out and force-fed me a mug of the scalding, starchy mixture. Squatting behind me, she kneaded the muscles of my back and stomach, pushing aggressively upward on my guts, in the Mongolian version of the Heimlich.

  Again and again, I retched. I could taste and feel the “spicy fried lamp” coming back up, and it felt like I was vomiting the lamp’s broken glass. Tears streamed down my face; I was scared. I’d never been this sick. Again and again, Batma forced the salted rice water down my throat. Gagging as I swallowed, the excess dribbled out of my mouth and onto my clothes.

  Hours later, it was nearly dawn and we’d repeated the drinking-vomiting ritual until I was hollow and flaccid. Spent, with dried and caked rivulets of mascara staining my cheeks and pooling around my chin, I crawled, limp, to the bedroom. Wrapping a warm deel around me, Batma helped me into bed, tucking me beneath an extra set of blankets.

  “Patricia, za?” she asked. “Okay?”

  “Za,” I mumbled.

  “Patricia, za?” she persisted.

  I opened my eyes and she was holding a needle in front of my face. It was so long and its diameter so thick that there could have been an eye on the dull end of it, like the ones she’d been knitting with the night before.

  “What are you planning to do with that?” I asked her, now fully awake.

  “Awk you pon sure,” she said slowly, smiling gently.

  “What?”

  Producing the sterile package from which the needle came, proving it was neither used, nor for knitting, she repeated herself. “Awk you pon sure?”

  “Acupuncture?” I said.

  “Teem!” she said, “Yes!”

  I could have refused, but I certainly didn’t. Batma had just spent hours healing me; she’d all but saved my life. And it certainly didn’t hurt that she’d gone out of her way to show me that the needle was fresh. Holding up the little sword, Batma grabbed my hand and one by one, poked a hole in all ten fingertips. I bled onto the deel and the blankets and agony lingered awhile longer.

  Just a few hours later, I woke up. I felt fine. Yes, I was weak and considerably lighter, but fine. In the bathroom, I peered closely at myself in the mirror. My eyes were bloodshot and my face was a chalky shade of gray. But I was cured.

  Still stunned, I tried to thank Batma, but she looked at me as if nothing extraordinary had taken place. Trying to explain to her that food poisoning usually takes days to cure, and that most of the western world pops a lot of pills to keep everything in, rather than the Mongolian way of forcing everything out, I gave up and hugged her instead.

  Bewildered, she laughed at me and left for work, and miraculously, I did the same.

  Over the next few weeks, I anchored the news several more times. And not because Chinzo had a chronic case of food poisoning either, but because Gandima and Enkhtuya had decided to give me a real shot at the role. In fact, the anchor chair wasn’t even where Chinzo wanted to be. One afternoon, while we were preparing the English scripts for that night’s broadcast, he confided in me that he, too, had a dream. And his dream had nothing to do with journalism. Chinzo wanted to work for the Foreign Ministry, Mongolia’s version of the US State Department. As it turns out, he was really only moonlighting as Mongolia TV’s English anchor in order to make ends meet. In that moment, it seemed to me that, no matter where I turned, everyone I was coming in contact with had a burning desire to take their own leaps of faith. I hoped one day Chinzo would do just that, and I told him so just as he left for the day.

  “Maybe I will,” he said, looking at me intently as he gathered his belongings.

  “You are single?” Otgon, one of the four editors at the station, asked as I presented her with our completed scripts. Otgon appeared to be in her early thirties. She wore tinted eyeglasses, which lent her a mysterious air. Quiet and petite, she didn’t often have much to say, but when she did, her dry sense of humor managed to transcend languages and cultures.

  I nodded.

  “I am too,” she said with a sigh. “Mongolian men are, how do you say, hetzu?”

  “Hetzu!” I shouted triumphantly. Hetzu, the very first word that Batma had taught me earlier that summer, had become indispen
sable. Someone would try to explain a Mongolian word that was new to me, and I’d try to repeat it back to them. Shrugging our shoulders when the going got too tough, we’d invariably splutter a couple of hetzu’s to curse our inability to communicate. It means “difficult.”

  “You think Mongolian dating is hetzu?” I asked Otgon. “You’re lucky you don’t have Match.com,” I said, and then spent the next ten minutes trying to explain the concept of Internet dating to her. That night, our broadcast reported on perhaps the most hetzu of all Mongolian men, at least as far as serial philandering went.

  According to a 2003 article in National Geographic, “Genghis Khan a Prolific Lover, DNA Data Implies,” Genghis and his offspring were so successful impregnating women that as many as sixteen million males living today can trace their ancestry directly to him and his lineage. That’s like replacing the entire population of New York City with Genghis Khan’s descendants—twice. Even an accounting professor in Florida once claimed to share an ancestor with him. Mention this fact to any Mongolian and you’ll get a reaction, every time, of unabashed pride. And so it was with our evening report, which was, literally, a nod toward Genghis Khan’s fecundity in the sack.

  Earlier that day, President Enkhbayar had taken the time to invite some of those expatriate descendants on a road trip from Ulaanbaatar to Kharkhorum to establish a center for Mongolians of international descent. In other words, this proposed cultural center we were reporting on was a celebration of sexual prowess—and that wasn’t even the lead story! We’d also report on a corruption scandal, which had surprised me, considering how young a democracy Mongolia was (and still is).

  Best of all though, the script that evening was peppered with more consonants than a Finnish phone book: Tsetserleg, Jarkgalsaikhan, Enkhbayar, Kharkhorum, and Arkhangai, to name but a few.

  Before we went to air, I put on a traditional Mongolian jacket. It was a faded sky blue, the color of a winter day, and hemmed at the cuffs and edges with boxy black diagonals.

  “A study done on laws pertaining to nature reserves has revealed inefficiency and corruption,” I read from the teleprompter, wishing right then and there that I wasn’t leaving Mongolia in just a few weeks. But my days were numbered. I’d signed up for a summer internship, and by this time it was August; summer was nearly over.

  “Mongolian expats from around the world have gathered today to meet President Enkhbayar,” I read as we switched to a voice over I’d worked on with Chinzo. “An estimated eight million Mongolian descendants are living in a dozen countries around the world. Over a hundred representatives of Mongolian expatriate citizenship will arrive today in Ulaanbaatar, and then continue on to Kharkhorum, Mongolia’s ancient capital city, where the delegation plans to establish a center for international Mongolian nationalities.”

  The broadcast closed with a warning about the degradation of Mongolian forests, and I signed off. Although it wouldn’t be long before I left the country, I had one more adventure to embark upon, and that adventure would begin the next morning. I wasn’t finished with Mongolia just yet, and Mongolia wasn’t finished with me.

  CHAPTER 28

  The Gobi

  The vice director of Parliament presented Dr. Tara Tritara Karn with the anniversary award. Today at her home, Parliament member Gandi received the Thai doctors as guests in order to express her gratitude for their efforts.

  —Voiceover, MM Today broadcast

  From the moment I’d arrived in Mongolia, I’d been fascinated with the Gobi Desert. It’s hard not to be. Although one of the harshest, driest, most inhospitable places on Earth, it’s actually populated, and the few people living there happen to be some of the most hospitable you’ll ever meet.

  Covering half a million square miles, the Gobi is the largest desert in Asia and one of the largest on Earth. Ten times the size of the American Mojave, it’s just a tenth the size of the world’s biggest desert: Antarctica.

  Fifty million years ago, a little island we now call India collided with the Asian continent. The collision caused buckling, like two fenders in a slow-motion car crash, and this buckling of the earth’s crust eventually created the world’s tallest mountains—the Himalayas. In turn, those Himalayan peaks created what’s called a “rain shadow,” which is what happens to a region when a mountain range blocks off the path of rainstorms. And of course, because the Himalayas are so enormous, they’ve created a huge rain shadow, which has resulted in the large desert region; that is the Gobi.

  Through a small tour company in Ulaanbaatar, Tobie, Meg, and I had pooled our funds and arranged to be driven from the capital into the Gobi. For seven days, we’d be transported nearly one thousand miles in the scorching summer heat to embark upon one of the most spectacular adventures of our lives.

  It was dawn on a Saturday morning in August, one of my last in Mongolia, and I dressed quickly. In the kitchen, I boiled a pot of eggs, double-checked the contents of my backpack, and knocked on Meg’s door. It was unlike her to oversleep.

  “Meg? Are you ready?” I whispered, and she emerged. Her face was drawn and gray, and she looked as if she’d been up all night.

  “Food poisoning,” Meg said, and I understood: she actually had been up all night. But Meg wasn’t one to cower in the face of adversity, and she certainly wouldn’t do so now, not before our last adventure together. “Let’s go,” she said, hoisting her pack onto her back. Feebly, she limped out the front door, stoically refusing my offer to carry her bag for her.

  Outside, in a lot across the main road, we met our driver. Mongolian drivers, at least the kind who transport you on epic journeys such as this one, don’t simply transfer you from one destination to the next like some sort of livery cab chauffeur. On the contrary, they are tour guides, cooks, mechanics, language teachers, and sometimes even would-be therapists. They’re responsible for the health of their vehicle over incredibly rugged terrain, as well as the health and well-being of the travelers. Although it’s possible to fly to the Gobi, rather than drive, we’d paid for the longer version of the adventure, which was also the cheapest.

  “Sain bain uuuuu!” our driver called out, waving us toward him. Stout, stubby, and bespectacled, he had a head of thick gray hair and wore pulled-up knee-high socks and short pants, his generous waistband hiked up in the style of a Japanese tourist.

  “I am Dergui!” he said, energetically pumping our hands. Then, Tobie arrived, and Dergui helped us all deposit our packs into the open hatch of the trunk.

  “We go!” he declared after we’d settled into the van.

  “Food shop,” Dergui explained as he sped down the empty streets of Ulaanbaatar. “Buy food.” He held up a finger to underscore his point, and I marveled at the size of it—it looked like a toe! In fact, his entire hand was so chubby it looked as if he were holding a fistful of stumps. At any rate, the message was clear: we would need provisions before we headed south.

  Still ashen and weak, Meg stayed in the van with Dergui while Tobie and I shopped.

  Impatient to get on the road, we did so haphazardly: packets of Ramen noodles, bars of chocolate, bricks of cheese, a bag of walnuts, one tube of salami, green apples, and a box of iced lemon cookies. Tobie and I paid for our groceries and returned to the van, where Dergui inspected our wares. With one glance at our eclectic assortment of items, he raised a bushy eyebrow, shouted a little bit, and gestured wildly. Who knew what he was saying, but we were ready to go, so we got into the van and shut the door. Finally, Dergui shrugged his shoulders and followed suit.

  “Glvi!” Dergui said, punching his sausage-like fingers in the direction we were headed. The word “Gobi” actually means “desert,” and the Mongolians pronounce it with a gulp, like “glove” without the “o.”

  Because the Gobi is so dry, so vast, and so inhospitable to its guests, it doesn’t have many residents. One of the least populated places on our planet, there’s only half a person for each square kilometer. In other words, if you and your spouse and two kids are willi
ng to put up with the whole living-in-a-desert-thing, you can have yourself a five-mile backyard without any neighbors.

  And precisely because the Gobi is so dry, so vast, and so inhospitable, Dergui wasn’t just stating the obvious by pointing in the direction we were heading and announcing “Gobi.” He was gently warning us.

  “Clothes?” Dergui asked, turning around from his seat in the front to check that each of us had packed appropriately.

  “Yes,” we each confirmed. Tobie and I may not have purchased the most nutritional food for a week on the road, but we all knew better than to pack inappropriately. Even Meg had diligently done so after a night on her knees, getting her stomach pumped by Batma.

  Temperatures in Mongolia are the world’s most extreme. But what makes the Gobi unique is how normal its extremes are. On any given day, the thermostat can fluctuate by an average of fifty-five degrees. After spending the day sweating in the dead heat of summer, you could end up wondering if you’d tucked in on a winter night.

  Dergui made an abrupt turn, drove southwest for a time, and then hesitated at a fork in the road. Studying the sky, he squinted, studied it some more, and then hung a left, putting the van into all-terrain mode. He never once used a map during our trip; the sun and his wristwatch would be his guides. Rolling and bumping along, fields of bright yellow flowers whizzed past, looking like a faint and careless brushstroke on a bare canvas. Wispy cotton clouds off in the distance masked the sun in gauze.

  Hours later, Dergui drove up a hillside and parked. “Lunch,” he mimed silently, pushing one of his ten thumbs into his mouth. Tobie and I spread a sheet along the lip of the gently rolling hill and set up a picnic. Meg finally appeared from the nap she’d been taking in the van’s backseat. Color had returned to her face, and she was ready to eat again. While we lunched, nibbling on apples and cheese and the boiled eggs I’d brought from home, Dergui introduced us to our first artifact.