How Does One Dress to Buy Dragonfruit? True Stories of Expat Women in Asia

by Shannon Young

  Giving and release are the keys to a partnership between rider and animal.

  When you "give,” you lighten your hold on the horse. You trust it to find its balance, speed, and footing without running away with you, and maybe more importantly, without veering off course. Along the way, you develop the skill to keep yourself in balance, and to move with the horse in a way that doesn’t make its own natural movement difficult. Giving is a release of the tense control that makes you feel safe on a horse’s back. For most people, it’s one of the most difficult lessons to learn: a gradual comfort with letting go.

  I learned this lesson at thirty-four, on my first trip to Mongolia.

  I had been nearly five years out of an eight-year relationship. I had started riding horses again, one of the many things I returned to when I found myself on my own. I first rode horses at fourteen, and briefly in college, but gave it up for nearly a decade as the priorities of a partnered life outweighed my solo interests. Returning to the things I once loved played a vital role in redefining my individual identity. I felt that so much had been lost in our relationship merger.

  I was coming to a crossroads at a job that I loved but which left little time for anything outside of its gravitational pull. For seven years I had worked for a small publishing, art, and retail company. It was a ground-up operation that required dedication, long hours, and creative energy, and had started to define my social as well as professional life. I curated art shows (for several years, thirty-six a year), worked with young artists, oversaw the operations of our stores and galleries in three cities, wrote and edited for our magazine and website, and worked closely with the owner of the company to see our way through the recession. I didn’t make a lot of money doing what I loved, but I kept doing it. I cashed in on the recognition and social perks to keep the fears of financial insecurity at bay. I spent twenty-four hours a day thinking about work or the people I worked with. Work always came first. I was passionate about what I did, but I also knew that there was more to who I was. Being consumed by my career was starting to feel unhealthy.

  Something within—something registering larger than all the other shifts on my metaphysical Richter scale—was begging for a change. My search for self needed to move beyond daydreams and late-night confessionals with best friends. I had to go somewhere.

  I chose Mongolia as my solo vacation destination because of the horses, but it also seemed like the right place to let go. All of my riding experiences had been in the ring and focused on lessons or competition. I wanted the freedom of open steppes.

  I expected a break from the workaday grind and plenty of adventure. I got those. What I didn’t bargain for was a complete life reboot. In my twenty days there, I remembered what it was to be master of my own agenda. I had no one to take care of, make decisions for, or oversee. I just got to be in charge of me, and I rediscovered how happy I could be with only myself for company. I walked city streets with people who looked like my own Korean and Portuguese reflection, a Eurasian blend of stocky builds and almond eyes. I forgot how to doubt myself out of taking chances, and I fell in love with this new-to-me brave woman I met along the way. After ten days on my own, my best friend (looking to fill the last pages of her passport) joined me.

  We drove out to the countryside with our translator, Heegii, to Terelj National Park in a Russian jeep driven by Agii, a man with golden eyes, a gentle voice, broad shoulders, and close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. He graciously made many stops along the road to Terelj so we could take pictures with camels, gawk at herds of horses gathered on the hillsides, and walk through the above-ground tombs of a Kazakh cemetery. Agii smiled shyly as I giggled. I was girlishly thrilled to be in the passenger seat beside him. He was seemingly amused by the way we took everything in.

  Heegii did his best to tell us more about what we were seeing. Agii always stayed with the jeep, watching us as we picked our way around the tombs, nervously ignorant of local cemetery customs. We’d climb back in the jeep, giddy about each passing kilometer across the steppes bringing us closer to our adventure.

  It was spring, and the land and its livestock were still recovering from a very harsh winter. The landscape a monochromatic rolling sea of yellow-and-brown grass under a gigantic blue sky. Only up close could you see bits of green coming up through the undergrowth and pushing out through the bark of spindly tree branches. The livestock we passed were shedding their winter coats in uneven clumps, and their ribcages pressed out they combed the grassy hillsides looking for something to eat. Every living thing we saw was eager for the Mongolian summer, a season I had only seen in guidebooks and on postcards at the souvenir shops. Summer grasses are vibrantly green, tall, and lush. Despite the yellows and browns around us, there was something electric about being in the countryside on the cusp of the season. We felt as if we were in on a secret, seeing the behind-the-scenes version of what nearly half a million tourists a year come to see. The tourist camps we passed were mostly empty as their season still had another month before it opened. We felt as if we had Mongolia all to ourselves.

  Terelj is the most immediate rangeland outside of the densely packed, polluted capital, Ulaanbaatar. Soviet-era cement-block apartment buildings stand in stark contrast to the modernity that foreign investment in mining has brought to the country. Journalists write the same stories and share the same photos of Mongolians in traditional dress walking past the Louis Vuitton store at the edge of the city’s central square. It’s hard to say which is the "real” Mongolia, the capital occupied by sixty percent of the country’s population, or the nomadic countryside and its traditions—the national pride of its citizens. I was captivated by both.

  Agii left us with Heegii at the ger (traditional home) camp of a nomadic herding family. Our guide was Zurigoo, a twenty-something herdsman whose family supplemented their income by hosting tourists looking for an authentic nomadic experience. They were used to people coming in and out of their home. Despite knowing that I was just one of many to pass through, the family’s genuine warmth and hospitality made me feel instantly at home. The matriarch, Munkhtulgaa, fed us constantly, inquired about our lives at home, tried her hand at matchmaking, and tucked us in at night.

  The trek took us around the valley where Munkhtulgaa’s family lived. We rode for six to eight hours a day, stopping to make a modest lunch in forest clearings or beside small streams. We napped in the grass after lunch, watching herds of horses amble by, sniffing the air as they passed us. We spent most nights sleeping under the stars, our horses staked for the night twenty feet from our tent, but we also stayed with other relatives when the temperatures were too cold.

  When we returned from our trek, we celebrated our birthdays with a big bonfire beside the stream that ran near Munkhtulgaa’s camp. That night, as we slept, she covered me with her son’s deel (the traditional clothing of herders) in the middle of the night when the ger stove’s fire had died out. Mongolian hospitality is what has kept the nomadic culture alive for centuries, and it’s what makes many people want to stay. At the end of the trek, I made a promise to return.

  I went back to Los Angeles with my batteries fully recharged, but with very little interest in re-engaging with the demands of my life in the city. Nothing seemed worth getting angry or stressed out about. Everything seemed trivial. In dead stops on the jam-packed freeway I’d find myself staring up at the sky and hating how small it seemed compared to the limitless skies above Mongolia. Everything around me made me think back to my trip. It was becoming a problem.

  I bought the horse I had been leasing before I left for Mongolia, knowing that he would provide a connection to what I had experienced there. Horse ownership was the perfect excuse for my shifting priorities, something that not everyone around me was comfortable with. He became the reason why I couldn’t make it out to bars and parties ("sorry, have to get up early to feed the horse”), why I passed up dinners ("sorry, penny pinching to keep the horse housed and fed”), and why I finally stopped w
orking sixty-plus-hour work weeks (no apologies needed). He was more than a cover for the changes, though; he truly was my connection to what I felt was slipping away with each day that passed.

  There was a fullness and peace I felt in Mongolia, and every minute back home made those feelings feel further and further away. I was terrified. I had fallen so completely in love with the woman I was there, and I didn’t want to think about slipping back into routines and the insecurities that maintained them.

  I had to make good on my promise to the Mongolians I had met, but more importantly, I needed to go back to see if I could recover what had been lost. I needed to know if what I was still feeling about Mongolia was just an extended version of post-vacation blues, or if there was something bigger happening. I made plans to go back in the spring. I made arrangements with the translator I had traveled with, and counted down the days until I was back in Mongolia.

  I had booked a short trip purely for follow-up analysis. Five days total. The morning after my arrival, the translator I had the year before showed up at my hotel with the same incredibly handsome driver who had taken us to Terelj, Agii. The translator, Heegii, knew I liked the driver and had hired him again as a surprise. Just as I had before, I sat in the passenger seat blushing and making translated small talk. Agii spoke only a few shy words of English. This time I pried. I was feeling braver than I had last time and I wanted to know how a man this incredibly good-looking spent his time. I wanted to know all about this guy, so I asked blunt personal questions, and after he answered them, he asked the same questions of me. All of this conversation was filtered through Heegii, and despite how shy I could tell Agii was, he became more confident as our drive and conversation carried on. He helped me pick out food and supplies to bring to the nomadic family in Terelj. We were clumsily flirting as best we could.

  Eventually we got to the family I had stayed with before. They were happy to see me—surprised, but happy. After they had filled a recycled Fanta bottle with fresh cow’s milk for Agii to take home (they liked him as much as I did), Agii and Heegii left for Ulaanbaatar. I settled in for three days of trying to help with as much work around the camp as I could. I was sad to see Agii go. It was a long goodbye, which is taboo in Mongolia, but there was still a lot we both wanted to know about each other.

  I had an incredible time with the family. Armed with a dictionary and a couple of phrasebooks, I lived like a second daughter to Munkhtulgaa, helping to clear dung from the sheep and goat pens in the mornings, sweeping the ger after breakfast, fetching water from a hole I had to kick open in the frozen river, collecting fallen branches for the fire from the nearby forest’s edge, washing dishes after each meal, and helping to take care of my "sister’s” one-year-old baby, so that she could tend the sheep and prepare meals for her husband. Everything felt so natural and familiar. I imagined myself living this life, but I knew I probably couldn’t hack it. I also constantly daydreamed about Agii, wondering if he had done this kind of work. I imagined he had since he seemed so comfortable when he had been there. That just made him all the more appealing.

  On the second day, Heegii called to see how things were going, and to pass on a message from Agii. Agii wanted to know when I would be flying back to the US after he was scheduled to pick me up from Terelj. He wanted to spend more time with me. I left Terelj one day early so that I could spend my last day and a half with Agii in Ulaanbaatar. It was the best decision of my life.

  I had already fallen in love with Mongolia. I had gone back to make sure it wasn’t just a crush, and now there was Agii, and it felt a lot like love as well. I had spent the first half of my thirties believing I wasn’t capable of love, and now I’d done it twice in a row. For me the key to falling in love was learning to love myself. Mongolia opened the door for me, and it brought me Agii just to show how generous it truly was.

  For the second time, I left Mongolia in tears, devastated to be leaving a place that felt more like home than any place I’d ever known. It was clear to me now that it was home to my heart, and that I needed to seriously consider what that meant.

  I got back home re-energized but troubled. I knew now that what I had felt on my first trip was real, and that with all the changes I had made in my life, there was very little justification for ignoring the strength of that call. How could I be happy settling for any less? What would I be willing to sacrifice?

  Agii and I had been in regular contact since we had said goodbye at Chinggis Khaan International Airport. He called me one morning, just a few days after I made it back home. I cried tears of joy when I realized that he felt the same way I did. We ended up speaking by phone or Skype at least once a week for the next ten months. We made tentative plans to be together again.

  I spent the next ten months trying to purge myself of a life in Los Angeles that I had become very fond of. I sold and gave away the things I had surrounded myself with, the things that filled my home and that I had always believed defined me. What I came to realize, as I revisited memories of acquiring these things, was that they were monuments to my past. I didn’t need them to stand in for me anymore. I was happy with who I was presently, without needing collections to legitimize myself. Every experience had made its contribution, but not every experience needed artifacts to preserve their memory.

  The horse I had sacrificed so much to make mine, who had given me so much more than I could ever give to him, and who had become the most meaningful part of my life, was probably the hardest to let go. I was in denial about not being able to take him with me. After much hand-wringing and tears, the perfect buyer came along. He now lives the life he was destined to live, if he wasn’t meant to live it with me.

  The life I’d known was leaving me in bits and pieces. I cried, I reminisced, and I had lapses of regret, but above it all I felt myself getting closer to feeling whole. As I cleared away the clutter of who I had always believed I was, I was able to get a better look at who I had become and I saw how much room I had made to keep growing.

  My plans with Agii became more and more concrete as my house emptied and my debts were cleared. We talked about how we spent our days apart, but we talked more about a future together. Our Skype sessions were aided by Heegii. Speaking through a third party took getting used to, but we were able to build on what we had started in Mongolia.

  Eventually, February arrived, and it was time for me to go. I’d purchased my plane ticket, and said my goodbyes. I was eager to get "home” again. I packed everything I had left into nine giant suitcases and went on my way to start a new life in Mongolia.

  After a day of being stuck at Russia’s Sheremetyevo airport, I finally made it back to Ulaanbaatar. I hadn’t showered in three days, and I was hung over from half a bottle of duty-free whiskey I had shared with another delayed passenger, but I came alive again when our plane touched down. Agii had waited patiently, and was there beyond the doors of the customs checkpoint, as nervous and ecstatic as I was.

  We drove to Darkhan to start our life together. His family was waiting for us when we got to our one-bedroom apartment on the first floor of a Soviet-era complex. I was received as a new bride in a traditional reception, and his family was eager to meet this stranger who had come such a long way to be with their Agii. It was the warmest, most loving start I could have imagined. Milk was poured on the threshold, ensuring a clean, fresh start to our life together. Each family member, eldest to youngest, embraced me with an inhale of each cheek, and the matriarchs rushed me to the bedroom to dress me in a new cashmere sweater, camel-wool vest, and the white-and-red beaded headdress of a bride. I was shy and exhausted, but followed along.

  We were married in May. My parents and two dear friends came out for the wedding and to see where I was living.

  I gave birth to our daughter at the local hospital in December. While my own mother wasn’t able to be there, every single woman in Agii’s family was there to support, teach, and care for me.

  Not a single thing about my life today i
s what I would have imagined before I first stepped foot in Mongolia. I learned to let go, give up the reins, and trust in myself and the world around me. I wrapped my head around the idea that dreams can be your present. Friends have said that I’ve inspired them to take more risks, and to do a better job of listening to their hearts. I wish that they could let go completely, but I also know what it takes to get there. I tell them there’s no rush. Whatever’s on the other side of trust will wait.

  Michelle Borok is an American living in Darkhan, Mongolia with her husband and daughter. She moved to Mongolia from Los Angeles in 2012. When she’s not editing The UB Post, or teaching English, she’s spending time in the countryside with her Mongolian family. She writes about her life in Mongolia at Wonton Cruelty and also contributes to Giant Robot, Roads & Kingdoms, and other arts and culture websites.

  AN AWKWARD PHONE CALL

  By Christine Tan

  I’m in bed at 12:20 pm, a perfectly fine hour to be in bed when your husband is away on assignment and you spent a sleepless Shanghai night watching the entire third season of Downton Abbey and crying over a baby’s birth and a mother’s death and good storytelling. A harsh buzzing from the nightstand informs me that my cell phone is alive with the desire of Someone Seeking Christine. The unknown number flashes, a random string of digits that mean nothing to me though my somewhat Asperger’s mind tries, in that split second before I answer, to discern some meaningful pattern in the digits.

  "Hello? Wei?” I say, prepared to end the call if it’s a telemarketer with some great deal I might contemplate falling for if only I were fluent in Mandarin Chinese.

  "Is this Chen Hui Ling.”

  If there is an inflection in his voice that makes this statement a question, it is lost on me. I am too surprised by this lightly accented, firm male voice speaking my Chinese name, a piece of personal information no one uses except Ma and Pa. He repeats my Chinese name, and what can you say to a strange voice that asks if that private Chinese name is yours, the three components rolling off his tongue like he possesses it, like he relishes that knowledge, that he is almost absolutely sure that you are she and he has found you?