by Mitch Moxley
It was May 2009, and Ulaanbaatar had four seasons each day. Morning was spring, the afternoon summer, evening fall, and night was winter—frigid, dark, and depressing. The city was dusty and run-down. It was home to just over a million people, with half the population living in outlying yurt slums, which had inadequate everything—plumbing, services, electricity. Beyond the capital was a sprawling country of grassland, desert, and forest, home to a largely nomadic population.
Jim and I woke early and walked from Peter’s apartment to Peace Avenue, which cuts Ulaanbaatar in two, running the length of the city. We were an odd couple, Jim and I. He was eighteen years my senior, closer to my mother’s age than mine. He was bald with a stocky build, and he wore a brown leather jacket over loose button-down shirts, with baggy Levi’s and big black hiking boots. He had a calm demeanor that put people at ease, and he was one of the most genuinely kind people I’d ever met. When we worked together, I always wanted to get what we needed quickly and move on. Jim, on the other hand, was slow and methodical. He wanted to take a thousand pictures when all we needed was one. It drove me insane. But somehow we made it work, pushing each other until we got the stories done and having great adventures in the process. He became one of my closest friends in China.
In late morning we met our translator, Zaya, who had been referred to us by a Beijing photographer. We had e-mailed him before our arrival and arranged to meet in a café in central Ulaanbaatar. He wore a T-shirt and baggy jeans, and was his mid-twenties with a chubby, friendly-looking face. I asked him a few questions to gauge his English and wondered if it was good enough for the assignment, but we were anxious to get started and didn’t want to waste time finding a new fixer. We told Zaya our story ideas and offered to pay him twenty-five dollars a day, plus more if he drove us around in his beat-up car. He didn’t speak much during our meeting, and I was skeptical that he’d be able to get anything done at all. I mistook his easygoing demeanor for laziness.
Zaya, it turned out, would be crucial to everything we did in Ulaanbaatar. Within an hour, in fact, he had a meeting set up with the leader of Mongolia’s neo-Nazis.
“How did you find him so quickly?” I asked as we drove down Peace Avenue toward the department store where we were scheduled to meet the neo-Nazi.
“Ulaanbaatar is small place.” He shrugged.
We met Zagas Erdenebileg, the fifty-year-old self-proclaimed leader of Dayar Mongol (All Mongolia), one of the country’s most prominent neo-Nazi groups, in a back alley behind the State Department Store. The alley was empty and shaded by the department store’s back wall. When we pulled in, he was already there, leaning against a car and looking at his mobile phone. Zagas was middle-aged, short, with an average build, black hair, and a pockmarked face.
Zaya introduced us from the driver’s-side window and invited Zagas to take a seat in the passenger seat of the car. The neo-Nazi leader sat in the car and started talking, and he kept talking for the better part of an hour. He refused to answer any questions directly and instead went into a long and convoluted history of Mongolia and the Nazis.
He talked. Zaya translated. I scribbled in my notebook.
“If our blood mixes with foreigners’, we’ll be destroyed immediately,” said Zagas, who had run for parliament, unsuccessfully, four times. He loathed the Chinese, accusing them of involvement in prostitution and drug trafficking, and revered Chinggis Khaan (aka Genghis Khan), who he said influenced Adolf Hitler, another man he professed to admire. I asked him if he considered his adoption of the beliefs of a regime that singled out and executed people with “Mongol” features from among Soviet prisoners of war to be in any way ironic. “It doesn’t matter.” He shrugged. “We share the same policies.”
His rant continued uninterrupted for forty-five minutes. I got bored and doodled in my notebook. When he was through, we exited the car to say goodbye. As Jim snapped a few shots, another car pulled up in the alley, driven by a young man with a shaved head, a swastika tattoo on his chest, and a bullet on a chain hanging from his neck. This was Shar Mungun-Erdene, the twenty-three-year-old leader of the two-hundred-member Mongolian National Union. Whereas Zagas came across as a bit of a buffoon, Shar was intimidating. Maybe it was his outfit, or his youth, but he struck me as someone who was no stranger to violence.
We asked him for an interview, and he agreed to meet us the next day.
He drove up to a fountain in a public square where we’d arranged to meet, and Jim, Zaya, and I crammed into his compact two-door. I was nervous as I got in his car. The square was empty, and it crossed my mind that Shar and his storm troopers might want to teach us a lesson about Mongolia’s neo-Nazis.
I asked him about his group. The MNU, he told us, took vigilante action against lawbreaking foreigners, mainly Chinese. When I asked him what kind of action, he replied, “Whatever it takes so that they don’t live here.” He was trying to convey a macho vibe, but soon enough he came across as an overzealous adolescent, and it didn’t take long before any intimidation I had felt about him was gone. He was, I realized, a kid—a misguided kid. At one point he opened his laptop to show us pictures of himself and his neo-Nazi buddies. Beside folders titled “Guns” and “Skinheads” were others with names like “My Car” and “Mom in Japan.”
It was difficult to assess how real—or how dangerous—the neo-Nazi movement was. There had been violence, but it was sporadic. Around town, neo-Nazi graffiti was common. “Shoot the Chinese” was spray-painted on a brick wall near a movie theater. We saw a pair of swastikas and the words “Killer Boys . . . ! Danger!” on a fence in a yurt neighborhood. There was even a Nazi-themed bar, complete with SS wax figures and other Third Reich kitsch. Jim and I went there to check it out early one evening. Again, I was nervous about entering a Nazi bar, and I walked in with some hesitation. But within a few moments, I realized that it was no neo-Nazi hangout, just a grossly offensive theme bar, a twisted, Nazified Planet Hollywood. (The bar owners confirmed that the motif was just a gimmick.) We drank our beers, paid the bill, and left.
A social worker we interviewed told us the movement didn’t enjoy large support, and it would likely subside as more Mongolians were exposed to the outside world. But the threat appeared to be real, at least for now. One night at a bar we met a twenty-five-year-old American who told us a story about the time he was accosted by neo-Nazis at a nightclub because he was cavorting with a Mongolian woman. “After they showed me a swastika, my initial thought was, This isn’t going to be a normal fight. They wanted to send a message,” he said. As things escalated, the Mongolian girl he’d been hitting on ushered the young American from the bar and calmed his accosters, saving him from what might have been a savage beat-down.
Beat-downs, in fact, were not at all uncommon in Ulaanbaatar. At night there was the edge of menace in the air, and several people—including locals we met—warned us of Mongolians’ fondness for fisticuffs. One night we went to a nightclub, and every few minutes a fight broke out, as if for sport.
Going out in Ulaanbaatar could be a surreal experience, as we learned the first weekend we spent in the city, while visiting Amrita Nightclub with Peter, the English photographer who was letting us crash at his apartment, and a few of his friends. It was one of those nights when I felt like I was out just for the sake of being out, forcing back vodkas and orange juice, and stuck somewhere in the gray haze between boozy fatigue and drunkenness. The club was loud and gaudy, filled with Mongolian girls in short skirts and potbellied Russians in bad suits. The type of place you’d expect to find in a city like, well, Ulaanbaatar.
Jim and I were about to call it a night; we were tired after a full week of reporting. I took a last sip of my drink. “Let’s go,” I said.
As we stood to leave, the music stopped and a team of busboys cleared the dance floor. Peter grabbed my arm and whispered in my ear.
“You’ll want to stick around for this,” he said.
From backstage, two young women in nurse outfits emerged. Within two minutes, they were naked, swaying lazily on the sticky dance floor to the Black Eyed Peas.
Interesting, I thought.
The nurses bowed to the audience and exited backstage. Replacing them were two child acrobats, one a teenager and the other ten or eleven, both wearing sparkling green spandex. The teenager lay down on a bench and flipped the younger one in various loops and spins. The kid was a real showman. Between stunts he ran to the front of the dance floor with a huge smile and cupped his hand over his ear, Hulk Hogan–style, soaking up the applause.
Next up was another stripper, this one in a leather dominatrix outfit. She pulled a French traveler from our group onto the dance floor, sat him down in a chair, and gave him a lap dance. Later, she led him to the stage, pressed him against a pole, and removed his pants. The crowd went wild.
The craziest part had yet to even begin, and I had come to expect nothing less from this city. After all, Ulaanbaatar was a place with a Nazi bar, where the only chain restaurant was a Kenny Rogers Roasters, a town where you risked a beating just by stepping out of your front door.
In keeping with the city’s Nazi theme, a Mongolian man appeared onstage wearing a black leather vest with a swastika on the back. He blew fire, swallowed a sword (with some difficulty), and lay on a bed of nails while his female assistant smashed bricks on his chest with a sledgehammer. After each stunt, he tossed his mane of black hair over his shoulder and took a mammoth swig of vodka.
For a finale, he ate a lightbulb, holding the microphone to his cheek so the audience could hear the glass crunching between his molars.
With that, my mood had changed. I poured another vodka and orange juice and leaned toward Peter.
“That,” I said, “was awesome.”
We spent two weeks in Mongolia in all, and by the end of the second week our stories had come together. Jim and I were burnt-out and were ready to fly back to Beijing. With a few days left before our flight, I e-mailed an editor I knew at Time magazine about our Nazi story. The magazine accepted the piece. We sold the rest of our stories as well, and we actually made decent money from the trip. We proved to ourselves that this could actually be done, and the last year of toiling as a freelance journalist all of a sudden felt justified.
Once all of our interviews were wrapped up, Jim and I went out of town for a weekend, staying in a yurt and relaxing for two days in a national park—hiking, riding horses, eating long meals with the family that provided our accommodation.
The following Monday, we bade the crazy Mongolian capital farewell. Zaya drove us to Chinggis Khaan International Airport and we flew home.
Back in Beijing, Tom and I started looking for a new apartment. If the city was going to be my home, at least for the time being, I wanted certain comforts. More than anything, I needed out of Comrade Wu’s claustrophobic rental apartment.
Among the creature comforts you are forced to give up as a foreigner in China—sanitary public toilets, reliably safe food, properly fitting clothes—the most basic are domestic. Unless you’re on an expat package with a multinational company, most foreigners in the city live in Chinese-style apartments like any normal Beijinger. The quality of these places varies greatly.
Compared to many, Comrade Wu’s place was a steal for a three-bedroom, centrally located apartment in Beijing. But it seemed to be falling apart before our eyes. Cupboard doors were coming off their hinges in the kitchen; strange smells emanated from the constantly plugged drain; the washing machine was destroying my clothes. I could feel every spring in my fifty-dollar mattress. I wanted something better. I wanted sunlight, a microwave, a dryer, a bed that didn’t feel like a medieval torture instrument. I wanted something more comfortable, something . . . Western.
Tom and I decided to look for a new place together, and we enlisted the help of a small army of real estate “agents” found on various expat listings websites. Each agent seemed to ignore our every request: Two-bedroom apartment? Here’s a one-bedroom. Oh, don’t worry, you can use the living room as a second bedroom. Just hang a curtain! Big windows/lots of sunlight? How about tiny, barred windows/no sunlight? No more than 5,000 yuan? Here’s one for 10,000 yuan.
Meanwhile, I broke the news to Comrade Wu that we were moving out. He and I met in the apartment complex’s rental office. When I told him, he got out of his seat and shut the door. He wasn’t pleased, so I lied and said I was moving back to Canada temporarily.
“For financial reasons,” I told him, in Chinese.
When I asked about the damage deposit, he said I shouldn’t expect it back because of the broken air conditioners and the kitchen cabinet doors. I explained that both problems had existed from around the time I’d moved in. Comrade Wu sighed.
“Mi Gao, we have good guanxi,” he said—good relations. “But your roommate, Tom, I don’t like him. He doesn’t get up off the couch when I come in. He goes to his room. You call me comrade because we’re comrades. Tom and I aren’t comrades.”
I apologized on Tom’s behalf, even though I didn’t actually believe he had committed any of Comrade Wu’s perceived slights. I said I was sorry, too, about the damage to the apartment. By accepting responsibility for the damage, even though it clearly wasn’t my fault, I was giving Comrade Wu, my landlord, face. After more than two years in China, I was finally learning. I had moved over another notch on the Foreigner/Chinese Identity Spectrum.
In the end, he returned half the deposit.
I waited in the office as he went to get the money. He came back in, sat down, and slid the cash across the table. I reached to pick it up and he grabbed my hand and looked me in the eyes.
“Mi Gao,” he said. “We’re comrades.”
“Comrades,” I agreed.
I stood and shook his hand. He held it for a moment, and then I turned and walked out of the office. It was the last time I saw Comrade Wu.
Eventually an agent showed Tom and me an apartment in a building called Sun City, near Dongsishitiao subway station and just outside the east second ring road. The apartment had a spacious living room and a big bay window overlooking the second ring. It had a dryer, a bathtub, a microwave, hardwood floors, antique furniture, two televisions, and soft lighting. I loved it. It was a bit more expensive than we had wanted, but nothing a few more voice-recording hours couldn’t handle.
We signed a year lease.
That summer was epic. It was better even than the summer before, the Olympic summer. I had a big, diverse group of international friends: they were writers, photographers, filmmakers, NGO workers, Americans, Europeans, Chinese, all staking their claim in the world’s biggest boomtown.
Something funny had happened to Beijing in the wake of the Olympics. There was no exodus of foreigners, no long-term post-Olympic depression. The city didn’t all of a sudden become dull, boring, and forgotten, as so many, including myself, had predicted. In fact, it got better. People from all over the world were arriving every day to learn the language, explore the city and country, and pursue opportunities that didn’t exist back home because of a stagnant economy. People were opening new bars and restaurants. They were creating art, writing books, making films. They were teaching yoga, building lives, and making money.
I was also finding my place in post-Olympics Beijing. I was more or less making the progress I wanted to in my career, and my confidence as a journalist and writer was growing.
There was a unique energy to Beijing. It was a city emerging as a world capital. It was exhausting to live in a city that frantic, but it was also intoxicating. We were out all the time because we didn’t want to miss anything. We were a part of something special, something historic. Beijing felt like Paris must have in the 1920s. Anybody who would be anybody was there.
But there was a troubling element to the expat experience, as well. We were part of a floating generation. Guo Li, my teacher/frien
d/therapist/shoulder-to-cry-on, once told me about the term bei piao. It literally translates to “Beijing floaters” and describes a person adrift, or floating, in the city. It was meant to apply to young Chinese, like Guo Li, who came to the capital for school or work and ended up in a life that could sometimes feel meaningless and lonely, in which you are constantly stressed about relationships and money, far from friends and family and with an uncertain future.
Increasingly, the term could be applied to foreigners like myself: those who came for the short term but ended up staying much longer than planned, addicted to the ease of life, the adventures, the constant stimulation. But the expat existence could be deceiving. Friendships, for example, could be fleeting. Especially during summer there seemed to be an endless stream of going-away parties. The more good friends that left, the more desensitized I became. There were good people in Beijing, definitely, but it was hard to develop friendships like those I had at home, friendships built over years of shared history.
And despite all the fun we were having—I was having—a certain sadness was always there, lingering just below the surface, and sometimes it would take over and stay for days. I felt it when I worked alone at coffee shops and when I stayed home at night to watch movies. I felt it in Uncle Wang’s studio, where I suffered long, soul-destroying hours of doing nothing but reading texts and thinking. I would become so full of regret—regret at being so far from my family. Regret for letting go of Julia, for pursuing selfish goals. I often wondered if it would be worth it in the end. Living in Beijing felt at times like a self-imposed exile.
But I was addicted to China now, for better or worse, and even though I felt like the life I was leading had an expiration date—April 13, 2010, my thirtieth birthday—I still wasn’t ready to give it up. One day in Chinese class with Guo Li, we studied a chapter that included a discussion about babies, and it gave me the chills. The thought of having kids, even at twenty-nine, terrified me.