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On June 30th, 2009, several of the foremost members of Mongolia's literary community gathered (following a typically last-minute venue change from the Zanzabar Gallery) in the Xanadu Gallery north of the State Department store for an afternoon of poetry with renowned British poet Ruth O'Callaghan.

The event was an appropriate follow-up to the event that had taken place almost exactly a year before at the Khan Bank theater with American poet David Lehman, which several of the same people (U.S. Ambassador Mark Minton; literary translator Simon Whickham-Smith; Mugi Oyoo and Gombajav Mend-Oyoo of the Mongolian Academy of Culture and Poetry) had attended. The Academy of Culture and Poetry was largely responsible for Ms O'Callaghan's presence, and the Mongolian Writers Union also helped though its director, my old boss Khaidav Chilaajav, is currently in Seoul on a writer's residency.

The wine was warm, the dixie cups leaked, and the Gallery was hosting us on such short notice that someone forgot to turn off the music and the blenders at the bar, but it's a testament to Ms O'Callaghan's compassionate and lyrical reading that all that ceased to matter by the end. Ms O'Callaghan wasn't a poet I knew about before I turned up at the event, but both her poems themselves, with a great attention to detail and internal rhyme, and her comments about them, with such comforting and universal acknowledgement of the experience of the process of loss, had me feeling like I wanted to know much more about her and her work. It was a Mongolian event, after all, so it turned into a series of readings bogarted by poets lesser- and well-known, the males of which gesticulated and enunciated to the point of spraying spittle with their enthusiasm for speaking their poetic truths. It was a Tuesday, it was 3pm, and it was a great deal of fun.

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On the evening of July 2nd, over a hundred people from UB's expat and local communities, both short-term and long-term residents, Ambassadors, LGBT activists, civil society and NGO workers, full-time artists and Ivanhoe Mines executives all wandered in back of the building charred by the fiery protests following Parliamentary elections exactly a year before and through arches into the National Modern Art Gallery northeast of Sukhbaatar Square. Inside, Mongolia's most famous singers alternated with modern dancers and a video monitor while those in attendance caught up with one another over wine, beer, and mini-hamburgers.

At the heart of such a gathering? Brandt Miller, Fulbright fellow and artist extraordinaire, who had after several months here become such a cross-genre man-about-town with such a good idea that he'd raised--from Khan Bank and private donors--enough money to mount a photography exhibition. The exhibition, called "Beyond the Blue Sky", opened last week at Mongolia's foremost modern art gallery, an expression of sophistication and elegance that at the same time addressed an incredibly salient issue for modern Mongolia: LGBT citizens and their struggles. The work was mainly portraits of Mongolians, single, couples, and groups of friends, who identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and/or Queer. Cultural sensitivity and symbolism was demonstrated through the use of khadags covering the heads of the subjects; khadags cover the heads of the dead according to Mongolian custom, and they covered the heads of the subjects to convey the way LGBT citizens feel they aren't fully living--while in practical terms concealing their identities, since the reason LGBT Mongolians must continue to "half-live" is the terrible violence that has and still does occur when they choose to come out. Indeed, one of the most stirring aspects of the exhibit was the timeline that accompanied the photos listing incidents of violence befalling Mongolians who chose to come out to their friends, family, or workplace.

Mongolia is not a safe place to be an LGBT-identified person; while politically and creatively it is a place of unprecedented freedom and maturity, attitudes towards same-sex love are still rife with hatred that becomes violent all too often. Even a quick look at a Lonely Planet will tell you that it's not even safe for there to be an established gay club in Mongolia; there are rather underground networks of LGBT-identified and -friendly individuals who gather at a different place every so often so as to avoid the ostracism and outright lethal violence that would befall them should they gather more publicly. For this reason many of Mongolia's more educated LGBT citizens who have the means to get out do, being granted asylum in countries like the USA and Australia.

There is no way to exaggerate the seriousness of the violence that befalls LGBT citizens of Mongolia: rape, murder, beatings, firings; constant harassment by colleagues, and superiors; disownership by family...Brandt Miller and his bravery could not be more important to the changing landscape of modern Mongolia as its urbanizing population enables an increase both in gay community formation and the abuse and violence that occurs when LGBT individuals and gatherings are found out. (The security downstairs at the Gallery that evening was not an accident.) I spoke with one LGBT individual there who tearfully told me they'd never seen an outpouring of public support for LGBT like this one.

The simple fact is that while this conversation had begun, it was waiting to be taken to the next level, and Brandt Miller and his team were the people for the job. It takes artwork and events like these to up the volume on salient topics. Social change is a noisy process, though happily, sometimes the noise is that of joy, like that which filled the Gallery that evening as Altan Urag lent its well-loved sounds to the fight for social equality in one of Asia's otherwise most forward-looking countries.

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My article about last week's Presidential Inauguration is up here at The Huffington Post. Enjoy!

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Below is the short piece I wrote for the Mongol Messenger about The Arts Council of Mongolia's awesome pioneer Fellowship program.

If you wonder at the fact that Leo Tolstoy's grandson was here in Ulaanbaatar, you can thank the Arts Council of Mongolia (ACM).

Over the last year, ACM has pioneered a fellowship program to empower arts administration in Mongolia. The nine fellowship recipients hailed from creative and management positions at such well-known venues as the Opera and Ballet Academy Theatre; the Modern Art Gallery; Mongol Costumes; the Arts and Culture Department of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science; and the Tumen Ekh National Song and Dance Ensemble. Ganbold Dorlig, one of the fellows, is a poet who participated in the World Poetry Congress held in Mongolia in 2006 and who heads up the Feather Foundation. Lkhagvadorj Dorjsuren, who has participated in ice-scultpure festivals all over the world and currently directs the Scultped Arts Center, is another. You get the idea.

Most of the fellows described their goals as related to the desire to network and build management skills within the field of arts administration, so the series of seminars started off with ACM board member Walter Jenkins and the topic of leadership out in the fresh air of Terelj. The ministry of education, culture, and science then helped fund a visit from Ms Kathy Tweeddale, Executive Director of the Seattle Opera, last September. Mrs. Tweeddale led three days of workshops related to arts marketing not just for the fellows but for Mongolian art students and administrators from all the aimags in Mongolia.

Dwight Gee, Executive Vice president of Arts Fund Seattle and President of the U.S. Branch of the Arts Council of Mongolia (ACM-US), led yet another 3-day workshop that extended out into Mongolian society by leading seminars not only for the Fellows but for the Institute of Finance and Economics as well. Thanks to Mr. Gee, several more Mongolian administrators know what an "elevator speech" is. Anyone who has ever attended a Mongolian lecture or event that has gone on longer than some might have liked might opine that this is no small amount of outreach!

Mongolia also hosted experts from Russia in its Fellowship seminar series. Vladimir Tolstoy, grandson of the famed Russian writer, gave a lecture on cultural tourism and the ways it could revitalize outlying areas. In this way and in many others, this program was so attentive to the needs of Mongolia and so inclusive that I, for one, think it's safe to call the pilot year a success. The ministry of Education, Culture and Science was so pleased with Mr. Gee's visit, for example, that it committed to conduct a 2009 National Arts Fundraising training in collaboration with him. They must have liked the elevator speech...

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Writing to come, but in the meantime, enjoy these photos from yesterday: Mongolia's Presidential Inauguration on Sukhbaatar Square in Ulaanbaatar.

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The incomparable photographer, biologist, and world fixer David Gilbert just alerted me to this photo essay documenting two of Ulaanbaatar's street teenagers. Worth a look.

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There have been some requests for this article on Bolivia's Rio Beni Health Project, since it saw print in an issue of the Santa Ynez Valley Journal that wasn't archived online. Not about Mongolia, but if you're interested in this blog, it's likely you're interested in hopeful development efforts in third-world countries, so take a look. It's one of those things that gives me hope in the possibilities for our planet.


Where Thoreau and Livingstone Meet:
Lou Netzer and the Rio Beni Health Project

After spending decades as the last doctor in California's Santa Ynez Valley willing to make house calls, after starting a home for Alzheimer patients, an elementary school, and a café on the side, Louis Netzer retired and set off not on an ocean cruiser, not on a tour of the world's greatest golf courses, but on a journey to the far corners of world.  He didn't get any farther than the village of Rurrenebaque on the banks of the Rio Beni, a remote tributary to the Bolivian Amazon.  On his annual two-month visits to the Valley in the following years Lou spoke often of his first moments on that smooth river, of the surrounding jungle, of the faces of the warm-hearted local people whose ailments he knew how to cure, of the moments he realized he would be staying until he did cure them.  In subsequent years, at talks he gave all over Santa Barbara County raising money for the Rio Beni Health Project, Lou said that he didn't have hope, because hope implies expectation.  He just had faith.  Lou's faith was the power behind his conception of the Project, which began in 1997 with "basically a boat and a motor."  Lou's faith is what drove him to reach tens of thousands of the poorest people in South America's poorest country, often their first experience receiving regular medical care, before succumbing to cancer himself in October of 2002.

Lou learned of his illness early enough to ensure that the Rio Beni Health Project would continue without him.  In 1999 he teamed up with his close friend, Christopher Brady, who had just returned from four years working in Africa but had six years of working in South America under his belt. The seven-person team that today keeps the project alive and expanding is a colorful crew of personalities bound together by the legacy of the man they loved and a commitment to the health outreach project that began as his dream.  The Rio Beni Health Project, or El Proyecto de Salud de Rio Beni, exists today as a rapidly growing endeavor managed by a newly established non-profit organization Netzer-Brady International. It is supported in part by Direct Relief International, officially recognized by the Bolivian government, and it reaches rural indigenous communities with unprecedented treatment and long-term education over hundreds of square miles of jungle wilderness.

Rurrenebaque, Beni Region, Bolivia, August.  A hen pecks at the tiny river of cane juice left on the trapiche. Near the small building that serves as Project headquarters and home-clinic, a boy walks to school in the required white shirt and navy trousers carrying a guitar, kicking up white dust from the road.  Another boy passes holding the hand of his little sister, a green bird fluttering in his hair.  A curvy woman with red lipstick rides "side-saddle" on one of the motorbikes serving as a taxi, driven by a young man who'll take her to any point in "Rurre" for one or two Bolivianos.  By 10am the sun is fiercely bright, the air heavy, the heat palpable. 
Outside the Project clinic the deck is full of prospective patients of all ages sitting in the shade and waiting to be called in.  One of the many leafy green plants growing up around the deck throws patterns of shadow on the threshold to the front room of the clinic, which is small and dark and crowded with fans circulating warm air.  Lola Guálica, a cheerful, round-faced nurse who has been working with the Project for seven years, calls clients up one by one and takes down their basic information. 

In the same room at another desk, Modesto Cuevas, a slim and soft-spoken sociologist and community organizer, uses that information and a personal interview to gently screen prospective patients.  "We need to make sure they belong to the town's neediest financial stratum," he explains.  "If a woman is married to a policeman, for instance, I direct her to one of the neighboring clinics.  There are other health clinics around here.  This one is for those who truly can't pay." 

A screening process like the one carried out by Modesto is unnecessary in most of the communities the Project visits.  For half the working week the Project functions as a "floating" health clinic: project team members and big red bags of medical supplies packed into a narrow little boat, zooming up or down the placid river through chilly morning mists and back through brutal afternoon sun, reaching the poorest communities of the region by boat because there is simply no other way to reach them.

Only one of the current team members has been with the Project since its inception.  Antonio Mendía, project pharmacist, auxiliary nurse, boat pilot, and general handyman, is tall, handsome, and popular among the ladies in town.  He met Lou Netzer in 1997 when he was eighteen.  Lou was trying and failing to operate his own new boat on the river.  "He was just this crazy little doctor, and you know doctors, they can't do practical things," Antonio laughs.  Antonio soon became Lou's right-hand man, and not just because he knew how not to crash a motorboat.  Antonio grew up in Rurre and knew all the people and the locations of poorer communities up-and down-river.  He was the logistics behind the dream.  "It was hard," he says, grinning.  "We were only two."

The simple screened-in, thatched-roof, one-room cottages in which the "happy, crazy doctor" stayed and housed his guests have now run down, battered by the heavy rains, heat, and influx of foliage that make the jungle a force to be reckoned with for its residents.  The Project team is talking about ways the huts could be used; one idea is to house Project guests, volunteers and hopefully someday more doctors there.  Another is to accommodate tourists--since the Project's inception Rurre has grown significantly due to the popularity of the spot with Israeli youths traveling through after completing their two-year army requirement.  An Israeli put Rurrenebaque on the map by nearly dying in the jungle nearby and writing a book about it.  Now Rurre sports multiple hostels, restaurants, internet cafes, and even a jungle-themed bar that serves such cosmopolitan drinks as the Flaming Lamborghini.  It's a far cry from the tiny village Lou first discovered nearly a decade ago with one working fax machine in the mayor's house, but neighboring communities and a large portion of Rurre's own population are still staggeringly poor.

Lou knew to live outside of town, away from Rurrenebaque's gossip network.  He was un loco, pero un loco feliz who saw all sorts of animals from the screens of his hut—even a panther once—and sometimes from within that hut: his efforts to convince a visiting snake to leave, since Lou never did get over his fear of snakes, went like a slapstick comedy. "The clouds go low in the mornings," Antonio says, gesturing to the mirror-like Rio Beni.  "Twice Lou crashed into the opposite bank.  He came to the clinic sopping wet from head to toe, but grinning.  Everything was an adventure for him."  During one of his visits to California, Lou was interviewed by a group of middle school students and reported, "20% of all the fresh water in the world goes through the mouth of the Amazon every day. The rains are heavy, and they last so long! As a matter of fact, I just spoke to my friend Antonio this morning, and my clinic is under water right now."

The forest Lou mentioned having to beat back with a machete every day is taking over his old compound, crawling over bamboo structures with limbs of brightest green.  This is where Lou did "the Thoreau thing," as he put it more than once, reading and writing and collapsing into his hammock after a long day treating patients.  The afternoon is warm and quiet, full of fragrance and emerald colors.  Antonio sits quietly in the wall-less structure that used to be Lou's kitchen.  "Lou loved cooking," he says after a pause.  "He loved having people by and talking and cooking.  But he also loved his solitary time."  Solito is the word Antonio uses, which is an affectionate diminutive term.  It does not mean only "by himself."  It means, roughly, "by his little self."  In the end, Antonio's relationship with Lou resembled that of a parent and son more than anything else, and Lou's wish to visit Rurrenebaque one more time after falling ill had its basis in his wish to say goodbye to Antonio as much as in his love for the Project.  Antonio looks around the compound.  "Sometimes I come here by myself, just to think," he says.

Travel days start early for the Project team.  At the weekly staff meeting, the team agrees on a 7:30am meeting time at the clinic.  As this is Bolivian time, at around 8:15 everyone is there, layered with waterproof jackets, baseball caps, and sunglasses.  Here alongside Antonio and Jose is Dr. Frida Rada, Modesto's
wife, the Project doctor who lives permanently in Rurrenebaque. (The Project regularly changes directorial hands in Bolivia; it has hosted a regular stream of long-term health professional work alongside the Bolivian team – usually an American or Cuban doctor will come with kids and spouse in tow for a two-year contract. Through the years over 20 pre-med and medical students and residents from around the world have worked short-term with the team, not to mention visits from anthropologists, photographers and writers.) Christopher Brady took over US-based direction of the Project under the auspices of Direct Relief International, an international aid organization, and another California-based NGO called Concern America, but in March 2008 he and Lou’s daughter Uldine, a physician, established their own non-profit -- Netzer-Brady International --to carry the work forward.

It is Christopher and his brother Jim, another prominent resident and educator, who came up with and lead the Project's most successful yearly fundraiser to date: Ride/Walk For a Reason, a bike and hike trip whose participants, mostly families from Santa Barbara County, spend the preceding year raising money for the Project and then either ride bikes in July from La Paz to Rurre, a grueling 300 miles., or do a 4-day jungle trek with local guides visiting Project communities. Ride families rope in an essential $100,000 for the project annually.  Participants learn about local ecology, strengthen the ties Lou created between Santa Barbara and Rurrenebaque, and observe the Project team at work on a day not unlike this one. 

Even an August day starts out with some mist on the river.  Antonio sits in the Project vehicle, a big jeep that takes the team and all the heavy red equipment and medicine bags from the clinic to the waterfront.  A stop is made at a market with walls painted aquamarine, and Lola runs in to order a dish of rice, meat, and fried egg for each member of the group.  The street is already packed with people.  Outside the market stands a family of several barefoot children and a mother whose face is wizened with premature wrinkles and missing a few teeth.  They pass a baby anteater between them, waiting for the furry creature to attract a potential buyer. Frida puts a hand to her mouth and coos at the creature from afar.  "I'd want to buy it, because it won't survive with those children.  They just don't know how to treat it properly.  Where would we put it?" she asks Modesto.  "We already have a monkey!"

Frida is concerned again at the water's edge while Antonio readies the motor of the boat, watching a man is yanking a cow with a rope tied around its neck onto a neighboring barge.  "I just can't stand it when animals are mistreated," she says.  Neither can she stand mistreatment of humans, something she makes clear two hours later after an exhilarating ride through the chilly mists to the community of San Miguel.  Once the equipment is offloaded and schlepped up the slippery riverbank by Project members and eager locals, and the clinic is set up in whichever communal space is available--which in the case of San Miguel is a fairly new open-air space whose construction was made possible by a recent influx of tourism--Frida begins to receive patients.  When a young mother slaps a baby who will not stop crying, Frida says firmly to her, "We do not use violence with children.  We don't hit children." She lifts her hands up at her husband, who looks up quietly from his post across the room.  "It bothers me," she says. It's the same thing she said when the children outside the market picked up the baby anteater by its hind legs.

Modesto and Frida (whose official Project duty is "health education and training coordination" though she's also a doctor) developed and lead the program of project promotores.  A promotor is nominated by each community the Project works with to act as a liason between the Project and their community and provide emergency medical treatment.  The promotor, who is usually between 15 and 30 years old, then makes a promise in front of their whole community to stay in that community for life.  Promotores receive university-level courses in medical training in a four-year program created, managed, and administered primarily by Frida and Modesto. Whenever the Project boat slides up onto the edge of the Rio Beni, the solitary figure waiting at the top of the tall banks is almost invariably the project promotor, who has known the date of the Project's visit for months and alerted the whole community to the fact. 

In August one of the rare meetings takes place in Rurrenebaque to which all promoteres come from their respective corners of the region.  Some take days to get there.  The promotores meet in a large room in a public building and sleep on cots in another.  Frida stands at a blackboard in front of the room, scribbling medical terms and asking questions about symptoms of an allergic reaction.  There must be about fifty young students male and female, with round-faced, Andean features, looking shyly up at her.  They answer each of Frida's questions correctly.  She turns to them.   "I love you guys!" she cries.  They smile.

On a mission to procure cane juice during lunch break in San Miguel, Modesto reflects on the promoter program as he disappears between tall, rustling stalks of sugarcane until only his voice remains.  "This is why the long-term mission of the project is to educate.  This knowledge should be in the hands of the people.  The social aspect of the project is the most important," he says, reemerging after using his pocketknife to harvest a few choice stalks. 

Promotores also stay in the Rurrenebaque and neighboring San Miguel hospitals to observe and talk with doctors, nurses, and patients.  Elian, the promotor for San Miguel, has a tattoo on the skin between his index finger and thumb.  It says "Jessi Te Amo" with stars. In response to the presumption that the name pertains to a romantic interest, Elian shakes his head.  "Jessi left us," he says.  "She was only two.  She was my little niece, most loved by me.  Very intelligent.  Already walking and talking.  She got sick, and it was so rapid, only three days, and then she was gone.  There was no time."

Indeed when one observes the broad smiles exchanged between Project members and promotores before the big red bags have even made their way up the steep hill, the embraces on the sunny banks of a breathtaking river, it is easy to forget that the lives of whole communities rest in their hands.  Bolivia, a country whose population of 8.8 million roughly equals that of New York City, supposedly guarantees health care to its citizens, but Bolivia is one of the poorest countries in South America; its residents are 60% indigenous, and being born indigenous, especially in that part of the world, still essentially guarantees a life lived below the poverty line.  Project doctors spend most of their time diagnosing malaria and various dysentaries.  Some of this is combated by basic education about sanitary methods—washing one's hands after bathroom use, bathing and washing in clean water--and some would be easily cured by inexpensive medicine that had not yet found its way to the communities of the Beni Region by the time Lou arrived on its banks.  This is Bolivia, where infant and maternal mortality rates are among the highest in Latin America, literacy rates are miniscule, and the phrase "government official" is synonymous with "thief" in the minds of both formally educated and uneducated Bolivian citizens.

All Project teams members are quick to point out that there would be no need for the Rio Beni Health Project if the Bolivian government were doing its job.  As the past years of protests, civil strife, economic frailty, and the 2005 Presidential musical-chairs game makes clear, Bolivia is still sadly distant from a time of stability and prosperity.  In December 2005, socialist and indigenous party leader Evo Morales won the presidency in a fair and democratic election. One of Morales' biggest pledges was to orient economic recovery towards safe and legal use of the country's coca crops, a major source of income for the Bolivian poor.  Coca is the crop from which cocaine is derived, and the eradication of coca fields has been a primary focus of the infamous War on Drugs conducted by the American government.

In lieu of efficient and consistent government guidance, the Project has multiple agreements with the local hospitals, not just to train promotores but to refer patients to facilities for ultrasounds and other surgical or emergency needs.  The municipal government agreed to pay the way of medical supplies otherwise donated for free from La Paz to Rurrenebaque and to donate 600 litres of boat fuel to the Project, but the Bolivian government has long been notoriously corrupt and that boat fuel remains undelivered.

In the meantime, efforts like the Rio Beni Health Project are the most successful methods of bridging the gap between the Bolivian poor and the resources they lack.  In Tamarín, one of the region's poorest communities, a bent old lady with hardly any teeth waits with a grandchild on her lap outside a run-down shack, the only open public building.  Inside, business as usual: Lola takes down patients' names and ailments, visiting doctors treat the patients, and Antonio retrieves the medications they prescribe.  Outside, the sun spins large red leaves of an immense almond tree near a boarded-up church.  Modesto stands with a group of adoring children, talking with them and playing games.  A starving kitten is scooped up by one of the children, then thrown to the grass.  The children, standing in the shade, sport the large bellies and skinny legs betraying the presence of malnutrition and parasites.  Modesto walks the path with them to the one-room schoolhouse, where he'll give a talk on the importance of brushing teeth and then hand out toothpaste samples and chalky chewable pills that eradicate parasites. 

When Lou got sick he wrote an open letter to members of the Santa Barbara community along with a card asking for donations to the Project.  After raising two children in his first marriage, he fell in love anew late in his life with Chantal, the French mother of his son-in-law.  He wrote in the letter of watching her walk along the beach while he sat bundled from the wind.  "I renew my pact with God," he wrote.  At his memorial service Dr. Reuben Weininger said that Lou's medical practice was a practice of applied love.  In and out of consciousness in his final hours, he wrote the words "for love" on a scrap of paper.  In Rurrenebaque, the mountains of jungle look like sleeping boars in the fading daylight as another boat purrs by and the tuckered-out Project members head home to rest.  V's of birds fly quick and low over the surface of the Rio Beni as the sunset spreads purple into the sky.  It is unquestionably for love that Louis Netzer began this health project, and it is unquestionably for love that the motley crew that is the Project team sticks together and moves forward with it--both for love of the good works and public service therein and for love of the sprightly, crazy fellow who knew the secret to making dreams come true.

Christopher Brady writes, "The Rio Beni Project continues to expand geographically and in the services it provides to the indigenous people of the Rio Beni region, including a quickly expanding potable water program. Recently the Bolivian Ministry of Health officially acknowledged the Project, and the team has applied for and been granted its official status as a Bolivian charitable health organization named La Fundación Salud Rio Beni--Louis Netzer (The Rio Beni Health Foundation). For more info, write me at CGBrady@igc.org or visit the new website at netzerbrady.org."

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The renaissancively brilliant (read: in his first two months of his Fulbright year in Mongolia produced, wrote and starred in hands down the best piece of theater--and aware, quality expat art--about Mongolia I've ever seen) Michael Littig woke me up to the existence of these photos of Mongolians in urban winter on the BBC network. Harsh, difficult, true. Please take a look, if you'd like a face to go with the tales of harshness you hear. Unfortunately, they are true, but fortunately, there are photographers (and playwrights!) to ignite discussion and action around the circumstances that lead to images like these.

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As the department head of Mongolia's Ministry of Justice, upon her visit to Choibalsan's border police compound Altangerel was treated to a full day of military formation demonstrations and, of course, lots of good food and a concert filled with soldiers performing Mongolia's favorite songs on Mongolia's favorite instruments. Here is one of the more surreal moments of that day--children in uniform running into the theater, where, as you'll see, a young man does a beautiful job on the Morin Khuur, or horsehead fiddle.


Back in her office in Ulaanbaatar, Altai said my name on the phone and I didn't know why and then her coworker came in with a tall bottle of water and gummy chews. I clapped with delight and she clapped that I was clapping.

It's routine now for Altai to go upstairs for meetings and me to sit quietly in her spacious office, editing her stories with my laptop on my knees. When Ministry officials poke their heads in and look questioningly at me, I wordlessly point up. The official invariably nods and closes the door. “Tell them in Mongolian that you are the new boss,” she said today, smiling as she left.

The door guards know me by now and when I arrive at the Ministry around 3pm I just say "Altangerel!" and proceed upstairs. Her door was locked today, which hadn't happened before. Two women in the hallway pointed up and said "305" in Mongolian and I went upstairs, wandering the hall for a moment. I asked a woman in the hallway who saw me looking daunted if it was all right to enter 305 even though the door was closed. She made a little fun of me. “I think it's ok,” she whispered.

When I finally got the courage to open the door to the conference room, where she sat with several suited men, she handed me the keys wordlessly and I scuttled out. A guard appeared (perhaps he had through some security camera seen me taking footage of the 3rd floor hallway, with all the certificates on the wall) with an antagonistic expression, sure I was in the wrong place. I held up the keys in defense.

Sometimes I hum, which Altai likes. At the end of a long day sometimes we listen to a little Mariah Carey on her computer. (Tumen Ulzii also quite likes Mariah.)
"Your family seems to fit the liberal portrait we get in Monoglia of America through all the movies," she says when I talk about the singing that goes on in my household.

Today she has a tummyache.
"I ate something in the night I think."
She grates an apple after first cutting pieces for me.
"I like eating like this. It tastes, I think, differently. My main recipe for stomach."
She eats the little pieces of apple like cole slaw. She looks adorable.
"Baby Altai!" I say.
"My husband says when I eat I resemble a small bear," she says.

The night we all went dancing in Choibalsan (and not only is Altai a 31-yr-old who studied law in England and Germany, heads a firm outside of her job as Department Head of the Ministry of Justice--a firm that takes on the biggest international cases from Russia to Germany--and has written four books of fiction and poetry as well as acclaimed political essays in Europe, the woman can also DANCE, man) I told her she was my mother hen because with all the big soldiers around I tended to stick close by her and flap after her wherever she went. "My baby chicken" is one of the things she calls me now.

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(removed at the request of those I listen to)

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This is Why I love Mongolians.

After a week working together near the borders of Russia and China in Choibalsan, these administrators, Ministry of Justice officials, border patrol officers, and policemen toasted and thanked one another for a week of good work by the river Kherlen with toasts, songs, hugs, handshakes, more songs, mutton with onion from a cardboard box on the hood of one of the cars, more songs, and some tears.

It was a trip somewhere between 11 and 13 hours from Choibalsan to UB. The night before, when the week's work was done with, Altangerel and the entire posse of border patrol and police chiefs/officers and me all danced in a circle of 18 people boogying out, all between the ages of 24 and 66. (Also why I love Mongolians: everybody dances, not just the hip youngsters, and they dance in friendly circles with lots of space to really groove, which my friends know is my style anyway.)

Karaoke is something I got teased for--not for the singing part (I *believe* Altai and I sang a Beatles song) but for curling up ("like an accordion!" laughed Byambaa) and napping in our booth while the Mongolian songs I didn't know were sung by swaying Mongolians.

"You slept," said Altai.

She's always been so succinct.

That morning, we all woke up early, downed tsuivan and suutetsai, and then drove for exactly five minutes to a mysterious (to me, at least) building where everyone got out and they all had a meeting. I found instant coffee. In the bathroom one of the officers was throwing up.

It was all Naranbat's fault. Naranbat's the Border Patrol Chief, and when Altai and the other ladies were on their James Bond mission near the border, Naranbat decided that I was to be shepherded by people I didn't know to every sight in Choibalsan, which was awesome for five hours, but then I needed to go find an internet cafe and work on Altai's stories. And not have people waiting for me to be done. Please.
No, I was informed, Naranbat said not to leave you alone.
At which point I had a moment of van-lagged exasperation and immaturity. Naranbat minii tukhai shiidej chadakhgui! I said. Naranbat can't decide about me.

Which was translated to Naranbat as simply "Naranbat can't make decisions."

Which Naranbat proceeded to repeat absolutely every time we saw each other to anyone who would listen (and everyone who wouldn't). I don't think Border Patrol Police Chiefs are used to hearing that kind of thing. I made the requisite correction and apology, but he was getting too much glee out of it. He never let it go, but he did call me when we got back to UB.

So anyway, it was Naranbat who, when everyone else had left for karaoke, insisted I stay and follow the several beers I had with half a glass of vodka. No one was there to defend me, and I owed him one.

It was also Naranbat who, when I tried to say it would be awesome to ride a horse in the countryside, had a horse readied for a soldier to trudge around and lead under the hot sun around the military compound just for me on Friday. I felt really bad for the soldier. But the toothless old man who owned the horse taught me some Russian, and that was fun. I looked round from atop the horse at the bright, dusty Gobi, the barbed wire fences, the run-down buildings of the compound. The soldier crunched through the dry grass, smoking a cigarette and texting on his cell phone. The horse was cantankerous and hungry. I had offended once again earlier, by leaving the military compound after the ceremony and concert held in Altai's honor (AWEsome footage coming your way soon of the soldiers in formation, footage I was then informed I wasn't supposed to have taken), when the bigwigs retreated to have a meeting and no one really knew what to do with me. I didn't want to be a burden, so texted Altai where I was going and walked past the Wrestling Palace to the internet cafe. Altai called.

"Why you left? The horse is ready for you!"

Woops.

Anyhow, after the meeting Saturday morning when one of the officers was sicker than me, we drove aNOTHER five minutes in the twelve-hour trek to the side of the Kherlen river, where two hours of toasting and hugging took place. I settled into the peace of just being there, since there was no telling really what the precedent was, while each person toasted with the special silver bowl and thanked the colleagues. The breeze was fresh, the land flat, the river a mirror and the sky patched with clouds. This crew had taken care of me for no good reason over the week. This crew had done work together the nature of which I'll never know. When language flies over, a wide-winged bird, when culture acts the scudding cloud. When the why of things isn't available, one surrenders attachment to causality and logic. I didn't know what was going on, but we all dug into the mutton and onions in the greasy cardboard box on the hood of the SUV: I didn't have to. The last half hour was all songs and hugs, sometimes with twelve people singing in a semi circle, arms around each other. Altai said goodbye and got in the car. They beckoned her back out for another song. When she got back into the car for good, a tear had coursed down her cheek.

217

Shameless plug! I just learned I will have a poem ("Origin") coming out in the next issue of Poets&Artists (O&S), and two pieces of fiction ("The Lateral Deep" and "Disturbing the Spirits" coming out in the fall/winter issue of Cerise Press). Both are mighty fine publications so check them out!

216

Hayden's Ferry Review is hosting my post for today on their wonderful blog here. I go a little deeper into the trip out here to the far east of Mongolia. Take a look and happy end of the week!

215

The dudes in Choibalsan I hang out with

Greetings from Choibalsan, the town in far eastern Mongolia near the Russian and Chinese borders where Altai has some mysterious business. She took me along in the jeep driven by border patrol officers for the 13 hour drive from Ulaanbaatar last Sunday.

Altai returned from her James Bond-style mission to the border last night. She hadn't bathed for three days. "I'm too dusty to talk to you," she smiled, so we trooped at 9pm to a hotel and paid to use their sauna and showers. Six policemen/border patrol officers entertained me during her absence, and I got to walk into clubs with them. They fed me. They sang with me. They taught me words, including Mongolian miliary-ese for "Soldier Ming at your service! For the country of Monoglia!" They gave me beer. They sat silently in their uniforms in the club, filling the booth in the corner. I think it's the only time I'll know how it feels to have bodyguards, an entourage, a posse.

"Translation is impossible, but one of the most worthwhile things to try."

One of the smartest things I did as an undergraduate was take Forrest Gander's Advanced Translation Workshop. The reasons why are numerous, but today, as I work on Altai's stories in an internet cafe and the elementary-school boys who like to play computer games here hover over my shoulder, curious about what I'm doing, my being reminded of that class (and the conversations we had in it) has to do with what a gift it is to translate contemporary literature and have the means to travel: I got to meet Vicky Allyon in Bolivia. I get to spend time with Altai. I get to sit next to naked Altai in the sauna and be naked myself and talk about all sorts of things. Vast are the amounts of literature to be translated, the years over which said literature was produced, and languages into which to translate; rare are the moments when the creator of a piece of literature and the one doing the translation get to hang out in a sauna.

I close my eyes and smell the warmth coming off the skin of the little boys breathing next to my head and looking at the English on my monitor. The off-the-record, offstage moments the ones with which I am endlessly preoccupied. Paula Vogel said what's happening offstage to the characters in her plays is what fascinates her the most.

Moments from last year in UB:
Luke ironing his clothes in the morning in my apartment before going off and being his industrious self (I myself hardly ever used that iron, and when I asked him how to iron correctly, he merely said, "Make it flat");
Todd pointing out that I'd managed yet again to get sprinkles on my cheeks and/or in my hair after my choco-latte arrived at Bestspresso, the place with wireless closest to the UB Circus, and managing to convey utmost affection while doing so;
Sticking my ipod in my armpit (otherwise it'd stop working) for the walk home from the gym in the -40 Neptune-iceworld Ulaanbaatar turns into midwinter, taking care not to step on the black tiles on Sukhbaatar Square, as doing so causes one to slip, banana-peel style, one one's butt.

Moment from the five months spent in NYC:

A boy around 8 years old, disproportionately big backpack on, book two inches in front of his nose, shoelaces untied, sits on the subway. He's clearly in the middle of a Big Grow, all gangly and ankles showing because his pants are too short. When he gets off the subway he doesn't break stride or break eye contact with the page; his growing self is walking but his head is somewhere else. All over the world, man, if you give a kid a book.

Moment from this stint in Mongolia:

Tony Whitten, a Senior Biodiversity Specialist at The World Bank and a wonderful friend whom I met at the British Embassy's friday-night drinking hole Steppe Inn during the coldest month (-40!) in Ulaanbaatar, asking me the other night as we weaved through the throngs emptying out of the Wrestling Palace after Indian food with a German colleague of his and a Spanish economist, when I asked him what to do about MFAs and more student loans etc:

"Ming, do you have something inside you that needs to come out?"

214

The Huffington Post published my article on observing Mongolia's Presidential election with The Asia Foundation's observation mission. It's up on their world page. Yay!

Here is some shaky footage of a Mongolian couple like the ones I talked aboout in the article, coming in their best clothes to vote:

213

Below is the article you can find in the Mongol Messenger that I wrote for the series the Arts Council of Mongolia contributes to the paper each week.


Maral and Khishgee, two Mongolian musicians who recently attended Turkey's World Culture Festival

“I didn't realize Russian was so useful!” exclaimed one of the 11 young Mongolian artists at the 20th World Culture Festival in Turkey earlier this month as he observed folk dance performances by Balkan countries. The World Culture festival took place in the Turkish city of Ankara from May 13th-20th, and groups of artists, dancers, and musicians representing 61 countries and 21 regions of Turkey came to take part.
I had the chance to sit down with Maral and Khishgee, two young women from the Mongolian University of Culture and Arts who attended the festival. Maral has been playing the hammered dulcimer and Khishgee the zither for 7 years. This was the first time for each to participate in an festival abroad.
Favorite memories include the parade through the streets of Ankara on the festival's second day, with participants from all 61 different countries pouring through the streets in full costume. The girls made friends with fellow young artists from Turkey, Moldova, and Egypt, a friendship they can now maintain through email. The festival hosted folk dance, sports, and cultural art presentations, and Maral and Khishgee played their instruments alongside a Mongolian folk dance troupe while they performed. One thing they appreciated about the diversity of artists was that the performances served to illustrate the difference between the Mongolian, Kazakh, and Georgian traditions, a refreshing perspective as they are often lumped together in the minds of people from other world regions (perhaps due to the aforementioned prevalence of Russian).
The group's presence at the festival was due to the support of the Arts Council of Mongolia, specifically the Cultural Heritage part of the Council's programming (the other three are Advocacy, Artist Development, and Arts Education). The Arts Council is a prominent organization that began in 2002 under the auspices of the Soros/Open Society Foundation as the independent entity that evolved out of the Foundation's arts initiative.
Maral and Khishgee, fresh-faced young women with ready smiles and casually trendy clothes, both have mothers who are also artist/musicians and both began studying music when they were children. Maral used to sing as a child and her mother, an artist herself, taught Maral one song on the dulcimer when she was just 11 years old. Maral played that song at a contest and won first prize, a judge at the contest suggested that she should attend the Music and Dance college, and so her musical career began. Khishgee's mother was a violinist in the Mongolian State Orchestra, which shared a building with the Jazz Band and Philharmonic Orchestra. “I grew up in the building,” Khishgee laughed. Her mother took her on a tour of the three musical groups and their instruments, and Khishgee picked the zither as her instrument of choice because of its wonderful sound. Both Maral and Khishgee attended the Music and Dance college for 6 years and now study in the Folk Music Faculty of the University of Arts and Culture in Mongolia.
When asked about the future of traditional arts in Mongolia, the girls mentioned folk-rock and folk-jazz as examples of the evolution of Mongolian music in ways that integrate the old with the new. “We believe the arts will flourish,” said Khishgee, “and we'll try our best to be part of that evolution.”

212

A busy home stretch, folks!

I spent Sunday from around 6am to around 11pm working for The Asia Foundation as an International Observer for Mongolia's presidential elections. A lot of amazing footage and stories, which I'll share with you shortly. The Asia Foundation continues to impress me with its innovative approaches and dogged commitment to supporting democracy in Asia, and just one day doing what these folks do regularly to that end had me tuckered out. Can't believe I share an office with these people!

In addition to editing Altai's book, it's likely I'll visit the UNHCR with Tumen Ulzii this week, if only to get more of a handle on whose court the resettlement-ball is in and make sure that the UNHCR knows that international interest in Tumen Ulzii's case is indeed considerable and, probably more importantly at this point, sustained.

Today I'll visit again with Chilaajav, the President of the Mongolian Writers Union, whose poetry I translated a little last year and will do more this summer; it's project that I've long been interested in doing but also likely that the guy will pay me to do it. Miracles!

I'll also work with Dashnyam, head of the Mongolian Academy of Traditions and the guy who brought me to WALTIC last summer in Stockholm, to place an op-ed in one of Mongolia's leading papers about PEN. He helped me do it once before. I'm less concerned this time around with my opinion-part of an op-ed and more with perhaps putting the PEN International Charter in the paper in Mongolian where everyone can read it and be clear on the fact that actual, accredited PEN centers are open to any writer to apply. There's only so far I can go as a young westerner spouting gospel about how detrimental infighting is to civic process, and I'd rather the document speak for itself.

In addition to being my Mongolian grandpa, Dashnyam was Sumati's favorite candidate for President in 2001, running for the Civil Will Party, garnering 7% of the vote, and described as the "Ralph Nader of Mongolia." Fitting that he was also the one to donate the space at the Academy for the December 2007 meeting about PEN that made the international news wire, the meeting to which I brought a copy of the aforementioned charter and watched it go around the table and be signed by some of Mongolia's most prominent writers.

However, those writers are not the ones a Mr. Ide of Japanese PEN met while he was here in in the autumn of 2008, when he came to do a workshop on PEN center formation. I was delighted to hear of the workshop from Mr. Ide, since it's the nuts and bolts of what comes after the signing of the charter that can get backlogged and slow the process for years. It also mattered a great deal to me that someone from Asia, and from a PEN center, would share the sentiment I tried to express about how the world wants to hear from Mongolian writers in even more practical terms. I was just a little white girl running around "representing" PEN ad hoccishly on the Cental Asian steppe for a year. I'm not a member of PEN in any country. I just think PEN's a fantastic organization and that Mongolian writers deserve a PEN center.

Anyhizzle, Mr. Ide worked with a Mr. Ganbat during that workshop. I don't know Mr. Ganbat and neither do any of the writers here with whom I am acquainted. So I think I'll introduce them all to each other, or at the very least make sure everyone has everyone else's contact information, before I leave. After a game of phone tag with the Japanese Embassy it was decided that tomorrow, near the Foreign Nations Center or something like that, Mr. Ganbat and I will have lunch. At which point I'll turn around excitedly and tell you all whatever he tells me about the workshop. Oh hooray for the long jump from signing something to doing something! Maybe a Mongolia PEN center will form before too long after all. I just want to make sure Mr. Ganbat knows of the wonderful writers I met here who'd like very much to be part of things PEN-related.

You'll also be hearing shortly of the Arts Council of Mongolia and all the awesome things they've been up to, with footage to boot! (VERY cool contemporary art scene here, people. VERY cool.)

So anyway, I'ma go try and make good on all this. Happy Monday to you and Happy Tuesday to me.

211

I don't know if it's the poet in me, but I get a kick out of the gems to be found amid pages of poor translations. Poor translations don't always make for a bad read. Sometimes they're downright hilarious. And sometimes there are moments of poetry in there.
As I've edited (rewritten every sentence) Altai's book I've kept a list of my favorite translation bloopers. Some of them are evocative, and perhaps even right-on in their own way: raiding a book instead of reading it. Raking one's brain instead of racking it. Yarning instead of yawning. Dreaming of Fraid instead of Freud. Flowing from Berlin to Ulaanbaatar instead of flying there. Answering the greets of a stranger.

And most of all, the ferry-tale, which, I imagine, like a fairy-tale, ferries you off somewhere else for a time.

210

Today's blog post is being hosted here, at the blog of wonderful Brooklyn nonprofit Slice Magazine, to which big cheeses like Salman Rushdie have contributed interviews, whose staff N+1 challenges to trivia showdowns with Jonathan Lethem, and which, last but not least, Susan Orlean follows on Twitter! Susan Orlean, people.
Their blog "Slices of Life" does profiles of people in about 500 words, and I profiled Altai. Enjoy!

209 Part V

(Part V of The Poem That Still Speaks: an Essay on the Poetics of Political Exile)

Tumen's niece and her brother arrived during breakfast. I could see Tumen in his nephew's eyes. The nephew was twenty according to himself, nineteen according to his sister. He put mutton in his milky tea; she put cheese in hers. She was, of course, perfect, hair in a swept side ponytail.

As a matter of decent of form rather than rebellion--
Formed a heaven of what he stole from the abyss.

I own I don't edit my texts as well as I should before making them available, but some of the grammatical/editorial mistakes are actually intentional. Example: "Would they have taken him into that van if he had attempted to return to his wife and daughter." The padded throne of textual space (here we go again, English and its movement) allows me this method of driving home (ditto) an emotional point (ha!). On the page, i.e. in the land of mimicry, I can mimic a question that does not turn up at the end--many languages do not turn up their questions at the end, including Mongolian. In these houses of questions and constructions of politics, pages are freedom-spaces and also very weak--hence, and bring on the metaphor (bring it: bring it from there to here)--the oft-used comparison of thin walls to paper.

Should I be surprised, then, that conversations with a tender ghost over wires during my year in Asia enabled my friend to turn into that ghost without my knowing it? That they allowed my friend's husk to leave the story out about just how much of a ghost, just how dead and gone (from here to a there I can't see) my friend was? Just how forced out of my best friend I had been, and would continue for long painful months to be. Tumen has adjusted to the idea that protection is fleeting. Should I be surprised that at physical approximation, the tree under which I took shelter, the well I used to drink from, was poisoned?

What if
a man went into his house and leaned his hand
against the wall and the wall
was not?

When Tumen and his wife lived together, did they hurt each other? Did they fight? What does the strain of exile do. Is abstraction the worst kind of decoy. Is it more toxic to meet and cause pain where love once lived, or to leave that stone unturned and continue as the ballerina rehearsing every moment for a recital she'll never give--in the case of Tumen and his wife, the chance to live together again in bodily proximity.

Better than any description of buildings or garments,,
The theory of a city, a poem,
With iron and stone edifices, ceaseless vehicles,
Ship and towered city are nothing,
Stripped of men alive within it, living as one.

Tumen's niece and nephew took me back to the museum, to the 3rd floor displays of song and dance traditions and hilarious Chinese translations. A sunny day outside, a day that took forever to get started--the niece's knock was assimilated into my dream as someone knocking on a car window--to lunch where they kept ladling food out of the hotpot and I realized I just had to say no thank you and let the food pile up, all green and the beer opening like a gunshot. The teacher who ate with us knew enough English to explain the train back to Mongolia to me: first a ten hour layover then a four or five hour one. I told them I would sleep and read during the ten hour layover rather than disturbing the doctor and his family again; they wouldn't hear of it but I was adamant. That evening Eej fried up our leftover green beans with meat and rice.
It's not good to eat alone, she says, exactly as Tumen had before, in another country, down to the very inflection.

On the way home from the park, T shirts hanging, people eating at barbeque stands. Tumen calls Eej while we're walking but something is wrong with the cell phones. I kept thinking of the word trick Godisnowhere. She insisted on coming to the park. I had wanted to go run alone instead of being pulled and cattled--we saw a movie and I let her pull me along after, trying to adjust for a few hours to the closeness and steering. She wanted to change my mind about the train layover. I live alone in Mongolia, I said, to which her response was that my ten hour layover would be me alone in China. The park had it all, teenagers playing ball and a group of middle aged powerwalkers. Young hip couples wrapping arms about each other, girls with mullets, girls in skinny jeans. I used to come here with Tumen Ulzii, she said. We would walk for an hour together every night around this time and talk.

Picking out our way through verbs and ruins,

That single idle word blown from mind to mind.

Tumen called the apartment, and when I talk to Tumen on the phone my voice always goes up a register. He asks if the trip was good, if she was feeding me. No actually, it's possible that I don't remember what he asked, I only know what he would ask, given the small pool of words I could understand.

His blood began again, talking and talking.
Did the letters work upon his blood?

What did you talk about? I asked fifteen minutes later after I jogged the track while she walked it. His writing, she says. Literature. In the little sector of woods between the university buildings and the apartment buildings in which she lived and Tumen used to live, she wended through the trees only to turn at the curb and enter them again. I uncovered what I half-felt before, of my role is as medium, that there was no experience I had that year that was not to write about--though that's not exactly right--god did the air smell good on that little path--

Is reform needed? Is it through you?

I did what human beings do instinctively when
They are driven to utter extremity—looked
For aid to one higher than man.

A cheerleader-style gaggle of girls, teens on the bleachers, two on the track learning to rollerblade. She walked, looking back periodically to check on me as I stretched. I asked if I could look at the vigil underway in the center of the loop of track. Fewer candles than yesterday; flags back up from half-mast.

The breastlike, floral air is
the bloody tribute we had paid that harsh, brutal singer
at the deadest hours of the night.
At each stroke blood spurts from the roots.

A girl approached shyly in fits and starts with two lit candles to where Eej and I stood at a distance. Please come, she says to me, little with big eyes.

Eyes going and going,
A swirl of it, nerves and clots,
Can roar in the heart of itself as a symphony,
Perhaps as no symphony can.

The students all looked like Williamsburg hipsters, leggings, mullets, and all. They sang a Chinese nationalist song. Didn’t realize how scarce foreigners were in Hohhot. They were agricultural university students. After I joined the circle I saw that the candles set upon the ground on top of Dixie cups spelled something, but I didn't know any Chinese besides thank you, so when the kids speaking and holding papers said something about me I didn’t know until all dark eyes turned my way. A tall boy came and stood next to me when the pixie girl couldn't quite understand me nor I her.
"Say what you feel, about the earthquake," he said.
"I am here to--" I began in a small voice
"--Speak to everyone," he encouraged.
I looked up at the eyes. "I am here to honor the spirits of the dead and grieve with you," I said.
"Thank you," they said together.
We stood holding our candles in our dixie cups.

Whatever is neglected slips away.
You elements that clip us round about,
All sent back by the echoes:
Heaven has always chosen the time.
No message plucked from the birds, the embers.
Always a knit of identity,
The moon had opened a blue field in the sky.

The next morning the niece took me out again. In the park, crowded with people and children for whom many empty kiddie-rides trundled round and round, incredible amounts of pollen tufts fell and drifted along like piano notes. A girl sang her heart out in the very corner of the park, next to piles and piles of shingles. A little boy fished in a shallow pool. Haughty looks from those power walkers. Less than 48 there in Hohhot; it took longer than I spent there to train there and back, listening to the groan of wheels on track as the lines coursed through me, looped an infinite number of times.

All times mischoose.

The night I left Eej and her niece stood outside the train window, as did the families of the other three passengers in our compartment. We crowded round. One of my compartment companions looked immediately to me like a band member--the loose half open shirt, the shaggy hair longer in back--and I would feel worse about profiling him if I hadn't turned out to be right. He was an opera singer, actually, coming to Ulaanbaatar for a show. A man with a cigarette in his mouth and similar hair and face to the opera singer came to the window, grinning.
"Your little brother?" I asked.
"Yes."
Somewhere in this train car was a former student of Eej's. When she said she was a geography teacher, she explained that she teaches what people of different regions eat, wear, (here they have sheep, she gives as an example, but in Argentina they don't, because it's too hot). Her student came in where I was miserable in my just woke up and unable to move state--had no sense of the hour; we were in the huge warehouse where they change the bogeys on the bottom of the train at the Mongolia-China border and the clangs resounded.

The boss was dead, the mistress nervous and the cradle already split.
Where’s my voice?
Where are all these corpses from,
Scattering too some heavy
Unwelcome thoughts that were beginning to throng on my solitude?

They all slept as my body trundled along with them to Tumen and a land of relative freedom of speech. Sunrise all to myself. Had seen the pink along the horizon for a while, then the gold bar, milking around flush with the horizon. I fished around in the cardboard box Eej packed with a week's worth of food for me, hoping to find that one apple. When I looked up again the sun was a rectangle of gold light with rounded corners. I watched it detach like an egg from an ovary under a microscope as in that video kids in some countries are made to watch. Burns on my retina exact as hole puncher detritus. Realized after a while of staring at it that I could only to so because the sun-spot of burn had layered over what I stared at.

Had I written the right things down? What to absorb but impressions, since information was dependent on time (too short) and a knowledge of the habits of Chinese authority (nonexistent) and a cultural sensitivity to journalistic questioning, not to mention language barriers? I abandoned the effort; the one fact I knew was that she needed someone. Someone there in the warm flesh. By the end I leaned into her and waited to be taken along by the elbow.

What do you do
when you fall far from help? Night doesn’t fall. Left to myself I abandoned myself:
I think the sun where he was born drew all such humours from him,
For he only holds a candle in the sunshine.

Before falling asleep the grandpa of the compartment asked me to sing. They'd tossed back a few, I think, this motley crew of new friends. They really were strangers at the outset of this journey, but by morning they were all getting off the train together to eat-, buying each other and me tarag and water, and in Erlian, big boxes of fruit because fruit was so much cheaper there than in Ulaanbaatar. The opera singer, who refused to sing last night now was humming in headphones, looking down at sheet music. Everyone took off to eat in the sunshine. The doors to the train station were set to open at 2pm, and by 130 there were mountains of canvas bags and boxes in front of the station doors and a long line of passengers waiting sensibly in the shade of the line of trees across the parking lot. Bright geometric shapes, wider roads than Ulaanbaatar, actual intersections.
Intersections, coincidentally, are one of my favorite metaphors once they make the leap from the outer world to the inner one.

I couldn't wait to see Tumen and show him the photos I had taken of his family, couldn't wait for him to make the leap from the inner world of my mind to the Outer world of his hell, Ulaanbaatar. I was selfish in that way, perhaps. It wasn't my hell. My hell would take another year to darken the walls of my mind. In his lectures Professor Weinstein said with great feeling that a central message to the texts he used, the texts that buoyed me through the hell of the heart surgery waiting room vigil and which buoy me now as I do my best to bury the tender ghost I loved who disappeared--during the phone call when I realized the voice didn't belong to my friend anymore the professor's words came back to me--"the prison in which you live is of your own devising"--

The thing I came for: the wreck
and not the story of the wreck. You won’t hear it nicely. If it hurts you, be glad of it.

And, with respect to my situation, not Tumen's, he might be right. There is a core selfhood that should not be given out to another body, since the self within that body might disappear without its husk disappearing as well. But love dissolves the plexiglass, which is why hissing and swearing hurts more when it comes out of a body that used to house a friend--it goes right in. I crouched sobbing with my phone to my ear at the corner of 103rd and Broadway, clear in the all-clicking-into-place that around that time last year, when I went to Hohhot, my friend had died but I'd kept thinking my friend was in there somewhere, looking for him and getting hurt every time I did, and I will always prefer to have sobbed rather than swear and hiss back at the stranger who took over the husk.

It is very late in the day to offer me your tears.
Now about setting you free: I cannot fall because there is no room to.

The trick to this burial, I think, it to recognize the presentation of self as a vessel of words into which I poured love--love that was nonetheless real. Recognize that if there weren't something real about that which is presented with words, language may never have evolved. Of course anything dependent on language (like a correspondence over wires by two selves inside bodies separated either, as in Tumen's case, by force, or in my case, by the choice of one) is bound by its limits. How can I grieve for my best friend when the physical subject-markers that humans use to melt plexiglass with those they trust are still there: face, eyes, hands. My related question: What is the psychology of adjustment for exiles. Did Tumen need, on some level, to bury his wife in order to move forward in his life without her, even as he knew there was a (smaller and smaller) chance they'd be together for longer than a week again?

It is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear,
To say: be kinder to yourself.
Rescue yourself, your city, rescue me—
Rescue everything infected by the dead.

"Prison", "torture," and "exile" are big catch-words in a vocabulary ridden with them. Power and authority are endemic to the English language, of course, but the same is true of language in general. I escaped upstairs in the train station, since I had no physical cargo besides my body, which was equipped with the right paper. A windowless, customerless duty-free shop up there, all cigarettes and booze. While the anthill subsided downstairs I talked with a friendly Australian about how my desire to learn Chinese had subsided once I realized the rote memorization necessary to learn an alphabetless language.

How can I say things that are pictures:
How could you leave the crime uncleansed so long?

We stopped in Zamin Uud and none of the Australians knew what kimchi was--this was after the dominatrix train employee ordered people off their bunks when she looked at their passports. It was the hour it grew dark, so after paying the dollar-to-use bathroom on the central square similar to one in a central Mexican town, we wandered away. Split level buildings that reminded me of my hometown in California, young people hanging out on the stoops. We found a square brown brick building with a karaoke room and a bar in the basement, a supermarket and a restaurant on the ground floor, and a kid's playground on the second floor. When we left it was dark, 8pm, and I saw the slim silhouette of a child watching us from a second-floor window.

The earth abode of stones in the great deeps,
the only name I have for you, that, no other—ever, ever, ever!

By now my dishonesty, I hope, is obvious. Obvious that on the level that matters--as in, physical matter! metaphor, will conceptualization ever be free of you?--but anyway, obvious that on the level that matters, there are no poetics to exile. Not the exile which is not metaphorical. Discourse is shredded as easily as paper when it comes (comes. from here to there.) to these issues: there are no heroes in this text, there is no perfection, and Tumen's story isn't finished. My myopia is equally as obvious, I'm sure. But I try to be kind to myself: metaphor evolved perhaps because it is inextricably intertwined with empathy. If I did not have my own admittedly small-minded story of dislocation and estrangement from a beloved other, of grief, with which to enter Tumen's narrative through one of its many holes, I perhaps would have noticed less of what was important. I treated Eej to the ever-rare trip to a cinema. We saw the animated flick Iron Man. Her delight at going to the movies and her hand steering my elbow: that was important.
When Tumen picked me up from the train and made sure I got home, when we met up later and he said for the second time to the word exactly what his wife had said days before, in another country (that of memory, now) 5pm honey light lighting up the sun of his face: It's not good to eat alone.

That was important.

In rooms of selfhood where we woke and lay watching
today unfold like yesterday, we had to take the world as it was given. The human rose to haunt us

everywhere, raw, flawed, and asking more than we could bear.

(How was it we were caught?)



--MH, May 2009

(Extensive apologies to, let's see: Agee, Beckett, Blake, Dickinson, Gander, Morrison, Rich, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Whitman...)

209 Part IV (re-post)

(Editor's Note: that's it, I'm never posting quickly before taking off for a horseriding countryside-overnight again! I managed to post the penultimate draft of Part IV, not the finished one. That's what I get for saving every draft of a piece of writing--it follows I'd at some point post the wrong draft. Anyway here's a slightly more polished read, and sorry to make you guys Be Part Of My Process. I am a hippie, but not *that* much of one. --MH)

(Part IV of The Poem That Still Speaks: An Essay on the Poetics of Political Exile)


Erlian was dusty, windy, and a little chilly. Against clouded brown air and light fixtures that looked like dandelions, the flag flew at half mast. The same woman who met my eyes like a hawk when I handed her my bedsheets on board the train then had a talking crush on me in the hallway because of my blue eyes--and then chased me out of the bathroom--passed by, her shift over for the time being. This region, the deserts of China and Mongolia, did feel to me unequivocally like the dusty, barren apocalypse, the real end of the world. During the night sometimes the man in the opposite bunk would sit cross legged in his paisley long underwear, studying me. Each time it always looked the same out--rock, sand, Gobi, pre-dawn. Now I waited in the cold gusts sitting on my bag on the side of the train station, wondering how to prepare for meeting the family and visiting the home of someone who had been exiled.

I tried to make my eyes blaze with other fires than those of love,
With corroding fires, or whistle’s echo, sinking, sunken.
Tell him...tell him you saw me and that...that you saw me.

A team of forest-green-suited police were there to greet us when the train arrived, standing between the train and log-laden cars on the next track. They shone flashlights on the floor and roof of the train hallway, felt my bed nonchalantly, asked me for an entry card I was never given, then shrugged and walked away. Now they filed into a van. Would they have taken him into that van if he had attempted to return to his wife and daughter.

You have rather the look
of another world.
We have our reasons.
How could you leave the crime uncleansed so long?

I thought I should not blink once, because I was in the land that was only a dreamscape to him: he would never come back, and as a place his body would never reside it was now, to him--to his brain in the body whose mobility was and is limited by political restraints--strictly a world of metaphor.

Look the house in its blind face.
the Film upon the eye
had the opal lightings of dark oil.

Winging, swept away,
What good were eyes to me?

I waited. Pushy taxi drivers. A woman with a gauze scarf pulled over her face, smushing her features. Tumen called me on my phone, which got service there, to say to stay where I was. Tumen's friend, who picked me up after a while, was a doctor with an office in one of the spaces of a mall sort of deserted outlet place. The other spaces in the warehouse sold all manner of things but mostly cheap clothing. There was a picture on the wall of a wolf and a Chinese emperor guy. Calendars. When I asked what kind of emch he was, he pointed to them.

You cannot explain to others because they have no conception of what is meant.
They say they are ions in the sun.
You may say it is to prevent our reason from foundering.

His wife mopped the floor. A sterile smell. Their daughter, an eight year old in a pink shirt, black pants, and clackety black flats scurried by, a white mop dog in her arms. She played jump rope with a long, rubber rope in the wide warehouse hallway with the other girls. Some of them sat and whispered on the sofa next to me, finally asking me how old I was. I slept and woke in a place that was not supposed to be surreal--not a metaphor for me--vibrating white light and girls clacking and jumping rope. The mother and daughter put on their jackets and left. The light was never direct. There was too much dust for that.

The book Tumen is writing now, he indicated through Natsagdorj when we met for dinner, chronicles his journey from China to Mongolia. I can't wait to read it--to be able to read it in Mongolian or to read the English version, whichever comes first--because those moments in Inner Mongolia were, for me, were peppered with holes in the narrative. Flickering in and out of sleep in that strange room in the storehouse mall, I wondered, was this a friend who helped him escape? Did he need help escaping, even? How much time did he have, or felt he had, to leave? How much time passed between when the police raided his house and his office, and did he know they would come? If he did not have such negative associations with the Chinese government, would he long for home? What thoughts did Tumen's inner world churn out as he left his country of birth?

I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future.

The car was taking four people to Hohhot and I was the first, which meant I got to see the bright shapes of Erlian's buildings against the dusty air as we made the rounds to hotels to pick the others up. In the car on the way to Hohhot every red flag flew at half mast. The three men I rode with, I knew, made up the miracle of the present but I still did not want to talk to them. Dinosaur statues on the way into Hohhot, twenty of them sweeping the landscape over hundreds of yards. All is well in the world, read some meditations. Life is unfolding as it is meant to. A chorus of schoolchildren were trapped under buildings for a third day then, in the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake. Dust formed a globe of the sun, it always would. "Stew in the screen of the mind," I scratched. First a flat expanse, then rows of trees thrashing, then as it grew dark the great sleeping-boar shape of a mountain.

The words are purposes.
The words are maps.

They dropped me off first. I said thank you to the moon, hanging full above their apartment. The first thing I noticed was how much less tired, how much happier, the face of Tumen's wife was as I glimpsed it through the window before exiting the taxi; I had seen her once before, in Ulaanbaatar, when she had just arrived for a visit from Hohhot the previous night. Here she was happy and affectionate--why wasn't she like this before? Was she exhausted from the train ride she had taken the day before from Hohhot to Ulaanbaatar? Was she worried? Had she been detained again? I knew the swiss-cheesed narrative, the lack of information and data and fact, influenced my experience there as one that played out in almost exclusively in subjective, emotional terms. I've mentioned before that I'm a shoddy journalist. Facts are not always mine to obtain, though; I didn't know how to be there. I didn’t know the words to all these questions. Plus her dialect, the Inner Mongolian, as it contrasted with the Outer I learned, made even the most basic communication difficult. I didn't know if the questions were appropriate to ask, or even if it was safe to ask them in that apartment.

She persuaded us to let the mystery go
And concentrate on what lay at our feet.
The worst of words. The original quarry, abyss itself.
You need riches, armies to bring that quarry down!
Will you swallow, will you deny them, will you lie your way home?

The walls were turquoise. She sat across from me. She worked today; it was Monday and she was a geography teacher. She mixed sweet yogurt and grain, gave me milky tea and a can of beer, cut the mutton for me from the bone when I showed myself to be incompetent. The mutton was the best thing I had ever tasted and I'd sworn I was done with mutton. I looked at her face and at her daughter's room, where I would sleep. This is where he cannot be. This is where he cannot be.

It is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear

24 hours later, after a day of outing she let down her hair and it framed her face in a way that made me understand why the word pretty came into being.
If they were to reunite, would they fit together again? With the death of the gentle ghost's voice that comforted me on the phone during my year in Asia, with the replacement of that self I loved by an unkind stranger, I learned it's possible for a self one loved to die while its body, the shell, lives on and grows new selves, nothing like the ones before. What if this happened to Tumen Ulzii and his wife? When distance is chosen--or, in the case of an exile, forced--experience of an other becomes dependent on medium, which doesn't cover everything. All sorts of changes can occur. The body lurking within a body--hope, optimism, a self--can die, and the other doesn't always know. What of realignment, should they be allowed to reunite?

You have not wept at all!
I see a white cheek and a faded eye,
But no trace of tears. I suppose, then,
Your heart has been weeping blood?
I have always stood in the way of your pleasures. Open your eyes. Look and see who I am.

In Hohhot's new Museum of Inner Mongolia they already had a graphic design poster with images of the Sichuan earthquake. The museum also boasted the largest complete dinosaur skeleton in the world. The guide accompanied us for it though she knew nothing about it since she was actually stationed on the floor below, and she wouldn't shut up so I retreated until she left. I call Tumen's wife mother in Mongolian, Eej, and accordingly, it took me no time to become the sullen daughter. Eej alternately pushed and pulled me by the elbow and I, sleepy from the day and a half of transit to get there, felt irritated and unable to help feeling irritated. Sometimes the body is a heavy thing to lug; it was for me when I knew I was walking in the nightmare of Tumen's memory, China, but also in the miracle of his hope, in the form of his wife. She took the day off to spend with me there in the museum, where the stuffed inanimate animal skins all looked vaguely confused.

Witness, you ever-
burning lights above, who are so lovely fair and smellst so sweet that the sense aches at thee:

Suppose we repented.


All over Hohhot streets, taxi screeches--in the restaurant thank god I came awake though I shuvuu shig iddeg ("eat like a bird")--only the mind and its attachments form the specters--I like this hour, I tried to tell her: the most popular Mongolian restaurant in Hohhot and we are the only customers--waiters walk by singing, and towards the back the cooks sleep with their heads in their arms--bed on the verge of breaking--futile to want the connection dreamed of, in which one does not construct oneself but one simply is--the cottonwood leaves clappered outside----a teaset shaped like genitals in the museum--a cup of coffee in "mike dong," as she said: McDonalds (and there is not one Mike Dong, KFC, or Starbucks in all of Outer Mongolia)--taxis like a school of fish outside the train station--they gave you a large faux-denim backpack in which to put your purse, then they lock it with a sensor for the duration of your stay in the bookstore--in the front of the museum a huge piece of topaz that supposedly looked like an eagle, which supposedly looked like the state of Inner Mongolia--the museum was huge, new, built in 2007, so Tumen hadn't seen it--behind his house, the university track field, where kids run around at dusk, playing ball--fewer people in Hohhot than in Ulaanbaatar, but Hohhot worlds more developed--Clean, wide streets, like a Chinese Seoul--Women taxi drivers--this is one way political privelege seeps through the cultural script of literature: I could confuse the past and present tenses, I could switch voices, whereas Tumen's past and present were starkly divided, and the violations had happened to him and his wife and will always have happened to him and his wife, not a "you" they can separate from--

Repented what?
Our being born? Remorse is the poison of life.

This, however, is one thing I choose to keep present whenever it rises up in me: outside, on the university field, a candlelight vigil is being held on the concrete track. On the ground the candles form the shape of a heart. It is for the earthquake victims. It is where Tumen and his wife would walk at dusk.

Give me the ocular
proof, if only to save you from freezing at the street corner all night, to comply with heat: Bells

in your parlors, wildcats in your kitchens;
After every tempest come such calms. Even then this forked plague is bated to us.

209 Part III

(Part III of The Poem That Still Speaks: An Essay on the Poetics of Political Exile)

The economic downturn has not hit Mongolia--and the streets of Ulaanbaatar--the way the rise in gas prices did in 2008. There is no discernible rise in crime, and there are several new tourist-oriented places opening up, like the veranda'd Amsterdam Cafe on Peace Street where westerners and wealthy young Mongolians can drink and be seen. Comely Mongolian women with insect-like sunglasses and trendy handbags loiter outside of the new shopping center in the parisian-style building on the east side of the ubiquitous State Department Store.

I first met Tumen in front of the State Department store after an exiled Inner Mongolian in Queens who had read Tumen's books wrote to me, just arrived in Mongolia for my Luce year, to find him.

The chasm between the concept of destiny and the horrid lot doled out by social inequalities isn't a new one. Tumen does not feel as though he's meant to be in suspended here in Ulaanbaatar, between the country whose government oppressed him and wherever he will be (we hope, with less and less faith) resettled with his family. I would not argue to those displaced with murdered families, either, that this is part of a larger plan, but I won't, as they say, "go there", though because those words are signifiers, metaphors, not an actual place, I have the mobility to do so (the right papers, one could argue)--there's no "getting round" the dead metaphor we don't hear, and it all becomes trite so quickly.

All the dead voices.
They make a noise like wings.
Like leaves.
Like sand.
Like leaves.

The train-compartment companion with the case of beer asked my name. I had by then switched with one of them so I could be a private island up top.

Min, I say, dropping the g at the end as I had grown hip to doing.
What kind of name is that? they ask in Mongolian.

I tried to tell them the story behind the name, of my brother giving me "Ming! Ming!" because he was only two and that was the character from Rikki Tikki Tavvi (Mingaling) whose name he could pronounce. On the other bunk the first to sleep was sawing logs.
After asking me for my Mongolian name and learning I don't have one they immediately called me "Shou Ming"--"Jijig Ming" in Mongolian--"little Ming." How old was I? Twenty three. I have a daughter who is twenty four, said the carpenter. Or maybe he was a contractor. He'd been in Ulaanbaatar for three months working on three eighteen-story buildings.

My greatest hobby was making little chapels
Run like quicksilver wheat in the lesions of heated air
Out there where that house is burning,
The bells bruising the air above the crowded roofs.

They asked me if I would drink the beer they gave me. I came equipped with a big bottle of Tiger--though Tumen never chose Tiger if Mongolian beer was available because Tiger is Chinese beer. The guy under me held up a plastic water bottle. To clink glasses? No, to drink--vodka in there, not water. When would I ever learn.

One by one my train friends slept. I scratched in my journal: "It doesn't make sense to me. Not talking about logic or even words, which make music out of the world at their best with enlightened language as objects present themselves, passive and aggressive by turns."

Margaret Atwood wrote a short piece about writing as a paper tent, scribbling on the paper as the dark huge wolves and night closed in--writing does very little, was her point (I thought). Nothing so tangible as construction.

The houses are broken open like pods in the increase of the sun, and they are scattered on the wind of a day’s work, alive and separate in that bell-struck air.

‘And what is hell? Can you tell me that?’

My body was hurtling through the nightened molasses of the Gobi Desert and unlike Tumen I had the right paper, so it would not be stopped.
I was going from him to her, from where he waited, working as a translator between Chinese, Japanese, and Mongolian, to where she walked, I would soon learn, around the track of the Agricultural University every day at dusk--and every time she did, she remembered walking that walk every day with him before he left two (now three) years ago.

The fading fires just showed her coming up the long, vacant room
as though out of some trivial and unimportant region beyond even distance.

Hell. Someone, in English, can be "going through" it as well as "in" it. Ulaanbaatar, again, is Tumen's hell. This I know. He wants out as badly as I wanted out of myself when the gentle voice of the ghost that comforted me through the phone when I was mugged one night last May in Ulaanbaatar began to belong to a hissing, swearing stranger I didn't recognize.
I think of Tumen's journey, the one inside his mind, when he went from believing these huge international organizations would help him to realizing they wouldn't, beyond a certain point. (Why am I only now realizing how rife English is with metaphors for physical movement?) The wells to which we crept, respectively, were poisoned. When Tumen's UNHCR contact was replaced by a surly, suspicious newcomer. When I realized my friend had died within a body that kept breathing. When the tree under which one has repeatedly found shelter suddenly is what is toxic, what is harmful, what then? When the well is poisoned?

I was in a printing-house in Hell and saw the method with which knowledge was transmitted from generation to generation, from his cold-house secret straight to her too-thick love.

A vulgar comparison to draw. Nothing, of course, approximates the experience of human rights abuse, least of all metaphor. A few days ago, when he was cutting strips of paper in English to show me one said:
"Now my health is very bad situation and mood."

The next one said:
"You write the articles in Inner Mongolia produced great impact.
My readers from your articles about my situation, the write E-mail sympathy and understand me."

When Natsagdorj arrived to translate for me, I said it with difficulty: Tumen should understand that if his wish is ever granted to relocate somewhere far away, the Inner Mongolian community that is financially supporting him, that bought him his snazzy new phone and wallet, will not be replaced. He will be far more without a feeling of community and inclusion, and it is this extreme loneliness which haunts and presses down like a dark cloud upon the chests of resettled exiles. I did not want to say this but I had to.

Each is a new and incommunicably tender life, wounded with every breath.
The human act will make us real again.