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.