13

Yet absolutely everyone here, expat or Mongolian, agrees that it’s a fascinating time to be in this country especially, but also Asia in general.

These are W’s sentences about his summer in China: I puked on the great wall. In Finland there was a field I slept in and a teenager in a farmhouse issuing visas. On the TransSiberian railroad we just drank, baffled; it kept getting dark and we didn’t know why. I was warned of theft on that railroad but all that happened was Norwegian tourists offered me some of their food. I met a girl whose parents live in a suburb of Fresno and do the twitchy revivalist thing. Her boyfriend is French. She blacked out dunk and woke up next to him, and that’s how they met. Or at least, that’s how she met him, and she’s always been afraid to ask what happened that night. She saved up enough money to travel by being a shot girl in Louisiana, learning places on her body to hide the bills, lining her lingerie with shot glasses and letting them touch. My neighbors down one direction of the street all sold bras, the other, saxophones. Everyone under 5 in China is naked.