Cliterati in Mongolia

199

2009-05-07T11:37:00.002+08:00

Annnnnnnnd I'm back!

Cliterati In Mongolia: Part Deux.

The Redux is here.

It's my new blog for this new chapter in the Mongolian saga...bookmark it and I'll see you there!

Gratitude,

MH

198

2008-11-03T03:44:00.004+08:00

Okay guys, I did sort of fizzle out on this blog without a Sweeping Farewell. I left Mongolia for the Luce Scholar Wrapup Session in Cambodia in early July, having completed my 11-month stay in that insane frozen desert full of drunk Buddhist nomads with hearts of poets and robes like Genghis Khan's. There's obviously so much to say about the incredible adventure of my Luce Scholar year working as the International Relations Advisor to the Mongolian Writer's Union that I filled a blog with nearly 200 posts about it!

And the response has been enormous and overwhelmingly humbling. Cliterati In Mongolia was getting hits from over 40 countries all over the world by winter, and the traffic didn't stop even when my posts did. For every reader from every part of the world who took the time to stop by I offer my deepest gratitude that Mongolia, its writers, and the scope and possibilities of the literary landscape there were all things you chose to devote some moments to through this blog.

The year was a fantastic one on many levels, but for me personally it was about carving out a path toward that space at the intersection of social justice issues and literary goings-on. There's a lot to do in that space, and it turned out to include even more than the wonderful process of editing books and translating poems! Facilitating the formation of a Mongolian PEN Center, for one. Assisting an exiled writer in the process of acquiring UNHCR Refugee Status, for another.

Oh, is there work to be done! There is, there is. My year in Asia showed me what's possible and also what's necessary. From literary translation to diplomacy, you can rest assured that I will continue the work I started in Mongolia. I just moved last week to New York, and I am very much looking forward to linking up with the Mongolian community here and especially the Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center. I am still in contact with all of my favorite Mongolian literary leaders and writers thanks to the wonderful invention that is email. I'll still post any pertinent info on this blog. Thank you again for all the support. What a wonderful year it was!

Update: so I was all set to put up my writing on a new blog that would underscore the idea of personal as political (very American, I know) and link to the larger message of progress and the need for sustained work on the political landscape (which, of course, to me means sustained work on the personal and creative landscape) championed by President-elect Obama--but we all know I am long-winded so Tumblr was a silly choice of venue. Back to the drawing board! I'll check in soon.

197

2008-09-12T06:58:00.002+08:00

I got an email recently from a Mr. Ide at the Japanese PEN Center. Japan PEN is hoping to host the annual PEN World Congress in 2010, and over the past four days a couple of representatives from Japan PEN were in Mongolia holding workshops for Mongolian writers on PEN Center Formation. It's a long shot, but possible that Mongolian writers will get it together enough to, like, apply formally to be a PEN center! The only obstacle at this point is the one that had made itself apparent during my year there: that an open-door policy, which would be required, does not appeal to Mongolian writers just yet. We'll see. They did sign the charter, and the buzz and momentum continues, as this most recent visit from Japan PEN proves, so I remain optimistic.

196

2008-08-21T12:21:00.002+08:00

Ha! I've started a trend! Remember how all year I've been all, dudes, Inner Mongolian writers have a hard time? Well Rick Moody thinks so too, and PEN America's got proof here in the form of a letter from an Inner Mongolian woman whose husband was incarcerated. Moody read the letter as part of the PEN World Voices Festival.

195

2008-08-12T20:32:00.002+08:00

Two more little montages--my last of Mongolia! These are of my mother's visit.

Lake Huvsgul, one of the world's largest freshwater lakes:

Out and about in Mongolia, and also in and about, as evidenced by the retired Mongolian Opera Great serenading my (poor? lucky?) mother:

194

2008-08-06T15:57:00.010+08:00

Notes toward walking in the woods with my mother

And on the raining streets, the globe-lights that go on for no reason
The synchronicity of the boys jumping over the partition into the divide between the roads that is Ulaanbaatar's own Boston Commons, Michael walked with his headphones in his ears. Poh comforted me in her Mongolian cashmere, touching my back, reminding me just what was en exchange of energy--slips of paper, among other things. Today I awoke and climaxed thinking of a broken bead string of things--the upstairs touch that wasn’t even me or the actors who played out the script. The sunset to myself. The eaves and vortexes of an acid sunset--the teenage boys clustered round the front stoop playing cards--the sleepy women or her daughter who have to get up and let me in after hours and the dislike they make apparent each time they do--Michael encircling me from behind the one moment I was alone on the dance floor--making one's way through the geometry of things--a wide range of intimacy then an inability to stop crying on the street in Michael's arms an hour after his play is over--of buildings, I mean, the geometry of buildings---he played see you soon 50 times the day after, to stay in that space, then sloughed it off like a professional when it wrapped--

Apart from thought I wave my hands around to illustrate the waving of the bamboo-like trees. Like seaweed, says Mom. I lie on my back and she does too.

Strong wind one way, then another.

Sofia reminds me of my sister Cricket's baby pictures. I am not sure exactly what it is, I say to Mom. Later in the ger while it rains she pats her cheeks. Face shape, she says. If I have a baby I want her to look like Cricket. I think Cricket was the cutest baby ever.

I'm letting the ribbon tied around my wrist do the prayer flag thing. I wore it along with everyone else because my dance card hung from it. By the river, alternately able and unable to stop the mind noise.

Mom doesn’t know how bad I feel about a moment she doesn’t remember, right after her heart surgery when she thought she was going to throw up and tried to signal us but her breathing tube was in and I couldn't tell and they asked us to leave and I left her there moving her hand feebly.

What was my first word? I ask her.
I think it was cat, she says.

We wander slowly--the sunlight yellow now and a dusting of snow on the farthest mountains, the nearer ones sill adobe brown--

Rafaelo is grounded when we come back from our walk, made to sit just inside the ger while everyone else rides horses. He pokes at the dirt on the ground inside the ger with a stick. He finds an ant. Look mom! he says. The head isn’t on the body but the body is still moving!

We come back from the river and a family of horses mills about, mostly standing, but for the two tiny ones, so thin as to look like paper lying on the ground. Look at the babies, says Mom in her Mom voice. The babies are taking their naps.

The horses were just out, with no minder and no fences. Babies asleep like flounder fish.

When it's time to "get up and amble on", as Mom puts it, from our spot lying at the bottom of the sky-aquarium, Mom has to roll over and get on her hands and knees. Cat Mom, I say. I have to lie down and get up in pieces, she says.

Wandering in the woods, in heaven, in the absence of dogma and in the presence of my mother.

Road trips used to be about dealing with one another, says Mom. Here's this family in Mongolia, each member fiddling with their own gadget...When John was done with college, he and Dad drove home to Portland in John's new car. Dad suggested at one point that it was time for gas, and john insisted they could go for longer, and then they ran out. It was a pretty tense drive...Bob and Mom picked me up from college and we got so hungry, and Montana just went on forever with no towns. There was just one place we could find in this tiny town and it wasn't exactly a restaurant but Mom managed to get a whole cooked chicken. She tore of a leg for me and one for Bob and then attacked the rest face-first.

I am to translate my boss's poem. The literal translation of the first line is "the golden duck of my chest is quacking." Sounds much more poetic in Mongolian. "The golden bird of my heart" fits the tone better but it's a bit trite.

Translating poems makes me stoned. It has me wondering at language--the impossibility of ever saying something exactly in another language, which implies a multiplicity of truths or realities--a new or at least uniquely nuanced one is described and upheld or carried with each language. Oh such an awkward and bulky thing sometimes and it's what transmits knowledge.

There are too many of us; we've outgrown our own myth.
I think we're talking about sustainability.
Or our own importance.
Mom uses a long piece of wood as a walking stick.
We wander slowly together, picking up big stones to throw into the shallow part of the creek. Hoping to make something to get across with. We're not able to master the precise art of aim.

Last night I had too much to drink. Mom, sleeping next to me, on her belly like a seal, and burrowing into the pillow with a small smile, breathed in and out. Her breathing was the sound of god.

Beforehand I talked with Steve about what it is like to be one of the ones with an open heart.

For snatches, I collect rocks with my mother and feel the cold of my feet without thought. With my mother and with no thought. We lay on the ground a while.

There is a camcorder vhs home video of us in the garden when I was one or two, holding the vegetables my mother handed me to my cheeks. It occurs to me that Mom has spent a lot of time with me when I was just existing without thought. I just don't remember those moments.

I was herding yesterday and we found a log so we rolled it over, says Sofia to me, her front teeth like two chiclets. The king yak had biiiiig horns. What makes the king yak the king yak? I ask. The one who saves the herd, she says. This is the first time it's rained since we've been here, her father observes.

What it's like to be the lightbulb the fireflies and moths flutter around to keep warm.

Running stars around us.

When I asked her for an explanation of the pain she just said, your heart is that expansive. When I was here before the river was iced over so you could walk on it. The ice was aquamarine and the willows a burnt sienna.

For such a giving landscape, the winter gives nothing.
Up on the ridge Mom pauses at each landing of the stairs up to the monastery.

On the way out Byambaa asks how my mother likes Mongolia. I translate the question for her. Big, she says.

My mother has one of those inviting faces. It' always looks good on film and in person. When she was young she looked like Julie Christie. Now she looks like Judi Dench.

*
I missed my ipod dearly on the drive up here--having been mugged the day before the body and mind I was left with to listen to instead of episodes of cross-cultural poetics are not happy.

Mom reads the BFG to me. This is the voice, the body, the person I would be near. This is where I would convalesce.

The lake has two colors, I say to our driver on the thin blue bench. Later he comes in the ger asking if I have any heart medicine. My heart hurts, he says in Mongolian. (They say this. They say their liver hurts.)

I don't remember clearly, so my body is telling me the story bit by bit. The limp: he took my down by kicking in my knee. The cut on the lip: where he covered my mouth hard. The aching wrist, where he wrested my gadget from my hand. The left side ache: where I hit the ground.

I try to memorize her lovely face as she reads.

We hear something along the lines of howls.

The pretty girl who brings the food knocks the stove door from its hinge. It's hot to the touch so she lifts is with a bendy piece of kindling bark.

It's the horsemen, singing.

There are too many of us; we've outgrown our own myth.

The myth of our own importance, says Mom, when I repeat the lines to her, the lines I first wrote over a year ago that have repeated themselves over and over in my mind.

There is a myth I have been telling myself that I'm not strong enough. To endure pain. To do it alone.

A guy my age singing a traditional song to no one in particular, lounging on his motorbike.

My mother and I plopping stones in the creek.

7-10 am or pm? Asks mom.
I think if it were pm it would be 17-22, I say.
No, says mom, 19 to--
--you're right, I say--
--25?
There aren't 25 hours in the day though, I say.
Right.
19-22.
Between the two of us, we got it.

Later she puts her arm toward the mountain ridge over Maine-like (conifer?) trees and says--now--
You're right about the doors facing south, I say: rises in the east, sets in the west--

We run into two backpackers from Romania who are excited for their first grandson's arrival, around 16th August in Vienna. Everywhere we go, we meet Polish people, the man says. We were alone in Mongolia on top of this mountain except for one guy and he was Polish. Caixan yum yum! Is their word for delicious.

I toss stones. It's not that it never happened. It's just, these men aren't here.
As if to prove my own point I forget for a moment the name of one. and then another. At moments like these it's easier to see the men in my life as different forms of the same love, the love that makes up the still lake I toss rocks on. I limp down the narrow beach, small overhang above. Small kinds of wildflowers: small white, small yellow, and the drooping purple flowers that, like poppies, turn upwards late in life but look rather dejected til then.

My aching body is here, the lake, my mother.

Only, experience changes how we receive text. Mom reads me the BFG and the beginning, about how a huge man sees Sophie in the dark and grabs her, is alive for me now--I have the visceral memory. I have loved the Tom Petty Wildflowers CD since I was 11 years old but but I will never forget the new pang of recognition I felt when I had the experience to make these words come alive from their inertness: "I'm not afraid anymore/ it's only a broken heart."

If I tell my family about the mugging I must tell them this because they worry so: my heart is broken and my body is bruised but I know that my self, my soul, is stronger than it has ever been before.
He slashed through a canvas behind which was not a fragile something ready to spill out but a forest, a mountain. An ocean, a world.

You have chosen struggle in the past because you did not realize you were writing your own script.

Fear closes down the loving heart.
Forget about how unkind he's been to me--what about how unkind I've been to myself?
Go into every sorrow and anger. Don't back away.

I think of story so often. About the depth of memory, the part of us that knows, inside, our own remedy. That is the remedy, the answer.

Past the pain is a brilliance...see everyone in their wholeness. This allows them to respond with their light faster and easier.
This last part I do know to be true. My mother can do it, and she taught me how to do it.

The cut on my lip makes it hurt to smile. The cut on my wrist where is scraped the ground. I am complete and unabridged.

--I wonder if anything happens to build the banks back up, says Mom. The banks are so eroded.

If you have a problem with something or someone, pay attention to the words being spoken. The purpose of my life story is to allow love to enter, to not be afraid any more.

We are sitting on the banks of one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world. In February they drive clean across the kilometers of ice. My glasses are fogged up, says Mom. Again it's almost like something sprays out of my eyes. Maybe my sunscreen.

Annoyed-sounding ducks. The lake shimmering and soft alternately. In the gloaming their full song undulating. I sit on the banks looking at the stones and the two young Mongolian guys in a boat ask if I'd like to come fishing. They tell me to come over later, when they’ve brought the boat in near the shack that houses the pump bringing cold water to the faucets in the camp bathroom.

Nyamdavaa, the beautiful girl who brings the food and firewood, will start university in the fall. She'll major in chemistry and biology in the fall. She opens the door to the ger and asks something about fish. You think maybe she is asking if we want fish for lunch, but no, she's got the fish in her other hand, almost half as long her, slimeslicked fish.

When Mom and I get back from out windy walk with the furs of the yaks swaying with the breeze--

in honour of Khainzaa Gelanduv who dreamed to fly in the blue sky of Mongolia using the wings made by him with sheepskin

The lake has as many colors as the wind has weathers.

193

2008-08-06T13:24:00.002+08:00

Some fun photos, courtesy of the uber-talented photographer Rob Shore, of us young literary upstarts rolling with David Lehman and the Ambassador Mark Minton in Ulaanbaatar in May are up over at the Best American Poetry blog. David's wife Stacey is about as awesome as they get.

192

2008-08-05T15:10:00.014+08:00

(Hey dear readers, don't forget to check out my recent "appearances" at InTheFray and the Best American Poetry Blog!)

Notes Toward a Visit to Hohhot, the capital city of the Chinese state of Inner Mongolia, to visit the family and home of exiled writer Tumen Ulzii Bayunmend

Tumen texts me just to see what I am doing sometimes. I am cleaning my clothes! He says. He speaks no English and his Mongolian is from Inner Mongolia, so the sounds are different. I've cleaned my house today, he texts me in Mongolian.
At a place near my house I order borscht and Tumen orders us both tall yellow beers.
he is haggard and hungover and misses his wife and child. He means he wants to leave Ulaanbaatar. He means to go write somewhere where he can live with his family, out from the reach of the Chinese government. I just want to be together with them; it's not right to be apart, he says. And I want to leave here.
When I get across to him that my boyfriend just broke up with me he says many things. My vocabulary in Mongolian is small; accordingly, the words he uses are simple: you have a good heart and a good head, he says, I helped him, and I will write books, and another man will come. He says Whoa! You will be a famous poet! I don't exactly understand the correlation but Ulaanbaatar can grind one down sometimes even when one is not living in political exile; I take belief like charcoal tablets where I can find it, with that kind of relief and anticipation of pain dying down amid the turbulence and smog.
I think about these conversations I have with Tumen. They are outside the more concerted work we've done to get him noticed by the UNHCR and PEN Freedom to Write. Who is comforting my silly sadness over another couple of men who didn't treat me well. An exile. When I made sure what was needed for Tumen's UNHCR Refugee status to come through done, and the status came, Tumen insisted on buying my ticket to Hohhot, the capital city of Inner Mongolia, which is in China. Where he lived before the police raided his house and office because of the books he'd written about Chinese government and its erosion of Inner Mongolian heritage and rights. Where his wife still lives, and, he says, is eager to have me.

Tumen always notices when I do not have make up on and says it looks good. He always notices my face; when I have a rash from some cleaning tissue from the train he asks about it and whether I have medicine.
Tumen has a bare apartment. He just moved into it. He gets beer especially for me. He knows I do not like the usual vodka. B will later tell me very directly that what Tumen spent hours emotionally telling you about how Inner Mongolians are misunderstood by Outer Mongolian (and both Tumen and Uchida have said this about Buryat Mongolians as well as Inner Mongolians), is not true. B admits he is no history expert, but he is very sure of this.
Tumen says his daughter was one of the 10,000 out of 200,000 students to test into the best university in China, so she does not want to leave if he is resettled, so will she be able to study somewhere good if he gets a teaching post in the western world?

Into the milky tea Tumen puts barley. Which makes sense to you; it's like breakfast cereal.

I don't like to eat alone. There's no point to making food if you're alone, no fun in it.
His wife said it in her apartment in Hohhot. He says it here in the light that's getting into his eyes so he squints and the waitress brings him a bowl of Mongolian noodle soup and me fish and cabbage. If you have another beer I will, he says, and gives me the flash drive that dropped onto the floor of his friends van when he was taking me home from the train station.

An unbelievable rose globe looming above the pregnant building on Sukhbaatar Square.
An incomparable globe.
These days never happened.

In the land of never happened I share a train compartment with three men in jackets. One of them brought a crate of beer. The other two don't know each other either.

Wait. You are made of energy of the divine but don't shuffle the order you were given.

The first two talk across from each other when you enter the compartment with Tumen's friend, the young lawyer who loosens his tie in traffic on the way here, which you (no, use I)

The one who held your book heavy pack upright while the last passenger lies down, hands braided like praying. The train yawns along, looping like two people taking it slow.

Treat yourself gently, comes a message from a friend.

Dusky marsh, trees up geometric land formations.

The backpack helping praying one, the first to bed, barefoot, is the one to peer at my page. "Boroo gar," meaning left-handed, apparently, either means rain hand, mistake hand, or both.

"Meant to be here" presupposes destiny--thus my problem with it.

Making music out of the world with enlightened language as objects present themselves, passive and aggressive by turns.

"Amerik okhin!" he says. So we have an American girl on board with us. The lights shut off, shut back on, then dim. The grime comes off my hands as I adjust my curtains, curl them in on themselves to see the hanging rose globe.

I went running today (gym girls who smile at me) so when I push my knees together the very lower of my back cracks.

Different sounds in their speech--is it inner Mongolian? Inner Mongolian-accented Chinese?

Tumen Ulzii is waiting in a suit to walk me to his young lawyer friend's car.
His wife is strip searched at the border.
No, wrong order.
He gives me toothpaste and wine for her.

The one with the case of beer asks my name. I have switched with one of them so I can be a private island up top.
"Min", I say, dropping the g at the end as I have grown hip to doing.
"What kind of nam is that?"
I try to tll 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 is sawing logs.

It doesn't make sense to me. And I am not talking about logic or even words. Radiate love.

After asking me for my Mongolian name and learning I don't have one they immediately call me "Shou Ming"--"Jijig Ming" in Mongolian--"little Ming." How old am i? 23? I have a daughter who is 24, says the carpenter. Or maybe he is a contractor. He's been in Ulaanbaatar for 3 months working on three 18-story buildings.

They ask me if ill drink the beer they gave me. The big tiger--though Tumen never chooses Tiger if Mongolian beer is available. The guy under me holds up a plastic water bottle. To cheer? No, to drink--it's vodka in there, not water. When will I ever learn.

Tumen positioning the napkin and the salt away from each other to indicate where I am and where I will be, romantically.
I ask him for my newspaper back, pouting, when he grabs it. You're bad today, he says in Mongolian. He tells me how when he was 30 with a 3 year old daughter he fell in love with a 25 year old woman, and she is in Ulaanbaatar now, but it was a long time ago and they both made their choice.

Hohhot is dusty, windy, and a little chilly. Against dusty sun and the light fixtures that look like dandelions the flag flies at half mast. The pressure on my bladder as the same woman who met my eyes like a hawk when I handed her the sheets then had a talking crush on me on the hallway because of my eyes and then chased me out of the bathroom passes, her job and shift over for the time being. During the night sometimes the man in the opposite bunk was sitting cross legged in his paisley long underwear. Each time it always looked the same out--rock, sand, gobi, pre-dawn.

I wait in the cold gusts sitting on my bag on the side of the train station. A team of forest green suited police were there to greet us, 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 file into a van.

Pushy taxi drivers. A woman with a gauze scarf pulled over her face as well as her face, smushing her features.

In a mall sort of deserted outlet place. Tumen's friend, who picked me up after a while (Tumen called me phone, which in Hohhot still works, to say to stay where I was), is a doctor with an office in one of the spaces. The other spaces in the warehouse are for all manner of things but mostly cheap clothing. There's a picture on the wall of a wolf and a Chinese emperor guy. Calendars. When I ask what kind of emch he is, he points to them. his wife mops the floor. A sterile smell. Their daughter, and 8 yr old in a pink shirt, black pants, and clackety black flats scurries by, a white mop dog in her arms. She plays jump rope with a long, rubber rope in the wide warehouse hallway with the other girls. Some of them sit and whisper on the sofa next to me, finally asking me how old I am. If sleep is a postmodern, surreal thing, on the sofa in turns, vibrating white light and girls clacking and jumping rope. The mother and daughter put on their jackets and leave. The light is never direct. There's too much dust for that. Believe in abundance. Every red flag flying at half mast. The three men I know make up the miracle in my present but I do not want to talk to them anyway. Dinosaur statues on the way into Hohhot, twenty of them sweeping the landscape over hundreds of yards. All is well in the world, reads the meditation. Life is unfolding as it is meant to. Chorus of schoolchildren trapped under buildings for a third day. Dust forms a globe of the sun, it always does. Stew in the screen of the mind. As so many hours unfold that the discomfort just is; the car ride, I accept, will never end. First a flat expanse, then rows of trees thrashing (don't wipe boogers on her clean wood tub) , then as it grows dark the great sleeping-boar mountain (don't get red pen on Ona's white sheet).

They drop me off first. (Say thank you to the moon.) (Hanging full above the university track field behind his apartment.) the first thing you notice is how much less tired, how much happier, her face is as you glimpse it through the window before exiting the taxi. The wisdom already lines the inner border of you. the moment on the island in the attic when I teared up from joy ; the moment I saw the girl who killed herself in the sunshine in my heart; the moment after the car crash when it all vibrated.

Tumen's wife is 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 don’t know the words to all these questions. Plus her dialect, the Inner Mongolian, as it contrasts with the Outer I learned, makes even the most basic communication difficult. I don't know if the questions are appropriate to ask, or even if it's safe to in this apartment.

The walls are turquoise. She sits across from me. She worked today; it's Monday and she is a geography teacher. She mixes sweet yogurt and grain. Gives me milky tea and a can of beer. Cuts the mutton for me from the bone when I show myself to be incompetent. The mutton is the best thing I have ever tasted and I swore I was done with mutton. I look at her face and her daughter's room, where I will sleep. This is where he cannot be. This is where he cannot be.

After the day of outing she lets down her hair and it frames her face in a way that makes me understand why the word pretty came into being. In the museum of inner Mongolia they already have a graphic design poster with images of the earthquake. The largest complete dinosaur skeleton in the world and the guide accompanies you for it though she knows nothing about it because she is actually stationed on the floor below and she wont shut up so you retreat until she leaves. Eej alternately pushes and pulls you by the elbow and you are irritated and unable to help it. She took the day off to spend with you. unable to enter the day, to shake thoughts of other people in other places either, so it spirals into miserable self-loathing there in the museum where the stuffed animals always look vaguely confused. Write to take another breath, then another--street screeches--thinking words to someone means one has not gotten where one needs to--in the restaurant thank god I come awake though I shuvuu shig iddeg ("eat like a bird")--felt like puking in the morning when she fed me--the present presents nothing to give you pain only your mind and its attachments form the specters--bed on the verge of breaking--she said I drew a picture of my heart and it's in poor shape--and if I had a choice I wouldn’t know which road to take--to get this taloned creature off my back--to flatten all the pennies on my track--the picture of my heart is leaking black--on the kitchen table--futile to want the connection dreamed of, in which one does not construct oneself but one simply is--the cottonwood leaves clapper outside--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--a teaset shaped like genitals in the museum--a cup of coffee in "mike dong," as she says: 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 give 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 was a huge piece of topaz that supposedly looks like an eagle, which supposedly looks like the state of Inner Mongolia--the museum is huge, new, built in 2007, so Tumen Ulzii hasn't seen it--behind his house, the university track field, at duck kids run around, playing ball--Fewer people in Hohhot than in Ulaanbaatar, but Hohhot is worlds more developed--Clean, wide streets, like a Chinese Seoul--Women taxi drivers--"handle yourself gently"--"If it's there it's supposed to be, isn't it?"--dream of kids from my elementary school piling alligators onto a wolf--wake up to her opening the door without knocking.

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.

Tumen's niece and her brother arrive during breakfast. I can see Tumen in his nephew's eyes. He is 20 according to himself, 19 according to his sister. He puts mutton in his milky tea; she puts cheese in hers. She is, of course, perfect, hair in a swept side ponytail. They take me back to the museum, to the 3rd floor, of song and dance traditions and laughable 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--palpably annoyed at Eej more than once. Internet lounge where I spent the better part of an hour with no excuse instead of out seeing Hohhot (handle yourself gently) to lunch where they keep ladling food out of the hotpot and I realize I just have to say no and let the food pile up--all green and the beer opening like a gunshot--the teacher who knows enough English to explain the train to me: first a 10 hour layover then a 4 or 5 hour one. I tell them I will sleep and read during the 10 hours rather than disturb the doctor and his family again and they won't hear of it but I am adamant--she has fried up our leftover green beans with meat and rice--when I talk to Tumen on the phone my voice goes up a register--on the way home from the park, T shirts hanging, people eating at the bbq stands. Tumen calls Eej while we're walking but something is wrong with the phones. To add to the pink river of human history with anything from hieroglyphics to doubt. Godisnowhere. She insists 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, thinking again, thinking, again, that I am a blessed and beloved daughter of the world--I am short with her, with them as they ay a 10 hr layover is too long to wait on the train--I live alone in Mongolia, I say, to which their response is that my 10 hour layover will be me alone in China--the park has it all, teenagers playing ball and a group of middle aged powerwalkers. Young hip couples in one anothers' arms, girls with mullets, girls in skinny jeans. I used to come here with Tumen Ulzii, she says. We would walk for an hour together every night around this time and talk. About what? I ask fifteen minutes later after I have jogged the track while she walked it. His writing, she says. literature. In the woods she wended through only to turn at the curb and enter them again I uncover what I half-felt before, that my role is as medium, that there is no experience I have that is not to write about--though that's not exactly right--god did the air smell good on that little path--the present is miraculous--the cheerleading-like 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; the flags went back up from half-mast yesterday. A girl approaches shyly in fits and starts with two lit candles to where Eej and I are standing at a distance. Please come, she says to me, little with big eyes. The students all look like Williamsburg hipsters, leggings, mullets, and all. They sing a Chinese nationalist song. I remember the songs at vigils post-9/11. Realize how ignorant it is to write off Chinese nationalism. Didn’t realize how scarce foreigners are here in Hohhot. They are agricultural university students. After I join the circle I see that the candles set upon the ground on top of Dixie cups spell something but I don't know any Chinese besides thank you, so when the kids speaking and holding papers say something about me I don’t know until all dark eyes turn my way. A tall boy comes and stands next to me when the pixie girl can't quite understand me nor I her. Say what you feel, about the earthquake, he says. I am here to--I begin in a small voice --Speak to everyone, he encourages. I look up at the eyes, I am here to honor the spirits of the dead and grieve with you, I say. Thank you, they say together.

Some moments of grace are that immediate, pure, and full.

In the park, crowded with people and children for whom many empty 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 fishing in a shallow pool. Haughty looks from those power walkers.

I see less and less of a difference between an abandoned power plant and monastic ruins.

Sunrise all to myself. Everyone else in the compartment was sleeping. Had seen the pink along the horizon for a while. If it's there it's supposed to be, isn't it?then the gold bar, milking around flush with the horizon. Fished around in the cardboard box Eej packed with a week's worth of food for me for an apple. When I looked up again it was a rectangle of gold light with rounded corners. Watched it detach like an egg from an ovary under the microscope in that video kids are made to watch. Burns on the retina exact as hole puncher detritus. Remember: you are with yourself. Realized after a while of staring at it that I could only to so because the sun-spot of burn had layered over it, the sun spot hole puncher detritus.

Somewhere in this train car is a guy who was Eej's student. She's a geography teacher, which means 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). The men keep talking to me. He 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 the change the bogeys on the bottom of the train at the border and the clangs resound.

Last night Eej and her niece stood outside the train window, as did the families of the other 3 men in our compartment. We crowded round. One of my 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's 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 comes to the window, grinning.
Your little brother? I ask.
Yes.

For the ten hour layover I step out into the high sunlight of Erlain and see the only other white people I've seen on the train. They rushed passed with their packs the night before in the rush for seats. Shan, Matt, Jess, and Susie. Shan and Matt are a young British couple who just finished their A levels and are headed to university next year--he to Manchester, she to a London school of osteopathy. Jess skipped university, she's from Australia (finally! The opera singer, who refused to sing last night--after the grandpa of the compartment asked me to sing--they'd tossed back a few, I think, this motley crew of new friends--they are new to each other, but by morning they are all getting off the train together to eat-, buying each other and me tarag and water, and in Erlian big boxes of fruit because they are so much cheaper here than in Ulaanbaatar--anyway the opera singer didn't sing last night though the rest of us did, and now he is humming along with his headphones, looking down at sheet music.
Us gringos took off down one way, motorbikes and dirt streets reminding me of Rurrenebaque, then down the other past rows of amused locals. 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 its front doors and a long line of passengers waiting sensibly in the shade of the line of trees across the parking lot--a windowless, customerless duty free shop, all the cigarettes and booze I looked at while the anthill subsided downstairs--bright geometric shapes, wider roads than Ulaanbaatar, actual intersections. As we walked I told Matt my desire to learn Chinese had subsided once I realized the rote memorization necessary to learn an alphabetless language--we ate at a restaurant where they served Matt a huge bowl of meat soup when all he wanted was small potato soup and they tried to charge him for it--none of them knew what kimchi was--later after the dominatrix train employee who orders people off their bunks when she looks at their passports we stopped in Zamin Uud for the second layover. It was the hours it grew dark, so after paying the dollar-to-use bathroom on the central square that looked like one in a central Mexican town, we wandered away from the square. Split level buildings like in my hometown, 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.

191

2008-08-05T11:30:00.001+08:00

The story about Tumen Ulzii, the Inner Mongolian dissident writer living in exile in Mongolia, that I began way back in my post # 121 has now grown wings and turned into a feature on the rigtheous online mag InTheFray.

190

2008-08-03T17:10:00.000+08:00

Behold...I'm the guest blogger today over at Best American Poetry!

189

2008-08-01T12:53:00.007+08:00

Notes toward a journey to Sain Shand

Will sugguested I write a completely new poem.
Good advice.

In the bright morning we board the train among throngs of country-bound Mongolian families in their deels. As we wait to board, Tuya's mother wipes sleep out of Tuya's eye as we wait for the aunt before boarding. Tuya responds in kind, a soft but firm swipe of the thumb over her mother's closed lid in the sunlight.

Tuya gives me a back rub and knows to press hard and pinch. I remember for short moments to just be there with the precious mama bodies around me in the train compartment. Accept the gift. Feel the train rumbling under and encasing us. They nudge me hard in the train corridor to get me out of the way of the mop. In my broken times, she told me, I wanted to go into a white room and have someone leave food at the door. Just lie down and let the leaves cover me. I know what she means, watching the Gobi pass by on the eastbound train to Dorngov. I finally realize what it reminds me of, camels grazing in the sandscape in front of an abandoned power plant: a Dali painting. Living inside the surreal. How comforting, the blank, to a heart that hurts. Those days when the heat lifts, working the skin but relieving the duty to move.
Tuya's aunt, the one with cancer, on of the reasons we are headed out, smiles at me. She says my yellow hair is pretty. The train attendant points me to the bathroom and winks when I walk past. I grab Tuya's fingers softly from where they hang off the top bunk, play piggies with them. the aunt with cancer says I'm cute. I bring her coffee from the samovar at the end of the train car.

Salkhi saikhan unertej bain. This and the comfort women last week drive my heart apart--of course it hurts, that tearing, like growing pains, what he called being time. Tuya hums and waits for me to finish in the outhouse. A year ago she was acting as a guide for her Swiss friend Felix, who was always scaring off young Mongolians in remote regions with his difference in looks, big white mustache and earring, and his odd language.

In Sain Shand, the capital town of Dorngov, an eastern province in Mongolia, an overnight's train ride from Ulaanbaatar, a young man of about 17 approached Tuya and Felix at the monastary. He was curious about Felix. What language was he speaking? Could he speak it some more? Where did he come from? Would he like to come back to their ger for some dinner? He looked intently at the nose ring, listened to Swiss-German. This young man, a carpenter, had a son 1 year old and a wife who was 20 years old with a painful hip injury from giving birth. Felix never forgot the family, and he asked Tuya how to help them. As it turned out, the little family lived in a ger that belonged to a badhearted mother who was always asking for it back.

In the morning Tuya comes in and feels my feet after a night of being a chilly caterpillar. They said I would take the bed while Tuya's mother and aunt took the floor and for once they listened to my no. on its way to sleep my brain incorporated the sounds of their sisterly slumber party chatter retroactively somehow, convinced itself the sounds figured into its reasoning. Next morning the sisters clucked and cuddled in bed like babies, peas in a pod, smiling up at me with their moon faces.

I ask Tuya in the other ger what kind of cancer her aunt has. Woman cancer, says Tuya, with the eggs. It is khortai, not khurgui, with cancer, not without, so the doctors cannot take it all away. Ondog, the young wife says to the husband so he goes back into the new ger and comes back with eggs that she puts in the big pot of water and the last thing I see before sleep is the salt she pours in a waterfall in the morning light.

When I awaken the day is much too bright and the monk has come and gone. He talked and read from a book, the aunt tells me. I am crestfallen. I wanted to see the new ger blessed. I have dreamt of fighting with a family member again, leaning in and saying things.
Tmuulen, the little boy of the household, helps me feel better about missing the monk. He gets a pot of water ready when he sees me reaching for my toothbrush and waits outside with it, pouring a little water on the brush when I need it, patiently waiting as I brush. He is 4. When I venture out to take pictures of the monochrome desert quiet, he is in the neighbors yard where there is a dog and a mother with a rash faced baby, the yard which is so silent and distance, the yard;s depth and distance affected like heat mirage. Past the yards a chorus of bones, sanitary pads wrapped up in bright blue plastic, pieces of khadag. It occurs to me that I was with the monk, or he was with me, when I puke dreamed up the things I needed to let go of. I awoke in my own sweat, the fever-need to release, and in the ruins, or what seem like ruins but it is just litter and dust, a younger person stands with what presumably is their grandparent, the older one dressed in purple and praying. Either praying or drunk, I guess, but when I come back through they're gone.

I hold back as I always to around children--not sure how to discipline in a way that's healthy--and he comes and lies down with me a while. Tuya cuts vegetables and onions in a confetti. The sunlight doesn't stop in this desert slow like molasses, the quietude of ever.

(some squiggles)
this was done by Temuulen when I asked him to draw a picture. he looked over at the book I was reading, Oyster Promises, and pretended to read what it said with purposeful authority and copy it down into my journal.

Temuulen feels the big middle of Tuya's mother, chatting with her about the babby he decide must be inside because she is so large. His mother and Tuya alarmedly beckon the newly bald 2 year old girl back into the ger since she tripped on her way out and that means loss of money. She has a butterfly sparkle dress on.

May 9th, 2008

The only geographic forever I've ever seen--dawn--sleeping grannies--one of them absconds with the sangria that would have been so much better heated up--unbound from time--it's a biological lattice--"order"--the young mother and father emerge from the ger into the snow with concerned looks, question the driver about why he left five women, two of them grandmothers and one of them with cancer, in a car with no heating in the snow--"what's this brown bird?" Mongolians ask their boys of their little penises, and this little boy answers, "my soldiers license!"--drums and prayers beads made from the skulls of dead monks--in the cave where he made his songs it takes forever to light an incense and a man carries his child like a log over his shoulder up the steps--the grannies shuffle down the dirt hill after going through the rock womb--Sometimes it is a walking soldier, sometimes a running soldier, sometimes a sleeping soldier--"it's my camel hair jacket!" temuulen says proudly--his mother turns back to the haasha after burning-after seeing her boy was coming to me and that I knew it, though there's always that distance where someone bobs up and down hills and one can't tell if they are coming or going--his mother shuffled around the ger with her one-two injured gait, sniffling, as the driver cursed and thumped the car hood outside--snow, hail, sun; the train back to Ulaanbaatar is fake wood paneled with red pleather seats-the flooded train car--the colors especially--my oldest nightmare--and the camels in front of the abandoned power plant on a frozen desert scape--living inside the surreal--a dog's vertebrae, half its spine, and then a snout still covered in fur, still showing the fangs--how to explain to a child that their word for apple or table is just a word, is inert--the first time one hears another language spoken, what to say? People everywhere have separate words for things--Temuulen walked along the wasteland with me, chattering, picked up a bluish horn--desert sand beneath us, and over is trach dump and treasure trove both--this is the thing about brightness in fissures--Temuulen's poverty, his mother limping from an injury birthing him (her stretch pants say "Malibu" on them--the creative act springing out of an absence of mind for what the mind would describe a moment--I stood in my blue jacket tasting the gusts of wind, heavy rain clouds and below them some fenced compound and a tower, a guard looking through the window--if anything, the perception of grimness is an attachment to form--the form of the mother, limping, of the muted earth colored felt tents--after spending more time in "ugly" places than first-impression time--"what's a camel?"--"camels also wear wool sweaters!"--it's all here, vibrating--at the stupa (cream colored rocks turn out to be hugs boulders covered in hardened milk offerings, layer after layer of droplets of milk--the offerings sprinkled us as we circled them, sprinkling us--the sun rose as we bent our heads, but we only knew it through the whiteness of dust storm getting whiter--the grannies held their hands up in the direction of the "boob stupa", palms out, and sang--the morning was terribly cold and the dust wind wouldn't stop--next to me was the one with cancer--the temples looked made of pearl--as temuulen's parents fought with the driver I thought about how suited Mongolian is to fighting as I passed them to use the outhouse, thought then about how fighting is a universal sound--Mongolian is also well-suited to a mother whispering her child to sleep--the young mother's silver shirt brought out specially for the ger-warming party--Temuulen shakes his hips and fingers with perfect rhythm to whatever the TV is playing, an no one knows where he got it from--he is my teacher, filling the present with his light--as we pull out his father pours milk into a spoon his mother holds, and she throws it up in a shower into the air after our retreating car.

188

2008-07-29T20:21:00.001+08:00

I lied. I'll be blogging on Best American Poetry on August 3rd, not the 1st.

187

2008-07-26T17:22:00.003+08:00

As a preview of the glory to come on August 1st, when I will be a guest-blogger for a day, some of the quotes I jotted down at WALTIC in Stockholm ended up as a post on the Best American Poetry Blog.

186

2008-07-20T20:06:00.001+08:00

Notes toward Hohhot, in China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region

Found poetry from a monastery in Hohhot

it's another appellation is the hall of returning to reflect, it was used to work as usual by the general which means second thoughts when emergency can remedy a shortcoming
now according to the original pattern the site of reading and working at that time is relived.

It was the place where the officials for seal worked. He had the charge of keeping keep the general seal and held the significant etiquette matters.

Here, the lower official ever drafted the documents.

Susedtoreceivetheguestvisitingtheofficialresidence.afteritsoriginalpeaceandgracewasrenewed,therespectedguesttherespectedguestcanhavearestandatea.

Originally, lower officials assisted the general to cope with the important political and military matters here. Now the scene that Qing's officials handled the affairs at that time is relived according to the historical facts.

Hui Shui Chu, also named Wen Shi Chu, where the general's subordinates dealt with the daily grind.

Now the vicissitudes of the ancient architectural structures are displayed here.

185

2008-07-09T20:42:00.005+08:00

A few things for y'all to read or get and then read--

1) the latest New York Times article to do with the hullabaloo in Ulaanbaatar over the June 29 elections--with quotes from both Bill Infante of the Asia Foundation, the guy who funded publication of "Dog of Heaven" and made sure I got to the Writers and Literary Translators International Congress to talk about a Mongolian PEN Center, and from Ambassador Mark Minton, the guy who made sure I got to meet David Lehman;

2) Issue # 42 of Hayden's Ferry Review, in which my translations of Bolivian feminist and socialist poet Vicky Allyon's work are published--in stores now! Whoopee!;

3) the latest news from the Southern (read: Inner, as in part of China) Mongolian Human Rights Center, as follows (their newsletter precedes their web postings:

China urged to free Mongolian dissident

Reuters

Jul 6, 2008

By Ben Blanchard

HOHHOT, China (Reuters) - The wife of an ethnic Mongolian Chinese dissident who has been in jail for over a decade for separatism called on Sunday for the government to release him as a goodwill gesture ahead of the Olympics.

Hada was tried behind closed doors in China's northern region of Inner Mongolia in 1996 and jailed for 15 years for separatism, spying and his support for the Southern Mongolian Democratic Alliance, which sought greater rights for ethnic Mongolians.

Amnesty International considers Hada a prisoner of conscience and has
expressed fears about his well-being.

"He's been in jail for 13 years. It's supposed to be a people's Olympics, a harmonious Olympics. Cannot they use this opportunity to let him out or grant an amnesty?" his wife Xinna told Reuters in an interview in the regional capital Hohhot.

"It hasn't happened. What's happened is the opposite. His situation has worsened," she added, over a traditional Mongolian breakfast of salty tea and sweetened, fried dough.

The Olympic torch reaches Inner Mongolia on Tuesday, and will pass through four of the region's cities, part of a journey whose international leg was marred by anti-Chinese protests following violent unrest in Tibet in March.

Next Thursday, the torch goes to the Inner Mongolian city of Chifeng,
where Hada is jailed.

"It's highly ironic that the torch is going to Chifeng as there has been no improvement in Hada's situation," Xinna said.

"I wrote to President Hu to say I hoped that before the Olympics they could release my husband, but I got no response," she added, referring to Chinese leader Hu Jintao.

"I heard that China made a promise when it applied to host the Olympics that human rights would improve. But this has not happened, especially in the last few months."

Hada ran a Mongolian-language bookshop in Hohhot, along with Xinna. Inner Mongolia is supposed to have a high degree of autonomy, but like Tibet and Xinjiang in the far west, Beijing in practice keeps a tight rein on the region, fearing ethnic unrest in the country's strategic border areas.

China's treatment of its ethnic minorities has leapt into the limelight following the March unrest in Tibet and ahead of the Beijing Olympics, which open on Aug. 8.

Decades of migration by the dominant Han have made Chinese Mongolians a minority in their own land, officially comprising 20 percent of the almost 24 million population of Inner Mongolia.

Hada has repeatedly said that the charges against him were trumped up. China denies mistreating Hada and defends his sentence as being in line with Chinese law.

Xinna said she hoped the torch's arrival in Inner Mongolia would help to highlight her husband's plight, which has received less attention than other more well-known jailed Chinese dissidents such as AIDS activist Hu Jia.

"I want to take this opportunity to say that there has been no improvement in human rights in China," she said. "I hope international society pays more attention to Inner Mongolia and to my husband. They must put pressure on the government."

(For more stories visit our multimedia website "Road to Beijing" here; and see our blog here.

------------------------

Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center

47-28 39th St, 2D
Sunnyside, NY 11104
U.S.A.

Tel: 001-718-786-9236
Website: www.smhric.org

184

2008-07-08T15:17:00.000+08:00

In his introduction of a keynote speaker for the first-ever Writers and Literary Translators International Congress (or WALTIC) in Stockholm, Mats Sodurland, President of the Swedish Writer's Union, reminded us of the seriousness underlying the conference's reason for existence: that according to PEN International's data, in the last year 18 writers were murdered and 4 of them kidnapped. Still other writers were frightened into not coming to WALTIC, or were denied the visas to attend.

WALTIC came about in response to the need for a forum on the relationship between literature and human rights. It had been planned for three years by the Swedish Writers Union, and those from low-income countries were given scholarships to be able to attend.

Over 600 delegates attended WALTIC from around the world. Over three days, they spoke about literary resources and rights, the struggle for literacy in elementary schools in Africa, censorship, and imprisonment. They shared personal stories about translating literature, immigration, war and its impact on the writing life…no one mentioned the kitchen sink, but that was about it in terms of what wasn't covered.

The notes I took at the conference were mainly in the form of quotations by the speakers. I transcribed them with the intent of using them to inspire and illustrate a piece about WALTIC, but the more I looked at the list the more I feel that the lines as they are speak for themselves. It might even be fun to guess who out of Jamaica Kincaid, Mats Sodurland, Nawal El Saadawi, Ana Menendez, Sasa Stanislic, and Philip Pullman said what…

***Quotes Toward Waltic

I am grateful to this society for this grocery truck, for the library truck…we have money, this is what frightens me, and we know what to do. 640 million elementary schoolkids, 570 million of whom are in schools. 40 of the remaining 70 million live in conflict-riddon zones.

It's not right to die before you've told the end of a story.

The salvation of human beings is found in dialogue.

That early morning hour--known as hour of the moon--when most people die.

…and I do not hesitate to use the word epidemic for literacy--

She was beautiful, a young girl, living in Africa, and I am not saying that if she had been able to read she would not have been infected with HIV. What I am saying is that she didn’t stand a chance. She didn’t stand a chance to find information…illiteracy could be vanquished with the money Europeans spend on their cats and dogs in one year.

The ABC book is still the most important book in the world.

We have to choose the language we speak according to the people who hear it.

We cannot read translations of music, which is why I'm so frustrated when I read translations of my book. It's not MY book.

I reunited my body with my spirit and my mind by writing fiction.

Thus language is a product we inherited since the slave system. Postmodern slavery is inequality in the family, in social and economic systems.

People who never know pain don't know pleasure.

(In an Egyptian women's prison, there were a group of women in the cell for political prisoners, and Nawal El-Saawadi numbered among them. The guard told them that finding a pen or paper in the cell was worse than finding a gun. Next door was a cell for prostitutes. One of the prostitutes had read Nawal's work and so Nawal asked her to bring some paper and a pen. She brought bread, hiding in it the toilet paper and eyebrow pencil Nawal would use to write (gingerly, or the pen and paper would break or tear) over three months her memoir from prison.)

There is no separation between medicine and literature, between religion and politics. Creative words are to undo the fragmentation we learned in universities.

When I sit and write, I get pleasure, more than sex, more than food.

Someone asked me if I believe in god. I said what do you mean by god? There are many conceptions of God……God is justice. God is my conscience. Egyptian illiterate peasants were told they knew nothing of god because they could not read the Koran. They said God is not a book.

Why condemn eve for knowledge? At the end of my play the god who comes out of the printing press has to resign.

The only prize for a writer is to write a good book. The only prize for me is to write a good book and be in dialogue with other people.

There is no authority above criticism. That is how we progress.

That is the problem with identity. Any group of people who want to exploit us has to define us.

Religion is a great weapon for dividing people.

Pure identity means racism. We are all mixed. Realizing this means tolerance.

Men can speak about politics, sex, economics, in a very dissident way. They respect the writer and they respect his wife. Because I wrote people saw my husband as weaker.

I haven't seen democracy in the U.S. I haven't seen it even in academia. I was supposed to go to a place in Missouri but they wouldn’t let me teach because I was too dissident. So a small liberal college took me in.

When they call it the Middle East, I say, "Middle to whom?"

They call me a postcolonial African writer--as if colonialism is finished!

There was a case against me to take away my Egyptian citizenship, my passport. I have a different conception of home. Wherever there are human beings who believe in justice and love.

I can't write in English--because a novel needs your dreams, your desire, your agony, your pain. Creativity is very much tied to memory…to sit and write is to trust yourself. If you don’t love yourself you cannot write. Creativity is very much related to loving yourself…creativity is very much related to getting rid of taboos. Getting rid of shame.

You have Condoleezza rice who comes to our region every day. And she is a woman, biologically.

(A woman who says she has a question stands up and then just says that 430,000 people have been imprisoned in Bangladesh including her husband who is a writer and why isn't anyone paying attention to that?)

There is the censorship which is of the government. But also, there is censorship inside you. Your fear. It's a process, to get rid of your fear.

I don't particularly like identitiy. It implies a sort of underlying evil. And a lot of narratives not of my own choosing.

I often find identity as a need to defend something, to define what is not-me so that I can do something to them or they can do something to me.

The language I speak in, the language I realize myself in, is a product of a history of completely evil deeds. Identity is an eternal reckoning more than a group thing.

The word "identity" is a political word.

When I am writing I am writing for the pleasure of my self, but also writing for other people. I prefer instead of identity the word self.

Every day I get up and think about (family in Antigua), and at the end of the day I say to myself, 'And I never want to see them again.'

I had a lot of mistakes in love. I had to correct my love of the other. And of myself. We were brought up to hate ourselves. Since I was a child I dreamed of flying away. Writing is a way of liberation of the self and the other we learned in childhood.

I could spend a thousand years in America and those thousand years would not be as prominent as the sixteen I spent on Antigua.

I live to remember.

So many problems in the world are "You don’t have a home, you can't come in", or "I want a home so I am going to drive you out"…I love my home, and I want to be safe and I don’t want to be robbed, but I don’t want to be so attached to it that I would ravage the rest of the world for it.

They ask you very detailed things in relation to what they call identity.

Education is not to inject information. It's how to think. I told my students, I can't teach dissidence. I can only undo what education did to you…amnesia corrupts, destroys creativity.

It's only identity when you tell me it's my identity.

Individual identity is a trap. Group identity is a recipe for transgression.

The nobel was intended to be awarded for a great work from the preceding year, 'a person who shall have produced outstanding literary work'. I think the original committee in 1901 would have been terrified to learn that what they had set in motion would define the canon. That the canon would be something current…attention wasn’t meant to be paid to the gender or nationality of an author…great authors are often wandering beings, with unclear ethnicity, unclear language.

The idea that western literature was an organism of its own, autonomous.

The first committee was a child of the 19th century. Certain authors were turned down because their work was too "obscure", "esoteric", "lofty", "perplexing", or, in Freud's case, "disturbing". The standards of the academy have their roots in French modernism. By the 40s, pessimism was on the rise.

The list of winners does not ascribe to any one aesthetic or creed.

If the Nobel Prize were conferred upon whatever the global community liked ("benevolent compromise") it would be futile…nothing would be gained..by trying to exist outside the periphery.

The politician uses words to obfuscate. Artists use words to lift the veil. That's why I am in favor of engagement.

The tension between the autocrat and the charming raconteur.

I want to understand more than I want to explain.

Every immigrant has a gap in their life.

The first thing that war does is to fragment your life. And every day is a struggle to become, and to live coherently.

Not so much nostalgia, as there's nothing so wonderful in our past that we long for it…-

Sometimes (people whose names I changed in my fiction) were even sort of proud even though they were after me. They wanted an identity.

If a reader is about to laugh and then realizes they shouldn’t, then that laugh stuck in their throat is telling them something, making you aware of something.

Fiction is the island of pretending one goes to.

What is the narrative made of? The smallest events possible

The most dramatic point is chosen…in a good illustration, the before and after is described in the image……with cinema, for the first time you could see time passing without the intervention of language.

The elementary particle, water, being poured into something from something else…standing for the whole, a range of symbols for every abstraction conceivable:-- mercy, justice, grammar…the source, the spring, the water, the well:

It would have no value, that which is poured out, if it wasn’t needed.

You don’t become an artist of any profession if you don’t know how to work when not inspired. People ask me, where do your ideas come from? And I say I don’t know but I know where they come to: they come to--my desk, and if I'm not there they go away again.

I see a shimmering perfection of form that gives me the inspiration to work through the material I have to to get there. It doesn’t last for long, but it doesn’t have to.

183

2008-07-02T22:11:00.003+08:00

Here's a montage from my time in South Korea, which includes forbidden footage from the de-militarized zone between North and South Korea. It took me a while to cobble it together...

182

2008-07-02T21:49:00.003+08:00

Yes, there have been violent protests in the wake of an election whose outcome did not satisfy democrats in Mongolia. 5 people were killed, and the city is on curfew. My friends in Mongolia and I are all okay. I actually was not in Mongolia for any of it--I'm at WALTIC in Stockholm. I do agree, however, that's it's less an unraveling than a bump in the long road to democracy for the first country in central Asia to approximate it.

181

2008-06-30T00:20:00.003+08:00

Further Notes Toward a Lunar New Year Trip to the South Gobi with the Mongolian Library Director, a Bunch of Monks, and a Golden Buddha Statue to Open a New Stupa at the World's Energy Center

For dinner we all stop at a random point in the darkness. Seven SUVs lining up. I don’t know where the women went. Akim beckons me into a large room with cots around the perimeter. Fifteen men with different sorts of hats on. No one in this group knows everyone else. After a bit we all head into a large neighboring room where all 30 of us wait--the wives are all wives of parliament members and directors, and unlike the men, who did not care or stare at the young blonde napping in their midst, the women give me looks of marked suspicion. It's rare in Mongolia compared to Russia. Breakfast lunch and dinner on the road in Mongolia is noodle soup with mutton. The monks read prayers in their baritone voices after poking around on their palm pilots.

There are a couple of middle sized children in the crew. The big room has pool tables in it. A statuesque woman in a light green deel serves the monks first. They mumble lowly over their food. Akim is then served, then me. There's precious little song and dance here compared to what I hear about in China and Korea.

I wake up with Akim next to me in the car, speaking in loud drunken bursts and pointing. Perhaps we are lost. Parliament member is also drunk. They insist I go back to sleep and that there is no problem. Yep, definitely lost.
They kept drinking vodka while I was asleep. We left concrete roads hours ago. Akim shouts in a restless sleep every time we hit a bump, pointing to the sky and saying "my child!" in Mongolian. The driver finally stops to ask Akim what's up. Parliamentary member says keep driving. Most of the time we can see the lights of at least one other car in the caravan. we stop several times for Akim, who stumbles, once getting caught in his seat belt and waiting to be helped out, I got out to pee and certain stars in certain constellations filled in parts I'd never known there were, not even at the ranch growing up, while I crouched in the -40 air and tried to unclench my body. I finally ask if Akim's seat reclines since it may help him rest better. Parliamentary member takes the opportunity to move Akim to the front seat, move back with me, and try to cop a feel under the pretense of tugging my jacket around me. I spent most of the night fighting him off. Akim was passed out, it was -40 outside, and we were in the middle of nowhere in the Gobi desert in his car. I wake up later and he is sitting anxiously forward. No lights. I don't move, knowing they'll just tell me to go back to sleep. We were lost for an hour. All 30 of us pile into the only hotel in the ghost town just before dawn.

The call Akim "Akim Go", which is either a reference to his middle name or a respectful thing, like Mr. Another former Peace Corps Volunteer warned me that Mongolian men are excused for bad behavior if they were drunk fr it, so I am not surprised when I awaken after they are so drunk that all they can talk about is how I shouldn't put my feet up and how because I am a woman their job is to make sure I am safe and warm.

Over the drone of throat singing the Parliament member asks me who won the democratic election. No one, I say, but Obama just won Maine. Whom do you support? He asks. Obama, I say, because people are getting involved for him who never have before, and because of the positivity in his message. But a woman democrat in the White House would be amazing also. They have similar policies on a lot of issues.
But if Hillary is president, the Parliament member asks, won't she go to war like Thatcher just to prove she can be tough like men? When a women is tough, that's no good.
I suddenly remember a theoretical argument someone was having at my high school near the mail room in 2000. America would choose a black man over a woman, no contest, someone said.

Please help me release what I need to, I asked, touching my forehead to the monastery ruins. We went to the three monasteries the poet and monk Natsagdorj had made. (Or at least, the translator said it was Natsagdorj, though a kind reader just commented that it was Danzanravjaa. I write the stories I hear...) Legend has it he raised enough money for the first two, but not the third. The Chinese workers wanted to be paid. So Natsagdorj sent his students to gather fifty white stones, one for each worker. The student kept one for himself and gave the poet forty nine. The next morning there were forty nine kilos of silver at 2kg each. He distributed them to the workers, then looked all over his ger for the last one, but couldn’t find it, so he paid out of his own pocket. Thus the monastery cost 2kg of silver to build.

There are all sorts of treasures hidden around here, says Parliamentary member, gesturing at frozen Khaan Bogd mountain. The Russians destroyed things. You know, Mongolia was never occupied by Russia or China, and we are this small land between two giants--we accepted the Soviet system to survive. The monks in the 20s made predictions of how Mongolia in 90 years would be a rich country. The monk Batbayar is translating these predictions now.
In the brush alongside the ruins I see the remnants of a khadag, discolored by the weather, unraveling slowly in ever-expanding squares.
At Khan Bogd they scatter biscuits the same color as the ground. Vodka is offered also. All 30 of them assemble and sing a song written by Natsagdorj, toasted with vodka, kneeled for pictures, tossed vodka into the air, and ate cold dumplings.

It's at the third and final stupa in a series that the crowds are gathered, lining up to the khadages tied around rocks in back. When we get to the stupa the guards assume I am one of the public waiting throng outside and don't let me in with the monks. I try to tell them myself but they don't meet my eye or say anything. Inside the stupa at the table they set down the golden Buddha we've taken from Gandan monastery. He is covered in a yellow cloth. The monks are doing something to the cloth and the Buddha's hand but I can't see what. It's smoky and there'd a ladder leading up to a sort of loft where all the important men I have come with disappear to pray after heaving up the boxes they brought from UB.

I stand on the steps with Akim for a minute or two befre I realize what's going on--one of those very Mongolians exchanging of gifts and speeches by around fifteen people.
Bracht was there, and Layton, who was the first to speak among the assembled men in front of the stupa after the private opening ceremony has taken place inside. Bracht's jeep, from his mining company, had an orange flag and 471 on th side. His mining company lent the crane that placed the top of the stupa.

Eyeless doll head. Car skeleton. Like a slanted Arizona. Wake up in stark landscape with honey morning light coming in the windows.

It's not eve that they love their traditions. It's that thy do them, still are them.

One the way back we all crash again at the same tiny hotel with the one big room for four hours. Snorting, farting, the men take up the floor. The women and Akim take the beds. We sleep under our coats. It's the noisiest naptime I've ever heard.

White antelope sit looking like swans in a lake of brown. Couldn’t see the tiny sunrise, sadly, for the frost on the windows. The words slide after I write them, a symptom of watching the passing landscape for pearl-colored antelope.

180

2008-06-30T00:10:00.002+08:00

Across the quietude khadags rippling--
--came here for the wind--
--the girl who comes to my side after I pray--please guide
me toward joy and the shedding of old skins, the release of the shadow inside like sap where it should be free and easy between my bones.

When I was done praying the little girl in pink with a long braid followed me. Love's withdrawal is musicless. Falling upwards, he wrote. Withdrawal's music is loveless. The picture I chose (though the one of him and his girlfriend was off limits, naked and taken from the shoulders up) Withdrawal's love is musicless. I like your panting, he said, the most generous thing he could have since 20km did not tire him. Music's withdrawal is loveless. He wrote about how the flame made the candle weep. I put the nice phone I found in the bathroom in my boot for five minutes before giving it to the waitress. Withdrawal's love is musicless. He took a sprite for his girlfriend and then told me they'd been quarreling all that day. He says with his hands, my anger just explodes. Hers is slow burning.

It's not a question of creating the chasm. I know I did. Can't stop foot from tapping. She got C a valentines day present even though she wasn't her stepmother anymore and C stole her gas quarters every time. What we call mist is the act of being forced into separate lucidities. He started using the word muffin like me, as a term of affection. From where do the bright clouds mass in? Seeing suffering on a lover's face for the first time is a form of punctuation.

Something to do with a train full of people passing us, and trying to hide from them. In sped up clips by the guy who languidly came out in his knockers and boots, waving his club in his hand. Turned out to be a sweet old guy who mimed his own ear being pulled, but showed us the way to the main highway back to Ulaanbaatar anyway, past the growling befanged German shepherd chained near the bridge guardhouse. What if a person could separate their anger and kindness into distinct physical entities?

179

2008-06-30T00:04:00.000+08:00

Further notes toward South Korea

Like skin, leaf, wing, or cracks in a canvas. What thing can you only do in Korea? Militarization tour. lead dresses symbolizing those who must roam the world in an unborn state. Very Korean, militarization. Very sad, but very Korean. the ground of the human world. Barbed wire fences: curly q's on top of y's. the trees who are born. We have twelve people. Twelve people is not thirty. Because if we had thirty people, we’d need a big red bus. devices transform an object into a site for memory. Behind the globulared red, white, and green walled "camouflage" shacks lies North Korea, though I want to find a different verb for it. into and must return to the natural world.

It was raining and the sequins one my dress made me feel I fancied like a fish. Bobby's father, a wrestler, talks behind us to the passengers behind him about how stupid bush is. Last night in the taxi, bobby spoke a long time on the phone in Korean. The locker room at the discothèque was like an aquarium. The taxi driver had a cough. The local kids wore jeans and sweatshirts.

A toddler on the ramp pushes the number seven in its circle on the floor. If you don’t have your passport you have to get off at the checkpoint and wait for us. And have fun with all the soldiers. Thirty seven prisoners were exchanged on this bridge. The altar was built at the turn of the century to recognize the wish of north Koreans living in south Korea to honor the ancestors who died northward. Is that a cross behind the south Korean army base? Are you ready for brain wash? This illustrates again the two sidedness of north Korea. If you go off the road, you may hit a land mine that was dropped from the air so we don't know the exact location.

Down the ramp, a gentle decline. Trying to imagine digging this tunnel in the rock--what did they use, and what went through the minds--in the tunnel my mind swarms as we make ourselves smaller to fit--"he talls around in the grass" instead of praying I bend my head down slightly to look past the barbed wire to the inner wall beyond which "no one" goes or nature is preserved. "hello" say the schoolchildren. "Good money for nothing!" says a guy in the opposite lane. Not praying at the spot itself but giving a couple seconds--when I say please to something inside or outside I never know what the something is, unless I am at home, in which case I ask the land--but the great thing is, I don't need to know. I did not grow up in a religious household. I think of the turn of the century in personal forms, singing goodbye to 1991 in a baseball cap while sleeping the porch. (transcribing this I see I wrote "church." The most I thought of the new century in public terms was the worry over computers for the change to 2000.

When we resurface someone has collapsed and ajimas descend to fan her, guards shooing onlookers away. The longer we stay, the harder we get about unification. If you stand behind the yellow line 3 meters from the wall, if you're tall enough, you can take pictures of north Korea but not the military structures. Red buses line up. Bobby sleeps with his mouth wide open, as he always does on transport.

Thundery clouds, fresh breezes, pots full of beetles next to turning hot dogs. Once they get elected congressmen have fish memory for promises. Back to the city of new buildings jostling for weight, a city of orange against dark fog. Alone at the zoo. Toddlers look up with onyx eyes from where they hold on to their preschool rope. Connecting with grandpas who hand out candy to the monkeys, one of whom has the most enflamed vagina I've ever seen, a glazed pink donut. See the otters floating in the brown water with bread and lettuce floating. Forgive us.

Not the hope for unification--all those moments erected in hope for a gradual change The people who erected monuments arranged for their erection. I enter the public to recreate the personal--to go alone into the people and be remade by their perceptions. Stop motion style because you've been sleeping, but even so you know the ride to the plane takes too long--on a road, not just across the concrete air field. Tiny turtles wander in their bins. Turning in their yellow vests like little noodles. After reading I was sad and the conveyor belt moved me along. The thank you bow is starting to grow on me.

178

2008-06-30T00:01:00.001+08:00

Notes toward South Korea

I forget that it isn't urbanity.
The space of the orchids and their slowness.
I forget that all time dependencies are out
Of fashion, the cabbie driving the streets whose paved I don't believe same as the stoplights,
Close packed heat from biology up to squared concrete.
Tell me again how I am not future material.
Zig zag or straight, chilly sunlight, ruffles or purple petals. "You've got to write it all down." To evoke is enough, is its own purpose, though it's been done before to raise words like music instead of one's own voice. It takes loss of sleep on someone else's floor and lots of flowers.
I'd like it not to depend on perception alone but I don't know enough. "here is place for clearing
his idea passage for someone who regards him as a bird can fly freely"
celadon inlay pots with stairlike protrusions "began to be made" as though people were not making them, actively--no mention of the hands and heartbeats save the urn with some unique feature.
T saw small writing as a symptom of restriction, I think, and of too much mind-noise, which I have yet to witness in myself or anyone else as something entirely unrelated to self hatred. He was right with me. Museums can reminders of how long people have been wearing makeup (12th century celadon pots!)
And if one can be dated, it's more valuable. If it can be rooted in the time of the hearts and hands that are then ignored. I know its supposed to be a waterfall but it looks like paper. A forest of signs and their perception, is all. The atoms of the artist that no longer occupy the space around a piece.
"and at the beginning of the Ming--"--in the late 1800 presenting his painting to the king. Plase select the work of art you would like to appreciate. Kang Ik-Joong, I Have To Learn English. Moon beam Slow, Same #9. Nam-June Paik My Faust Autopiography.
Encourages viewers feel the sublimity of the universe with sequin swirls
Viewers feel the difference when they know the artist killed himself

177

2008-06-29T23:34:00.001+08:00

I would, I would be sadder. Perhaps it makes one more of a woman. Because of the sadness. It's why long is a verb. Made endless by a desert's distance. A frozen desert, in perhaps the only place on the planet where it isn't a metaphor. Umbrella shadows out the rest.

Ice slats. We can;t land in Ulaanbaatar, it's too windy. In your spotted whitelight sleep you dream. As the buildings triangle out wooden from round Mongolian gers as we head into Russia I realize how stranded I am, like he was in Dallas eight or nine months ago.

We stay on the tarmac for three hours since the transit authority wont let us use the transit hall. There is a zipping sounds that reverberates through the floor every time someone flushes. Irkutsk has a red sun, graveyards where to rust. The kind by the sea, crying. The monster of gold. Blue eyed ger camp. "I knew she was bad because she had the wrong kind of hat," I remember my mother saying as she washed vegetables she's just picked in the kitchen while I watched a Saturday morning cartoon special.
The characters keep escaping out of potholes.

176

2008-06-29T23:28:00.003+08:00

Notes toward.

Thunder, lightning and sand drove almost everyone else off the balcony. Corseted waitresses stacked chairs, lamplight on the monastery across the way dim in the dust.

It means you're assuming he'll come back, which he might not. It means you think you deserve to be cycled, said J, my tough love angel on the cold cold street. I was sitting on the steps. He remained standing. He doesn't like to get dirty.

Hemingway's recipe called for champagne and absinthe. He called it Death In The Afternoon.

Stay open, be his friend, J says. Pretend like everything's okay when there's a sad storm railing around inside? How can I do that and still take care of myself? I asked J--because I am no Buddhist--well, romantic pull almost presupposes an attachment to a certain outcome, doesn't it.

In the warm breeze next to my table some Australians shout at the waitstaff and wave, complain about the service. "I'm sorry," I whisper in Mongolian to the dollfaced, beleaguered waitress. ("Irish stew" sounds enough like "orange juice.") I translate a poem from Mongolian about heartbreak. Agony and ache are the same word in the departure language.

Don't pretend to be or act casual when you're not. Don't hold back or try to do this his way. That's not what Ming does, J says. It's part of who you are to believe in the best you've seen of someone: a heart expansive enough to give the benefit of the doubt, enough to hope, enough even to sometimes have too much faith in the bright glimpses you saw of someone. It feels like the same train track but it's different; you know now that your heart is bigger and brighter than the loss.

A smiling baby is wheeled by my table. Later they clean her butt with wipes. My electronic dictionary offers spoken English practice with proverbs: don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs.

One yellow afternoon we were talking over head-sized beers at Ikh Mongol about wandering in the woods. That’s it's actually okay to wander in the woods, accomplish nothing more than breathe free of dogma. I looked at the muscle-like chewed gum on the corner and said if fear determines the choice to shut down I don't admire it. Nothing more than breathe in the middle of the forest free from the need for sense or reason that drives one to religion and control. Breathe amid the trees where people wander dogmaless.

This is how quickly the silt settles. The drops arrive particly-er than normal ones--the baristas are spraying down the Tiger Beer emblemed umbrellas in the sunlight, preparing for tonight's beer garden, which they've started up again with the influx of warm weather and tourists.

You would have been proud of me, I tell J through the tears in my throat--I was my best self. I was who I wanted to be.
If you stayed open and someone else shut down, J says gently to me, you were the honorable one.

It smelled of smoke all day today.

175

2008-06-29T23:24:00.002+08:00

The public voice. The push and pull of you and your mother across the dirty sunny busy street--you're her youngest, but she's in your city and hasn't been anywhere with roads like this since Rome. Who's leading who, the littlest chick who has made her home in a new and bizarre city, or the mother who doesn't watch upsetting movies because they "stay" with her there--this she tells the former monk in your kitchen in the summer dusk while you awkwardly do everything, taking your cutting board over to the stovetop so they won't see if the way you're cutting is incorrect.

The poem you're translating has a lot of camel in it and although the horse is the most miraculous animal the camel is the most unlikely. Robin Williams figured before you did that God has to be a real stoner. Look at the human ear.

I ruined it, but what was there to be ruined aside from a false cathedral of construct--some times a dash of parentheses doesn't do it--the juice you bought for your mother has frozen solid in the fridge--I happen to like my white wine as cold as possible--parentheses offer enclosure but not a manatee, a fetus, or anything else you might doodle, and certainly not closure.

I cried a lot when I was cutting the onions before they joined me in the kitchen. If I could just occupy myself with metaphysical questions, I tell the former monk, when I wake up unable to move, instead of daydreaming about sex with men who are to some extent unavailable, I could be like some junior apprentice Descartes.

"Do you have milk?" He asks me.

Oh the relief of space on the page when dialogue happens! And the beauty of writing know instead of now.

"I think proffering is just offering with a 'pr'," he says. We go on to discuss when a bed becomes a deathbed. When has someone gone from living to "Dying"? Twenty-five breaths before the last! We decide. Before then, the person is just unwell in their bed, not dying on their deathbed.

He says, "I think the answer to your little koan--my little pony--is that you should take responsibility for what you're responsible for and not what the world is responsible for. "
He spatters the floor with milk, because the ice inside the carton has made it dangerous to grab normally. "I'm useless," he says. "It's why you're here," I say. "I think you're the only person to tell me that," he says. "If I didn't find strictly non-utilitarianly valuable skills and events useful on some level I'd have offed myself a long time ago," I say.

In the world of the page, if everything could be interpreted in the "slow world of metaphor" in equally illuminating terms, then the signified itself, the milk carton, the former monk's face, the dusk, the cutting board in the sink, every thing that becomes a metaphor on the page carries in itself if not the essence of illumination at least the potential for it. Before he went to the reindeer he made a sound upon entering that was weak and newborn, between a moan and a sigh. Draw your manatees and let the tears come: you are awake.

174

2008-06-29T23:23:00.000+08:00

Notes toward a poetry reading in Mongolia

About the man whose minutes of greatness is sitting alone with no light on, watching it all get dark.

Please write me a letter, reads Simon in his soft voice. Tell me of the high August winds.

I am called up to read an English version:
Shifting patterns
Are they not chasing
The blue water-patterns
Of the earth
The mottling of the wind
Becomes the spirit's manuscript

Donald hall wrote a poem in which Whitman and Dickinson are married. But I've given you too many sentences to translate.

the present is there to be stepped into, hollow slit stairwell, 3am cold night street, trees tossing. After a night at the ambassador's house--they thought they knew where Ryan lived--it's behind BBQ chicken! Under lamplights a man with whose dark face and intonation as he turned to us, away from his friend behind buildings--it seemed absurd to Patrick, the next great writer of satire. A room for the reading with traditional deels and Mongolian hats and palm pilots going off. There is no how, there is only do. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. The natural diplomats and emissaries. In the spirit of creation. Ambassadors of the word.

As a young nation we are able to invent ourselves, which carries with it the risk of being able to discard or jettison our own history. The act of writing is an affirmative act. The spirit of imagination is something that affirms our existence on this planet. You could compare prose to walking and poetry to dancing. You walk for a purpose, to get from one place to another, so there's this real useful, utilitarian aspect to it. Dancing, however, is gratuitous, it has no particular utilitarian function, and that is its sublime value, that it is something beyond blandly functional.

How does one read aloud a poem that goes, "I met my friend N____ M____?"

173

2008-06-29T23:21:00.001+08:00

Chilaajav called the cold day we were supposed to go the countryside. Outside is very high winters, he says. Maybe my babies is having problems.
We go the next day. The family punched and play-fought all day, especially the mother and the 12 year old daughter. As the world moves through me--in Arizona my great aunt held onto her husband after he died, lying down with him, stopping them from wrapping several times so she could kiss him. The Mongolian kind of Buddhism is quite decorative for a country with so little, observes my mother. The tufts from the aspenish alderish trees come down like bits of white magic, I think, then remember that it is not magic at all--the opposite, in fact. I follow my mother, turning the golden cylinders at Gandan monastery. The small rivers are gone now, says the mother to us, gesturing down in the forest we walk through. We meet nomads at the bottom in the sunny pasture, three generations of them. Attachment to form. The father, the head of Mongolian Broadcasting, sits down on a log next to a wizened old herder woman. He pretends to eat the cow dung. "Chocolad!"

My mother points out the gentleness of the scooped out valley. Behind us is a vertical calico-textured but monocolored cliff face. I ask the guide what the cord carve into the side of the mountain means (or maybe it is made laboriously from placed rocks?) but he doesn't understand.

What were we like as babies? I ask my mother as we amble on horseback under the Mongolian sun. Your sister was very cautious, and settled into me when I held her. Your brother was always jumping into everything and holding him was like holding a monkey. As for you, my mother says, all I remember about you is that you never had any clothes on.

172

2008-06-29T23:17:00.001+08:00

Notes toward the Mongolian State Ballet

The main ballet dancers are in white. The male lead is the one who did and interpretive wolf dance at the release of the book of wolf myths I edited. He stands out as the best, having had the opportunity to study elsewhere--Russia, Canada. I didn’t realize how much a good ballet dancer is a good actor--just look at how he looks down at her. He has more facial expressions than many dancers I've seen, says my mother. There's a 6 foot tall handmaiden, veiled, who I keep waiting to reveal herself as the hero, back from what would turn out not to be actual death to rescue the heroin. Rebecca invited us to sit in the box seats. She is working for mining responsibility. As of now there's no independent laboratory for testing the fine white powder settling over the town neighboring the largest state-owned mining site.

I've never been so close to the dancers before. The mother of the box seat guy painted the close ups of flowers in the VIP room. There is a dentist here doing volunteer work. 600-800 kids migrate to the pipes underground in the winter. 90% of them are from single-parent households. Many of the girls turn to prostitution. The boys don't often like the classes and strict rules of the shelters. So they steal instead. The dentist had to stop extracting teeth in the garbage district because he ran out of tools and there was no way to clean them.

171

2008-06-25T11:22:00.000+08:00

Notes Toward a Lunar New Year Trip to the South Gobi with the Library Director, a Bunch of Monks, and a Golden Buddha Statue to Open a New Stupa at the World's Energy Center

In Gandan monastery's off-room, I begin to wonder how long the lamb will be there. The monks don't say anything. Some of them stare at the Sprite bottle on the table. Guests must eat a mutton dumpling or no one gets to. The monk's wife is Korean. The first book I see in the large bookshelves is a Russian Sexual Bible. Also books in English called "Erotica" and "Sexual Intimacy."

Two monks heft the golden Buddha, sitting gold and the size of a man from his place at the head of the table of silent monks taking the occasional sweet milk curd.

A large TV blares in the room where things are cooled, next to a room with the kind of squat-toilet common in China.

Outside walks an orange-cloaked women, which I suppose is how females dress for the cold. Drapes and drapes of yellow-orange. Steam sweeps off the frozen puddles outside.

We drive out of the monastery compound. The building under construction juts out like a pregnant woman over a deserted Sukhbaatar Square. The members of Parliament who are part of our seven-car caravan change out of their deels and into Playboy parkas.

Stopping outside a gas station on the edges of the ger districts, air reeking of gasoline, the monks, Parliament members, and businessmen stand in the -20 cold, passing each other jade and onyx bottles filled with deep yellow tobacco powder that tickles the sinuses. It's something they do with their right hands, each passing their bottle to the other at once so the bottles clack together and slide past one another within the two walls of hands. Sometimes they just touch a nostril to it and give it back. Around them the ubiquitous landscape of Mongolia begins to open out, dirty dogs shivering their way across the empty lot beyond which three large cows lumber underneath the power lines. Occasionally, the men without hats press their hands over their ears.

They laugh robustly over how a few days earlier Akim, the head of a National Library and the guy whose book translation I am editing, gave me too much Tsagaan Sar whiskey to drink--he forgot I was a girl and I forgot most basic facts of the world--and how this led to me not remembering the ensuing visit to my boss Chilaajav's house. Specifically, I woke up on Chilaajav's bed, where his wife had put me, and threw up onto the floor. Don't worry, says the member of Parliament in whose car Akim and I are riding, it's common among Mongolians too. My first Tsagaan Sar when I could drink I did the same thing.

Out along the road three people put their hands out like people do in the city to catch cabs, but it's much much colder here where the buildings and pollution don't keep any warmth down. Maybe it's a bus stop, but there's nothing to demarcate one that I can see.

It only takes an hour south of Ulaanbaatar for there to be more tan than snow, which has shrunk to strips of white. The men spread across the rocky flatness to piss, some flapping their robes open, some standing in jeans. A former peace corps volunteer taught me to flap my jacket around me as I squat. No one told me, however, that -20, -30, -40 on one's exposed parts makes it hard to convince the body to urinate. I turn around--the men have all arranged their standing, smoking semi-circle with their backs to me. I see a woman and her daughter come from the other side of the road, where they had been more discreet than me.

Back in the car Akim breaks out a bottle of vodka, pours some into a silver bowl and rolls the window down to release the vodka for "the god", and it whips up and out in a flash of mist. The Parliament member then swallows nearly a whole bowlful, then Akim does.

He calls them deer. But they're too lithe and pale to be deer. Antelope. Herds and herds of them, quite close to the road, and Akim speculates they're heading north out of the desert for lack of snow. In the front seat the Parliament member moves his prayer beads along through the conveyor belt of his hand, touching each with his thumb. When he sees me looking, he says, 108 beads on an erkh. The praying is related to the counting. You say certain special words many times and then they become.

170

2008-06-25T11:09:00.000+08:00

Notes toward Tsagaan Sar, the Mongolian lunar new year

The day of the new year, all the families are out in ceremonial deels. Babies wrapped until they are as pastel and puffy as care bears unable to do much but stand.

Chilaajav greets with a very old khadag, or prayer flag. My father's, he tells me. Where is your father? I ask. Chilaajav points upward. The sky, he says.

The grandmother in curlers. In the morning, the lamb and cake--even last night's half finished beer--are all precisely where we left them after last night's "full night", as it translates. The daughter who works at Oriflame is there, and the one who buys her groceries in the shop in front of the house.

After the first round of family the grandmother sits like a queen at the head of the table, smoking an Esse cigarette. Her daughter jigs sideways through the door. She has long soft hair, a green deel, and two daughters.

At my teacher Tuya's house afterward I dozed on the bed and Bayraa slept off the morning's activity on the floor. Nemo curls up next to him after an interval, his slim body splayed across the remainder of the floor.

Hardly anyone on the streets. Elephants walk across the blue. Her name means constellation, with the "-maa" at the end to mean girl. She plays with her new rubic's cube. Her cousin writes "row row row your boat" in the condensation in the window.

Families pack and fog up the minibuses. Families spill out of cars. "Walk west five steps, hold earth, walk south, touch metal"--at dawn on the first day of the new year, according to your astrological sign and year.

Sukhbaatar Square was deserted so the child came with me, jumping in front of my path, for blocks, until I shouted no and then felt awful; it is, after all, like begging on Christmas. He followed for blocks instead of feet, drooping mittens.

All day they visit each other, all week, and in the countryside all month, trooping to the house of every in law.

The men got up at dawn to go to a certain hilltop and toss vodka into the mist.

The auntie who was ironing her curtains earlier tosses wrapped candies out into the night.

169

2008-06-25T00:35:00.001+08:00

The guy who drove me to the Mataram airport had never been off the Indonesian island of Lombok. I tell him Barack's middle name is Hussein. He is overjoyed. "All Americns are rich, aren't they?" he asks.

Layover in Beijing. My friend works at CCTV, where her bosses were all called in to a meeting in the middle of the night when the Tibet stuff went down. My friend, an American, naturally was not allowed. Nor is she allowed into their more routine weekly meetings. "State secrets," she whispered loudly. Otherwise bare winter trees whose fingers interlock to suggest mist. We walk around robots spouting symptoms of political authority.

Think of the teenager hanging herself as a symptom of national consciousness, if you want the doctor's perspective, since it happened right around when Saddam was executed. The same doctor whose sage ridden property you watch while he's away. The same teenager you babysat, whose house you watched while she and her parents were away.

Beijing does not emerge flaunting color like the warmer climes. It just is, static. A faint haze of green in the subways. Beijing the reluctant.

168

2008-06-25T00:04:00.001+08:00

Further notes toward Indonesia

I have seen few things as kick ass as a petite, demure young Indonesian girl with her head scarf on, smiling shyly at me from her perch on her motorcycle.

"Big wind yeah," says the motorcylcist taking me from the club where a bunch of blonde bebraced good looking teenagers from America poured drinks on each others' heads.

My khakis are still wet. How like Bolivia it is, I keep thinking. And as for the ocean, how quickly it gets deep--a ravine or drop off so steep it causes a geometric reaction in the mind to dangle and look at the waves slapping a sand wall in front of you.

No happiness if one thinks about them all the time, no purpose if one doesn’t think about them at all.

Buddha gardens. Moss covered bricks. If I am alone they call me darling. "Hey honey white girl--where you stay?"

"Do you like me? Do you like me?"

"Do you need a q tip?" asks Bobby, holding out the toothpicks. Fashion TV is on in the hotel room. What did we see in the 80s?

The sweetness and smell of the water and of movement when we went river rafting. The trust Jack lost and the nastiness he says he gained when an employee at the NGO he directed in the Congo ran off with $40,000 to Zimbabwe--because some of the remaining employees had to have colluded.

The broad and insistent sound of the ocean. All the twisting bodies of bark.

Please give me enough,
Please give me
Enough. Please give
Me enough. Please
Give me enough.

167

2008-06-24T22:35:00.001+08:00

Notes toward Indonesia

Indonesia's lush greenery and rain remind me of--no wait, Surya is here to pick me up and take me to the hostel. After he pays off the baggage officials who say I need to present them with a form I've never been given, says "welcome to the jungle" in explanation, leads me across the dark, humid, hot parking lot to his tiny red stick shift car, and drives me in the 3am desertion the 45 minutes through Jakarta to the hostel, he says, "I am very happy to meet you because you are real American woman. Like American Pie movie!"
Next he says, "I was in Jogya with an Italian guest and he thought the girl who fucked him for 3 hours for fifty bucks was so beautiful. I thought she was ugly like a duck. Black skin, big lips like a black person, and he was done and said I could go but I said no. she could be naked in front of me and really I am not horny.
"my wife's breasts now are too small because now 1, 2, 3, 4 of my children has used them so they"--he makes a gooey melting motion with the hand that's not on the steering wheel--"this is why I say have fun when you are young."

Bobby in the back of the car is in a frog position because he is tall, Surya's tiny car leaks, and the floor is puddling.

A british guy points to the floor of the waiting area. "Better watch yourself", he says: there's puke. Managed only to see Jakarta at night, then during the monsoon. Bobby and his forays into the Korean public baths, the black actors who take him home. Next to the bathroom a praying room, windowless with mats. He shaves his legs now because all Korean men do at the gym. "Korea tends to become obsessed," he says. "People dream about speking English. They have camps to recover from video-game addiction., to kick the habit down to 5 from 19 hours a day Someone died recently after spending 54 hours playing without stopping. Most of the women have had plastic surgery. Korea has the highest suicide rate in Asia."

Tbe warm air, the white sunless sky, the deluge of rain. The men look women up and down. "That's Bali, man," says the doll faced guy on the pink motorbike who almost hit someone, driving insanely fast for no reason, me with no helmet, losing Bobby on his friend's motorbike in the maze of dark alleys and bright booths that tourist traps human ants in Kuta. If it were driftwood I would go swimming but it's as though dumsters emptied on the shore. Large trees with such sexual curves there's no visual angle to them. silver fish stuccoing the beach. "A population stretched to capacity" is how Greg put it after he'd lived in Indonesia for a couple months. The most densely populated city in the world, Jakarta.

Bobby and I ride elephants on Christmas. We made up our own carol: "ten bad waiters, nine tummy rumbles..um…two hangovers, and an elephant that was peeing. I took off my yellow flip flops to put my bare feet on her wrinkled, warm skin.

Saaya was the only lady elephant rider. She was lovely. She had many hairs on her chin. She was the only lady rider on the only lady elephant, Petri. Petri is 42. She has children in Sumatra. Saaya has been with only Petri every day. "She understands," she says simply. Saaya crouches on Petri's neck like a crap, whacking her with a stick when she stops to eat what Saaya thinks is too often. Saaya works for her sister's tuition. Or so she tells us. I've never been good at being suspicious, though. Close up the elephants eyes are intelligent and I keep thinking of pictures of anteaters.

Wake up at dawn. Hear voices so close and realize that outside the screen window they must be washing towels.

When the people disappear, during the deluge, that's when we go walking on the beach. The next day is bright and so windy that the ocean turns over and over like rolls of quarters.

Flowers like a brighter world is bleeding into this one through small cuts.

166

2008-06-24T21:57:00.001+08:00

December journalings (because I hardly ever immediately transcribe)

So you missed what you wanted to do, which was go to a modern dance show--they let you look in but you didn’t know what the friendofafriend with the tickets looked like--outside you fall in love with yourself in an orange lit mirror like rosie did in New Mexico on acid once, only yours is just an instant (afraid of approaching the lattice of self-reference, are we? Vaguely frightened of where creativity stops and delusion begins), darkness descending, the absence of attention span, the society of an endless chronicity. She's disappeared again. Most of the time you drink you think of her. "hard wired to think she's a failure." She's usually somewhere in California. You sewed her a pillow yesterday. The two boys are sleeping next to each other in the stairwell, their hoods pulled around them. it rains outside. When you return from the airport $25 poorer and without your mother, one of them has his leg thrown over the other. No no no your life is filled with luck, know this even as your shadow twos around you and you step into oncoming traffic. You feel bad about missing the show until you make the gym receptionist giggle.

--oyuna sweeping up the toddler who was asleep when she opened the car door and he began to slide out--effortless and immediate "ooyooyooyoo" she said, rubbing his back briskly--

Women of Mongolia: in the event of an emergency remove your high heels. The product of a stream of consciousness is altered by the process of recording it, thus the obstruction of experiment. So while away the hours before dawn imagining him inside you. You awaken because you always do after drinking. You puked a purplish mess that reminded you of when you were hostessing at a restaurant famous for its wine list and you saw a woman in the shadowy corner of the lobby holding the back of a chair and looking more like the word "woozy" than any cartoon character with stars ringing around her head. You asked her if she'd like to accompany you to the restroom. She was spitting into her napkin. You held hands down the hallway. She wanted you to leave once you got there, insisted she wasn't going to be sick. Later when you checked in the sink was filled with purple mess and a woman was embracing the wined-out lady while she sobbed. She's a nurse, she comforts people like that all the time, she told you over her shoulder. You went to find Jose, the grandpa who always saves water bottles for the desk staff and tried to kiss your neck in that bathroom once, and in the meantime a towel over the sink would have to do.

165

2008-06-24T21:37:00.002+08:00

June journalings

The mouse caught in the trap, looking demure.
A teenager in a red shirt with an arm cast on, looking
Down at a street where they keep digging.
But what is going on in the minds of the characters
Offstage
In the margins.
There is a folder with his name on the desk
Top. Art as the only response to tragedy(--if they had just
Let Hitler into art school). Instead of doing the things
That need doing I don't do them, for the first time.
The knocking doesn't stop. It's election season.
Outside the pulse of techno. Daylight stretches on here
Though it's finally dark and one wanders at the squandering
Of hours. There would be no reason to keep a record
If nothing changed, no reason to strive if immortal.
Salmon colored thing moving outside window turned out to be building crane.
My friend came over and watchd a movie with me after we ate out the last
Of the dying day. He told me in the kitchen my eyes were beautiful.
He carried the vacuum up the warm street and I
Dropped his ice cream. He fell asleep
During and I listened to his breathing. After a year alone
In an apartment the breathing of a dear one is the sound of God.

164

2008-06-24T21:20:00.002+08:00

The Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center (SMHRIC) welcomes Jaranbayariin Soyolt's release...Meantime, SMHRIC urges the Chinese authorities to free all ethnic Mongolian political prisoners including Mr.Hada who is serving his 12^th year of a 15-year jail term for demanding greater autonomy for the Mongols, Dr. Naguunbilig, a Mongolian physician, who is serving his second year of a 10-year jail term for engaging in “evil cult”, Ms. Daguulaa, wife of Naguunbilig, who is serving her second year of a 5-year house arrest for “conspiring” with her husband, Mr. Naranbilig who was recently put under a 1-year house arrest for attending international gatherings to protect the rights of the indigenous Mongols, Mr. Tsebegjab who was also put under a 1-year house arrest for his alleged link to “separatists” in Mongolia, and many other ordinary Mongols who are arbitrarily arrested and detained for defending their right to access their ancestral land and right to preserve their traditional way of life.

163

2008-06-23T18:40:00.004+08:00

It wasn't actually last night that I got mugged--I just wrote that entry the day after. The weekend was spent at Lake Huvsgul with my mother, who is in town. Instead of hiking and horse riding, which I was a little too banged up to do, I convalesced with the most comforting person in the world: my mother, who had exactly the right response to the upset. She looked at my bookshelf, took down Roald Dahl's The BFG, and read it aloud to me in bed over the weekend in our cozy ger.

And as cosmic reward, two French guys showed up with a couple affable Australians and immediately recognized my Mahm for who she really was: Agent M! Or, Judi Dench's doppelganger. Here are Michel and Roman, who were also singing the James Bond theme song:

Mahm looks rather pleased with herself, no? My favorite picture EVER.

I swear to GOD I'm transcribing tomorrow, but until then, enjoy some of the sights from the lake:

162

2008-06-23T17:11:00.000+08:00

last night i was walking home on little ring road north of the trade and development bank, same as i've done at all times of the day and night all year. i passed a guy and the next thing i knew i was on the concrete and he had clamped his hand on my mouth. i struggled and he ran off with my ipod. i had been out saying goodbye to all the peace corps volunteers i won't be seeing again, and it was around 3am. i didn't see his face. he looked young, with a baseball cap and shorts. i then ran to my building and sat crying near the front door for a while because i did not want my mother to see me so upset.
two guys in uniform came over, telling me not to cry and asking what happened. one of them, the security guard for the building next to mine, asked me to walk back down the street, as far as i understood to look around for people there. instead he started asking if i had a husband or a boyfriend, then wanted me to take a "short cut" that was actually longer behind some buildings, and i said no. then when we got back to my building he wanted me to come to eat with him, and i said no again, and when my front door was locked he did not want me to go wake up the family that opens the door for people who come in after midnight, but by then it was 4am and i was very tired so i said no again and the daughter of the family let me in.
all today, according to the mother and daughter, the security guy was waiting outside my building to collect "thank you" money from me for "saving me" from an attacker when i was "really drunk." i was certainly tired and bleary on my way home, but not drunk, and actually very awake after the adrenaline rush when i was attacked. all the same, i feel really, really unsafe because the guy works about twenty feet from my front door.

i've got a cut lip and a scrape on my wrist and a limp from where he kicked me knee to take me down, but otherwise i'm all right.

161

2008-06-17T22:46:00.000+08:00

Southern Mongolia Watch Info --- Amnesty International's Urgent Action on Jaranbayar Soyolt's Case

Document - China: Incommunicado Detention/ Fear of torture or
ill-treatment, Jaranbayar Soyolt (m)

PUBLIC AI Index: ASA 17/081/2008

04 June 2008

UA 155/08 _Incommunicado Detention/ Fear of torture or ill-treatment_

CHINA Jaranbayar Soyolt (m) aged 48, Mongolian citizen

Jaranbayar Soyolt has been detained by the Chinese authorities since
6 January for alleged involvement in "overseas activities harmful
to China’s security". Originally a Chinese citizen from the Inner
Mongolian Autonomous Region, he legally left China and settled in
Mongolia in 1991, and became a Mongolian citizen in 1997. His
current whereabouts are unknown, and he is at grave risk of torture
or other ill-treatment.

Jaranbayar Soyolt was detained by immigration officials at Beijing
Capital International Airport, as he entered the country with two
business colleagues. His colleagues went through immigration and
customs at the airport before him. After waiting for him for two
hours, his colleagues returned to inquire about the reason for his
delay. At the customs counter, they saw Jaranbayar Soyolt handcuffed
and surrounded by five policemen. Jaranbayar Soyolt told his
colleagues that he had been arrested by the Chinese police and asked
them to contact his family and the Mongolian Embassy in Beijing
immediately on his behalf.

Jaranbayar Soyolt telephoned one of his colleagues on 11 January, under duress from the Chinese authorities. Jaranbayar Soyolt said that he was being detained in Beijing because of problems with his passport, and asked that nothing about his arrest be revealed to foreign media in order not to “make things worse”. As a result of this threat, his family has not publicized his case until recently. They have not had any further contact with Jaranbayar Soyolt since this telephone call. On 31 January 2008, Beijing Public Security officials confirmed that Jaranbayar Soyolt had entered China through the airport on 6 January 2008, though they had previously denied any knowledge of his whereabouts. According to their latest statement, the Chinese authorities have placed Jaranbayar Soyolt under ‘house arrest’.

Jaranbayar Soyolt is a human rights activist and a founding member of several exiled dissident groups based in Mongolia. In 1981 he was one of the leaders of the Mongolian Student Movement, a mass protest by ethnic Mongolian students and academics against the Chinese Central Government’s plan to migrate 600,000 ethnic Han-Chinese into Inner Mongolia without consulting local communities. In 1992, he went into exile in Mongolia. From here, he continued his human rights activities. In 1993, he gave a speech at the World Mongolian Alliance First Congress publically criticising China’s ethnic policy as one of “ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide”. He was later granted asylum in Mongolia and Mongolian citizenship in 1997. The Chinese authorities have labelled him a Mongolian separatist and have claimed that he is plotting to overthrow the ruling communist party of China.

Jaranbayar Soyolt suffers from ill-health, and in the light of this
and of persistent reports about torture and other ill-treatment of
political dissidents in China, Amnesty International is extremely
concerned for his well-being and safety.

RECOMMENDED ACTION: Please send appeals to arrive as quickly as
possible in Chinese (Mandarin), English or your own language:

- calling on the Chinese authorities to reveal the whereabouts of Jaranbayar Soyolt, who was detained at Beijing Capital International Airport on 6 January;

- urging the authorities to release him immediately, or to charge him with a recognizably criminal offence and ensure he is tried promptly in proceedings which meet international fair trial standards;

- seeking assurances that he is treated humanely in detention, and not tortured or ill-treated;

- calling on the authorities to give him immediate and regular access to his family, a lawyer of his choice, and any medical treatment he may require.

APPEALS TO:

_Director of the Beijing Public Security Bureau_

*MA Zhenchuan* Juzhang

Beijingshi Gong'anju

9 Qianmen Dongdajie

Dongchengqu

Beijingshi 100740

People's Republic of China

*Email: wbjc**@**sohu.com*

Salutation: Dear Director

_Director of the Beijing Municipal Justice Bureau_

*WU Yuhua* Juzhang

Beijingshi Sifaju

12 Xinjiekouwaidajie

Xichengqu

Beijingshi 100088

People's Republic of China

*Email:* *webmaster@bjsf.gov.cn*

Salutation: Dear Director

COPIES TO:

_Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China_

Dr Galsen BATSUKH

*Embassy of Mongolia* *
*No 2, Xiushui Beijie Jian Guo,

Men Wai Da Jie

Beijing,

People’s Republic of China*;*

Fax: +86 10 6532 5045

The fax number listed can be unreliable, please keep trying.

and to diplomatic representatives of China accredited to your country.

*PLEASE SEND APPEALS IMMEDIATELY.* Check with the International Secretariat, or your section office, if sending appeals after 15 July 2008.

160

2008-06-16T11:34:00.002+08:00

I have a strange urge to share my three favorite poems.

159

2008-06-06T13:41:00.004+08:00

I recently had the profound honor of journeying to Inner Mongolia, which is part of China, to visit the family of Tumen Ulzii Bayunmend, the exiled Inner Mongolian writer I have been working with all year in Ulaanbaatar. Here is footage of photos of him when he was younger, his home in Hohhot, his lovely wife, and in another profound turn of events, a candlelight vigil Inner Mongolian University students held behind Tumen's apartment building for those who died in Szechuan.

There is really a bevy of posts to come about all these images and videos I've posted lately. Transcribing from my journal is always the most time-consuming part of sharing my experience; sorry for the lag.

158

2008-06-05T11:57:00.001+08:00

I have an article in The Asia Foundation's newsletter about the formation of a Mongolian PEN Center.

157

2008-06-04T13:31:00.004+08:00

I'm nearing the end of my year here in incomparable Mongolia, and the mood in Mingland is accordingly retrospective. I've been in a state of deep, deep gratitude lately. For the work done. For the friends made. For the lessons learned. For a year given to me like pennies from heaven by the Luce Foundation--a year given to me to adventure in a faraway land, to do The Work I am here in this world to do: work at the intersection of literary arts and social justice. Grateful is the only word for me these days.

I did a shoddy job of ever combining my photos and my writing this year, perhaps because of the ability of images to override text so easily. But while in this retrospective mood I'd like to share some of my favorite photos from this year--because I can't blame anyone for not sorting through the hundreds of my uncaptioned photos in Picasa.

First, winter pollution, taken from my apartment in central Ulaanbaatar:

And in February, in -30 cold at monastary ruins in the South Gobi:

On my very first day in Monoglia, I snapped this picture of a couple enjoying the autumn green:

More to come soon.

156

2008-06-02T01:44:00.003+08:00

This is Jamukh. (We were at a glam rock party.)

Jamukh is one of Mongolia's younger poets whose work I am spending this last month here translating. I hope to give you some of this remarkable man's remarkable thoughts soon. Until then, enjoy this photo, which should help you look forward to his thoughts. Quite the unique dude. Doesn't his hair make you want to go to a concert?

155

2008-05-30T16:00:00.002+08:00

This will make you happy. If you look at no other footage from my year here, please look at this beautiful little boy, Temuulen, and his natural dance moves out in Sain Shand in Mongolia's easternmost province:

There are burns all over his body, and his mother can't walk properly because of complication from giving birth. His mother was 20 years old when he was born and his father was 17. This family is one of the most beautiful families I've ever met, and while I stayed with them I knew that they are some of the most important teachers I've ever met too.

154

2008-05-30T15:58:00.001+08:00

New footage! A trip to Tetsen Uul, a holy mountain, outside of Ulaanbaatar:

153

2008-05-06T14:52:00.002+08:00

I was in Seoul recently, and I happened to be there on the day the Olympic Torch came through. I was there to protest for Tibetan rights with members of the local Amnesty International chapter.

There is an intense and get-feeling press to the air in a crowd like that, thousands and thousands of young Chinese nationalists. People had been beaten up for protesting, their signs had been torn down.

That afternoon my friend Michael had been walking on a nearby street in Seoul with a yellow balloon in support of Tibet aand a young Chinese girl took his balloon, sweetly at first, asking, "Can I have that?" and then, looking intensely angry, she popped it. Then smiled sweetly again and said, "Sorry!"

It's as bewildering as it is troubling. I didn't realize that Chinese nationalism, the kind with no logic I can understand (does she think we're more likely to agree with her if she takes and destroys property? If China squelches any disagreement?), is now being born forward my people my age and younger.

This is the first time I have put my photography and my (very jilty, Blair-Witchy canon powershot) video together. I'd be interested to know what you think.

152

2008-05-06T14:28:00.004+08:00

So the part of my life being eaten by the manuscript is over, suddenly. It was with me through the convolutions of my life changing and winter ending and spring beginning. In January I would shower, make coffee in my almost broken Chinese coffee maker with terrible King coffee coffee grounds, sit down at my kitchen table and work my way through the awful English translation of (director of Mongolian National Library) Dr. Akim's wolf manuscript, a 126-page manuscript every sentence of which needed to be rewritten. I still went to the gym (have only in the last two weeks become comfortable taking taxis here, which rip me off and which are just regular civilian cars with regular guys in them; friends of mine have been driven off with and I didn't want to take the risk; the funny thing is I walked miles every day in -25 cold in December, January, and February and now that it's warming up I take cabs…) and watched Russian MTV and did things that made me feel like a bad editor and a slacker. I would usually have a lesson with Tuya after that so sometimes I would take a break from manuscript rewriting and do Mongolian grammar.

At the reading, which was held in the National Library, everyone important in my life here was there—Todd, Michael, James, and Amanda, some of my closest expat friends; Jamukh and Deggii, two hardcore bonewearing punkrock poets from Mongolia who are always at the center of the arts; Dr. Akim; and Bill the head of Mongolia's Asia Foundation (the guy who generously funded the publication) and his awesome wife Betina; Eggii and Davaa who take care of me at the Asia Foundation when I need to do things like find an apartment; Chilaajav my boss at the Writer's Union who is also the head of TV and radio and just got back from a 4 city tour of the US for conferences and who spoke for a good fifteen minutes after the reading and checked his phone during; Mend-Oyoo, who heretofore as Chilaajav's archrival had not looked me in the eye and today introduced me and had me come up and stand in front; Batsukh my Mongolian grandpa who gives me guitar lessons and came to my house with a package for his grown daughter for me to take to Seoul where she lives and studies; Pete, the head of the largest bank in Mongolia, Khan bank; and perhaps best of all Tumen, the exiled Inner Mongolian writer I just helped to get UN refugee status for.

Akim was in the hospital up until right before the event—he was still there the morning of. He's your basic brilliant and sometimes confused old guy who still works and teaches and is usually home resting by 3pm. He had disappeared the weekend before, when the book manuscript needed badly to go to print but we didn't want to do it without his final approval, and we found out after the fact that he'd been in the hospital. Chilaajav had been in a private hospital once and I'd gone to see him there. It was like a subpar hotel where they were just monitoring, tested him. It's not a surprise that the older Mongolian men I know have heart problems. Just look at how they live.

So the book went to press late and for some reason the publisher, Edo, needed to send it to Beijing. So we found out at about 2pm, the book event being at 5pm, that there was no book. All 1500 copies were still in Beijing. Welcome to Mongolia. Bill was pissed, and I felt bad because no one could help that Akim had been sick and unable to give his approval til later. But by 5pm, Eggii had found someone somewhere who produced 16 copies of the book. Welcome to Mongolia. It looked great. We're still not sure why Edo needed to send stuff to Beijing.

Two weeks ago I lived at Edo for two days, manually putting in every tiny grammatical change, worrying over how to capitalize words in chapter headings, being served salty milk tea by the tank top wearing young guy on my side of the office and fending off the head of Edo, who worked on the other side but asked me out when he gave me a ride back even though we had just been talking about his wife and children. I came back an extra day because halfway through my first stay at Edo, the power went out. Entire aimags don't have power right now. There are some blinking lights on the street that blink at 6am when no one is out or awake and the lights aren't needed, and then they take the power out of entire districts of the city and counties of the country. I guess a boiler exploded? At the central power place? That's what I hear anyway.

So everyone was there. And the room was packed. And I gave an interview afterwards in Mongolian for the TV cameras that were there. Akim and I read two passages, him in Mongolian and me in English, and Bill spoke about the efforts I had made to help create a PEN chapter for Mongolia—and that this book is an example of the kind of thing that a Mongolian chapter of International PEN would make possible.

I think the best part was just watching Akim's eyes light up when his oldest and closest friends showed up. He and I were trying to rehearse—I was trying to get him to rehearse—the parts I had chosen to read (he made me choose) in his office and people started pouring in. Akim had naturally been looking a little under the weather what with heart problems and such, and it was so fantastic to see the sweet old man belly-laughing his ass off with his oldest friends. I got away with only three shots of vodka before the reading, and that was by escaping early. Akim's old friends filled up the front row and laughed at him and talked and applauded a lot. It was truly a transformation for Akim—from a tired old guy to this spritely happy tipsy old guy. Bill had the idea to do this event as something nice for Akim just because he thought Akim was sweet and wonderful, and it couldn't have come at a better time.

It was a success. People could understand me when I read, I didn't read too fast, and they said they'd never read Mongolian literature translated into English that was nice to read/hear, so I did what I wanted to do.

151

2008-05-06T14:25:00.000+08:00

That's what knocked ME out, he said, your beautiful, beautiful wetness. The river and trees too, in mute gradations, you need a different lens. A Mongolian kid named Bowler takes a skateboard into the ice, aqua then layers of shard above the layer that makes us lose our balance, my arm through B's as she tries to remember the words to the Nelly Furtado song. Bowler scrambles above me sending rocks raining---they're not real rocks, says B laterally to me ten feet along the cliffside, they just crumble off--she flags her arms when we cabooses fall behind under the fog on the way up to the ridge--black, grey, and blonde like the rolling hills on the ranch where I grew up--it's a difficult thing, I say, when he asks if I'll put it in my blog, what I can write and what I can't, what I have a right to say about others…she said, "I tried once to write family stories but you come upon painful internal stuff--fortunately the distant cousin had a tape recorder; they're more open with outsiders," The sun comes and goes, willows providing red, I wear only a sweater on the ridge. Now that you've been there, return in your mind. With the sweet fresh of the stillness and barrenness therein, follow the lateral: inhale the cottonwoods and while releasing don't let go, there is a difference. The German father sits with his hands in his daughter's lap. Walk slow across the ice, without traction and feeling the pocks and dips. Feeling the pulse between your legs at the rich click inaugurating a frozen copy of a moment perpetuating. The clouds will disperse.

150

2008-05-06T14:23:00.001+08:00

I came in to the Writer's Union, which since before the holidays I have not frequented, and nearly mistook the office for another because they had renovated and painted the office lavender. Chilaajav asked me why I don't come in anymore and I told him the truth--drunk men come in to talk to the person I share the office with and tell me and my teacher to lave if we make any noise, it's cold, and there's no internet or even computer. He said I'd have my own office, then, but I knew not to believe him. He said the President of Mongolia asked him to translate five books of lit and asked me for other translators' names to help but not me. It's okay; Akim's book wasn't out yet. At the table that day was a man who decided to give me an impromptu lesson in translation and wrote down a poem for me to translate into Mongolian:

"I want to play a politic. I have sun's horse. I have star's dream."

I remember the guy's name anymore but I remember his lines.

149

2008-05-06T14:20:00.004+08:00

Anyway the circus is much more interesting than all that--it was from North Korea. Lighted figures looping and doing things that emphasized my feelings of stiffness and sterility, occupied as I am with the project of describing something even as I do it. That's the switch *I* can't turn off.

You should have seen the hair on the guys in the box seats! The performers did all sorts of things, human catapults, trapeze, balancing on several rolling around canisters, a tower of them--for that stint even the other performers came out to watch.

The children all had glow-sticks and glow-rings and between acts when it darkened they looked like fireflies. This is the thing, I have it in museums too--I saw the Mona Lisa in 2005 and was more amazed by the spectacle of humanity, jostling and flashing their gadgets, then the smallish painting inside the glass box. I have trouble getting psyched about things in glass boxes for very long, mainly because it all seems arbitrary and rehearsed. It' a privileged object. It happens to have been preserved. It's interesting, I guess, but I'm too aware, as someone who writes, of how full of shit anything written is, and this includes historiography. Writing is something crafted regardless of forum, I truly believe this. And if all writing is crafted then all writers, not least historiographers, can be described as "crafty" maybe.

148

2008-05-06T14:20:00.001+08:00

My landlady just left. Almost every time I see her she has a different hairstyle. She has a twelve year old daughter whose English is very good. Her English was markedly better this time around; last time we met (always to pay up the electicity and such) she was still teaching beginners English to hers students. Whenever I go to the central post office to pay the bill the number is filed under her name. Dagvamaa, (which is pronounced Davagmaa, another Wonder of Mongolian Writing Vs Speech, of which there are many many) and I am used to the person looking up at me and saying it. It's always beastly hot in there. Soviet central heating.

147

2008-05-06T14:10:00.002+08:00

When Batsukh comes over he does not know the mountains he is helping me climb. When he says the food is good he does not know how frightened I was of cooking; when he asks me to "play the American song" he does not know that it is the first song I wrote with guitar and that he is the only one who ever heard it. One day he chopped veggies while I cooked and I put on the Be Good Tanyas. He liked them a lot. On Internatonal Army day I didn't know what day it was, only that I left my apartment at 1pm and a guy was already puking outside it. Anyway Batsukh was drunk. Which makes him a less effective but funnier guitar teacher. Boroo Khideg! He says. I made a mistake! "I made rain," in Mongolian.

It's weird to know I am in the middle of the era people look back on with a mix of nostalgia for the fun and frivolousness and rolloercoasteriness and regret for the stupid shit they did and people they hurt--it's sheer free time that lets me hurt still about guys and stuff--Poh did say the other day that the word should is not helpful, that the amount of time something took doesn't figure into the healing nearly as much as the meaning that was attached to it…

I wonder what meaning looks like. A hanging thing with Velcro I attach and reattach to a big furry wall. No it's more sticky than that. Dark windy tentacles I wrap around things, around logic and memories and my heart, that I can't take away after that because it's bonded to the thing it surrounds.

Ah, people in their 20s. Self-involved and self-entertained. Of course this is true of me, which is why the same muscle I use to write is the one that disgusts me. Why do I try to escape the prism of the senses and the emotional awareness in order to write when writing is only possible through those things? Be at peace, Ming.

In Mongolian raisins are "water grapes." One normal day a woman was moaning and spitting sitting on a stump in the dirt strip I always walk when I leave the gym if I want to cut across to UB mart, the dirt strip above the Children's Park where the rock doves bloom up in an unintentional collective art movement or something with the statue of some dude only visible bust upward because of the fence surrounding--which during the warm season, the season that just started so suddenly there are all these white people thronging the streets again, is guarded at the north entrance by people trying to fool you with their pressed clothes into thinking one needs to pay to get into the park…the park itself has a swastika and "we hate the Chinese "graffiti, and there was once a Chinggis figurine who somehow was made to breathe or something? This A told me when we walked her dog in the park in the eye watering cold and she had on her black market sweatshirt with guns all over it. A has the most beautiful auburn curls I have ever seen. She's fucking smart too, you can see from the breadth of her expressions. Normally droll she's actually very sensitive and trained as a teacher. I cant tell if the ones full of shit are the ones who pretend like they don't care when they do, like A, or the ones who carry on and won't shut up about it all, like me.

146

2008-05-06T13:57:00.002+08:00

I almost got a kitten in the black market when Todd and Michael and I went there. Oh dear, said Todd when I said I wanted to see if there were kittens. And there was one, a grey one with blue eyes and I wanted to take it home and after one second I said I have to go RIGHT NOW because I am leaving all July and that would not be responsible but it must be so hot and uncomfortable in the cage it shared with the turtle. The photos Todd took that day were amazing. Such sunlight. The black market is a bunch of shaded booths now, everyone erecting sheets against the sun, so that it could have been in Thailand. Sun all over the black pantyhose, and that color soaked it up like velvet. There was a monk ringing a bell amid the knockoff Prada sunglasses and baby phat shirts, holding the head of a kneeling guy. Blessing him I guess.

The sun is coming whitely through the windows. It's the first Sunday afternoon I have taken to write in a long time. Blood is leaving my body in bits and pieces, couches for the baby that will not be.

It's strange being in such an odd place for such a long time--strange in that it isn't strange, though I know that if two weeks in Russia would make me wonder on the floor in Brooklyn at the fantasia I had just been inside of, over a year in Mongolia will seem a long dream, an endless acid trip or coma where you dream of pink clouds while your diabetic body flips the fuck out.

145

2008-05-06T13:54:00.001+08:00

Pete Morrow, the guy who salvaged Khan Bank (or Xaan Bank) and made it into the biggest bank in Mongolia, is the guy I met up with to discuss possible funding at the restaurant that had no electricity. He invited me that Wednesday evening for a personal tour of all the bank's art. It was a lot of fun--Mongolia does have its own small and very interesting community. Some amazing stuff happens. Camels and big sky and gers are all magnetic to the eye, really great shapes to work with. All sorts of stuff. Installations. Oil. Abstract. As with the great writers and great ballet dancers of Mongolia, the great visual artists went to Moscow to study. The bank was large and on every floor was a different sort of layout. One floor had glass booths. Behind his desk is an altar with the burnables and sage and seed at the foot of a tapestry--when they moved to the new building the bank employees finally had someone tell pete that they felt uneasy working at a bank that didn't honor the god of money. Pete knows good feeling of employees is central. I asked him for the summary of how he salvaged the bank. It was actually pretty simple, but it took someone like Pete to do it. He still has the World Bank assessment of "there is no way to save this bank" framed on the wall behind his office chair. He had a poll guy go in and find out who was keeping how much money where--and most people, of course, were keeping their money stashes in their gers, lending and borrowing from friends and family, etc. So he just lowered the amount of cash needed to open an account and upped the interest rate about 5 points above what Mongolian neighbors charged each other, and also put new bank branches in the tiny outpost centers. Just need to pay rent and the salary of one or two people, a tiny bit for pencils and paper--this was all ten years ago now.

There were two bottles of white wine waiting in the ger outside the fourth floor of the bank, on the rooftop. Around the ger were pictures hanging on the wall of Chinggis and his descendants. It was bizarre to see Ulaanbaatar through the windows of this bank, which is taller than a lot of buildings in UB. It was a purple kind of dusk and the bigger buildings all look real different--one white building looks like it came here from Paris. It used to be the Russian embassy compound and now it's where wealthy Russian businessmen stay.

He then had his driver take us to banditos, the Hispanic/Indian fusion food restaurant where we got a lot of excellent drunk food--quesadilles, samosas, etc. He was lots of fun to talk to. He gave me a book about a monk.

144

2008-05-06T13:41:00.002+08:00

Ayurzana, the young, handsome, and incredibly accomplished (like 20 books kind of accomplished) 40 year old guy with a face like an open stone who spent last semester at Iowa's international writer's program, is firmly in the camp of Chilaajav, my boss at the Writer's Union. He's the guy Larry Siems talked me up to in NYC in December before he returned. He was nominally in control of the nominal PEN club which, he admitted more that once, existed in name only and was never an approved branch of international PEN. Because you his modernity, his youth, his worldliness, he was the best bet for a non-old-guard feel to the meeting in December that he led, where he stated for all the reporters to write down that PEN would become open to the public for writers to apply. We got drunk in the cold January at Brauhaus and I handed over the list Mend-Oyoo had given me of people he'd like to see ivovled with PEN who were not part of Chilaa's and Ayur's particular interest group or clique. He did not say anything at the time except that they were all Mend-Oyoo's friends. He did say that he felt really stupid when he worked with Lisa Fink (Fulbrighter here last year) and then she went and worked with his enemies. I reminded him that mine and lisa's job is not to work with the literature in one interest group but with Mongolian literature as a whole, and it's sort of our job to like everyone. He called me a smart girl.

Just two weeks ago he wrote that he could not work with "them who are not real writers" and who "slandered" him; namely, the people on Mend-Oyoo's list. So, after heading up the nominal PEN club and heading up the meeting in December, he's out. He still has the Mongolian translation of the charter, and the signed charter itself. Have to get those at some point. I told him once again that there simply is no way to have a branch of International PEN approved without opening applications up to any writer--it's not a suggestion, it's a rule.

When I told this to Ariunaa (Arts Council head), specif. the part he said about other writers, she clucked and shook her head and said "terrible." But then she said what I felt: that with names ike Dashnyam's and Akim's tied to this effort to create a PEN center the movement was not dead in the water. I'm so glad that there's been enough buzz about it among enough people that it has its own momentum apart from one person or association.

Ayur's wife is lovely, another person from Lisa Fink's reading. She was the only person to read differently, instead of the drunken rhythmics of the men she whispered her poetry, and whispering in Mongolian sounds like the quietest breeze in winter cottonwood leave. The ones that remain. I didn't know they were married til January when I finally put two and two together. We had lunch, the three of us, in January, and she wore a sparkly purple skirt and he looked at her with adoration. She was afraid I didn't enjoy the ox tongue salad they ordered for me.

Dahsnyam and I went from the academy of traditions one block south to the Arts Council to talk about getting funding for him, Chilaajav, and me to go to WALTIC in Stockholm this June. (big literary translation conference) Dashyam wants to talk with other writers from other countries about their PEN centers and how they started, and he wanted me there because I came to Mongolia primarily to facilitate that conversation and could help greatly with it, just communication-wise since he does not understand accented English he'll be hearing from Swedes etc. Unfortunately the arts council offers the sorts of grants that would support passage to such a conference to citizens of Mongolia, so Dashnyam and Chilaajav with most probably get to go and I would have to find $1500 if I wanted to. At least that. And my attempts at finding funding for things like that here have been few and far between since the results are always so scarce.

Dashnyam chatted with Deggii, who works part time at the Arts Council. In the meeting room where the coat rack and hot water maker is. Deggii I met my first week here because Lisa fink, the poetess who was finishing up her stay as a fulbrighter translating poetry, did a reading jointly with her--Degii has black chains and spikes and lonk black hair and long earrings and eyeliner. She's also a well respected member of the community here and a magazine editor--this inclusion is one of my favorite things about Mongolian society.

143

2008-05-06T13:31:00.001+08:00

There's a dust storm outside, a big one--it's never rainish outside but it is now. I can hear the wind crashing against todd's windows. It reminds me of st Petersburg and how we all went crazy because of the white nights. It's hard not to go a little insane when the light changes and stays opening like that. Right now all the dust has it a different light than any I have seen in Mongolia and it feels like my mind is a man trying to keep his hat on in the wind.

142

2008-05-06T13:26:00.001+08:00

I was not supposed to be filming this, either--footage from a North Korean circus visiting Mongolia.

141

2008-05-06T13:14:00.001+08:00

Footage from Ikh Tengur, the Mongolia's Presidential Compound, located outside of Ulaanbaatar. I was NOT supposed to be filming.

140

2008-05-06T12:58:00.001+08:00

Here's Mongolia Montage 19. Folk tune, Tsagaan Sar leftovers, dancing...

139

2008-05-05T10:47:00.001+08:00

One more note toward the anti-corruption seminar:

The rock star, a ministry member whom we have dubbed D. Sug ("D. Sugar" is literally his name plate) is back after peacing out of yesterday's afternoon session. That morning he had expertly bamboozled the crowd. He spoke, and others got turn if they wanted one. He had on burberry jeans, stonewashed grey, and a fashionable and not businesslike buttonup shirt, and didn't take off his sunglasses. He devised a plan for anticorruption action that included a raise for people who worked at the level he did. Someone said (this I heard, as always, through the translation earpiece) "let's make implementation measure distinct between the natonal and the institutional."

"--let's take a break," said D. Sug, "and a few of us will formulate the action plan with your input."

So everyone filed out for the Mongolian equivalent of elephant ears.

138

2008-05-05T10:46:00.000+08:00

I watch the sunlight from the dining room at the Krempinski hotel, where I had a $9 breakfast after a $1.25 cab ride across town in the deserted 8:30am morning. I awoke on my own at 6, three hours before the seminar. Last night I did what my dad does, stir fry veggie soup with eggs to offset a day with no protein then three bottles of beer. The stores were all closed, even the bakery, though the sign on the door said open and it was 8am. "A 9 o clock city" was how Tom Briggs described it. I spilled coffee on myself by sitting it beside an open window behind me yesterday so my jacket was home drying wrinklishly from the wash. It remains to be seen if insisting on not paying out for laundry service was smart, since the manual washer-spinner I use tears my clothes apart. At least they dry in a flash here, in Indonesia they never did. I'd rather awake with coating on my tongue and a loogie that tastes like sediment than never have dry clothes.

The hostess and black and white dressed busboys remind me of the restaurants where I worked. And catering. And getting fired from catering. And I was thinking of him and her too, of Linda telling me that heartache fades longly and unceremoniously in fits and starts and returns. A couple Saudis had some breakfast, and an old white guy sat across from me at the other table-for-one.

The taxi had lace on the seats. For the first time here, I rode a taxi alone and the driver did not tell me I was cute, and if I was married or how old I was.

137

2008-05-05T10:39:00.002+08:00

The Krempinski hotel is where the anti-corruption seminars were that The Asia Foundation held with the Education and Transportation Ministries. The anti-corruption seminars were wild. The first was a two-day affair at the presidential compound, Ikh Tengur, and when I'd had lunch the week before with Akim and Tugsuu about the wolf book Tugsuu had said something about the seminar. So when I came into the Asia Foundation to speak with Bill about the book I asked if I could observe it. It's a closed seminar, he said, but maybe we could get you in--can you take notes into a powerpoint? Tom Briggs was there from the US national treasury. He was one of the first twelve non-press civilians allowed into Iraq after 9/11. He was in the book with "Emerald City" in the title, featured as the guy who knew the right thing to do with the stock market there:

"I went to Iraq I the fall of '03 for a couple months. I had been a banker, and I went to organize banks as a counterpoint to the debt reduction problem. Iraq owes the world $180 billion at a GDP of $10. Not exactly sustainable. The first day I wore my flak jacket, 9mm, guards, then the next day ditched the equipment and the next day ditched the guards. I was fine. Every so often I'd get a look. This one guy I talked to was Sunni and he married a Shiiite. He said it's fine, there's no trouble, but don't do anything to create divisions. Which of course," he said primly, stirring his coffee, "We proceeded to do.

"I had an idea for a stock exchange--by that point, anyone with stock in Iraq was corrupt, dirty, and I was a banker and they asked me so I said get a blackboard and a telephone and unfreeze some of these equities. But then Baghdad fell and an army guy came in and tried to write laws, SEC, etc like in the states, it was a mess. 6 months later they were back to my plan exactly, the only difference being that they used a whiteboard instead of a blackboard.

"I was supposed to find a safe to store the money making up millions of dollars--this friend of mine had a simple, brilliant plan to give $20 to all the government civil workers who had been shocked by our invasion to get them to come back to work. I was presented with a safe with 2 ft thick walls and a roof that was essentially open, just tile. The truck was coming, loaded with cash. They said they'd build another wall for the roof and pour concrete on top. I said fine, but then Baghdad fell.

"When I was in Iraq for the first time I hired two young Iraqi women about your age who had been friends since girlhood to do administrative things. I taught them how to use cell phones and computers. I told them their daughters would laugh when they heard phones used to be connected to walls. They laughed and laughed. You know how those girlhood friendships are, really tight. I got to see them--they were still there when I returned in January. Next day I was walking and there was an explosion that felt like the mortar was on the next block. I was actually half a mile away. I was walking with my weight on my left foot at that moment, and if it had been on my right foot I would have gone down. As it was my left foot just hit the ground really hard.

"Anyway one of the young woman was in a car. It was 8am. She died at 9 that night. Horrible death, burns, you know. I still have trouble talking about it."

137

2008-05-05T10:37:00.001+08:00

It snowed one of the days I spent with Dashnyam at the Academy of Traditions. I don't know why changes in the weather make me feel so pensive. The morning was overcast but bright today, warm enough for flip flops, and it smelled like burning. Later after we came out of the café it was almost rain cloudy and the smell was different.

I'm not even sure why I want to stay in a dirty city that smells like burns and freezes over vomit and condoms in the wintertime. I guess I don't think I have done enough. I don't think I am done learning. And I have nowhere better to be. If I went back to the ranch all the old memories would be there, but moreover, I cant afford to live alone where I grew up. None of us can, so we all left and come back once or twice a year to sleep on our parents sofas, smoke a bowl, reconnect. To each other, to the land and oak tress, the memoryscape.

136

2008-05-05T10:36:00.001+08:00

I came out of the Academy of Traditions into yellow sunlight to see two guards or policeman kicking a drunk lying in the side street street. Even after the drunk got up they pulled him along by the ear.

135

2008-05-05T10:32:00.002+08:00

The head above the sheet metal. Will I stop ascribing. Can I get rid of the I without hatred. Do I need to go outside writing--since it is so relentlessly self referential. Reluctant Beijing

I have wondered about this desire/identity I have as a writer. I think in words, comfortably and deeply, saturatedly in words, but I wrestle so much with the activity of reading, of ignoring the waking world. Thalia Field said to me when I said I don't have a very good attention span, Your whole generation has no attention span, and then you write these long long long things. It remains to be seen whether I am a good editor--I do a lot here, but I always could be doing more.

Maybe I do look for the cracks and dissatisfaction and unhappiness, because that is, as Pearl S Buck said, what drives an artist to create, create, create, because everything is felt a thousand times more. I lie awake worrying about how the PEN letter referenced something not every writer reading the newspaper would know about. I lie awake thinking about him and how when I meet someone with fair curls like his my chest still hurts. I wonder if I will ache about it for the rest of my life, with no regard to reason, to what should be.

I don't think I go so far as to create them--most of the time.

"Get rid of the whiny I"

134

2008-05-05T10:29:00.002+08:00

The children playing with plastic guns in and around my building, crouching on the gritty stairway. Cardboard boxes they put down on the stoops when the ice was thick and slick as all hell. I walk through the Russian school yard--concrete with hopscotch--and yesterday they were jumproping; everyones changed into light blue uniforms because of spring time. The letters painted on the ground in the schoolyard are Russian.

Linda Oppen: relationships are a culture. They come with norms. I think I have so long wished for what Christians find in Jesus--constant company, someone who understands my mind. Infidelity is just one example of what did not make sense to me: this is the person who knows you best, right? This is the person you can tell anything to. But that's not the case. There are always things you don't say. All that compartmentalizing. "Putting order to things is something I try desperately to do." Receipts. Spreadsheets.

I think of Pshemeck in Siberia ovr 4 years ago, telling me someday you may want a good father for your children, then later, perhaps you will want a man who is a good lover.

The sky retracts.

133

2008-05-05T10:22:00.001+08:00

Today the snow was falling and I immediately felt more removed and dreaming. It flew at me in vortexes, big tasty flakes in my eyelashes and my hair. I did a lot of walking today, three meetings at different points in the city center. I remember getting to poetry class one day my first semester at Brown and my friend Stacey going, Ming did you fall in a snowbank on the way here?

Vortexes of snow. "My love is bottomless." I left my apartment tightly closed up for my ten days in Korea, but the Mongolian silt has layered over the kitchen again.

132

2008-04-28T21:05:00.001+08:00

Theres a penis rock in Omnigov that everyone worships. It was near one of the three ruins I went to with Akim and all the monks who were opening the stupa at the energy center of the world in early February. The kind of clear desert cold where your junk gets cold induced stage fright when you try to pee. There's also a vagina rock. This is one you walk through. It's like being reborn. When akim spoke through tugsoo today of the Mongolian genetic disposition toward drinking I said it sounded a bit like Native Americans, and then he said there's a legend about two brothers whose land was broken in two by much water, and the older brother was the Mongolian one and the younger brother was the Native American one.

131

2008-04-28T21:02:00.001+08:00

I must call somebodies! Akim said to me as we parted ways. His bowler sits so high on his head it looks tophattish. The wind and the cold were lionish today though the beginning of march was sort of lamby. Trust this north to do things the other way round. Akim and I met with tugsoo from the Asia Foundation today to hammer out deadlines for the wolf book. He agreed heartily to the idea that the book signing ceremony could be held with attention to the most recent efforts to create a PEN center; specifically the differences between past closed-Soviet-"PEN-clubs" and the branch of international PEN I'd like to help Mongolian writers create, which would be open to any writer to apply for. The book signing ceremony will publicize that difference, and I couldn't ask for anyone better to agree to this since Akim is the ONLY literary guy I have come across who gets along with Mend-Oyoo at the academy of culture and poetry, Baigal Saikhan at the Freelance Writer's Union, and Chilaaajav at the Writer's Union.

I think I'll always remember the big hug Akim greeted me with when I came into his office yesterday—he told me he had read my rewrite, and that I am a poet.

The guy who translated the manuscript that I had to rewrite sentence for sentence is the best Mongolia has to offer in the way of translators. This Akim told me today through Tugsoo in the smoky pub that was home to our meeting. Akim first took us up the stairs of some business building. Where are we going? I asked. I don't know, said Tugsoo, but I smell food. We got to the third floor and akim opened the door and said wwwwhohhoa! because there was no restaurant there anymore. Just some piled of powder of plaster and chairs, and dimness. This is emblematic of mongolia's shiftingness (I understand we're at an impressive latitude, and that the horizon seems quite flat; all the same, the shifting is always going on and the sidewalks are always pocked. I'm surprised I haven't fallen up yet)--I was concerned for Akim; he's a tottery old fellow and usually is home napping by the time Tugsoo arrived--We laughed an adjourned into the frenzied wind, me holding Tugsoo's hand because I was afraid of the traffic and old Akim simply holding his hand out in front of the cars, whiched stopped for him as they hardly ever stop for me.

130

2008-04-28T21:01:00.000+08:00

I also had this thing where I was like, I can't write to anyone until I finish editing the wolf manuscript for Akim, and I learn to cook chicken soup, and I mop my floors. Cleaning here is a constant pull, and writing is difficult to justify—it takes being selfish with your time; it takes letting other things slip. For the first time in my life I have wanted to hide behind those things, perhaps because being in such a foreign place and calling myself out on all the bullshit—I live a very urban, comfortable life here in many ways; my plumbing works and the showers are always hot, which is more than I can say for the way I grew up. How many 23 year olds from ANY culture get to live in their own apartment? It's ridiculous.

And then I remember that my stairwell is visibly grimy and people live under it, there is graffiti on the walls, and daily I walk around uncovered manholes and daily I encounter at least one pile of frozen vomit. Daily I step over frozen condoms and used birth control packets—but those just make me sigh with relief. Whoever was using them was not in a position, I am guessing, to provide for a little human in the ways every little human deserves to be provided for. I will always remember the summer I worked with family planning clinics in South America and how by the end it was august and Katrina was flooding when I was on the plane home and I had HAD it with misfortune and disaster and buried my head in Harry Potter for two days, muttering about how the whole planet needed to put a condom on until every person got the food, education, and shelter they deserved. The entire planet. An earth-sized condom.

129

2008-04-28T20:57:00.001+08:00

Today I met with a VIP about funding opportunities. Ostensibly the reason was to find funding to stay in Mongolia a couple months past the luce to September or October and translate literature. Since for my Luce period I am bogged in PEN stuff and wolf story editing and have another bad-english-translation-rescue-project to do after this one, and plus I will know Mongolian better by then. I am learning the traditional script now—beautiful, like drawing a picture, and Mongols say it's saying yes because yu move your head/eyes up and down to read it instead of side to side, wagging no.

Anyway he said lets meet at Veranda over email so I went to Veranda and the power was out. It was out all over Peace Street. And so they told me, sorry it is not possible. I said, I am meting someone. They said, I am sorry it is not possible. So I waited in the foyer and he came in looking very brusque and businessmanny and I said, they won't let us sit down, and he said, oh sure they will.

And they did. And the table was reserved for us, and we never had to pur our own wine, and they upgraded our candle from silver to red with a tutu at the bottom. Everybody's a whore, was one thing he said. Not about me , but in general. And another: that Mongolians don't know basic courtesy and are what we would consider rude because they "don't know any better". Which is either really fucked up or really true.

I guess too much has been going on to even write about, in a way. I got through the winter and my bruised tailbone almost doesn't hurt anymore. Because I had a warm coat and a warm bed, winter was just another spectacle. If your basic needs are met the surroundings are metaphor.

128

2008-04-28T20:52:00.003+08:00

Batsukh just left. He is the opera singer who is teaching me guitar. He came into where I was doing a grammar lesson last fall at the writer's union and sang opera. He translates operas from romance languages into Mongolian. He comes to my apartment every Monday at 7pm and I make him coffee or give him beer and we work generally on one Mongolian song about migrating birds flying like eyelashes.

I was just making my bed and Obama was on BBC for a while. TV here is funny. There are many Mongolian channels that sometimes show things like an entire Paul Mccartney concert or a retrospective of New Order videos. I have been covering the elections news and voting etc through the internet. I was sitting sweating on a hotel bed with my Korea Luce Scholar friend Michael when Obama came on after winning Iowa.

Today saw another dip in the weather. Someone told me to look for the bit of redemption in the mess or the heatbreak the same day as the cold came back, pinkening my fingers around my 25cent instant coffee from the building next to the pink stock exchange. I've never been in there, though it was featured in the Mongolian lessons I took next to the ocean in Goleta on summer nights after social work and before hostessing with the monk Batra. It means "the bridge of wealth."

No one else is my saviour. And after years of wanting to but being afraid to try, chicken soup isn't even that hard. Just put everything into a pot and have good music on. And mopping floors? That was an adventure, but not the doing of it—I went to the Mongolian black market, called the thieves market, but I never get robbed there in any case, with my friend Jon Whitten and we found a squeegie. Small victories, people. Small victories.

So I tried that--a squeegie. On international womens day, after putting it off for like three months, when the afternoons sunlight was all honeyish I squeegied my kitchen and then realized that there was no strainer on the squeegie so I had to sop it up with a towel, and then saw that my feet made marks, so I pulled a pippi longstocking and boogied on a towel in my underwear in the kitchen and giggled to myself. I had the moment I had been waiting for out of this year, my Susan Mitchell moment, my moment of being my own best friend. It turns out, I only realized today, that the Mongolian way of putting a rag on a stick and wooshing it around is actually the best way.

127

2008-04-28T20:51:00.000+08:00

I see beauty in weird things, like the ribbons of tape when a cassette is taken apart of broken. They lace the ground or other pieces of trash here. And it occurs to me that this is a dirty and unsafe city by the standards of myself in the states.

The roads are the least democratic in the world. We're talking worse than Moscow.
Things are thawing, I guess.
I am learning. No one will stop for me, I hav learned, and I, along wit every other pedestrian, nearly get killed by cars and buses every day. Neither drivers nor people obey stoplights. I realized I had to get braver when I was waiting for six year old girls to step out before stepping myself. Now every day I step headlong into oncoming traffic.

126

2008-04-28T20:50:00.000+08:00

So anyway, I haven't written anything to anyone, even to myself, for different reasons. One of them is that it was winter in Mongolia.

Gym is hilarious; either it's deserted, or there are people in there who are likely CIA or somsuch ambassador. And it's awkward, amazingly awkward, because if a person is using a neighboring running machine and you use your remote to change your tv channel, theirs changes too, and I have done that so many times and then I turn and apologize to someone who is likely responsible for today's multimillion dollar trade agreement or whatever or the ambassador from India or something. And I just turned off their TV in the middle of CNN or MTV. Awesome!

125

2008-04-22T13:14:00.001+08:00

Two new photo albums: Casual Shots II and Spring in Mongolia. Captions to come soon.

124

2008-04-17T12:12:00.001+08:00

And a little montage I forgot to post in January when I made it...birches, hospitals, schmoozing..

123

2008-04-12T11:15:00.003+08:00

More tsagaan sar, this time with Dr. Akim, Mongolia's National Library Director, whose book of wolf stories I am ALMOST finished editing...

And the trip with the monks of Ulaanbaatar's Nandan Monastery to Omnigov for the opening of a new stupa at the World Energy Center. (More singing!)

122

2008-04-11T17:07:00.002+08:00

And now, for a barrage of video montages:

First and most importantly, Tumen-Ulzii, the Inner Mongolian essayist living here in exile, and his family on the lunar new year. (Singing!) These visits with his family are extremely rare.

Next, more of that never-ending February holiday with my boss, Chilaajav, and his family.

More soon.

121

2008-04-04T09:24:00.005+08:00

It was fall in Mongolia, and the dusk falling round the State Department Store, the central meeting place in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar, made it hard to see anyone's face—not that I knew what the man I was supposed to meet looked like. I had just arrived for the year to work with writers, and my desire to see a Mongolian branch of International PEN created was shared by an Inner Mongolian writer living in New York. When we emailed he told me to look up a Mr. Tumen Ulzii. I thought the two were friends, but later I’d find out that this man knew of Tumen because of Tumen's status as a prominent essayist on the Chinese government’s actions towards Inner Mongolians and as a leading figure of the People’s Party of Inner Mongolia. That night, with only the most basic Mongolian words under my belt and about ten English words under his, Tumen and I relied almost entirely on pens, paper, an electronic dictionary, and universal gestures. Tumen is keen and quick. He told me the first bit about himself—his wife and daughter, who are still living in China, and the books he wrote about race and politics that brought Inner Mongolians in from the countryside just to meet him—and precipitated the banning of his writing in China and, after he left China for Mongolia in 2005, police raids on his office and home.

The day was clearer and much colder in January when we walked the five minutes from my apartment to the Mongolian branch of the United Nations. Uniformed men in their early twenties guarded the compound. My passport was not with me because I put it on my dresser to remind myself to get more pages at the American Embassy, and Tumen had called while I was out to say it was a good time to go the UN. They let me in anyway. Tumen and I crossed the asphalt of an eerily quiet parking lot with white vans to a pink Soviet-style building, where the receptionist clucked at my passportlessness. We moved beyond, to the UNHCR office, where I asked one large Mongolian man, Mr. Och, what the holdup was on Tumen’s refugee status.

Refugee situations are never easy, and this was no exception. Mongolia has no UNHCR branch, only a liaison office, so the decision to grant him refugee status had to come from the nearest branch, which happens to be in…Beijing. Mongolia also has no provisions in its law for asylum seekers, so as long as Tumen remained one he was at risk of deportation and then punishment at the hands of the government whose officials stormed his house, strip-searched his wife, and arrested his friend Soyolt, another Ineer Mongolian dissident, on January 7th, 2008 upon touchdown in Beijing on a business trip. Soyolt is still in the incommunicative world of arbitrary detention without charge or trial somewhere in China (while his wife and three children remain powerless here in Ulaanbaatar), having been allowed one phone call back in January wherein he reported that Chinese officials had told him that if he makes a fuss or alerts any foreign media, things will get worse. The imminent Olympic Games in Beijing seem to be both a blessing and a curse for Chinese dissidents; attempts by the Chinese government to silence them in the buildup to the Games have resulted in multiple situations like that of Tumen and Soyolt, but the unprecedented amount of attention the international community is currently paying to China’s human rights record can also serve as a form of inoculation for the lucky ones who get noticed.

Mr. Och at UNHCR told me to secure a letter of support for Tumen from Freedom to Write at PEN New York, and then that a decision should come in the next week, which is something he would tell me for three months. Afterwards Tumen and went and got a beer. Tumen loves that I like beer. It was midafternoon, but around here people drink beer at lunch, at least the demographic I work with (read: middle aged male writers). Bayarlalaa, minii okhin, he says. Thank you, my daughter. Sain okhin, he says. Good girl.

Tumen is extremely quick, but there are some things he says that boggle me. He can understand lesbianism, but not male homosexuality, and he wants to know why it exists—and how the sex happens. He thinks Hitler’s fine, since he wasn’t as bad as Stalin. He likes President Bush, purely because Bush is the President of the U.S.A.

He does have a few good friends here. Uchida is a gentle Japanese man and a great friend of Tumen’s. I met with both men several times at the pub around the corner from where I live. Uchida, who studied in Inner Mongolia, showed me pictures of his 4 month old baby on his cell phone. The baby and her mother live in Japan. I wrote up a bio of Tumen to forward to PEN’s Freedom to Write program, and the men checked over it, Uchida translating, while I dug into fried meat and rice. Though they are both in their forties they looked and sounded like school buddies hunched over a cheat sheet, casual and affectionate. Afterwards, I told them I needed to go and clean my floor. They told me they would like me to stay and drink beer with them instead. “Tomorrow,” Uchida said. “What tomorrow?” I asked, and at the same time one man mopped with an invisible mop and the other swept with an invisible broom.

Tumen had read the book about wolves by Mongolia's National Library director that I was helping translate into English. In the pub he wrote a note for me to give Akim in traditional Mongolian script. My Mongolian teacher, Tuya, is the only younger Mongolian I’ve met to know traditional Mongolian script, which Inner Mongolians still use exclusively. Tumen, fluent in Mongolian, Japanese, and Chinese, is confounded by Cyrillic type. Though it was only instituted in 1944, It has taken deep hold here in (Outer) Mongolia. The pages of Tumen’s notebook, which looks like a molskeine, are covered in the rows of lacy black script whose verticalness, Mongolians say, makes you nod yes to the world as you read instead of shaking no. Inner Mongolians see themselves as part of a larger Mongolia and maintain that Inner Mongolians helped Outer Mongolia to achieve independence. This view is not shared by the Outer Mongolian public, and anyone from any part of China is at physical risk here--as the “f*cking Chinese go home” graffiti outside my apartment and the recently acquired black eye of my young Chinese friend Li, who is here to study, can attest. Tumen speaks differently; Inner Mongolian dialect has a “j” sound where outer has a “ts” and the pronouns are a bit different. It’s a small city. He does not feel safe.

He had Tuya and me over for a real Inner Mongolian dinner, presenting a modest and bare but immaculately clean apartment on the worse side of town, near the black market (also called “thieves market”). He gave me some kind of grain cereal at the bottom of a bowl of milky tea, then surprised me by thumbing off pieces of meat from the boiled sheep on the table and dropping them one by one into the bowl, something he kept doing throughout the meal. The second time I came by myself during the February holiday of tsagaan sar (“white moon” or “white month”). He had invited me weeks beforehand to be present on the first day of his wife and daughters’ ten-day visit. He and his daughter, Ona, a delicate university student with very good English, picked me up in a taxi (which in Ulaanbaatar is usually a regular guy in a regular car who could use a thousand tugriks or two) and we stopped for groceries—he wanted to get beer for me and he wanted Ona to have one too, like me, which she does not usually do and which I tried to stop. On the way up the stairs Tumen took us one floor too far and then couldn’t figure out why his key didn’t work, and Ona gave him grief for it in universally understandable tones. The apartment was filled and Tumen was alive, bickering with Ona, their voices zinging in Mongolian and Chinese across the kitchen. Tumen is immensely proud of his daughter, who tested into the top 10% of university students in China. I took videos of them singing traditional Inner Mongolian songs and smiled at his wife, a quiet geography teacher a few years older than Tumen, feeling guilty for knowing what was done to her at the border the last time she visited her husband, trying not to imagine it now that I had seen her tired face.

April 2008. It’s not spring by the standards of my home in California—it snowed last week—but it was sunny enough for sunglasses yesterday as I waited for Tumen in front of the State Department Store. He approached in a long black coat and shades that made him look like a spy in en big-budget movie. He smelled my cheeks, the customary Mongolian greeting, and as we walked away from the throngs, he said “Min! United Nations OK!” and put his thumb up. I whooped and called Och, who confirmed. Tumen is an official refugee, eligible for resettlements. The letter Larry Siems at PEN Freedom to Write in New York sent expressing concern about Tumen had been crucial to the decision.

To celebrate, Tumen took me to a Korean restaurant. He lay several strips of fat with a bit of meat attached (Mongolian meat always comes this way) on the griddle set up at our table. My Mongolian is better than it was six months ago when we met, but we still do a fair amount of the gesturing. I admitted I'd forgotten to give Akim the note Tumen had written. Tumen put up his pinky finger the way he does when he talks about his daughter's English mistakes: "Muu!" (Bad!") and we hooked pinkies. He’s keen to know which presidential candidates are leading in my country, and overjoyed that Obama is dark-skinned. He now wonders where I think the best place to resettle would be. America? He mimed an injection into his arm, and then reading a book, then put his arm high into the air: hospitals and university fees are high in America. Resettlement can be a long and difficult process. Canada or Europe, we hope. He is very concerned that Ona go to a good university. He loves dogs, but can’t have one here. Somewhere where he can have a dog. Tumen insists that when I visit Hohot next month I stay with his wife. Sain okhin, he says, kissing the top of my head. Good girl.

120

2008-03-25T17:32:00.002+08:00

The following is a letter the kind Mr. Dashnyam is helping to translate and put in a major Mongolian newspaper, along with the International PEN Constitution and other information about forming a branch of International PEN:

Open Letter to Mongolian Writers

This information about forming a branch of PEN International is being made public because the formation of a Mongolian branch of International PEN, if it is to be approved by the PEN International committee, must be a public process.

I arrived last fall for my year in Mongolia to work with writers--with the goal of assisting and facilitating Mongolians writers’ formation of a Mongolian branch of International PEN. I came with information and guidelines about the formation of a branch of International PEN and contacts at International PEN headquarters in London, and I have tried to disseminate the same information to all writers I know of in Mongolia.

Early on in the conversations I had with writers about the possibility of forming a Mongolian branch of International PEN, I came into contact with a misunderstanding that has plagued the effort to form a Mongolian branch of International PEN for six months. The misunderstanding is this: “PEN club” is a phrase familiar to all Mongolian writers from times past, and it connotes a closed club of writers who almost always agree with one another. This is not what a Mongolian branch of International PEN would be. The difference between a “PEN club” of yore and a Mongolian branch of International PEN would be that this branch connects to the worldwide association of PEN centers across the world, and Mongolian writers would send representatives to vote and participate in the annual International PEN congress. A Mongolian PEN Center, if it is approved by PEN International congress, would be required to have an open application process available to any Mongolian writer who would like to apply.

The next argument I always hear is that this kind of PEN branch in Mongolia would be impossible to create because if two Mongolian writers do not agree on who the best writer is, they will never work together. I respect Mongolian culture, and also the right of Mongolian writers to have aesthetic differences, and I do not believe that writers have to agree on everything to do something like create a Mongolian branch of International PEN, because PEN Centers number above 145 centers in over 100 countries around the world, and I know for a fact that writers in those centers do not always agree on everything. In fact, debates and differences are a healthy part of any civic process, including the formation of a Mongolian branch of International PEN. The fact of the matter is this: Mongolian literature is not translated, published or read abroad to the extent that it should be around the world. Every Mongolian writer I have met agrees with that fact, and that is the only fact Mongolian writers need to agree on to begin to create a Mongolian branch of International PEN. International PEN requires that the application to become a member of any country's PEN Center be open to the public, and it also requires that the meetings to begin a PEN Center be public. I am very happy to report that the first public meeting, held in December 5th in Ulaanbaatar, was successful in that over the required 20 Mongolian writers signed the charter. The next meeting, to happen this spring, will be a public forum for the creation of a constitution for a Mongolian PEN Center.

I respect very, very much the organizations Mongolian writers have created over the years. The effort to create a Mongolian branch of International PEN would not be an effort to close down those groups, even the ones called "PEN Club." I understand that there will be disagreements as a Mongolian branch of International PEN is formed, but I still believe that process should happen, because with a culture as rich in literary heritage as Mongolia, with as many poets and journalists as Mongolia has, I believe it is wrong that Mongolia is not represented to the extent that it should be on the international literary scene. That is what this effort to create a Mongolian branch of International PEN is about: to give Mongolian writers and Mongolian literature the worldwide recognition, inclusion, and representation it deserves.

Ming Holden

119

2008-03-22T16:55:00.002+08:00

These are some more of the gems I have run across while editing the manuscript of wolf stories called "Dog of Heaven" for Mongolia's National Library Director, Dr. Akim:
“...one meter bride stream...”
“...wolf was waiving with its tale...”
“Marmots got provoked and were whizzing.”
“traces” instead if tracks, “ribbons” instead of ribs.
“Unerbayar with the knife several times trusted the wolf.”
"Spreading paws of its front feet and lowering its rumple”
“Mongols believed that items and utensils have soils”
“please, present us from
your parti-colored partridges”
“In Mongolian traditional medicine is believed to predict somebody’s becoming rich or poor by feeling his or her pulls.”
“In describing Red Protector god’s terrible expression is added horror strike with wolf figure opened wide its mow and baring teeth.”

118

2008-03-15T12:21:00.003+08:00

Things have been quiet on this blog, mainly because I have been working on a the manuscript of Mongolian National Library Director Dr. Akim in order to have it ready for publication next week. The book will be published in English thanks to funds from the Asia Foundation, and the book signing ceremony to be held here sometime this spring will coincide with developments on the Mongolian-PEN-Center-formation front.
The task of "editing" a really bad, sometimes nonsensical, very un-literary English translation has amounted to rewriting the entire book manuscript sentence for sentence. It has its fun moments, though. Sometimes the translation has moments of unintended, but still brilliant, comedy. Here's a sampling of the manuscript that fell in my lap:

"Wolves catch marmots very adroitly. It was on Five hills mountain (in the near of Ulaanbaatar) in autumn. I was watching a wolf through binocular. On this side of slope five or six marmots were grazing. The wolf sniffed their traces and run towards them from behind a hillock. The marmots didn’t notice it. But the wolf was running and waiving with its tale. It was waving with tales as hunters wave to provoke marmots. Marmots got provoked and were whizzing."

Whizzing marmots! Brilliant.

117

2008-03-09T13:59:00.002+08:00

Notes toward why I am excited about Obama:

"Party officials reported extremely high turnout at caucus sites across the state. In Laramie County, more than 1,500 came to cast votes at the caucus site, quickly filling the auditorium in downtown Cheyenne. Hundreds waited outside for hours until they could enter and vote. (In 2004, only 160 people showed up for the Laramie County caucus.)

...The newfound attention by the candidates and the national news media drew many newly registered Democrats to caucus on Saturday — officials said there were more than 2,000 registrations recently — and lifelong Democrats who had never caucused before.

Vernice Sack, 80, and her husband, Paul Sack, 83, counted themselves among the first-time caucusgoers. They both supported Mr. Obama, they said. “He’s got the right ideas,” Mr. Sack said."

From this article at nytimes.com

116

2008-02-25T14:09:00.001+08:00

Mongolia, often referred to as Asia’s last unexplored frontier, is also described as the land of Asia’s cowboys. Indeed, the rugged culture of “felt tents” embodied by the nomadic family of Genghis Khan is one still practiced by almost half of Mongolia’s 3 million people today, only sometimes there’s now a TV or radio receiving scratchy signals inside the ger. The difficult lifestyle is one that’s gone virtually unchanged for centuries, and at no time is this more evident than the month of February.
The national holiday of tsagaan sar, “white month” or “white moon,” is a holiday the exact date of which Mongolian astrologers argue over. This year it is celebrated on the three days of February 7-9, and mothers in city apartments and gers alike have been at work making buuz, or mutton dumplings, for weeks in preparation. The country quiets down from mid-December through to the end of February, since holiday and December 31st festivities are followed so closely by this very Mongolian celebration of the lunar new year. Through the month of February, family members visit each other far and wide over this frozen desert sprinkled with Buddhist nomads, greeting by layering their palms face-up and asking, “Amar bain uu?” Instead of the usual “Cain bain uu?” (literally, “Are you easy?” instead of “Are you good?”) and showing off their very best deels, traditional coats that stretch almost to the ground and that many Mongolians still wear normally, even to business meetings.
All this is not a display for tourists, as is often the case in other post-Soviet Central Asian countries. The majority of older people on the streets of Mongolia’s capital city of Ulaanbaatar still dress in the deels, pointed boots, and tall hats of yore, and residents of both country and city still regularly drink salted milky tea and airag (fermented mare’s milk) and eat dishes of lamb and horse meat. Regional culture is celebrated with vigor, as on this day at the onset of white month, at the Dundad Zuun Tourist Camp around 65 kilometers outside of Ulaanbaatar, where the Eagle Festival is in full swing. Hunters in dark, thick deels and red, tasseled hats circle in front of the cheering crowd on thick-set horses, and on the bent arm of each rider a huge hunting eagle, fierce of eye and claw, spreads its black and white feathered wings and waits to released to the immaculate sky.

This year the eagle festival is not hard to get to. Round a corner on the main road about 60 kilometers northeast of Ulaanbaatar and there opens out a valley dotted with wooden houses and grocery shops like a piece of American, Midwestern suburbia, surrounded by implausible geographical structures the likes of which give Yellowstone a run for its money. This is the beginning of Terelj, the national park outside the city district of Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia’s central province, dotted with such sights as the Mother Stone, Turtle Rock, and plenty of altars made of piles of stones topped by tree branches festooned with blue Buddhist khadags (prayer flags). Beside one of these altars are usually parked at least a couple minibuses or jeeps, and Mongolians of all ages walk their three-circle rounds about the altar, tossing a pebble after each rotation and muttering prayers.
This is the first time the Eagle Festival is being held in Terelj rather than the westernmost province of Bayan-Olgii, where Mongolia’s Kazakh, Sunni Muslim minority is largely settled. 600 hunters usually participate in the festival, but because of the grueling, four-day journey from Bayan-Olgii, only 22 hunters aged 18-80, have made the trek. Lucky for those who live in the capital, though--it’s close enough to make a day trip out of Ulaanbaatar on the weekend; local businesses like Ayunchin Guesthouse offer up a mean cheeseburger and choice wines an hour’s drive outside the city among Terelj’s stunning mountains, with ger camps open to customers who’d like to hole up in a fire-warmed nomadic house for the night.

On the road to Terelj, snow swirls laterally, twirled this way and that by the cars that pass each other dangerously on the hilly-two lane “highway”. Train cars crawl quietly by on the trans-Siberian railway a few hundred meters from the road, the only dark movement in the white, white landscape. The sole interruptions made in the otherwise unbroken snow are the tracks of jeeps that swerved off the concrete road entirely—something that anyone going to the countryside to visit a nomadic family member does regularly, for miles and miles. (Rural Mongolia is perhaps the only place where a vehicle hyped by “test course” commercials on closed, desert-like courses in California might actually be bought for the purpose touted there.) In the early 90s, it was difficult even to get chewing gum in Mongolia, and the meal coupons and bread lines one imagines along with post-Soviet economic freefall were not only real but made even more unendurable by the severe weather—Ulaanbaatar is, point blank, the coldest capital city on the planet.
It is also one of the most polluted cities on the planet, but only for the coldest three months of the year, when the temperature never climbs above -5 Fahrenheit in the sun and the comparatively warm exhaust just drifts in the tiny valleys between Soviet-era apartment blocs. Fortunately, the visible grey-brown smog ends right when the city does, beginning a seemingly endless supply of the freshest air on earth. Even Mongolia’s president has come out for a breath of it, riding in one of the many tinted-windowed, siren-flashing cars forming a fast, beeping procession on the left side of the road (Mongolians are supposed to drive on the right).
Mongolia’s intriguing position between the two superpowers of China and Russia and its unbelievable mining resources make for a country on the move. It’s a vast, pristine land of both unmitigated love of tradition and unmitigated growth. The American Ambassador, appointed by the current administration, goes from hosting receptions for left-leaning activist Fulbright fellows in his living room to flying to Washington last October for the signature of a $300 million Millenium Challenge package for Mongolia. Mongolia does need it—a few “big freezes”, as they’re called, killed the livestock of thousands and thousands of herders over recent winters, swelling the population of Ulaanbaatar from roughly 1 to 2 million, and the city lacks the infrastructure and the immigrants the particular skills to make this an easy transition. In the city of Ulaanbaatar, where a statue of Chinggis Khan presides over smooth, wide Sukhbaatar Square south of the Government house, cell phones and wallets are stolen regularly, and the heavy vodka-drinking tradition is evident in pools of frozen vomit on the sidewalk come Saturday morning.

Everyone, from local Mongolian families showing off their camels for a couple thousand togrigs (a couple dollars) a ride to the newly minted Mongolian urbanites in designer jeans who pay to ride them, is out for the Eagle Festival. Various Ambassadors and other VIPs stand up on the deck of the only non-ger in the area; the rest, a mixture of traditionally and modernly dressed Mongolians and American, British, and Australian expats and tourists, gather at the ropes sectioning them off from the eagles and their masters, jostling for a view in the clear, -24 Fahrenheit air.
And the view is spectacular: the waiting arms of the hunters crooked like the unlikely, austere natural rock-scape above it, where golden eagles whose wings, when opened, easily hide the head and shoulders of their masters, are laboriously carried on foot to a high enough rock from which to soar at the sound of the hunter’s high-pitched cry below. The eagles and their trainers, who perform on horseback, enact a ritual that has gone on for 6,000 years in the mountains of central Asia. The eagles are trained similarly to hunting falcons, and festival-goers have been warned not to wear fur or anything with red color. The ceremony starts with the 20 or so hunters parading up and down the crowd to wild clapping, holding the eagles aloft, the splendid birds’ sharp claws and beaks close enough to cause the spectators to step back. Then the hunters begin the three rounds of the ritual that determines whose eagle is the most dexterous and loyal--not a small determination among a culture of men who go virtually without sleep for the eagle’s youth in order to cultivate an all-consuming and intimate 20-year relationship with the eagle, who is hooded when it is young to make it dependent on its master. First the crying hunter rides his horse at a run through the clean snow, dragging by a rope the carcass of some unfortunate, furred creature (word on the street is that the hunters arrived in Ulaanbaatar without enough bait and so had to buy a bunch of rabbits at the market at the last minute), and there follows the unequivocal arc of the eagle off the high rocky perch through the dry, lucid, sub-zero desert air, bearing down with centuries’ worth of natural agility and magnificent speed to a skidding collision with the prey.
Even when the eagle misses, it’s nothing short of breathtaking. To their credit, these eagles have been traveling for days to be here, so no one is surprised when an eagle doesn’t spot the prey at first or prefers instead to fly in an impressive circle above the crowd, as occasionally happens throughout the afternoon—it’s still visually pleasing, and even a little thrilling; when one eagle is brought through the crowd on the way up to the VIP porch, standersby are startled at the still-fierce alertness in the eyes of a bird who must be very, very tired. The eagles perk up after the ritual, when four live rabbits are let lose and the eagles and spectators both enjoy the carnage. The metaphor for “eagle eyes” is elucidated by these birds in the bright, white cold; the scurrying bunnies don’t stand a chance against these predators who seem the biological embodiment of accuracy.
After a few hours filled with golden eagles diving, the horsemen play a game in which a few of them hold by its hooves a dead goat and ride at top speed, and the last one astride a horse holding the carcass wins. It’s not an easy game to win; the horsemen sometimes ride bent to the side almost at a right angle in order not to lose hold of a hoof. Still, it’s less alluring to most of the crowd, and besides, -24 can be tough on the toes. Anyone who steps outside in this weather with wet hair will notice their freeze within seconds. Men who piss on the sides of buildings can watch their steaming urine slow like chocolate sauce. At this temperature fairy-dust ice settles on eyelashes and cheek-hair and any part of a scarf someone’s breath touches, and mucus has an annoying habit of freezing on an intake of breath and melting just enough to run at the exhale. Luckily, there are perhaps ten public gers set up for the event with fires blazing inside the stove at the center of each. Entire Mongolian families take turns settling down in them for a packed lunch of milky tea with pieces of meat at the bottom of each cup, with distant family members and old friends stooping down through the door to an exuberant tsagaan sar welcome.
The entire Eagle Festival program will repeat in the afternoon for the latecomers, a good move on the part of the event’s organizers, who clearly know how Mongolians treat time. The VIPs have their photos taken with the hunters, who kneel with eagles on their arms. Slowly the crowd thins out to the last strains of the slightly campy Mongolian pop music that blares alternately with the bilingual commentating, some headed home in private cars to the city, others in packed buses to nomadic outposts near and far. Mongolia has always been a place of intensity, and it has its share of growing pains. But today, as some of the freshest air in the world was breathed by folks in deels and sports jackets in a collective gasp at the heart-moving, arrow-like descent of an eagle out of the frozen desert sky while the president stood nearby, one thing is clear: Mongolia is not growing away from its heritage.

115

2008-02-11T13:45:00.001+08:00

And here's dinner with Inner Mongolian Tumen-Olzii Bayunmend and his family on the eve of Tsagaan Sar (Mongolian new year festivities).

114

2008-02-11T13:42:00.001+08:00

And from a trip to Terelj...

113

2008-02-11T13:40:00.000+08:00

Here's some footage of sledding outside UB--

Writing to come-I have to transcribe my journal.

112

2008-02-05T23:17:00.000+08:00

I had the pleasure of attending the Eagle Festival, with eagles and their masters who had come in all the way from Kazakh mountain cultureland Bayan-Olgii, on Saturday. Writing to follow. For now, enjoy the sights I did:

111

2008-02-04T10:04:00.000+08:00

An anonymous person left a comment on my post #49, saying that the big silver Chinggis Khan statue is not, as I had been told by my teacher, a project funded by the Mongolian government but by a private company. I think Mongolians might actually be reading this blog, which is totally thrilling. Keep correcting me, guys!

110

2008-01-30T18:12:00.000+08:00

I am super, duper proud to be part of a new communo-blog with three of my favorite women in the world:

A discussion of what it means to be writers, thinkers, artists, workers, women in the world:

http://sexinthecities.tumblr.com

with Sunisa in Bangkok, Leora in Tel Aviv, and Kate in New York City.
Let the discussions and explorations begin! I could not be more psyched.

109

2008-01-30T17:51:00.000+08:00

Recently added casual shots (partying with fellow Luce Scholars in Indonesia, and sledding north thereof) can be found here.

And pictures of winter in Mongolia deserve their own folder, which is here.

108

2008-01-30T16:19:00.000+08:00

A montage from three weeks in Indonesia:

107

2008-01-29T22:10:00.000+08:00

I am studying sayings in the Mongolian language—"she comes from the other kidney of the earth" is a way to describe some foreigner from far off; "young as a flower," "heart as pure as milk," "heart as hard as a stone," "she's slim as a snake," "slow as a turtle," "gentle as a lamb"—and they lay bare the relationships traditional Mongolian nomads had/have with animals and with the earth, and how the very words they use harkened back to and reified that relationship through metaphor. Everything was understood in terms of animals and the earth. I suppose this could be said of any place, but here, where I saw in the same day a man in full nomad garb the high hat, the robe, down to the ornate pointed boots, in an office for a business meeting, and a young couple outside the central post office having a screaming fight in their trendy jeans and bleached hair…it's not something I automatically brand as bad, this journey or departure. It's just all so vivid here and yet I am used to it, used to this city which only recently came to host half the country's population yet which isn't a city by Beijing's or Hong Hong's standards…

To mean unpleasant Mongolians say "with bad ideas," which when I think about it is a much more compassionate way to put it.

106

2008-01-29T22:05:00.000+08:00

The moon today was one of those big fat off white moons. It was epic
just before dusk, this creamy scoop just above the power lines. This
is the worst time of year in a lot of ways—for the homeless, it is
when the conditions are the most lethal; for the breathing, it is when
the cold bears down, compressing the smoke festooning the bottlenecked traffic to the point where it's normal to cough upon the first cold blast outside. Later in the night the moon had risen, rust-colored.

105

2008-01-15T20:16:00.000+08:00

Well, fambly members, over a month after it was published, here's a scan of the newspaper article about yours truly. True to form, I only have one copy, and that copy is hopelessly wrinkled, but then, so are my clothes, and no one loves me because I am good at ironing. (I tried to be, the other day, but to no avail.) A photoless version of the article is here.

And thus ends my prolonged tooting-of-my-own horn session. Back to all things Mongolian that are not about me, starting with post 106.

104

2008-01-13T15:48:00.000+08:00

Here is a China Montage for you, from the November voyage to the Luce Scholar mid-orientation session in Honk Kong. One for Indonesia will soon follow, if my powers of procrastination keep up...Also a new creative-nonfictiony piece called "the lateral deep" that started with my previous entries about China is now up at Cliterati nonfiction.

103

2008-01-06T16:29:00.000+08:00

U.S. Ambassador Mark Minton kindly forwarded me the Embassy's English summary of the article about me that was published in Mongolia's Today's News Newspaper recently (scan of that to come, dear proud family members, when I am not in Indonesia anymore):

"U.S. writer, translator, Mongolian Writer’s Union’s international representative, Brown University student Min Holden gives interview. She is 21 years old and native of California. She arrived last September and had very little knowledge about Mongolia. She is here to learn Mongolian and try to translate Mongolian literature to English in order to introduce it to the rest of the world. Her translations from Spanish published in “Arizona’’ magazine and few other publications. She is learning Mongolian language and found very interesting when ordinary Mongolians knew art products and producers. She liked Mongolian culture, people and friends she obtained in Arts Council and Mongolian Poets Association. She is helping Mongolian PEN club to become a member of the International PEN organization. She hopes that very soon the official letter will arrive. (Odriin Sonin, 12/18/2007, p.15)"

Now, to be clear: I am 23 years old; the translations (of contemporary Bolivian poet Vicky Allyon's work) will be published in U of Arizona's Hayden's Ferry Review; I find Mongolian artists and their work interesting, not the fact that they "know art products"; the old suspicious dudes at the "PEN club" are probably going to be disgruntled when I break it to them that PEN, a name they've used since the late 1980s, is not a name International PEN technically allows them to have until they have been approved as a PEN-Center-that-is-affiliated-with-International-PEN--which, as it happens; will probably not happen "very soon" but after a year-or-two long application process.

102

2007-12-15T22:27:00.000+08:00

Notes toward the PEN meeting I organized

Oh, yes. Yes indeed.

101

2007-12-13T22:11:00.000+08:00

Mongolia Montages 9 and 10 are ripe for the plucking--check out 10, for the love of music, because it's a short one centered on Batsukh, the retired opera singer who is teaching me little Mongolian ditties on a bright blue guitar. He gets me into ballets and operas for free, and he has a white beard and mustache made out of yak hair in his pocket to delight his grandchildren with.

9:

10: