To thank Ganbaatar and Alta for their hospitality, I took the family out to a Chinese meal on Peace Avenue. I was really pleased that their three daughters and three sons all joined us. I knew this would be an unusual experience for the kids.
I asked each of the children to select a favourite dish. It was an exciting task for them, looking through the elaborate menu with exotic names. Their son Muugii and his younger brother were giggling shyly when discussing their choice of food. It happened that their favourites were close to mine – almost all dishes are of Sichuan cuisine. (This feast for fifteen persons cost only £36.)
When the dishes came, the kids looked more fascinated with the colours and variety than the actual taste of the food. The round, rotating table allowed them to see all the fifteen dishes in front of them. It’s probably an agricultural habit (not that I came from an agricultural background) to believe that the abundance of food is a joyful sensual experience. But when I saw the expressions of excitement and curiosity on the children’s faces, my theory’s confirmed.
But there was one unhappy person in our midst - Ganbaatar and Alta’s eldest daughter has never smiled since I’ve met her. She looked sad and miserable even when breastfeeding her son, Ulaana, in the lounge-bedroom of their house. The only time she did put on a vague grin was in her three-hour-long wedding video that her parents had made me watch. The entire wedding was a big singing session in which all family members took part, one after another, from the five-year-old to the seventy-year-old, through the super-loud amplifier.
That looked like a very happy wedding, but perhaps more so for the family than for the eldest daughter...Since she got married, her husband had gone to work in another part of Mongolia. She had to move back to her parents’ in order to get help with childcare. No one was asking the question of why the husband doesn’t come back to visit.
Muugii, who can speak some English, was sitting next to me. He told me that he might like to go to study in London. This is a migrating family, as I’ve come to know. Ganbaatar’s brother works in the US and hasn’t returned to Mongolia for years. His sister is living in France, although Ganbaatar hasn’t heard from her for some time.
‘And my sister-in-law, Tseegii, works as a domestic helper in London. You can call her and meet her,’ Ganbaatar said to me. I promised to show her all the family pictures.
Half way through the meal, a young couple, both in jeans, walked in and sat down. They didn’t seem to greet anyone at the table.
‘He is my son,’ Ganbaatar introduced the young man with a beard. I suddenly remembered this is the eldest son of whom Ganbaatar is so proud. He and his wife both work in computing. She had gone to work in Tokyo and left their new-born baby daughter, Baika, for Ganbaatar and Alta to look after.
The couple has moved back from Tokyo to live in Ulaanbaatar. But because of their hectic work, they felt they had to let the parents carry on with the childcare. They hadn’t seen their daughter Baika for a few weeks now. But since they arrived at the meal, the couple hardly ever looked at the child.
Baika stayed in Alta’s arms, crying a lot because of all the noises around. She has probably become used to having her grandmother as the mum a long time ago – she didn’t seem to need to go to her mother’s embrace. All throughout the evening, Alta tried to calm the crying granddaughter while her son and his wife enjoyed the dinner. This made me feel guilty for taking the family out and causing this extra stress to Ganbaatar and Alta!
party member
Walking the cattle back home wasn’t a light job – they were as easily agitated as kids. The whole process took over an hour to complete. I was exhausted by the end of it. When we retreated back into their ger, Alta’s mother was already sitting there waiting for us. She had changed into a deep pink traditional costume, looking a world different from the same woman I saw herding out there. She had also pinned her own medals on her chest for me to see.
‘Where are these medals from?’ I asked her.
‘From the party. I am a member,’ she replied. She is also an election campaigner.
Alta's mum
We decided to take a walk to find Alta's mother. We walked along with our shadows at dusk. The sunshine still felt warm. A few kids were stepping in the large shadows of the fences, looking like they were walking on a wood bridge. Nature did magic to our eyes.
Smoke was coming out of some houses. The herding farmers must be almost finishing their day’s work and about to return home for supper.
At the hills of the mountains were waves of thick birch trees, presenting themselves in yellow-brownish shade in the setting sun... Along the way, there were a few dry tree branches with blue ribbons tied around them.
The houses became bigger as we walked along, away from the centre of the village. When we walked pass a huge two-floor building with an European-style balcony on the top floor, a garage downstairs, and a metal gate, Alta pointed to it and said to me: ‘It’s the governor’s house.’
‘Who? Who’s the governor?’ I asked.
‘The politician my father’s campaigning for,’ she replied.
As we walked closer to the mountain where Alta’s mother was herding, their daughter called out: ‘Grandma! Grandma!’
‘I am here!’ she shouted back. I couldn’t see anything or anyone in that distance.
A few minutes later, I saw three sheepdogs. Then a few cattle. Finally I saw a woman appearing. She looked strong, walking against the wind as she came down from the mountains.
When she was a few yards from me, I saw that she’s probably in her early sixties. Amazing strength. ‘We have ten cattle,’ she told me. They would be making a living from the diary products that they make.
meeting Alta's dad
Through the large yard of fifteen-something square meters, Alta's father welcomed us into their ger, and put a metal kettle on the stove in the middle. ‘Tsai (tea) is coming!’ Ganbaatar said to me.
‘The sparrow is tiny, but it has all five organs.’ This is how I would describe their well-maintained ger. Inside, they have three cupboards in orange-colour, an utterly compatible orange-colour table, a fridge, a TV, and two beds with layers of red duvets.
Alta's father took out some biscuits for us from the cupboard. Suutei tsai (milk tea) is ready! I could hardly wait. The steam of the boiling tea filled the entire ger. It tasted so delicious. The salt was like nutrition for me at this moment. And the creamy texture of the milky tea is absolutely soothing…
‘May I have another bowl of tsai?’ I asked politely.
Alta’s father was pleased at the request. More tea was poured into my bowl. Four or five sips, I’ve drunk it clean again.
Seeing that I’ve satisfied my thirst, Alta’s father put a large election poster on the table to show me.
‘It’s him! It’s him!’ he tried to tell me. Alta explained to me that this is the candidate for whom her father was campaigning during the election.
‘He put leaflet in every house in the village!’ Ganbaatar told me, giving a thumb-up to his father-in-law, if not just for his hard labour. He’s a village-level canvassing officer, you can say.
‘My party is Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (MPRP),’ he told me proudly. ‘I am a Communist.’ Alta then told me that her father has been a party member for all his life.
The MPRP has been very much part of the Mongolian collective memory of the people’s struggle against economic deprivation and imperialism. Alta’s father belongs to a generation that grew up in political upheavals. He was born a few years after People’s Republic of Mongolia was formed in 1924, as the second communist country in the world. Its final independence from China was only followed by the dominance of the Stalinist politics of the Soviet Union. Alta’s father grew up learning the Cyrillic alphabet and seeing monastries taken down. He wanted change, but he also wanted to see Mongolian people making the change for themselves. Soviet Union continued to occupy Mongolia with its military presence and ran the country as a satellite state, until 1990, when waves of democracy demonstrations broke out in Ulaanbaatar. The wishes of Alta’s father were realized by the younger generation – that March, Russia withdrew from Mongolia. In June, the first democratic elections were held, with the MPRP winning 85% of the vote.
The governing Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party (MPRP) won a majority in the June election 2008, gaining 58% of the 76 seats in Parliament. Following the election, the MPRP and opposition Democratic Party (DP) agreed to establish a coalition government for the next four years.
‘Look at these!’ Alta’s father took out a cushion pinned with dozens of medals that he had won for campaigning for the party.
He is also a Buddhist, and saw no contradiction between his communist ideals and the religious beliefs. The “isms” don’t seem to apply to him in his loyalty.
While he was chatting away about heaven and earth with the repeated use of a maximum of twenty words in English, his wife was herding the cattle out there in the mountain two miles away from the ger. She often works alone, all day long.
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