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.