Don't I know you from somewhere?

I have found that people here do not praise you for speaking beginner's Mongolian. In China, a simple "thank you" may elicit praise. "Oh, you speak Chinese very well!" It's a great ego boost, especially when your last test makes you feel less than adequate in your new language. At the extreme, this fascination and praise breeds a "performing monkey" syndrome: there are televised competitions where foreigners give speeches, sing Peking opera, and do kung fu. I have participated in three such competitions, but I'm not ham enough to ever win. Now I'm content to simply be understood, and to get past the wonder. Once people get to know you, the praise melts away and truthful, useful critique sets in.

So far, no one I have talked to on the street or in a restaurant here has shown symptoms of the Performing Monkey Syndrome. Many waitresses and shopkeepers just roll along with my poor Mongolian. But occasionally someone shows a different kind of interest. Buying orange juice yesterday with two of my classmates, the shopkeeper asked us where we were from. "German?" he asked. "No, Amerik hun (Americans). I'm from Washington, D.C." His face lit up. "Oh, I lived there for two years! Do you know Rosslyn? My apartment was off of Wilson Boulevard." The Washington, D.C. area now has the biggest Mongolian population in the U.S. Approximately 5,000 people live in the area, mostly in Arlington, VA. So in an Asian city of one million people, talking about the Key Bridge is not so strange as it may seem.

Mongolian-Americans used to center in the Denver area. Starting in the 1980s, students starting studying at the Colorado School of Mines, then telling their friends about it when they came back home. (That is, if they did return home; many overstayed their visas, leading to stricter immigration policies in the state.) There are still about 2,000 Mongolians living in Denver, now Ulaanbaatar's sister city. The New Jersey and Chicago communities are runners-up. But in D.C., there are Mongolian schools (two, I believe), Mongolian karaoke joints, and businessmen who summer back home.

The small-world feel of Mongolian studies makes it homey. My classmate Sara and I started our class in earnest yesterday (the other three students are in an advanced section). Introducing ourselves to our teacher, Tsermaa, I mentioned my first Mongolian teachers back in Cambridge, UK. "Oh, Hurelbaatar!" She nodded. "Of course I know him."

The World is the Expo

On Friday afternoon I landed in Beijing. My first experience of China at age 17 was overwhelming, and made me pretty homesick. (There's a long-distance phone bill attesting to that.) But now I know enough Chinese, and enough of what to expect, to feel at ease there. Still, things that I remembered still surprised me yesterday: hadn't the Beijing air improved after the Olympics? The sky was yellow and thick with haze. Were Beijingers really like New Yorkers? Yes, a little--certainly in the terse way they sometimes talk to each other. Haven't I been here before? Yes, but the tangle of highways and looming high rises never fails to disorient me.

My friend Sarah* and I checked into our "Fotel" (I kept the slippers as a souvenir), then went to a Thai restaurant in Sānlǐtún'er, the bar and nightclub district popular among Chinese and expats alike. Banana Leaf is famous for forcing its patrons to dance. We watched a whole table get up and swing their hips to "Can't Take My Eyes off of You." There's a particularly notorious server there, a shortish man wearing bright red lipstick and long fake lashes, who hits on the men, stroking their hair as he dances close to them. "Don't take his picture," Sarah warned. "He'll get angry."

In traditional Chinese style, Sarah over-ordered. I'm used to this, but again I'd forgotten that taking home the leftovers isn't the point. The menu was book-length--it even had a table of contents--and the food was pretty good. I'm not sure if spicy chicken feet are a Thai delicacy, and I have my doubts, but they were good either way.

We then walked around Nán luógǔ xiàng (South Gong and Drum Lane), one of the few remaining hútong (alleyways) still clinging to life in the capital. Unlike the hútong which get razed, Nán luógǔ xiàng is neatly paved, broad, and filled with Obamamao shirts and other trinkets to attract foreigners. I actually like these upscale hútong--as a tourist attraction, they are able to avoid the wrecking block. The inhabitants of unheated sìhéyuàn (courtyard houses) who have no running water get evicted, then watch as the city builds high-rise apartments and skyscrapers where their homes once stood. Despite the inconveniences, people love their hútong. I myself have wandered through the maze of alleyways, past houses and little barbeque stalls, catching glimpses of Hòuhǎi, one of the city's lakes. A maze perhaps, but on a human scale. Sarah and I settled into a bar called Hútong'er. "People like this bar because you can rarely see a real hútong these days," Sarah mused over her Lindemans. "I tell people I don't like Beijing, and they ask why? Didn't I grow up here? But the Beijing I grew up in is gone."

The Shanghai Expo is on, but Sarah and I wonder how useful it is in our current age. Foreigners are no longer an oddity in China's major cities. The country is hyped for the World Cup, but still keeping an eye on the NBA finals. And now I'm in Ulaanbaatar, staying with a family who has family in Chicago. On the way from Chinggis Khan Airport, cows browsed under bilingual billboards. The world is the Expo.

* This is her English name. I will use initials or nicknames unless my subjects wish otherwise.

Before I begin.

Tomorrow I fly to Beijing, stay the night with a friend, and head on to Ulaanbaatar. I began taking Mongolian through Indiana University last fall, and will continue to study through the American Center for Mongolian Studies this summer.

I will assume a question you want to ask. Why Mongolia? It started in college, when my Chinese teacher and I performed folk songs together. Included in those songs were "Mongolian", "Uyghur", and other ethnic minority folk songs--actually, new compositions from the communist era with Chinese lyrics. What music and languages lay behind those songs? Then I heard Huun-Huur-Tu, the Tuvan throat-singing band. I've linked to my sister Emily's conjuring of city walkers as eerie incarnations of Huun-Huur-Tu's voices. Since those ethereal nights in my Philadelphia studio listening to them, I've wanted to know more: how this music works, why it works the way it does, and who are the people who make it. Tuva isn't Mongolia, true, but the music of the two places share a common spirit.

Here I am, five years later, ready to spend two months in the capital of Mongolia. I hope not to make the mistakes I did on my first visit to China. (One of my biggest shocks visiting China in 2001? They have bread.) Interest in something "exotic" drew me to China at first, but familiarity has kept me studying Chinese. It's easy to see in a foreign country only what you want to see, and that can make it feel very strange and lonely. But the more I travel, the more I see each new place as home. Because every inhabited place in the world, no matter how remote for you, is someone's home.

I just read Jill Lawless' Wild East so as not to arrive with a totally blank slate. Lawless worked as a reporter and editor for the UB Post in the late 1990s. Her book gave me some idea of what I'm in for, but not as much as I'd hoped. Lawless gives what seems to me right now a vivid picture of Mongolia, from its vast desert to the taste of domestic beer. But some things trouble me. Besides the immense changes in Mongolia from 2000, when Wild East was published, to today, Lawless sometimes oversimplifies (for instance, conflating the Huns and the Mongols) or even gets things wrong (sloppy transliteration, questionable translations). With no basis of comparison, it's hard for me to tell when she's exaggerating, when she's slipped up, and when she really knows what she's talking about. Where I can compare, I see her slipping into homesickness: in the chapter on food, she lovingly describes aaruul, dried curds, as a treat "with the consistency of rock and the smell of vomit" (132). Don't listen to her--I've had aaruul, and, to me at least, it's pretty tasty. In many of her observations you hear her pining for home. Not that there's anything wrong with missing home, but too much of her own discomfort inflects her stories. She says she's reluctant to return to Canada at the end, but is she really?

It's hard not to pass judgment. It's hard not to taste a meat dumpling and think of hamburgers. If you're American. If you're Mongolian, the difficulty is the other way around. I am me, an American Jewish suburbanite who wants to feel at home everywhere, even though I know it's impossible. I will try, though, to write about Mongolia just in that way: as a vastly foreign terrain which will soon be familiar, a place where I will not just stay, but live.