Day 1 (第一天）:
One of the best things about this Mongolia trip (from here on in I'm just saying Mongolia instead of Inner Mongolia because I'm lazy, but be aware that there is a difference since the latter is a Chinese province and the former isn't) is the adventures started before we even got there. After racing through midterms and last-minute supply hunting, we left BLCU for the train station. It was great getting out of Beijing asap... except that we left Friday afternoon, which is easily the most crowded time of the week in an already massively overcrowded city. As a result, we couldn't take taxis because there was no guarantee a taxi could get through the traffic in 3 hours, so instead we dragged all our luggage several blocks from BLCU to the subway station at Wudaokou, hopped onto the 13 line, got off at the terminal and waited on line for half an hour or so to get into the other terminal, pushed our way onto the 2 line, fought our way onto the 1 line, and then lugged our stuff for another 15 minutes or so to the train station. Note that the verbs get increasingly violent - that's intentional. In a city of 15 million, there is no concept of waiting so you have to fight tooth and claw to get anywhere. It was an epic three hours of human sardine cans, yelling at people to stop shoving in, and cursing myself for not investing in a rolling suitcase.
(so many chinese people...)The train ride wasn't quite as epic, but it was an excellent precursor to life in Mongolia because we rode hard-bunk, which means rows of three beds stacked on top of each other and thus tight living conditions (any concept of personal space is at risk), there was no showering opportunity so we had to go to sleep sticky with three hours of sweat, and they ran out of water in the morning so we had our first run-in with creative ways to brush teeth and wash up with bottled water.
Day 2 (第二天):
After arriving the capital of Inner Mongolia, Huhhot 呼和浩特, we were immediately put on a bus to go elsewhere, so my first impression Mongolia is that of a run-in with super sketchy toilets #1 (aside from the customary squat toilets of China, also atrociously smelly, dark, and lacking running water).
Insert note about our bus: As if there aren't enough bizarre things about China as it stands, our bus turned out to be lime green with music notes all over it and apparently our driver liked to drive on the wrong side of the road and obnoxiously blare his horn at any moving object that could possibly get in the way (we didn't die since there were hardly any cars on the road for most of the trip, but there were plenty of sheep that liked to walk across the road so the horn got really annoying). The seats were manageable for people like me (sometimes it pays to be short), but as a rule American kids are not tiny like Chinese, so it was a squishy seven days on the bus as well as the train. All in all there were 18 students, 6 teachers (including Director Feng for the first three days), and a tour guide.
Anyway, our first stop was the middle-of-nowhere for lunch, by which I mean there was nothing for miles except for the lonely highway and wide expanses of bumpy grassland. We had our first taste of Mongolian diet: starchy crackers, salty milk tea, oily grass, and sour yogurt cakes. Even though they also brought out cucumbers and scrambled eggs with tomatoes, we were convinced Mongolia is the ultimate dieting opportunity. Discovering that Huhhot's super sketchy toilet was nothing compared to middle-of-nowhere toilets (a hole in the ground with a shit mountain underneath for your viewing pleasure) only solidified the conviction that there was no point in eating or drinking in Mongolia because it takes a lot of bravery to have to deal with its aftermath.
(蒙古包）So with the backdrop of this new life in mind, we went on our first round of interviews 采访. Our tour guide wasn't actually a tour guide but rather a pretty prominent Mongolian with connections who got us access to talk with Mongolian sheep herders 牧民, which is extremely rare considering how middle-of-nowhere the rural lands we visited really were. My interview group consisted of the four fourth years on the trip and our first interview was with a family of four ethnic Mongols 蒙族 at their home. The 牧民 homes were just like you see in the movies about rural China 乡下 except now up-close and personal – the quaint little wooden shacks with a herd of bleating sheep, a chained dog or two, and maybe a beaten motorcycle or car for transporting water outside. Inside, nothing more than a couple of modest rooms with a table on the bed, a stove, a water holder, a picture of Genghis Khan above the mantle, and miraculously a TV. There’s no air conditioning or running water and the electricity goes out pretty often.
(so many sheep...)
(The bedroom, dining room, sitting room, etc. all consolidated into one. Talk about space efficiency.)During the interview itself it became clear that we knew next to nothing about Mongolian culture and rural Chinese life, so what little conversation we would have with the locals could only scratch the surface of understanding. Even though it was really difficult understanding the people's accents and it was really awkward not knowing how to present ourselves, this set of interviews was probably one of the highlights of the trip because of how startling the immediate immersion into local culture was and how incredibly eye-opening and humbling the experience turned out to be. There's a Chinese term 纯朴 that means honest and simple that I can see why everyone uses to describe rural inhabitants 农民. On one hand it’s depressing to see how hard and monotonous lives their lives are, but on the other hand it’s enlightening to see how human they are, how simple their hopes and dreams are, and how lucky we really are in comparison. I had definitely not expected this kind of opportunity when I signed up for the trip, and it was all the more valuable in retrospect knowing that my mother had always wanted me to visit the peasants in Anhui 安徽 that she stayed with during the Cultural Revolution in order to get a taste of what real hardship 吃苦 “eating bitterness” is like.
(The first family we interviewed, from left to right is the mom, dad, sister, and brother. Mongolians are allowed to have two kids because they're minorities.)In the evening we observed the making of our dinner – the sheep victim has its stomach cut open and its heart pulled out to the surface so that we can watch as it slowly… stops… beating… and then it’s taken inside to have the head cut off and the skin pulled off and the insides removed (but not thrown away, apparently intestines makes good side dishes).
(dinner)Let’s just say it was again a bit difficult to swallow our dinner. However, the Mongolians also really like 白酒, which can be thought of as some sort of Mongolian vodka. They performed drinking ceremonies on everyone (basically you have to bless the sky, the ground, the server, and yourself with the alcohol before downing a shot), which improved the mood very quickly. Afterwards they setup a bonfire outside and invited students to participate in wrestling 摔跤, which eventually deteriorated into raucous singing and dancing and then going inside again for an impromptu dance party using their ghetto Karaoke machine and some random Eurotechno music.
(摔跤)At night we slept in Mongolian tents 蒙古包, which are actually just tiny round huts with pillows and blankets inside. By this point we hadn’t showered since leaving BLCU or washed our hands since last night, and again we had to think of creative ways to brush our teeth with bottled water and change in the dark. In a way it was just like a big slumber party Mongolian style with lots of easily amused and increasingly disheveled/smelly American teenagers.
Thus my first day in Mongolia was kind of surreal. I had trouble breathing because it smelled of sheep dung everywhere and of course I had trouble eating and sleeping as well. It was such a drastic difference from the familiar landscape of 20th century Beijing, Hong Kong, and New York, and a drastic drop in quality of life from the comforts of suburban Long Island. I felt out of place sporting my shiny camera and fake designer sunglasses, apprehensive about what to expect and what’s to come, but oddly at peace with such a different field of vision and sense of smallness in such an unexplored world.
Day 3 (第三天):
At 5am the next morning four of us who were crazy enough to wake up that early crawled out of the 蒙古包 and watched the sunrise. Unfortunately it wasn’t quite as picturesque as we had hoped, but you don’t get to watch sunrises in Mongolia every day (never again I hope… both because I love sleep and because this trip was enough Mongolia for a lifetime).
(日出）After breakfast we left 蒙古包#1 and drove to Yellow Flower Valley 黄花沟, a touristy spot where we rode horses and had another traditional Mongolian meal, which I suppose grows on you with time as long as you’re careful and clean your own plates. Afterwards we hiked down the Valley, which was somewhat reminiscent of climbing the Great Wall except of course not as long and grueling, especially since we took the cable car back up.
(黄花沟）In the evening we took the bus to Zhao He 昭和, a middle of nowhere tourist town for dinner and a Mongolian folk song and dance show. Like everything else the show was a bit ghetto, but it was a good concise demonstration of some quintessential Mongolian traditions i.e. bowl dance, songs about the grassland, singing in two keys at the same time (which I heard is horrible for your vocal cords), etc.
At night we slept in 蒙古包#2, which was slightly larger than the first one and in a larger compound of huts, but still the same idea as the night before. Our favorite improvement was the discovery of running water, which meant the possibility of using facewash and flushing squat toilets instead of holes in the ground. This was, however, Day 3 without showers... you can imagine what our hair and fingernails looked like by now.
Day 4 (第四天):
In the morning we visited a Mongolian temple 敖包, which turned out to just be a really large pile of stones covered in blue and white scarves called hadas 哈达. Mongolians go to these temples four times a year to offer hadas and pray for rain. It would have been a nicer experience if the tour guides at the temple weren’t so eager to prey on tourist meat and we could learn more history instead of being sold hadas.
(敖包）Later we drove to another rural area to interview more families, but by this time we were all a bit burnt out, sick of Mongolia, and craving showers, so thankfully this was the round of 牧民 interviewing. By this day I had finally decided to focus on the relationship between Mongolians 蒙族 and Han people 汉族 (the majority ethnic group that is often mistakenly considered synonymous to “Chinese”) for my social study report 社会调查报告, and conveniently the family we interviewed was Han unlike the Mongol family we had interviewed before. My perception of the differences between the two might be skewed because the Han family lived in a wealthier rural district and clearly enjoyed a more convenient, wealthier lifestyle than the Mongol one. They raised animals besides sheep, such as horses that signifies taller grass, and they also had things like a fridge and cell phones. To our luck, we were served fruit and tea – a first in Mongolia and definitely a sign that this family was relatively well-to-do. Our interview, however, revealed much in common with all other 牧民 – heavy Mongolian accent (even though Han people don’t speak Mongolian), hard times because of desertification but enjoying better system than communist or nomadic lifestyle because of good government benefits and privatization, dreams for the children to find a better life in the city, importance placed on money because no money means no “culture” 文化 (which is interestingly their term for “knowledge” 知识), etc.
(With the second family and their dog outside their home)After this last 牧民 interview, we took a long bus trip to Erdos 鄂尔多斯, a relatively wealthier city in Inner Mongolia because of its coal resources. By this time we were all tired, cramped, hungry, and layered with almost four days of grime. Therefore two cheers went up when we got to Erdos: one for the KFC 肯德及 we spotted a few blocks from our hotel and another for the showers and western toilets that awaited us. The water was scalding hot (the city had turned off cold water around the time we arrived) and the toilets wouldn’t flush properly for all of two days, but it was a huge relief nonetheless. As for the KFC, it’s ironic that we don’t eat fast food in America where it’s relatively cheap and instead travel around the world to eat it in China where it’s relatively more expensive than anything else, but that’s the consequence of yearning for the homeland and learning to appreciate the taste of America.
Day 5 (第五天):
Our first day in a Mongolian city we went to visit the Erdos Cashmere Factory 鄂尔多斯羊绒衫广, which seemed pretty propagandized in order to emphasize modernization and promote the brand name, but still an interesting shift in perspective from the countryside. Erdos is remarkably capital instead of labor based and the sweatshop we did see had reasonably good conditions.
(Cashmere sweatshop)Because of company regulations we weren’t able to interview anyone at the factory, but through special connections it was arranged for us to visit the homes of factory workers and talk to them during their lunch hour. Unlike workdays in the states, Chinese workdays have an allotted two-hour or so time period for lunch. The Erdos workers were mostly female and their lives as city folk were visibly more modernized and wealthier than those of the countryside. The worker my group interviewed reminded me much more of the general majority of Chinese people I had encountered thus far – a Han woman who speaks proper Mandarin and can be identified as an average middle class worker who can afford to entertain thoughts of buying a car and maybe sending her child to college abroad one day but still quite humbled by limited means. It was useful for our social study to note the differences and similarities between countryside and city, since these are the kinds of differences that reveal the effects of socio-politico-economic change in a developing country.
After lunch we took the bus to the Tomb of Genghis Khan 成吉思汗陵, which is easily the most revered site by Mongolians and probably also draws the most tourists. Basically every ethnic Mongolian has a picture of Genghis Khan on their wall and respect him as a demi-god of sorts (he did amass one of if not the largest empire in history), so even though no one even knows where his real body is, the tomb at Erdos is supposed to be the official one and thus pretty sacred, drawing droves of Mongolians four times a year for praying and giving hadas.
(In front of Genghis Khan's tomb)After a tour of the tomb we went to interview the tomb guards, which is a post designated to some 34 families who have passed the job of guarding Genghis Khan’s tomb on for 39 generations (almost 800 years). Unfortunately none of us were researching topics that emphasized the cultural or historic aspect of Inner Mongolia and the guard we were assigned spoke very little, but nonetheless it was a chance for yet another perspective.
(With the tomb guard we interviewed)Day 6 (第六天):
This day was easily the most memorable and fun out of the entire trip and probably of the whole summer. We went to the Singing Sands Ravine 响沙湾, a desert amusement park that was filled with pricey (by Chinese standards) but ridiculously fun and unique activities like parachuting, motor racing, sand surfing, camel riding, archery, rolling around the dunes inside a big clear plastic ball, etc. It was like an American theme park except Mongol-ified. It was a terrific way to wind down the trip with a purely bonding experience.
(Check out the cool booties... they're supposed to keep out the sand. We're sure they're going to replace Uggs as the next big fashion statement.)
(Parachuting)
(View from the sky... riding in that truck down there was half the fun :D)
(Archery)
(Motor car racing)
(Sand slide)
(Camel riding)
(Look how much fun Mongolia is!)
To top it off, our new hotels at Huhhot were again an upgrade with flushing toilets, bigger rooms, and a McDonalds 麦当劳 and Pizza Hut in addition to KFC next door ;)
Day 7 (第七天):
On the second to last day we were scheduled to visit another factory. This time we drove to 和林格尔 and visited Mengniu Factory 蒙牛工厂, a company that sells cow milk products and is the largest private company of its type in Inner Mongolia that attained world class status in under ten years of development. It was an impressive tour since the Mengniu factory standards are super high and we learned all the details about everything about production is about quality – from placing mirrors in the workers’ desks in order to remind workers that their demeanor affects their working environment to the ridiculous grandeur of the cows’ treatment (they listen to music, have private workout gyms, get massages, are trained to step in and out of milking devices themselves, etc.) to the internationality of the company’s production processes (they have imported grasses and milking techniques from eight different countries). It was actually pretty entertaining and definitely an effective way for Mengniu to create a loyal consumer base when it comes to selecting our daily icepops.
(A circular cow milking contraption. The cows are trained to step in and out on their own so that they work whenever they feel like it... they're taking workers' rights to a new level.)After driving back to Huhhot, we toured DaZhao Monastery 大昭寺, a Buddhist temple famous for its enormous silver statue of Buddha, 400-year-old wall paintings, and an original peacock umbrella left by Emperor Qing Long 乾隆皇帝. It was a good look into Buddhism for someone like me who knows almost nothing about religion, but according to some others all Buddhist temples essentially look the same, so these kinds of tourist sites quickly lose their appeal.
(大昭寺)At night we strolled around Ruyi Square, which apparently boasts the biggest music fountain in Asia. To me it seemed quite Las Vegas-ifed, but it was a nice night to relax and enjoy the fruits of China’s desperate push to generate hype about the Olympics (even in Mongolia they’re building things and wasting water in the name of national pride).
(The music fountain played everything from Pavarotti to Mongolian pop, it was quite a spectacle)Day 8 (第八天):
For our last day, we visited a Huhhot middle school 师大附中 and spoke with groups of high school students. Afterwards we went across the street to the University of Inner Mongolia 内蒙古大学 to interview and have lunch with college students. The student interviews were easily the most productive and engaging of the trip, since we able to overcome many language and generation barriers that had previously existed. I was really taken with all the students’ genuine curiosity about us, which often exceeded our interest in them. They gave really insightful answers to all our questions and could handle probing intellectual problems that other interviewees skirted around, which made for ideal social study candidates. Most of all, it was enjoyable to just make new friends and get an idea of what life is like for our counterparts in other parts of the world. One of the college students was particularly interested in English literature, so when she found out I’m an English literature major she was so eager to hear about my education, what kinds of books I could recommend, how I approach thinking about literature, etc. Even across such expansive cultural, linguistic and geographic distances, I still find myself talking about the same universal great works and marveling at both the power of literature to connect. And to my surprise my social study questions lead me to discover that the ethnic minority experience in China matches the ethnic minority experience in America on many levels. I discovered that I had inadvertently chosen to write about a phenomenon that I could relate to on a personal level when I thought there was almost nothing in Mongolia that I could possibly ever understand like that.
(HBA and Inner Mongolia students)In the afternoon we were set loose in Huhhot for some last hours of free time, but it was so hot and we were so sleep deprived (we had recreated the 蒙古包 in our hotel room the previous night for old time’s sake) that all we wanted was to find somewhere for napping, so we eventually found our way to the only movie theater in Huhhot, which turned out to be everything I imagined a Chinese movie theater to be: huge, run-down, no popcorn or movie boards or anything, buzzing with people talking and walking around in the dark without a care about other people’s comfort, playing a very typical sad Chinese movie with all the static and poor picture quality, etc. We snuck in for free (later we found out because there was only 15 minutes left to the movie) and found a row in the back to nap, which was a pleasant solution until they kicked us out and told us there was only one show a day so we couldn’t stay for the next one. We were still intent on avoiding heat exhaustion so we ended up wasting several hours in McDonalds and Pizza Hut (yes, both, McDonalds for the drink and Pizza Hut for the pizza) before getting back to the train station and taking a much needed rest on the train ride home. Who knew BLCU would be such a relief to see again? I can only imagine what it’ll be like to see my home on Long Island and my home at Yale again.
Overall (结论):
So that was an insanely long post that took me an unnecessarily long time to write (I’m procrastinating with the report if that wasn’t obvious). To compensate, here's some concluding points to save everyone the trouble of reading it all:
- 大跌眼镜. This is a term we learned in fourth year that literally means "big drop of glasses" and figuratively means "big disappointment". As soon as we left BLCU it has been a string of 大跌眼镜 in the sense that living conditions got progressively worse for a period of time in ways we were definitely not prepared for. Every basic living need (food, water, air, shelter, transportation, bathrooms, sanitation, etc.) were all jeopardized or eliminated at some point or another. However, this leads to my next point,
-Appreciation. For example, during the first few days when we were able to find a watermelon everyone flocked to have a piece because they were so grateful to taste fruit again. Every time our living conditions improved, we were so thankful – from running water to flushing toilets to KFC. When was the last time you were grateful for things like these that we take for granted on a daily basis? You only realize the worth of water when it’s gone, literally. And sometimes it takes these kinds of drastic disparities between what your life has been like and what you are now encountering that makes you 1) appreciate what you have, 2) appreciate the friends you have to keep your spirits up and share your experiences, 3) appreciate what you can come to understand about other people and other worlds, and 4) appreciate what you can come to learn about yourself.
- 化(-izations). We also came to appreciate some other really commonly used terms in the fourth year class, i.e. modernization 现代化, capitalization 资本化, commercialization 商业化, westernization 西方化, etc. I will be the first to preach to you about the dangers of all of the above, but now I realize I will also be the first to run home to my internet and American music any day. This term “advancement” takes on new meaning, because I really did find that the despite the drawbacks of so-called “advances,” there really are defining benefits that allow us to do so much more with our lives than we ever could before.
- Bonding. I’m not alone in many of my above thoughts and experiences and I was lucky to have developed a group of great friends over the course of HBA that solidified in Mongolia. In a way, suffering brings people closer together because it gives you something to bond over – you enjoy all the ups and downs together, help each other along the way, learn from each other, and become all the more intertwined in the other’s life. Forgive the corniness but I definitely think that was one of the best parts of the trip and one of the biggest reasons all future HBA students should consider it.
**edit** So it turns out that one of our new vocab terms for the first lesson back is 苦尽甘来 "when bitterness is finished, sweetness begins" and a more formal way of saying 先苦后甜 "first bitter later sweet." Just thought I'd tack that on as another conclusive point that basically summarizes the appreciation thing. Ok, back to homework =(
