Mongolia Today, Mongolia Tomorrow

Mongolia Today, Mongolia Tomorrow

Published June 1, 2012

Once, while walking to my home after teaching an English lesson at the National University of Mongolia, I heard a familiar bass line drift through the brisk evening air from a second story window. In an old grapefruit building next to my school, a young Mongolian band was practicing a cover of Nirvana’s “Come as You Are.” I stopped, a little surprised to hear that particular song drifting from the half-opened window. As I continued walking, it dawned on me that the song defined so much that I witnessed in Ulaanbaatar every day: its startling individuality, its anachronistic underpinnings, its double-edged hospitality, even down to its weapons laws.

If there is truly a place where West meets East, a place where an old man wearing a traditional Mongolian deel and checking his iPhone with prayer beads wrapped tightly around his wrist isn’t out of the ordinary, a place where a woman under the age of 30 helped start and run the first Mongolian stock market, a location where a young man with a sharp Korean haircut and patent leather jacket is at ease and walking with his arms behind his back while doing a bit of throat singing, a place as hot as it is cold, as isolated as it is welcoming, as mysterious as it is pedestrian—Mongolia is such a place.

It is a country where modernity and tradition have mixed so fluidly that neither seem oblivious to the other and every time one is in danger of overshadowing the other, the natural way of things somehow balances the other out. It is an endless knot of extremities and creature comforts, culture and technology, whimsicalities and sustainable groundwork, laudable feats and furtive failures, incipient consumer culture and daily surprises. Mongolia has a dialectical relationship with itself.

Ulaanbaatar is almost a world unto itself with its own celebrities, its own host of singular magazines and newspapers, its own clearly defined communities, widening social gaps clear as UB days cold as UB nights, its own environmental problems, its own fascinating history, all within the confines of a city that paints itself larger than it actually is, a city that is the center of its own world. It is a city that treats itself how New York treats itself: self-important, an obvious center of something, a place where everything happens, a place to be seen, a place to be heard. Yet it is truly in the middle of nowhere, miles from any other major city, on a vast steppe surrounded by vast steppe surrounded by icy mountains, fields of livestock, sandy deserts and sandwiched by the Russian and Chinese border.

This solipsistic mentality, this come as you are belief system, only adds to the uniqueness that is Mongolia, uniqueness wrapped in justified self-importance. Justified by its historical place on the world stage, its budding mining sector, its switch to democracy, justified through its matchless ability blur the distinction between past and future, tradition and technology, globalization and cultural identity. The Mongolian mindset is contagious, dangerous at times, but radically distinct at a time in history when tedious standardization is prevalent and great powers are waning. It is invigorating in a world weighed down by economic woes and fruitless wars. It is booming, it is revitalizing, it is growing so quickly that living in Ulaanbaatar is quixotic, the growth as mesmerizing as it is frightening.

Mongolia is and always will be as Mongolia does. It’s the Wild West of Asia, the last frontier, Minegolia, the land of Chinggis Khan, the last nomadic stronghold or whatever buzzword economists and social historians levy on it. While the sustainability of its growth is yet to be seen, and many would rightly argue needs to be addressed, the near future seems to be pretty bright for the unique inhabitants of the Asian steppe.