HONEYMOON IN
INNER MONGOLIA
Or: If Genghis Khan lived here,
he'd be home now.
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Illustration by Ad McCauley
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And so it was that we found ourselves headed for Genghis Khan's Mausoleum, the Mecca of Mongolian culture -- some 18 hours by train plus eight hours on local bus from Beijing. Lugging water, instant noodles and backpacks -- mine stocked with American chocolate bars for our future Mongolian friends -- we approached the train, a great iron-wheeled beast in the 19th-century style. A woman in a brown military uniform took our tickets and directed us to different cars. "Tai tai," my husband said, pointing to me, and the conductor rearranged our seats. We had learned the word for wife in Chinese on the flight over. I thought it was a pretty word. So unlike that sniff of propriety, "wife." And since it happened to be the only Chinese phrase my husband could pronounce with any hope of being understood, "tai tai" had quickly become his litany for all manner of situations. As Henry read about the military strategies of the Mongolian generals, I watched a train worker who was gathering a mountain of cigarettes, grape skins, styrofoam noodle cups into a small tin bin. At the end of the car, she dumped the contents out the window. The sticky trash pelted a gang of boys on rusty bicycles who were waving frantically at our passing train. Beyond the sweet-faced boys, fields of shriveled sunflowers, corn and sorghum stretched to a horizon of coal stacks spewing black rivers into the sky. An occasional nuclear power plant broke the monotony. "Once this was all Mongolia," Henry said, grandly gesturing toward the bleak panorama. "Those plucky little pony-riders totally ruled until they were driven back to their ancestral territory. But they're a hearty people, they know how to survive. We'll meet them herding their goats and they'll invite us for some salted horse milk tea." A man spit a frothy red-streaked dollop between my husband's feet. "It's like being a traveling troubadour," Henry declared happily, "I'm not going to shave or wash or brush my hair ever again." Later, in the darkness of our upper berth, I turned to Henry. "How are we going to make it all night?" Every man on the train was a chain smoker. "Smoke is a soporific for me," Henry chirped. "I'll bet it cures my insomnia." As Henry slept, I practiced breathing through my sweater to filter the smoke coming in and the sobs going out. "It make me sick too," a voice whispered in the darkness. It was Chu Li, the young college student we had shared pears with at lunch time. She offered me some hot water from her giant tin mug. The hot water permeated my sinuses and I drifted off, buoyed by tender feelings for this gentle woman with the big hot cup ... then the man below me began snoring. It was a battle of air and mucus of samurai proportions. As the hours ground by, I whispered, tapped, jostled and finally resorted to kicking the man's back. The toilet. I would go there and find peace. I stood and looked for my shoes. They danced in the shadows. I screamed. "What is it now?" Henry hissed. "Rats!" "Oh come on, don't exaggerate." Henry's face floated above me like a gargoyle. "And would you please stop snoring?" As I made my barefoot way to the fetid latrine, I resolved to keep my growing disappointment a secret from my Beloved. After all, I was the real traveler in this relationship. I was the one who had escaped Soviet tour guides to hike through an Armenian wilderness area; snuck into an Iranian mosque while crowds chanted "Death to Americans"; been attacked by an African mongoose at age 7 and shrugged it off. Where had she gone -- that cheerful explorer, who, in the face of danger, disease and discomfort, never batted an eye, only craned her neck forward toward the next adventure? Henry seemed changed too. The nerdy, adoring lover I knew had vanished behind the grinning, gristled visage of a modern Marco Polo. The bus to Genghis Khan's mausoleum appeared no more than a patchwork of metals assembled with upholstery tacks. With a perpetual chant "ChinngiseKhanChinngise" the barker packed us in like bread crumbs in a holiday fowl. I tried not to think about my body parts strewn in all directions, my honeymooner's smiling face down in the Mongolian dirt. To die on a honeymoon that hadn't even been consummated, that would be ridiculous. You see, Henry had convinced me that we would have a more genuine experience by staying in dormitory rooms. "Are these people Mongolian?" Henry asked a tall, disheveled man, who taught high school English though he could only speak a few halting phrases. "Monguo? I think no." "They're city people," my husband whispered. I looked around at the blue Mao peasant uniforms, windburnt cheeks and toothless smiles. "Once we get into the country, we'll see the real Mongolia." The bus stopped and I escaped my husband's obsessive cant to look for a bathroom. I walked through the market, where rosy-cheeked girls impaled water snakes on nails, and men in white fezzes called to me joyfully, waving boiled sheep's heads. I entered a dirt courtyard full of playing children. When the children saw me, they let loose a war cry of glee and encircled me. Their dirty faces swirled round, drinking me in with an almost predatory curiosity. I spotted a shack in the corner swarming with telltale flies. The "toilets" were ten rectangular holes cut neatly into the earth. Some ten feet below, a swamp of human waste baked in the sun. It was one of the pleasantest bathrooms I had seen thus far. Nearly 50 gaping girls and boys pressed into the shack behind me. I made a feeble attempt to shoo the children out. They shifted and shoved but no one was about to forfeit their spot for this world-class performance. I closed my eyes, trying to visualize myself back in the sanctuary of my mirrored bathroom, the lock firmly fastened. The air was pregnant with bated breath, barely controlled hysteria. When I was finished, I glanced at my rapt audience. Suddenly, I saw myself as they saw me: a large white alien crouching like a pterodactyl. As I rushed back across the courtyard, buttoning up my pants, the children ran in front of me in frightened herds. One boy pushed a smaller boy toward me, then both ran screaming in terror. Back on the bus, Henry was reading aloud a list of diseases from our guidebook to a group of amused peasant men. "Rabies," Henry enunciated, "Arf, arf!" and then began frothing at the lips. Then men howled with laughter. Henry leaned in to kiss me. I winced. Suddenly, the bus blared its horn and we careened off the road. I dug my fingernails into the arm of the farmer next to me. The shouts of other passengers were but muted echoes compared to my remarkable rendition of a howler monkey. We crashed into a knoll at the bottom of a ditch. The English teacher took me by the arm and helped me off the bus. "All is normal," he said consolingly, "extra normal." "Have you been in many bus accidents before?" I gasped. "Not many." "How many?" There was a pause and he laughed heartily as he thought up an unfrightening number for the weak American woman. "Maybe six ... or seven." My eyes widened and he saw that he had gauged too high. "Not very many." "Tai tai," Henry said. The man's laugh echoed over the valley of pink dirt, dry crops and map-blue sky. An hour and a half later, another minibus dumped us on the side of the road next to the Mausoleum's hotel. "Authentic grasslands," Henry whispered in my ear like a love poem. The enormous courtyard was dominated by an asphalt yurt and a moth-eaten camel chained to a flag pole. On the wall outside the hotel office, a sign read:
Inside the darkening office, a well-coiffed adolescent girl scowled at me from behind a desk. I told Henry I wanted to splurge a bit: not only get a room of our own but a room with a shower. It had been four days. "Meiyou." The woman answered my request, employing the ubiquitous Chinese phrase of refusal. The basic double. "Meiyou." The deluxe suite. "Meiyou." A dormitory room with no shower -- for triple the list price -- was the only available accommodation. I looked outside. A single military jeep was parked in front of the office. "The whole hotel is full?" I snarled, slamming my hand on the counter. "I just don't believe it. I need a shower. Need. Do you understand?" "We're in Mongolia. Together," Henry said, timidly stroking my hair. "Isn't that what's important?" I had no answer for him. Somewhere along the road, I had tossed out the noble concept of import for visceral urge. I wanted a shower, a meal and a decent orgasm. Nothing else seemed to matter. The giant dining yurt was alive with festivities. Three women, draped in embroidered silk gowns, were singing piercing ballads to two tables of well-dressed men. When the song ended the women presented the men with small cups of clear liquid. Slacks and tennis shoes peeked out from underneath the women's costumes. Henry didn't seem to notice. In response to our request for vegetables and water, they brought us an unopened bottle of crab-apple/carrot juice and a plate of something resembling digested grass. Choking down our pitiful meal, we eyed the other two tables overflowing with opulent dishes. The men began singing to the women. One woman, changed into a pink dress suit á la Jackie Kennedy, sat on the lap of a wide man and began eating voraciously, spitting her bones on the floor. Frothing drunk, she started cursing the man until two others escorted her out, their hands fighting for position on her butt. I flashed on the hotel sign about drunkenness and prostitution, realizing that for these guys, this was, in fact, a very sexy spot. We shared a room with a shy political science student from Kyoto, whom Henry engaged in a lengthy discussion of Mongolian battle strategies. I read my Chinese dictionary and learned that the root word "tai" translates as "too much" and so the word for wife means "too much, too much." When I unpacked my suitcase, the chocolate bars intended for my imagined Mongolian friends had melted all over my clothing. I cried myself to sleep. The next morning we climbed the steps to the intricately carved gates of Ghengis Khan's mausoleum. I was wearing a white T-shirt smeared with brown stains. "Now comes the moment we've been waiting for." Henry skipped ahead of me. "I think I'll just wait outside and eat the congealed chocolate from the folds of my negligee, if you don't mind," I muttered. "Carol! This is the Mongols' place of ancient pilgrimage!" We paid for our tickets and entered the main hall. "OK, so where are they?" I was standing in the center of an empty room. "You said there would be Mongolians and I want to meet one." "Look, they're everywhere." Henry danced toward some decorated walls. "These are not people, darling, they're wall paintings, and moreover they aren't even Mongolian wall paintings, look at this plaque -- this was 'rebuilt' in 1993." "So?" "So? It's a deserted tourist trap for horny Chinese businessmen. This is your Mongolian culture. Fake wall paintings of warriors torturing enemy soldiers." "Outer Mongolia has the real living culture. The book says it's only three days by bus." "We're not going anywhere!" I sounded like Elizabeth Taylor in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" -- drunk, craven, rotten to the core. Then I began to run. "Honey, is something wrong?" I swerved past the altar of the great ancient warrior, out into the sunlight toward a bed of cultivated, grassland wildflowers. I fell to my knees and the Mongolian feast of the previous night rose and crashed, soaking the brilliant petals with a translucent pea-green syrup. "Oh honey, I thought you wanted an adventure." "Yes, but it was our honeymoon and so I just thought it was supposed to be, you know," I paused to spit, "nice." The locals gathered at a distance, deeply disgusted by the strange American woman. "Tai tai," Henry whispered to the men, and they nodded.
It is our last day in China. Since leaving Mongolia, Henry's health and cheer have deteriorated markedly. Only in retrospect does he admit disappointment. He is reading "Detained in China," an exhaustive report on political and religious prisoners. He has learned from it that only 10 percent of the population of Inner Mongolia is still Mongolian and most of their religious and political leaders are in prison or dead. "Don't you want to buy something pretty for your grandmother?" I ask. "They say the Famous Beijing silk market ..." "I'm not buying anything from China ever again. Do you know what they do with cattle prods to Mongolian nuns?" I leave my husband in bed with his book of atrocities. I've always known he was fickle. The only thing, it seems, that isn't vulnerable to his wild shifts of loyalty, is me. I enter the streets, looking at faces, steamed dumplings, red-fringed rickshaws. I try to memorize these last few impressions of a country which I barely saw, so thick was the lens of my preconceptions. We each tried to make China into a backdrop for our private fantasies: the romantic epic, the historical war story. I became a "tai tai" and Henry, a clueless husband. Then I am struck by the thought that our marriage is exactly like China:
struggling under the yoke of tradition to become new, modern, free. I laugh
out loud. It's astounding how I can shrink the world to resemble the navel I
am contemplating. I walk and walk, pulled into the sea of bodies, vehicles,
outdoor markets. That ineffable traveling sensation comes over me -- an
opening between the head and heart -- a boarding room for the world to rest. I
walk. The city goes on forever and it doesn't need me.
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Carol Lloyd is a writer based in San Francisco.
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