We Lower Ourselves into the Old Shafts

I remember places like this, says Saran. Once again there are wildflowers laced into her braid. I imagine what it would be like to pull them from her hair each night at day’s end.

The water by the bank is shallow. Soon the jug is heavy enough that it doesn’t float away. I let it go and take a plate from the bucket full of dishes, rub its face with my palm. Her statement puzzles me. Isn’t all Mongolia like this, I say. I think of the places where Mun and I grow up in the shadow of Yatuu Gol, the beauty of the volcano something that is always there.

My family are herders, Saran says. I remember summers like this. Blue skies, endless herds, the rivers clear and cold. I’m four when the first zud hits, she says.

I nod. I also remember the zud. It is at the start of our first year in the monastery. We are eight years old. Our father moves the flocks south before it hits. The people who stay on the grasslands during the zud come to the gates looking for food. The Rinpoche gives what the monastery can, but when the zud drags on, turning the grasslands into a sheet of ice, there is no longer extra food to share. The older monks cut back, eating only one meal a day so that there might be something to give any supplicant that arrives at our gates.

There are two back-to-back zud, I say, one terrible winter following another.

Saran smiles but there is a sudden hardness in her usually dream-heavy eyes. She nods, tells me how in the first winter, two-thirds of their flocks die, while in the second, only a handful survives, though the next summer the grass is tall as her shoulders because there are no animals left to eat it. Without animals, she says, my family becomes ninja miners.

I take another plate from the tub. I am familiar with the term, which is used to describe people illegally scavenging in old Soviet mines that are abandoned after the USSR collapses, but I don’t know where the phrase comes from. Why the word ninja, I ask.

She laughs, says the miners look like those cartoon characters—the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the way they carry green pans on their backs. We lower ourselves into the old shafts, she says, me, my siblings, my parents, my oldest brother staying on the surface to pull us back up. She tells me that clouds of coal dust can explode, how it gets in your lungs. We all have colds, she says, our noses constantly running a thick black sludge. Once a week a truck comes and we sell what we have. All over the landscape people crawling around under the earth. All of us trying to make enough money to buy new herds, to start over.

She tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear. Three years later we have enough to buy new animals. Then when I’m twelve, she says, a convoy of trucks rumbles over the grasslands, and everything changes.

Who are they, I ask.

She sighs. The Chinese. She explains that after Mongolia becomes a democratic country, foreign companies begin to arrive, the old Russian mine where her family scavenges bigger than anyone knows. It also has copper, she says. The government claims it’s the world’s largest deposit of copper plus one of the largest deposits of coking coal, which you need to make steel.

Saran wipes her brow with the back of her hand. It’s constant, she says. Trucks coming and going day and night. Construction expands the mine. The earth stripped open. There are no paved roads, so the trucks kick dust up in the air. It looks like darkest night even at noon. Our animals start to get sick. The babies don’t thrive. The grass begins to die. Then our local well dries up. They say that in order to extract copper, the mine is using almost a thousand liters of water a second!

She places the last clean dish in the plastic tub. I remember this one time out with the animals, she says. We go to cross into one of our traditional pastures, but there’s a barbed-wire fence where there is never a fence before. Several of the animals get caught in it. She nods to where the water jug is full and beginning to sink. I rush over and haul it up on land.

So we move to Ulaanbaatar. My oldest brother gets a job driving a cab, my mother sells clothes in the black market. She looks off toward the horizon. I can sense her slipping away, back to a world of clouds.

What’s your family name, I ask.

Borjigin, she says.

I laugh. Yes, I say. Borjigin is my family name too.

Back when Mongolia is a communist country, surnames are unheard of. Then the Soviet Union collapses. We have no choice. We can go on being communists, a system that fails us at every turn, or we can change, open the door, and see where history might take us. With the coming of democracy, we are slowly brought into the modern age. For a while, everything is in chaos, though most of us don’t know. Life on the grasslands goes on as it has for hundreds of years. On the steppes, the seasons continue, flocks fattening or not.

One day the government in Ulaanbaatar decides everyone needs a surname. It becomes a top priority. Previously, we never need to distinguish ourselves like that. It is enough to know your name and who your father is, your patronymic. I am Tsakhiagiin Chuluun, son of Tsakhia. There are three million of us scattered across the country. How would a last name change anything?

Still, we are excited by the prospect of reimagining ourselves, of becoming something new. People let their imaginations run wild. They consider various possibilities, like features of the landscape, dreams, horses. When it comes time to put name to paper, the most common surname adopted is Borjigin, the clan name of Chinggis Khaan. According to The Secret History of the Mongols, the Borjigin lineage begins in the world’s first dawn with Blue-Grey Wolf and his wife Fallow Doe. Today Borjigin is as common a name in Mongolia as I hear Smith is in English-speaking countries.

Nice to meet you, Borjigin Sarangerel, I say, ta sain baina uu, are you being well? Saran smiles. I feel my brother’s presence somewhere in the growing dark, most likely smoking beside the Machine. What might he think to see me speaking so freely with a woman? Why do you speak Tibetan, I ask.

For the first time since we meet, I watch as she blushes. Something in her face tells me that she is one who holds the deepest of secrets within her, and that this secret is at the heart of her identity, that to be without it would efface everything she is. I don’t pry. I know what it is to have a secret, the letter in my robe like an inner darkness waiting to find the light.

I just do, she says, the dreamy quality back in her eyes. She lifts the tub of dishes to her hip and turns to walk back to camp. The sun sets, the earth cooling. I struggle with the weight of the water jug but try not to let my effort show.