Mongolian Nazis Must Die

One of the strangest phenomena in the nation is that of the Mongolian Nazi.  In a land without Jews (at least since the end of the Mongol Empire), Nazism is rampant.  It's a particular type of Nazism, in that (a) it stands as a totem for hatred and/or national pride, (b) the main target seems to be Chinese and (c) it's relatively acceptable, or acceptable enough that you can slap it on your car and drive and in broad daylight without fear or shame.

I first became aware of Mongolian Nazis when I turned on a computer in a classroom that I didn't use that often and was confronted with the empty gaze of Hitler in sheer black-and-white as the desktop image.  It was a Chinese classroom but one that was usually left open during the day for kids to come in and use the computer and the space for studying.  I asked around and Lena said that she once asked the kids to bring in a picture of someone to learn how to do a portrait and a number of students asked immediately if they could bring in Adolf.  Lena also said that she saw a couple in full SS gear just hanging out and walking around during a summer festival.  A few times on the weekend, the Mongolian Nazis drove down a street near my apartment in a large convoy with their Nazi flags flying, clad in balaclavas, shouting loudly and looking mighty impressed with themselves.

When Germany was my Country of the Week, I made a rule that anyone who mentioned Hitler or Nazis would be kicked out immediately as it wasn't relevant to the Germany of 2013.  In the very first class, 2 kids yelled out "Hitler!" as soon as I announced the Country of the Week and, following through on the threat, I opened the door and told them to leave.  Later, I went outside and had a chat and asked them what they knew of Hitler, the Nazis or the Holocaust.  They knew basically nothing except that he was "a great military leader, and very patriotic to Germany" (both patently false, by the way).  Their ignorance of Hitler isn't surprising as they aren't taught anything about them and their information is likely filtered through television, the Internet, their families and what they hear on the street.  The kids weren't Nazis but they were shockingly open to what they thought it meant.

I've spoken with Mongolians and done a bit of research on the topic and Mongolian Nazis seem to be a relatively recent movement that has taken up the iconography of Nazis as a sign of national pride and patriotic fervour.  Mongolians often point out that the swastika itself was hijacked by the Nazis as it was a Buddhist symbol and the use of the swastika hearkens back to that usage.  Except, that many Buddhist countries, knowing the signified of the swastika nowadays, have backed away from its use.  As for national pride, there are of course many different ways of expressing your love of your country than resorting to the symbols of one of the most murderous regimes of the 20th century.  As in many things in Mongolia though, the spectre of China and what it stands for, both real and imagined, is at the heart of things.

 

I saw the above sign posted on a door of a hair salon about half a click from my apartment.  I quickly instagrammed it, just as a dude with a Mongolian Nazi jacket on entered the establishment for, one supposes, a quick trim.  It's a spectacular sign in many regards to have so brazenly on a shop.  Before this sign, I didn't know that there were that many Viet people in the country (there aren't but they do work mostly in semi skilled trades such as car repair).   The fact that Viet and Chinese were banned from a place so quotidian as a hair salon is striking.  What did this Nazi salon fear by cutting their hair? Making money?  Being "infected" by Chinese/Viet hair?  Decency?

There are a number of groups on Facebook called "Fuck China" (or some variant) started by Mongolian Nazis/Nationalists.  Generally, these groups just seem to exist for awhile to post banal gross photos and gossip in Mongolian (and sometimes English) about how China is evil before they get shut down.  Once, through an Expat Facebook group, I saw a link to a YouTube video on one of these groups of a veritable gang of Mongolian Nazis going to a garage somewhere in the countryside, beating the shit out of  the two or three Vietnamese and Chinese staff, playing for the camera and threatening to come back the next day and do the same.  The violence on the video was visceral: full of snot and blood and cruelty for no absolute reason.  It was a cowardly attack on a couple dudes just trying to make a living in a tough country.

I should be clear here to say that Mongolian Nazis are a minority of the population, but they exist in plain sight.  Many Mongolians hate the ignorance of these Nazi pricks.  But, you might not see something everyday but it's a regular thing to see Nazi swastikas on cars or Hitler statues at the Black Market or even just hear something racist about Chinese people.  The severity of these sightings differs wildly but it remains that this is part of the discourse of a country, which filters down to 12 or 13 year olds from privileged families (and, I'm assuming, much further down).  Much like their Surf brethren, Mongolian Nazis must die.

Rites of Spring

Ulaanbaatar is a city of divisions: between locals and expats, locals and repats, repats and expats, rich locals and poor locals, countryside locals and city locals, and on and on.  The expat community likewise breaks down into a few tightly enforced groups.  There are the mining types (on and off site), the UN/NGO types who have been here forever, young American and Australian do-gooders from the Peace Corps or AYAD, expats-by-love, the exiles and degenerates that I've written about previously, random European adventurers, diplomats, and the Chinese and North Koreans that are in Mongolia for work who are rarely seen in town.

These communities distrust, hate and often don't even know one another. As someone who doesn't slide into any of these categories very easily, I've been part of many a conversation where NGOs/mining companies are slagged by the other side, even though the slagger knows no one personally from their imagined foe.  There's an aura of distrust via ignorance that permeates UB on all sides.

With spring though comes the type of person that all can agree to hate: the tourist.  After not gracing UB for months due to the deep chill of winter, they start to bob up and about in early March.  Suddenly, the city feels much more crowded.  You might find them taking up tables at Millie's or Rosewood during lunch that you had a right to after planting your bum in those chairs at -45C for months.   They could be strolling in front of you, oblivious to the rhythms and protocol of the Mongolian street.  Or they might just be having drinks at an Irish bar, looking hopefully at the wait staff for service that, this being Mongolia, may never come.

You can spot them a mile away.  Clad invariably in what you might call "safari gear" (white or light coloured button up shirts, completely new hiking boots and, of course, a freaking safari vest) despite being in the middle of a postindustrial city, they walk around the streets aimlessly grasping their expensive camera, often wandering straight into the vicinity of pickpockets and thieves.  They move in large numbers in suspiciously new clothes as if they had all gone to some "adventuring" shop in whatever country they came from and chose the "Mongolia special."

There are of course tribes, to get old school anthropology on you, within the tourist community.  The major categories here are the backpacker, the professional backpacker, the Eurotrash adventurer and the Aussie bogan tourist (not many but they find their way up here).  We hate all of them, and, in this hate, we find an ultra rare feeling of what we might call a communion of life in UB: that we (all expats, locals, repats, whatever) share the experience of living and surviving in Mongolia in the medium to long term.  There is a palpable sense that in order to enjoy Mongolia in the spring and summer then you must endure its winter, and skipping the difficult part is a galling defiance of that communion.  Plus, they are, for the most part, fucking annoying.

A Nation of Fitzy Solutions

As the ice and snow recedes, the streetscapes of Ulaanbaatar begin to reveal their true selves, unadorned and unconcealed by the cover of extreme weather, or its waste products.  The potholes magically return as if newly created (instead of just filled in with ice), the sidewalks' deep crevices open up like the varicose veins of an old man and the inner structure of buildings reveals themselves as usually just poorly laid bricks and mortar slapped up and covered by a thin veneer of concrete to hide the shoddiness of the work.

It's also the time of the year when improvement projects are started (though not always finished).  Coming home after a month of travel, the front door of our apartment building had been replaced, the stairway repainted with green and gold racing stripes and the landings were newly tiled.  All of these changes were unexpected as our landlord, in his typical mix of neglect and laziness, hadn't told us any of these changes would be happening or what the code was to get into the building.  It took the work of our intrepid cleaner to find the code and inform us via other intermediaries.

In any case, after dinner one night, I came home to find 3 dudes wielding gigantic, gas fuelled soldering torches straight out of the Soviet era, blasting something onto the top of the apartment's doorway, which coincidentally was just outside my window.  They worked without safety gear (of course) and without care for whatever they were trying to achieve.  As the sun set, they finished their soldering job - or whatever the hell they were doing - and turned to painting the entrance way in the dark.  The next morning revealed a half done, all shitty job done.  They came back and added more layers of paint, and then went to work on laying bricks and concrete down to fix the stoop (it didn't need fixing).  Basically, they poured some concrete in front of the existing stairs, placed bricks in a line on top of the concrete and called it a day.

A friend of ours in UB worked in construction as a day job while in university in Australia and often says that Mongolians just don't really know how to do anything.  There are no trades, and most men don't have the skills to do the jobs needed to run a country (or just pour concrete properly).  This gap in skills may be traced back to either the Soviet era, a Nomadic-herding recent past or just plain incompetence.  But, I've recently began to think of it as something else entirely: Mongolia is a nation built as a series of "Fitzy Solutions."

Let me explain a bit here.  A "Fitzy Solution" is something that I've become increasingly familiar with over the years as I've become more and more aware of the workings and rhythms of my wife's family.  Usually devised by Tess' dad, a Fitzy Solution is born out of a creative mind that desires a frugal yet effective fix for a problem, despite not really knowing how to fix the thing in question for real.  Thus, all sorts of implements might be used to find a way for the thing in question to function normally (or as close to normally as possible).  I've seen plastic knives, crayons, metal rods, screwdrivers, used gum, old rags and more used to fix mechanical devices, shoes, sink plugs, dishwashers, and more.  The Fitzy Solution may work (it usually does) but it's a slapdash, temporary fix that usually entrenches itself as a permanent solution, before needing another Fitzy Solution to take over.

Similarly, Ulaanbaatar's infrastructure, housing, and general joie-de-vivre seems to be built as a series of Fitzy Solutions.  Roads are repaired by throwing some asphalt and concrete into the potholes (instead of repaved fully).  Paint is splashed on an entrance way in the middle of the night.  Bricks are haphazardly slapped into uneven mortar and then covered over by a building's casing not to be seen for a few years until the casing crumbles or the building just falls over.  Sidewalks are paved over with a random assortment of building materials which all seem to be liable to becoming extraordinarily slippery in winter (which of course lasts for most of the year).  In the end, Fitzy Solutions do the job but only just.  They lead to more issues, which are in turn addressed by another Fitzy Solution.  The cycle is self replicating and cascading.

Part of this slipshod approach to addressing the problems of the city are from the lack of building materials produced in the country and a lack of local knowledge of how to effectively and purposefully improve a city that was built for 250,000 people but have perhaps 5 or 6 times that number in it.  The genius of a Fitzy Solution is that it works but only just.  But, if an entire city (or even country) is built on them, the whole thing continually reproduces issues without a true solution in sight.   Development is development except when it's not.

Returns

Here begins the Final Chapter of ICantBelieveItsNotBaatar.  We left UB a couple days ago but I was so exhausted with the business of leaving that I didn't have the time or inclination to write about it at the time.  I will though have a series of 5 or 6 final posts to conclude the blog, before it seeps into the ether of the dead blogs that so populate the Internet.

April was a month of travel for me.  I spent little time in UB or even Mongolia and instead I found myself far from the exhilarating chaos of this country.  My travel itinerary reads and feels a bit ridiculous: From UB to Bishkek to Lake Issyk Kul to Manas Airport, Bishkek to UB (for 6 hours) to Beijing to Hong Kong airport to Melbourne to Hong Kong (in what turned out to be a visa run) to Beijing and finally back to UB on May 2nd.  All told, I think I spent over 30 hours in the air and perhaps up to 60 if you include all the time getting to and from airports, waiting, driving through the Kyrgyz landscape, and so on.

After all this time away, returning to UB generates a unique feeling that mixes anticipation, dread, hope, relief, depression and buoyancy.  You may start to feel it when you first hear someone speaking Mongolian in the airport, after going without its whispered, squelching and spittle-infused timbre for the time you've been out of the country.  Or, it might start when you're on the plane and you spot the endless brown of the steppe out of the window.  Or, alternately, it could hit you as you pass through the impossibly quaint airport and emerge into the arrivals "hall" (it's more of a small lounge at Chinggis Khan International).

Tess recently said that Mongolia's good nicely balances out its negative aspects.  While it has its difficulties (weather, supply chains, occasional whispers of expats being robbed/kidnapped/raped), we have found UB to be an easier place to actually live in than say Beijing.   There's so few interesting, non-degenerate expats that once you meet someone that may be sane (or at least not insane) you make efforts to include them in your circle.  This isn't to say that UB isn't cliquey, because it is, but that there just aren't that many cliques and generally people slide into a crew with relative ease, as compared to more usual expat spots like Beijing where making friends is an alienating experience, for the most part.

What I guess that I'm getting at is that returning to UB feels like coming home.  You're glad to be able to use your stuff and to sleep in a familiar bed and to see your friends, but somewhat disappointed by what you call home.  I first came to UB in January 2012, unsure of what we were getting into and unsure of what to expect, but somehow over the past 18 months or so, I've been there more and more (moving there full time in August) and it's become home.

As I flew in on the morning of May 2nd, I experienced an acute form of this feeling.  This would be the last time that this return would be a return home.  Ostensibly, I was returning to gather our shit and get out of there (and eventually return back to Australia).  So, although we might go back to Mongolia in a few years to check out the development (or lack there of), it wouldn't be a return home.  As the plane touched down, I thought to myself, "So begins the end."

Returns are always linked to departures.

You have to be hard in Central Asia, Part 2

Upon arrival at the tournament site, we were assigned our rooms, which were scattered throughout the compound.  My students were taken away to their rooms, and I was spirited off to an obscure corner of the resort.  I entered the townhouse that I was assigned to find that it was full.  One of the residents helpfully suggested that I could share a bed with a boy, but of course I declined and went searching for the tournament organisers who eventually told me that I was assigned to the wrong townhouse and then showed me to my coaches only house.  I choose a bed at random and went off to find my students.

This was a harder process than it should be.  I patiently explained that I needed to know where they were, since I was responsible for their safety as their teacher.  (Before leaving Mongolia, I had signed three notarised documents that effectively said that I was their guardian for the duration.)  Eventually, someone told me the answer and I found them getting settled into their rooms, and busy meeting other kids from around Asia. 

As an Asian championships of a sort, this debate tournament featured teams from all around Asia, but with a concentration of teams from Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan were especially well represented) and South East Asia.  No teams from East Asia (unless you counted us, which you might as well do) or South Asia.  Pakistan had a couple teams apparently but they backed out after the funding was less than expected, and Nepal's visas were denied absurdly by Kyrgyzstan for unknown reasons.  (Kyrgyzstan immigration procedures were the most lax ones I've ever experienced: no forms, no fees, no questions, just a stamp and you're in if you're from the developed world or the CIS.)  

Debate tournaments are strange beasts, and our expectations going in wavered between modest goals (let's not come last) and delusions of grandeur (we should be able to easily win this thing).  Perhaps I should have done some more research and watched some debates from Central Asia on YouTube beforehand, but we had little idea about the quality of competition, expectations of adjudicators or style of teams.  I also didn't know that I was going to be a judge in the tournament until the day I arrived expecting to just coach my team to respectability.  Instead, I was to judge at least 6 debates in 3 days in a format I was relatively unfamiliar, and with no real experience judging debates.  

Our team survived the first debate with a clear win, but the adjudications were strange, obsessed with things like "clashes," devoid of mention of method (structure) or manner (way of speaking), and looking for refutation instead of rebuttal.  Indeed, in the debate that I judged, the adjudication of another judge was from another world: in a debate where the negative team offered no rebuttal and did not engage with affirmative's team, she gave it to negative.  As a team, we hunkered down and decided to ditch our thematic rebuttal, and instead renamed it "clashic rebuttal" and decided to play up "clashes" as judges (aside from me and a few others) did not seem to like a debate that weighed up competing arguments and models, instead preferring to see arguments taken down and refuted, as if it was a professional wrestling match with words.  

With our adjustments, we ran the table to 4 and 0, before losing the final two debates of the round robin in close decisions against the top 2 teams.  Basically, after each round teams were reseeded based on their results and so you constantly went up against teams that were at or above your level.  This made for a bit of a wonky tournament that sacrificed the certainty of a draw, and allowed other teams to roll through to finals debating against other mediocre teams.

Regardless, we came into finals feeling as if we had a real shot at winning everything,  Our team had a strong reputation for its precision in its arguments, closeness and ability to win at secret topics.  We won the first final in a close one against a rapidly improving Malaysia and went into the quarter finals with dreams of victory in our heads.  Unfortunately, the decision went against us unfairly, which happens in the randomness of debating and the style of adjudication which boggles my mind to this day.

One of the strangest features of the tournament was how we debated the same topic 3 times (!!) and only in the end did 3 secret topics, when we had extensively prepared for secret topics and won them all.  The repetition of the same topic made for inaccurate judging, from my experience as a coach or judge, because by the time you've seen 2 of these debates, your mind wanders from the debate at hand and to the realm of what you've seen or heard before, especially when you have judged 7 or 8 debates total.  I myself judged past the round robin and into the octofinals round, though thankfully I was finally taken off the roster for quarter finals.  You can't help but have your mind not focus completely after debate #7 in 3 or 4 days.

In any case, coming 5th overall and having 2 speakers in the top 10 of the individual best speaker award (#3 and #8) was a very good achievement, especially for a team that had only really come together and gotten serious a couple months before the tournament.  After a night where we tended to our psychical wounds and grievances, we breakfasted together and spoke to each other about how well we did, and how debate's a random game at the best of times.  It was a cathartic and important moment and allowed us to look into the tournament and take from it what we had achieved.

In the days following the tournament, the labs started and these days rounded off our trip on a positive and educational note.  The kids moved into their debating labs, and I went into the coaches/judges stream where we discussed strategy, organisation of tournaments, breaking down topics, educational possibilities, and more.  I wished these sessions came earlier because Central Asian approaches to debate differed substantially from the Australian tradition that my knowledge comes from and which, strangely enough, Mongolian debating now revolves around (especially taking into account the debate tournament we've organised in UB that uses almost exclusively Australian rules, scoring methods and expectations).

We left the tournament before it was over.  We had planned this for months, since our students had to get back for exams and the school was rightly reticent to have students away for almost half a month.  In the planning stages, leaving early always seemed a prudent decision, both in terms of costs and sanity.  Like, how could you talk and live and breathe debating for more than 10 days at a time and not go crazy?  But, as the date of our departure approached, our thoughts all turned to how we wish we could have stayed for longer and for the second part of the tournament, a mixed teams challenge.

There was more than a hint of sadness on our final day at the tournament.  It was also the excursion and games day.  We left the resort for a crazy religious tourist attraction on the lake, which featured mini temples to all the major world religions (except hinduism), as well as extensive art galleries and a monument and building dedicated to a great Kyrgyz poet.  We walked around the park in a bit of a daze, feeling wistful and already nostalgic for the time we had spent here.  Returning to the resort, we packed our bags, the kids played games on the beach, and I read a book quietly in my room.

Our ride picked us up at 9:30 PM.  We had a flight at 4 AM the next morning and I decided to go directly from the lake to the airport, instead of spending an evening with our bags in Bishkek and leaving earlier in the day.  As we left, a large group of Tajik and Kyrgyz debaters showered us with songs and handshakes and, for our kids, wrote their email addresses and facebook profiles on whatever they could find, whether it be a scrap of paper, or a hand or a forearm, so that one of my students left with sharpie markings all over her arms from the boys and girls of Central Asia.

In retrospect, my night time escape from Lake Issyk Kul was not the best plan that I've ever devised.  We left in pitch blackness and the road around the lake was perfectly acceptable.  On the way in, I found out that the road through the mountains though was being repaved and widened.  In the middle of the day, the road was passable but not great, but in dark it was shockingly and scarily unsafe especially as cars in both directions shared a one lane highway that snaked its way up and down the Tien Shan mountains.  To make matters worse, a slight drizzle started, which soon developed into an outright torrential downpour.

Our Kyrgyz driver did his best to pilot us safely, and he turned out to be a safe, cautious and excellent driver.  (Other cars seemed to hurtle themselves through the road at ridiculous velocities.  We later passed them as their vans' engines billowed out smoke.)  That didn't though stop me from picturing in lurid detail our death in the Tien Shan.  At times, to make matters even worse, the driver would stop the car, pull over, kick the tires, tighten the nuts on the tires and tinker with the engine in the pouring rain.  There were perhaps 4 of these stops, each becoming more and more frightening than the last, especially as I coudn't communicate with him as he didn't speak English and I can't speak Russian or Kyrgyz.

After an hour and a half, we made it through the mountains and found ourselves in the plains of Northern Kyrgyztsan.  By the time, we made it to the airport at 2 AM, I had finally fallen asleep.  Awakened by the bright lights of the airport, I silently said a prayer and woke up the kids, who had slept the entire trip (as I had advised them to).  As we got out of the van at the departures level of Manas airport, I thrust 2000 som (about $40) into our driver's fist, thanking him in my worse than elementary Russian for his efforts in getting us safely to the airport.

We walked into the airport, which is an even more dreary and horrible spot at 2 AM than Chinggis Khan International in UB, and breathed a sigh of relief.  Eventually we went through to the gates and then tried our best to spend the rest of our money, before boarding the plane back to Mongolia in the dead of the Kyrgyz night as it continued to pour down endless sheets of rain.

You have to be hard in Central Asia.