Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (35 page)

“When their minds are cleared of what they have forgotten, when they have learned forgetfulness well, I teach them to work. Whatever kind of work they want to do, I will find a way to teach it to them. Some train only to clean houses or take care of children. Others learn skills they can use as they care for orphans, and some begin toward a real profession. They must learn to do these things well and to have pride in them.

“And then when they have mastered work, at last I teach them to love.” I wondered aloud how one teaches such a skill. “Well, I actually teach them that by way of manicures and pedicures,” she said. I raised an eyebrow. “In the camp, I built a sort of lean-to and made it a steam bath, and now in Phnom Penh I have a similar one, a little better built. I take them there so that they can become clean, and I teach them how to give one another manicures and pedicures and how to take care of their fingernails, because doing that makes them feel beautiful, and they want so much to feel beautiful. It also makes them give up their bodies to the care of others. It takes a lot for a woman who has been so wantonly and violently injured to extend her hand or foot, to trust a relative stranger to come at her body with a sharp implement. When they learn not to flinch, it rescues them from physical isolation, and that leads to the breakdown of emotional isolation. While they are together washing and putting on nail polish, they begin to talk, and bit by bit they learn to trust one another, and by the end of it all, they have learned how to make friends, so that they will never have to be so lonely again. Their stories, which they have told to no one but me—they begin to tell those stories to one another.”

Phaly Nuon showed me the tools of her psychologist’s trade: the little bottles of colored enamel, the steam room, the sticks for pushing back cuticles, the emery boards, the towels. Grooming is one of the primary forms of socialization among primates, and this return to grooming as a socializing force among human beings struck me as curiously organic. When I remarked on that, she laughed and told me about monkeys she had seen in the jungle. Perhaps they, too,
were learning to love, she remarked. I told her that I thought it was difficult to teach ourselves or others how to forget, how to work, and how to love and be loved, but she said it was not so complicated if you could do those three things yourself. She told me about how the women she has treated have become a community, and about how well they do with the orphans now in their care.

“There is a final step,” she said to me after a long pause. “At the end, I teach them the most important thing. I teach them that these three skills—forgetting, working, and loving—are not three separate skills, but part of one enormous whole, and that it is the practice of these things together, each as part of the others, that makes a difference. It is the hardest thing to convey”—she laughed—“but they all come to understand this, and when they do—why, then they are ready to go into the world again.”

Phaly Nuon died on November 27, 2012, from injuries sustained in an automobile accident. Her funeral took place over seven days and was attended by thousands of people, many of whom had been children at her Future Light Orphanage. Hundreds of children who lived there mourned her as their mother.

The situation of the mentally ill in Cambodia is still bleak, and continues to be aggravated by forced displacement and human trafficking. PTSD is ubiquitous. The suicide rate is nearly three times the world average. Yet despite the citizens’ fragile mental health, the care system is abysmal; roughly one in three mentally ill people is kept in a cage or tied down with chains. Most mentally ill Cambodians neither seek nor receive help. Only 0.02 percent of the Cambodian health budget goes to mental health. Only the Khmer-Soviet Friendship Hospital provides inpatient treatment, and Cambodia has a mere thirty-five trained psychiatrists to serve a population of 15 million. In the spring of 2015, one Cambodian province proposed that mentally ill people be rounded up, sent to pagodas, and cared for by monks to recover their “beauty and order.”

Travel + Leisure
, July 1999

My mother used to indicate the obscurity of some destination—where an uncle she didn’t much want to visit anyway was domiciled, where a college she hoped I wouldn’t attend was located—by saying, “That might as well be in Outer Mongolia.” Perhaps that is why Mongolia became for me a symbol of the remote. Often, I’ve imagined some place to be very exotic only to arrive and find it disappointingly familiar, but Mongolia was emphatically another place and seemed to have lingered in another time. The gorgeousness of Mongolia is a shimmering presence that stays with you as you traverse the country.

I came down with terrible food poisoning in the Gobi Desert. I was traveling with a colleague who decided halfway through the trip that he had had enough and headed home. By chance, I stumbled upon a college acquaintance who was living in Ulaanbaatar; after a brief conversation, I invited her to join me, and she jumped at the offer. She spoke excellent Mongolian and knew enough to contribute a steady stream of insights, but not so much as to be bored by what we saw.

W
e took the thirty-six-hour train ride (rather than the two-hour plane ride) from Beijing to Ulaanbaatar. On the way my traveling companions
and I saw much of the Great Wall and some of Hebei and Shanxi provinces in north-central China. Then we passed through the endless flat monotony of Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of China. In the next cabin was a twenty-year-old Mongolian Buddhist monk (he joined the monastery when he was eight) who had been studying in India and was returning home for the first time in five years. He was sharing his quarters with a German management consultant, and next to them were a twenty-one-year-old graduate student of Russian from North Dakota and a retired English teacher from Cleveland. A Polish novelist who wore five wristwatches was in number 5. In the next car were an outrageously beautiful French couple who didn’t speak to anyone and some Hare Krishnas from Slovenia who were trying (unsuccessfully) to convert us all. After two days we arrived in Ulaanbaatar, capital of independent (aka “Outer”) Mongolia.

Mongolia is one-sixth the size of the United States, with a population of about 2.5 million. Most of its people are nomadic, living in wood-framed felt tents and herding sheep, goats, yaks, camels, cattle, and horses. They do not have paved roads. They do not in general use electricity or own cars. They practice Tibetan Buddhism; in fact, the Mongolian ruler Altan Khan coined the title
Dalai Lama
more than four hundred years ago. Many temples and monasteries, despite seventy years of Communism, are thriving.

Though Mongolia has a literacy rate of almost 90 percent and an impressively well-informed population, outside the cities the way of life is much as it was at the turn of the first millennium. The country has important copper and gold mines and is the world’s leading source of cashmere, but it remains largely immune to modernization and industrialization. After almost eighty years as an “independent” buffer state between Russia and China, Mongolia has recently established democracy, and in the last election, despite the limited number of polling stations and the vast distances between them, more than 90 percent of the eligible population voted.

From Ulaanbaatar the guides and I drove three-quarters of the way toward Kharkhorin before setting up our first night’s camp in a big field near a
ger
, one of the low-slung tent-like structures in
which Mongolians traditionally live. In the morning, we woke to the sound of horse traffic. I sat up, pulled aside the flap of my tent, and saw a tall man wearing a long side-buttoned coat of blue velvet, tied at the waist with a yellow silk sash. I stumbled into wakefulness, half-dressed, and followed him to the
ger
, where he gave me cheese and butter and a slice of fresh bread. Such hospitality is automatic in this nomad country, and endlessly delightful to a Western visitor. I tried his horses, provoking amused delight from the little boys and girls, who from the age of four know how to ride and at six move more self-assuredly on their mounts than I can walk. An older child, perhaps sixteen, came to look at our car and gestured to the inside of the door with the bemused air of an action hero on an alien spacecraft. I showed him how one could rotate the handle to make the window go up (he thought this amazing); and I showed him how if you push down the lock, people can’t open the door from the outside (he thought this hilarious).

We arrived in Kharkhorin on the first day of its Naadam celebration, a festivity of sport that takes place July 11 through 13 every year. The number of horsemen we saw heading across the roadless countryside and the bright colors they wore told us which way to go even before we had spotted the first of the distant pavilions. As we came closer, we picked up on the crowd’s excitement. The jockeys had set out near dawn, and more than two hundred horses galloped in the morning’s race. At least six hundred others stood in rows, and the spectators sat astride their mounts the way Western audiences sit in grandstands. Everyone was eagerly waiting for the first glimpse on the horizon of the winning stallion. The men and women mostly wore long robes, called
del
, often of velvet or brocade, tied at the hip with silk sashes of brilliant yellow, crimson, or green. Saddles were ornamented with silver, and many riders had silver crops and chatelaines. Colorful hats, some trimmed in fur, crested in points like steeples. A few hotshot adolescents who had drunk too much
airag
(Mongolia’s specialty: fermented horse milk, which is what one might call an acquired taste) were riding fast, and from time to time the crowd had to part before them. Children and the elderly were pushed to the front, while the rest of us on foot strained to see
over their heads. The air rang with speculations, greetings, family arguments, and plans.

At last the first horse came through, and the cheering erupted. We parted to make way for an endless line of runners-up, all bearing jockeys ages four to seven. They cantered through the crowd and slowed only in the distance. Ribbons flew from the bridles. The winner was taken to a nearby field, where a lama in a flowing robe and a yellow, pleated hat blessed him in the name of the Buddha. Everyone was laughing, some began singing, and the joy was for old and new friends alike. We received invitations—translated by our guide—from every Mongolian we met: come into our tent, have some of our
airag
, have a piece of fried dough, some cheese. They struggled to communicate over the language barrier, swore brotherhood with us, gave us their hats to try on, taught us words of exuberant Mongolian.

The next morning, closer to town, we watched the wrestling. Silk tents were pitched in a great circle on a greensward. Cavalry kept the crowd more or less in order, though periodically spectators rushed forward and threatening words were exchanged. The judges sat under a blue canopy adorned with white sacred symbols. Music played loudly; people jostled one another for good views or shady spots. One by one, the wrestlers came out in long leather
del
, paraded past the cheering crowd, then removed their coats to reveal hand-embroidered wrestler’s garb. Each solemnly performed an eagle dance around a judge, then slapped the front and the back of his thighs (
thwack! thwack!
and
thwack! thwack! 
). Next, partners began sparring according to ancient rules, striving not to touch the earth except with their feet and the open palms of their hands, while forcing their opponents, with a hair-raising mix of weight and precision, down to the ground.

Nearby, the archers were competing, firing slender arrows over a long meadow. The men shot from a back line; the women, in white silk, stood a few feet closer to the targets. On another field was a pickup game of polo. Small stands sold cakes, carpets, or radios. The hillside that formed the backdrop for the events was a wash of color: the revelers had pitched a small village there. The smell of meat cooking on open fires mixed with scents of curdled
airag
and the wild thyme that the wrestlers were trampling. I could have lived five years
on the hospitality the Mongolians offered. I photographed one man who looked particularly noble in his saddle, and he swept me up onto his horse. From that lofty height I watched the sport as his friends asked me questions and gave me cow’s-milk liquor.

We left the Naadam, and as we traveled deeper into Övörkhangai Province (Kharkhorin is on its northern edge), the paved roads stopped. Imagine the worst dirt road you’ve driven. Now envision the worst stretch of that road; now that worst stretch in the rain; now that worst stretch in the rain immediately after an earthquake. You see in your mind’s eye one of the better roads in Mongolia. We crossed muddy fields where it was impossible to see the road, and we forded rivers when our driver thought the bridges looked unstable. It was rough going, and more than once we had to get out to push our car—or to assist others whose cars had given up.

But despite the wild jolting, the magnificence of that drive will stay with me forever. The great hills were nearly mountains. There were, however, no trees; and grazing animals had cropped the lush grass so low that it was as smooth as a golf course. A brook flowed through the bottom of a valley, and yellow flowers bloomed all around. Slender columns of smoke came from a
ger
here and there. Herds feasted on the vegetation: yaks and cows and sheep and goats and even the occasional stray camel from the Gobi, and astonishing numbers of horses running free. There were no predators and no hiding places; the feeling was of sublime peace.

Every so often a herdsman would come into view, smoking a pipe, watching his flock; children played and laughed by the water’s edge. Women emerging from their
ge
r
s surveyed the scene with satisfaction as they arranged trays of cheese on their roofs to dry. Eagles circled overhead in deliberate patterns, while smaller birds flew lower. Marmots darted from their holes and scampered in and out of sight. Here were innocent stretches of earth that had been neither exploited nor deliberately preserved. I have never encountered a terrain that was at once so magnificent and so unthreatening; no evidence of the monstrous force of nature was here, but only the golden, the light, the perfect.