Chill Out Man

ULANBATAAR, Mongolia - Last night I tried to upload a few of my photos to the Internet. Ulanbataar has an Internet cafe on each block, squeezing a couple dozen ancient Dells into a dark room. At 50 cents an hour, it's cheap and always available, but damn if it isn't painfully slow. After two hours, I'd put up maybe 40 pictures. I decided to head back to the guesthouse.

Since it's run by a Korean, guests are required to remove their shoes at the guesthouse entrance and put on clunky plastic slippers. I chose a too-small blue pair and sat down on the couch. Myriam, Caleb, and Jin were finishing the "Sisterhood of Travelling Pants." I arrived in time to see the titular garment flashed across the screen along with the credits.

On the couch were two new people, Eric and Erica. They are Peace Corps volunteers, just back from one month in Thailand. Both wore Thai style baggy pants and tanned skin not normally seen in the Mongolian winter.

They came from a small town in Missouri, north of the college town of Columbia. Eighteen months into a two year stay in far eastern Mongolian, Eric and Erica had a few stories to tell.

We moved from the couch to the kitchen, where we pulled out the cards and a couple bottles of vodka.

"The other volunteers sometimes come over to play cards, but we always just end up drinking," Eric said.

After a shot, the conversation turned toward drunkeness in Mongolia. Soviets gave the Mongolians a taste for vodka, but genetics gave them little tolerance. In Choybalsan, people are passed out drunk in the street before 9 a.m., male life expectenacy is a decade less than that of women, and there are frequent bar fights.

On their last night in Ulanbataar before Thailand, Eric and Erica went out to a club. As Eric went toward the dancefloor, a Mongolian man pushed him. Thinking him just another harmless drunk, Eric ignored him. Thirty minutes later the same man came over and ripped the right arm off his long-sleeve shirt. He grabbed him so hard that his white undershirt tore as well. He showed us the tear.

Eric said he acted without malice. Why did this man act so aggressively? Perhaps this was an act of xenophobia, an expression of Mongolian desire to keep foreigners out.

"They hate the Chinese," Eric said.

Eighteen months ago, Choybalsan had two Chinese restaurants. Now there are seven. Chinese companies are buying abandonded Soviet mines from American investors.

Cheap Chinese imports flood the town's markets. Locals fear that the Chinese will overwhelm their sparsely populated country.

I've heard this time and time again in the past week. China is the Grean Satan. They stole half the country 100 years ago - the province of Inner Mongolia. Some Chinese maps show all of Mongolia as part of China.

"Some of them dislike us, but they really hate the Chinese," Eric said.

Mongolia is in the same situation as Lithuania, in constant peril of being swallowed whole by a large, powerful neighbor. While Lithuania looks to the European Union for protection, Mongolia has America and its Peace Corps volunteers. Perhaps they shouldn't be so quick to anger when they arrive at a disco.