I live in Ulaanbaatar Mongolia

Here in Ulaanbaatar Mongolia, I have just finished my third term of teaching. This has been the hardest so far. Over the last nine weeks, I wavered over one question: Will I stay or return home? This was the first real choice of my adult life. The choice to go to university wasn’t real, nor was the choice of university. I made the obviously ‘correct’ choice, of going to university, and going to the best one. Then it was time to find my first real job. This wasn’t a real choice, since I didn’t decide anything. I spent some time unemployed. I was a private tutor who didn’t respond to any inquiries, so I had no students. I hated being unemployed because I was unable to direct myself. Living is composition, you ought to put everything into its proper place. Maybe the macrocosm is the microcosm, and how you spend each day decides your life. When I am left to my own devices, I do nothing. I am, without prompting, like the process of hibernation or a flower which refuses to face the sun. Without direction, my life became an undifferentiated abyss. And I didn’t really apply for many jobs. This is how I ended up in Mongolia: an international school here was the first to reach out to me, rather than the other way round, and I accepted their offer without making a single decision. The two flights took in total 20 hours, and on the Frankfurt to Ulaanbaatar leg, I was sat next to a member of the Mongolian Olympic Shooting Team, who placed 7^th in his event.

A gift from a dear student, received a few weeks ago.

I can’t decide what to write, either. Moving to Mongolia brought salvation: isolation, and fixation on art. I fell into a tidy routine. I would read with breakfast, I would work, and clock out exactly as the day ended. I would go home and write. In the evening, I would lie down and watch TV. While here, I’ve read Goncharov’s Oblomov (a body horror for layabouts), Unamuno’s Mist (truly terrible), Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars (an encyclopaedic rumination on the eternally in-exile), Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius (deeds of the centrist Anti-Christ), and Bolaño’s 2666, among other things. I have consistently released work on Substack and have a novel in progress. The process is clearly working. I have not been able to watch many films, cinema is now my jilted lover, because the only place with good English-language cinema is Kafka Bar, whose owner (I am dearly fond of him) translates the movies and produces his own Mongolian subtitles for them. They are projected in the back room of his bar via Windows Movie Player. The acoustics are not great, though I appreciated the opportunity to watch Blue Velvet, and Amélie, which was a mistake, since I didn’t stop to think that the movie was French, and the subtitles would be in Mongolian, and I had not a clue what was going on, but I quite liked the girl.

David Lynch’s Blue Velvet

There’s another sort of routine I stick to as well: the routine degradation of my routine over the course of the two months of term. At the beginning, I wake up at 6am exactly, I read for an hour every morning. I clean my flat when I get home, I finish a new piece every few days and add something to my novel daily. As the term goes on, I am steadily exhausted. IB revision sessions, parents’ evenings, needing to wake up at 4am to finish lesson plans, needing to finish at 6pm or 7pm, needing to work Sunday evenings. I wake up terrified at the prospect of working again. In fact, I’m so terrified, I do nothing all weekend, since all I want is release, and I delay the terror until it’s time to lesson plan, the night before Monday morning. I snap at students, I dissociate in the school café, and eagerly await only the opportunities to eat and sleep — but when the time comes to sleep, I don’t, instead I lie awake until the last moment. And when it is time to wake up, I lie in bed until the last moment. I wait for the last moment. So, my writing comes in waves: a month or two of consistent, even egregious effort, then a month of paltry output.

Ulaanbaatar in winter

The city is terrifying. I don’t speak the language and I’m not even close to learning it. For three months, everything was sheer dark and cold, and I barely went outside. I went for a ‘mental health’ walk once in early January, to a café about 40 minutes from me. By the time I got there, my eyelashes were frozen, I picked icicles out of my moustache. Once I opened the door taking my coat off was a race, because the café was overwhelmingly warm, and I would go from shivering to sweating in a few seconds: I wouldn’t even have to sweat, the ice in my hair and beard would melt all over my face. I sat down and ordered an English Breakfast. Mongolian food is, to be frank, not the best (at least in the city), I mostly cook for myself or sample new Korean snacks. Sometimes, I like to have a taste of home. The waiter came over and apologised — he had to pop over to the shop to get mushrooms, and 30 minutes later my food was ready. It was something interesting: an English Breakfast where each thing was not quite how you’d (being an Englishman) expect it. The sausages were German wieners. The baked beans were simply beans. Scrambled eggs, and thick bacon chunks, rather than long streaks. There was a salad to the side with lettuce, tomatoes, and mushrooms (with delicious salad dressing), rather than the familiar grilled-half-of-tomato and mushrooms presented separately. It was a fine breakfast but I was somehow sweating the whole way through, and I did not feel the slightest bit lifted. After eating I wandered the city and saw precisely nothing. This was the dead of winter. As hard as I tried, there was nothing to do or see. I returned home, I pulled the icicles out my moustache and dried the sweat from my forehead, and I didn’t go outside the next few weekends.

When everything is dark and cold, it’s hard to find much to do. When I tell people I live in Mongolia, they see it as adventurous. I’ve seen many reels captioned ‘the trip to Mongolia making it out the gc’, depicting guys wildly drinking on horseback. It is, sometimes, like this. But I have a job, and weekends usually aren’t enough time to get out to the countryside. In the city, things are mostly forbidding. There are countless shops where, frankly, I have no idea what is even being sold. Occasionally you pass a guy selling a cow carcass from the boot of his Prius, or someone selling 1 litre bottles of mysterious white liquid (ayrag) on top of a wooden pallet. I’ve not tried it, maybe I should. Freedom isn’t all its cracked up to be: I am not a free person, I follow the course of right activity, and being a foreigner, my presence is always a nuisance, there is nothing for me to do but wander and look at things. I have found while travelling that strangers are friendly everywhere other than Germany. In Mongolia, people are friendly too. But most conversations go:

— Senbeno.

— Senbeno.

— (Quietly, with deference) Can I, uh, get a table?

— (Incomprehensible)

— Ah, uh, ok.

— [Exeunt]

Yes, most of my conversations with Mongolians are at restaurants, with restaurant staff. I am not some careening white boy with a GoPro doing street interviews. Of course, living in any foreign country where you don’t know the language is like this. Before Mongolia, I lived for a time in Vietnam, where more people speak English, and where I was with around ten other young English people at all times. In that case, the foreigners are the bullish ones. In my case, I am awkwardly led around the city by myself, trusting that people will take pity and bestow a few words of English on me.

My flat in Ulaanbaatar

Des Esseintes, of Huysmans’ À rebours, is a downwardly mobile aristocrat, born into a dying genus, noble blood that has expended its worth on itself, one last spurt. After a revelrous youth he is truly spent, misanthropic, impotent, without purpose, having only a caustic, vituperative aesthetic sense left. With this last quality, like a splinter, the last remnant of a great log, he retires to the countryside, builds himself an isolationist estate, and does mostly nothing. My position, that of a downwardly mobile petit-bourgeois who has squandered his education and malformed his cursus honorum, is similar. I left to halfway between the centre of the world and nowhere: I can still peer in, I watch everyone’s stories, I sometimes talk with friends back home (though it feels wrong — because I moved), but I am somewhere without peers, without familiar comforts, there is nothing but myself and my own ability to shape my surroundings. This is all, of course, what I wanted. I wanted to put myself to the test and prove the strength of my qualities. I wanted isolation, quiet, a total lack of interruption. I wanted the freedom to live life without any priors. I also wanted money and a place to live, things which were sorely lacking in the UK. I have always believed that life is meant to be painful and agonising. And I have quite enjoyed my painful and agonising time here.

The Mongolian countryside

Trips out to the countryside are the best part about living here, the unique boon of where I live. I stay in gers and shiver, in a comfortable way, wielding a fire poker, piling log after log into the wood stove, ducking out (since the door is low and small) to get bundles of sticks, hiding under endless layers of blankets in bed until the ger crackles with warmth. I hike through empty plains, up hills spiked with Buddhist monasteries, where I spin the prayer wheels and take my shoes off to wander, with cold toes, past the paintings of Arhats and Bodhisattvas. I have taken a serious liking to Buddhist art, and Mongolian art specifically. Traditional Mongolian paintwork is full of beautiful swirls of primary colours, all in sequence, little clouds like blades of grass, mysterious geometries like knots where each twine is a new colour. At the Ariayapal Temple in Terelj, I saw pictograms of men being tortured in fire and eaten alive by Buddhist deities. In the Zanabazar Fine Arts gallery, I saw the unique Tibeto-Mongol fusion, the same bright swirls of colour now arranged in mandalas, or forming the array of peripheral figures patterned in worship surrounding the central deity.

Works at the Zanabazar Fine Arts Gallery

I decided, ultimately, to leave Mongolia. I do really love it here. I love the cold, I love the pollution: I love everything painful and difficult. I love the feeling of exile which drove me here, it’s a feeling which is my own. It’ll always drive me on to new places. I love the people I’ve met here, and the things I’ve seen I wouldn’t see elsewhere. I can feel that if I were to stay here longer than my allotted time, I would rot. I don’t think I’m meant to be here. I feel, not homesickness, but the intense desire to make my life back home. In particular, to see my friends, and to enjoy the familiar comforts of London: seeing a movie, taking public transport (I miss this), paying extortionate rent, not being able to find a job. I want to be around other creative people: My writing has gotten better along with my focus. I know more clearly what I want. The sharpened nub of my aesthetic sense is now more like a red wedge, ready to split open every head of oatmeal. My return feels prodigious, I can’t miss it.