Thanksgiving in Mongolia

Ariel Levy
FROM The New Yorker

MY FAVORITE GAME when I was a child was

Mummy and Explorer. My father and I would trade
off roles: one of us had to lie very still with eyes
closed and arms crossed over the chest, and the other
had to complain, Ive been searching these pyramids
for so many years. When will I ever find the tomb of
Tutankhamun? (This was in the late seventies, when
Tut was at the Met, and we came in from the
suburbs to visit him frequently.) At the climax of the
game, the explorer stumbles on the embalmed
Pharaoh andbrace yourselfthe mummy opens
his eyes and comes to life. The explorer has to express
shock, and then says, So, whats new? To which the
mummy replies, You.
I was not big on playing house. I preferred
make-believe that revolved around adventure, featuring pirates and knights. I was also
domineering, impatient, relentlessly verbal, and, as an only child, often baffled by the mores
of other kids. I was not a popular little girl. I played Robinson Crusoe in a small wooden fort
that my parents built for me in the back yard. In the fort, I was neither ostracized nor ill at
easeI was self-reliant, brave, ingeniously surviving, if lost.
The other natural habitat for a child who loves words and adventure is the page, and I
was content when my parents read me Moby-Dick, Pippi Longstocking, or The
Hobbit. I decided early that I would be a writer when I grew up. That, I thought, was the
profession that went with the kind of woman I wanted to become: one who is free to do
whatever she chooses. I started keeping a diary in third grade and, in solidarity with Anne
Frank, gave it a name and made it my confidante. To this day, I feel comforted and relieved
of loneliness, no matter how foreign my surroundings, if I have a pad and a pen with which
to record my experiences.
Ive spent the past twenty years putting myself in foreign surroundings as frequently
as possible. There is nothing I love more than travelling to a place where I know nobody,
and where everything will be a surprise, and then writing about it. The first time I went to
Africa for a story, I was so excited that I barely slept during the entire two-week trip.
Everything was new: the taste of springbok meat, the pink haze over Cape Town, the noise
and chaos of the corrugated-tin alleyways in Khayelitsha township. I could still feel spikes of
adrenaline when I was back at my desk in New York, typing, while my spouse cooked a
chicken in the kitchen.
But as my friends, one after another, made the journey from young woman to

mother, it glared at me that I had not. I would often listen to a Lou Reed song called
Beginning of a Great Adventure, about the possibilities of imminent parenthood. A little
me or he or she to fill up with my dreams, Lou sings, with ragged hopefulness, a way of
saying life is not a loss. It became the soundtrack to my mulling on motherhood. I knew
that a child would make life as a professional explorer largely impossible. But having a kid
seemed in many ways like the wildest trip of all.
I always get terrified right before I travel. I become convinced that this time will be
different: I wont be able to figure out the map, or communicate with non-English speakers,
or find the people I need in order to write the story Ive been sent in search of. I will be lost
and incompetent and vulnerable. I know that my panic will turn to excitement once Im
thereit always doesbut that doesnt make the fear before takeoff any less vivid. So it was
with childbearing: I was afraid for ten years. I didnt like childhood, and I was afraid that Id
have a child who didnt, either. I was afraid I would be an awful mother. And I was afraid of
being grounded, sessilestuck in one spot for eighteen years of oboe lessons and math
homework that I couldnt finish the first time around.
I was on book tour in Athens when I decided that I would do it. My partnerwho
had always indicated that I would need to cast the deciding vote on parenthoodhad come
with me, and we were having one of those magical moments in a marriage when you find
each other completely delightful. My Greek publisher and his wife took us out dancing and
drinking, and cooked for us one night in their little apartment, which was overrun with
children, friends, moussaka, and cigarette smoke. Americans are not relaxed, one of the
other guests told me, holding his three-year-old and drinking an ouzo. Greece was falling
apart. The streets of Athens were crawling with cats and dogs that people had abandoned
because they could no longer afford pet food. But our hosts were jubilant. Their family
didnt seem like a burden; it seemed like a party. The idea bloomed in my head that being
governed by something other than my own wishes and wanderlust might be a pleasure, a
release.
I got pregnant quickly, to my surprise and delight, shortly before my thirty-eighth
birthday. It felt like making it onto a plane the moment before the gate closesyou cant
help but thrill. After only two months, I could hear the heartbeat of the creature inside me at
the doctors office. It seemed like magic: a little eye of newt in my cauldron and suddenly I
was a witch with the power to brew life into being. Even if you are not Robinson Crusoe in a
solitary fort, as a human being you walk this world by yourself. But when you are pregnant
you are never alone.
My doctor told me that it was fine to fly up until the third trimester, so when I was
five months pregnant I decided to take one last big trip. It would be at least a year, maybe
two, before Id be able to leave home for weeks on end and feel the elation of a new place
revealing itself. (Its like having a new lovereven the parts you arent crazy about have the
crackling fascination of the unfamiliar.) Just before Thanksgiving, I went to Mongolia.
People were alarmed when I told them where I was going, but I was pleased with myself. I
liked the idea of being the kind of woman whod go to the Gobi Desert pregnant, just as, at

twenty-two, Id liked the idea of being the kind of girl whod go to India by herself. And I
liked the idea of telling my kid, When you were inside me, we went to see the edge of the
earth. I wasnt truly scared of anything but the Mongolian winter. The tourist season winds
down in October, and by late November, when I got on the plane, the nights drop to twenty
degrees below zero. But I was prepared: Id bought snow pants big enough to fit around my
convex gut and long underwear two sizes larger than I usually wear.
To be pregnant is to be in some kind of discomfort pretty much all the time. For the
first few months, it was like waking up with a bad hangover every single morning but never
getting to drinkI was nauseated but hungry, afflicted with a perpetual headache, and really
qualified only to watch television and moan. That passed, but a week before I left for
Mongolia I started feeling an ache in my abdomen that was new. Round-ligament pain is
what I heard from everyone I knew whod been pregnant, and what I read on every prenatal
Web site: the uterus expanding to accommodate the baby, as he finally grew big enough to
make me look actually pregnant, instead of just chunky. That thought comforted me on the
fourteen-hour flight to Beijing, while I shifted endlessly, trying to find a position that didnt
hurt my round ligaments.
When my connecting flight landed in Mongolia, it was morning, but the gray haze
made it look like dusk. Ulaanbaatar is among the most polluted capital cities in the world, as
well as the coldest. The drive into town wound through frozen fields and clusters of felt
tentsgers, theyre called thereinto a crowded city of stocky, Soviet-era municipal
buildings, crisscrossing telephone and trolley lines, and old Tibetan Buddhist temples with
pagoda roofs. The people on the streets moved quickly and clumsily, burdened with layers
against the bitter weather.
I was there to report a story on the countrys impending transformation, as money
flooded in through the mining industry. Mongolia has vast supplies of coal, gold, and copper
ore; its wealth was expected to double in five years. But a third of the population still lives
nomadically, herding animals and sleeping in gers, burning coal or garbage for heat. Until the
boom, Mongolias best-known export was cashmere. As Jackson Cox, a young consultant
from Tennessee whod lived in Ulaanbaatar for twelve years, told me, Youre talking about
an economy based on yak meat and goat hair.
I got together with Cox on my first night in town. He sent a chauffeured car to pick
me upevery Westerner I met in U.B. had a car and a driverat the Blue Sky Hotel, a new
and sharply pointed glass tower that split the cold sky like a shark fin. When I arrived at his
apartment, he and a friend, a mining-industry lawyer from New Jersey, were listening to
Beyonc and pouring champagne. The place was clean and modern, but modest: for expats
in U.B., its far easier to accumulate wealth than it is to spend it. We went to dinner at a
French restaurant, where we all ordered beef, because seafood is generally terrible in
Mongolia, which is separated from the sea by its hulking neighbors (and former occupiers)
China and Russia. Then they took me to an underground gay bar called 100 Per Cent
which could have been in Brooklyn, except that everyone in Mongolia still smoked indoors. I
liked sitting in a booth in a dark room full of smoking, gay Mongolians, but my body was

feeling strange. I ended the night early.

When I woke up the next morning, the pain in my abdomen was insistent; I
wondered if the baby was starting to kick, which everyone said would be happening soon. I
called home to complain, and my spouse told me to find a Western clinic. I e-mailed Cox to
get his doctors phone number, thinking that Id call if the pain got any worse, and then I
went out to interview people: the minister of the environment, the president of a mining
concern, and, finally, a herdsman and conservationist named Tsetsegee Munkhbayar, who
became a folk hero after he fired shots at mining operations that were diverting water from
nomadic communities. I met him in the sleek lobby of the Blue Sky with Yondon Badrala
smart, sardonic man Id hired to translate for me in U.B. and to accompany me a few days
later to the Gobi, where we would drive a Land Rover across the cold sands to meet with
miners and nomads. Badral wore jeans and a sweater; Munkhbayar was dressed in a long,
traditional deel robe and a fur hat with a small metal falcon perched on top. It felt like having
a latte with Genghis Khan.
In the middle of the interview, Badral stopped talking and looked at my face; I must
have been showing my discomfort. He said that it was the same for his wife, who was
pregnant, just a few weeks further along than I was, and he explained the situation to
Munkhbayar. The nomads skin was chapped pink from the wind; his nostrils, eyes, and ears
all looked as if they had receded into his face to escape the cold. I felt a little surge of pride
when he said that I was brave to travel so far in my condition. But I was also starting to
worry.
I nearly cancelled my second dinner with the Americans that evening, but I figured
that I needed to eat, and they offered to meet me at the Japanese restaurant in my hotel. Cox
was leaving the next day to visit his family for Thanksgiving, and he was feeling guilty that
hed spent a fortune on a business-class ticket. I thought about my uncomfortable flight over
and said that it was probably worth it. Youre being a princess, Coxs friend told him
tartly, but I couldnt laugh. Something was happening inside me. I had to leave before the
food came.
I ran back to my room, pulled off my pants, and squatted on the floor of the
bathroom, just as I had in Cambodia when I had dysentery, a decade earlier. But the pain in
that position was unbearable. I got on my knees and put my shoulders on the floor and
pressed my cheek against the cool tile. I remember thinking, This is going to be the craziest shit
in history.
I felt an unholy storm move through my body, and after that there is a brief lapse in
my recollection; either I blacked out from the pain or I have blotted out the memory. And
then there was another person on the floor in front of me, moving his arms and legs, alive. I
heard myself say out loud, This cant be good. But it looked good. My baby was as pretty as
a seashell.
He was translucent and pink and very, very small, but he was flawless. His lovely lips
were opening and closing, opening and closing, swallowing the new world. For a length of
time I cannot delineate, I sat there, awestruck, transfixed. Every finger, every toenail, the

golden shadow of his eyebrows coming in, the elegance of his shouldersall of it was
miraculous, astonishing. I held him up to my face, his head and shoulders filling my hand,
his legs dangling almost to my elbow. I tried to think of something maternal I could do to
convey to him that I was, in fact, his mother, and that I had the situation completely under
control. I kissed his forehead and his skin felt like a silky frogs on my mouth.
I was vaguely aware that there was an enormous volume of blood rushing out of me,
and eventually that seemed interesting, too. I looked back and forth between my offspring
and the lake of blood consuming the bathroom floor and I wondered what to do about the
umbilical cord connecting those two things. It was surprisingly thick and ghostly white, a
twisted human rope. I felt sure that it needed to be severedthats always the first thing that
happens in the movies. I was afraid that if I didnt cut that cord my baby would somehow
suffocate. I didnt have scissors. I yanked it out of myself with one swift, violent tug.
In my hand, his skin started to turn a soft shade of purple. I bled my way across the
room to my phone and dialled the number for Coxs doctor. I told the voice that answered
that I had given birth in the Blue Sky Hotel and that I had been pregnant for nineteen
weeks. The voice said that the baby would not live. Hes alive now, I said, looking at the
person in my left hand. The voice said that he understood, but that it wouldnt last, and that
he would send an ambulance for us right away. I told him that if there was no chance the
baby would make it I might as well take a cab. He said that that was not a good idea.
Before I put down my phone, I took a picture of my son. I worried that if I didnt I
would never believe he had existed.
When the pair of Mongolian E.M.T.s came through the door, I stopped feeling
competent and numb. One offered me a tampon, which I knew not to accept, but the
realization that of the two of us I had more information stirred a sickening panic in me and I
said I needed to throw up. She asked if I was drunk, and I said, offended, No, Im upset.
Cry, she said. You just cry, cry, cry. Her partner bent to insert a thick needle in my
forearm and I wondered if it would give me Mongolian AIDS, but I felt unable to do
anything but cry, cry, cry. She tried to take the baby from me, and I had the urge to bite her
hand. As I lay on a gurney in the back of the ambulance with his body wrapped in a towel on
top of my chest, I watched the frozen city flash by the windows. It occurred to me that
perhaps I was going to go mad.
In the clinic, there were very bright lights and more needles and I.V.s and I let go of
the baby and that was the last I ever saw him. He was on one table and I was on another, far
away, lying still under the screaming lights, and then, confusingly, the handsomest man in
the world came through the door and said he was my doctor. His voice sounded nice,
familiar. I asked if he was South African. He was surprised that I could tell, and I explained
that I had spent time reporting in his country, and then we talked a bit about the future of
the A.N.C. and about how beautiful it is in Cape Town. I realized that I was covered in
blood, sobbing, and flirting.
Soon, he said that he was going home and that I could not return to the Blue Sky
Hotel, where I might bleed to death in my room without anyone knowing. I stayed in the

clinic overnight, wearing a T-shirt and an adult diaper that a kind, fat, giggling young nurse
gave me. After she dressed me, she asked, You want toast and tea? It was milky and sweet
and reminded me of the chai I drank in Nepal, where I went backpacking in the Himalayas
with a friend long before I was old enough to worry about the expiration of my fertility. It
had been a trip spent pushing my young body up the mountains, past green-and-yellow
terraced fields and villages full of goats, across rope bridges that hung tenuously over black
ravines with death at the bottom. We consumed a steady diet of hashish and Snickers bars
and ended up in a blizzard that killed several hikers but somehow left us only chilly.
I had been so lucky. Very little had ever truly gone wrong for me before that night on
the bathroom floor. And I knew, as surely as I now knew that I wanted a child, that this
change in fortune was my fault. I had boarded a plane out of vanity and selfishness, and the
dark Mongolian sky had punished me. I was still a witch, but my powers were all gone.
That is not what the doctor said when he came back to the clinic in the morning. He told
me that Id had a placental abruption, a very rare problem that, I later read, usually befalls
women who are heavy cocaine users or who have high blood pressure. But sometimes it
happens just because youre old. It could have happened anywhere, the doctor told me, and
he repeated what hed said the night before: there is no correlation between air travel and
miscarriage. I said that I suspected he was being a gentleman, and that I needed to get out of
the clinic in time for my eleven-oclock meeting with the secretary of the interior, whose
office I arrived at promptly, after I went back to the Blue Sky and showered in my room,
which looked like the site of a murder.
I spent the next five days in that room. Slowly, it set in that it was probably best if I
went home instead of to the Gobi, but at first I could not leave. Thanksgiving came and
went. There were rolling brownouts when everything went dark and still. I lay in my bed and
ate Snickers and drank little bottles of whiskey from the minibar while I watched television
programs that seemed as strange and bleak as my new life. Someone had put a white bath
mat on top of the biggest bloodstain, the one next to my bed, where I had crouched when I
called for help, and little by little the white went red and then brown as the blood seeped
through it and oxidized. I stared at it. I looked at the snow outside my window falling on the
Soviet architecture. But mostly I looked at the picture of the baby.
When I got back from Mongolia, I was so sad I could barely breathe. On five or six
occasions, I ran into mothers who had heard what had happened, and they took one look at
me and burst into tears. (Once, this happened with a man.) Within a week, the apartment
we were supposed to move into with the baby fell through. Within three, my marriage had
shattered. I started lactating. I continued bleeding. I cried ferociously and without
warningin bed, in the middle of meetings, sitting on the subway. It seemed to me that
grief was leaking out of me from every orifice.
I could not keep the story of what had happened in Mongolia inside my mouth. I
went to buy clothes that would fit my big body but that didnt have bands of stretchy
maternity elastic to accommodate a baby who wasnt there. I heard myself tell a horrified
saleswoman, I dont know what size I am, because I just had a baby. He died, but the good

news is, now Im fat. Well-meaning women would tell me, I had a miscarriage, too, and I
would reply, with unnerving intensity, He was alive. I had given birth, however briefly, to
another human being, and it seemed crucial that people understand this. Often, after I told
them, I tried to get them to look at the picture of the baby on my phone.
After several weeks, I was looking at it only once a day. It was months before I got it
down to once a week. I dont look at it much anymore, but people I havent seen in a while
will say, Im so sorry about what happened to you. And their compassion pleases me.
But the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebodys mother were black
magic. There is no adventure I would trade them for; there is no place I would rather have
seen. Sometimes, when I think about it, I still feel a dark hurt from some primal part of
myself, and if Im alone in my apartment when this happens I will hear myself making
sounds that I never made before I went to Mongolia. I realize that I have turned back into a
wounded witch, wailing in the forest, undone.
Most of the time it seems sort of O.K., though, natural. Nature. Mother Nature. She
is free to do whatever she chooses.