SECTION TEN
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COLUMN
FIFTY-EIGHT, APRIL 1, 2001
(Copyright © 2001 Al Aronowitz)
FROM MONGOLIA TO THE AMERICAN DREAM
[This article was originally published in The Ellensburg Daily Record.]
Mongolia
is a landlocked country in northern Asia, about the size of Alaska, surrounded
by Russia to the north and China on the other three points of the compass.
The terrain is rugged, mostly steppes and desert, and the majority of the
country's two to three million citizens are pastoral nomads, living in yurts or
their modern equivalent, living on horseback and moving herds of everything from
cattle to reindeer to camels over a vast grazing landscape.
These people are descendants of the Huns, whose leader Ghengis Khan and
his swift cavalry, back in the 12th and 13th centuries, terrorized and conquered
a good part of the known world.
After
the decline of the Khan dynasty, the Chinese had their way with Mongolia for a
good number of centuries, but in 1921 the country broke free from Chinese
control and became a Soviet satellite. There
was coal and ore and minerals to be mined, and modest industrial centers sprang
up around the country's major cities such as Darxan and Ulaanbaatar, the capital.
A gap had already existed between nomadic Mongolians and those living in the cities, but with the introduction of modern industry, the gap widened, exacerbated in no small part by a transportation problem--to this day what roads exist are primitive, and unless you've got a rig with four-wheel drive, you travel cross-country on horseback.
*
* *
Inhee
(pronounced Inca) Mijiddorj was born in Ulaanbaatar in 1969, and from the get-go
he was out of synch with both ends of his polarized country—his father was an
artist, his mother a librarian. Inhee
spent the first six years of his life in the care of his grandmother while his
parents completed their university studies, and by the time he went to live with
his parents, he had already become self-sufficient beyond his years.
In school, along with his younger brother and two younger sisters, he was exposed to
There was something missing in Inhee's life, but he did not know what it was
political
indoctrination, but with Inhee it was water off
a duck's back--his exterior and interior life were as polarized as his
country. He fostered perceptions
that did not jibe with the world he'd been born into.
Things he thought were funny, no one else thought was funny, and things
that were presented to him as ultimate truths seemed shallow and lacking.
There
was something missing in his life, but he did not know what it was.
The closest his inner and outer worlds came to coinciding was when his
father would have a group of free-spirited artists over and they would drink and
carry on far into the night, expressing their serious dissatisfaction with the
state of the nation and wondering how life truly was in such far away places as
America.
Inhee
followed in his father's footsteps--he began to paint.
But even here there was no full escape from a world saturated with
political correctness. His father
was ranked among the top artists in the country, but what he was required to
paint were murals and posters and portraits glorifying the personalities and
achievements of the State. He could
do landscapes on the side if he chose, but there was no place to sell them.
Anything remotely abstract was taboo.
After
eight years of schooling, Inhee was competitively selected to go into a
university curriculum. He did two
more years of regular schooling, and then, at the age of 18, did two years
compulsory military service. Upon
getting out of the army he entered a Fine Arts College, and two years after
that, in 1991, he was graduated. He
got accepted to do advanced study at the prestigious Repin School of Art in
Leningrad, and off he went to Russia.
Inhee
was about a half year into his studies in Leningrad when the Evil Empire,
as Ronald Reagan so blithely dubbed it, came tumbling down. Communism gave way
to capitalism, subsidized education went out the window, and Inhee was forced to
returned to Ulaanbaatar.
The
entire confederation of East Block countries had been plunged into economic and
political chaos with the capitulation of communism. Governments were declared
democracies with the wave of a wand and the issuance of a decree, but it was not
such a simple matter to change living patterns and mindsets that had become
deeply ingrained over a period of more than half a century.
As
Inhee describes it, government in Mongolia became paralyzed as it struggled to
come to grips with such alien concepts as banks, free trade and the stock
exchange. Borders were opened,
businesses and corporations
Inhee did his best to stay out of the fray. He painted with his father, landscapes now, political pomp was out of vogue. They were essentially street vendors, selling paintings depicting Mongolian life to the influx of mostly East-Block tourists. But within a few years his father began landing commissions, and they painted to order for the offices and lobbies of various businesses and foreign corporations. They'd landed on their feet financially, but for Inhee, the new life did not seem much better than the old. Something was still missing.
*
* *
Inhee
spent seven years in Mongolia under the new way of life. His brother, who had also studied art, stopped painting and
became a wholesale art dealer. One
of his sisters, a nurse, went to Korea. His
other sister became a journalist for a Ulaanbaatar newspaper.
The
structure of life in urban Mongolia was being warped into an ever-changing
configuration, and there was a substantial migration into East Block and even
western countries. When in 1999
Inhee's aunt, who had moved to the United States with her husband as part of an
agricultural exchange venture, invited him to visit, suggesting he bring some of
his art along, Inhee immediately accepted.
America! Now he would see
first-hand what his father and his artist friends only dreamed about.
Inhee
landed in Kansas, which is like Dorothy landing in Oz. He and his brother-in-law packed up a van with Inhee's art,
and off they went in search of markets. They
crisscrossed through a number of states, including Oklahoma, Colorado and New
Mexico, but Mongolian art proved to be ahead of its time in central
and southwestern America. Within
a few short weeks they were back in Kansas, Dorothy's Kansas this time, and
reality began to set in.
Inhee
was dismayed but not disheartened. He
asked a Bulgarian friend of his brother-in-law where he could go where the
countryside was beautiful and the people were friendly and his art might get a
better reception. Go west, said the
Bulgarian. Go Northwest.
Inhee
wound up in Ellensburg, Washington and Inhee took to the town like a fish takes
to water. At long last he'd found a
physical place and a way of life that corresponded to his inner reality. He found he understood American humor, and he felt easy with
the way people conducted their lives, the way they went about their work, how
they interacted. And he discovered
a generosity like he had never known before through the help and the love shown
him by the congregation of Ellensburg's First Christian Church.
Perhaps
the most important thing that came alive in Inhee in Ellensburg is his new-found
spiritual awareness. Spiritual
awareness is not looked upon kindly in a totalitarian state--in the early
Seventies in Mongolia, a state-orchestrated pogrom razed the Buddhist temples
and slaughtered over 40,000 monks and laypersons. Inhee has a hard time pinpointing the nature of this
awareness. It's intangible, but he
says it came about through his exposure to the way Americans live. For the first time, his life is imbued with a meaning that
goes beyond politics and ideologies and lends quality to everything that he
does.
He's
not sure what the future holds. Recently
his country elected an all-communist government, and he does not want to go back
to that. His dream is to remain in
America, in Ellensburg, to work here and to create his art--For the first time
in his life, he feels like he's home.
The paper work is in, and I for one hope Inhee's dream comes true. Ellensburg would be the richer for it. ##
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