Why mongolians don cry

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 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.

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. When the pair of Mongolian E. 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 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. 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.

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.

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.

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 warning—in bed, in the middle of meetings, sitting on the subway. It seemed to me that grief was leaking out of me from every orifice.

Like opera, throat singing requires decades of specialist training to create multiple pitches at the same time. Hearing an expert up-close is an almost supernatural experience. We recorded Batzorig Vaanchig , one of the very finest, and the subtlety and colour of his overtones was astounding. To get to the throat-singing source, I travelled 1, miles west from Ulaanbaatar across the Gobi desert to Hovd province.

I spent several nights in a yurt on the shores of a vast lake watching cranes migrating south from Siberia, the glacier-tipped high Altai mountains on the horizon. No roads meant gruesome car sickness. A grand master sang ancient verse with his granddaughter on his knee. A choir sang pop covers with a synthesiser backing track. It was surreal and glorious. What better mark of a tradition in rude health than a gaggle of six-year-olds belting out Born to be Wild in amassed overtones? Remember Genghis Khan?

Mongolians certainly do. International wins have made Ariunbaatar a celebrity at home. Some people told me to be more resilient and follow what they did in their culture and just accept it. Some comforted me by saying languages change over time. But the question bugging me was who changes languages, because confusion over the term is still strong. One half Mexican and half Mongolian person contacted me to say that in the Latino community, the words "Mongolito" and "Mongolita" still have very ugly meanings.

And another person from Morocco told me they have a son with Down's syndrome and that neighbours call her Mongolian and throw stones at them in the street. Again someone from South Africa wrote to tell me they were "shocked to find that Mongolians refer to themselves as Mongols when I arrived in Mongolia". In the US, some Mongolian friends of mine were stopped on the street by a lady insisting they should take their child to a doctor because she suspected he had Down's syndrome.

And while on a course in London, my Chinese and French classmates told me: "We didn't know someone from Mongolia could be normal and clever like you. I want people to know you can use Mongol in the same way as you would refer to a Scot, Turk or Pole. It's fine. We can unlearn negative connotations because we learnt them. You can call me Mongol because I am one.

Listen again on the BBC iPlayer. Image source, Fred Merriefield. Uuganaa with her Mongolian parents and niece. Image source, Other.