My father died unexpectedly when I was 26 years old. My parents divorced when I was in high school; my mother remarried and moved to New Zealand. On the day of my father’s death, my brothers and sister and I tearfully converged at his two-bedroom home to divvy up his meager worldly possessions: thousands of tools, books and some dour artwork that used to hang in my grandfather’s house. The only thing I wanted was Dad’s oversized world atlas. For me, it was the holy book.
In the 1970s, when I fancied myself a tragically misunderstood teenager, I sat with my father on Sunday afternoons and watched Miami Dolphins games on TV. Football was one of the languages my father spoke, and so I, too, learned its vocabulary and syntax. It was safe, shared turf at a time in my life when even benign topics were laced with landmines. Those Sundays are the only times I remember that Dad and I spent alone together.
During halftime, Dad turned down the volume and pulled the atlas from the bookshelves that lined a wall of our family room. Together we’d pore over the world while some high school marching band oompahed across the football field during the halftime show.
The world and its beguiling nomenclature were laid out before us like a buffet table as we turned page after page of cities unfathomably far away, cites with names that giggled off his tongue, cities that seduced with their otherness.
One of Dad’s favorites was Ulaanbaatar, the capital of what was then called Outer Mongolia. He delighted in its goofy melody. Ulaanbaatar, Outer Mongolia: This became the arcane ammunition I brandished when I was being a smarty pants and wanted to trump someone with my worldliness.
When we buried my father all those years ago, I made one of those promises that people sometimes do to stanch the grief and to trick them into looking beyond the wrenching pain that saturates the present. One day I’ll visit Ulaanbaatar, Dad, I said to myself. I’ll go there, and I will go in your name.
During July of 1999, after spending a year teaching in Albania, a journalism foundation called, and I was offered a two-week job in Ulaanbaatar helping a group of Mongolian high school students make a youth newspaper. Though the trip would be brief and the journey would be long, saying no never entered my mind. With me I took my camera, my father’s birth certificate, one of his bookplates, and the page from that big atlas where I first learned of Mongolia.
Many of the sages from Buddha to Freud have articulated some version of the idea that there are no accidents. The universe, it has been said, orders itself in ways unreadable to befuddled mortals.
During my final days in Ulaanbaatar, the country celebrated its grand, national holiday, Naadam, a three-day pageantry of what are called “manly sports.” In the big stadium on the edge of town stocky competitors vie for first place in archery, wrestling and horse riding. Shops close, people throng to the city, and banners loop across the wide Communist-era boulevards.
It was dusk and my last night in Mongolia. I strolled with camera in hand, grateful for the rich light and the chance to see the city in full mirth. I made my way to the broad square in the city center named for the Mongolian revolutionary who in 1921 declared the country free from Chinese rule. I stood before the statue of Sukhbaatar astride his horse. He was silhouetted against a wide palette of dimming sky—one hand on the reins, the other gesturing toward the heavens. To commemorate the national holiday, three wreaths on wooden stands perched on a patch of grass at the foot of the monument.
I reached into my backpack for my father’s bookplate. As I kissed it and laid it near the wreaths, I heard the faint strains of a marching band oompahing nearby. The music grew louder. And then they rounded the corner: squadrons of musicians in red and blue jodhpurs and elaborate hats. Their instruments were hoisted, and their happy noise grew ever louder.
It was, I think, a fitting soundtrack.
