Anonymous
Basic information
Interviewee ID: 990118
Name: Anonymous
Parent's name: Anonymous
Ovog: Urchuud
Sex: f
Year of Birth: 1947
Ethnicity: Halh
Additional Information
Education: some elementary
Notes on education: 4 years
Work: retired
Belief: Buddhist
Born in: Dalangadzad sum, Ömnögovi aimag
Lives in: Dalangadzad sum (or part of UB), Ömnögovi aimag
Mother's profession: herder
Father's profession: herder
Themes for this interview are:
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family
childhood
travel
herding / livestock
education / cultural production
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To read a full interview with Anonymous please click on the Interview ID below.
Summary of Interview 090208A with Anonymous
The story Anonymous has told is a story of the parents and children and grandchildren separated at the end of 1940s at the Chinese and Mongolian border. Their separate lives continued until 1990 when they met again. It’s a story of live, virtual and amazing fate.
She was born in 1947 in Dalanzadgad sum of Ömnögovi aimag. During the revolutionary outburst of 1920-1930 her grandparents were persuaded and forced by some noyons of the province to move and settle in the present-day Chinese territory. Anonymous’s parents went there in their childhood and they were raised in the land of Inner Mongolia until they reached adulthood and got married there. The Mongolian ‘ails’ have conducted a nomadic way of life together with their livestock for twenty years in the unknown country’s territory without belonging to any country. The political situation escalated in China and the Mongolian ‘ails’ living there started to move back to Mongolia, but her grandparents decided to remain there for they couldn’t cope with the long distance move. But her parents, a young family together with other ten ‘ails’ secretly moved to Outer Mongolia with all their belongings. Anonymous’s five-year old sister was left there to assist her grandparents. In their haste to leave, her mother, who had been plaiting her hair didn’t manage to plait the other side of her daughter’s hair. She grabbed her mother’s wooden milk bucket in her memory, she recalled. Her parents travelled for many days and nights. During the day they made a circle with the camels, staying concealed inside the circle. In this way they reached Dalanzadgad and have settled there. Anonymous was in her mother’s womb then and she is the child born in Mongolia.
She wrote letters to her older sister in Inner Mongolia, and her older sister learned Cyrillic in the pasture to read her sister’s letter. Anonymous learnt Uigarjin script to read her older sister’s letters. Their letters had been censored by the Ministry of Public Security and she always received opened letters. In the middle of the 1980s by the negotiation of two countries the relatives who resided in the two countries had the opportunity to meet each other. She recalled how her older sister came to Ömnögovi with her family, what she had been through to come by plane, how she prepared for the meeting with her sister, keeping it secret from her husband. After 1990 she got a lift by a car to go to China by the southern border. After a long search she found her sister’s ger and she talked about the difference of the life here and there. She observed the different customs of the people there.
She spoke of the various things organized during the cultural campaign, how she used to cover a long and hard distance walking in the winter cold to attend the public dance party in the aimag center, how she used to get dressed up for the dance.
She also spoke of the man she had married and the work she had been doing.
