Adiyadolgor
Basic information
Interviewee ID: 990179
Name: Adiyadolgor
Parent's name: Tsendor
Ovog: Harchin
Sex: f
Year of Birth: 1944
Ethnicity: Halh
Additional Information
Education: incomplete secondary
Notes on education: This most likely means 7 years of schooling.
Work: retired
Belief: Buddhist
Born in: Hairhandulaan sum, Övörhangai aimag
Lives in: Arvaiheer sum (or part of UB), Övörhangai aimag
Mother's profession: died, herder
Father's profession: died, herder
Themes for this interview are:
(Please click on a theme to see more interviews on that topic)
work
cultural campaigns
collectivization
privatization
childhood
Alternative keywords suggested by readers for this interview are: (Please click on a keyword to see more interviews, if any, on that topic)
family
omens
cultural campaigns
repression
privatization
collectivization
democracy
To read a full interview with Adiyadolgor please click on the Interview ID below.
Summary of Interview 090318A with Adiyadolgor
The interviewee was born in 1944 in a place called Muruin hujirt in Hairhandulaan sum of Ӧvӧrhangai aimag. She was one of eighteen children in her family. She started elementary school at the age of eight in Hairhandulaan sum and finished the fourth grade. Afterwards she worked as a milkmaid in the ‘Shine yalalt’ (New Victory) collective farm for ten years, during which time she finished the seventh grade. In 1975, she moved to Ӧvӧrhangai aimag centre where she worked as a seamstress for twenty-five years until she retired at the age of forty-seven for ‘having mothered many children’. She has five children.
In the interview she discusses a variety of topics, including: her family, relatives, her school years, the repression, the cultural campaign, the collectivization and democracy. She tells that there were two ways of joining a collective farm: either by paying money or donating animals. Her parents chose the first way. Well-off people with many animals did not want to join collective farms, whereas the poor or jobless were happy to do so. The interviewee describes the collectivization as a good thing, for it made all the herders ‘nicely equals’. In her view, the cultural campaign also brought benefits. Exemplary households were awarded with certificates and glorified in newspapers and journals, whereas dirty ones were given ‘pigs’ (as a mark of evaluation) and shamed in a special journal called Tonshuul (woodpecker). According to the interviewee, the cultural campaign began in 1960 and finished when democracy started. But socialism was not without its flaws. It was a time when dargas consumed all the best- the fattest meat, silk cloth and sable hats- as opposed to working people who could not. Nevertheless, socialism cannot be compared with democracy where killing, stealing, cheating and bribing are widespread.
Her stories about omens and signs are interesting. For example, one of her sisters has been single all her life, because her hair was cut on the wrong day when she was a child. Another example: Her mother made an earring for her daughter, but the latter died soon afterwards not having a chance to wear the earrings. When her mother gave birth to another girl, who had a hole in her ear, she understood that the baby was the reincarnation of her deceased daughter.
