Pagma
Basic information
Interviewee ID: 990307
Name: Pagma
Parent's name: Dejee
Ovog: [blank]
Sex: f
Year of Birth: 1925
Ethnicity: Halh
Additional Information
Education: elementary
Notes on education:
Work: retired
Belief: none
Born in: Otgon sum, Zavhan aimag
Lives in: Tömör Zam sum (or part of UB), Ulaanbaatar aimag
Mother's profession: herder
Father's profession: herder
Themes for this interview are:
(Please click on a theme to see more interviews on that topic)
work
family
childhood
repressions
urban issues
Alternative keywords suggested by readers for this interview are: (Please click on a keyword to see more interviews, if any, on that topic)
childhood
schoolchildren's life
group
repression
urbanization
Chinese
store
Russians
work - labor
cook
official regulations
To read a full interview with Pagma please click on the Interview ID below.
Summary of Interview 090811A with Pagma
I was born in 1925 in Otgon sum of Zavhan aimag. I didn’t attend any school and I spent my childhood in the countryside with the livestock. I came to the city in 1955 and I worked for 25 years as a cook at the Ulaanbaatar railway nursery and then retired.
When I was a child around the age of ten, I was told to attend the [literacy] group but my mom refused to send me. My friends who attended the bag group taught me and I copied on the paper what they told me. I memorized them and in such a way I became literate and got the literacy certificate. I had a dream to live in the city. I married an aged rich man and we had lived for quite a while and then I divorced him and came to the city. In the beginning he didn’t want me to go but at the end we divorced peacefully. He said, ”I will send you some money from the livestock in the spring. If you find difficult to live in the city, come back. I will set up a ger for you and give you some livestock.” I made him quite a lot of clothes and I came to the city. He gave me travel expense money and food and he saw me to the Bayanhongor post. Thanks to him I had the chance to see the city and I realized my dream. In 1955, when I came to the city, my acquaintance helped me to get employed and then I was trained as a cook. I was working at the Communications ministry when I met a man, and we got married in 1958. My husband died in 1985.
I heard the husband of my mother’s sister, the nobleman Luvsantserendorj, and the older brother of my father, Sorj bagsh, who had been a high-ranking lama, were arrested and killed. I saw Bat-Ayush lama be arrested. Bat-Ayush’s was a rich family with two mentally handicapped young women and one mentally handicapped old man. Two men with guns and white horses came and ransacked all his things and, having recorded them, took everything away. Ayush guai was alarmed, wiping his sweat and, putting on new gutal and a new deel, he pleaded to the people who came to arrest him, “Please consider these people of ours. Only sick and simpleminded people are left. Please leave something for these sick people!” That lama disappeared. I don’t know whether he was taken to the aimag or not. The people of his nutag said that he was killed.
