The Blue Sky by Galsan Tschinag

I could feel myself growing more and more upset because before long it would be my turn to leave behind the flock, Arsylang, our home, Father and Mother, the Black Mountains--everything that had been part of me. With that thought came misgivings that led to further thoughts and left me afraid: Would Grandma find me if I were no longer at home? What would come of our flock, which meanwhile had become my flock? What of the yurt we would have to get somehow and in which I planned to live with Grandma? Would I one day become a teacher or even a darga and live off a salary rather than livestock? In that case, would I live in a shack made from larch logs and smeared with clay, just like the elegant people in the sum center? Which meant, didn't it, that I would never have a yurt of my own, would never put it up and take it down and move with it through the four seasons and across the four rivers, from the mountains into the steppe, over to the other mountains, to the lake, and back? And did this mean that I would have to leave behind, and would never be able to return to, all that I had had and held so far, and all that had been mine?

Mongolia: it's one of those gray countries that reads NO DATA. So how rare to have a novel like this: a first-hand account, translated into English, of a nomadic childhood among Mongolia's Altai mountains. Galsan Tschinag is a Tuvan shaman--that is, not ethnically Mongolian but of a Turkic group most famous in the West, perhaps, for their otherworldly throat-singing. The Blue Sky is his story of growing up a boy among nomads, tending to their flocks of sheep in times of summer fat and disastrous winter, and of his loyal dog, Arsylang.

Little Galsan, known in the book as Dshukuruwaa, is the youngest of three children. He lives with his mother and father, as well as two siblings who are soon carted off to the village, or sum, and made to go to school by Soviet functionaries. There's also his grandmother, who's not really his grandmother at all, but the less prosperous sister of a nearby woman who finds her household--or yurthold--slowly being absorbed by her selfish sister, until she sets out one day to find someone to shave her head as a symbol of her forgotten status. Coming to the boy's family, she soon finds herself a home, and a special attachment to the young boy, to whom she entrusts the remainder of her sheep herd. Emboldened by the gift, he begins to dream of becoming a baj like his father once was: a rich man whose wealth is in his immense herd. This is why he fears the school to which his siblings disappear, and in the meantime there are more obstacles, like the excruciating experience of falling into the boiling kettle of yak's milk.

What lurks behind The Blue Sky is an image of a changing Mongolia: Galsan's father is no longer a baj because he cannily divested himself of his wealth when Soviet ideology, and Soviet ideologues, emerged in Mongolia looking for what they considered kulaks, wealthy landowners whose money comes from the exploitation of farm labor. Such a label, of course, makes no sense among nomadic people, but that's revolutionary fervor for you. Little Galsan doesn't understand that the dream he has for himself is one that has already become extinct; what he longs for is not his own future but a past that has already been closed off. And yet the family's traditional life persists, though at a level of as-of-yet-unknown precarity: without his former herd, Galsan's father is suddenly at the mercy of a single harsh winter, like the one that brings their small family to a crisis at the novel's end.

The winter is the family's crisis, but Galsan has his own. The novel opens with a nightmare: the trusty Aryslang, dying on the ground, vomiting poison. The vision comes true after the harsh winter when Galsan's father leaves out poison to meet Soviet hunting quotas, and the death of the sheepherding dog--about as sad as the death of any pet in any book I've read ever--rends young Galsan's life so completely that he finds himself raging at his parents and cursing the very universe, throwing insults at the "blue sky" that represents some divine force of providence, and which has failed him. I thought it was a strange way of ending the book until I read in the afterword that Tschinag wrote two sequels; one about the experience of Soviet schooling, where he eventually did go, and a third about his ultimate reconciliation with the sky and the Tuvan way of life. I'd like to read those; I really enjoyed the detailed depiction of the young herder's life The Blue Sky presents, and the humor and pathos that come alongside them.

Thanks to the addition of Mongolia, my "countries read" list is now up to 76!