An Unforgettable Encounter

I want to share with you all a story... On my travels in Inner Mongolia so far I’ve met many remarkable people. This cute old Mongolian man is one of them, and he is someone I’ll never forget. I went to his grasslands for a Naadam (in the Mongolian language this literally translates to “games” but it is commonly used to refer to Mongolian Wrestling competitions) during the summer wrestling season in 2020 and I was struck by the way he just sat next to me, staring with true joy, smiling at me and my wife, Ariela, the whole time.

We in turn were curious about him and his story- so we struck up a conversation with Oyuntana translating for us. We learned that this man had never in his entire life met a foreigner, and he actually didn’t even know what “America” was. He told me that he didn’t know anything outside of his grassland (located in Xilingol, Inner Mongolia, China). He thought “America” was just another grassland found somewhere in another region of Inner Mongolia, and that I was just some kind of different Mongolian from there. He figured my name “American Hangai”(what they call me here at the wrestling naadams) was just my full Mongolian name. It never occurred to him that actually we came from a distant country in a distant land, and he had no concept of what that would even mean.

This adorable old man asked us to take a picture together and he was so happy when he looked at the image on the phone screen, seemingly fascinated and astonished at how clear and beautiful the picture was. To tell him of my home in America and Europe was like reading a fairytale to a kid. His eyes lit up and he was smiling with joy, and he began to tell us about his own life growing up there in the grassland and the changes that have occurred over the years. I asked him why he came to the naadams and he explained that his son was a wrestling enthusiast and that they had been coming to watch the naadams together for many many years. He told us that 3o years ago the prizes given to the top wrestlers at the naadam would consist of things like a bar of soap or a silver bowl for washing your face in. In the grasslands, soap and silver bowls for washing are meaningful gifts to receive and quite useful for nomadic people to use. Nowadays, people are no longer nomadic, and the prizes given are mostly monetary based, or livestock such as sheep, horses, and camels for the very top wrestlers.

This beautiful old man wasn’t afraid that I looked different, spoke a language he couldn’t understand, and he didn’t treat me strangely even after I told him I came from a land that he had never heard of. When we asked him what he thought about us speaking English, he simply replied that he thought it was beautiful and maybe it was just a dialect of some mongolic language that he couldn’t understand. He accepted and welcomed our differences and he genuinely wanted to share a smile, some stories, and laughter together.

My encounter with this old man will always stay in my mind as a special memory, and it was a small sign of hope for me in this world we live in. Who knew that a man who knew nothing about the outside world could fill me with so much hope about life and humanity on the inside.

This is a man I’ll never forget ❤️

-Blog written by Lavell and edited by Ariela