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The third story was perhaps my favorite for this week. It made me think back to a discussion we had a few weeks ago, about freedom and where it may come from – in this piece, neither from acceptance nor choice, but from a perceived sense of living life unrestrained by rules – one would have to ask the old man and the prostitute (especially the latter) if they feel free, but here the point is about dreaming and desires, not about finding out if those dreams and desires really taste nectarean once they become real. Perhaps not coincidentally, the opening paragraph is about a dream that is hardly every made. The oneiric feeling to the story was very present without moving the story too far away from reality, as it sometimes happen.

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Would you have PDFs to share of these?

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“Images from a single day” puzzled me a bit. I liked the way in which the author draws attention to how the same place changes – an imagined beautiful land “the foreigners want to write about” is in fact a hot, difficult (and perhaps confusing?) land for those who are active in it. And yet, the narrating voice is so concerned with how they would be perceived (“what did we look like, then, as we rode along on our horses under such conditions”, and again then, two paragraphs later there is a long description of Sambaa, his swat as well as his horse’s, a description that combines vision as well as taste and smell), as if someone were in fact observing to describe them.
It seems to me that the writer is writing with an audience in mind, perhaps someone acquainted with the environment central to the story. It is introduced with a simple “we arrived at the milking division”. What is special about it, in Mongolia? I think I miss the referents here to flesh out the narrative that follows.
I was surprised by how emotional these three men are, given that this is their job. By which I mean that I would expect them to be more accustomed with the fact that sometimes, accidents happen, and that death follows from it. I did not expect cruelty, but I was surprised by the appearance of tears.

As for “The Shelducks”… written under censorship?!

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thank you so much for this! I do not have many comments, other than the fact that translations are always interesting also for the reasons highlighted here. I am glad this was posted, since I now better understand the story by Erdene.

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Some thoughts on this week’s readings. Perhaps I am once again influenced by my unfamiliarity with this literature, and more broadly with Mongolian culture. With regard to question #1 raised by Prof. Wickhamsmith, one thing that I found myself thinking while reading was that the stories had a sense of mobility, often associated in cultures with nomadic soceity. I do not mean the mere change of scenes or descriptions of moving from one location to another. I was thinking more about the fact that I could not put my finger on who exactly these characters were, and what they wanted, as if the personalities were shifting while the story developed. In the first story, the horse seems to play a central role (e.g., “the horse did not shy” when the kissing happens between the protagonist and Ariunaa); I cannot think a short story from around the same time from a European or American author (perhaps even Chinese) who would use an animal domesticated to travel in the same way. In the second story, the theme of mobility comes up in different forms. Geographically, in that Sampil moves away and returns to his homeland throughout the story; at the same time, he is “stuck” emotionally, always returning in his mind to that one encounter he had with Hulan when he was younger, which drives some of his thoughts. This relates also to question #3. The mobility in “Hulan” is also expressed temporally, especially in the final question, “what should we do with this world that is passing us by?”, and the presence of children, in particular Sampil junior in the final scenes – as children are perhaps a universal sense of future (“the voices whispered a future”).

I admit to not quite seeing the theme of memory in the first story – unless the horse is representing the past, and thus the memory. If so, the final sentence is a statement about the value of the past – the horse is calm and silent, unlike the “juddering machine.” And thus, the two protagonists can be together without waking her mother up. This ending made me curious about the figure of mothers in this story and more broadly in Mongolian society, since this story begins with his mother, being happy only once a year, and ends with a sleeping mother.

In “Blue as Water” the protagonist moves on with his life without really doing so emotionally, as in the first story. Jantsan goes on to lead life like his father did only because the girl he loves is married off to another family. I thought it was interesting that by the end he is too old to be part of the caravan, and I associated his refusal to leave this lifestyle as his way to refuse to go back to hurtful memories of a life that he could not have with the woman he loved. Another passage that struck me was the way in which this love story begins: much is set in motion by his father’s violence (which recalls the violence of Hulan’s husband). The son is then sent to the woman he yearns for by his father, and I was a bit puzzled by the author’s remark “reluctantly” as the son leaves his father. I understand that the father wants Jantsan to see her only to then leave her, but this is not Jantsan’s desire. He does come back with the silk “blue as water.” So why is he *reluctantly* leaving a father being violent to him?

I noticed that in these three stories too the characters are not introduced. Is this a feature of this period’s literature? Or just of short stories? I had to read the third story a couple of times to understand precisely who each person mentioned is and to whom he/she is related in the narrative.

I realized I did not answer to all the questions, taken as I was by all these thoughts!

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Hi All! Apologies for arriving to this so late. I indeed missed the discussion section. I am Maddalena, originally from Italy but have been living in Philadelphia for 5 years now while in grad school (with some trips to Mainland China and Taiwan for research). Prof. Chris Atwood mentioned to me this course, and since I love reading books / literature *and* boring others with my thoughts on them, I decided to join. It’s also a great way for me to learn more about Mongolia, about which I know very little. I am a specialist of ancient China, and anything after the third century CE is a bit foggy…!!

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