All the Khans Before Me

By Matt Mills · Estimated Reading Time: 17 Minutes

When I go to sleep, I see Genghis Khan’s ghost.

He stands at the door of his yurt, the great war yurt ringed with gold. His men are asleep, and he stands under the moon staring southeast toward the sea. I follow his gaze. In the distance, I see it: a great length of brick, winding over the hills like a coiled snake.

“What do you think, little one?” comes the voice of the Great Khan. “Will the wall stand?”

It’s getting cold, and my arms are bare. I hug myself and shiver. “I don’t know.”

He turns to me, and his face is grim. “Once,” he says, “all of this was mine.”

✷

When I arrive in Hohhot, the capital city of the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia, it is Zhongyuan Jie, the Hungry Ghost Festival. They are burning paper money in the streets, and paper items to send to their ancestors beyond the grave: new clothes and food and even paper iPhones. Overhead, the rows of skyscrapers stand like looming soldiers, enveloped in the haze coming from the factories. I cannot fathom a place so large. It is a small city by China’s standards, but to me, it is a metropolis. I clutch the handle of my suitcase harder and wish again that my parents could have accompanied me. But one train ticket was much cheaper than three. Now I stand on the crowded bus that goes from the train station, watching the cars and streets and lights float by, lamps carried by passing spirits through the mist.

I have come to attend Inner Mongolia Normal University. It is a teacher’s college, and I will learn to teach English. When I am finished, I will return to my village to instruct the children so that they can get better jobs and succeed out in the world. This is what my father tells me.

When I enroll, however, the administrators tell me I have to attend for five years instead of four. My Chinese is not good enough, they say. This is probably true: I am Mongolian. Some of the other Mongolians, who went to Chinese schools and have been speaking Mandarin since they could form sounds, are placed in the regular classes, alongside the ethnic Han Chinese. But I am placed in a special class, and all my classmates are Mongolian. Like me, they went to Mongolian schools. Like me, they have parents who are concerned that they will lose their heritage now that they are away from home. Like me, they will be at university for the next five years.

I share a dorm room with five other girls. They are also Mongolian. Our bunks are arranged barracks-style, three bunk beds, three desks, and three dressers. There is a shared washroom down the hall, and they cut the electricity to the whole building every night at 10:00pm. We take turns charging our phones. That first night, I unpack my suitcase and cry. 

A single suitcase is all I have. It is enough to hold all of my belongings, all I have to show for nineteen years of growing and ripening in that village that is now far away. I can hardly believe it. Yesterday, when I finished packing back in my parents’ little home, I slumped overwhelmed onto the floor. If my mother had seen me, she would have scolded me about the cleanliness of the act, but it has only ever been my feet to walk on that floor, and I know where my feet had been. They have only slipped out into the dirt roads of the village, to the school and grocer and restaurants, or to the pasture with my father to tend the sheep. They have held firmly to the leather stirrups of the horses. And on some days they have trekked out beyond the village into the grasslands. My inheritance, my home.

But now my feet have crossed an invisible threshold, passed beyond the land of the living. I lay on my upper bunk and try not to let my roommates hear my sobs while, out in the dark, the little old man who sweeps the streets stoops to burn a paper dress for his departed daughter.

Tonight, the dead walk among us.

✷

I am standing barefoot in the grass. There is a strong wind blowing down from the bald stone mountains. The riders are watching me. I cannot count their number, and they bubble over the grasslands like hot water from a kettle. I hear their horses snort and see the glitter of their spears. They are all watching me.

“You are Tümed,” they say. “Rise up and become one of the ten thousand.”

✷

In the first week, I make a friend. She is one of my roommates, the girl who sleeps on the bunk beneath me. Her name is Nabuqi.

Like all of the incoming freshmen, we have military training together for the two weeks before classes start. It is mostly marching. Many of the girls sneak selfies in their fatigues when the superiors aren’t looking. Nabuqi and I are in the same troop, and for two weeks we march in time, stand up straight, and do drills with fake rifles. During breaks we sprawl on the concrete badminton court with the other girls and talk about where we come from.

Nabuqi is not from a small village: she is from Baotou, another big city not far from Hohhot. Her cousins all went to good Chinese schools, but her parents had been firm in their conviction that she should be trained in her Mongolian roots. She knows how to play the horsehead fiddle, but now she too must spend an extra year at university studying Chinese. Still, she is used to the big city. She has already found the best shopping mall and a trendy Korean specialty store. She wears cute earrings and fashionable shoes. She teases me about my hair.

“When these drills are over,” she says, “we’ll create a new you.”

Two weeks later, on a Sunday, we go to the mall. I use the money my father gave me to buy new clothes, the brands that Nabuqi buys. The ones that all the Chinese girls wear. Then we go to the beauty parlor. Nabuqi wants me to get bangs like her, but I pick a more elegant center-part like BoA, the Queen of K-Pop. 

When the styling is complete, we get bubble tea and lean against the railing that overlooks the center of the mall, giggling at the people going up and down the escalators. I feel as though I’ve been transformed. I half expect to toss my hair over my shoulder and have everyone stop and stare at me, like a star after a makeover in a music video. But no one pays any attention. Somehow, I like this better. Here we are not Mongolian, really. We have become like everyone. We are minnows in a teeming ocean.

✷

When military training is over, there is a welcome celebration for the new students. We crowd into an auditorium to watch performances and speeches. Standing at the entrance are two rows of sophomore girls, all Mongolian, all wearing traditional Mongolian dresses. During the performances, they scurry around up front, bringing tea to the professors and honored guests. At one point, Nabuqi plays the horsehead fiddle. Another girl sings a Mongolian song, a windswept ballad full of the singing that my people are so famous for. It is beautiful. Then three Chinese boys perform a rap and a choreographed dance. To close the ceremony, three students give an impassioned speech in three languages—Mandarin, Mongolian, and English—about cooperation and harmony.

That night, I am visited by Kublai Khan. 

He sits supreme and fat in his palace in the center of Beijing, the seat of his great empire. He has chosen this city as his capital, and from this deep water well spring forth rivers that become streets that become marketplaces that become hutongs, the narrow alleys now so famous in northern China. At the nexus is the palace, Khanbaliq, “City of the Khan.” Though it is a khan’s palace, it is built in the Confucian style, with nine vertical and horizontal axes, the surrounding markets and sites of ancestral and divine worship arranged just so. His dynasty is the Yuan Dynasty. He is Mongolian Khan and Chinese Emperor.

I look up at him. “But which are you?” I dare to ask.

That specter of power, who holds half the world in his meaty hands, looks down at me and only smiles. “I am both. I am all. Which are you?”

✷

When the freshmen come in next year, I feel a pang of resentment. I am just now beginning the same classes they are.

But otherwise I am happy to be back. It is true, I have had a wonderful summer in the village with my parents and cousins and friends from high school, under that open sky. But I have come to love the city. This year, I volunteer to help the new students get situated and find what they need, a “big sister” to the helpless and starry-eyed. My group of girls all come from villages like me, and all week long I take special pride in guiding them around campus, showing them where to buy things, and making recommendations on their maps. I offer up my knowledge freely: I know all the bus routes and where the best cheap restaurants are. I know the locations of the trendy cafes, where the boys sit smoking and playing games on their phones. I know where to buy the best cosmetics. 

But my favorite things I keep for myself and Nabuqi, and when my duties are done we walk arm in arm up the small walking street north of campus where street vendors roast mutton on long skewers. We sample snacks and buy cute socks. We stop in the Mongolian restaurant for naiyou ban chao mi and tai yang bing. After lunch, we walk down to the end of the street, the peak of the mountain where I am most eager to climb: the art supply store.

I always save the art supply store for last. It bores Nabuqi, so while she goes to the boutique next door to ogle at purses she cannot afford, I walk up and down the aisles looking at the colored paper, running my hands over them to feel the textures. I select the ones I want and take them back to the dorm. Then I sit on the top bunk and teach myself origami.

It has become my secret obsession. Many days, while my roommates shop and take selfies by the lilac bushes, I sit all afternoon on the stone floor, carefully making folds and watching tutorials on Youku. I begin with simple cubes and tops, tulip flowers and small candy boxes. But now I move up to an intermediate level, making pandas and elephants and scorpions and, the one I am most proud of, a stallion rearing up on its back legs, tossing its mane in the wind.

It is also in the art supply store that I meet Bataar.

It’s early in the fall my second year—technically my freshman year—that I notice him behind the counter, smoking and reading a book about Western philosophy. He is tall, and has a thin, pointed beard. It is long and skinny, the kind that is truly Mongolian. It makes my blood burn under my cheeks.

All semester long, I go to the art supply store every chance I get. Sometimes I can only afford a single sheet of colored paper. He is not always working, but when he is I try my best to smile and hope that he notices. 

After a few weeks, he asks me why I am buying so much colored paper. I blush, and I tell him about my origami. He says he would very much like to see. 

That night, I stay up late, folding a rabbit. I bring it to him the next day. He holds it up to the light, studies it for a moment, then comments on a single sloppy crease. I snatch it back from him in surprise and anger. But he only laughs, then takes out a sheet of red paper from under the counter and, with quick and precise movements, folds a perfect heart. Then he reaches over the counter and takes my hand, and at his touch I feel my ancestors and their galloping thunderous hooves go all down my arm. 

He opens my fingers and puts the heart in my palm.

✷

He is three years older than me, and his dream is to work in Japan. Like many aspiring animators, Hayao Miyazaki is his idol. If not Japan, he says, then Canada; if not Canada, then Shenzhen; if not Shenzhen, then somewhere in or near the great municipality of Beijing. When I ask him what his parents think, whether or not they want him to stay and run the store, he tells me they want him to be successful, even if that means going away. 

To me, this is wonderful. I begin to lay awake at night imagining walking the streets of Tokyo or Toronto or Tianjin. But when my eyes close there are always the ten thousand, watching me, the moonlight shining on their armor.

In my third year—I am a sophomore—we all must choose another language to study. I am an English major, having spent a year studying Chinese, and now I must choose a third. Most of my classmates choose German, but I pick Japanese. It’s not for Bataar: it is for me. I don’t even tell him about it right away. When BoA was learning Japanese, she lived alone in Japan for a whole month, and I begin listening to her Japanese albums while folding origami to practice the sounds.

Before Mid-Autumn Festival, Bataar suggests we go on a weekend date to Dazhao Temple. It is my third year in Hohhot and I still haven’t seen it. When we arrive, the tourists from all over Inner Mongolia are ambling through the cobblestone walking street where vendors sell every Mongolian trinket imaginable: knives, flasks, leather goods, little colored yurts on keychains, even cowboy hats. From a back alley, the reclining form of a giant, grinning Buddha peeks out as money changes hands. Parakeets warble in cages and life-size statues of Mongol warriors lie impotent on their sides.

We come to the temple itself. It is very old, the first building ever constructed in the city. Stretching from the roof are ropes adorned with khata, the silk scarves of Tibetan Buddhism. In other places they are white or gold, but here they are Mongolian blue, blue for our precious yawning sky. The strands of khata go out like reaching fingers from the temple and across the square, to the very center where sits enthroned the statue of Altan Khan. His great heavy hands form the Buddhist mudra, and his gaping stone eyes look down at me.

When I fall asleep that night, I know he will be waiting.

There he is. Standing in the grass, watching his workers raise up the temple. His temple. The wind rustles his robe and his long necklace of beads. The stars peer at their reflections in his helmet.

“I built this place,” he says. “Hohhot is a Mongol word.”

“I know that,” I say. I am in my pajamas, and the wind is cold. “It means the Blue City.”

“Yes. Blue like the sky. Our sky.” He looks down at me. “You cannot run from our sky, my child. We expect you to expand it, to build beneath it, to hold it up. We have done great things under that blue expanse: we have built cities and empires. What will you do?”

I wake up with a start and throw my pillow across the room.

✷

I am Mongolian by heritage, Chinese by citizenship. I am studying English and listening to Korean music and making Japanese paper art. My father and mother live in the grasslands, buffeted by the desert winds and tending livestock, while I take taxis and drink bubble tea and shop at the mall. I am an amalgam. I don’t know what I am.

✷

I go home for the summer. I have decided to tell my parents my secrets.

It takes three days for me to work up the courage. We are eating dinner, my mother’s warm and homey hui cai of beef, green beans, and potatoes. That’s when I say it.

“Mom, Dad,” I begin. “I don’t want to come back to the village when I graduate.”

I tell them about Bataar and his parents. I tell them about our dreams of Japan and Canada and Shenzhen and Beijing. I tell them how much I love the rush of the streets and the bustling sidewalks and the coffee shops and the taxis. It all bursts out like a dragon puff of quick fire. When I am finished my mother is very quiet, but my father is trembling. He slams his chopsticks down on the table.

“You will break up with him,” he orders, shaking his fingers at me. “You will study hard. You will return to our village and you will get a job at the elementary school as an English teacher. You will help us and our children have a better life.”

“But he’s Mongolian!” I cry.

“Mongolian, Chinese, Russian, I don’t care. He will go far away, and you must return here.”

Now I am trembling, and I cannot keep the angry tears from pooling up in my eyes. But I say nothing. I say nothing for the rest of the meal, and my parents eat in silence, until finally I flee to my room and fling myself on the bed.

A little while later, my mother comes through the door. She sits next to me and places a gentle hand on my back. 

“Did you know you were almost named after your uncle?” she says.

It’s not what I am expecting to hear, and it’s enough to make me emerge from the folds of my pillow. “What?”

“When I was pregnant,” she says, “we sought the shaman to find what name you should be. He said ‘Bayan,’ after your uncle. We asked three times, and every time he said the same thing. Bayan. It was certain. But then I gave birth, and there you were: a girl. I told your father we must obey the shaman’s instructions. It would be strange, our little girl with the name of a man, but we could not tempt the spirits.”

“But you didn’t,” I say.

“No. Your father came back from shearing the sheep that night, and he said, ‘Her name is Surina.’ After your grandmother. I argued and I pleaded with him but he would not budge. I was scared to go against the shaman. But do you know what he said? ‘The shaman knows nothing.’”

I stare at her. My father, the man of tradition, the herdsman of the Mongolian grasslands, had gone against the shaman. I cannot imagine it.

My mother gives my knee a pat. “Tradition isn’t everything. Neither is progress.”

After she leaves, I lay on my bed for a long time. I lay there, looking up at the ceiling that hides me from that wide-open sky, and I marvel.

✷

They are waiting for me. I hear them, but I cannot see them. I hear their voices and the stamping of their horses’ hooves. They are shouting at me, all of them shouting. I try to put my hands over my ears but they are pinned to my sides. There is a shaman of the mountains before me, a little shriveled man with a falcon head, his great black eyes twitching and his beak snapping. Behind him is a towering shadow, and two great oxen, and a war yurt ringed with gold. They are shouting, and shouting, and I cannot stop them. 

But this time I hear my father’s voice, and I feel my mother’s gentle hand. Though I’m shivering in my pajamas, I stand up straight.

“This is going to end,” I whisper into the wind. “I’m coming for you.”

✷

I fold origami.

I fold, and I fold, and I fold. I have been folding for days. When I stop to rest my eyes I see paper creasing behind my eyelids. But I do not stop. I barely eat. I barely sleep. My roommates whisper, and Nabuqi tries to convince me to go with her to the beauty parlor. I tell her no, and I keep folding. I fold with deadly and desperate purpose. I must be ready by September.

And then, it is here: Zhongyuan Jie. The Hungry Ghost Festival. It is the beginning of my fourth year at university, and tonight the dead will walk among us.

“Let’s go to the Great Wall,” I say to Bataar.

We are at the Mongolian restaurant. We have finished eating breakfast, and he is smoking and reading. “I don’t have money for a train to Beijing.”

“No, not in Beijing,” I say. “Here, in Inner Mongolia. There’s still a part of it left.”

I am insistent and almost venomous in a way that takes him aback. We use his parents’ car. The drive is long, and we rocket out of the city, a bullet shot from between those towering skyscrapers out into the desert. I say nothing the whole way: I press my face to the window and watch the barren hills roll by. On my knees rests my backpack, and I hug it close.

“I’m coming for you,” I murmur.

Finally, we arrive, but there is nothing to be seen. We park the car and walk for a long time, looking everywhere for whatever remains of that famous monument. 

Then, all at once, there it is: just a heap of stones.

Ignoring Bataar’s protests, I climb up. I stand on top of it and look to the east. Behind me, the sun is setting, and my shadow stretches over the whole land, a giant over that vast and empty countryside. The air crackles. Then I take off my backpack and empty it onto the ancient stones.

Out tumbles my origami, my horses and riders and spears. There are countless numbers of them, a host, a horde, gushing out like oil from broken earth. I dump them in a pile, atop that wall that had once been built to keep my ancestors out.

“I need your lighter.”

Bataar is already smoking. He hands it to me. I light the pile and watch it burn from the top of the wall. The smoke goes up and my heart rises with it. I spread my arms and begin to sing. It is one of the old songs, one of the songs my mother taught me, one of the songs of the grassland.

And they come.

They come riding out of the west, a sandstorm over the desert. Thousands and ten thousands. Their spears glitter and their stirrups slap against haunches and the hooves of their horses are a roll of drums. They carry bows and swords and the manes of their steeds are like lions. I stand there, in my sneakers and jeans. I stand on the rubble and there is wind in my hair.

Then they stop. The ten thousand are watching me. The horses toss their heads and paw at the ground.

“I am your khan now!” I call into the night. “I have thrown down this wall. There is nothing that stands between us, and our worlds must forever mingle. You are mine, and your blood is mine. It will always be so.” 

There is silence. Their vacant eyes are on me.

“But now,” I cry, “go! Ride off into those gray hills in peace. Leave me alone, and let me sleep. Your khan commands it!”

They shout, all ten thousand. The roar makes the ground quake. Then they are off. They sweep past us, and we are an island, feeling the spray of dust and the sweat and the heat. They race in every direction, north, south, east, west, a wave that crashes over the face of the world.

Then the horde is past us, and it is like it has never been.

Bataar has dropped his cigarette. “Did…did you see that?”

I smile. “No.”

Then I hop off of the rubble.

✷

I will break up with Bataar. I will study hard. I will return to my village and I will get a job at the elementary school as an English teacher. I will not go to Japan or Canada or Shenzhen or Beijing. I will teach the children so that they can leave the village, so that they can get into a good university, so that they can go to Japan or Canada or Shenzhen or Beijing. 

It is not defeat. It is a quiet conquest.

I will continue to fold origami, paper lambs and goats and horses that I give to my students on their birthdays and that fill the shelves of my room. I will listen to the music that I like. I will help my father take care of the sheep, and when he is older I will take care of him. I choose what is expected of me, but I choose it willingly. I, myself. I break its power. Its spear shatters on my shield, its armor cracks under my blade. I carve out my own empire. In that village in the grasslands of my ancestors, I will stay forever. 

But the ghosts of all the khans before me will trouble me no more.

✷

Story by Matt Mills · Photo by Matt Mills

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