I have received a letter from a reader, G.Hongorzul, who is a ninth-grade student in Ulaanbaatar's School 33. She asks two questions:

1. How did you begin to write Shiliin Bogd?
2. In your novel, I enjoyed the stories told by the teacher on the mountain. How did you come to know them?

Here are the answers to her questions.

To begin...to begin anything is not easy for me. To begin this story was extremely difficult. Thinking about it now, I began this story three times. Almost twenty years ago, I had started a piece entitled “Toroibandi” but I did nothing with it. Later on, I wrote a few pages, to which I gave the name “Single Towering Tree,” but when I read it now, I don't like it.

Three years ago, as I was flying to Tokyo, I looked through the window, and there below was the utterly empty and skyblue steppe. But I imagined not that I was flying over my homeland, but rather I thought that I was a bird flying down, I closed my eyes and my thoughts continued. But I came to think about what it might mean to write about the wild steppe from the height of a bird in flight....Before I knew it, I became a falcon and soared above the wild steppe, and my ideas developed....The falcon is an intrepid warrior. It dives and soars in amazing ways. As though it knew that I was interested in it, it became a dot into the clarity of the sky and disappeared. When I heard that archaeologists had found a golden falcon ring in the land around our region of Tavan Tolgoi, and a bone ornamented with a carved falcon, I felt something, and thought that there might be a connection between the image of a falcon taken from the earth and the falcon in flight....So my feeling from many years before was revived, but I grew interested in how I might begin my novel from the hight of a bird in flight. The night that I came back to Mongolia I sat down at my writing desk, and began to write, “They soar. They dive. They rose...”.

Many of the stories which run through the lines of Shilin Bogd, the stories of “Single Towering Tree” “The Swans of Ganga Nuur,” “The Stone of Budar” and “Nutritious Food” have their origins in what I heard as a child, in the speech of elders, and the symbolism which I wrote into them grew from what I later read. For instance, I am aware that there is no tree at the top of the Ongon Sands. In my heart remained what I had heard from the elders, that “Russian soldiers were going here and there, there was a white sandalwood tree there.”

I took an idea from the old ones about how the tree took root and grew from a stick which had been taken from India and planted in the earth of Mongolia, and wrote the poem called “The Tale of the Asoka Tree.” I heard a lovely song about the Asoka tree which withered and died, and there is a definite connection between my story and the poem by the ancient Indian poet Kalidasa in his play Malavikagnimitra, “Where the lovely woman places her foot, there the Asoka tree will bloom.” Later I came to understand some things, and I had the distinct impression that there had been students from the Hun empire studying at Nalanda University. Over a long time, research into such history and stories came together in my mind and these became embodied in the lines of my novel. But I didn't chase after the story of “Single Towering Tree.” I believe that I should look at the desires of the people who, over many thousands of years, have established their roots in the Mongolian landscape, desires which were held in the culture, in the items of practical value, and in tales and stories, and how they were transmitted to future generations, and that I should drink a new drink from my own writer's heart.

15 May 2015

Translated by Simon Wickhamsmith