Adrift in Mongolia: Christopher Howard on “Tea of Ulaanbaatar”

Christopher Howard is the author of the Kindle Single Darkstar, a lyrical love story set at the dawn of the apocalypse, and the new novel Tea of Ulaanbaatar, about a band of Peace Corps volunteers in Mongolia who come unraveled.

The protagonist of my novel, Tea of Ulaanbaatar, is named Warren, and, to say the least, he is a flawed, alienated fellow. Unable to find meaningful work in the States, he joins the Peace Corps and is stationed in Mongolia. There he sees things that make his alienation deepen.   

One of the things he comes to realize, depending on how you read the text, is that Mongolia has traveled the path of the Society as War Machine, and has emerged the worse for the experience. Warren comes to believe that Mongolia offers a dire lesson for those who would travel in her empire-building footsteps, and a glimpse of America’s future.

Forget the Romans. Forget Napoleon. Forget Hitler. True aficionados of the Great Game understand that the Khans came the closest to winning, to taking over the whole shooting match, as any empire in history. From Romania to Iran to Vietnam, the Hordes were nearly unstoppable during the 13^th and 14^th centuries. They bested the three greatest Russian generals of all time: December, January, and February. They pillaged Baghdad for seven days. They conquered roughly twelve million square miles and one hundred million souls, seizing the largest contiguous empire ever known.

Warren might say, in modern America we aspire to a similar path. We fight official wars (Congressionally-authorized engagements) in Iraq and Afghanistan. We fight unofficially in Libya and Pakistan and elsewhere. We wage the War Against Terror. We wage the War Against Self-Medication, abroad and domestically, employing police against our own citizens. We have bankrupted our nation, in part, to prosecute these wars. War for the sake of war, Warren comes to believe. War because people should want to live like us. War because nobody can stop us.

Now, Mongolia, over seven centuries after the death of the Great Khan’s grandson, is among the bottom third of the poorest nations on the planet. In the late 90s, when I was there, they received the most foreign aid per capita of any country on Earth.

For the American Peace Corps volunteers in Tea of Ulaanbaatar, the Gulf War lies behind them, America’s contemporary wars loom ahead, and Mongolia’s history stares them in the face. Feeling disaffected they turn to the blood-red, hallucinogenic Mongol tea, Tsus, as a means of escape. The tea, more powerful than anything the West has ever seen, grants its long-term users visions of a warlike apocalypse, as if to say:

To be consumed. To wither and deaden. This is what comes from empire-building.

--Christopher Howard