“‘Humanity’ does not advance, it does not even exist. The overall aspect is that of an enormous experimental workshop where some things succeed in all ages, and whole things fail, and where all order, logic and proportion is lacking.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Mongolia has become a place of deep spiritual significance for me. When I first relapsed from sobriety, it was with a group of Mongolians in 2019. I had just met the woman who would later become my wife. We’d spent the weekend together on the Tomb Sweeping Holiday, a traditional Chinese festival in April where families honour ancestors by cleaning their graves and making offerings in Yunnan, in the town of Xishuangbanna. After that weekend with her, I flew to Beijing to meet the Mongolians. My year of early sobriety had been very frustrating: I had removed alcohol without replacing it with faith or love. I left one way of life and hadn’t figured out how to enter another. I didn’t like my life. I wanted love and connection, but I also wanted freedom. How can you have both love and freedom? How can you be both connected to other people and free to do whatever you like? That contradiction is the hole through which I’ve always fallen. For me, the biggest risk has always been feeling totally alone, and in Mongolian winter, I found that feeling, wrestled it to the ground.

When we quarrel today, my wife tells me that I’m a very needy person. I need the affirmation and interest of others, and when I had the revelation in 2019 that this beautiful woman might become my lover, it was all I needed to forget about sobriety, which at that moment seemed like a delay to the joy of life. After a few days in Yunnan with her, I flew to Beijing; with the Mongolians, I drank vodka.

The city of Ulaanbataar – “Red Hero” in Mongolian – is both the capital of Mongolia, and somewhere that feels foreign to the Mongolian mentality. Mongolians are nomads, and in the countryside they live far apart from each other, because of the land required for herd farming. Where Chinese or Russians live in tightly clustered villages with varied social roles, the Mongolians are scattered across vast spaces, leading individual lives that are yet – in all major aspects – completely identical.

In China, I work as an editor for Palgrave, the academic publishing house, and this year, I’ll publish a book by the Mongolian historian Batsaikhan Ookhnoi Emgent about Soviet Communism, which eventually entailed the struggle between a traditional, nomadic way of life and the forces of urban modernity: the erection of a capital city and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, the centralised institution for scientific research in the country. The Ulaanbataar Hotel, for example, was built as a vanity project by the Russian wife of the Mongolian head of state during the long Soviet years between 1952 and 1984. When it was built in 1961, it was the first place with hot water in winter in Ulaanbataar. For many years, the Mongolian Academy of Sciences (MAS) had a statue of Stalin outside its front building, and in many ways, Stalin was responsible for the creation of the Mongolian state. Up until then, it had been a loose network of clans and groups. Now, Mongolians are scattered across Buryatia and Tuva. The Russian defense minister Shoigu is Tuvan, and the Buryat Mongols have been drafted in great numbers (indeed, Mongolia is only one of several regions where Mongols live). In Chinese Inner Mongolia, where the GDP is high, traffic is efficient, and the Mongolian language is forbidden in schools. Mongolia itself takes up 1% of the earth’s land mass, and has a smaller population than Greater Manchester. When the USSR collapsed, the statue of Stalin was pulled down overnight.

It might seem to the naked eye that the Mongolians are in an isolated place, but their mental world is one of intense awareness of the potential approach by Russia and China. In his office in the Blue Sky Tower, downtown Ulaanbattar, the Mongolian crypto-mogul Ganhuyag Chuluun Hutagt once told me contemptuously that both Moscow and Beijing were founded as Mongolian tax collection posts. Which do you regret more? I asked.

The 12th Conference of Mongolists

When I went to Ulaanbataar for the first time in 2023 – the first time I returned to the country since 2019, and sober again – the experience was vivid. In town in summer 2023 for the 12th conference of Mongolists, the street scenes I witnessed were like illustrations taken from a medieval illuminated manuscript: an enormous sky; a stray dog in an alley; a man holding a tray bearing cubes of butter; young gymnasts spinning around. After years in Shanghai, the streets are so familiar that I barely notice them: if Shanghai is forgettable in its familiarity, Mongolia is challenging in its foreignness. Since Russia has become closed off to me, I can no longer think of any place that I can go whose wildness is alluring in quite the same way. I was looking for a place which makes a secret sign to my nihilistic, wandering inner self, the one who I have restrained. I know that Mongolia is just a somewhat poor country in northern Asia, but my imagination embellishes it into a holy land of freedom. I’ve come there with my expectations and needs: I need a pure land, a land to find myself, a land to think about things. Above all, I think about freedom in Mongolia and what it might mean for me.

My friend Zolboo Dashnyam, of the Mongolian Academy, wrote a book about the historical similarities between English-speaking peoples and Mongols. He thought that there were a lot of parallels; for example, both groups are known for their warmongering empires; we built massive empires, which shrank again. In the high time of the British Empire and now under a new American imperialism, many British and Americans hesitated from foreign involvement. Now that the British Empire is over, many British people feel nostalgic for it. Similarly, a person might crave the privacy of their own personal space, but on retreating to it, feels themself to be alone. As I went through Mongolia in a stupor, I started to consider what parts of the Mongolian historical experience I recognised as meaningful to myself, if only as metaphor. I desire freedom, crazily. But when I get there, I need love and connection. I revel in my individuality and fear my aloneness. I cherish my ancestors without knowing who they really were, and pour my life force into my children. And into writing. We drove through an empty, white prairie, and I had the impression of sailing through a white sea, lit by strong beams of sunshine.

Brain Outside Brain

On the flight from Beijing to Ulaanbataar in December 2025, I was exhausted from arguments at home. I fell asleep and when I got off the plane, I realised I had left my computer on it. The computer had stored my diary. It records almost the entire period of time I’ve been sober for the past five years. I had a moment of intense anxiety and panic when I realised I would never see it again. The feeling didn’t pass that night as I looked outside at the icy cold snow. I felt vulnerable and afraid and alone. I thought about what it would be like to sleep on the endless Mongolian grassland in a yurt, even if it was warm inside. Normally, with my computer, phone and other distractions, I keep the world at bay – but right then I couldn’t. I was alone with my own thoughts – and even though I’d been sober for five years, my own thoughts were just as frightening a place as it had ever been.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. If I want freedom, I have to accept that I might be alone sometimes. At the same time I want love. Around 4.30am that night I thought of my wife and Shanghai. Since I met her, we have had two kids. In the same period, I published several books on the Mongolians, about the Civil War with the Russians, about shamanism and about England. Without having slept, I was preparing to go to the homeland of the Genghis Khan Museum’s director, Chuluun. I was going to pray to God to show me what to do with my life and how I could be both free and connected.

For me, insights about life are only ever gained by hard, painful experience. I hoped it would be the same this time. I hoped that losing my computer – my comfort blanket – would allow me to think new thoughts. I hoped that it would help me to reset the way that I related to my wife, wipe the slate clean of resentments and remember what I was doing in the relationship at all – what came before, what I hope comes after. I wondered what my objective was. Was it fame or status? Was it to tell other people what I thought was happening? In the end, I believe that I just want to connect with other people. My own life is the one thing that I have to offer.

As we drove through the steppe on our way to meet Chuluun, mountains crested with white snow like the waves of an ocean, we occasionally passed data centres, warehouses, and districts of unfinished villas

And Then,

Driving to Chuluun’s yurt, on the outskirts of the city, just next to the national archives, Zolboo told me that my computer had been found by Air China’s staff. I could only have it back in three days’ time. Exhausted but exultant, I realised: God has let me dodge the bullet again. Originally, I became sober after a biking accident that could have killed me. I woke up in a hospital, with a machine regulating the flow of blood to my brain. But when I left, it was only with a small scar. It was as if God was giving me the sternest of warnings, without any long-term consequences. He works in mysterious ways, but sometimes, what He’s trying to say is pretty obvious. And if my computer is a secondary brain, He had given me a dark night of the soul, literally. He was causing me to question which thoughts and experiences I could retain, and woke me through a long, reassuring drive through the tundra with my companions. I thought about the first diary that I had believed I’d lost, and remembered that years ago, I backed up everything that I’d ever written onto a USB key. I wrote with great passion throughout my adolescence, but I’ve never once gone back to look at what I wrote. Fundamentally, I don’t really care about my younger self. In that case, why, reader, should you care? Perhaps you’ll see in my writing what I see in Mongolia’s snow –a blank space – at once full of meanings and prepared to be the page onto which I project my own feelings.

As we drove through the steppe on our way to meet Chuluun, mountains crested with white snow like the waves of an ocean, we occasionally passed data centres, warehouses, and districts of unfinished villas, similar to my wife’s hometown of Daqing, on the Chinese side. Indeed, Daqing has a suburb of ethnic Mongolians, Do’er’go’te. Chuluun is a big shot; a bit more than a week before our trip, he’d been with the Pope, discussing a relationship between his Genghis Khan Museum and the Vatican’s archives. I was surprised, then, that when we pulled up to his compound hours from any settlement, it was just two yurts in the middle of the prairie. A dog and an outhouse made of sheet metal stood on the plain beside a small yurt. We entered, and I asked him question after question. He parried my attempts to put specific values on China, Russia and freedom with a plate of organ meat, whether from horses, sheep or cows, I’m not sure. I only sampled the offerings. “In the winter”, he told me, “We only eat meat; we can’t grow grain here, but our animals can find grass underneath the snow. Summertime is different. We eat dairy products to supplement the meat then.” With these words, he smeared some fermented curds onto a piece of Russian black bread that somebody had brought as a gift. We were with his entourage, including the director of the historical section of the museum, who later proposed to me a book about Buddhist practices under socialism. Then there was an old friend of Chuluun’s, whose yurt it was, and his five-year-old son who played Candy Crush next to a stove fuelled by cow dung. Driving back, we coasted through the country before hitting a wall of traffic in town. I asked Zolboo if the Mongolians would allow the Chinese to build a subway system here. He laughed in response.

The Toilets

The next day, R and I were picked up by Oyungerel Tsedevdamba, a former minister of culture who now devotes herself to improving access to public toilets for rural Mongolians. She told me at some length about the issues that NGOs and foreign governments, including Japan, had experienced in trying to link the Mongolians of the “Ger District”, a massive area of new builds, to the grid. The Soviet downtown was one vibe. These comfortable but dilapidated homes, built of wood or cement, were very much another. She and the person she called her partner (business, romantic or both – it wasn’t clear) took us to their model home in the district. It had the ambience of a rehab clinic in suburban North Carolina, with modest aluminium siding, comfortable chairs and a television connected to Netflix. We talked of the Russian provocations, large-scale military exercises which Mongolia could only ignore, possessing no way to react. I told her that I believe Mongolians know something about the world that I don’t. I wanted to find out what they know about living with China, with Russia, with winter, with uncertainty. You’re not the first American to come here with these questions, she told me.

Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History, found it excruciating to imagine that the human race had originated in Africa. A prominent eugenicist, Osborn promoted the “Out of Asia” theory of human origins. Osborn was a vocal advocate of scientific racism, promoting Nordic superiority and opposed to immigration from non-European groups. In 1923, Osborn was the primary funder, organiser and intellectual driver behind the AMNH’s Central Asiatic Expeditions. Led by Roy Chapman Andrews, the expedition never found a pristine Agartha. But it did find dinosaur eggs at the flaming cliffs in the Gobi desert, along with fossils of the Protoceratops and Velociraptor. The expedition made its way into American culture through Indiana Jones. Americans often go in search of themselves in places where they expect to find nothing. The American fantasy world is always narrated in terms of science and money, but it’s just as fantastical as the historical destiny-infused narratives of the Russians – and it often crashes on the walls of the everyday.

Zolboo picked us up. We were going to his father’s place in the suburbs. As we pulled up to the dacha, Zolboo pointed out a school for orphans on the neighbouring hillside; his mother had taught there for decades. We walked first through the woods and down to a river, part of which was flowing, although it was -20°C. Here, Zolboo told me, he had spent a blissful childhood. His father was a civil servant during the Soviet period and into the early 1990s when Mongolia was as closed off to the world as North Korea is today. He eventually started a small business. This man, petite and elegant, with a face as if whittled lovingly from wood, told us disapprovingly about the transition. Nostalgic for socialism, he made a point to praise President Trump to us before we left.

The big day finally arrived: at MAS, I addressed a group of 30 or 40 Mongolian scholars, specialising in fields ranging from sociology to paleontology, and shared my theories on why Mongolian ideas should have a large audience in America. Indeed, on this voyage I had been accompanied by a handful of friends from the English-speaking world. The concept of Mongolia in winter carried a certain cachet for some in my social circles, although others found the idea crazy. I spoke to the Brigadier General about Mongolian geopolitics. I discussed shamanism with the director of philosophy; I chatted with a shifty-eyed businessman about how Mongolia and China could cooperate for the common good. I was always relieved to have companions whose eyes I could see things through. Reader, I can assure you that on my own, it wouldn’t have been the same. For me, the bracing shock of new ideas and experiences tastes best when it is accompanied by a person whose assumptions, ideas and sense of self are parallel to my own – like a child having a teddy bear accompany them to the unknown shore of sleep.

In the weeks leading up to the New Year, Mongolian work-units celebrate wildly with music, drink and festivals. On that first awful night, one of the reasons I slept so poorly was from being kept awake to the sound of Boney M songs on the second floor of my hotel. On the eve of our departure, my friend R and I took a long walk in search of a place whose food didn’t taste like offal. We spoke of the uncertainty we’d felt before having children and moving to a foreign country. We discussed what we thought of as the bold chic of the Mongolians we had met and our favourite books.

My problems, I realised, as I flew over Beijing and back to womb-like Shanghai, were in my own mind. Not so for the Mongolians, who actually have to deal with pressing issues. I have accepted interdependence with the machine, to the point that losing it is as shocking as a death in the family. But, in my desperate search for meaning, I have decided that my computer, my passport, my children, my own body, even Mongolia – are all reflections of God. And, whatever happens, it is all part of a plan: one much larger than myself. .