Nutug

Tarag idegen-u amta ni
Eejiin süünii shimtei
Taliin jergelgen miraljagsan
Eejiin süünii shimtei

1

I once came across a little video on TikTok. In it, a pen in someone’s hand moved steadily across the page, writing a script from top to bottom and from right to left. Though I knew nothing about the language, I recognized the script as Mongolian.

But that wasn’t why I lingered over the video.

A little tune played in the background. Something about the singing caught my attention. It touched me somewhere I can’t name or pinpoint. Something in it seemed to speak to me in an inexplicable way. What it was, I didn’t stop to think. It happens to all of us. You hear something, you like it, and you play it again.

Only this time my finger also wandered to the download button. That was how the little video found a permanent home on my phone.

2

Then, last November, I wrote a piece called Axia Yiruo.

I had no idea what I had done.

When it was finished, I went back and read it from the first word to the last. It hit me with a force I never imagined possible. It stirred emotions I didn’t know existed in me. The power of what I had written shook me to the very bottom of my being and turned my world upside down. For days afterward I could not emerge from it. The emotional turmoil simply refused to subside.

One evening, I remembered the little TikTok video. I searched for it on my phone and pressed play. The moment the singing began, I was dumbstruck.

That voice could not be anything but Axia. It was her. Of her. For her.

It mattered very little that Axia was Yi and the song Mongolian. It mattered very little that the Yi language has its own script while the script in the video was Mongolian. At that moment, that voice was Axia, and the singing was my story about her, transformed into sound.

Of course, a song cannot be a person. But that was how it felt. It was as though, the moment I reached the final word of the story, the song began, and with the first notes Axia quietly stepped out from the page.

In the days that followed, I tried to explain this strange experience to myself.

The singer was a young woman. Axia, when I met her, was young too. The voice was clear and unaffected. The singing was gentle, without the self-conscious polish or theatrical habits one so often hears in professionally trained singers. It felt untouched. Axia, too, was untouched in that sense—simple, wholesome, without pretense.

The setting also mattered. A single guitar supplied the chords. It seemed to be recorded outdoors. You could hear the wind brushing across the microphone and the rustling of grass in the background.

As I listened again and again, I thought of photographs I had taken several years earlier in Aba, the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in western Sichuan. Somehow, the immense, open highland, the Mongolian song, and Axia all came to belong to one and the same place in my memory.

Looking back now, I think I understand why.

There comes a point in life when the world behind you has grown vastly larger than the world still ahead.

The song belonged to that world.

With the singing and my photographs from Aba, I made a little video of my own, something I could play whenever the feeling returned.

3

This went on for months.

Not once did I stop and ask myself:

“You’ve been listening to this song for more than half a year. Have you ever wondered what she’s actually singing?”

Even now I find that astonishing.

How could I never have asked what the words meant?

It wasn’t that I ignored the sounds. Quite the contrary. Soon after making my little video, I searched online for the opening lines, compared them carefully with what I heard, and produced a Romanized transcription to use as captions.

Tarag idegen-u amta ni
Eejiin süünii shimtei
Taliin jergelgen miraljagsan
Eejiin süünii shimtei

But I was content simply to hear the sounds.

I loved the way the singer rolled the first word—not tarag, but tarrrag.

Only recently did I begin to feel dissatisfied with my ignorance.

The opening word of the song was that heart-melting tarag. But what did it mean? Surely a word that beautiful must carry a beautiful meaning. How could I have let it roll past my ears hundreds of times without ever finding out?

Finally, with no excuse left, I dragged myself off my mental couch, put aside the potato chips, and started digging.

I expected to find the meanings of a few unfamiliar words. Instead I found a poem. A poem about the grassland that nourishes the animals; whose milk nourishes the mother; whose milk nourishes us; and about that land itself—the homeland of the grasslands.

Taraag ideni amtaa
奶酪的纯香

Ejin suni ximtai
有着母亲乳汁的营养

Tajin jergelge miraljaa
草原上的蜃气飘摇

Ejin suni ximtai
有着母亲乳汁的营养

Only then did I look up another word.

Not a word from the song, but the word I had already chosen as the title of this essay.

Nutug.

It means homeland. Not merely the place where one was born, nor simply the place where one lives. It is the land to which one’s heart belongs.

By then, I realized I had known the meaning of the word long before I knew the word itself.

4

I often ask myself, honestly, and often, forcefully, “What is it about Axia that keeps me awake at night? What is it about her that does not give me peace of mind?”

I never wronged her, in the sense one would think in such cases. We were nuns and monks, if that’s what you had in mind. We were together, and then we were not, at a time when both our lives were just starting.

Now, decades later, if I had to name one thing, it would be what I would use to describe this version of the song.

A simple girl, never went to college, the Tess of my younger days, with whom I could have stayed together and raised a family.

She was my Nutug. Or perhaps, she could have been my nutug.

Like this version of Tal Nutug, I don’t care too much about the big names and their performances of it on stage. I’d give up everything to start life again with you, with a “tarrrrag,” on an ordinary day, on the steppe, with wind blowing across the microphone placed between us, drawing us together.

Postscript

While writing this essay, I looked up another work bearing the same title, Tal Nutag, by Urna Chahar-Tugchi. It left me puzzled. I tried several times to hear in it the same homeland that had moved me in Anda Union’s performance. I failed. Perhaps there really is such a thing as music for music’s sake. I have never learned to hear music that way. To my ear, I could not find nutug there.

---

---