Urna · The Voice of the Mongolian Grasslands

Tal Nutag

Urna talks about her life and childhood in the grasslands

My homeland is the Ordos district, a high plateau in western Inner Mongolia belonging to China. It was here that I was born in the last winter month of 1968 into a humble family of livestock farmers. As a child I looked after the lambs on the sand dunes with the neighbouring children. Sometimes we lost track of our flock whilst playing. So to gather them together again we tossed lumps of sand into the air. In this way we sometimes caused whole sandbanks to collapse. Later I looked after calves in the plains of Shirdegiin Tsaidam where the thick grass grows tall. And so the first ten years of my childhood quickly passed.

In my country it is customary for the children to attend a day-school when they reach the age of ten. My parents now expected this of me. I got on my horse, presented myself on the neighbouring household and began to learn the Mongolian alphabet. Where I come from day-school means a particular family where all the local children gather to receive instruction in writing. Later on I went to a middle-school. It was too far away to ride to every day, and so from then on I only got to visit my parents for one or two days of a fortnight. The school was run with the strictest discipline. Each morning, as soon as the sun rose, we had to get up out of our warm beds and go to lesson. It was no longer the bleating of sheep and lambs and the lowing of cattle which awoke me but the clanging of the school-bell.

The years passed quickly. Soon I finished middle-school and set my thoughts on studying. I got in the train – for the very first time in my life – and travelled to Shanghai. There I was, a simple twenty-year-old Mongolian peasant-girl, wanting to matriculate at the conservatory and unable to speak a single word of Chinese! So I diligently learned the language, took lessons on the Chinese Yangqin and was eventually admitted in 1990 to the Institute of Traditional Chinese Music at the Shanghai Conservatory. I was fascinated by the student life and getting to know what was still for me the foreign Chinese culture proved to be an important experience. During my studies of the basic music-theory I returned more and more to my Mongolian roots.

The Ordos district has been dubbed the Sea of Songs by its inhabitants. I am very happy to have born in this particular part of the world. In my homeland there is no one who doesn’t know our folk music. Its range is endless and the songs are sung everywhere in the open air, tending the cattle, whilst riding. So it was that I grew up in a sea of wonderful melodies, fairy-tales and legends.