B.Munkhdul : “I love being informed and in the know.”
It’s not just Mogi and his growing number of fans boasting about his newswire either. US based financial writer and Mongolian economic and political guru Jon Springer says, ”To subscribe to Mogi’s Cover Mongolia News Wire is to be informed. There is no better aggregation of news in English about any single country I have come across (from Djibouti to Myanmar, from Bangladesh to Uruguay). That said, an opportunity to talk to him is to insightfully understand how the news relates to the daily life and future of Mongolia’s citizens.”
Mogi describes how after resigning from his last job he was looking for new opportunities. There wasn’t a lot out there that excited him as perhaps would have done so a few years ago. “I’ve always had my newswire which kept me in touch with friends and contacts and they were always telling me I should make something out of it. So that always encouraged me to do it consistently, day in, day out. And in the midst of looking for other opportunities, I realised maybe I could make a career out of this. It’s no longer a hobby. It’s my business. It all just started as me trying to find out more about my own country after having come back home after seven years abroad. Then I started sharing this information with colleagues and clients – and the rest is history.”
After receiving a scholarship from the Japanese Government and studying business at Saitama University in Japan, Mogi returned “home” in 2009. I should mention that prior to studying in Japan, Mogi had no knowledge of the Japanese language, but came out of Saitama fluent in Japanese.
“I learned to speak Japanese when I was twenty years old,” he tells me matter of factly – like it’s no big deal. I think of the sheer tenacity it must take to achieve this small feat. Most could not fathom obtaining a degree in a foreign language, particularly one as difficult as Japanese, but Mogi’s humbleness about this achievement is as impressive as he is.
“After I came back to work in brokerage, I realised I knew very little about Mongolia today, so I was forced to be knowledgeable about all things Mongolia in order to sell stocks. In 2009 I started reading what was on the web like a few Reuters articles here and there. There wasn’t much back in those days, but I got caught up in it and wanted to share what I read. So I started sharing with my colleagues what I read and it became a habit. My colleagues and boss appreciated it, so I started adding clients to it.”
Mogi’s father was a diplomat and as a young boy Mogi lived in Laos from 88-92, his first school being Russian. “So my first written language that I learned was Russian, but I spoke to my parents in Mongolian.”
Mogi was born in Nalaikh in 1983. His dad was in the army and his mother gave birth to him at his maternal grandmother’s town. After he was born he came to UB where he grew up until moving to Laos in 1988. “So we were away when Mongolia transitioned to a democracy. I was lucky in some ways not to be there as the initial years were hard. Laos was a great tropical country. Food was being rationed in Mongolia, Laos was tropical and food was plentiful.”
His later childhood memories are not uncommon, but descriptions like this never cease to amaze me: “I guess when I came back from Laos in 1992 at that time there were so many street bullies that everywhere you walked you’d get bullied. Everyone went through it. There were a lot of turf wars and everyone knew everyone within their own district – if there was somebody you didn’t recognize you’d get bullied.”
As a new kid on the block, Mogi found this a difficult time. He relays to me over a sandwich surrounded by expats at Rosewood Café even his precious chewing gum was stolen from his mouth. “It was 1992 – I guess the rationing was over, but people were still in struggle mode and everybody relied on the state for so much.”
I ask him about Mongolia today. “It’s such a big commercial town now and politics is politics.”
We talk about the recent financial debacle surrounding the deputy speaker, the PM getting lost in the Khentii Mountains and the opposition walking out during the President’s speech. “It’s just politics,” he assures me again.
I egg him on asking about the flow through effect into the economy, but he’s adamant and says, “C’mon look at America today. Nothing gets done in American politics, but still business is good and is reviving. The business community there has built a tolerance towards politics because at the end of the day politicians won’t do anything to deter the countries growth right? It’s just about deciding who the presides over this growth.”
What does Mogi miss about the old way of life in Mongolia? “In Mongolia things were simpler, people were nicer to each other it seemed, especially in the city. There seemed to be more time for family and friends. Progress makes people busier.”
Mogi’s paternal grandparents were from Khovsgol and he describes to me how he’d like to spend time in this region of Mongolia – relaxing for a month in a ger, “waking up to the sun and going asleep with the sun,” he beams.
I think to myself you can take the boy out of Mongolia, but you cannot take Mongolia out of the boy. “We were all at some point nomads and people in the city quickly forget this.” To this day, Mogi loves spending time in the countryside in the summer with friends to just “enjoy nature.”
We discuss the future of Mongolia and he points out, “Nobody these days disputes that the Mongolian economy is going to grow, but we have to improve the quality of life of each and every Mongolian. We need to make everyone healthy and skilled and as smart as possible so we’ll be the ones who control and manage this growth instead of having to rely on expat expertise.”
I want to know about the modern day inspirations in his life. Mogi’s parents left a memorable imprint, particularly his father who worked in the public service his whole life. “He’s my moral compass. He never drifted into the more immoral or corrupt side of public service, probably to the detriment of his career. He’s got a lot of integrity and gained a lot of respect for being so well grounded. Even in the 1980’s when everybody was becoming a party member, he didn’t get into politics or became a party member which was interesting. He also showed me the world and took me abroad so I’ll always be grateful to him. My mom was the backbone of course taking care of us. She sacrificed a lot to look after us all.”
And how does he feel about foreigners living in UB? I tell him he doesn’t have to be diplomatic and he quite bluntly says, “I’m not going to be diplomatic.”
“At one point I had spent two thirds of my life abroad, so I understand what the expat life is like. Of course this moment in Mongolia’s history we all need each other and the opportunity is here for expats to invest and teach us and leave us with a skilled work force so we can take over. A lot of the expats here are short term oriented and say they won’t live here forever and I find it a little insulting I guess. That just means to me they’re here to make money and then leave. I endorse this though in many ways because they will make money and we will make money with them and become more skilled. The majority of Mongolians do not, however, understand this. This short-term mentality is how some expats behave here. When I go to a restaurant or a pub and I see only expats there grouped together, I sometimes cringe to myself and think this is why some Mongolians dislike you. They can also be a bit patronising at times especially when I hear them talking about how stupid our politicians are.”
He goes on, “You could have a hundred Mongolians understand what foreign investment is and why Mongolia needs this, but still they wouldn’t be able to do much about it because people don’t really have a grasp of capitalism. A sense of ownership is a new concept. For 100 years we didn’t own anything, the sheep we herded were not ours. They belonged to the state. In the 90’s when the state gave back the herds and apartments we understood it as property, but not as assets. They knew it was theirs, but they didn’t understand you could use it to increase your wealth. The privatisation effort of the early 90s was such a failure because nobody understood they actually had investments. So everybody got shares and stocks in these privatised companies thinking they were just pieces of paper that might go to waste if they didn’t sell them right away. Of course, the savvy guys bought them cheaply. In the 90s everyone had an equal playing field. Now twenty-three years later, the world expects us to know what a stock, investment, asset or liability is and they complain and start rolling their eyes. I just hate it when I see it in articles or hear expats talking about Mongolians like this.”
Mogi also created a petition to convince the world to start spelling Mongolia’s capital correctly Ulaanbaatar and not Ulan Bator: https://www.change.org/petitions/english-speaking-world-please-spell-mongolia-s-capital-correctly-ulaanbaatar-not-ulan-bator
Most recently he (along with Michael Kohn) convinced Bloomberg to use the right word. WSJ and The Economist also started spelling it correctly before Bloomberg. “Now I have AP, Reuters, BBC from the majors to follow,” he tells me.
Short URL: http://ubpost.mongolnews.mn/?p=3612
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