Inner Mongolia

"The immense Mongolian prairie rolled out in infinite waves. I distinguished herds of horses in the distance, grazing on gentle hill slopes scattered with the small dots that the nomads’ yurts resembled from afar…"

Abstracts

"I fell asleep in the car. The town in the south of the province of Inner Mongolia, where we’d landed, looked as dreary to me as all the previous ones in northeast China that I’d visited in the past month. Also dreary was the road that we’d been travelling on for hours. I was desperate to see, in this country, something other than the sinister stage of a sad, polluted industrial world. In no way did the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia resemble my idea of Mongolia of the steppes, ineffably pure, vast and bucolic.

I’d had enough and I fell asleep. When I opened my eyes, an immense Mongolian prairie unfolded endlessly before me like a gigantic green ocean swell. (…) In the distance, I spotted a car racing across the vast plain. Sa Ren Tong Ga La was on her way home with her sister on the luggage rack. I was given directions to her yurt."

Extract from Zoé Zoé, Femmes du mondes, 2007, Éditions Gallimard