What if you don't really own your house?
Three days in northern Mongolia, and a question I brought from Hong Kong began to come apart in my hands. The road to the lake fords three rivers and stops, often, for livestock. Goats and yaks hold their ground before a speeding Land Rover with the indifference of animals never once asked to move, because out here there is nowhere they are not allowed to be. At a roadside market I buy a knife, its handle carved from reindeer antler, its blade wrapped in a leather strap; the woman selling it names one price and has no appetite for haggling. Further on, a family of four in a felt ger — the husband away on horseback gathering cattle across half a valley, the children unbothered by clothes or by cold. Animals, small children just roaming free spirited in this beautiful land: where, exactly, is the boundary for one person with another? A land lawyer is trained to answer that by looking for the marks of ownership she knows — the fence, the boundary, the title deed, the entry in ...
