When I came to Mongolia to start a new life, I did not come empty-handed. I carried with me the inheritance of my grandfather’s footsteps, though I had sold the only material thing he left me, an apartment in Ulan-Ude, the capital of Buryatia. What I carried was heavier than stone and wood. It was memory, persistence, and the strange circle of history.

My grandfather’s name was Ulan. He was a Buryat, born in the Kyahta district of the Republic of Buryatia. For those who have never heard of it, Buryatia lies in Siberia, on the northern shore of Lake Baikal, east of the great river Angara. It borders Mongolia to the south. The Buryats are the largest Indigenous group in Siberia, closely related to the Mongols. Our languages are kin, our histories intertwined. For centuries our ancestors moved freely across these steppes, long before there were borders between Russia and Mongolia.

But by the time my grandfather was born, the borders were real. His mother was Mongolian, but he grew up on the Soviet side. His father was absent, so he was half an orphan. In the village world of Siberia, that meant he had no protector. Other children often mocked him. He was poor, alone, and hungry, but he was also stubborn.

During the school week, he lived with his older sister in Kudara-Somon, where the school was. She was married there and took him in. The school was an internat — a Soviet-style school with a dormitory for children from distant villages. My grandfather studied there and later even worked as a teacher. Kudara-Somon is also the village of my own childhood, the place where my grandparents would one day build their family.

On weekends, he walked home to his mother. She lived alone and poor, waiting for his help with the household. The road between them was long and rough, winding through open steppe and strips of forest. He often set out late, after the day’s chores were done, and darkness would catch him halfway.

The journey was enormous. First through Semyonovka, then Ivanovka. From there, he turned left and climbed over a mountain. Still twenty kilometers remained before Naryn-Gunduy, where his mother’s house stood. By the time he reached it, the light was fading and his small figure swayed with exhaustion. Imagine a boy of ten or eleven, boots thin, clothes ragged, stumbling through the evening steppe. That was his routine.

One evening, on that long road, a Russian man from Ivanovka met him.

“Where are you going, boy?” the man asked.

“To Naryn-Gunduy,” my grandfather answered.

The man frowned. “That’s still twenty kilometers! There are wolves out here, too many. You’ll never make it safely. Come with me instead.”

And so my grandfather went.

The man took him home, fed him, and laid him on the warm stove-bed to sleep. In Russian villages, the great brick stove is not only for cooking; it is the warmest place in the house. For a boy who had been walking all day in the cold, it was like being lifted into heaven.

The man had a son, the same age as my grandfather. They spent the evening playing together, though one spoke only Russian and the other only Buryat. It did not matter. Children do not need a common language to laugh, to chase each other, to invent small games. For a night, my grandfather had a companion, someone his equal. In the morning, the man harnessed his horse and carried my grandfather all the way home.

It was only one night, but it became a story he never forgot. A night when strangers saved him from wolves. A night when hunger gave way to warmth, when loneliness was replaced by play. That was the thin thread by which his survival hung.

But survival was always fragile. Later, my grandfather stopped going to school altogether. He had nothing left to wear, nothing left to eat. He stayed home, ashamed, believing that education was beyond him, and began to work. But the teachers came to him. They traveled all the way into his remote village and said, “You must study. You are clever.” They brought him food, clothing, and a place in the dormitory. In the Soviet Union, with all its harshness, there were also such mercies. That was how my grandfather continued. That was how he endured.

He grew up to become a physical education teacher. It may sound ordinary, but for a fatherless boy mocked by his peers, it was a triumph. He was respected. He had students who listened to him, who ran and jumped at his command. He got married, he raised two boys, one of which is my dad. And little by little, he saved money. Carefully, stubbornly, he gathered enough to buy me a small apartment in Ulan-Ude, the capital of Buryatia.

Ulan-Ude is not a wealthy city, but it is the heart of Buryatia, the place where our culture, language, and faith persist under the weight of history. That apartment was his gift to me, his way of protecting me where no one had protected him. He left it to me not with instructions, but with freedom: to do with it as I wished.

It was small, just a few rooms in a concrete block like thousands of others, but for me it was more than shelter. It was proof that his sacrifices had become something solid, a home in the city that had once seemed unreachable to a poor village boy.

Years later, I sold it. With the money, I came here, to Mongolia. The land of his mother. The land from which he was once separated by politics and fate. My grandfather walked away from Mongolia into Buryatia, carrying nothing but hunger and persistence. I have walked from Buryatia into Mongolia, carrying his memory and his strength.

This is our family’s sansara, the cycle of rebirth that Buddhists speak of. A life is not a straight line but a wheel, turning, carrying us back to where we began. My grandfather’s footsteps did not end with him; they returned with me. His hunger has become my sustenance, his poverty my inheritance, his survival my new beginning.

And sometimes I think back to that one night in Ivanovka, when he lay on a stranger’s stove, playing with a boy who spoke a different language. I imagine their laughter in the dark, wordless but true. That moment, as fragile as a snowflake, helped carry him through his life, and now it carries me into mine.

The wolves did not devour him. The road did not defeat him. And because of that, I walk free today, back into Mongolia, where the circle closes, and where another begins.

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