About this project
TumenUlzii Bayunmend is perhaps the most famous ethnically Mongolian Inner Mongolian writer. His essays about politics exiled him from China, where his wife and daughter still live. His wife was strip-searched at the border; Inner Mongolian dissidents over the last year have been arrested outside the UN in Ulaanbaatar. I met TumenUlzii in September of 2007 during my year as a Henry Luce Scholar working as a literary translator for the Mongolian Writers Union, and collaborated with PEN Freedom To Write to get him UNHCR Refugee Status--but he has yet, after five years in Ulaanbaatar, to be resettled somewhere safe.
This project is one of citizen journalism: to write Tumen's story and tell it to the international literary community. The paper I would present at the Writers and Literary Translators International Congress (WALTIC) in Istanbul in September is about Tumen in the hopes that he would get more international attention and therefore inoculation against the Chinese government and assistance out of Mongolia with his family joining him.
I have already been accepted to WALTIC on the premise of my abstract, I just don't have the means to get there, eat and sleep for three days, and make the presentation--and the conference offers no scholarships. I will likely be the youngest presenter, and it is such hopeful news that the international literary community forming around WALTIC wants to hear his story.
Tumenulzii is a brave soul who lives without his family and personal safety every day. He deserves freedom of expression and a daily life with his family, as we all do. Thank you for anything you can do to help me spread the word about him and others like him.
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This project successfully raised its funding goal on July 24, 2010.
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A postcard with a handwritten and one of a kind poem by yours truly!
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A thank-you note and a copy of the pamphlet I will assemble about Tumen Ulzii to hand out at WALTIC!
Project By
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MING HOLDEN served in the Mongolian Writers Union as their International Relations Adviser during her year as a Henry Luce Scholar in Mongolia, collaborating with The Asia Foundation on literary translations and working towards the formation of a Mongolia PEN Center. While an undergraduate at Brown University (’07) she co-founded and edited the Brown Literary Review.
She is a Huffington Post blogger, a freelance editor and grant-writer, and lover of cashews and cake.
Her poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, journalism, and literary translations have appeared in Cerise Press, The Best American Poetry Blog, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Huffington Post, InAsia, InTheFray, Peaches and Bats, The Poker, Poets & Artists, Prospect, the Santa Ynez Valley Journal, the Santa Barbara Independent, and Slice Magazine’s blog.
She recently taught a cross-genre workshop at the Richard Hugo House.
She has done international nonprofit work in Russia (at the Silver Taiga Sustainable Forestry Foundation); Ecuador (at the CEMOPLAF family planning center); Bolivia (at the Rio Beni Health Project); Mongolia (at The Asia Foundation); and also in New York (at Archipelago Books) and California (at People Helping People).
