Mongolië is voor veel mensen nog een mysterieus land dat vooral beelden oproept van woeste ruiters, uitgestrekte grasvlakten en nomaden. Het is een land waar de tijdstil lijkt te hebben gestaan. Als Jill Lawless arriveert in Mongolië treft ze een hoofdstad aan die veel westerser is dan ze had verwacht. De trendy geklede jongeren en moderne discotheken van Ulaanbaatar staan in schril contrast met de nomadische bevolking die nog in tenten op de ruige vlakten leven.
Het wilde Oosten is het onthullende reisverslag van Lawless’ verblijf in Mongolië waarbij je als lezer alle wetenswaardigheden over de lokale politiek, de diverse tradities en de historie van dit intrigerende land leert kennen.
De Canadese Jill Lawless werkte als redacteur in Mongolië bij de enige Engelstalige en onafhankelijke krant The UB Post. Zij schreef ook diverse artikelen over Mongolië voor internationale dagbladen. Momenteel woont en werkt ze als verslaggeefster in Londen.
For most of us, the name Mongolia conjures up exotic images of wild horsemen, endless grasslands, and nomads — a timeless and mysterious land that is also, in many ways, one that time forgot. Under Genghis Khan, the Mongols’ empire stretched across Asia and into the heart of Europe. But over the centuries Mongolia disappeared from the world’s consciousness, overshadowed and dominated by its huge neighbours — first China, which ruled Mongolia for centuries, then Russia, which transformed the feudal nation into the world’s second communist state.
Jill Lawless arrived in Mongolia in the late 1990s to find a country waking from centuries of isolation, at once rediscovering its heritage as a nomadic and Buddhist society and simultaneously discovering the western world.
The result is a land of fascinating, bewildering contrasts: a vast country where nomadic herders graze their sheep and yaks on the steppe, it also has one of the world’s highest literacy levels and a burgeoning high-tech scene. While trendy teenagers rollerblade amid the Soviet apartment blocks of Ulaanbaatar and dance to the latest pop music in nightclubs, and the rich drive Mercedes and surf the Internet, more than half the population still lives in felt tents, scratching out a living in one of the world’s harshest landscapes.
Mongolia, it can be argued, is the archetypal 21st-century nation, a country waking from a tumultuous 20th century in which it was wrenched from feudalism to communism to capitalism, searching for its place in the new millennium.
This is a funny and revealing portrait of a beautiful, troubled country whose fate holds lessons for all of us.
The world has changed considerably since then; and so has Mongolia. The digital revolution has rolled across the planet, the attacks of 9/11 unleashed a wave of violence and wars, and Mongolia even became the fastest-growing economy in the world a few years ago (2012). But back when this book was researched, Mongolia was just coming out of decades of isolation within the Soviet orbit under Communism, and the country experienced in the 1990s “one of the biggest peacetime economic collapses ever” (Mongolia’s Economic Reforms: Background, Content and Prospects, Richard Pomfret, University of Adelaide, 1994).
That collapse made for some crazy times, as Wild East shows.
Wild East was called one of the top 10 Canadian travel books of 2000 by The Globe and Mail.
Reviews for Wild East: Travels in the New Mongolia by Jill Lawless:
The Globe and Mail
“Engaging…a revealing and often amusing account of her journeys through a beautiful country awakening from a tumultuous era.”
The Georgia Straight, Vancouver
“This readable and reportorial book is the perfect antidote to … those tiresomely difficult, pointlessly dangerous, and essentially fake expedtions undertaken against the advice of local people who know better.”
Toronto Star
“Lawless introduces us to Mongolia’s tabloid press, to teenage mineworkers, sharp-eyed young hustlers, nomads whose only possessions are their livestock, Mongolian wrestlers and Mongolian horse races.”
Mongolian Buryat Civilisation Bookstore
“Wryly funny and wide-spectrum account of Mongolia’s tumultuous rebirthing into the 21st century. Half the population lives in Soviet apartment blocks and watches satellite TV but the other half still eek a living from the exquisite, barren hills while living in nomadic felt tents. Of course, I’d much rather be in the tents… but whatever your preference, you will definitely enjoy Ms. Lawless’ writing. She was editor of an Ulaan Baator newspaper for two years, and she tells it like it is. Very highly recommended.”
“Jill Lawless’ book is not a scholarly tome per se, yet it is of definite value to the contemporary Mongolian scholar … Lawless’ period is 1997-1999, the heart of the tumultuous and ill-spent years of Democratic Coalition Government… a period of great hopes for democratic flowering and free market enterprise leading the nation to prosperity and progress.”
Copies of Wild East: Travels in the New Mongolia by Jill Lawless are still available in various editions and languages.A promotional poster for Wild East from 2003.
The New York Post called Wild East: Travels in the New Mongolia “harrowing, hilarious” (April 26, 2016).New brand sites for Jill Lawless and Wild East on the way for 2021.
“This is a good, fun book about life in Mongolia. … it’s an interesting and often amusing series of stories loosely connected.”
On the difference between Wild East: Travels in the New Mongolia and other travel writing on contemporary Mongolia:
“Others sent me Jill Lawless’s Wild East: The New Mongolia, a compilation of pieces she wrote when she was editor of Mongolia’s English-language newspaper, the UB Post, during Mongolia’s transition from a socialist people’s republic to young democracy. With the wind shaking the frame of my ger, I lit the stove and read what these and other writers claimed to have found just outside my flapping felt walls.
“By the time veteran journalist Jasper Becker’s Mongolia: Travels in an Untamed Land arrived, I had put aside books written since Mongolia opened up to the West in the early 1990s. Most Western travellers and writers discovered the same sights from the back of a borrowed horse. Only Lawless had investigated the place over time on its own terms. The others, full of pith and vinegar and a standard set of assumptions about what they would find, built books on flights of fancy – golfing across Mongolia, following the path of medieval monks, ‘rediscovering shamanism’ – that were flimsier even than those that had set me in motion. The books were as exciting as museum diorama, papier-mâché models of their ‘medieval’ travels and capitalist fantasies.” Three Years in Mongolia: Trying to be a Travel Writer, Luke Meinzen, Kill Your Darlings, 10 April 2012
“In the early 2000s, Canadian journalist Jill Lawless accepted a correspondent position at a news outlet in the remote and isolated foreign capital of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. At that time, Mongolia’s media was newly privatized from beneath Communist oversight, and her role was as much a consultant for how to run a newspaper under freedom of the press, as she was a journalist with the UB Post.
David South Consulting 
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