Mongolians Meld Old, New In Making Arlington Home

Families often come in waves, with parents working in the United States before sending for their children.

Urtnasan Jigjidsuren, 38, sat recently with her husband and two sons at their home in the River Place apartment complex, where several hundred Mongolians live. On one wall of their living room hangs a portrait of Ghengis Khan, the 13-century ruler who is Mongolia's national hero; another wall has a window framing the Potomac River and Jefferson Memorial.

Jigjidsuren, who owned a salon in Mongolia, and her husband, Tsogtsaikhan Gendenpel, who owned a construction company, arrived 2 1/2 years ago, leaving behind their son Bat-Amgalan Tsogtsaikhan, who goes by Bati and is now 12. Arriving nine months ago, Bati met his new brother, born in the United States.

"I was, like, nervous," Bati recalled with a smile.

Jigjidsuren, who works at a Korean deli, said Mongolian neighbors help the family stay connected to home. When anyone in the complex gets a Mongolian CD, everyone listens to it. Students take piano lessons from a Mongolian teacher. "We are inside Mongolian culture in River Place," Jigjidsuren said.

Arlington Public Schools' 219 Mongolians make up 1.2 percent of students, but they are the majority in some ESOL-HILT (English for speakers of other languages and high-intensity language training) classes -- in some schools revitalizing a program that had dwindled as the flow of immigrants slowed.

"The HILT program all around the county is shrinking," said Jack Lane, a HILT teacher at Williamsburg, where more than half of HILT students are Mongolian. "But the Mongolians were growing. They basically kept the program alive here."

They tend to excel, their teachers say, often moving into mainstream classes a year or two earlier than average.

Theories abound as to why. "Mongolian people are nomadic people," explained Consul General Gonchig Seseer over tea in the Mongolian Embassy. "That's why they very quickly adapted to a different lifestyle."

"We have the yurt tent," added Second Secretary Sukhbaatar Altantsetseg. "Just take your yurt and move to another place and just live there."

Other theories include the complexity of their language (one Mongolian described it as containing every possible phonetic sound); parents' emphasis on education; the fact that many children have learned foreign languages in Mongolian schools -- traditionally Russian and Chinese, more recently German and English; and the country's literacy rate of 98 percent.

"They have to learn another language, but they have the cognitive foundation that allows them to move faster through the system, rather than some of our students who come from countries that had civil war or didn't attend school," said Laura McDermott, a Williamsburg teacher whose HILT B class is about two-thirds Mongolian.