The Mongols Are Coming

It's interesting how immigrant communities get established. For example, most people don't know that the second-most spoken foreign language in the Arlington County, Virginia school district (across the Potomac River from Washington, DC) is Mongolian. Yes, really. Since the collapse of communism in Mongolia in 1990, about 20,000 Mongols have emigrated to the US, and Arlington is the capital of Mongolian America.

In this case, I know why they ended up in Arlington. First, the Mongolian Embassy opened in Washington in about 1990, providing a small nucleus of Mongols in the region. And second, the State Department recruited a Mongolian language teacher from Mongolia, to teach the language to diplomats at the State Department's Foreign Service Institute, located in Arlington. With the teacher came his wife and kid and grandkids... and that plus the attraction of the embassy (family members coming to work there too) created the critical mass for Mongolians in Arlington.

So if you're riding the bus in Arlington and see a group of Asians speaking a foreign language, don't assume it's Chinese or Korean. You could be sharing a ride with a descendant of Genghis Khan.