On Ashol-Pan, the 13-Year-Old Eagle Huntress

You guys have likely read the BBC story about the 13-year-old Kazakh girl who hunts with eagles in western Mongolia; if you haven’t, you must; the Ashol-Pan Lifetime Admiration Society starts now and ends never. (“I will endeavor to make myself worthy of you for the rest of my life, you eagle-wielding teen who strides the narrow world,” wrote Mallory Ortberg yesterday.) It’s a tough fucking life being a young girl in Central Asia, let alone one who is challenging gender norms, let alone one who is doing so by hunting with eagles: after a year of being harassed out of my skull in Kyrgyzstan I’d still barely seen things my female students already counted unremarkable. In a couple of those beautiful photos Ashol-Pan (off-duty) wears the same space-maid schoolgirl aprons they did, sits in one of those meticulous unheated schoolrooms with the blue-green walls and the white mountain light filtering in from the side. She looks, actually, a lot like an eighth-grade girl I taught once:

She’s hidden in there among all the other Ashol-Pans. Bless the teenagers of Central Asia. These kids weren’t eagle hunting but they were certainly better than me in almost every way: kinder, more generous, more spontaneous, more loving, more brave. Yesterday I was reading that Salon piece about how young girls often view assault as normal male behavior; two years ago I was listening to my 12-year-old host sister, who spoke four languages and halfway ran the household, tell me matter-of-factly that I shouldn’t wear a skirt on the bus because men, as she knew from experience, would try to get under it. I guess what I’m trying to say about Ashol-Pan is that there is only one of her, as there should be with all perfect beings, but there are also a million of her, girls who are used to having to build the fires that keep them warm at night, and I hope they ride the sea change that’s happening in their generation to enormous ahistorical things.