Uuganaa with her Mongolian parents and niece

Uuganaa Ramsay was raised in Mongolia but now lives in Scotland. She has recently been exploring why her ethnicity is linked to Down’s syndrome, a condition diagnosed in her son.

“I don’t like that word,” says a woman sitting opposite me on the train, pointing at the title of the book I am holding. “Horrible word.”

It’s my memoir, but she doesn’t know that. It was me who gave it the one-word title, Mongol.

I chose it because it has a deep meaning for me. It’s the word I grew up using to describe who I am, reading it in poems, singing it in songs, writing stories with it and drawing pictures about it – it represents my identity and culture.

“Where are you originally from?’ the lady asks. “Mongolia,” I say. “Oh, of course. Of course you are,” she says. I could see in her face that she had realised something that was now obvious but hadn’t previously occurred to her.

The word Mongol is rarely used politely these days and is often unpleasantly shortened to “mong” but how on Earth did my ethnic identity end up becoming a slang word for stupid? Even worse, used by comedians to “push boundaries”.

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