After the Last Border

by Jessica Goudeau

  Karen people were mostly either Buddhist or Baptist; Mu Naw’s mother was Buddhist, but Mu Naw converted to being Baptist before marrying Saw Ku. Missionaries from the West had come to various parts of the country in the nineteenth century. Entire regions had been Christian for more than a century; their Christian faith put them further at odds with the Buddhist Burman rulers.

  North of the Karen state in Myanmar, the Shan state and the Kachin state bordered on China, which was even less welcoming of refugees than Thailand. There were no officially sanctioned camps on the Chinese border as there were in Thailand, only informal sites that cropped up precariously. Refugees from the Kachin state often made the much harder journey west, joining Chin refugees from western Myanmar in escaping toward India, as word eventually spread about how stuck the refugees in Thailand were. Kachin refugees fleeing the fighting in northern Myanmar also felt it was worth the higher risk of paying smugglers to run with them at night across Thailand’s peninsula—near popular tourist destinations like Phuket—and into Malaysia, where they might not be legally recognized and would never have rations, but could work more easily in cities and therefore hope to make some kind of new life.

  Any of the members of Myanmar’s ethnic minorities could run a nuanced cost-benefits analysis of the various escape routes—China, India, Malaysia, Nepal, Thailand—and whether it was better to live a half-life in a camp or a hunted life in a city, based on the rumors they heard. Many more of them took their chances and stayed in Myanmar, part of the millions of internally displaced. Whatever choice they made held high risks.

  In all of her journeys, Mu Naw had had very little choice: She was five when she crossed into Thailand and ended up in the small camp where she lived out much of her childhood. Circumstances dictated most of the journey that led from that small camp to life in Mae La years later. The only choice she had really had was a yes or no one: to accept the UN offer of resettlement in Texas. Choice was not a thing Mu Naw thought about much at all.

  * * *

  —

  The day after Rita took them to RST, an Asian woman showed up at their apartment midmorning. She did not speak Burmese or Karen, but she smiled often and spoke several words in English that Mu Naw did not understand, except for “food” and “bus.” Saw Ku stayed behind with the children and Mu Naw followed the woman outside the apartment complex, turning left instead of right, away from the convenience store with the canary yellow sign that sold only junk food. They stopped at the bus stop that was to become Mu Naw’s lifeline to the outside world. The woman showed her how to slide her bus pass into the small machine and wait for a green light and a beep before boarding.

  Mu Naw had slipped one of the shopping bags from the convenience store into her purse just before leaving. As discreetly as possible, she leaned into the wall and threw up into the bag as the bus halted to a stop. The woman made sympathetic noises and patted her back occasionally. Embarrassed, Mu Naw avoided the woman’s eyes until she had had a chance to throw the sack away and wash her hands inside the grocery store.

  Her nausea easing, Mu Naw exclaimed joyfully as each new aisle brought items she recognized: chili paste, sticky rice with a label from Thailand, vegetables, fruit, spices. The woman did not understand her words, but she smiled as Mu Naw made her discoveries. The woman put almost all of the things Mu Naw recognized into their cart, as well as a number of other things she needed, including two kinds of rice cookers—the machine to make regular rice and the bamboo steamer for sticky rice. Mu Naw would not have dreamed that this new country would have a store with sticky rice and lychee so close to her house. As the cart filled up, she began to worry whether the bills in her envelope would be enough, but the woman smilingly pushed her hand away when she pulled out the envelope at the checkout line.

  Mu Naw wondered if one of the papers she had signed at RST would grant her a small card like the one the woman slid, as she had the bus pass, to pay for the items. Mu Naw could see herself, clad in jeans like this woman, pulling out her plastic card and sliding it confidently to pay for the food her family would eat. She almost giggled, but stopped herself.

  After their bus ride home, laden with sacks they could barely manage, the woman came inside and turned the knobs on the stove. Gas came out immediately. Someone had come while they were gone and connected the oven to the gas, showing Saw Ku how to turn it on. By the time the woman left, they had rice bubbling gently in their new rice cooker, strips of chicken sautéing in oil with chili paste on the stovetop, and a green mango salad chilling in the refrigerator. The familiar smells made Mu Naw hungrier than she could remember being in her life.

  Two-year-old Naw Wah ate four bowls of chicken and rice that night, dribbling the juice down her chin.

  * * *

  —

  By the end of the week, they could go to the refugee resettlement agency by themselves on the bus. Mu Naw was racked with debilitating nausea, but buses were still better than cars. The Karen man they had met the first night invited them to come over for dinner, carefully writing out the stops to the south part of Austin, where the six Karen families in Austin lived. Saw Ku and Mu Naw were the seventh family to arrive. More would be coming soon, he told them.

  That Friday they spent the night surrounded by Karen people. All of the families cooked in big aluminum pans with plenty to share; they stuffed themselves and told stories late into the night. Mu Naw was so overwhelmed by sights and smells of home she cried twice before the food was served. They treated one another like long lost relatives, any shyness lost in finding one another in the shared loneliness of this new place. The man and his wife had rice mats for them to sleep on and Mu Naw slept all the way through the night for the first time since arriving.

  They spent the next morning lingering together over breakfast while the children played, finally climbing back onto the bus toward their isolated apartment. When they unlocked the front door, the apartment now seemed strange, almost hostile. For the rest of the day, Mu Naw was taciturn, cooking woodenly. In the hours in between meals and cleaning, she sat and looked out the window, watching the comings and goings of her neighbors with a vague detachment. A woman shook a rug out on her front porch. Children ran past in shorts and flip-flops. A young man lugged a bicycle up the stairs and chained it to the iron railing on the apartment across from her.

  After dinner, once the children were tucked in bed, the grief came upon her all at once. While Saw Ku showered, Mu Naw buried her face in a kitchen towel still damp from drying dishes to quiet her sobs. She could feel the terry cloth with the edges of her teeth. She gripped the refrigerator handle fiercely.

  Once when she was a child, missionaries came to visit the camp where she lived with her parents. They handed out brightly colored balloons on white string to the children. Mu Naw had felt the gentle tug of her green balloon on her wrist after the man had tied it; his hands were warm and smooth and had a soft down of blond hair.

  Another child near her had untied his string. Mu Naw watched his yellow balloon as it drifted slowly toward the sky, past the tops of the trees, past the height at which the birds flew, into the wispy clouds above her until she could no longer see it.

  She felt then if she did not hold on to the refrigerator handle, she might become that yellow balloon—untethered, moving aimlessly, inexorably toward a desolate sky.

  * * *

  —

  She could remember crying as she did that night only once before in her life. She was around ten or eleven; the passage of time in her childhood went largely unmarked, without birthday parties and school grades to note the change from one year to the next. Her family lived in Nu Po, the small refugee camp where they had ended up after fleeing across their first border. They had lived in Nu Po for six years.

  Life was rhythmic and uneventful—cousins and siblings and neighbors to play with, dirt floors to sweep, rice and canned food deliveries to sort and cook every two weeks. Mu N
aw spent many days at her great-grandmother’s hut a few doors down from them. Mu Naw’s great-aunt lived with her, caring for her aging mother; both women adored Mu Naw and her younger sister and brother and, without small children around their own hut, were always ready to help her mother out.

  Mu Naw’s mother and father took turns leaving the camp to find jobs and provide some income for their children and for the many grandmothers who relied on them. For Mu Naw, those intervals when one of her parents was off trying to find work were peaceful—her parents’ intense fighting was renowned throughout the camp. Her father, like most of the men she grew up with, disciplined his wife by beating her. Mu Naw’s mother was sullen and critical; Mu Naw heard the other women of the camp remark on more than one occasion that her mother deserved the beatings because she yelled back at her husband, did not submit to him as she should. Mu Naw felt that her mother’s actions were shameful in some way that she did not understand. Her father never raised his hand to Mu Naw and only a few times to her sister and brother, but she learned that when his eyes flashed, she should leave at once. Mu Naw spoke with her eyes down, anticipated his need at night for a seat and balm for his arm where his makeshift crutch rubbed it raw. She knew when to fetch him cool water, how to serve his food in a way that he found pleasing. As the years passed, she wondered sometimes why she should know these things and her mother should not; at some point she realized her mother knew them, she just refused to do them. Mu Naw decided, after hearing it from a few of the aunts, that her mother was a very bad wife.

  Mu Naw cooked when her mother was gone, and helped her mother when her father left. Most of the time, her great-grandmother and great-aunt were the grandmothers who made sure she had clothes, that she learned to read, that she went to the schools that missionaries would start up, often lasting for a year or two before discontinuing.

  No one seemed very interested in doing more than containing the Karen refugees pouring out of Myanmar. Buddhists fought Christians and both fought the Burmese, and the Karen people who did not want to fight fled. Because Nu Po was one of the smaller camps, it received less aid and less attention than larger ones. As the years passed with no plan for employment, no real schooling for the children, no system in place to ensure the people could go back to Myanmar safely, Mu Naw’s parents and other adults grew increasingly restless. Mu Naw’s father stopped looking for jobs and journeyed alone back into Myanmar to check on relatives.

  He came back unexpectedly one day and confronted his wife over something that Mu Naw did not understand, their blazing argument audible several huts away. Later, when the screams and thumps had died down, Mu Naw snuck back in. Her mother’s face was unmarked—he never hit her face, because he thought she was beautiful—but she was limping and she did not move her left arm away from her ribs. Mu Naw’s father was stretched out on the bed, his snores evidence that he was drunk and would not be awake for several hours.

  Without saying a word, Mu Naw watched her mother as she moved clothes around, put a few things in a small bag, including some of her gold necklaces. The rest she put into a small woven purse stuffed behind the supply of rice on the shelf in the kitchen. She showed Mu Naw, indicating that Mu Naw was not to tell her father where the bag was hidden. Mu Naw nodded, not understanding. It was only when she realized that her mother had packed some of her shirts and skirts that she realized her mother was leaving. She followed her mother out of the hut; her sister and brother were still with the grandmothers. Her mother cupped her face for a moment.

  “I’m going to go to Bangkok to find work. I will be gone for a few weeks, maybe a few months, but I will find a way to send you money if I can. Here.” She took one of her gold stud earrings out of her ear and put it into Mu Naw’s. “Do not sell this unless you absolutely have to.”

  And then she walked away, limping slightly and holding her arm pressed against her torso. She did not say good-bye. She did not say she loved Mu Naw.

  That afternoon, while her father slept, Mu Naw sat in a semicircle with some of the other children from the camp around a television set in the dirt, watching a movie of white children singing Christian songs Mu Naw did not understand but that she loved anyway, with catchy tunes she tried to remember as she walked back to her great-grandmother’s hut. She did not want to be at her home when her father woke up. In the movie, the children sat and sang and animals came up to them, animals that Mu Naw did not recognize but that seemed soft and snuggly. She wished she had animals like that to play with and pet.

  The next morning, when she woke up at her great-grandmother’s hut, her father was there eating breakfast. Though her great-grandmother was related to her mother, all of the camp grandmothers approved of her father.

  “Have you seen your mother?” he asked around the bite of rice and fish that he was chewing.

  “She left yesterday to go find work, she said. She’ll be back soon.”

  His crutch leaned against the wall. He ran his fingers along his mustache. He sat back, tied his longyi more tightly around his waist, tucking it close to his amputated leg.

  “She didn’t go to find work. She left me.”

  Mu Naw felt her vision narrow as she tried to catch up to what her father said, as if he were speaking a language she did not understand. Dim light shone through the cracks in the bamboo. The window was open, letting in an anemic breeze. A glob of food clung to the end of his mustache. A fly buzzed around him, landed once on his shoulder.

  “Your grandmother thinks she went to Bangkok.”

  “Maybe she just left to go find a job. She said she was going to find a job.”

  “No, she left me for another man. I’m going to go find them.”

  His face was grim. He hugged her briefly, his hand on her ear, her cheek against the top part of his bare belly. He went outside and called to her brother and sister and explained to her great-grandmother his half-formed plan. He gave her some money to continue to care for the children for a few weeks until he could come back. He packed up what he could and then he was gone. He did not find the gold behind the rice bag. Mu Naw went after he was gone to check; she pushed it farther back so that it was hidden and then pulled the door shut tightly.

  The next morning, when the early dawn light had begun to shine through the cracks between the bamboo, her great-grandmother shook her awake. Mu Naw smelled acrid smoke, different from the homey cook-fire smell that always hung low over the camp. She heard popping noises. Mu Naw sat up at once. The camp was burning. Men were firing guns. Her great-grandmother’s voice was low. “The Tatmadaw are coming. We have to leave here right now. Go to your hut and get what you can. I’ll stay here and get your sister and brother ready to go. Come straight back. Don’t speak to anyone.”

  Mu Naw didn’t pause. She threw on the few clothes she had and raced to her family hut. She opened the door silently and walked into the shadowed interior. Open cabinets and strewn clothes told her she was already too late. Looters had taken what little they had; she had missed them by minutes. The rice was gone, as well as the sack of gold hidden behind it. She touched the earring her mother had given her and grabbed a few shirts for her brother and sister in a heap at the bottom of the niche they used as a closet. There was nothing left of her childhood home. It felt already as if it were empty, as if it were rotting back into the jungle, erasing every trace of the family who had lived there for six years.

  She rushed back to her great-grandmother’s. They ran behind her hut through a slim hidden path. The next four days they spent squatting and lying beneath the undergrowth, watching the camp, the fighting a distant rumble in the background as the Tatmadaw tore through the camp looking for men who had fought for the Karen armies, sporadically burning down huts. When the soldiers came too close, they retreated into the woods. Her great-grandmother had packed food, but it was not enough.

  Mu Naw did not speak for several days. Her sister and brother were equally unobtrusive. They had
all heard the stories of what those soldiers could do. A baby cried once in the jungle a few hundred yards away. Mu Naw, her sister and brother, her great-aunt and her great-grandmother moved closer to one another, their breathing shallow, their eyes wide. Their bodies nestled low among the leaves around them. They did not dare to move their bodies until it was almost too dark to see; by then, Mu Naw’s feet were asleep, her back numb.

  The soldiers did not destroy the camp—there were too few of them and they didn’t want to risk the attention of the Thai army or international peacekeepers. After four days of sitting in the jungle and observing the camp, Mu Naw and her great-aunt took a chance. They walked around the sprawling perimeter, keeping their bodies low and their footsteps silent. When they were sure it was secure, they walked confidently into the open square on the opposite side of the camp from where their hut had been. It was food delivery day and, if they could receive an allotment of rice for their household, they could sell it and have some extra money for the upcoming journey.

  The UN officials were there, undeterred by the raid. They handed out giant sacks of rice as they did every two weeks; Mu Naw’s aunt showed them her papers and received her allotment. Mu Naw helped her carry the unwieldy sack. When they were far enough away from the truck that they would not be observed, Mu Naw’s aunt offered to sell the rice to a man with a large family. They haggled politely for a few minutes, and he gave Mu Naw’s aunt a handful of coins. Mu Naw was hungry, but she saw her great-grandmother’s excitement over the coins. They ate root vegetables and leaves in the jungle that tasted bitter but filled their stomachs, moving back into the cover of the trees. This time, there was not a group of people working together. Two old women and three small children picked their way across miles of jungle.

  That first night, as the darkness enfolded them, Mu Naw felt the sobs come with no warning. She buried her face in the bag she had been using to carry her belongings, the one that smelled like wood smoke and spices from her mother’s home.