Burmese Lessons

by Karen Connelly

  The ship’s captain, clearly a great admirer of the old Russian writers, is scandalized. “But that is how Tolstoy …” He looks at me, openmouthed, searching for the word on my white face. Apparently, he finds it. “That is how Tolstoy re-creates the world. He fills his books with real human beings. Yes, there are many of them; Russia is a big country! And all different kinds of people live in his work, not just one class or another class.”

  Is he really a ship’s captain? He talks like a professor. I tell him, “Listening to you makes me want to be a writer.”

  He replies in a tone close to reverence, “You already are a writer. How fortunate!”

  “But writing is hard work. And lonely. There may be a lot of characters in a story or a book, but the writer is always alone with them.” I look around the table. “And there’s never enough money.”

  My fellow writers at the table nod their agreement. But I know that none of them are spoiled as I am spoiled: by early success, by government grants and, most abundantly, by freedom. Yet still I complain. In Burma! It’s disgusting.

  Lately I’ve found my enthusiasm for my calling on the wane, partly because I know I’m stuck with it. Most of my life will be spent in a room in front of a computer, tapping out the visions in my head, reworking handwritten scrawls. This notion once filled me with delight. Now it just makes me want to get out of the room and meet someone for a drink—preferably someone who looks like San Aung.

  However, the captain is right. Tolstoy has been dead for one hundred years, yet Anna Karenina is alive and beloved in Rangoon. It is extraordinary that something so still, so lifeless—black type on the cheap paper of Penguin’s classic pocketbook—can contain a living world. A Burmese man can step into a time machine and go to nineteenth-century Russia just by turning one page, then another, and another, until he is entangled emotionally and intellectually in fictional lives. Strangers become his familiars.

  I look around the table at the animated faces. Tall Anita is flushed, the tip of her nose red—did she eat a chili? The folktale collector talks across the table to the lawyer, who nods and grunts every few sentences (ah, I know it well, the Asian male grunt—so expressive, so full of feeling!) to show her that he’s listening. He also stares, as I do, at the woman’s plump mauve mouth. I wonder if she is married. Or if he is. Possibly they are married to each other.

  Good travel is like good reading: you go inside a new world and cannot resist it. This will implicate me, I think, chopsticking a load of delicious oily noodles into my mouth. I love eating with strangers. Nothing but sex brings people together so quickly; dining is usually more friendly and lasts longer. People are still chatting, but the steamed fish has displaced the miracle of Tolstoy. Under a gloss of sweet sauce and dark skin is delicious white flesh, fat flakes of it without too many bones.

  The poet spoons a tangle of worms onto my plate. “Excuse me,” he says, his voice reminiscent of Tom Waits’s, a rough engine idling the vocal cords. “This is the custom. You have not tasted this yet. Delicious. We make sure you eat. I still do this for my daughter.” He means placing the finest morsels of food on her plate, feeding her. When he smiles, his narrow eyes sink into folds of heavy eyelid. He has great bulldog jowls, too, a wide, lumpy nose, and a few dribbles of a previous meal staining his shirt. He smells like a tea shop during the early-morning rush: earthy and smoky and surprisingly sweet, as though he had an Indian pastry in his breast pocket. He has not stopped smoking his cheroot since I arrived. Many Burmese people are beautiful. If not truly endowed with good looks, they have the straight-backed, slender grace that passes as beauty. Therefore it is refreshing, even reassuring, to meet this man.

  “I’m very sorry, but can you tell me your name again?”

  “I am Tin Moe,” he answers.

  And now I recognize him. Sayagyi—the great teacher—Tin Moe, the famous, beloved poet laureate of Burma, imprisoned for five years because of his writings and his support of the National League for Democracy, the political party headed by Aung San Suu Kyi. He was on a list of imprisoned Burmese writers that PEN published a couple of years ago. Ma Thida, a young woman writer, was on the same list. Tin Moe was released; Ma Thida is still in prison.

  “It’s so good to meet you, U Tin Moe. I’m honored to be sitting with people who love books so much. And with such a famous poet! I didn’t expect to be so lucky on my first trip to Burma.”

  “Oh, thank you, thank you. It is our pleasure.” He motions toward my plate with his chin. “Your eels will be cold, Miss Karen. Please eat them.”

  “These are eels?”

  The captain, who has been listening to every word, interjects, “Babies.”

  “Really?” Poor things! They are salty, faintly crablike, and sublime.

  My fellow diners have started talking about writers again: Havel, Kundera, Faulkner—have I read them, and do I like Gabriel García Márquez, and why, and who else have I read, who is my favorite writer? Someone makes the joke that Márquez, in One Hundred Years of Solitude, was competing with Tolstoy for the greatest number of characters, to which San Aung responds sharply, “That’s another novel I could not read. Life is too short.” Then he asks my opinion about several Swedish authors. I have to admit that I’ve never read them.

  The hunger for books is greater than the hunger for food, though there is no doubt that the conversation is enhanced by the meal. When the waiter brings new dishes, of prawns, a broccoli-like green stir-fried with garlic and ginger, and spicy eggplant, new discussions arise with the fragrant steam. We eat and talk, turning to each other as we swallow, laughing often, over many comments and turns in the conversation, our voices growing louder and louder, until Sayagyi Tin Moe says, “It’s very good, to talk about all these books, these writers.” His eyes shine. “But this talk makes me think of all the books that Burmese people cannot read.” He heaves a sigh and picks up his cheroot again. He scrabbles in his breast pockets for a lighter. “So many of our own books are banned now. Many names cannot be printed. Her name. No one is allowed to publish her name.”

  The table has fallen silent and we attend him, respectfully, knowing who the unnamed woman is. His time in prison had as much to do with his unequivocal support of Aung San Suu Kyi as it did with his writing.

  “Did you know”—he turns to me—“that each new book a writer produces here must be copied out four times and given to four different censors? For a Burmese writer, that is a great expense. Then each censor puts lines through any offending passages. After that, the manuscript has to be rewritten without those passages. This is not the way any normal writer likes to write. It’s the way the censors like to write. One of my friends, a popular novelist, not a political writer, had to write her last book five times. It almost drove her crazy. But she had to do it. She wants to write her books. She doesn’t want to go to jail and get tuberculosis.”

  “Like Ma Thida,” I say in a low tone.

  “Do you know her?”

  “I know of her. One of the reasons I’ve come here is to find out more about her. I do some work for a group in Canada that has made Ma Thida an honorary member, and we’re lobbying the Burmese government for her release.”

  “Amnesty International?”

  “No. PEN Canada. It’s an international organization. I’m a member of the Canadian chapter.”

  “Ah, yes,” someone says. “They support U Win Tin also.” U Win Tin was detained at the same time that Suu Kyi began her house arrest. His sentence was recently extended because he had made an attempt to inform the U.N. about the appalling conditions of Burmese prisons.*

  “Ma Thida and I worked together,” says the old poet. “She is like a daughter to me. She’s a dear woman, and a fine writer.”

  “Do you know much about her situation?”

  “The tuberculosis is under control. But she also has some—I don’t know, some female problems. I’m not sure. She suffers with that, but she is doing a lot of meditation. For many hours a day, meditating. That is h
ow she survives in the prison.”

  “Vipassana meditation,” the folktale collector clarifies. “That is how Buddhism helps many political prisoners.” She lowers her voice. “While the Lady was under house arrest, she used to sit vipassana every day, for some hours. Do you ever meditate?”

  “I try. But I’m not very good at it.”

  She laughs. “That’s normal. We need to practice every day or it remains difficult. Sometimes I go into retreat at a monastery near Mandalay, and by the end of two weeks I start to feel calm!”

  Sayagyi Tin Moe snorts. “By the end of twenty years, you would be extremely calm.”

  “No,” says the woman reflectively. “I think I would be insane.”

  “Insane in Insein,” intones San Aung in a jokey voice. Insein is the name of the prison where many political prisoners are held, including Ma Thida.

  Sayagyi Tin Moe says, “If you are a writer in this country, going to Insein is an occupational hazard. I am not allowed to publish anymore, not even magazine articles. My old poems are in the school books, but my books are banned.” He looks across the table and says something to the folktale collector, who breathes a few words—a consolation or a whispered condemnation, I don’t know. It’s not the moment to ask for a translation. Everyone at our table is silent, as though in a show of respect for all the banned words and writers, which throws the noise of the street and the voices of the other diners into sharp relief—the ongoing clatter of plates and cutlery, the hum of gaslights and music playing nearby.

  Suddenly the poet lifts up his hands like an orchestra conductor. “Keep talking! Talk, talk.” He raises his voice. “It is a good thing to do. We can still talk!” Then he has such an energetic coughing fit that he has to put down his cheroot. After recovering, he raises the dark green cigar and addresses it, “My good friend.” Then, to me, “It is like a companion. The tea shop, the cheroot, and the writing. They go together.”

  “It’s like that in Canada, too,” I say. “And Greece. Writers love to smoke and drink.”

  “An international brotherhood,” remarks the lawyer.

  “And sisterhood,” adds the folktale collector, with her mauve smile.

  Sayagyi Tin Moe turns his big head toward me and asks, “Will you write a book about our country?”

  Memorably, I answer, “Uh … I’m not sure. I’m …” How to dodge the question with some grace? “Right now I am still reading books about your country. I have so much to learn.”

  Which is absolutely true. The purpose of my visit, ostensibly, is to collect enough material to publish a few articles about political prisoners here. Because I’ve been living in Bangkok for the past few months, it seemed a logical step in my work for PEN Canada to come to Burma and try to make contact with former political prisoners and the friends and families of current political prisoners. Ma Thida is only one of more than two thousand. I’ve become attached to her because of the similarities between us—and the gaping differences. At twenty-nine, she is very close to my age. While I am free to write my books and live my adventurous life, Ma Thida is in solitary confinement, ticking the days off her twenty-year sentence. Her crime? Writing short stories that are critical of the military regime.

  Both of us are young women writers. Is that where the similarity ends? The single great accident of human existence is geography: where we are born in this bordered, divided, largely unjust world. My life would have been different if I had been born elsewhere. This is an obvious enough notion, but when I was a child I used to think of it as a kind of magic. At the age of eight, when our Filipino neighbors moved in next door, I had an epiphany: “I” would not exist if I had been born in another country, to other parents. “I” was contingent upon so many things that “I” had no control over. It was a dizzying concept, and I have never ceased to feel its power. If I had been born in a country like Burma, who would I be? What would I look like?

  In the depth of a Canadian winter, Ma Thida’s photograph had haunted me. Framed by black hair, the attractive round face wore a small, impish smile. She regarded me with a calm gaze. It was hard to believe that she was in prison even as I thought of her; that she was suffering from tuberculosis as I prepared to return to Asia, packing up my apartment—a place I had lived in for less than six months—putting all the necessities for a year or two of travel into a small suitcase and a backpack. The least I could do was try to find out more about her, and write a couple of articles about the situation in Burma. Then, after another month or so in Thailand, I would return to my little island home in Greece and stay put, just writing and gardening, for a good long while. The past couple of years have been a whirlwind of book tours and research trips across three different continents. Though weary of traveling, I felt that this journey to Burma was crucial. And would be short: a few weeks at the most.

  That was the modest, reasonable plan of a few days ago, before the plane touched down in Rangoon. Now my mind has been tossed upside down by these people. Yesterday my cab driver said of the ruling generals, “They have guns, but no brains.” He grimly bared his teeth. “But guns kill us.” And the merchant I chatted with at a tea shop: when I quietly asked him about the Lady—a discreet way of referring to Aung San Suu Kyi—he was so taken aback that he said, “No, I am sorry. I am afraid to talk about that.” Then he stood up and left me sitting there, ashamed that I had not anticipated his fear, that I do not have the mechanism of fear myself. At least, not the fear of speaking.

  Plates of fruit arrive. The end of the evening has come, but the lawyer asks me about Noam Chomsky, which in turn leads to a discussion about the failures of democracy, and how those failures are preferable to the bloodier failures of dictatorship. As the tables around us empty, we’re talking about art. Anita describes the beauty of the Musée d’Orsay (her long hands in the air like white sculpture), and Sayagyi Tin Moe invites us to a gallery opening. San Aung says he knows a group of painters and asks if I would like to meet them. The fruit is finished and we are drowsy—the old poet has nodded off, twice, snoring so loudly that he wakes himself up again—but my companions are still hungry for more information, more news, more evidence of the ongoing life of the world, and how their own country, how they themselves, are connected to that world—the realm of freely circulating ideas and books and newspapers and technologies. Freely circulating people, in fact—Anita and Johnny and myself bring our worlds with us. In an isolated place like Burma, this kind of meeting is also communion that vivifies, renews, the way color comes as a mind-sparking pleasure after weeks in a monochromatic hospital ward.

  The boys who clean and stack the night tables are swishing rags over the wood and the cracked Formica and sluicing the dirty water down the gutters. Our party cannot stretch the evening any further; we need to sleep. No, no, the folktale collector says, shaking her head theatrically and pressing my hand, you must not walk back to your guesthouse. San Aung will see you home—he has a car.

  Goodbye, goodbye. We turn to one another with a curious mixture of formality and friendliness, not quite bowing but almost, smiling too, laughter igniting without reason, just the punchiness of being so tired, so pleased with the company. “Now-mak dwei-may,” I say, which brings another laugh, the colloquialism comical in the mouth of someone who cannot speak the language. “See you later.”

  The poet shakes my hand and whispers in his gravelly voice, “Very quickly you will learn Burmese. That will help you.”

  “Help me what?”

  “Write the book.”

  *U Win Tin was Burma’s longest-serving prisoner of conscience. After being in prison for nineteen years, he was finally released in September of 2008, at the age of seventy-nine.

  CHAPTER 2

  BURMESE LESSONS

  During the days, I walk among the Buddhas of Pagan. Sometimes the coat of whitewash is gone, revealing the Holy One’s countenance as deep red, the same color as the bricks people still bake near the river’s edge. These statues are eight hundred, nine hundred, almost a
thousand years old, naked of the gold and gems that once made them so famous.

  Twice in the fresh dark of morning, I have hired a horse-cart driver to take me to the farther sites. I can die now, for I have sat atop one of the great temples of Pagan and watched the sun rise as its own true self, a great globe of fire. My head burned with the vision, which doubled on my retina when I blinked. My young driver, Min Ley, sat on the stone rampart without speaking, his back to glory. He watched me for the sunrise and its dénouement. After the dark plain caught red and gold fire, the mist burned away to reveal the land’s bounty: more than two thousand white-and-gold-tipped stupas, crumbling pagodas, sister and brother temples, lines of toddy palms, the immense gray Irrawaddy River, wide as a small lake.

  Can I remember the word for “beautiful”? Humans meet a landscape like this and all our words become second-rate. The beauty is mythical, mesmerizing; from elsewhere, I thought, then corrected myself. The plain of temples was just there. It is I who come from elsewhere, which is why the driver stared at me with such patient interest. His was not a sexual gaze, which would have made me nervous out there at dawn in the middle of a vast ruined kingdom, in my bare feet, my shoes far below at the temple entrance. He watched me as though observing a strange animal.

  I stared at the plain of fire with equal fascination, and more longing. After the familiarity of my makeshift room in Bangkok, I have become once again an absolute foreigner in another country, my notebook filling with words spelled in crude phonetics, my mind reeling, my body craving stability. Why do I keep doing this to myself—leaving, beginning with nothing, gathering other people’s stories? I want to go home now: the small stone house in Greece, a view of the sea between olive trees. So why have I come to a nation ruled by a superstitious and brutal bevy of generals, with their menacing billboards and their malnourished chain gangs of intellectuals and students?