Burmese Lessons

by Karen Connelly

  Barely two weeks in, and Burma is changing me. I know that what I see here, what I choose to write about, could be transformative. But how? Why? What has drawn me in so quickly? Several mornings in a row now, I have woken to the absolute conviction that I have to stay in Burma longer, as long as possible. A month, two, three. How long can I stay? And I must write about Burma, and the political situation here, just as the old poet suggested.

  There, at the top of the temple, I thought how ephemeral the human being is, how light. I saw myself from high above: a speck of blood and bone in that extraordinary landscape. Yet still so loaded down by thoughts and desires. The Buddha knew what he was talking about when he declared that desire was the root of all suffering. When I returned to Thailand last year, I started meditating again, sporadically, even in the throb and clamor of Bangkok. Just being in Southeast Asia was enough to make me sit down and shut up, become unself-conscious, even for a breath.

  Many times in my life I have wished to be a fish, or a tree, or an otter. Swimming in the Greek Aegean, hiking in the Rockies, watching seals near Protection Island: if only I could slide through the membrane, like a magician or a subatomic particle, and become something other, there would be peace. In Pagan, sitting at the crown of a world that no longer exists, I reached the bottom of such wishes: a lichen-red stone would be enough. Turn me into the temple flagstone under the driver’s foot and let me give in, with igneous equanimity, to the ravages of time and sunlight.

  Dawn pulled itself out of the earth and across the burning sky, drawing the mythical human past of Pagan with it. I recalled the stories from the tattered little book San Aung gave me before I left Rangoon, tales about the lavish courts of King Anawrahta—grand battles on the plains, fates decided by dreams and numbers, alchemic preparations, the lives of the princes and princesses in their riverside palaces. I could almost hear voices.

  I did hear voices. High-pitched, lilting. Far below, just beyond the horse and cart, two children appeared, and a smattering of black-on-white goats. Their wooden slippers clackety-clacked as they stepped up the stone pediment at the base of the temple. Then the clatter intensified. I tried to lean over the rampart to see what they were doing—tap-dancing?—but Min Ley waved me away from the low edge. He pointed toward the narrow stairwell that would lead us back to the ground.

  By the time we got down the many steep stairs that turn inside the temple like the swirl of a shell, the children were half an acre away, the goats salt-and-peppered around them. The plain beyond was no longer reddish, or rose, but turning back to sage yellow. We climbed into the horse cart to move on to another site. It was already getting hot.

  During the Mon rule of lower Burma, Pagan was called Tattadesa, “the parched land.” First kings and queens then pious noblemen and women built lavish temples here in their dedication to Theravada Buddhism, hoping to make merit for their next lives. The golden age lasted from 1044 to 1287, when King Narathihapate fled from the Mongol invaders who destroyed the splendor that was the kingdom. Successive generations of raiders and thieves came, and sun and wind. But the strength of stone and brick is surprising. And the people who have lived here for centuries—they call themselves the slaves of the temples—have protected the holy sites.

  The crumbling hands of the statues are like the faces, eerily alive. See them in a certain light and you freeze, waiting for the fingers to curl or straighten. The beginning and the ending / The final moment / My hands. The hot dust and the sawing cicadas remind me, at every turn, of Greece. My mind grapples for foreign words that will fit the landscape, and, because I don’t have Burmese, I hear the Greek poet Seferis over and over. I have spent hours reading his poems, in Greek and English, on the shores of an island not far from his birthplace: These stones I have carried as long as I was able / These stones I have loved as long as I was able.

  At various sites, I find dozens of young women helping with the restoration work, each with fifteen bricks balanced on her head. With little regard for the demands of archeology and architecture, the generals are fixing things—laying slabs of concrete over temple pediments, crudely whitewashing Buddhas, rebuilding walls without much thought for appropriate materials or methods. Their earlier fixing of the ancient city involved forcing entire villages to move away from the holy sites.

  The soldiers arrived in 1990. They destroyed the temple keepers’ thatched and wooden houses, razed their little shops, and carted everything away like so much garbage. The villagers were forced to resettle in a few dusty treeless settlements on the plain, too far away from the river to easily carry water home. When people refused to leave their homes, the soldiers beat them; other troublemakers were chased down with helicopters and arrested.

  All that was done for me, and other tourists like me. The military government wanted these ancient sites to be authentically empty and tidy for our appraising eyes. Near one of the “new” villages, I come upon a few children hauling water from a dubious-looking water hole. They struggle up the incline from the hole with buckets hanging off the ends of thin poles.

  “Hello,” I say to them. “How are you?” Several of them put down their buckets to take a break, and rattle off a half-dozen questions. I don’t understand.

  “Have you eaten rice yet?” a girl asks, and giggles. A boy bows theatrically and says, “Big sister, how are you?” I bow in return and say, “Very fine.” A paroxysm of laughter shakes the ragtag lot of them. It’s the only time one of the girls tips water from her buckets.

  The spillage makes her stop laughing. Her thin face becomes thinner as she carefully lowers her load to the ground. I lean over, raise my eyebrows at her—May I?—and pick up one of the buckets. Then gasp, grimace, and rub my shoulder. The other kids laugh harder. I’m hamming it up for their benefit, but it’s true. How can these small children carry two large buckets filled to the brim without spilling? Uphill? The girls and boys are so young—eight, ten, twelve. The thin-faced girl squints at me suspiciously, without a smile. Does she think I’m making fun of her? I carefully set the bucket down.

  She steps forward, hooks it back onto its carrying pole, ducks under the smooth length of wood, and lifts. The tendons in her neck cinch tight. The other kids also pick up their loads; she is their leader. She bites her lower lip and walks away, quickly, lightly, catching the rhythm of the swaying buckets. The other children follow. In a moment, I am alone again, beside the brown water hole, and absurdly lonely.

  We come and go, the tourists and the intrepid travelers (who differ mostly in luggage), the well-wishers and the do-gooders. I have come and I will go, taking away stories and photographs of these places. The people who live here remain. They drive their cattle and fill their water buckets; they sell rice and fall in love. They write, they push through the labyrinth of silence, they wait. Which reminds me of Aung San Suu Kyi, whom I interviewed last week. She was gracious, but also as taut as a bowstring, as pointed as an arrow. “We are not waiting,” she said wearily, in answer to one of my awkward questions. “We are working.”

  I know they work hard, the hounded politicals, the people who believe in the inevitability of change. I have never met such dedicated, generous men and women. But the children work hard, too. While the labor of the politicals is often hidden, clandestine by necessity, the labor of eight-and ten-year-olds is ubiquitous. True, I have traveled narrowly here, only to the larger centers, on a steady journey toward individuals whose names have been entrusted to me by journalists and activists in Thailand and Britain: people who are willing to talk about dissident politics and their experiences in Burmese prisons. Sometimes these people are hard to find; sometimes they cannot meet me.

  But the children meet me everywhere and share big secrets with the foreign woman: the vocabulary of their daily lives. It is the child laborers who are my most dedicated Burmese teachers.

  Every day, no matter where I’ve been—here, Pegu, Mandalay, various townships in Rangoon—I sit in a tea shop at a low wooden table and watch children weigh
ed down with trays of dirty teacups and bowls, children who teach me words and laugh at my mistakes. They serve, wash dishes, load and unload crates, mix the great, steaming vats of tea. For the most part it is good work, with a place to sleep at night and fairly clean air to breathe and enough food.

  It is one thing to search out members of the National League for Democracy, to listen to the writers and artists talk about their lives, their prison sentences, their forms of escape, their failure to escape. But the children move through the streets, across the fields and lanes, visible and oddly invisible in their enslavement. Who wants to interview them? Their degradation is taken for granted; it is part of the new Burma called Myanmar, a country filling up with railways, roads, highways, hotels, pipelines. Eleven-year-olds have helped build them all. Many child laborers are on their own, sent to work in the cities and towns. Either they are orphans or their parents are too poor to keep them at home.

  Without words, the children speak of the generals, communicating in a language filled with silences and omissions, as though their vocabulary were written with an eraser. What they do not have dictates who they are and who they can become. The lucky ones have attended school for three or four years; the unlucky ones have not, and never will. Though I use the words “lucky” and “unlucky,” none of this happened by accident.

  This morning at a roadside shop, I watch the smallest boy in the tea-making retinue. He perches on a low stool, scrubbing away at his pile of dishes. As he grows, he will understand more than he does now about why he has so few options, why he cannot read, why he is trapped this way and who has trapped him. He is one of the blessed ones, too—he’s not hauling cement or working on a highway or a railway crew. Every morning, before I finish my tea, he teaches me a few words in his language.

  Cup. Table. Sweet. Lizard. Child.

  His name is Hla Win. He is nine years old. One morning, as I’m leaving, he calls out to me with the spontaneity of a songbird, “Chit-deh!”

  Another Burmese lesson.

  “I love you.”

  CHAPTER 3

  THE CONDOM LESSON

  Whence comes my lust for vocabulary? I’ve had it since grade-three spelling tests, which the teacher called vocabulary drills. I loved them; I had to hide my enthusiasm from my fellow students. Once I started learning other languages, in my late teens, I became insufferable, a collector of dictionaries, a pest to anyone who would tell me the names of things. Part of the understanding Min Ley and I have involves vocabulary. When I point to something from the cart, he gives me the name in Burmese. Temple, water, horse, bell, tree, goat. I do not remember any of these words for long.

  I ask, he says, I repeat, and repeat, and ask again, until I get the sound right. Then we cover more terrain, and the dust gathering on the backs of my hands and the clank-jangle of the harness and the slap of leather on the mare’s bony withers combine to shake the word from my mind. I point at the same things over and over. He says the words. It took me a full day to realize that, as often as not, he gives a different word for what I believe is the same object.

  Perhaps he is not saying tree repeatedly; he is telling me the different names of the trees. Not temple but its name. The names of the goats? I don’t really care. I’m in it for the music. For hearing this world of brand-new things.

  We travel by horse cart to his house. Ein, for “house.” Yesterday I bought Min Ley a bowl of curry for lunch, and this morning, when he picked me up, he announced that today his wife is cooking lunch for me.

  The house is simple, wood and thatch and windows without glass. I never go inside. Min Ley’s wife, San San, is in the kitchen, which is outside, in a structure like a hut without walls, so that as I sit at the roughhewn table I also watch Min Ley take the harness off the mare, drop the cart shafts, and lead her to a bucket of water under a tamarind tree. San San smiles at me from her stool behind a charcoal burner. She scoops yellow curry out of a large pot into a bowl. I smile back at her, then our heads turn at the same time, toward the high whine of “May May! May May!”

  A toddler, about three years old, stands in the doorway of the house, naked but for a loose green T-shirt. The child’s large-eyed, delicate beauty suggests a girl, but his nakedness asserts boy and, as though to prove it, a colorless stream of urine stretches out toward me in a falling arc. His mother squawks, we both laugh, and an older sibling, another boy of about eight, scoops the little one up in his arms and disappears into the house.

  They reappear a few minutes later, the toddler looking pleased with himself, wearing baggy, threadbare underpants. He smiles at me, then presses his head against his brother’s hip. The older boy tousles the young one’s hair and looks past me imperiously, to his mother. My eyes are on the older boy, fascinated; he emanates pure jealous animosity—toward me. When I smile at him, he leans down and whispers something into his little brother’s ear.

  Two girls come out of the house as well. Their mother motions toward me with her chin—greet the guest—and they smile, link hands. Why are they not at school? Do they have a day off? Or is the family too poor to send them all to school? I know how to ask, “How old are you?” One is ten, the other six.

  Four children. In a small house. “How old are you?” I ask San San. Generally, this is not a rude question in Southeast Asia but a practical one, as many intimate questions are.

  “Twenty-six. And how old are you?” she asks. She ladles rice and curry onto one plate after another.

  “Twenty-seven.”

  “Do you have children?”

  Wishing I knew “Not yet,” I can only say, “No, I don’t.” Having children is the furthest thing from my mind, though I am attracted to them, and they to me, usually, as if the living ones know how to call out to their unborn playmates. I even like the grumpy kids, the screamers and growlers, this older boy here, so covetous of his mother’s attention. He sits at the bench, his head and shoulders just above the high table, waiting for his food, occasionally throwing a black glare into my eyes. Yes, it’s unfair that you have to share her with so many siblings. Now there’s a stranger at the table, too. Poor kid.

  Min Ley, who has rejoined us, points to the little boy pee-er and waves his hand. “Here, you can take this one. To Canada. And school, far away.”

  San San laughs, bends down, kisses the boy’s red cheek, to make sure he knows it’s a joke, but he has picked up on his older brother’s distrust and pouts at me.

  Min Ley sits down and announces, “Twenty kyat. You can have him for twenty kyat.” He is the only one who laughs. San San smiles politely, but she doesn’t think it’s funny, either.

  I only know how to say “I don’t want to” or “I don’t allow it,” which I hope will work in this context: “Ma ya boo.” And I say, “He likes it here. With mother.”

  San San sits beside the bigger boy with her own plate of food, now that the guest and her children and husband have been served. Her body, warm and right there, is enough to settle her sons and let them return, reassured, to their food.

  We eat without talking. San San is the only one without a sizable chunk of meat. Now that the boys know they’re not going to be sold, they eat steadily with their hands, no utensils. My first day in Rangoon, I had the wonderful shock of seeing people eat without utensils everywhere—in the biryani shops, on the pagoda steps, under a tree in Mahabandoola Park. San Aung, my guide-of-all-things in the capital, explained that it makes the food taste better, and he gave me a brief lesson on how to avoid messing the fingers past the first knuckle.

  I’ve been practicing my technique to prepare myself for times like this, when it is awkward to ask for a spoon. I’ve learned how to roll a dollop of rice and neatly squeeze or scoop up a mouthful of curry to accompany it. I still make a bigger mess than any of these children, with the possible exception of the three-year-old, but no one comments on my sloppiness.

  In between rice and curry, the children slurp soup from the communal bowl in the middle of the table. The soup, a broth with
root vegetables of some kind, is barely warm, almost as clear as water, and absolutely delicious. The curry is also good, though less oily than I am used to. They are not rich enough to use a lot of oil.

  People in Rangoon talk often about how difficult it is to earn the money for basic necessities, to get the extra job to pay for extra costs, such as a parent’s operation or the expensive journey to visit a relative in prison. I wonder how often the horse-cart driver and his wife and children eat meat. If a Burmese doctor makes sixty dollars (U.S.) a month and still has to take on other jobs to survive, especially if he has a family to provide for, how much does a cart driver make?

  Oh, if only I could have a real conversation.

  I can draw. After we finish lunch, I get out my notebook and draw pictures for the girls. A horse. A cat. A pig. These sketches give them a delight that is out of proportion to my meager artistic skills. When I hand the masterpieces over, the sisters squeal with pleasure and start arguing over the pages. Then a baby in the small house behind us starts to cry. San San goes inside to get their fifth child.

  Min Ley shakes his head and says, “So many children.” He raises his hands into the air and waggles his finger. “Difficult. We don’t have money.”

  When he starts to smoke, I pop the question of the day, rudely, without thinking. “Do you know condoms?”

  “Condo?”

  “I don’t know how to say it in Burmese.” I’ve heard of a foreign NGO that uses a boat—the love boat—to distribute condoms up and down the Irrawaddy River. Hasn’t the boat come to Pagan?

  “Condo,” repeats Min Ley. “I don’t know this.”

  “Condom.” What next? I gesture to the left with both hands open, as if to point to exhibit A, “Condom.” And then, swinging both hands to the right, I announce the result of using the condom in Burmese: “Kalay-reh muh shee boo.” You don’t have children. I don’t know how to say “use.”