Burmese Lessons

by Karen Connelly

  Then I remember the Lonely Planet phrase book in my knapsack. I flip through the pages until I find the section on health.

  How much does it cost?

  I have chest pain.

  I vomit often.

  My throat hurts.

  Is it serious?

  There is no word for condom in the glossary, either. What if a worthy traveler found herself in Burma and needed some handy protection? Why do the Lonely Planet writers take their title so literally? In my experience, the planet is not lonely at all.

  How about penis?

  I flip through a few more pages while Min Ley looks on with a slight frown. He takes a long drag on his cheroot.

  Ta-da! Just as San San comes out of the house with a fat baby perched on her hip bone, I pronounce my new word—penis—well enough to be understood. “Ingaza!”

  San San laughs and looks around. “Where?”

  Min Ley sits up, waving cheroot smoke away with his hand. He leans over my arm, blinks at my pointing finger. Then blinks at me.

  How about plastic bag? I’ve learned that word already, numerous times, but where is it now? Lost.

  Here it is!

  “Condom. Plastic bag. Penis. You don’t have children.”

  They both stare at me. Min Ley smiles cautiously. He looks at his wife and says, “She can speak Burmese.”

  San San looks confused.

  I have to try to explain. I grab my notebook and begin, slowly, to draw a penis. San San and Min Ley both stand over the table and watch. To clarify, I add a little spray of semen, hoping they don’t think it’s pee. I say, “Children.”

  San San laughs and announces, “Yes, yes.” The baby smiles, too.

  On the facing page, I draw a condom.

  On the next page—the sketching gets dodgy here, I have to admit—I pull the one onto the other, just so, with the little reservoir tip in place and everything. This time the little spurt is contained inside the condom. “See? You don’t have children.”

  Min Ley’s brow furrows deeper. He tilts his head to the side and squints. “Ahhhh. I know. I know this. Condo. Good.” He explains to San San, who frowns at me as she listens. She nods, taps a finger on the drawing, suddenly all business. She asks Min Ley a long question. To which he responds with a single grunt.

  Exasperated, she says to me, “We don’t have condo.”

  “You don’t have it in Pagan.”

  Min Ley shakes his head. “No, not in Pagan, not in Burma.”

  “In Rangoon they have condoms.” Street vendors sell them. The brand is called Apaw.

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Rangoon has them. Apaw.”

  “I don’t know apaw,” San San says. “But we want condo.”

  Min Ley explains, “We don’t have this. Many children, no condo.”

  I wonder if this can be true. If I went to a pharmacy here, would I be able to buy condoms and give them to Min Ley the horse-cart driver who has five children and does not want any more? Would he even try to use them?

  He answers this question by picking up the pen. He places his elbows on either side of my notebook. Then he writes in Burmese: “Here, my house. My address.” He points at the condomed penis and continues, “Send me, from Rangoon. Very good.”

  San San smiles at me and hands the baby to her husband. “Thank you,” she says. “Thank you.” Then she turns away and fills a kettle with water, lights the gas burner. “Would you like some tea?”

  CHAPTER 4

  “IS IT REALLY POSSIBLE

  TO BE HUNGRY IN THE TROPICS?”

  There is only one other person staying at the wooden hotel above the wide river. We’ve run into each other a couple of times now, going in, going out, passing the terrace on the second floor. She is an artist from Spain, a brunette who wears graceful cotton shifts. She has pale brown eyes and high cheekbones. On the evening before her departure, we dine together.

  “I’m an idealist, like you. I grew up in Spain. I remember what it was like, during Franco’s time. My parents were always telling me not to get involved in the politics, it was too dangerous. So I appreciate the situation here. And I think it’s terrible that the people are so badly off.”

  “I don’t think ‘badly off’ describes it properly. Most people are poverty-stricken. And oppressed. Hungry for many things.”

  Her tortoiseshell eyes search my face. “Do you think they are? Is it really possible to be hungry in the tropics? There is so much fruit everywhere.”

  I swallow a sip of my bottled water.

  She continues, “A doctor I met in the North said that he has never seen the infant mortality rate so high. I agree—that is really awful. But, in a way, it’s a natural form of birth control.”

  I wonder if this woman has ever had a baby, and watched her baby die of diarrhea or dysentery or malaria. Those are the common killers of small children and babies born in Burma, ailments often complicated by severe malnutrition. Three in five Burmese children are malnourished.

  I finish my water. The food has come, but my appetite has left me.

  “And the people are always smiling!”

  “The Burmese are very hospitable. That’s why they smile at us.”

  “There seemed to be a lot of people with bad eye diseases in the North, and even they laughed a lot.”

  What can I say?

  “I’m an idealist, but if democracy came all at once the country would disintegrate! It can’t come too quickly.”

  “The people of Burma already voted in a democratic government. There were elections in 1990. The NLD, Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, won by a huge majority, but the military refused to hand over power.” She must know these details from her guidebook.

  “Voting for freedom is one thing, living with it is another. A rapid transition could destabilize everything.”

  “The situation in Burma is hardly stable. The currency is a farce, corruption is rife, the military makes deals with drug lords, and most people can’t afford to live on what they make because inflation is so high. Even the electricity doesn’t work. People die after operations because the hospitals cannot afford proper sterilization equipment.”

  She looks at me condescendingly. “Journalists exaggerate the situation.”

  “I haven’t been talking to journalists. I’ve been talking to Burmese people. Students, doctors, artists, women in the market.”

  “Hmm,” she says, chewing a mouthful of chicken breast. “It’s not bad,” she adds approvingly. After another bite and swallow, she asks with alarming intensity, “What are you trying to do for the Burmese people?”

  “Nothing.”

  “But you said you would not come here only as a tourist. So what are you doing here, then?”

  This is a good question. I consider it. “Talking. And listening.”

  “Aren’t you trying to accomplish the freedom of these people?”

  I laugh out loud; her statement is so lofty. We sit at this table in Burma, talking about the Burmese, while the waiters stand at the dining-room doors like sleepy sentinels. They might understand everything we’re saying. Or nothing, which is worse. “I don’t pretend anything like that,” I say. “It’s too presumptuous. Only they can accomplish their own freedom. I am … hanging around. I will write about what I see here. That’s all I can do, unfortunately. It’s not much.”

  “Don’t you think you will contaminate your writing if you become political? Art in the service of politics can only be propaganda.” She smiles at me. Bitchily.

  “But I probably won’t write much about politics. I will write about people.” This is a cowardly feint on my part; we both know it. But I’m tired of the conversation. Why are artists in so many disciplines afraid of being political? If an artist creates a work that defies oppression and violence, or offers an alternative view of history—like Ma Thida’s short stories—is that propaganda?

  I’m about to tell her that I disagree with her when suddenly she starts to speak again, with her earlier
intensity. “You know, I have tried to talk and smile as much as possible. To let them know that foreigners are not threatening. It’s absolute hell up in the North, where there are no other tourists. I wanted to go up there to prove I could, though it’s very isolated. It’s hard work, trying to get to places they won’t let you get to, and the locals mob you, and there are no other white people. But I kept calm the whole time, never lost my temper, always just smiled as much as possible.”

  One of the dining-room attendants switches on the television. The news is starting. Out of respect for the diners, he mutes the volume. But the Spanish artist and I are relieved by the interruption. We turn to watch the images of a fine mango crop, box after box of the small, sweet ovals lined up and glowing. It is impossible to be hungry in the land of a million mangoes. Then come the obligatory scenes of a smiling military leader inspecting a new factory. Followed by a battalion of soldiers marching on a road through the jungle, belts heavy with ammunition.

  The Spanish woman turns away from the television and talks more about the difficulties of being a tourist. White-shirted waiters come, take away our plates. After the table is cleared, we stand up. The artist smiles with her teeth. She shakes my hand and says, “Perhaps we will meet again someday in Madrid.”

  Perhaps. I wish her a safe journey home.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE EXPERT INSOMNIAC

  I’ve made a list of names, and added to it almost every day since my arrival; these are the ones I want to talk to, the ones who will have something to tell me. These are the ones I met, briefly, the week of my arrival, and wish to meet again. My initial intention to find out about Ma Thida and a few other political prisoners has complicated. Or perhaps it has simplified. I am willing to listen to those who want to talk, who want to describe life under the SLORC, the ruling military regime of Burma. I need to know more about this country, and it seems that learning how people live under a dictatorship is key to catching at least a glimpse of the truth—something beyond the beautiful images that are so readily available to the foreign eye.

  A magazine editor happened to be at the opening of a new art gallery that Sayagyi Tin Moe invited me to attend. This editor gave me his card and asked me to call him upon my return from Pagan. I’m back in Rangoon; I called him today. But the woman who answered the phone said he was unavailable. She hung up while I was still asking when I might call back. An hour later, I called again; she answered, heard my voice, and put down the phone.

  So I called the gallery owner, who quickly explained that the editor has been detained. By the MI, the military intelligence, the SLORC’s extensive spy, interrogation, and torture network. Everyone I’ve spoken to mentions the MI. Its web stretches across the country, through every organization in every city and town. The civil service, universities, colleges, high schools, hospitals, marketplaces, taxi stands, the photocopying shops: they all have their watchers and their informers. The generals who make up the SLORC are the leaders, and people speak of them angrily and scornfully. But when they say “MI” their voices are hushed and fearful. The MI operatives are on the ground, doing the nasty work, knocking at the door in the middle of the night, taking people away to the interrogation centers, picking people up off the street in broad daylight. It happened to the editor just a couple of days after I left Rangoon. He’s been sent to prison for an article that he published in his magazine last month. The gallery owner told me this. Then he also hung up in my ear.

  I cross the editor’s name off my list. One dark line. I move the pen back and forth until his name is indecipherable. As I’m doing this, I become aware of a crying baby, somewhere down the road. A howler. The sound seems so close. Maybe it’s not down the road but in the next house? The black scrawl becomes solid, as impenetrable as the ink the government censors use to blot out offensive passages in periodicals. What is wrong with the baby? A pre-verbal wail is the human siren. Do something, help me, do something, help me, do something.

  I put down my notebook and pick up the editor’s card again. He has become a political prisoner. Why am I surprised? I know what happens here. I tear up the card and mix it in with the other paper in the garbage in the communal toilet.

  Perhaps Pagan was too beautiful; it made me forget where I am.

  • • •

  There are two realities for the new foreigner. Two worlds, both legitimate, both real: the seen and, kaleidoscoping deeply, endlessly, the unseen. Unspoken, unexplained. The unseen world does not yield easily. Facts swirl and shift rather than settle. Repeatedly, a new layer of knowledge displaces the older, simple pattern.

  I need years to learn. What I’ve had is two weeks in the Golden Land, as Burma is sometimes called, and many conversations about the country in Bangkok, sometimes with Burmese exiles but more often with other foreigners—Free Burma activists, NGO workers, journalists. Until recently, I’ve been living with a couple of journalists. Their house was an open center for international members of the Fourth Estate—American, Canadian, English, Irish, Australian, Kiwi. All these nationalities passed through, to do work in the studio, voice-overs and film editing for the BBC, CNN, NBC, CBC, ABN (Asia Business News, out of Singapore).

  The journalists were the ones who most strongly suggested that I visit Burma. They supplied me with names and addresses here, people to visit. They also told me to be careful of my list of contacts; if it seemed potentially dangerous to anyone to keep the names, it was better to get rid of them. Scribble them out. Throw them away. I am grateful to the journos.

  But now I’m thinking traitorous thoughts about their dinner parties. I’ve always had these thoughts. Now that I’m in another country, I can write them down. The dinner parties involved crates of red wine, loads of Carlsberg beer, joints so powerful I literally toppled over after smoking them, fried chicken and cashews, Italian pasta, and—always as the true main course—energetic, loud, smoky political conversations.

  So. What is there to complain about?

  During every intense, hand-waving, half-drunken rant or dissertation about Cambodia, Vietnam, Burma, and Thailand, I remained on the far edge of the dialogue. When I did speak, attention invariably strayed, or the topic changed. I was always reaching for the detail or the individual or the subjective truth contained in the particular moment. That’s how poets talk, and women; among hard-nosed journalists of either sex, my approach was embarrassing. They knew everything. They spoke in broad strokes, with assurance and conviction. Even when they didn’t really know what they were talking about, it sounded as if they did.

  And I was younger than any of them. Why does everyone think youth is so wonderful? Most people won’t take a woman seriously if she’s under thirty. If she’s under thirty and beautiful, too many men want to fuck her and too many women are jealous of her. And still none of them take her seriously. I look forward to being over forty, wrinkled and tough. At least, I hope that toughness will come with the other two.

  At the dinner parties, the talkers dazzled me with their encyclopedic knowledge of Burma and “the region,” their many stories, their wealth of experience. I gratefully accepted their advice; they are experts. But something disturbed me more and more as the months went on: though the talk was often about those with brown faces, and though we were eating and drinking and living in a land of brown faces, there was rarely a brown face among us. I started to wander into the kitchen to chat with the maid, who was my link, in that house, to the Thailand I lived in years ago, as a teenager.

  During the day, she sometimes took me to the nearest street market, or to the temple hidden on the other side of it. She spoke Thai with me all the time, until the language reasserted itself in my mind and my mouth. I felt uncomfortable that she was the maid and washed my clothes and brought me fruit in the morning and cleaned up after me. Of course there are maids here, servants, people to wash our dirty clothes, by hand, brown people to send to the market, who shop and cook for us, the white people. Social hierarchy is the way of things in Asia, and many Th
ais and Burmese have servants of various orders. But it gets stickier when you mix color into that hierarchy, especially when the only brown person in the house for days on end is the one who cleans the toilets.

  Oh, hierarchies! I noticed, too, that most Western experts think of and treat the Thais differently than they do the Burmese dissidents, who are the subjects of white concern and deference and genuine admiration. The Burmese political struggle is inspiring and exciting. The dissidents are heroic. Not like the Thai maids (who need to be told everything twice or three times and still don’t understand—why don’t they learn better English?). Not like the Thais in general (who are considered unintellectual and shallow and spoiled).

  I should know that the Westerner is allowed to make such distinctions between one Asian race and another. The Westerner knows. We are entitled to knowledge, among other things. That is what makes us experts. Everything becomes territory to us, everything becomes ours. Is the tendency to colonize genetic? Even the political struggle of a small country can become our colony.

  Thus, I become suspicious of myself. What am I doing here? Really? Why do I need to know more about Burma?

  I get off the bed and stand at the window. The street below is empty and dark. The baby stopped crying awhile ago.

  Sleep, then, if you can. Make use of the silence. I lie down, my mind whirling through countries and words and conflicting allegiances.

  Just before I drop off—two in the morning? three?—I hear the breath-stilling clarity of trishaw bells. The ring seems to come from below my window. Who is out there so late at night? Is he leaving home or arriving?

  CHAPTER 6

  “EXACTLY WHAT WE WANT TO TELL YOU”