Burmese Lessons

by Karen Connelly

  Inwardly, I scoff, “You’ve got to be kidding.” Out loud, I murmur, “Thank you,” and stare down at the napkin I unfold over my lap. The lowered eyes, the fluttering lashes—that’s Southeast Asia making me unrecognizably demure. I’m behaving like a Thai girl.

  We do what a couple does on a first date. We talk about the food—excellent northern Thai cuisine, the ground-pork laab moo a dish for gods and luckier mortals—and we chat about the weather, the cold last night, the chill already rising at eight in the evening. He offers me his jacket, which I decline. When he smiles, I take a sip of water.

  “It is surprising.”

  “What?”

  “That we met at a Christmas party. A strange coincidence. I am Buddhist. We do not have Christmas parties.”

  More internal scoffing on my part. Christmas was a pretense for that souls-of-the-border gathering, not a reason. If one is an illegal alien in tough circumstances, a party in a safe haven is an occasion not to be missed.

  I hold Maung’s gaze for a few seconds, sounding his eyes. Fathoms deep, heavy-lidded. I look away and address the ashtray. “But a party is a party. And a religion is a religion. I have Buddhist friends in Bangkok who go to church just to make sure they have all the bases covered.”

  “But you were there.”

  No. No. No. I must resist the romanticism. Someone around here has to be skeptical.

  But why? Instead, I describe in graphic detail how hard it was to find Angie’s house, how the guitar music led me there. So the conviction grows around us like a bubble that fate conspired to allow us to find each other. After being used for thousands of years by millions of people, why does this trick continue to work?

  “Too bad the A string broke,” he says wistfully.

  “Are you kidding? I’m glad it broke. You were embarrassing me.”

  He seems not to hear. He prods one of the newly arrived dishes with his spoon, scrutinizes one chunk of food, sets it down, lifts up another. I wonder why he’s being so picky. Eventually he chooses a tasty-looking morsel of curried chicken—and floats it over the candle to place it in the middle of my rice. This congenial gesture makes me smile. “Tzey-zu-tin-ba-deh,” I respond in thanks. He beams at me.

  I think, Now I will reach across the table and kiss him. But the risk of knocking over a glass is too great. I put some more rice into my mouth, wondering why this man affects me so dramatically. It’s confusing. After tidily cleaning a chicken leg, Maung leans back to light a cigarette.

  He is a chain-smoker. I do not like chain-smokers.

  “Maung, it’s hard to eat when someone is staring at you.”

  “You seem to be doing fine.” When he smiles, wisps of smoke escape from the corners of his mouth, giving him momentary white Fu Manchu whiskers. He doesn’t stop staring.

  “Where are your bodyguards?”

  “There is only one. And I don’t like this word ‘bodyguard.’ He takes care of me. He is like a brother.” With a single question, I have broken the little romantic-conviction bubble. Good!

  “Does he have the night off?”

  “No. He is outside somewhere.”

  “Outside the restaurant?” I didn’t notice him out there when I came in. Was he hiding?

  “Yes. I saw him a few minutes ago, through the plants. He is in the parking lot.”

  It takes me a moment to digest this. I chew and swallow another mouthful of spicy chicken. I sip my beer. His caretaker/bodyguard is in the parking lot. I wonder if Maung is in actual danger. If not, why does he have a bodyguard?

  “So. What do you do with ABSDF?”

  “A lot of organization. Decision-making process.”

  Vague. He can’t spend a lot of time in the jungle anymore; he has some fat on him. At the party, the men and women I met who were visiting from their military camps were thin as rails. Maung has a happy layer of flesh on him, as do a couple of the other ABSDF higher-ups. Officers vs. those in the trenches, I think.

  Not that he’s eating much tonight. I dig my way, as delicately as possible, through three dishes. “Aren’t you going to eat any more?”

  He shakes his head—distracted, I suppose, by the mention of work. He smokes hungrily and peers through the lanterns and plants out to the parking lot. Disappointed to have lost his attention, I eat the last of the morning-glory vines.

  He stubs out his cigarette so decisively that I think he’s going to get up and leave. But he doesn’t. He moves his plate out of the way and puts his hands on the white-clothed table. “I have to tell you something. Can I tell you something?”

  I nod.

  “The men and women who are doing revolution on the border, we are not like other people. I see Thai men with their wives and families, doing the normal things. But that is not how my life is. We left our homes behind in Burma a decade ago and we do not have homes here. I move around Thailand a lot, but I also travel to China and India for meetings with other revolutionary groups.

  “We would like to be as the other people are, but we cannot be. We must try to fight for Burma. Even if we cannot continue the guerrilla war, we have to prepare for the future—when we will go back to our country and rebuild it. It will happen. We will go home.”

  He has explained his life to me in a few sentences. Not the normal routines of domesticity, not the unfolding of career, marriage, children. It’s good to know what a person is. I hold his gaze, and ask, “Will you keep doing politics?”

  “It is all I know now. I did not do politics when I was a student. There were many political students, having meetings in secret. I only studied medicine. And had a good time. I wanted to be a doctor, but I loved school, too. We had so much fun. Singing and playing the guitar and falling in love. Politics was not part of my life.

  “The ’88 protests changed that. I woke up. The democracy uprising was something that we were doing together, the whole country. After the crackdowns, I knew that I would join the armed revolution. We thought that other countries were going to help us—they would give us weapons maybe, or money. We were wrong. There was no one but the KNLA, and how much could the Karen army help us? They didn’t have many resources for their own people, and then thousands of university students wanted to become guerrilla soldiers. We needed training and food and clothes. And weapons. At first we trained with sticks. It was crazy.

  “I did what I knew how to do: I helped organize the students in the military camp, and I worked as a doctor, and ran a clinic without supplies, with little medicine. Dozens of people were getting sick with malaria and dysentery. And snakebites.”

  “Did anyone help you?”

  “Sometimes one of the young women or men would act as a nurse, but few had training. When I went to university in Rangoon, I was like a child—we were all like children. In the jungle, we grew up. I slept four hours a night for a couple of years, because the clinic was so busy.”

  He looks around the restaurant. “Sometimes, in a place like this, I cannot believe I am here. I think I am still there, with my sick people, or walking miles through the trees. I remember one march, we kept going though we were very hungry. We wanted to wait until the rain stopped, to have a meal in peace. But it did not stop. We halted to eat in the rain. The rice in our hands filled with water before we could get it into our mouths.” He shakes his head, tosses out an unexpectedly loud laugh, and lights another cigarette. “I miss that time, too, somehow. I miss the jungle.”

  He shakes his head. I want him to keep talking, so that I can keep watching him, but our coffee comes, interrupting his reverie.

  After the coffee is finished, we’re tired. It’s like sunstroke: we’ve exposed too much. I’ve talked about my work, my unrooted existence, my little home in Greece. Strangers, we’ve laid out the simple lines of our lives so that the other person can try to imagine fitting, somehow, into that shape. We haven’t even touched each other.

  Maung pays the bill. I ask to share it, but he refuses, which makes me feel uncomfortable. Should the revolutionary fo
rces fighting against the Burmese military regime buy my dinner? I think not. Where does he get his spending money, anyway?

  I yawn. He yawns back. We grin. I tell him, “It’s not because I find you boring.”

  With deadpan delivery he replies, “I find you boring. That is why I am so tired.”

  We walk along the little path beside the parking lot—no sign of the bodyguard, but I’m not going to bring him up again. “Do you want me to send you back to your hotel?”

  I believe that he means it—that he would accompany me to the hotel and leave me in the lobby. Many people in Burma wanted to “send” me back to my guesthouse, or accompany me to my next appointment, or go out of their way to make sure I was safe.

  But I decline his offer. “A songtow taxi will have me there in less than ten minutes. It’s quick. You’re staying at Angie’s, right?”

  “Yes.” He quickly adds, “A group of us are staying there. Not just me.”

  I don’t flag a songtow out of the traffic, and neither does Maung—not yet. He takes a deep breath, and a step closer to me. “I feel something special with you. It’s hard to say in English. I hope I don’t make you angry by saying that. Can I see you again?”

  “Yes. I would like that. But I’m not sure when.” I knew we would arrive here, at this key piece of information, but I’ve put it off as long as possible. “I’m leaving Chiang Mai tomorrow. To go stay with friends for a while. They have a little resort near a lake. I’m going there to write for a couple of weeks.”

  He looks shocked. “A lake? Where is it?”

  “Three hours south of here. It’s called Nam Waan, near the province I lived in when I first came to Thailand, as a teenager.”

  “I won’t see you before you go?”

  “You’ve just seen me!” The jokey tone of my voice sounds false. I’m not happy to be going away, either, but I’m determined not to change my plans. Too often I have changed my plans for attractive men. It’s a habit I’m trying to break.

  “Will you call me when you get there? I will give you my cell number.”

  When he puts his card in my open palm, he grasps the back of my hand with his thumb and folds our hands into a double fist. And then lets go. “Thank you for having dinner with me,” he says, raising his arm in the air. For a moment I think he’s making some bizarre salute, then I realize that he’s flagging a passing songtow. The small canvas-covered truck grinds to a stop a few feet beyond us. I tell the driver where I want to go and hop in the back.

  Maung doesn’t come closer while the songtow waits to merge into the traffic. He just stands there, smiling his sleepy, delectable smile. He brushes his hair out of his eyes. I smile back, and wink, which makes him laugh. As the truck pulls away, he lights another cigarette.

  CHAPTER 19

  TWO FISH

  The lake is not really a lake. It’s an old gravel quarry filled with cool green water, surrounded by long-needled pine trees. I swim from one side to the other in less than half an hour, and then have to go back again, of course, as my shoes and towel and the easiest path out of the little forest remain on the other shore.

  I am actually a marine animal. As a child, I kept frogs and salamanders for pets and copied their swimming techniques. I used to hold my breath underwater for long periods of time—and once made it to two minutes, but fainted as I was climbing out of the pool.

  Is it just a coincidence that I am a Pisces? Two fish swimming in opposite directions. In water, you are yourself—a body encased in skin, capable of swimming only so far. But you are also other—almost weightless, almost free.

  Freedom was much on my mind during the three-hour bus ride from Chiang Mai, and it’s much on my mind in the lake-that-is-not-a-lake, because I’m thinking of other water, in my other country, Greece. Part of me feels that I should return to the island as soon as possible, because I feel depleted, exhausted. I was planning to go back in March, two months from now. On the island, I would be able to digest my experiences and write about them. But I can’t leave Asia that soon. I want to go back to Burma.

  And, possibly, become involved with Maung. Possibly? All I’ve done for the past several days is think about him. But being here, walking through the gardens, floating in water, reminds me that I need to rest. I crave peace. While imagining a relationship with a revolutionary.

  In the middle of the body of water, the coolness turns cold. My stomach seizes, flips over. It’s deep here, in the center. I’m unused to swimming so hard. And there is supposed to be a ghost in the water. That’s why the people of the nearby village refuse to swim here.

  The ghost of the lake is a child. But he or she—the gender is not specified in the story—didn’t drown. There was an accident a long time ago, when the place I’m floating above was still a rock quarry. The child died on solid ground; I don’t know how. As she haunted the quarry, now she supposedly haunts the water I’m treading in.

  With a big splash, I kick below the surface, glide down three feet, four, five, and open my eyes. Do skeletal hands reach out? Does a ghoulish child-face waver below me? I see nothing but pillars of sunlight. Flecks of algae float through them like shattered jade. The only dangerous thing in the lake is my mind, its complicated uncertainties and longings, which attach it so irrevocably to my body.

  Pretty blond Zoë showed me the lake, and took me to swim there the first time I stayed here a few months ago. Now we sit at the bar of her restaurant. After listening to me talk for a while, she interrupts. “Karen, give me a break! Why are you talking about being in love? You haven’t even slept with the guy. Can’t you just have a wild affair?”

  She is the smart, easy-in-her-skin American woman who runs this resort with her Thai husband. Expert dispenser of free advice, she answers her own question on my behalf. “No, they never just want to have an affair, do they? They fall in love with you after the first kiss, and after the first night they expect to marry you. Look at me! Three kids and a Thai husband because of one youthful romance!

  “You never know where an affair with a Thai guy will go. I don’t think the Burmese are any different. Especially someone who’s doing dissident work—wives must be scarce. Do you really think he’s a revolutionary? I mean, gun-toting and everything?”

  I shrug. “What’s the difference between a revolutionary and a dissident, anyway? He wasn’t toting a gun.”

  “You were in Chiang Mai. It’s not like he’d be able to carry around an AK-47.”

  “I don’t think he has much to do with guns. At least not now. I think the focus is more on making diplomatic connections, building up an international lobby. He talked about trying to get the U.S. government to implement economic sanctions against the regime. And one of the NGO women said that politics on the border is also about education. Dissidents are learning computer skills, and ‘democratic conflict resolution’—whatever that means.”

  “Sounds like an NGO. They’ve got their own language. The NGOs who come down here for R and R from the hill tribes all talk like that. Sawan hates it.” Sawan is her jack-of-all-trades musician husband. “He says the CIDA people can make ‘taking a shit’ sound like a major triumph for Third World development.”

  I laugh. “I think Burmese dissidents have to learn to talk that language, too, to get funding for education projects. A lot of people are studying either English or computers or both. It’s become part of the movement, part of resisting the isolation that is so much a part of Burmese life. It’s incredible, really.”

  “What?”

  “The whole story. How these university students walked out of Burma to wage revolution in a jungle war. They’re amazing people, dedicated to this cause that has taken over their lives.”

  “You think that’s amazing?”

  “Of course it is. They’ve sacrificed years—their youth and sometimes their futures—trying to bring democratic change to Burma. Don’t you think that’s admirable?”

  She stirs her gin and tonic. “I do think it’s admirable. But it’s
… it’s also … tragic. Sad.” I can’t read her expression. Dubious? Amused? Cynical? She cocks her head to one side and says, “Sooooo. What does Maung do? Do you know?”

  “I don’t, really. He travels a lot. His group works with other border groups. And there are several battalions. He talked about that, too. Visiting the jungle camps.”

  “Hmm. That sounds like he’s one of the leaders. It’s bizarre that he’s still single.” She pokes her straw at the ice cubes in her glass.

  How does she know it’s bizarre? Was Che Guevara married?

  “Are you sure he’s single?”

  “Uh … I don’t think he would have been so stuck to me that first night if he were married.”

  She raises one sun-bleached eyebrow. “What about girlfriends?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “But you didn’t ask?”

  “Well, no. I thought that if he was following me around in front of all his friends and colleagues—his comrades!—he must be single.”

  “You’re awfully trusting, aren’t you? But I suppose there can’t be that many Burmese women out in the military camps. It’s been, what, almost ten years since they left Burma, right? So most of the girls would be married by now. With a kid or two. Good God! Those poor women, in the fucking jungle.” She shakes her head, then, a split second later, gives me a sexy pout. “Well, you were probably the prize of that Chiang Mai party, honey!” She lifts up her gin and tonic again and gives my half-empty glass a good crack.

  I suddenly regret talking to Zoë about Maung. She has a surplus of the attributes I lack: skepticism, practicality, long experience. She is twelve years older than I and feels trapped by her married life, her children, her endless responsibilities. She loves her family and her (sometimes overly) charming husband, but I know that her restless, unsatisfied energy comes from longing for some of the booty in my camp: unfettered freedom of movement, adventure, self-direction. She and Sawan have built a business out of a couple of empty fields, and it’s a great success: fourteen small wooden houses for guests, several extraordinary gardens full of vegetables, flowers, and stone sculptures, an excellent open-air restaurant (which is a favorite with Thais—everyone in the know, traveling to Chiang Mai or Bangkok, stops here to eat), and a large fish pond. The foreigners who stay in the little cabins work in Thailand; it’s not frequented by tons of tourists. It’s a gorgeous place to visit. But perhaps a dull place to live?