Burmese Lessons

by Karen Connelly

  “Does a songtow go to Umphang every day?” I ask.

  Tennyson replies, “I will find one for you. For tomorrow. They usually leave in the morning.”

  I’m heat-dazed, riding shoulder to shoulder with fifteen people crammed into the back of the small covered truck. Like the Thai women, I hold my scarf over my nose as dusty wind gusts through the long side apertures. We hurtle through the thick stands of trees, almost jungle; labor up and careen down parched hills, almost mountains, through sun-stunned fields burned black by farmers. The passengers sit facing each other on two benches. Several bags of vegetables, a big sack of chilies, and two long, misshapen boxes shift and slide on the floor between us, sometimes bumping us in the shins. We sway together, silently, helplessly pleading: Despite the driver’s unwise choices, his lack of sleep, his probable amphetamine use, let us survive this journey. With amendments when he pulls out to pass other laboring vehicles on the steep hills: But if we are to die in a head-on collision, please let death or painless unconsciousness come as quickly as possible.

  • • •

  The truck lurches to a halt at a small roadside hut. Two dark-skinned men approach and wave their hands at the driver, trying to negotiate payment for the trip. They don’t speak Thai very well.

  The tension rises as my fellow passengers glance at them, then survey the cramped songtow. The woman across from me pulls the scarf from her head and whispers sharply to her neighbor, “Kohn baa-maa.” Burmese people. The other woman yells at the driver, “There’s no room!” Interested only in the extra fares, he shouts back, “They will ride on top, they don’t care.” The women grumble to each other.

  One of the men easily swings up to the roof; the other man throws him their bundles, then walks to the back of the truck and peers in at us. There is a third passenger with him, unseen until now, a small girl, maybe ten or eleven, with a full-lipped red mouth and kohl-drawn owl eyes and long curling lashes. She blinks and the world wobbles. What a face. A gold-and-crimson glimmer pierces her nose. I wiggle, shift my knees to the side; there’s always room for a child in these trucks. The Thai woman opposite me snaps, “She can’t sit with us.”

  I glare at the nicely dressed woman. She’s not a peasant. A peasant would make room. Sometimes, in tense situations, I lose my vocabulary. Or just don’t know the right words. How do you say “callous racist bitch” in Thai? Darn, I don’t know. But other words jump to my mouth. “What are you talking about? She’s a child. Of course she will ride with us.”

  The woman is taken aback; her face softens in confusion. Then hardens again. “She can ride with her father. Or in the front with the driver. Not with us.” But we all know there’s no space in the cab, either. He already has two passengers up there.

  I throw my only punch immediately, because the father and daughter are getting nervous, the songtow driver impatient. The other passengers won’t meet my eye. They’re just waiting to see who wins; this is good entertainment on a long trip. “We respect the Buddha’s ideas, don’t we? Compassion and kindness. Even for foreigners.” Being the one who is most obviously a foreigner here, it’s as though I’m making an appeal for myself. Which I suppose I am.

  Not even the racist will argue with the Buddhist card.

  “The little girl will ride beside me.” I smile at her father first, then at her. “Come sit here.” The moment she hears Burmese, she looks up at her father and grins. I twist my knees away and move one of the vegetable bags to make space for her. Other passengers signal their agreement—or acquiescence—by helping her into the truck.

  Thin gleaming girl child! I ask the man beside me to shift the bag of chilies. If she sits against them for a long time, they will burn her skin, even through the cotton sack. I once saw that happen on another long songtow journey. Her father thanks me and clambers up onto the roof of the truck. She folds herself down onto the floor as the truck pulls onto the highway. I pat my leg, showing her that she can lean on me; she is obviously tired. The hair that frames her face is black, but the long braid is gray with dust. Her three layers of clothes are filthy, especially at the edges, where the material touches her skin. When I ask her name, words pour from her mouth.

  I explain, “I can’t understand, I only speak a little.”

  “Oh, that’s not a problem, I just want to talk.” She talks and talks, self-possessed, laughing at her own jokes, asking me questions. I stumble along behind her, picking up phrases I recognize. She is to be married soon, unbelievably enough; her mother is dead; she and her father and uncle are going to the refugee camp near Umphang to see a sick aunt. I think. She lives in Maw Ker. “I have been to Maw Ker,” I tell her. “Then you must come again,” she says. “To visit us.”

  When she is all talked out, she molds her skinny body to my legs, worried about sliding toward the open end of the vehicle; everyone holds on tighter when the truck goes up the steep hills. Soon she begins to nod off. “Here, take this.” I pull my scarf from my neck and ball it up into a pillow.

  But she doesn’t want to touch it. “Ayun hla-deh,” she murmurs, and shakes her head.

  She’s right: the silky black material woven through with bright threads is beautiful. For an old traveling companion, it’s still in good shape. “Don’t worry,” I tell her, patting my thigh. “You’re tired.” After a few more refusals, she puts her head down on the pillow-scarf and drops into sleep, one arm over my lap, the other curved around my shins. The Thai woman’s upper lip lifts in disgust. I gently stroke the girl’s hair away from her face.

  After two more hours of numb bum and aching knees, the truck grinds to a stop. Below us, and stretching toward the hazy horizon, are thousands of thatched roofs, brown dominoes fallen in a complex pattern up and down the hillside. A refugee camp. We are close to Umphang. The girl’s father and uncle jump down onto the dusty road; they look sandblasted. The father calls out. Calls again. I touch her back, the scapula like a blade under my palm. She wakes and rubs her face. Blinks. Lifts her head to me and smiles.

  Goodbye, dark eyes of the world.

  “You will come and visit us?”

  “I will try.” As she climbs out of the truck, an inordinate sense of loss, or regret, rises in my chest. I lean over the chilies and push my scarf into her hands. “A present for little sister.”

  I’m relieved that she doesn’t refuse. When the truck pulls away, she is still oohing and aahing, showing her father. She waves with one hand and holds the colorful fabric to her cheek with the other. I wave too, smiling, wondering what will happen to her.

  Do the light touches leave a clean trace, a thread of kindness to weave into suffering, that endlessly unraveling bolt of cloth? This notion is a Buddhist tenet—in essence, to be kind for the sake of kindness, to step gently through the world. But what I do is small. Even what I think is small; my mind is not big enough to understand what I meet here, to absorb and to know it. The little girl needs much more—a guarantee of protein and rice, a peaceful country, an education—so many things that are impossible for me to give. What is a scarf?

  CHAPTER 33

  ONE WOMAN

  A shirtless man waters the bougainvillea in front of the wooden house, which is built on stilts in the old Thai style. I lean out the window and watch a piebald dog pee against the outer beam. A flip-flop flies in the dog’s direction; someone under the house shouts in Burmese. The bougainvillea waterer laughs and sprays the farther plants. Muscle flares over shoulder bones and extends into excellent arms. He turns and grins at me. “I’m the gardener!”

  “I see that.”

  “Did you do your interviews?”

  “Some of them.” In fact, the man who spent the most time in prison didn’t want to talk about prisons. He wanted to take me for a walk through the verdant fields here, on the outskirts of Umphang.

  “It was like an Indian film,” says the shirtless man.

  “What?”

  “When you went for a walk with Thet Mu. I thought he was going to burst into song
and you would run across the field to each other, like Bollywood. So romantic.” He drops the water hose, spreads his arms, throws back his mop of curly hair, and runs toward an invisible woman at the other end of the fence. The man under the house giggles and makes a comment I don’t understand.

  I laugh, too. “I didn’t know you were watching, or I would have danced.”

  “Oh! More fun!”

  “What’s your name?”

  He opens his mouth in mock amazement, then puts his hand to his heart. “I’m not insulted. But I’m well known in my circle. A Burmese circle.”

  I realize that this is the famous Moe Thee Zun.

  A few hours later, a few of us sit on the large porch at the front of the house, a bare lightbulb over our heads, lizards running around on the insect-crowded roof beams. Moe Thee Zun’s voice is sharp, commanding. “We were trying to think of ways to get more regular people to join the protests. Students are good, but a whole country is not just students. The demonstrations had to include everybody, working regular people, the ones we knew were also sick of the government, just like we were. We knew they were our comrades also, but they were afraid.” He shakes his head. “So I went to the monastery. I wanted to ask the monks if they would help us. If the people saw the monks join the protest, then they would become more brave—they would join us, too.”

  He lowers his voice to an urgent whisper. “I was respectful. I asked to see the abbot and explained to him what we were going to do. I said that the students wanted to invite the monks to join us, to show that we had their support. Most Burmese people love the monks, they know they are wise, they listen to them. And, to my amazement, the abbot agreed to join the protest.

  “Our brother monks followed me out of the monastery carrying their alms bowls upside down. That means they would not accept any gifts from the generals or perform Buddhist ceremonies for them. This is a serious thing and everyone would see it, that the Sangha did not support the government.

  “As we walked along, more and more people came out of their houses to join us.” He conjures up masses out of the air with a sweeping gesture. “There were thousands, then tens of thousands, walking down the road together, and the crowd continued to grow even after we reached the pagoda and gave our speeches.

  “We had a lot of power through these rallies, but we lacked political experience. The older politicals who knew more about the government did not want to help us. They did not want to form some kind of coalition with us. They thought we were too young to be involved in politics. This was the big missed opportunity. The Burmese BBC radio station announced that we would be having a rally on August 8, a strike rally, and none of the students realized how big that strike would get. Millions of people heard the BBC broadcast and went on strike. Imagine that! We could have brought down the government—just a few more days, the country would have stopped functioning, no one was working! But we had no real plan of action and not enough unity, not enough direction.”

  He drops his hands in his lap. A heated exchange follows, in Burmese, between him and the other men. I see that he is not as young as he looks. None of them are students anymore. Like Maung, this man is pushing forty and living by his wits in an unstable political exile.

  Two of the men go back inside the teeming house. The political meeting that Tennyson mentioned will take place tomorrow, and a dozen people have arrived to spend a couple of days here. One of them is Win Min, whom I first met at the Christmas party. He has a dapper mustache, a quick sense of humor, and a talent for computers. Earlier in the day he promised to show me how to send an email, but at the moment he stares into the screen of a laptop; he’s busily finishing a report. A couple of guys stand behind him like hypnotized sentinels, watching his fingers fly over the keys.

  With the house so full, I suggested that I get a room at a guesthouse in the town, but Moe Thee Zun said no, I could have the bedroom. Two more men have since shown up, making me regret my presence as an overnight guest; I’m taking up badly needed space. But it’s too late to leave. And it’s probably the only chance I’ll have to talk to Moe Thee Zun alone. His comrades have left us out here on the porch together. “Ko Moe Thee, I have a difficult question to ask. You don’t have to answer it if you don’t want to. Of course.”

  He puts his elbows on his knees and rests his head on his hands, an expression of longing on his face. He will be disappointed: I’m not going to ask him if he’s single. He’s been flirting with me steadily. Many of the Burmese men on the border flirt subtly, or charmingly, or obviously, or ingratiatingly, each according to his means. It’s a condition of life without women; a new woman in their midst must be tried. Is she single? Is she available? Will she love me?

  “I still don’t understand why there are two parts, two sections, to the ABSDF. Why did the organization split up?”

  He sits back and bites his lower lip, puts his head to one side. Grunts. His hesitation makes me feel the depth of my duplicity. I’ve asked him about a rift that involved him and Maung. If he knew about our relationship, he would answer the question differently; he might not answer at all. I feel like a spy. Though I am spying only for myself, in an attempt to understand what’s going on. At least, that’s my rationalization.

  I wave my hand. “You know what? I’m sorry, never mind. It’s a private matter.” But it’s also a tendency of secrets: we want to tell them and they want to be told.

  “No, it’s all right. It’s not so difficult to explain. There were conflicts between people. Disagreements. If two groups do not get along, they split up.” I wait. He steeples his hands together. “But we were right to part ways.”

  “Why?”

  “Many reasons. Some people on the other side do not respect.”

  “Don’t respect what?”

  “The law. After we split up, I was very glad.” I wait again. “Because in 1992 there were executions in Kachin territory. I was thankful we had nothing to do with that. Maung gave the order.”

  “What order?”

  “For the executions.”

  I immediately think, It’s a war. People have to die in a war. “Were they SLORC soldiers?”

  “No.” His forehead wrinkles in consternation.

  “Well.” I can hear the defensiveness in my voice. “I thought … I heard there was just one. Only one.”

  Moe Thee Zun looks at me, puzzled. “No. That’s not true. It was a group of people.”

  “Who were they?”

  I know. I know before he says it. The gooseflesh rises up my arms, down my back.

  “They were members of the ASBDF. Some were students, like us. Some of them were tortured.”

  The words reverberate in my head. “Like us.” The voices inside the house, and the Burmese music on the ghetto blaster, grow faint. “But they must have been …” What? What could they have been? “Did they commit crimes?”

  “The men in command said they were spies for the SLORC. But I don’t believe that. Many people don’t believe that. It’s almost impossible that they had any communication with the SLORC, especially so many of them. It wasn’t just one or two. It was a group, and at least one woman. One of them had been a political prisoner. He had already suffered enough. He would never betray the movement. There was no trial. And there was no place to confine them. So they were executed. Maung was responsible.”

  “He did it? He killed them?”

  “No. He wasn’t in the camp. One of his men did it. Or maybe more than one. I don’t know the details. I only know it was wrong. Many of us think it was a power struggle within the organization.” He takes a cheroot out of his breast pocket, tamps it against the floor, and snaps off the end. But he doesn’t light it.

  I remember Maung talking, before he left: “If people think someone is stealing their power, they do bad things.” And Nola, that evening outside her gate: “A lot has happened on the border that you don’t know about.”

  One of the men comes out onto the porch again and announces that dinner is read
y. Moe Thee Zun puts his cheroot behind his ear and gets up. I stand too quickly and almost lose my balance. Moe Thee Zun walks into the house, and I wait for the dizziness to pass. Do I know anything at all?

  A large group sits in a circle on the wooden floor; the steaming bowls of food begin to arrive from the kitchen at the back of the house. Someone gives me a stack of chipped plates to hand around. Win Min the computer expert asks if I’m still excited about sending my first email. We laugh about the Westerner learning computer skills from the man who has spent years living in jungle camps.

  Maybe the story I’ve just heard about Maung is meant to discredit him. It could be a lie, a fabrication by a rival who doesn’t like him.

  Moe Thee Zun returns to his flamboyant, talkative self. As we reach out to take spoonfuls of curry and soup, he makes jokes in English and Burmese. People chat easily through the meal. I listen from a distance, half my mind on what I’ve just been told. I need to speak to Maung. Why didn’t I know about these allegations? The woman is always the last to know. About the other woman. About the executions.

  I glance at Moe Thee Zun throughout dinner. His colleagues are indulgent or deferential toward him, but consistently affectionate. Along with his charm and earnestness, an essential element of his character is a persistent innocence. He’s like the teenager who has dared, and fought, and beaten himself into the mold of manhood. Has, in fact, become a man. But remains boyishly transparent.

  Late in the chilly evening, Moe Thee Zun and I talk about the mental and physical benefits of yoga—of which we are both practitioners—particularly of Sirsasana, the headstand. He’s about to demonstrate his agility in this pose when, fortunately, we’re interrupted by footsteps and voices on the porch stairs. Two men announce themselves just as they come into view. Moe Thee Zun greets them and asks if they’re hungry. I see their guns even before they take off their jackets—gleaming gray and black machines.