Burmese Lessons

by Karen Connelly

It feels hotter here than it was in Mae Sarieng, though that seems improbable. I smell the woodsmoke of cooking fires. The young man delivers me to a hut not far from the edge of the hill and introduces me to a pretty young woman who has just lit up a cheroot. A Burmese paperback is splayed open against a rock beside her. “Oh, hello!” she says, putting the cheroot down on another rock. She stands and brushes out the wrinkles of her sarong. Her bobbed hair is pinned in a little curl at the nape of her neck. “It’s nice to meet you,” she says formally. “I am Khaing Lin.”

  “I am Yee Yee Cho,” I respond, which cracks her up.

  “Yee Yee Cho! Who gave you such a nice Burmese name?” It basically means “sweet smiler.”

  “Members of ABSDF.” Maung, actually, but there’s no need to mention that. I smile. “See?”

  “I see! You have the—” She twirls her index fingers in her cheeks.

  “Dimples.”

  “Dimples! Ayun cho-deh! So sweet!” She laughs and plucks her cheroot off the rock. She draws on it quickly, but it has already gone out. “Please come in. I will show you everything.” Once inside the two-room dwelling, she glances around with a scowl and laughs again. “Somewhere is my lighter.” Then louder, as if she were calling to the missing object, “Somewhere in this universe, my lighter!”

  Within a few minutes it’s clear that I will be staying here with her, her daughter, and two other women. This is the single women’s hut, she explains. Oh. Obviously that means I won’t be staying with Maung. He and I have repeatedly referred to our trip to the jungle. Thus I had it in my mind that we would stay together. Not just in the same camp but in the same hut. Khaing Lin chatters on. I try to listen, but the only words I hear for a minute are booming in my own head. Why didn’t Maung tell me about this?

  My hostess leads me into the second room, where a little girl sits on the raised bed platform, a hairbrush in her hand. She holds the brush out, bossily, to her mother; as Khaing Lin begins to fix her daughter’s hair, the girl talks like a four-year-old version of her mother, propelled through language by curiosity and sparky irreverence.

  I interrupt her to tell her that she’s cute. She looks at me as if I were trying to give her a headless doll. Khaing Lin chides, “Say thank you!”

  Dutifully, without feeling, she thanks me.

  I try again. “What’s your name?”

  “Decembaa.”

  Khaing Lin tugs the brushed hair smooth, parts it, and expertly divides it into two long pigtails. December throws herself off the bed platform and runs outside to play.

  “Why did you call her December?”

  “Oh, because it’s such a beautiful word. Isn’t it?” She pats the bed platform. “You can leave your bags here.”

  I move to put my bigger pack on the dirt floor, but she shakes her head and nods at the bamboo platform. “Up, up. To avoid bugs and snakes.”

  Ah, right. I lift the bag.

  Two platforms are built on either side of the entrance, which has no door, just a curtain. They double as shelves that hold large, striped market bags. I’ve seen so many of these nylon sacks in exiles’ rooms and offices—containers for people’s clothes, books, and personal effects.

  “Let’s go out to check the fire. I’ll make some noodles, then prepare your sleeping place. Are you hungry?”

  I follow her out the back of the hut to the cooking area, where a large aluminum pot sits in a fire. With sure movements and a blackened fork, Khaing Lin rearranges the scarlet embers.

  “I forgot to look for the lighter!” The cold cheroot is stuck behind her ear. “Never mind!” She pulls a twig out of the fire, blows out the flame, and uses the live coal to light her cheroot. “Ahh. Very good, the cheroot. Do you smoke?”

  “No. I love the smell, though.”

  “Be careful! That means you may smoke soon.”

  As she cooks our noodles, we compare notes on the people we know in common along the border, moving through ABSDF members, NGO workers, and English teachers. Then the conversation drifts to Burmese writers and poets. Khaing Lin shows me her small pile of books inside the hut. Several novels, collections of Burmese poetry, and a few recent literary journals make up the treasure.

  I pick up one of the novels. “I met this writer when I was in Rangoon.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, I interviewed her, and we had lunch together, too. She’s a good talker.”

  “Yee Yee Cho, you are so lucky! I would love to talk to other writers. I write poetry, too, and some journalism. But it’s not easy to do that here.” She gently takes the book from me and presses it between her palms. “Who else did you meet there? Did you talk with other writers?”

  I describe my dinner with Sayagyi Tin Moe (she shows me a dog-eared collection of his poetry) and the ship captain who talked like a professor. I tell her about two afternoons I spent with Ludu Daw Ah Mar, the famous fiction writer. “I thought it would be hard to find her house, because I didn’t have directions, but when I showed the address to a si-car driver he knew exactly where she lived.”

  “Yes, everyone would know her house. The people love her books.”

  “That’s what he said. He’d read everything she’d written.”

  Back outside, using two rags to hold the handles, she lifts the pot and takes it to the hillside. She speaks through billows of steam as she pours out the water. “Burmese people love books. The country used to have the highest literacy rate in Asia. Before the dictatorship. Even the women, hundreds of years ago. The monastery schools taught boys and girls to read. As for me, I used to love going to the library. I was always involved with a book.”

  The noodles congeal in the pot as Khaing Lin and I talk, jumping from one literary subject to another. Eventually she stands up, flattens out her sarong in a businesslike way, and asks, “Do you like chilies? I put them on everything because the food here is boring.”

  She gets some bowls and sets aside December’s portion before dousing the noodles with chili oil. “She will be home soon. She always knows when the noodles are ready.”

  We eat quickly, then go back into the hut to get my “bed” ready. This consists of a blanket and an elusive mosquito net.

  “I wonder where I put it,” Khaing Lin says. “You have to use a net.” She pulls a bag off the platform and unzips it. “Aha!” The gauzy white mass unfurls under her hands. “Even if it’s very hot, make sure you use the net, okay?”

  “Some people say that it’s hard to get malaria in the dry season.”

  “It’s true, we don’t have so many mosquitoes in the dry season. But one mosquito is enough.”

  CHAPTER 37

  GORKY

  I see Maung at dinnertime, in a communal kitchen shelter. He is obviously happy, surrounded by talkative men who fall silent when he speaks. He has also changed into a longyi and jettisoned his Marlboros for a cheroot. He’s in such high spirits that I don’t want to spoil it with my disappointment about the sleeping arrangements. I smile as he introduces me to everyone. In due course, I discover their various titles and jobs: information officer, military strategist, radio operator, commanding officer of such and such battalion. Apparently a group of soldiers are here from the front. Right now they’re bathing in the stream, and soon they’ll come up the hill and devour all the food in sight.

  The information officer says, “The soldiers are always hungry. They work hard and the food out there is not so good.” He smiles at me enthusiastically. He has a thick scar through his upper lip, which emphasizes his fine teeth. “Maung says you are a writer. Do you know Gorky?”

  His tone suggests that I may know Gorky personally. “Well, I know his name. And that he was Russian. But I haven’t read him.”

  The radio operator is thrilled. My ignorance provides him with a marvelous chance to narrate Gorky’s life story, from his humble beginnings to his revolutionary activities in czarist Russia, from his great friendship with Lenin to his eventual disgust with the Bolsheviks’ savage disregard for human ri
ghts. A couple of times the other men join the conversation, but his love of Gorky is the star, and it speaks, and through that love shines his knowledge.

  I presume he also knows a lot about radio systems.

  I sit back to listen, saying, “Hmm” occasionally and “Really?” at the appropriate spots. Sometimes he interrupts himself to ask his companions in Burmese for the right word in English. He reminds me of the qualities I most admire in Burmese people: their love of literature and art, their openness to the world, their ability to bring the world into their own experience, their intellectual generosity, their enthusiasm for learning and for teaching. Because, of course, he is teaching me. Just as I realize how serious my Gorky deprivation has been, he asks, “Would you like me to lend you one of his books? I have a photocopy of My Universities, in English.”

  I thank him for the offer, genuinely pleased. I’m always short of reading material.

  After dinner, Maung walks me back toward Khaing Lin’s hut. We walk slowly because it’s not that far. It’s also dark, though the froth of the Milky Way glitters above us. A moon glow shows above the treetops in the direction of the stream.

  “Khaing Lin says this is the single women’s hut.”

  “Yes. Though you are not a single woman.”

  Teeth clenched, I nod. It’s so hard to speak sometimes. I feel needy, and feeling needy makes me mad at him. “Maung, I promise I will ask you this just once. Then I won’t ask again. Do you think we might have a chance to spend any time together? Alone?”

  “Difficult. It’s communal life here. You and I are not married, so we cannot stay together like we are married.” I don’t bother pointing out the obvious hypocrisy of this behavior, considering our usual conjugal relations.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that before? I know it’s stupid, but I thought … I just …”

  “You thought we would stay together?”

  “Why didn’t you explain that we wouldn’t? At least I could have prepared myself.”

  “I’m sorry. I was busy in Chiang Mai and I did not think about it. For me it’s obvious.”

  “For me it wasn’t.”

  “Do you want to declare?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We publicly announce our engagement so we can act like a married couple.”

  I roll my eyes. “That’s almost as bad as … Christianity! We should declare our marriage plans so we can sleep together!”

  “I am a Buddhist, not a Christian. I told you it was not so easy in the jungle.”

  “I didn’t realize you were talking about us.”

  We have arrived at Khaing Lin’s hut. I hear her inside, murmuring to December in a mellifluent voice, half spoken, half sung.

  I sidle closer to Maung. “Will you kiss me good night?”

  “It is better to be private.”

  “Maung, who can see us? Most people know that I’m here because we’re a couple. We’ve been out a lot together in Bangkok. It’s no longer a big secret.”

  “But it doesn’t have to be a big public.”

  “All right. Fine. I’ll see you tomorrow. Maybe. If I’m lucky, I guess.” I duck into the little house before he can say another word.

  Do I care that I am being childish? Not at all. Like a child, I enjoy my petulance for the illusion of power it gives me.

  CHAPTER 38

  A LOCK ON INSPIRATION

  During the next week, I visit briefly with Maung and his colleagues over lunch or dinner; we spend one long afternoon in the radio-operations hut. With a copy of My Universities in my hand, I learn about how far the signals reach, how often the operators are able to listen in on SLORC radio communications, how the SLORC sometimes decodes their signal and listens in on them. Sometimes the two sides find themselves on the same wavelength and talk and swear at each other.

  Throughout these visits, I inwardly congratulate myself on my maturity. At meals, Maung and I occasionally slip off a flip-flop and touch our feet together under the table. What a thrill. It seems we are engaged in a chaste, public courtship for the benefit of his comrades. It is natural, in this world, that my behavior will determine their approval of me. They are a family, after all, formed and bonded through experiences I can only imagine, no matter how much I may know of the details. Part of me strongly rejects the notion that I need to be approved of, that I need to satisfy an entire group’s requirements in order to show my love for their leader.

  I remind myself that if I were a Burmese woman I would probably be more accepting, more patient—qualities that are valued in every Theravadan Buddhist culture. Women are expected not just to exhibit those traits but to embody them. I pride myself on my ability to adapt, but in fact this pride is false: I don’t like adapting when it means acting out some kind of charade. I don’t like adapting to celibacy when my lover and I have been apart for two months already. On several of these hot afternoons, I daydream longingly of Greece. I wish I could teleport myself out of this bamboo camp to the edge of the Aegean, blue water spread out, waiting to be entered by men and women who live more easily in a conjoined realm of body and heart.

  What a load of romantic crap! But I indulge in it as I sip my warm water and wonder when constipation becomes a serious problem. (It’s been two days since I’ve had a meaningful visit to the stinky latrine.) Romantic crap or not, the extrovert’s tendency to intertwine emotion and body works well in Greece, land of loud talkers, big huggers, passionate hand-wavers.

  I shake my drowsy head back and forth. Snap out of it. I’m not on the edge of the Aegean, I’m on the edge of Burma, with cheroot smoke in my nose, in my mouth. Why not? An information officer offers me one and I tamp down the tobacco and snap off the end as if I’ve been doing it all my life. We light up and smoke as he shows me a few snapshots of his battalion’s first few months in the jungle. He explains how people move from one camp to another, from camp to town or city, from city back to camp, bringing books, mail, supplies, job assignments, and news.

  Though he never states it directly, I understand that there is a slow drain of people out of the jungle. As the SLORC buys more weapons, swells its ranks continuously with young, destitute soldiers, keeps troops near the border into the rainy season—which traditionally has been a period of détente—the ABSDF armed battalions grow smaller, worn out. Without more new recruits, it’s hard to keep a guerrilla force alive.

  Besides the soldiers fighting in the jungle and the undercover agents sent back into Burma, the ABSDF’s other powerful battalion consists of people whose weapons are made of words. They are public-relations people and record keepers, clipping and sorting and keeping notes for Burma’s unofficial history. It is a curious thing, to enter a small house in a dusty Thai town and discover dozens of metal bookshelves sagging with carefully labeled files. Political events. Business deals. Overt and subtle shifts in the regime’s chain of command. The names of the dead, the missing, the presumed dead. The names of the imprisoned. Records that no one inside the country can keep. The men and women who build the files and fill the metal shelves believe that someday there will be a place in Burma for the truth they have so carefully preserved.

  I am conscious, too, that there will be a time when a few of the men and women I’ve met here will write about their experiences. Khaing Lin still composes poetry sometimes, in the evening, and occasionally jots down her thoughts on her life, as it is now, as it was before she left her country. “But I am often tired,” she tells me. “There is … how do you call it, when something is missing?”

  “An absence?”

  “Yes, but another word. A lock. A lock on inspiration?”

  “A lack! You mean a lack of. A lock is on a door, to keep it closed.”

  “Hmm. The lack of, yes. Also the lock on. I would like to write, but it is hard. When I was in Rangoon before the strikes and nothing ever happened to me, I wrote pages and pages. Now so much happens, but it is painful to write, and tiring. Sometimes too hard.” She physically shakes herself—her h
ead, her shoulders, even her arms, which loosen and lift off her lap as she attempts to rid herself of an encumbrance.

  I spend long hours with Khaing Lin, December, the other women and children in the camp. Each bird-filled green morning burns into a silent, hazy afternoon, the heat so thick that it’s hard to breathe, especially when the water-boiling fires are going. During these hours, of sweat and thirst and physical discomfort, I repeat to myself: almost ten years in the jungle. I consider living this way for one. Could I do it for one year? Doubtful. I think of the rainy season. This far north, the cold season would be bone-chillingly damp. Every morning, I stretch my aching back and hips, wondering how long it takes to get used to sleeping on bamboo. A decade?

  One of the hardest things is the smallest, the most trifling. We have to haul the water up from the stream. All right. I do this task on the sly, otherwise Khaing Lin refuses to let me have the buckets, saying a guest shouldn’t have to haul water. Frankly, no one should have to haul water up that fucking hill. The first time I attempted to ascend the kicked-in steps with the full buckets, I fell on my ass—twice. I lost so much water that I had to go back down to the stream and refill. But it’s not the hauling, or even the falling, that bothers me so much.

  It’s the drinking. The stream water has to be boiled long and hard. In this heat, forty to forty-five degrees Celsius, the water never cools. I don’t like freezing-cold water; I don’t need ice. But it’s dispiriting to drink bath-temperature water when you are sweating and thirsty at midday.

  As our cauldron comes to the boil, I offhandedly mention this to Khaing Lin, trying to frame it as an observation. She laughs at me. “You are suffering with the hot water. Oh, me too. We are used to it, but it is still bad. I went to Chiang Mai a couple months ago. With December. She was scared of ice cream! She didn’t know anything could be so cold. It is a strange life in the jungle.”

  “Do you ever wonder what might have happened if you had stayed in Burma? Do you think it might be better?”