Burmese Lessons

by Karen Connelly

  To which I responded, “Don’t touch me, you bad man. I will buy my own cow-tom.”

  And I did, stopping myself from having a second bowl because the driver was ready to go.

  Ah, Bangkok! You diesel-belching, blemished monster of a city, I am pleased to breathe in your smog from the filthy balcony. I step back inside and admire the shining parquet floor, this room’s most attractive feature, though the coily mattress also seems the height of luxury. Sleep knocks me down for a few blind hours.

  Upon waking, I get up and visit the VD clinic at the corner of Soi Dang, hoping the som-tam seller doesn’t see me. The good doctor listens to my symptoms and prescribes the right penicillin for non-honeymoon cystitis. He also looks at me with concern and says, “You are very tired. That’s why the infection is bad. Now take the medicine, and drink lots of water, and rest. Then you will be happy again.”

  What a sharp clinical eye. Will it work? Will I be happy again? Am I unhappy? Best not to think about it too much. I drink cold water. I make some ice in the small freezer. Popping it out of the plastic tray, I revel in the cold transparent edges, the white heart. Ice, after weeks of drinking warm water. Ice. It’s like a new word.

  I dust off the companionable Buddha postcard. I genuflect, sit, breathe in and out. An ice cube melts in my mouth. I meditate long after the cold water is in my stomach. My weariness asks for nothing but stillness. On the exhalation, I release, again, the besieged mind. In. Out. In. Out. Why don’t we learn this in grade school?

  Over the next week, I return to my novel, but when I reread the work it’s false. The characters are doing romantic things; they are predictable, they are flat. I’ve started writing about a white woman, an Anglo-Burmese man. They are more graceful and better-looking versions of me and Maung. Nauseating. The people I had before have receded. When I’m not writing the Harlequin romance of Burma, I’m writing political-tract crap.

  I stand on the balcony, careful not to put my elbows in the pigeon shit, and light up a cheroot. Both romantic and political self-indulgence involve oversimplification, which is the dullest, most effective form of lying; but political self-indulgence is the worse crime. I don’t want to write propaganda.

  “What’s wrong with propaganda?” Maung asks. He’s no longer in the hospital, though he’s still in bed in the Mae Sarieng house. “We need as much good propaganda as we can get.”

  “The movement needs support, but that’s not the same as propaganda.”

  Silence. I fill it by asking, “Are you feeling better?”

  “No. I’m still sick. I haven’t had an attack like this for a long time.” As the dysentery subsided, a virulent recurrence of malaria knocked Maung off his feet again.

  “I hope you’re not smoking too much. Can you eat anything?”

  “I don’t have much of an appetite. It’s all right. I’ve lost all my Bangkok weight. How are you?”

  “Just meditating a lot. And writing shit.”

  He laughs. We say goodbye without mentioning when we might see each other again.

  Two days later, I wake to a lightly thudding skull. The headache sinks down until the same monkey banging its nasty drum swings high and low through my bones. An exotic flu. Picked up at the VD clinic, perhaps.

  It’s malaria, of course. A dozen or more people have described this pounding achiness as one of the earliest symptoms. Yet it’s relatively uncommon to contract malaria during the dry season, especially when one has Deeted one’s skin to carcinogenic levels. I heave myself up, make a cup of tea, and dismiss the self-diagnosis as melodramatic.

  The next day: dengue fever?

  Evening of the next day: brain tumor?

  The morning after that, in forty-two-degree-Celsius heat, my teeth begin to chatter. I put on my sweater and my windbreaker and lie down under the hitherto unused blanket. I get up and unfold the big clean towel on top of that and get back into bed. I’m still freezing. Child of Canadian skating rinks, veteran of a poor winter in Montreal without good boots, I’ve never been so cold in my life. When I wash my hands under the cold bathroom tap, it’s like rubbing ice on blistered skin. My brain is curious about the physical manifestations of illness, but I don’t take them too personally. At first I think this is a consequence of my week’s successful meditation practice: I have attained a certain level of detachment from the self. Though no Bodhisattva, I am at least on the long road to enlightenment.

  This causes me to feel self-congratulatory until the late afternoon, when, poof, just like that, the chills vanish. A few minutes later a fever sparks, catches, and burns across the plains. A state of arduous panic begins under my skin. Something besides fever happens, some other event. I can’t describe how the sensations are communicated to me, but I feel flesh, fasciae, muscle, organs—all of these surge into action, trying to protect the whole. It reminds me of the useless mobilization ants undertake when someone is burning their nest. But the illness—which is unlike any flu I’ve experienced—is taking over. That’s what makes being sick such a perpetual surprise to the healthy person. The illness doesn’t win, necessarily. But it cannot be resisted.

  I want to get up and phone someone. My Thai brother and good friend Goong, who stayed with my family when I first lived in Thailand, is out of town. Aye Aye Lwin is on a training course. Chit Hlaing and Ma Tu live more than an hour away by bus, and their schedules are so busy that I don’t want to disturb them. I am shy about calling my journalist friends; months ago we quarreled over white entitlement and Asian politics and I dropped out of the documentary project we were doing together. We’ve seen each other since, but we are no longer close. I don’t know Nola well enough. Besides, she might tell me to pull up my bootstraps and take my quinine. Not that I have any quinine. I sneer at the phone on the floor. Why doesn’t it ring? I don’t want to phone Maung in desperation. I want him to call me.

  I resist the one person who might be able to comfort me as the afternoon becomes evening and the fever breaks hard into chills again, then the chills simmer back into fever and morph half an hour later into worse chills, making me shiver so hard that I no longer have the strength to call anyone. I don’t want to get out of bed or talk. It’s enough to lie here, sipping water. Sleep will come soon.

  The next morning, I am sicker. I take my temperature: 39.5 degrees Celsius. Which is 103 degrees Fahrenheit. How bad is that? I call Maung, finally, because at least he’s a doctor. “Why haven’t you phoned me?”

  “The house is very full of people right now. It’s hard to use the phone or have any privacy. I’m sorry. How are you?”

  Grumpily, I describe my symptoms.

  “That is malaria. It usually takes a couple weeks for the first symptoms to develop after infection. You probably got it in the first camp.”

  I bet I know the night, too, and the place from which the mosquito sucked my hot, dumb blood.

  “Take some paracetamol for the fever. Wait until tomorrow, then take a cab to the Tropical Diseases Hospital on Ratchawithi Road. It’s close to your place. They will test you and then maybe give you some drugs.” Maybe. He likes that word. It’s a prophylactic against being wrong.

  “Why should I wait?”

  “So that more parasites build up in your bloodstream.”

  “Oh. What are they doing in there?”

  “What? Where?”

  “The parasites, in my body.”

  With galling cheerfulness he responds, “They are eating your red blood cells.”

  “Oh.”

  “Not exactly eating. Destroying. They already spent some days in your liver, and now they’re in your blood. Then they might affect your spleen. That’s the only thing you have to worry about. If your spleen gets too big. Spleen helps get rid of old red blood cells, so many parasites end up there.”

  To this impressive lecture, I say nothing. I feel a lot of spleen, though.

  Because I’m not talking much, Maung observes, “You sound sick.”

  “Hmm. I don’t feel so well.”


  “I’m sorry that I can’t come to you. There’s too much work here, and I’m still sick.”

  “That’s fine. I didn’t expect you to come. I just …” I clench the phone, chest caving inward, body seized by some unexpected force. What is this? Heart failure? No. I’ve started to cry. I quickly let go of my monumental disappointment. I didn’t expect him to come to see me. I sniffle for a minute. He says he knows how hard it is (which he does). There is no need to overwhelm him, no need to be overwhelmed. Very Buddhist. I dry it up.

  “Soon Aye Aye Lwin will be back. She will come to see you.”

  “I know. I just …” I cannot believe that I’ve made a vocation of being a writer when words are often so useless.

  “I know. I miss you, too. I love you, Yee Yee Cho.”

  At the end of the day, tens of thousands of parasites are munching away in the back of my neck, in the major arteries in my thighs, in the veins in my hands. I slowly get dressed and go outside, carrying with me a plastic bag, because I’m not sure how much longer I can resist throwing up. There are two kinds of people in this world: those who can abide vomiting and those who cannot. I belong to the latter tribe. Swallowing, I step into the elevator. Swallowing, I step out. I don’t have the strength to walk down the soi and catch a real cab on Phaholyothin, so one of the motorcycle boys gives me a lift to the Tropical Diseases Hospital. I see nothing of the near-accidents and mad weavings; my head rests heavily between his red-vested shoulder blades.

  Soon enough, I enter a waiting room full of sick people on wooden benches and plastic chairs. Rather than being depressed by this familiar scene, I’m happy to be among fellow sufferers, out of my empty room. Most of the folks here don’t look as poor or as dejected as the ones in the Mae Sarieng community hospital. A young male attendant takes me to someone who pricks my skin with a needle, then ushers me back to my bench.

  Either I doze for half an hour or the results come fast. A commanding female voice bellows out my name. I approach the desk, behind which sits a stalwart woman with an old-fashioned nurse’s cap mysteriously affixed, as though by glue, to her bouffant hairdo. She glares up at me over her reading glasses. “Go back home.” She sounds exasperated, as if I’m wasting her time when she could be helping real sick people.

  My lower lip trembles. I’m so raw with illness and the gut-wrench of self-pity that I want only to lie down on a hospital bed and have a nurse—a gentle, loving one, not this sergeant major—bring me water and pat my hand. She sees how upset I am and softens her tone by a quarter of a degree. “Whatever is making you sick, we don’t know. Dengue fever? Maybe. Malaria?” She raises her hands in that seemingly universal “Who knows?” gesture. “There’s not enough of it in your blood yet. Mai pen lai. Go back home and come here again when you are sicker. We need more parasites.”

  I should have listened to Maung and waited until tomorrow.

  The next morning, the paracetamol doesn’t seem to be controlling the fever very well and nothing controls the chills. I take three more tablets and look at the clock. Ten. My temperature is 104.

  At four in the afternoon, sicker, nauseated and newly afflicted with diarrhea, I return to the hospital on the back of another motorcycle-taxi. What am I thinking? I am thinking that it’s much faster to get there on a motorcycle; all I want to do is arrive and be placed in a hospital bed.

  Once more the blood test shows nothing conclusive. “Have you thrown up yet?” the sergeant-major nurse asks.

  “I hate throwing up.”

  Her eyes needle me mercilessly. “Come back tomorrow, after you puke.” I don’t think to check myself in and get sicker in the hospital. I don’t even know if that’s an option. It’s not a hotel. I return to the apartment, where I keep a bucket by my head.

  I shiver under the blanket and towel; I burn in my underwear on the cool floor. The rising throb of invasion marches into my joints and muscles, lays siege to the viscera behind my eyeballs. It occurs to me that this is how dying begins. Tennyson spat out the words, “This is how our children die.” Yes, I remember now. This is the disease of the border. This suffering is the ritual, the rite of passage that should marry me to the cause as effectively as a wedding.

  I cry for a long time—for myself and beyond myself, for the people who have described their small roles in Burma’s history, their lives in the camps and the prisons and the interrogation centers. Why do I know these stories? Why do I know how the world becomes inverted, wrong, transforms into hell, less and more than hell, because hell implies some awesome rendering of justice, whereas the tortured students, the terrorized villages, the starving slave porters are savaged for … what? To what purpose—the regime’s twin addiction to violent power and greed?

  I cry because I have learned not only the horror of evil but also its oppressive stupidity—the sheer waste, the way it takes promise, intelligence, youth, all human rightness and possibility, and destroys them, consciously, tears them apart and swallows them down like Saturn devouring his children. What can I wield against such a force? Scratches on paper. My good intentions are laughable. Such powerlessness makes me angry, and beyond my anger is despair, a grief that cracks open my rib cage and pins me to the bed.

  It’s the same feeling I had on the phone with Maung but managed to swallow down. It has returned in full force. I can’t howl, because I’m too sick, but at last I permit myself the relief of weeping, the freedom of being sad. What is inside me? A fracture, from my left shoulder across my chest. Invisible traces of Burma and the border. Parasites the doctors cannot see.

  Is this not what I wanted, what I have always craved—to be transformed? The change I sought when I first went to Burma is complete. It is an irrevocable alteration: the fever has seared something into me, burned something out. She is gone, the one who could go forth so easily, so readily, wishing to enter another world and opening herself to it completely, like a door or a flower.

  CHAPTER 47

  WHEN I FIRST GAVE MY HEART TO ASIA

  The next pay, I almost fall off the motorcycle. I swoon and the machine dips and swerves dangerously. This rips the dizziness right out of my head and makes me yelp with a fear so high-pitched it sounds like laughter. Luckily, the car beside us is not too close. The skinny motorcycle boy somehow rights the bike and swears with Thai words I’ve never heard before.

  A minute later, we joke with each other, he shouting into the diesel fumes, I whispering in his ear, “It would be funny to die on the way to the hospital.”

  Three times lucky. A new nurse calls me to the desk and tells me, “You have malaria. Do you want to stay at the hospital?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have money?”

  “Yes.” Is it because I am white that she doesn’t ask me for a deposit?

  An attendant brings an old wheelchair. As soon as I’m sitting down in it, I ask for a bag and throw up, wretchedly but triumphantly, too. I’m in the hospital! It’s as if I’ve won the lottery.

  I see a doctor whose name I immediately forget. I don’t even know what he does to me. Checks my reflexes? Asks me if I’m allergic to drugs? He drifts out of the room like a ghost wearing large glasses. Then I am helped into a hospital gown by a woman with warm hands. She tucks me into one of the two beds in an empty room. Someone else—a nurse, presumably—gives me pills. I sleep.

  They give me a lot of pills, several times a day. Though normally I’m suspicious of the medical establishment and leery of pharmaceuticals, sickness has made me acquiescent. I take the drugs without asking a single question. The nurses are the kind nurses of my dreams, bearing trays of water that I drink and food that I do not touch. Something about the side effects of the drugs—they kill the appetite.

  I spoil myself. After the first couple of days, I could just buy the pills and go home. But the malaria has frightened me. I don’t want to be alone in the apartment; I want to be taken care of. The day after I’m admitted, I call Maung on the pay phone down the hall, to tell him where I a
m and that I’m all right. I run out of change before we can say goodbye.

  Since I first became ill, the flesh has been melting off my hips, my belly. My breasts deflate; the double ladder of ribs shows under my skin. The invisible diminishment of self is a more gradual process. As I get skinnier, my heart swells with self-pity. Am I allowed to feel sorry for myself? You don’t have to tell anyone. I stare at the fingerprints on the wall at the end of my bed, imagining the crowd of people who were here before, like the ones who hovered at Maung’s side in Mae Sarieng.

  Give your heart to Asia. I have thought often of those words. My mind walks around them, turns them over. What is on the other side of that moving request? I sometimes say it out loud. “Give your heart to Asia.” Curiously, the words have lost their original incantatory effect. I stare at the fingerprints and ask myself why.

  Because I understand them. I realize that Maung was asking me to do something I’d already done. That first weekend by the lake, when he said, “I hope you give your heart to Asia,” the words didn’t express only romantic longing to me and for me. They had the import of prayer because they also described an act of grace from my past. They explained the small miracle that launched my adult life. I gave my heart to Asia when I was seventeen years old, a wide-eyed, serious, brash girl from Calgary adopted into a Thai family, a Thai town, a Thai school, and made to feel, for the first time, despite the initial culture shock and language barrier, like a normal teenager, doing normal teenager things. I had never experienced family life so rooted in calm dailiness, in peace. To my surprise and complete delight, it was not too late.

  That is why I will always be a great advocate of the wisdom of physical escape. It’s not always appropriate, though sometimes it’s imperative. It can save you from yourself, or from them. Leaving Canada for Thailand allowed me to depart physically from many things: my father’s alcoholism, my brothers’ increasing violence and delinquency, my sister’s suicide (she died one year before I left for Asia), my mother’s long-standing faith that religious fanaticism might help our family alleviate some of these problems. Physical departure is not enough, I know, but it is a crucial part of a long disentanglement. It would be easy to leave fucked-up families behind if we did not love them. We want to keep what we love, rightly. Distance has helped me learn how to do that.