Burmese Lessons

by Karen Connelly

  I had already started packing my bags to leave the country when I discovered that I was pregnant: knocked up at seventeen, like my grandmother and my mother and my sister before me. Such is the power of a family pattern, and of that octopus dysfunction, stretching out its tentacles to drag me back into the fray, that I briefly considered canceling my plans to depart for Thailand, ceding my last chance for a taste of peaceful childhood to the child I would bear.

  My mother was profoundly against abortion as a crime against God, but she counseled me to get one as soon as possible and leave the country. She told me that, besides all the other problems it would bring, having a baby at seventeen would undermine my dream of becoming a writer. My mother! I love her utterly. She has done the best she could do through years of recurrent disaster. She has always taught her children the value of generosity, humor, and gratitude. Only now do I begin to comprehend her bravery. Her love for us has always been more important than her obedience to a wrathful God.

  I was still bleeding when I arrived in Denchai. But all that other unpleasantness disappeared. I shed my family the way a snake sheds its skin, and, as with a newly molted reptile, my eyes were brighter, my aspect gleaming. I saw the world clearly, in all its rawness, brutal and beautiful and, for me, replete with kindness, for I was protected from the brutality by my vigilant Thai fathers, the members of the Denchai Rotary Club. They showed me the beauty of temples, silk, Japanese electronics, large rice cookers, low mountains, tall waterfalls, well-made badminton rackets. And the most they wanted from me in terms of religious faith was to sit still in a temple for a few minutes and have my fortune read by a good-humored old monk with three teeth in his head, one of them so pointed and gold that I couldn’t take my eyes off it. The sitting still was harder than it looked, but no god threatened to kill me when I failed.

  I came to love the very air of Denchai, the red dust of the roads into the countryside, dust I would draw my hands through, delighted with the smooth transfer of earth to skin. I wanted to lick it off my fingers, leave prints of it on my clothes and skin. I loved, too, the sleepy faces in the marketplace at seven in the morning, when the gaggle of us schoolchildren—I was a school child!—would hop in a songtow to go to school in Prae, half an hour away. Once there, I walked with my friends through the gates and past the light green buildings of Nareerat School to my classroom, which overlooked grounds full of roses and indigo morning glories. What power had brought me here, to these flower-bedecked buildings of colonial architecture and the village with ghosts under the bridge and Chinese soap opera and horned bugs the size of golf balls and lizards everywhere? It had to be a kind of magic. Thai friends said that my good karma delivered me to a Buddhist country.

  Concentrated in the space of one year, I received the unexpected gift of a happy childhood, for as soon as I realized that I could be a teenager, I reverted, I went farther back, and became a little girl. My Thai parents and teachers accepted my behavior, perhaps assuming it was peculiar to Canadian adolescents. I was naughty occasionally; I misbehaved grandly a couple of times. One time they wondered if they shouldn’t send me back to Canada. This threat saw me become diligent, self-sacrificing, winning: a traditional Asian daughter. Like my Thai mother, I would have got down on my knees and given my Thai father a pedicure if he had asked me to—or anything else, for that matter. But no one asked anything outrageous of me, or dirty, or wrong. I stayed for the rest of the year. How could I not have given my heart to Asia?

  I get out of bed and rummage through my knapsack to find the photograph of Maung. It’s from the roll of film I shot when he came to see me at the lakeside resort, where he said those words that were part of the charmed dialogue new lovers employ to bind themselves closer together. I must have said similar things, seeking to draw him in, hold him.

  I hope you give your heart to Asia. What a powerful, encompassing request. I look at his face in the photograph and know beyond a doubt that I love the man I see. His smile in this photo makes him look touchingly young. He’s loose-limbed, relaxed in a way I’ve rarely seen him, his mouth open to the camera—he was in the midst of saying something when I pressed the shutter button.

  The whisper comes again. I write it out in my notebook, as one should write a whisper, in a narrow script: I do love him. But is love enough? (Doesn’t love have to be enough?) To whom can we ever give our heart, really? I need my heart. I need to keep my heart. The metaphor works only in the abstract, on a grand scale. I can give my heart to Asia even while it pumps my replenished blood and powers my limbs.

  But Maung’s was a veiled request, and a natural one, the desire of the man newly in love. What he really meant was “Give your heart to me.”

  CHAPTER 48

  THE GIFT

  I push down the window and let in the hot, filthy wind of Bangkok. We are what we are: complicated, fretful, endlessly involved humans. We are not much. The megacities teach this without concern for their pupils, the men burning garbage, the women collecting newspapers from soiled bins, the girls selling green mangoes, the dozens of children who live with their families in shanties on the tracks’ edges. They stare at me staring at them, and sometimes they laugh, and often they wave as if we were friends. I wave back, our eyes touching until we can no longer see each other.

  The very fact that humans are so compelled to look at each other contains a mystery, evidence of a pact that goes beyond language or culture. What is exchanged through the eyes? A lifetime condensed in a meaningful glance. Some primordial form of love no one has named. A map, in every iris, of a corresponding galaxy of stars.

  Of course, it’s easy to stare into the eyes of poor people when one is being borne away from them on a train. The wisdom of escape can also look like an appetite for adventure, or a need for open-ended freedom. But is it simply cowardice?

  When we rush past a fish pond, a white egret wheels up from shimmering green into blue sky. I have booked a flight to Greece. I think about this as much as I think about my current destination, Chiang Mai, still some several hundred kilometers north, where Maung is waiting for me.

  I wonder if he is waiting. He has work to do in the northern city. But he has asked me to come and see him, and I am glad. We will look different, and feel different in each other’s arms, because both of us are skinnier than we were in April. I begin to understand the monks, why the wisest among them grow thin. It’s easier to meditate when you eat lightly. Successful meditation facilitates right thinking, and I’m trying to think rightly about leaving. For months I’ve wanted to go back to the island to write and rest, but I’ve repeatedly put it off. Maung can’t understand why I’m still second-guessing my decision.

  That’s not hard to explain. I feel guilty about leaving him, guiltier about leaving at all, when so many other people are trapped. When I try to explain my discomfort over the phone, he chuckles and says, “Don’t worry! It’s all right for you to go. You are a global person.” Translation: Other white people deal with their white guilt and they manage just fine.

  Perhaps my lack of appetite has nothing to do with the getting of Buddhist detachment. Anorexia blameworthia: hunger as penance for hailing from the fat midriff of the world. But that seems so unlike me, and unsuitable for a Grecophile. Guilt usually cannot restrain me from a good piece of roast lamb. But since the antimalarial drugs—no, since the jungle—I’m rarely interested in food. Not eating is a novel experience. Life becomes sparer and sharper, somehow … detached. I carry it around in my mouth like a bone.

  We pass from irrigated to non-irrigated fields, whisked from jade and emerald to the semidesert in the space of minutes, zebu cattle in the distant yellow lowlands like a vision out of the African savanna. I’m riding third-class to save money; there’s no air-conditioning. The rocking motion of the train lulls me into a sweaty doze.

  A face peers over the seat in front of me, startling me awake. I raise my eyebrows at the boy. He raises his eyebrows back, unsmiling. Then he sinks into his own seat again. We are mi
rrors of each other.

  And sometimes caricatures of ourselves.

  Escape. The train approaches Denchai, the little town I lived in when I first left Canada. In the outlying fields there are no water buffaloes standing under shade trees. I don’t see a single buffalo-driven cart. The dusty red tracks have trails of smoke rising from them, the fumes of small trucks and two-stroke motorcycle engines. As we come closer to the town, I see the new development wrought by rapid industrialization, fancy cement houses painted white, with red tile roofs and Italianate balconies: Thailand’s response to the West’s large, wasteful suburbia. Middle-class Thais build them but often still live as they have for decades, on the floors above their narrow shops in the hearts of their towns and cities. The houses are for parties, for weddings, for show. When I returned to Denchai earlier this year, several of my Thai fathers took me to see these new trappings of their hard-earned wealth. But we talked and gossiped back at the liquor store, or the electronics shop, where the families, the business, and the outdoor kitchens remained, humming with liveliness.

  Denchai’s train station remains unchanged. Simple elegance and mild squalor fit together companionably—fine wood details darkened by varnish and dirt, plastic bags hooked and fluttering in the rafters. We take on several new passengers who have come from Prae to catch the train—young people on a weekend outing, backpacks slung lightly over their shoulders.

  Through the open window comes the smell of creosote and sun-warmed dust: a reminder of my seventeen-year-old self. I gaze at the platform and its old benches. I used to sit on the left one, scribbling in my journal or studying Thai. I was also waiting to hear the train whistle that would tell me it was past six, which meant that I had to go home for dinner. Now, when we pull away from the station, I stretch out the window and wave back at no one, at the town, at the huge tree by the crossroads, at the white girl sitting cross-legged on the bench, writing in her notebook, staying too late just to have the pleasure of watching the train pass through Denchai.

  You can know a thing for years but not have the language for it. Then an event, or the ferment of years, acts as a catalyst and crystallizes the knowledge of the flesh into words. Until I went to the hospital two weeks ago, I’d never thought of that first year in Thailand as a reclaimed childhood. I thought of it unequivocally as a gift, but I wasn’t old enough to grasp the depth of the gift’s meaning.

  I’m old enough now. Time promises us we’ll age, and time delivers promptly, but illness speeds up the process. When I was alone in my room in Bangkok, sick but not sick enough, alone and afraid of getting sicker, four words looped through my mind, mantra-like: I am not endless. I was not meditating, but the words are a variation on the truth of annica, the Buddhist concept of impermanence. Animals know it. Molecules know it. Atoms know it. Even subatomic particles know it. Unceasing change is a condition of existence. Why does human consciousness make it so hard to grasp this until it smacks us in the face?

  I watch the young people in the seats ahead of me, preening, chattering away, taking photographs of one another. Three girls and two boys. The boys have a lithe, androgynous quality that suggests homosexuality but may not be. All five are specimens of human perfection, including the one with a rash of acne on her cheeks. I have no idea how old they are. Late teens? Early twenties? They respond enthusiastically to one another’s jokes. The girl with the most beautiful long hair swings it around like a loose black fan.

  Simultaneously unaware of itself and morbidly self-conscious, youth crows endlessness and beauty while it busily fears being ugly. I think of the young girl I was, surrounded by other girls and boys, most of us variously plagued by mirrors and magazines and one another. Do these young people, too, wish they were taller or smoother or thinner when they are already lovely, yet dumb to their loveliness and good luck? Life hummed inside me, as sweet as a beehive, and whirred out of me like bees disturbed. Yet I never fell on my knees in gratitude for my functioning limbs, my thumping heart.

  When I got back to my room on Phaholyothin last week, that’s exactly what I did. Am I so old, then? No, I just feel older. After a few months on the border, standing at the edges of a war, I know I am not endless. I, too, will die. As my sister died. As the child in Maw Ker died. Fragile human, think of the border. Burma. Across the other border, Cambodia, and farther east, Vietnam. Millions of dead, battalions of ghosts more abundant than the armies that felled them.

  Every army is in love with death. The men in the camps carried their guns proudly. They relished the roles they had been given, or had been forced to take: killer, destroyer, wielder of the blasting weapons, sower of mines, captain of the rocket launcher. To embrace those roles is a human’s only chance of surviving them. How could I have compared Sparrow to the god Pan? Like every soldier, on any side—like Maung, too—he is a child of murderous Ares.

  Is it wrong that I crave peace? If it is not wrong, then why is it shameful? I feel ashamed of returning to Greece, embarrassed by my wish to plant a garden and watch life reassert itself in a small, fundamental way.

  When I first came to Southeast Asia a decade ago, my experiences here were a healing balm. Now I want to return to an Aegean island to partake of the same good medicine in Greek form. Is this the template I have chosen for my life? In response to brutal realities, I get on a plane and flee toward Eden?

  This formulation is too reductive; I dismiss it as soon as I’ve made it. But it comes back in more complex forms, like a virus mutating in order to cause new damage. Marla’s self-righteous criticisms return to me: “Not every experience is for the artist’s palette. You are not allowed to use everything.” Maybe she wasn’t being self-righteous. She simply recognized my treacherous, inconstant nature.

  Please! Soon you’re going to quote some old inquisitor on the inherent wickedness of women. Get a grip. You’re going back to Greece for a while. Big fucking deal. You’ve been planning to leave for months, and soon you will leave. You need a break.

  But I’m afraid that Greece will make me fat and happy again and I won’t want to come back here.

  You’re afraid of that, are you? Better to be afraid of another parasite. Or getting pregnant. But aren’t they the same thing? Remember the high-school teacher who always used to say that pregnancy was parasitism made good?

  I’ve brought condoms.

  I know this may be hard for you to believe, but they won’t work in your toiletries bag.

  This contrary voice goes on and on, bossily, with crass humor. It’s no longer whispering.

  CHAPTER 49

  DRAGON MEDITATION

  Manng comes to see me in the little apartment I’ve rented near Chiang Mai University. This is the neighborhood where I first met him at the drunken Christmas party. I look down from the window of the apartment and see not only trees but the confounding maze of streets and houses that complicates the hillside. At the top of the hill is an old monastery and, outside its grounds, a mostly unused pagoda. Optimistically, I plan to meditate there every morning.

  When I come down from my rooms, Maung is waiting for me in the atrium of the apartment building. We stand looking at each other; we don’t touch. The sight of him moves and unsettles me. I take deep, slow breaths, willing myself to produce no tears. Why cry? Here he is, in the flesh, wearing his blue shirt, smiling with a mixture of hesitation (not showing his teeth) and expectancy (his eyebrows lifted slightly). This is the face in the photograph that I carry around, but it is the real face, older, more closed. More handsome, too, though he looks tired.

  We don’t embrace in the plant-filled foyer. We approach each other slowly. Hello. How are you. We link hands and walk up the stairs. There is a space between us. Or is it the missing flesh? Between the two of us we’ve lost twenty pounds or more. We need to be in each other’s company for a few hours. The closeness will return, settle back into and between us.

  Upstairs, in an apartment twice the size of my room in Bangkok, with tall windows filling one wall, we leap from conv
ersation into hungry lovemaking. We do everything gluttonously, too quickly, until the food of delight is devoured in record time and we lie spent on the bed, panting, covered in a sheen of sweat. Maung hops up and goes to the bathroom, runs the shower. After a few seconds, he calls out, “There’s hot water!”

  “Only the best for you, my dear,” I respond lightly, though I’m listening to the shower spray on tile as if it’s some kind of warning. I don’t know why. Fucking like animals made the separation between us wider than before. I’m angry at the sex itself. It didn’t work. It cinched us together but didn’t release us into each other. Vexed, confused, I yank the anonymous sheet over my naked body and tuck it under my arms. Back against the wall, I stare out at the splendid, rounded treetops that float beyond the fourth floor.

  Maung emerges from the bathroom with a threadbare white towel wrapped around his waist. I can tell by the careful way he walks toward the bed that he has something unpleasant to tell me.

  But I’m wrong. He has two unpleasant things to tell me.

  The first is, “I have to leave soon. I have a meeting to go to.” He watches the disappointment freeze my face. I look out the window. Why don’t I know the names of those trees? “Please don’t be upset, Karen. I can’t help it. I’ll have dinner with you tomorrow. And the next day.”

  My voice is toneless, unfamiliar to both of us. “I don’t know what I was thinking, to expect to have dinner with the man who’s just fucked me. Honestly. What was I thinking? How long has it been since I’ve seen you alone?” He’s confused for a moment, unsure whether or not he’s supposed to answer my rhetorical questions. I clarify by adding, “It’s all right, Maung. I understand. Go. Just get dressed and go.” This makes it sound as if I’m ordering him to do something that he will do regardless.