Burmese Lessons (17 page)

Without expecting much of an answer, I ask Jenny, “How did you decide to make a life here?”

Her reply is striking. “I decided I didn’t want to be an observer anymore. I wanted to be a participant, whatever that meant. The Burmese struggle is … remarkable. It made me think about human solidarity. Does that sound out of date? I suppose it is. But I guess I came to the point where I didn’t want to just watch the struggle. I wanted to struggle with them. And so, in a way, I do.”

I do. Two small, fateful words.

Maung returns from the garden. I shift places to try to put some distance between us, but within five minutes he insinuates himself into the chair next to mine, looks me straight in the eye, and smiles, as if to say, “It’s not that easy to get rid of me.” As a newcomer to this society of foreigners who do Burma-centered work, and as someone who doesn’t know any of the Burmese people here, I try to be quiet in conversation, and respectful. Not too talkative. “Inconspicuous” is not an adjective I can claim as my own, but it is a state I aspire to on occasions such as this.

Maung makes being inconspicuous impossible. He flatters me, he stares at me, he sticks to me. He asks three times if I want another cup of tea, and when I finally say yes he leaps up to get it. His charm is a catalyst; I can’t help reacting. Whatever comes out of my mouth charms him right back. I’m not even trying! I’m trying not to, in fact, but we flirt with each other in small but obvious ways. Angie, our hostess, glares at me from time to time. I want to tell her it’s not my fault—I can’t help the torrential flood of pheromones and the girlish smile.

Maung’s friend—Jenny’s husband—teases me about the tragedy of the broken A string. “You need to hear Maung sing. The sooner, the better,” he says knowingly. My face burns as hot as a stove.

A few minutes later, Maung stands up to help himself to more tea, but before he goes inside he lays his cotton jacket over the back of my chair. It takes monumental strength not to lean my body against this material that has touched his skin. Hilarious. Infuriating. He’s done it on purpose, too; he’s tempting me. But I will be strong.

After some more conversation, I stand up and say goodbye to everyone, thanking Angie for the party last night and for the tea this morning. She grunts an unintelligible reply and throws a look like a machete between my eyes.

Maung once again walks me to the gate of her house. Before I turn out into the street, he asks me, “Are you busy tonight?”

“Why, is there going to be another party?”

“No. We’re just having a dinner.” He tells me the name and location of the restaurant while I back away from him.

Dinner will involve at least a dozen people, so I’ll be safe. I don’t want to be safe, of course. I want to be my impetuous, passionate Greek self and act on my lustful impulses. But this is hardly the place for that kind of thing. I’m in Thailand, with Burmese political exiles, people whose lives are defined by dictatorship and revolution. The past twenty-four hours have been a respite for all those I met last night—and for me, too. I know nothing about these people, but I felt in the music, and in that magical dance and the mostly happy drunkenness, that I had entered a rare oasis of pleasure. It continued into the morning, the teacups and the chime of spoons, people talking on the terrace in the dappled shadow of a tamarind tree, a man flirting amusingly with a woman: all lovely, lovelier because unexpected, fleeting. Not unreal, but not reflective of the daily life of struggling Burmese dissidents, to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of refugees in camps up and down the border.

I have so often chosen pleasure, taken it as the right of my body and
my mind. I love Greece because the world I experience on the island feeds the passionate animal I have been. The easy dry heat, the reasonable winters, the Mediterranean, the physical body cherished through swimming in that brilliant salty blue, enlivened through eating, dancing, gardening. The Greek landscape calls forth a sensual response partly because it’s covered in human fingerprints: the earth is both body and living memory.

But I am here now. How do I know what my real self is, when I owe so much of what I am to the places that have made me? Thailand was my first foreign home, the country my chameleon heart cleaved to a decade ago; I will always be comfortable here. But I’ve further complicated myself with Burma.

I know that I lived too much there, leaped into events that I didn’t fully understand. I feel frayed at the edges. When I close my eyes, I see image after image from those last days in Rangoon—the monks who led me up the stairs, the man being beaten, the child’s arm hanging out of the bed I was supposed to hide under if the soldiers came.

Could I have contained the trip? Could I have turned away from unexpected events and departed unscathed? I didn’t think I had a choice, but I did have a choice.

Why must I love?

I’ve been served an unreasonably large portion of love for an insane world, yet the world does not serve the same portion back to me. Why would it? I don’t mean romantic love, not even human love. I love the feral dogs as I love the thick dust and the filthy mess of broken streets in Mandalay, as I love walking into the market at the bottom of this hill and seeing the human faces over the pyramids of fruit and, farther back, the stalls bloody with chunks of meat and the guts of animals laid out like augury that always comes to pass: cooking, dinners, people eating together, taking in the life of the animal to feed their own lives.

I love, I love, I love. The language of the world calls me, wills me to know it. To become it, in a way. That is why I’m obsessed with new words. To speak another language is to think anew, to be born again—eyes,
mouth, sky, blue, hand, heart, open, open. I still carry around my Burmese notebook, full of phonetic spellings, scribbled notes, the many words that San Aung wanted me to learn. Where is he? Lying low with friends in Mandalay? Or having tea on Mahabandoola Street?

Burmese will be my sixth language if I ever learn to speak it properly. Isn’t that just another form of gluttony—wanting to take it all in, have it, know it? In one of his notebooks, van Gogh scribbled the words I live by: “The best way to know life is to love many things.”

But should I live this way? To love widely is not to love deeply. I love, yes, but I am also lonely. I remember talking to an NLD member in Burma. Early in the interview, he inquired if I was married. I said no. He responded, “Always alone! You modern women. Alone, alone, alone against Rome.” We laughed. Then he became thoughtful and said, “Daw Suu Kyi is also alone. Alone against the SLORC!” We did not laugh.

Sometimes my loneliness is like a well I cannot get out of, though I see the human light up there, the people coming and going. It’s partly why I am interested in these amazing women who have married Burmese men and settled here. How I admire them!

There are precedents—that’s the point.

Though I still think it unwise to become involved with a man who belongs to a guerrilla army, even a small one.

Should I blame
my naïveté on youth? But I will be twenty-eight years old in two months. That’s not so young. By my age, my mother had three children and a house to run. I need to smarten up.

I arrive at the lovely garden restaurant expecting a group of Burmese men and women dissidents, foreigners who do Burma work, maybe a smattering of journalists. But there are no large tables. I check out the diners seated among potted palms and hanging orchids—several couples, a group of four, Thai businessmen drinking a bottle of Johnnie Walker. I wonder if I’m at the right place, or if the dinner was called off; I didn’t give Maung my number, so he wouldn’t have been able to contact me at the hotel.

Then I realize that the one solo diner in the restaurant—in the far, candlelit corner—is him. Maung. My date. This is a date, not a motley gathering into which I can slip, one more motley among many. Self-consciously, I walk through the restaurant and sit down across from him. “I thought some other people would be here, too.” I don’t know whether to be amused or irritated.

That smile again. The earliest form of foreplay. How does he do that? “You look beautiful,” he says.

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.