Burmese Lessons (27 page)

“I have to go away. To America.”

“What? Forever?”

He lights another cigarette. “No, just a trip, not very long. To meet with Burmese people. And lobbyists.” Takes a drag. “Diplomacy trip.”

“So, how long is not very long?”

“About two months.”

“When are you leaving?”

“In a week.”

I shake my head. Such crappy news, and I’m still hungover. “I think we should go out for a drink. And some
gwiteo.”
Nothing like noodles for comfort. “There’s only one beer in the fridge, and I’ve been in this apartment
all day long writing about an imprisoned man and thinking about my cheating boyfriend. Let’s go.”

Furious, I throw on some dirty clothes. Why bother looking beautiful? He’s leaving in a week! For two months. I’m not going to ask why he didn’t tell me sooner. I don’t want to hear the diplomatic response.

Last week Maung left
for the United States. I didn’t cry—we try not to do that around here—but I left Bangkok as soon as I could. I’ve been in Mae Sot for three days, staying at a scruffy little guesthouse. The walls between the rooms are made of thatch (the holes are stuffed with toilet paper), the mosquito nets have gaping tears, the mattresses stink of mildew. I love it. The town’s a bloody mess—roads ripped up through the center, too many mangy dogs, and two-stroke engines belching fumes. The dusty streets exude the faint yet distinctive odor of criminality, along with an overripe whiff of seediness. Crime does nothing for me, but seediness is attractive. I have a nose for it.

Consequently, I spend a lot of time watching the men in the gem-trading street. My cover is photography. The camera is a way to move among and stare at them. Dozens of men hunker down at low tables, poking at the glassy, glittery stones with silver pincers. The buyers are mostly Chinese-Thai and Thai; the sellers are Indo-Burmese and Burmese. Buyers squint through magnifying loops and dubiously thrust out their lower lips. Sellers flash their gold watches toward the sun with insistent gestures.
This is where much of the region’s gem trade becomes Thai; just a few days ago, all this jade, all these cut and uncut rubies, sapphires, emeralds were Burmese.

Other men hover at the edges of the business. They usually wear well-pressed, clean clothes, but that doesn’t fool me. They have a different look about them. More cautious, a tension in the limbs, an animal wariness in the movements of the head. They appear to be standing around, smoking or reading a newspaper, but they’re also doing what I do, which is why we’re aware of each other. We watch. Are they the smugglers themselves, or hired thugs who work for the smugglers? Burmese government agents? Informers? I promise myself that I will not ask; I will not allow myself to speak to them.

They attract me sexually. Danger can arouse, heighten sexuality. But I’ve never been into criminals or physically dangerous men, so I can’t understand why these ones intrigue me. Their physical tension could spring into violence; I sense that that’s part of their job description. Yet I would like to bring one of them back to my mildewy mattress, get him to fuck me for an hour, then fetch another one after dinner for the evening session.

That is seediness at work on me.

I try to take a photograph of the man with tattoos on his forearms, but he raises his hand in front of his face, palm out. I lower the camera. He drops his hand, too, then holds my gaze as his mouth curves into a good-natured, mocking smile. I saw him yesterday, and the afternoon I arrived. Already we know each other well. His eyes flicker over my face and down, exploring my neck, chest, breasts, until I turn and walk off, toward the other market, fruits and vegetables, deep-fried grasshoppers, pigs’ heads on the massive cutting tables. Safer subjects.

I
n one of his letters, Graham Greene wrote that seediness has a deep appeal because it feeds our nostalgia for something that has been lost. But what? Wildness? The grimy underbelly of civilization, a place where we
can still act like beasts and tell morality to fuck off? I’m not so sure. I think certain people are drawn to seediness because it flourishes on the site of a wound. Wounds are like magnets, variously repelled by and pulled to each other. The wound outside draws us because of the wound inside. That is the unsavory attraction.

So. What is my magnetized wound? And why does a wound seek a dangerous, emotionally disconnected pleasure? A pleasure that is also a betrayal (of my lover, of my healthier instincts).

I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. How many ways can you not know something? I think back through my life to times of violation—the attempted rape in Spain, the teacher who used to make comments about my body whenever we were alone together, the man in Paris who stalked me through the streets until I lost him by hiding in a stairwell. A few other minor incidents. Yet each of those experiences undid me—sent me into paroxysms of anger, uncontrollable crying, loneliness. Shame. They also sent me back to another time, an early part of my life that I can’t remember. I was too small to remember. Remember what? I don’t know.

After turning away from the tattooed stranger, I bought some mangoes and returned to the guesthouse, where I sat eating at the big teak table and reflecting on the weight of morality, of being a moral creature. I wasn’t thinking about my promise of monogamy to Maung. I was thinking about Mae Sot. For me, it is wrong to have lustful, mute, slavish sex on the site of a wound.

But it seems to work well for a lot of men.

Every year thousands of Burmese girls and women enter Thailand through the Thai-Burma border towns of Mae Sot, Mae Sai, and Ranong. Agents recruit them from poor villages, sometimes with the promise of well-paying domestic or factory work. When they arrive in Thailand, they’re in debt to the men and women who have brought them overland, fed them, smuggled them into the country, arranged their job. But that job is often not what they expected.

The bedroom is the workplace: a curtained cubicle just large enough
for a narrow bed where the women are supposed to have sex with a dozen or more strangers every day. There can be as many as thirty to forty clients per day on weekends and during festivals. Sometimes the men refuse to use condoms, making HIV infection an occupational hazard. Even when Burmese women come to Thailand expecting to enter the sex trade, they are often shocked, after they arrive, by how much they have to work and how few choices they have. Brothel owners keep passports. In Thailand illegally, the girls and women are afraid of the Thai police, who sometimes work with the brothel owners to receive a cut of the profits.

If a defiant girl refuses to have sex with clients, she is beaten and raped until she is compliant. This is called “seasoning.” A similar term exists in dozens of languages, in dozens of countries where women are trafficked into the sex trade by a global crime network. Human trafficking, predominantly of women and children, is organized crime’s third largest economy, superseded only by drugs and weapons. Yet governments all over the world still don’t take it seriously; traffickers, brothel owners, pimps, and the local officials who help them are rarely prosecuted according to the severity of their crimes.

I know these facts from talking to NGO workers and from reading human-rights reports from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, UNICEF, the International Labor Organization, and so on. How many ways can we know something and still not be able to face it?

I decide I would like to meet some of the women. I begin to make inquiries, phone calls, ask people at Dr. Cynthia’s clinic. But something stops me. On the surface, visiting a brothel feels voyeuristic. I wouldn’t be able to spend enough time with the women. Second or third visits would be difficult to manage. As the human-rights reports show, many people have already documented the horrifying circumstances of their lives. Do women who work in the sex trade want to talk about the cage they live inside? The brutal enormity of the problem frightens me, and its locus in the individual woman’s body makes me feel physically ill. I shy away from the subject because the damage is too immediate, too near, dangerous in a way
that arouses nothing in me but fury—a fury that is all the more enraging because it’s impotent.

Yet no one can spend time in Mae Sot without seeing the evidence. The little twinkling lights on the house, so pretty at night: that’s a brothel. The tea shop beyond the market, where such young girls serve: also a brothel. The decrepit building on the road out of town. The karaoke place near my guesthouse. Even a small café and ice-cream shop run by a local family—the back courtyard is lined with little booths, quiet during the day, busy at night.

Last night I went to a bar often frequented by NGO workers and dissidents. It sounds like a joke: a Canadian writer walks into a bar and sits down to drink with a Médecins Sans Frontières doctor, a Burmese dissident, and an American teacher. But there’s no punch line. I’d met the doctor earlier in the day, at my guesthouse, and I’d met Win Myint Aye at the Chiang Mai Christmas party, but he seemed a different man now, with dark circles under his eyes and a haggardness in his face that wasn’t there before. Yet he greeted me warmly and asked how my work was going, then told us how glad he was to meet the doctor, because he had studied medicine before leaving Burma and was still interested in medical work. The two of them immediately started talking, so I turned to the strawberry-blond American woman. She’d been teaching English and basic math among Karen and Karenni refugees for almost five years. Though she was a shy, self-effacing person, the way she spoke about her work—with knowledge, intelligent humor, and enthusiasm—was an unconsciously displayed CV of her talents.

Often these spontaneous drinking parties among border-dwellers involve subtle jockeying for status among the foreigners, something the teacher and I discussed. As an independent writer, I’m one of the lowlier white entities, though not as lowly, apparently, as a refugee-camp teacher. She pulled her chair closer to me and whispered, “All those experts who fly in for a week or two and make their pronouncements on the Karen, or tell the medics what they should be doing, they can be really irritating.”

Not five minutes after these words slipped into the smoky air, there was a lull in our conversation, and to our joint amazement we heard the Médecins Sans Frontières doctor say, “But the Thai-Burma border refugee camps are an easy gig. I mean, comparatively. The refugees here live in luxury compared to the ones in Africa, who really suffer.” We stared at him, speechless, shocked that a doctor could turn suffering into a competitive sport. Win Myint Aye angled his chair away from the table, a look of pained disappointment on his face.

We didn’t hear any more of the doctor’s pronouncements, because a small drama unfolding behind us interrupted him. A young Burmese woman stood up, talking loudly. She gestured at the end of each sentence with a wild swing of her arms or a raised fist, and she addressed her tirade to the Thai and Burmese men at her table. Another young sex worker sat there, too, but she sucked her pink drink from a straw and ignored her friend, who was so unsteady on her high heels that she had to press her thighs against the tabletop to brace herself. The slippery fabric of her turquoise-blue dress rendered this balancing technique ineffective; twice it looked as if she was going to topple over. She began to shout, her beautiful made-up face contorted with anger.

I had no idea what she was saying. The linen-suited Thai man beside her reached out, laughing, and grabbed one of her arms. On the fingers of the hand he used to hold her, he wore two rings, jade and ruby, both set in gold so yellow it looked orange. He pulled her down toward her seat, but she yanked her wrist from his grasp and stumbled away from the table, losing her balance finally and keeling over. She caught herself with her outstretched hands flat on the dirty floor, her bum in the air. The entire table erupted in laughter, and the Thai man looked at one of his companions and asked, “What the fuck is she saying?”

At that moment, Win Myint Aye stood up so suddenly that his heavy wooden chair fell backward with a loud clatter. Several people looked over at our table, wondering what would happen next. But he had already turned away from the scene and strode across the bar; he pushed through
the swinging doors and disappeared into the street. I looked back at the girl and saw that her white high-heeled shoes were at least a size too big for her; no wonder she was unsteady on her feet. As if to follow Win Myint Aye, she walked, swerving and swearing, out of the bar, her voice grown ragged; she was close to tears. One of the Burmese men, still grinning, got up and went after her.

The teacher, the doctor, and I were silenced by the sounds emanating from the table behind us: the men were imitating the girl’s gestures and making fun of her. The other young sex worker sat without smiling, her drink empty before her, her face empty, her hands upturned and empty on the littered tabletop. For the first time I noticed how crooked her lipstick was, falling away from the line of both the bottom and the top lip. She’d put it on the way a little girl does.