Burmese Lessons (28 page)

The American woman and I watched the doctor, as though waiting for him to declare that women in Africa suffer more. But all he said was “Let’s get out of here, shall we? I’ll ask for the bill.”

Rock Hudson’s
Asian doppelgänger appears in the courtyard this morning and sits down at the table where I’m having coffee. The massive teak slab could seat twenty people, so the man’s presence is not an infringement of personal space. I think he has come for the TV, which he watches while chatting with the Karen housekeepers as they go about their morning tasks.

He speaks Karen—so I can’t even try to eavesdrop—but from the camouflage jacket and the furtive manner I suspect he is Burmese-Karen, not Thai-Karen. In another moment I know it, because he catches my eye and introduces himself. “My name is Tennyson. Like the poet. A lot of Burmese-Karen are named after English people.” With a casual wave, he asks who I am. I answer with my name and nationality.

“Ka-rén?” He looks thoughtful. “It must be fate.” No, I think, just a misplaced accent. He relaxes back into the chair, his handsome toughness falling about him like a loose uniform. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

“I want to visit Huay Kaloke.” That’s the name of the big refugee camp near Mae Sot.

“The Burmese attacked it ten days ago.”

“I know.” The photographs have been in the Thai papers almost every day. “That’s why I’m here. To visit the camp.”

“They burned everything,” Tennyson continues in a subdued voice. “The little market was burning, the school, our church, the clinic, all the houses. They burn the camps down to make the refugees go back to Burma. It’s crazy.”

“It does seem like an insane way to treat people.”

“Is someone going to take you into the camp? An NGO or someone? The Thai guards don’t always let visitors through the gates.”

“I don’t know yet. Even if I can’t get in, I’ll spend more time at Dr. Cynthia’s clinic. I’ve been there a couple of times.”

“Did you meet her?”

“Just for a few minutes. She’s very busy. One of the medics showed me around the clinic. It’s an incredible place.”

In 1989, when the soft-spoken thirty-year-old Dr. Cynthia Maung set up a clinic in a barn outside Mae Sot, she worked straight through her own attacks of malaria and dysentery, treating sick and injured Burmese people seven days a week. She used a rice cooker to sterilize her few medical instruments. Now the Mae Tao Clinic has grown into several clean, sturdy buildings that serve a population of more than 100,000 Burmese people, from both inside and outside Burma. Dr. Cynthia and her medics help the sick, train new medics and midwives, counsel women in reproductive and dietary health, and refer the most seriously ill to the Thai hospital in Mae Sot—a reciprocal relationship that the doctor and her colleagues worked hard to build. They also equip backpacking medical teams that enter Burma illegally to serve poor and isolated communities. Though she’s Baptist and married with two kids, no wonder the woman is often called “the Mother Teresa of the border.”

Tennyson asks, “Why do you want to know about all this, Dr. Cynthia’s clinic, and the camps? What are you doing?”

“I’m writing a book about Burma.”

He sits up straighter. “Really?”

“Yes.”

“And you will write about the struggle of the Karen people?”

“Yes.”

He places his palms flat on the teak table and stares at me. “I work for the Karen army. The KNLA. You know?”

“Yes, I know. The Karen National Liberation Army.”

“Right! I will take you wherever you need to go. Show you things.”

This stranger turning up to offer his services seems too easy. He reads the distrust on my face and shakes his head. “Don’t worry. I know who you know. I am a friend. Everyone at Dr. Cynthia’s clinic knows me. I know Moe Thee Zun, from ABSDF. And I know Maung.” He goes on, naming people I’ve met or have heard of, declaring his credentials. I wonder if Maung has sent him to help me. Or to check up on me.

“Do you want a cup of coffee?” I offer.

“No,” Tennyson replies in a gruff voice. “I want to help you.”

I
n the 1930s and ’40s, the minority Karen people fought beside their British colonial “masters” against the Burmese independence fighters. Throughout their long reign in various territories, the British colonizers became experts at manipulating cultural and societal inequities in order to consolidate their own power. By bringing education and medical facilities to isolated, long-neglected Karen outposts, they created a loyal ally.

Many Karen people saw the British as their saviors, because they promised to help the minority ethnic group negotiate for and construct a state of its own—an almost Shangri-la-like land called Kawthoolei. With the crumbling of the British Empire, that grand promise never came to
fruition. In 1947, General Aung San negotiated the country’s independence from Britain. Later the same year, he and most of his cabinet members were assassinated, plunging the country’s future into uncertainty. The shaky new democracy didn’t have time to resolve the tensions between the central government and the ethnic groups. Another military man, General Ne Win, staged a coup d’état in 1962 and became Burma’s ipso facto dictator for the next twenty-six years. In 1989, he handed power over to the SLORC.

The Karen have never stopped fighting for their autonomy. They are in a similar position to many other ethnic groups of Burma—the Karenni, the Shan, the Wa, the Mon, the Kachin, the Rakhine, the Naga—except that the Karen are the only ones who are still openly fighting against the generals. The others have signed cease-fire agreements with the junta in exchange for a fragile peace and an unobstructed, mutually lucrative opium trade. Thus the Karen resistance—which enforces the death penalty for opium trafficking—finds itself alone, slowly being crushed by a superior military power.

Hundreds of thousands of Karen people are internally displaced within Burma, cut off or shut out from their ancestral lands in the southern delta region, in central Burma and farther north. Sometimes they are forced to live in SLORC-run compounds while they work on government projects, or they hide from the soldiers in the jungle, trying to avoid capture and forced relocation and the labor that comes with it. Every year brings a new tide of refugees into Thailand.

The stories they bring with them are terrifying. I learn one thing, essentially, from the human-rights reports I’ve been reading. Something is broken in the human race. Is this brokenness another name for Thanatos, the death impulse that battles with and often overrules Eros, the life force? But the Freudian opposition seems too reductive, and does nothing to help me understand the nature of evil.

The most sadistic and psychopathic members of the SLORC’s army are not sent to work in the country’s jails and interrogation centers, at
which the Western world occasionally wags an admonishing finger. The amputation of penises, of breasts, the immolation of live children, the rape of little girls and grandmothers and women in labor—the sickest, most annihilating torture is perpetrated in places that do not exist on Western maps, against people who often know little of the political labyrinth they are trapped inside. They are never mentioned on the evening news. Nothing about them is noteworthy. The child’s favorite color was yellow; she often had a cough. The man turned the furrows in his fields just so. This woman wore her grandmother’s thin gold ring on days of celebration.

Yet those distant people are so much like us. The small. Unknown except in their narrow worlds; there, and only there, beloved. Unlike us, they live their lives in a time and place that is out of joint.

Suffering is a mystery, the hard side of the bargain for knowing the pleasures of being alive. People often experience too much of one or the other. Crimes will always outnumber punishments; justice sought is rarely received. I must not take it too personally.

But if I do not take it personally, how must I take it? What will the meaning be, therefore, of the human-rights reports, and Tennyson’s long, sad soliloquy about his people’s suffering, not rehearsed, per se, but repeated, by heart, through the heart?

I walk through the hot air. I see the green lizard on the tree in the courtyard and feel my little happiness. I do not witness my husband having his penis cut off and stuffed into his mouth. I am not the woman whose baby is killed, cut up, boiled; I am not the woman who is forced, then, to eat her baby’s flesh. Later, she is shot by a young soldier. I am not the soldier, either. Yet such atrocities have happened. They will happen again, and not so far away from this place and this morning.

I no longer wonder about God. But I wonder about humans. Do I believe in humans? Like other teenagers, I wrote down my obligatory quotations from Camus. I think it was in
The Plague
that he wrote, “There are more things to admire in men than to despise.” But are there?

There is no understanding. There is only damage and its wages, its
demands, before and after. We wonder how the Holocaust could have happened, how people could have done that to one another, how the civilized world could have colluded in the extermination of innocents, if not by action then by the crime of inaction, indifference. We wonder about that historical barbarity while it continues to happen in other ways, in other places. Not the magnitude but the intent, the system, and the act. Who could throw a screaming child into the bonfire of her destroyed house?

I make a vow. The first half of it is the lazy vow of many rich people: I will accept the bounty, the silk and the fruit, the beautiful mouth of the beloved, the songs, the books, the sea and its islands. I will relish the gift of my life, not squander it. I will live with gratitude.

The second part of the vow is more difficult: I will live also in conscious mourning. The gift should belong to everyone—the woman, the man, the burned child. But it does not belong to them, they are dead.

I will live in consciousness, in mourning.

But what will I give? How will I act? There has to be something more than the vow itself. There has to be a way to measure its fulfillment.

T
he next day, I walk with Tennyson through the ruins of Huay Kaloke refugee camp. Children trail us, chatting with him and eyeing me, hiding behind each other’s shoulders. Once again, my name makes an impression. This time I am glad: give them anything to be amused by, these little ones tossed into the blackened fields like so much grain. How can they grow here?

What is left of the camp is black. The ground is black, or gray with ash, or white with ash like dirty snow. Charred trees stand here and there, offering no shade. A few black house frames still stand, undulating in the forty-degree noonday heat. As it appears, so it smells—of burned-down fire, ash, smoke. Filthy children come to a well and haul water away in cleaned-out gasoline and oil containers.

I am thirsty. Tennyson, I want to say, take me away from here, I am so thirsty. Instead, I photograph the children. Some of them do not smile. Some of them stare into the camera with undisguised anger, their faces raw. When I click the shutter, I feel ashamed.

Seven thousand people had houses here. Small thatched houses, but houses nevertheless. There was a market, a clinic, a church. Gone. Everyone is now living under tarpaulin. The cinder-block school and library is still standing, but the windows are framed in black. I stick my head through an aperture that looks and smells like a large fireplace. Desks, benches, books, scribblers, pencils—burned.

Tennyson tells me, “The school and the library. Where our language and our future go together. They always burn them. And not only at Huay Kaloke. The next day, soldiers attacked Beh Klaw camp. It’s sixty kilometers to the north, with over twenty-five thousand people. The soldiers killed some people there, shot them. It always surprises me that they don’t kill more people, because they take
myin-say
. You know that?”

“Ya mah?”
That’s what it’s called in Thai. Horse medicine. An opiate-amphetamine, ingested in tablet form or crushed up and smoked.

“It makes the soldiers crazy. And more stupid than usual. How else could they steal from these people? They loot the market first because the people who have shops have some money, sometimes jewelery. So the soldiers go there with their faces painted black, and they take what they want. Then they go to the clinic and get the microscope. It’s their habit—they must have a lot of microscopes. Sometimes they take the microscope away, sometimes they shoot it or smash it. Then they start burning. They come at ten or eleven at night, cowards. To burn the houses of sleeping children.

“The other day, a granny was crying. We thought, she is depressed, her house is gone. But it wasn’t the burned house—she is used to that. Many times her house is burned. She was crying because no one saved the photo album. She forgot it because she had to get her grandchildren out of the house—the mother and father were away somewhere. The soldiers
had already set the market on fire, and everyone’s house is made of bamboo and thatch. So it all burns”—Tennyson claps his hands loudly—“just like that. It’s gone. It takes an hour or so, and everyone loses everything—clothes and plates and books. And the photo album.” He spread his arms and described a full circle, taking in the temporary shelters. “This is the way my people live. Always a war on them, even when they are not soldiers.”