Burmese Lessons (4 page)

Dawn pulled itself out of the earth and across the burning sky, drawing the mythical human past of Pagan with it. I recalled the stories from the tattered little book San Aung gave me before I left Rangoon, tales about the lavish courts of King Anawrahta—grand battles on the plains, fates decided by dreams and numbers, alchemic preparations, the lives of the princes and princesses in their riverside palaces. I could almost hear voices.

I
did
hear voices. High-pitched, lilting. Far below, just beyond the horse and cart, two children appeared, and a smattering of black-on-white goats. Their wooden slippers clackety-clacked as they stepped up the stone pediment at the base of the temple. Then the clatter intensified. I tried to lean over the rampart to see what they were doing—tap-dancing?—but Min Ley waved me away from the low edge. He pointed toward the narrow stairwell that would lead us back to the ground.

By the time we got down the many steep stairs that turn inside the temple like the swirl of a shell, the children were half an acre away, the goats salt-and-peppered around them. The plain beyond was no longer reddish, or rose, but turning back to sage yellow. We climbed into the horse cart to move on to another site. It was already getting hot.

D
uring the Mon rule of lower Burma, Pagan was called Tattadesa, “the parched land.” First kings and queens then pious noblemen and women built lavish temples here in their dedication to Theravada Buddhism, hoping to make merit for their next lives. The golden age lasted from 1044 to 1287,
when King Narathihapate fled from the Mongol invaders who destroyed the splendor that was the kingdom. Successive generations of raiders and thieves came, and sun and wind. But the strength of stone and brick is surprising. And the people who have lived here for centuries—they call themselves the slaves of the temples—have protected the holy sites.

The crumbling hands of the statues are like the faces, eerily alive. See them in a certain light and you freeze, waiting for the fingers to curl or straighten.
The beginning and the ending / The final moment / My hands
. The hot dust and the sawing cicadas remind me, at every turn, of Greece. My mind grapples for foreign words that will fit the landscape, and, because I don’t have Burmese, I hear the Greek poet Seferis over and over. I have spent hours reading his poems, in Greek and English, on the shores of an island not far from his birthplace:
These stones I have carried as long as I was able / These stones I have loved as long as I was able
.

At various sites, I find dozens of young women helping with the restoration work, each with fifteen bricks balanced on her head. With little regard for the demands of archeology and architecture, the generals are fixing things—laying slabs of concrete over temple pediments, crudely whitewashing Buddhas, rebuilding walls without much thought for appropriate materials or methods. Their earlier fixing of the ancient city involved forcing entire villages to move away from the holy sites.

The soldiers arrived in 1990. They destroyed the temple keepers’ thatched and wooden houses, razed their little shops, and carted everything away like so much garbage. The villagers were forced to resettle in a few dusty treeless settlements on the plain, too far away from the river to easily carry water home. When people refused to leave their homes, the soldiers beat them; other troublemakers were chased down with helicopters and arrested.

All that was done for me, and other tourists like me. The military government wanted these ancient sites to be authentically empty and tidy for our appraising eyes. Near one of the “new” villages, I come upon a few
children hauling water from a dubious-looking water hole. They struggle up the incline from the hole with buckets hanging off the ends of thin poles.

“Hello,” I say to them. “How are you?” Several of them put down their buckets to take a break, and rattle off a half-dozen questions. I don’t understand.

“Have you eaten rice yet?” a girl asks, and giggles. A boy bows theatrically and says, “Big sister, how are you?” I bow in return and say, “Very fine.” A paroxysm of laughter shakes the ragtag lot of them. It’s the only time one of the girls tips water from her buckets.

The spillage makes her stop laughing. Her thin face becomes thinner as she carefully lowers her load to the ground. I lean over, raise my eyebrows at her—May I?—and pick up one of the buckets. Then gasp, grimace, and rub my shoulder. The other kids laugh harder. I’m hamming it up for their benefit, but it’s true. How can these small children carry two large buckets filled to the brim without spilling? Uphill? The girls and boys are so young—eight, ten, twelve. The thin-faced girl squints at me suspiciously, without a smile. Does she think I’m making fun of her? I carefully set the bucket down.

She steps forward, hooks it back onto its carrying pole, ducks under the smooth length of wood, and lifts. The tendons in her neck cinch tight. The other kids also pick up their loads; she is their leader. She bites her lower lip and walks away, quickly, lightly, catching the rhythm of the swaying buckets. The other children follow. In a moment, I am alone again, beside the brown water hole, and absurdly lonely.

We come and go, the tourists and the intrepid travelers (who differ mostly in luggage), the well-wishers and the do-gooders. I have come and I will go, taking away stories and photographs of these places. The people who live here remain. They drive their cattle and fill their water buckets; they sell rice and fall in love. They write, they push through the labyrinth of silence, they wait. Which reminds me of Aung San Suu Kyi, whom I interviewed last week. She was gracious, but also as taut as a bowstring, as
pointed as an arrow. “We are not waiting,” she said wearily, in answer to one of my awkward questions. “We are working.”

I know they work hard, the hounded politicals, the people who believe in the inevitability of change. I have never met such dedicated, generous men and women. But the children work hard, too. While the labor of the politicals is often hidden, clandestine by necessity, the labor of eight-and ten-year-olds is ubiquitous. True, I have traveled narrowly here, only to the larger centers, on a steady journey toward individuals whose names have been entrusted to me by journalists and activists in Thailand and Britain: people who are willing to talk about dissident politics and their experiences in Burmese prisons. Sometimes these people are hard to find; sometimes they cannot meet me.

But the children meet me everywhere and share big secrets with the foreign woman: the vocabulary of their daily lives. It is the child laborers who are my most dedicated Burmese teachers.

Every day, no matter where I’ve been—here, Pegu, Mandalay, various townships in Rangoon—I sit in a tea shop at a low wooden table and watch children weighed down with trays of dirty teacups and bowls, children who teach me words and laugh at my mistakes. They serve, wash dishes, load and unload crates, mix the great, steaming vats of tea. For the most part it is good work, with a place to sleep at night and fairly clean air to breathe and enough food.

It is one thing to search out members of the National League for Democracy, to listen to the writers and artists talk about their lives, their prison sentences, their forms of escape, their failure to escape. But the children move through the streets, across the fields and lanes, visible and oddly invisible in their enslavement. Who wants to interview them? Their degradation is taken for granted; it is part of the new Burma called Myanmar, a country filling up with railways, roads, highways, hotels, pipelines. Eleven-year-olds have helped build them all. Many child laborers are on their own, sent to work in the cities and towns. Either they are orphans or their parents are too poor to keep them at home.

Without words, the children speak of the generals, communicating in a language filled with silences and omissions, as though their vocabulary were written with an eraser. What they do not have dictates who they are and who they can become. The lucky ones have attended school for three or four years; the unlucky ones have not, and never will. Though I use the words “lucky” and “unlucky,” none of this happened by accident.

This morning at a roadside shop, I watch the smallest boy in the tea-making retinue. He perches on a low stool, scrubbing away at his pile of dishes. As he grows, he will understand more than he does now about why he has so few options, why he cannot read, why he is trapped this way and who has trapped him. He is one of the blessed ones, too—he’s not hauling cement or working on a highway or a railway crew. Every morning, before I finish my tea, he teaches me a few words in his language.

Cup. Table. Sweet. Lizard. Child
.

His name is Hla Win. He is nine years old. One morning, as I’m leaving, he calls out to me with the spontaneity of a songbird,
“Chit-deh!”

Another Burmese lesson.

“I love you.”

Whence comes my
lust for vocabulary? I’ve had it since grade-three spelling tests, which the teacher called vocabulary drills. I loved them; I had to hide my enthusiasm from my fellow students. Once I started learning other languages, in my late teens, I became insufferable, a collector of dictionaries, a pest to anyone who would tell me the names of things. Part of the understanding Min Ley and I have involves vocabulary. When I point to something from the cart, he gives me the name in Burmese. Temple, water, horse, bell, tree, goat. I do not remember any of these words for long.

I ask, he says, I repeat, and repeat, and ask again, until I get the sound right. Then we cover more terrain, and the dust gathering on the backs of my hands and the clank-jangle of the harness and the slap of leather on the mare’s bony withers combine to shake the word from my mind. I point at the same things over and over. He says the words. It took me a full day to realize that, as often as not, he gives a different word for what I believe is the same object.

Perhaps he is not saying
tree
repeatedly; he is telling me the different
names of the trees. Not
temple
but its name. The names of the goats? I don’t really care. I’m in it for the music. For hearing this world of brand-new things.

We travel by horse cart to his house.
Ein
, for “house.” Yesterday I bought Min Ley a bowl of curry for lunch, and this morning, when he picked me up, he announced that today his wife is cooking lunch for me.

The house is simple, wood and thatch and windows without glass. I never go inside. Min Ley’s wife, San San, is in the kitchen, which is outside, in a structure like a hut without walls, so that as I sit at the roughhewn table I also watch Min Ley take the harness off the mare, drop the cart shafts, and lead her to a bucket of water under a tamarind tree. San San smiles at me from her stool behind a charcoal burner. She scoops yellow curry out of a large pot into a bowl. I smile back at her, then our heads turn at the same time, toward the high whine of “May May! May May!”

A toddler, about three years old, stands in the doorway of the house, naked but for a loose green T-shirt. The child’s large-eyed, delicate beauty suggests a girl, but his nakedness asserts boy and, as though to prove it, a colorless stream of urine stretches out toward me in a falling arc. His mother squawks, we both laugh, and an older sibling, another boy of about eight, scoops the little one up in his arms and disappears into the house.

They reappear a few minutes later, the toddler looking pleased with himself, wearing baggy, threadbare underpants. He smiles at me, then presses his head against his brother’s hip. The older boy tousles the young one’s hair and looks past me imperiously, to his mother. My eyes are on the older boy, fascinated; he emanates pure jealous animosity—toward me. When I smile at him, he leans down and whispers something into his little brother’s ear.

Two girls come out of the house as well. Their mother motions toward me with her chin—greet the guest—and they smile, link hands. Why are they not at school? Do they have a day off? Or is the family too poor to send them all to school? I know how to ask, “How old are you?” One is ten, the other six.

Four children. In a small house. “How old are you?” I ask San San. Generally, this is not a rude question in Southeast Asia but a practical one, as many intimate questions are.

“Twenty-six. And how old are you?” she asks. She ladles rice and curry onto one plate after another.

“Twenty-seven.”

“Do you have children?”

Wishing I knew “Not yet,” I can only say, “No, I don’t.” Having children is the furthest thing from my mind, though I am attracted to them, and they to me, usually, as if the living ones know how to call out to their unborn playmates. I even like the grumpy kids, the screamers and growlers, this older boy here, so covetous of his mother’s attention. He sits at the bench, his head and shoulders just above the high table, waiting for his food, occasionally throwing a black glare into my eyes. Yes, it’s unfair that you have to share her with so many siblings. Now there’s a stranger at the table, too. Poor kid.