Burmese Lessons (48 page)

They were kind to me, the Thai MI agents. But they were not subtle. “Your boyfriend has many problems,” said the slender one, turning in his seat to look at me. He had two moles in the places where dimples would be, which gave him an almost clownish smile. The beefy one was driving, but glanced often in the rearview mirror.

“They have a military government.” I stared back at the smiling man. “You know how difficult the military can be.”

He laughed outright. “I do, I do. But when we are with such people we also have their problems.”

“Who doesn’t have problems? I’m sure you do, too. But your wife loves you, doesn’t she?”

“Of course,” he replied with an impatient wave of his hand. “But my problems are not like
his.”
A new thought passed as a frown over his face. “You’re not
married
to him, are you?”

I sighed. “No.”

He shook his head. “I don’t understand.” In Thai, the literal translation of that phrase is “It doesn’t enter my heart.” “What are you doing?”

“I’m doing what I have to do,” I replied, my voice grave with real emotion. But I was also acting. I wanted my Ingrid Bergman line, and I got it.

The bristle-headed driver ruined the moment with a deep belly laugh. I met his merry eyes in the mirror. “But you can do anything you want! You are beautiful, and free.”

More questions came. The slender man covered the territory: what I was doing in Thailand, when I planned to leave, when I would return. He asked me repeatedly, in different ways, what Maung was going to do in China. For once, I was pleased to know nothing.

I was trembling by the time the truck pulled up in front of the apartment building. I said goodbye to the agents and hopped out. They waved as they drove away. I waved back, spat on the road, and stared in the direction of their monster machine long after it had disappeared.

T
wo weeks later, a surprising thing happened.

Maung returned early from China—before I left for Greece. I think he came back to show me that he
could
come back for me; he could act on my behalf, because he loved me. Or perhaps he came back because he finished his work in China early.

It was too late, though. “You’ve already decided to finish our relationship,” he said sadly one evening, after we reached the end of a conversation we’d had several times before. But it wasn’t so much that I’d made a decision as that I’d imagined my escape. Escape was still my solution to insoluble problems. I was soon to be disappointed, though, because fleeing from Maung and the border didn’t work. That failed escape was, in fact, the beginning of the end of escaping. As a modus operandi that had once saved my life by differentiating me from my family, it had become a habit that had outlived its usefulness. Almost.

I left Maung and arrived on my beloved island, emotionally and physically exhausted. People I’d known there for a decade didn’t recognize me. I’d lost too much weight. I looked different. Like a nun in both the Buddhist and the Greek Orthodox Christian traditions, I compounded that difference by shaving my head—an act that Barba Andreas, my old shepherd friend, talked about for years afterward, and never forgave me for. But I was a different woman from the person they had known. I gave away or burned all the strappy, flowery dresses from my early, voluptuous twenties.
None of them fit me anymore, in size or in spirit. My hips were too lean, my breasts too small.

The villagers and my friends were not impressed. They fed me and fed me. The island earth fed me. I took to lying in the field at night, under a massive bowl of stars—the same stars I had seen in the jungle, though they looked different from a half-wild olive grove. I let my skeleton settle into the earth. One night, a scorpion scuttled up onto my hip, under my sleeveless shirt. Recognizing its particular double-pronged scurry, I lay motionless, though part of me wanted to move and to be stung. It seemed a way to transform my inward pain into the electric pain of the body, which I could release with a scream and tears. My healthier instincts prevailed; I remained completely still. The scorpion crossed over the hill of a breast, across the top of my bare shoulder. It slid down onto the ground and scrabbled away through the grass. With the still-warm dirt pressed into my flesh, I thought: I might already be buried. Staring up at the Milky Way—
galaxias
, from the Greek word for milk,
gala
—I wondered if I had made the defining error of my life by leaving Asia, abandoning a man I loved so deeply and a purpose I believed in with my whole, fragmented heart.

In that free, fertile kingdom, ribboned by the azure Aegean, I waded into a gulf of loss and treaded water for a long time, mourning the losses of those in Burma and on the border. I mourned my own loss. I still loved Maung. An attempt to love someone else, as a distraction, failed miserably. I loved him; I wanted him still. Yet I had left him purposefully. It was a knot of emotion and circumstance I could not undo. It’s unnatural to rupture a profound physical and emotional connection at its zenith; I wished we’d been arguing openly, the relationship cracking at the seams. I knew that the tensions between us had been real, and impossible to ignore. Neither of us had had the time, the peace, or the maturity to attend to them. Why was I still thinking about it, many months later, almost a year? I had betrayed him, willfully, adding to his deprivation. What kind of love was that?

•    •    •

A
nd yet. I knew in my gut that I had made the right choice. To keep my own future safe for my work as a writer, I had to leave both Maung and the border. I had seen my private nature: I would not be able to make the sacrifices that other Western women had made when they married Burmese men. Most of them would not use the word
sacrifice
, at least not openly, and that was the difference between us. I berated myself:
You should have known better all along
. You should never have allowed yourself to fall in love with him. Hadn’t Zoë foretold everything, in her way? But I had not listened. I thought further back, to Marla, who had accused me of being a selfish artist. I had proved her right. But if my vocation had become subsumed in Maung’s life and in the life of our sure-to-come family and its added responsibilities, who would I be? What was I but a writer?

I could not risk testing that question. My self was, and still is, bound up in my identity as an artist. To endanger the work endangers the self.

So I left Burma and the Thai-Burma border behind. But they did not leave me. In the little stone house in Greece, I put up dozens of the photographs I had taken in Burma and on the border, and I returned to the novel
The Lizard Cage
. It soon became clear that the book had stalled because I was too entangled emotionally, politically, and physically with my material. The closer I had been to the turmoil—witnessing the aftermath of events, absorbing stories directly, receiving that steady stream of faxes outlining the latest disasters in Burma and on the border—the less capable I was of creating art out of it. Now that I was far away, forced to imagine myself back into the world I had left behind, I was able to enter the fictional prison of
The Lizard Cage
and stay there.

Stay there I did, for another eight years, during which time I managed to get a visa to return to Burma once, in 2001. This was a changed and an unchanged Burma, a country that felt more open in some ways: limited Internet access was available, telephone connections were more reliable,
foreign NGOs had established or reestablished offices in Rangoon, and were doing important work with street kids, in HIV prevention, maternal health, and education. And Ma Thida was free. She was the young woman writer and doctor whose unjust imprisonment had drawn me to Burma in the first place. Though she had served only seven years of her twenty-year sentence of solitary confinement, the Burmese junta had released her in response to intense lobbying by Amnesty International and PEN.

It was a miracle for me to sit across from her in a tea shop and listen to her stories, which she told without a drop of melodrama. She had contracted pulmonary tuberculosis in Insein Prison, and become so ill that she couldn’t walk; fellow prisoners carried her to her parents when they came to visit. Her weight dropped to eighty pounds. She developed such severe endometriosis that she bled copious amounts every day. She was soon suffering from acute liver failure.

The prison authorities eventually took her medications away because they believed she would try to commit suicide. “Can you believe how ridiculous they are? I was trying to live, not to die! I told them that if I died it would be their responsibility, their fault—I would have nothing to do with my own death! And the warden said to me, ‘You see, Ma Thida, you are free. You are free in your mind and your heart. But we are government employees, and we are trapped. We have to do what they say.’” Over Burmese tea, we laughed together at this absurd, profound truth.

Like many political prisoners, she credited her survival to daily vipassana meditation. That liberating practice still seemed to sparkle around her and through her clear, forthright voice. In a fearful place, she had come to live beyond fear. She had returned to her medical work and to her writing. I visited her clinic, where she often treated other former political prisoners who had been tortured. We ate meals together, talked books and politics, and laughed a lot, surprised by how much we had in common. She was hopeful about some kind of change within the SPDC, as the ruling junta was now called. (Repeatedly criticized for the Orwellian moniker
SLORC, the generals had changed their name to the State Peace and Development Council.) But she was not banking that change would come too quickly.

A few years later, in 2004, the prominent student activist Min Ko Naing was also released from prison after fifteen years in solitary confinement. His release made many Burma watchers hope for a softening in the regime’s policies toward its opponents, in particular toward that other famous political prisoner, Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been under house arrest for much of the past twenty years. Another encouraging shift has been the gradual relaxation on travel restrictions; more Burmese citizens manage to obtain passports for travel abroad.

Tragically, though, Burma today remains closed in the most crucial ways. The junta, led by General Than Shwe, has moved the capital from Rangoon to a new city called Naypyidaw, built literally from the ground up, to the tune of several billion dollars—in a country whose spending on health and education is one of the lowest in the world. This bizarre move several hundred kilometers inland separates the top brass as well as the entire political and civil administration more completely than ever from the people they govern. Alienation is arguably the ruling junta’s most serious pathology. Though allied to the many hungry nations and individuals who covet the country’s natural and human resources, the generals are increasingly isolated from and ignorant of the sixty million people to whom those resources rightly belong.

In August 2007, the junta dropped all subsidies on oil and natural gas, resulting in a doubling and tripling of fuel prices. This led to a rapid increase in the cost of food. The price of Burmese rice has long been a gauge for measuring unrest in the country; when it goes up, people literally go hungry and get angry. Min Ko Naing and other activists began to protest the SPDC’s debilitating fuel-price increases in mid-August. By September, thousands of monks and nuns had joined these protests and marched together in Rangoon and Mandalay. The Sangha is the only large organization left in Burma that still has some freedom of movement, freedom of
assembly, freedom of communication. Hundreds of thousands of people across the country joined the Saffron Revolution, as it became known, inspired by the Sangha’s peaceful but bold acts of civil disobedience.

The rest of the world was inspired, too. Footage taken by clandestine Burmese video reporters allowed the Saffron Revolution to go global. Aware of the cultural and religious importance of the monks and the nuns, many of us held our breath, thinking that their presence would prevent the junta from ending the protests violently. But we were wrong. Soldiers opened fire on their own people. Dozens were killed, though the exact number of deaths has never been determined. Many people remain missing, disappeared. Min Ko Naing, other political activists, and scores of monks and nuns were arrested and given prison sentences as long as sixty-eight years.

Mourning for those who were murdered in 2007 was not over when Cyclone Nargis hit the Irrawaddy Delta in May 2008. Though official death tolls for the devastation wrought by the high winds, floods, and collapsed buildings are usually placed around 100,000, some NGOs estimate the number of dead to be much higher. The cyclone severely affected between two and three million people.

But the hardest thing about Cyclone Nargis was not the loss of life due to the horrific violence of nature; it was the SPDC’s criminal response to the tragedy. Through decades of military rule, the leaders of Burma have systematically damaged their people’s ability to communicate, to organize, and to trust. Cyclone Nargis showed that the generals are not immune to the deformations they have wrought upon their citizens. Faced with the biggest natural disaster in Burmese history, the SPDC did not know how to help its own people—it was too accustomed to treating them as enemies. General Than Shwe refused to allow dozens of qualified Western aid workers to enter the country. Unshamed by the rotting bodies of people and animals, the generals dithered away precious days, fearful of who might see the truth. Ever-resourceful citizens from less affected parts of the
country did as much as they could to help. Groups of entertainers, young medical students, businessmen, and thousands of members of the Sangha collected funds and mobilized to help feed the people and attend the injured and sick.

After a meeting with the U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, General Than Shwe finally relented and opened the door to foreign-aid workers, regardless of nationality. But the damage was done, and, in the words of one Burmese writer, “this was the deepest damage. The people already hated the regime, of course. They were already angry at the regime, yes. But now they became bitter. Such bitterness! It is like our leaders are no longer Burmese people anymore. If they were Burmese people, how could they do this to us?”