Burmese Lessons (6 page)

I’ve made a list
of names, and added to it almost every day since my arrival; these are the ones I want to talk to, the ones who will have something to tell me. These are the ones I met, briefly, the week of my arrival, and wish to meet again. My initial intention to find out about Ma Thida and a few other political prisoners has complicated. Or perhaps it has simplified. I am willing to listen to those who want to talk, who want to describe life under the SLORC, the ruling military regime of Burma. I need to know more about this country, and it seems that learning how people live under a dictatorship is key to catching at least a glimpse of the truth—something beyond the beautiful images that are so readily available to the foreign eye.

A magazine editor happened to be at the opening of a new art gallery that Sayagyi Tin Moe invited me to attend. This editor gave me his card and asked me to call him upon my return from Pagan. I’m back in Rangoon; I called him today. But the woman who answered the phone said he was unavailable. She hung up while I was still asking when I might call
back. An hour later, I called again; she answered, heard my voice, and put down the phone.

So I called the gallery owner, who quickly explained that the editor has been detained. By the MI, the military intelligence, the SLORC’s extensive spy, interrogation, and torture network. Everyone I’ve spoken to mentions the MI. Its web stretches across the country, through every organization in every city and town. The civil service, universities, colleges, high schools, hospitals, marketplaces, taxi stands, the photocopying shops: they all have their watchers and their informers. The generals who make up the SLORC are the leaders, and people speak of them angrily and scornfully. But when they say “MI” their voices are hushed and fearful. The MI operatives are on the ground, doing the nasty work, knocking at the door in the middle of the night, taking people away to the interrogation centers, picking people up off the street in broad daylight. It happened to the editor just a couple of days after I left Rangoon. He’s been sent to prison for an article that he published in his magazine last month. The gallery owner told me this. Then he also hung up in my ear.

I cross the editor’s name off my list. One dark line. I move the pen back and forth until his name is indecipherable. As I’m doing this, I become aware of a crying baby, somewhere down the road. A howler. The sound seems so close. Maybe it’s not down the road but in the next house? The black scrawl becomes solid, as impenetrable as the ink the government censors use to blot out offensive passages in periodicals. What is wrong with the baby? A pre-verbal wail is the human siren.
Do something, help me, do something, help me, do something
.

I put down my notebook and pick up the editor’s card again. He has become a political prisoner. Why am I surprised? I know what happens here. I tear up the card and mix it in with the other paper in the garbage in the communal toilet.

Perhaps Pagan was too beautiful; it made me forget where I am.

•    •    •

T
here are two realities for the new foreigner. Two worlds, both legitimate, both real: the seen and, kaleidoscoping deeply, endlessly, the unseen. Unspoken, unexplained. The unseen world does not yield easily. Facts swirl and shift rather than settle. Repeatedly, a new layer of knowledge displaces the older, simple pattern.

I need years to learn. What I’ve had is two weeks in the Golden Land, as Burma is sometimes called, and many conversations about the country in Bangkok, sometimes with Burmese exiles but more often with other foreigners—Free Burma activists, NGO workers, journalists. Until recently, I’ve been living with a couple of journalists. Their house was an open center for international members of the Fourth Estate—American, Canadian, English, Irish, Australian, Kiwi. All these nationalities passed through, to do work in the studio, voice-overs and film editing for the BBC, CNN, NBC, CBC, ABN (Asia Business News, out of Singapore).

The journalists were the ones who most strongly suggested that I visit Burma. They supplied me with names and addresses here, people to visit. They also told me to be careful of my list of contacts; if it seemed potentially dangerous to anyone to keep the names, it was better to get rid of them. Scribble them out. Throw them away. I am grateful to the journos.

But now I’m thinking traitorous thoughts about their dinner parties. I’ve always had these thoughts. Now that I’m in another country, I can write them down. The dinner parties involved crates of red wine, loads of Carlsberg beer, joints so powerful I literally toppled over after smoking them, fried chicken and cashews, Italian pasta, and—always as the true main course—energetic, loud, smoky political conversations.

So. What is there to complain about?

During every intense, hand-waving, half-drunken rant or dissertation about Cambodia, Vietnam, Burma, and Thailand, I remained on the far edge of the dialogue. When I did speak, attention invariably strayed, or the topic changed. I was always reaching for the detail or the individual or the subjective truth contained in the particular moment. That’s how poets talk, and women; among hard-nosed journalists of either sex, my approach
was embarrassing. They knew everything. They spoke in broad strokes, with assurance and conviction. Even when they didn’t really know what they were talking about, it sounded as if they did.

And I was younger than any of them. Why does everyone think youth is so wonderful? Most people won’t take a woman seriously if she’s under thirty. If she’s under thirty
and
beautiful, too many men want to fuck her and too many women are jealous of her. And still none of them take her seriously. I look forward to being over forty, wrinkled and tough. At least, I hope that toughness will come with the other two.

At the dinner parties, the talkers dazzled me with their encyclopedic knowledge of Burma and “the region,” their many stories, their wealth of experience. I gratefully accepted their advice; they are experts. But something disturbed me more and more as the months went on: though the talk was often about those with brown faces, and though we were eating and drinking and living in a land of brown faces, there was rarely a brown face among us. I started to wander into the kitchen to chat with the maid, who was my link, in that house, to the Thailand I lived in years ago, as a teenager.

During the day, she sometimes took me to the nearest street market, or to the temple hidden on the other side of it. She spoke Thai with me all the time, until the language reasserted itself in my mind and my mouth. I felt uncomfortable that she was the maid and washed my clothes and brought me fruit in the morning and cleaned up after me. Of course there are maids here, servants, people to wash our dirty clothes, by hand, brown people to send to the market, who shop and cook for us, the white people. Social hierarchy is the way of things in Asia, and many Thais and Burmese have servants of various orders. But it gets stickier when you mix color into that hierarchy, especially when the only brown person in the house for days on end is the one who cleans the toilets.

Oh, hierarchies! I noticed, too, that most Western experts think of and treat the Thais differently than they do the Burmese dissidents, who are the subjects of white concern and deference and genuine admiration. The
Burmese political struggle is inspiring and exciting. The dissidents are heroic. Not like the Thai maids (who need to be told everything twice or three times and still don’t understand—why don’t they learn better English?). Not like the Thais in general (who are considered unintellectual and shallow and spoiled).

I should know that the Westerner is allowed to make such distinctions between one Asian race and another. The Westerner knows. We are entitled to knowledge, among other things. That is what makes us experts. Everything becomes territory to us, everything becomes ours. Is the tendency to colonize genetic? Even the political struggle of a small country can become our colony.

Thus, I become suspicious of myself. What am I doing here? Really? Why do I
need
to know more about Burma?

I get off the bed and stand at the window. The street below is empty and dark. The baby stopped crying awhile ago.

Sleep, then, if you can. Make use of the silence. I lie down, my mind whirling through countries and words and conflicting allegiances.

Just before I drop off—two in the morning? three?—I hear the breath-stilling clarity of trishaw bells. The ring seems to come from below my window. Who is out there so late at night? Is he leaving home or arriving?

Today San Aung
will introduce me to some Burmese artists, so that I can see their work for myself and ask them about living and working under the SLORC regime. In the car, he asks how I slept. I remember the trishaw bell, so late at night, ringing in the dark street. “That was the last thing I heard.”

“In Burmese, there is no trishaw,” he says. “We call it
si-caa
. From ‘sidecar.’ Like the sidecar on an English motorcycle. Another word for your vocabulary.” San Aung is pleased with my word obsession; he thinks it’s a reasonable objective to try to learn his language in a few weeks’ time. I scribble “si-car” in my notebook.

In the beginning, all language is innocent—
tree, cup, flower, love
—but San Aung wants me to learn serious words. He has taught me
death
and
freedom. Democracy, cruel, trust, don’t trust
. I learn quickly, but as I fill my notebook with phonetic spellings I lament the loss of my innocence. Why can’t I just have sweet chats with the tea-shop boys? Or repeat the number of siblings I have? Or ask, “Can I take your photograph?”

No. I am infected with the desire to grasp meanings, which makes it
difficult to keep things simple. And any language makes a home for those who speak it. Even a few shreds, a few building-block phrases, provide shelter. San Aung is at home in English. Unlike his parents’ generation, he didn’t have the opportunity to take language classes in school; General Ne Win had forbidden the teaching of English as too colonialist. Years later, after Ne Win’s daughter was denied entrance to a British university because of her poor language skills, the general put English back in the curriculum. But that was too late for San Aung. He learned the language from his mother and various tutors.

I watch him from the corner of my eye. In a country of gracious hosts, I find myself attended to by a prickly, impatient man. He is a friend of a friend in London, and has been explaining things that I wouldn’t notice otherwise, taking me to meet people I would not be able to find myself. He has the same alternately madcap and black humor I noticed among Burmese exiles in Thailand, but sometimes there is a caustic, unnerving edge to his jokes. In a Southeast Asian context, this stinging humor is unfamiliar to me. More than once he has said of himself, “I am not very Burmese,” meaning that he does not much subscribe to
ana-deh
, that essential trait, not directly translatable into English, which is a mixture of decorum, grace, and exquisite tact. He is more direct and more openly critical—of just about everything—than any other Burmese person I have met so far. “I sometimes say out loud what others think in private,” he tells me.

H
anging on the walls are a dozen works by the senior painter’s students. I use “senior” to denote well known, respected—I cannot tell the man’s age. He might be fifty and not so healthy; he might be seventy-five and excellently preserved. The deep hollows of his cheeks make the upper half of his bald skull seem abnormally large; only after looking again do I realize that he is missing most of his molars. Like the stick limbs of a scarecrow, his pale, hairless wrists and lower legs poke out of his brown sleeves
and brown longyi. His rheumy eyes examine me briefly through thick glasses. Then he turns to talk to San Aung. As he speaks, intelligent energy beams out of him like electricity. I take an involuntary step away, as though he were giving off sparks. His head seems to shine harder the more he talks.

As if reading my mind, he turns back to me, puts his hand to his naked skull, and says, “I went away to a monastery last year, during the rains. Just two months. But I continue to shave my head.”

When we shake hands, he does not smile. “Please, feel free to look at the pictures. That is why they’re here.” He invites San Aung to sit down with him at a low table. Three young men are already sitting. The senior painter explains, “They are my students. They have made these pictures.” They stare at me; only the one who wears a baseball cap smiles. Not one of them says a word. Perhaps they don’t know any English. Or maybe they’re just deferring to their elders. Even when San Aung begins to exchange rapid-fire Burmese with the old painter, the young men remain silent.

I walk around the low-ceilinged room, looking at the mostly abstract canvases. Unlike the representational art I’ve seen in Rangoon’s large, expensive galleries, there are no exotic Burmese scenes for tourists, no be-robed monks, no women carrying water pots on their heads. If there is lushness here, or some common Burmese example of culture—as in the painting of the mythical stone lions that guard the overgrown entrance to a temple—it has a menacing quality to it. The lions are dangerous; the vines on the temple walls resemble snakes. For ten minutes I stand before a series of small watercolors. Each picture shows the same brick wall from a different angle, a different position. There are three paintings of the same closed door. The images remind me of Sayagyi Tin Moe describing how many Burmese artists and writers struggle with self-censorship. The outer system of repression calcifies into internal paralysis. The wide-open circle of the mind shrinks, turns into a shackle, a handcuff, the mouth shut tight, unwilling to speak.