Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (63 page)

On the way out of town, I looked at the local peasants and thought that if some of their forefathers had not burned down the houses of such as my forefathers, mine wouldn’t have left. I considered what had happened to my family within two generations, and what hadn’t happened for them, and instead of feeling outraged by the history of aggression, I felt privileged by it. Oppression sometimes benefits its victims more than its perpetrators. While those ravaging others’ lives exhaust their energy on destruction, those whose lives are shattered must expend their vigor on solutions, some of which can be transformative. Hatred drove my family to the United States and its previously unimaginable freedoms.

The conditions in the Roma settlements to which Leslie took me next made Dorohoi look like East Hampton. Where the subsistence farmers of northern Romania ate simply, the Gypsies of Colonia were going hungry; while the farmers lived relatively short lives, the Gypsies showed obvious signs of chronic illness. The peasants may not have had modern plumbing, but the Gypsies had none at all; they defecated in the surrounding pasture, and the place stank to high heaven. At this writing, as a result of OvidiuRo’s work, fifteen hundred Roma children are getting the early education that might help them break out of poverty. I met some of those children, bright-eyed and full of fun, and hoped they could escape growing into morose teenagers and glassy-eyed adults like those who sat around Colonia in the squalor.

On the way back to Bucharest, I received a call from Duane Butcher, the chargé d’affaires at the US embassy (the de facto ambassador, given that we did not have an ambassador to Romania at the time). He wanted to know what had happened concerning the library kerfuffle. A Facebook post I’d written about the incident had been picked up by a wire service and was being widely reported in the national media. He said that he would be writing an official letter about the matter to the Romanian government.

ACCEPT soon issued a press release that quoted Florin Buhuceanu saying, “A human-rights organization militating for LGBT rights in Romania cannot access a lecture hall in the most important library in Bucharest? An illustrious American writer and journalist should not speak about sexuality and identity in a cultural institution? Books written by gay authors, foreign or Romanian, will be disregarded in an academic and literary setting because of the sexual orientation of their authors?” Remus Cernea, a member of Parliament, told the press that he had asked the education ministry to punish the people responsible within the Central University Library. (After being called out on the floor of Parliament and in the media, the library officials made a ludicrous claim that ACCEPT had made a “bad approach.”)

That night, I had been scheduled to engage in a public, forty-minute conversation with Cărtărescu at the New Europe College in Bucharest, a gathering place for the urban intelligentsia. Fifty
or sixty people had been expected, but we found perhaps three hundred filling the seats, crowding the aisles, and spilling into the hallway. The beginning of our conversation was predictably affable, but twenty minutes in, Cărtărescu said, “And now I want to apologize personally for what happened to you at the library. I hope you know that these backward views do not represent the mind-set of all Romanians.” The audience burst into rambunctious applause. “We can only hope your other experiences in Romania have shown you the true hearts of our people,” Cărtărescu said, to further applause. Our talk ended up running for nearly three hours. I signed another two hundred books afterward, and their owners all expressed contrition. The last in line was Cernea, who said, “The legislation for recognizing civil unions failed, as you know, but there were three days of debate about a topic no one would have thought to discuss a year ago. Please give us a little bit of time. Our politicians are more conservative than our society.”

How did Romania relate to Jews, to the mentally ill, to gay people, to Gypsies? Many of the groups I represent in one way or another have attracted prejudice there at some point (as they have at other times, in other ways, in my own country). I had not intended to set off a scandal, nor had I anticipated my resonant sadness at this aspect of the six-day trip. I had likewise not imagined the surges of joy beneath those cherry trees and at New Europe College. The supporters of social liberalization in a conservative, deeply religious country do not constitute the mainstream, but neither do their opposites. Romanian is a Latin language, and Romanians blend the warmth of Italians with the combative spark of Slavs. Various Romanians pointed out that, because my grandfather was born there, I could get a Romanian passport, and some asked me to do so. I’m contemplating it. I understand why Aunt Rose characterized Romania as a horrible place we were lucky to escape, but it’s also a wonderful place and I’m glad that I returned.

I learned in 2015 that Andrei Rus, the professor who had arranged for my lecture to take place in the National University of Theater
Arts and Cinematography, had come under attack from the Ethics Committee there. His contract was terminated for “ruining the University’s image” with his “gay propaganda and homosexual agenda”—which is particularly striking given that he is not gay himself. His colleagues asked that I write a letter of support for him, which I did; in the end, he was sanctioned but not fired.

Travel + Leisure
, November 2014

My assignment for
Travel + Leisure
was to describe Myanmar’s most fascinating sights and most luxurious lodgings. I had recently been elected president of PEN American Center, an advocacy organization supporting freedom of expression, which gave me access to a group of writers who were forming a PEN center in Myanmar. So my month in the country long known as Burma seesawed between luxury river cruises and interviews with ex–political prisoners. The contrast was not as extreme as it sounds; the luxury was far less opulent and the prison alumni far more upbeat than one might have imagined. This essay examines Myanmar’s social, political, and economic life in greater depth than was pertinent for
Travel + Leisure
.

I
had anticipated a time of hope in Myanmar. In the eighteen months prior to my visit in January 2014, eleven hundred of the country’s political prisoners, including the most celebrated ones, had been released; censorship of the media had eased; limited parliamentary elections had taken place; and most international sanctions had been lifted. Foreign investment was beginning to invigorate the economy. Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize and an icon of courage in the name of justice, had been freed in 2010 after two decades under house arrest and was
campaigning for the presidency; her National League for Democracy (NLD) party had finally won seats in the legislature. The country seemed to be progressing economically and socially.

What I found instead was an extremely cautious neutrality. No one denied that things were better, but no one thought things were fixed. The exuberance of transition was tempered by the majority Buddhist philosophy of a people who had seen too many guttering flickers of hope extinguished. The population had been optimistic, perhaps, in the lead-up to independence in 1948; they had been optimistic again in 1988, when student uprisings promised a new justice; they had even had a streak of optimism during the Saffron Revolution of 2007, when thousands of monks rose up against the government only to be brutally crushed. By 2014, the people had eliminated such buoyancy from their repertoire of attitudes, and they were merely waiting to see what might happen next.

Neither were they bitter about their painful history. I had anticipated that former political prisoners would rant about their appalling treatment while incarcerated, but few of them did. Many said they were grateful for their experiences. In prison, they had had time to develop their minds and hearts, often through meditation. Most had set out knowingly to do things that would land them in jail, and they had marched to their cells with heads held high. When they were released, their heads were still held high. The writer and activist Ma Thanegi, who spent many years in jail because she had been Aung San Suu Kyi’s personal assistant, told me that the best way to oppose the regime was to be happy in prison. “It’s like spitting in the face of the military,” she said. “They wanted us to be miserable, and we were not going to oblige them.” If they could be happy there, then their punishment had failed, and the regime had no power over them. As she explained it, their adamantine cheer was both a discipline and a choice.

In 1993, the writer, activist, and physician Dr. Ma Thida was sentenced to twenty years for “endangering public serenity,” contact with illegal organizations, and printing and distributing illegal materials. Her health deteriorated drastically in prison; she developed pulmonary tuberculosis and endometriosis. At her sickest, she weighed only
about eighty pounds, had a continuous fever, vomited constantly, and could barely drink water or walk more than a few feet. Then her liver began to shut down. Ma Thida had been allowed to keep a supply of medicines to treat other prisoners, but the prison doctor confiscated them when she sought to treat herself, on grounds that she might use them to commit suicide. Only after she began a hunger strike did he relent. Kept in solitary confinement, Ma Thida begged for a companion, even a murderer or a thief, but her request was denied. She was not allowed paper or pencils; in six years, she managed to write only three short stories using smuggled implements. “But I still owned my body and mind,” she said. “So I treated this as time to learn how to get free from the circle of life. In this way, I could find total freedom.” When her captors asked what she wanted, she said, “I want to be a good citizen. That’s all. Nothing more and nothing less.” She noted the incomprehension on their faces. But her jailer eventually said, “Ma Thida, you are free, and we are not.” Upon being released in 1999, she said to him, “Thank you for this time in prison.” She refused to thank him for releasing her. She clung to the prospect of writing about her prison experience, knowing that her books might be read only by censors, but even to make those functionaries understand her perspective would count for something. Now that her prison memoir is a Myanmar bestseller, she can inspire the younger generation to resist. “My imprisonment therefore becomes totally positive,” she told me.

She was at pains to point out that the reforms in Myanmar had been instituted by the military government, and she viewed them cynically. “We Burmese show tremendous grace under pressure. But we also show grievance under glamour, and the fact that these reforms have begun to unfold does not change the deep problems in this society that we learned to see so clearly while we were in prison. What’s really changed here is not the laws, not even the enforcement of the laws; what has changed is awareness. People are aware of their rights and use them to make demands and argue. That is the full measure of progress.” This was no small matter, in her view; more important than the next president was the population that president would lead.

Under the military junta, people were frequently jailed for their
beliefs, but only after they had expressed them in public. Opinion was never as tightly controlled in Myanmar as in North Korea or Saudi Arabia. “It’s always been a pleasure working here compared to Cambodia, for example, where the intelligentsia is restricted,” said Vicky Bowman, a former British ambassador. “Here, the intelligentsia has always been visible. Sometimes it’s been in jail; sometimes it’s had to wait to publish. But it has always been around.”

Although the generals who seized power in 1988 kept the borders largely closed, the attention of the outside world remained vital to their opponents. “Please use your liberty to promote ours,” Aung San Suu Kyi famously said in 1997. The opposition no longer needed that outside amplification so urgently by 2014. There was a great deal of parsing this change among the people I met and a great many attempts to quantify it. The poet and activist Maung Tin Thit quipped that people who used to be arrested secretly for their radical views would now be arrested publicly. The artist Aye Ko, a leader in the 1988 uprising and later a political prisoner, said, “I won’t believe this government until they are out of power.” The comedian Lu Maw drew upon his reserve of catchphrases to characterize the ostensible reforms. “Snakes shed their skin, but they are still snakes,” he told me. “From 1952 up to now, same military. Only a new uniform every so often. Now, same guys but without the uniform.”

Ko Minn Latt, the young, dynamic mayor of a township in Mon State who hopes to run for Parliament, said, “As the people get less frightened, they get more angry, because it’s safe to be angry now. Ten percent are busy with religion, ten percent with getting rich, and the other eighty percent are furious. But problems built during the last sixty years can’t be solved within three. This is a ‘distorted democracy’—not only because these changes are led by the military government, which is still in power, but also because the people don’t yet know how to function in a democracy.” Still, he believed that the leadership had become too attached to their newfound status on the world stage to relinquish it; reform now afforded the ego boost once achieved through the brutal exercise of power.

Moe Satt, an independent art curator, told me that Burmese artists had begun to talk about postmodernism. “But how can we make
postmodern comments on a premodern society?” he asked. “There’s a lot of catching up to do first.” He felt that many Burmese artists and intellectuals were unready to create work from the vantage of authority. “We resist the end of pressure,” he explained, commenting on how artists can do their best work under oppression, be it political oppression or market oppression. Nay Phone Latt, who served four years of his twenty-year sentence for blogging about the Saffron Revolution, said, “The people are not accustomed to taking responsibility; they imagine it will be done for them. If there’s not yet democracy here, that is not only the fault of the generals.”