For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question

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Marlboros. We are sitting on opposite sides of a rectangular table, the type I’d call a picnic table, talking over the spread: three bottles of vodka, two cartons of orange juice, plates of sugared citrus slices, nearly empty bottles of beer and bowls of fried pork, sweet corn waffles, pad thai, a chocolate cake. We share the benches with two guys each, and half a dozen others hover. Most of them are listening to Poe K’Ler Htoo, who is working through a light slur to tell his new favorite story. This morning, he sent an email to Htoo Moo, the coworker around whom he’s draping his arm, asking if he’d finally finished a report. Htoo Moo somehow accidentally cc-ed the rest of the staff—including the administration of the organization that employs them—when sending back a simple response: Fuck you, Poe K’Ler Htoo.

The men are all in their twenties. Most of them are solid and strong and hunky, tight pecs and asses nearly all around. Their faces shine sweaty because they’re drunk, and it’s July. A few of them are smoking. One holds a guitar. They laugh when Poe K’Ler Htoo gets to the climax. Some of them received the email or have heard the punch line already and nod, smiling, into the post-anecdote silence, young professionals talking about interoffice inbox blunders, like
outgrown frat boys unwinding after another tedious workday. Except that they’re stateless. They are all penniless. They speak three or four languages apiece. Two of them had to bribe their way out of Thai police custody, again, yesterday because they’re on the wrong side of the border between this country and the land-mine-studded mountains of their own.

Htan Dah’s silky chin-length hair slips toward his eyes as he leans forward. My Marlboros picture a baby reaching for the cigarette of the man who holds her, absentmindedly exhaling a cloud of smoke around her face. It’s an episode in a series of legally mandated photographic deterrents, scabby hospital patients hooked up to respirators and cancer-rotted mouths and throats, but it doesn’t deter Htan Dah. Nor is he deterred by the fact that he doesn’t smoke. Tonight, he is flushed with heat and booze and the virility and extreme hilarity of his comrades. Tonight, as always, he is celebrating the fact that he’s still living.

He takes a cigarette. “Never say no,” he says, and winks at me.

EVEN ON
a Saturday, the refugees were up at dawn. The roosters of Mae Sot had been crowing for hours already, the packs of stray and unleashed domestic dogs fighting intermittently throughout the night, the wiry migrants working overtime at the construction lot across the verdant residential street since darkness had begun to fade.

Downtown, the western central Thailand city contains several blocks’ worth of congested, though hardly happening, streets lined with stores full of jewelry and bikes and food processors. At its center is a market—flip-flops, live frogs, long green beans—and on the fringes a few guesthouses and bars that cater largely to the community of well-tanned aid workers supporting the city’s exiles.

Though Mae Sot is a major receiving hub for people, pirated teak, and other goods that enter the country illegally from Burma, and the population is loaded with smugglers, dealers, documentless immigrants, and slaves, the atmosphere of the border town is serene. Beyond the city center, past factories and karaoke joints, the alternating fields and rice paddies and shack-filled villages and suburban homes and temples and rickety corner stores are all quiet. Out there, just a couple of miles from downtown, the noise is reduced to the occasional outburst of Buddhist bells or motorbikes whizzing by.
Though everyone was awake at the office and staff quarters of Burma Action (BA), it was quiet in there, too.

The employees—twentysomethings all, males, except one—who hadn’t yet crawled from their sleeping spaces on the floor and rolled up their cobalt mosquito nets for the day could hear from their beds the light clangings of breakfast preparation: pots being washed in the stainless steel sink, motorbike keys hung on metal hooks after a market trip, knives slid off the stone counter and carried toward the cutting board. Upstairs, they were too far away to smell the steam that escaped the rice cooker in the kitchen. A couple of them had already gotten up and stumbled, still rubbing their eyes, straight into the computer room. Since it was the weekend, their work hours would be healthily interspersed with naps and guitar playing and Ping-Pong. Technically, they didn’t have any schedule at all, much less mandated hours on Saturdays; they worked at will, with only occasional deadlines to direct them. Still, some took their places in front of the four computers and turned them on, chatting and stretching in their seats while they waited for the machines to boot up so they could get some work done before breakfast.

Half a dozen employees were there now, and as many more were out on long field assignments. Almost all the organization’s work was done by refugees, though a few Thai citizens and Western do-gooders helped with administration at headquarters in Bangkok. Sometimes, the office hosted volunteers sent by charities or aid groups. The pale auxiliaries from Australia or France or the US or UK stayed anywhere from a few weeks to a couple of years. Those times, like today, a staff member took a motorbike to the bus station to wait for a foreigner to off-load. This time, on the first of July, 2006, the bus, my bus, arrived in the late afternoon. I wasn’t connected to any organizations—I’d just happened upon BA’s website and, interested in the crisis in the Texas-size Southeast Asian country the page was going on about, eventually volunteered via email—so my background was something
of a mystery to the staff. No one in the house could pin down its origins, but there was a rumor that I was Norwegian.

I walked up the driveway in the early evening, through the gold-detailed black gate that stood heavy sentry at the road. I’d followed The Guy who came to meet me, whose name wasn’t The Guy, but whose actual name I hadn’t caught when he’d mumbled it twice in a row and then just shaken his head and laughed when I’d asked him to repeat it one more time, in a three-wheeled tuk-tuk from the station. I watched him, compact and strong looking, buzzed black hair, sharp cheekbones, cinnamon skin, sliding the gate slow and screaming shut behind us as my hired driver puttered away. The house was big but run-down, two stories of worn wood and dirty concrete with a balcony on the left, cement garage on the right. We entered the latter, where The Guy pushed his shiny red motorbike in among a couple of dingier ones. Behind them was a picnic table with benches, and behind that, against the back wall, a single metal range hooked up to a propane tank. We cut around the table, to the left, into the house.

“Kitchen,” The Guy said. It had a sink and some dishes; the cooking took place out in the dining room/garage. He took a few steps farther. “Bathroom.” He gestured into a cement block through an oversize wooden door. There was a squat toilet, of course, set into the floor, and in lieu of toilet paper a shallow well, serviced by a tap, a little plastic bowl floating on top. There was also, running the length of the left wall, a giant waist-high cement trough filled with water and dead mosquitoes.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Water.”

Sure. “For what?”

“A bath.”

I looked at it, jet-lagged, hazily noting some of the differences between this bath and my conception of a bath. This wasn’t my first time in Southeast Asia, but I’d only ever taken showers. I wondered
if I was supposed to hoist myself in there and splash around. I wondered if he wondered what I thought a bath was.

“How does it work?” I asked.

He exhaled hard through his nose, a whispery snort. “Like this,” he said, pantomiming filling a bowl with water and dumping it over his head. “Are you hungry?”

Back in the dining room/garage, I sat at the table with a plate of rice and some durable pieces of fried pork. I asked The Guy what was in the soup he offered me.

“I don’t know the word in English,” he said. “Leaves?”

Close. Twigs, actually. The Guy pulled a stump of wood up to the short, benchless edge of the table, next to me, content to perch there quietly and watch me chew through the sautéed woody stems.

“So, where are you from?” I asked.

“Me?”

Silence. He wasn’t asking rhetorically.