For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question (14 page)

Yes, they do it all on an annual budget of $7 million. If you’re wondering who puts up that cash, the answer, incidentally, is that you do—12 percent of it, anyway. The United States Agency for International Development is on the case, and the bulk of the rest is kicked in by “other” (charity, church, private) donors and the
Netherlands. But the programs are increasingly underfunded, with a shortfall of more than half a million dollars in 2008. Plus, they use the curriculum of the Karen Education Department, which is, naturally, unaccredited, which grants graduating students a certificate that is completely worthless outside of their refugee camp. Not that they have a lot of places to take it anyway. Two online courses are available through Australian universities for a lucky few students: Seventeen graduated from them in 2006. But then what? World Education trains some high school graduates to become teachers for the new classes. There’s a post-secondary Further Studies Programme, a Leadership Management Course, and an English Immersion Programme, but there are very limited openings. For the most part, even those with schooling and skills have nothing to do. Wah Doh had gone through several years of both FSP and EIP, but he was as illegal and unemployed and prospectless as ever. Some education workers in the camps have become, in addition to their many other duties, lobbyists trying to cajole the Thai government into letting refugees leave the camps for Thai university. Godspeed to them.

Coming from such a drastically different and faraway culture, I built on this educational foundation with inadvertent lessons in the random and semi-useless. I mentioned that as a teenager I’d had braces, but nobody knew what I was talking about, and when I explained what they were, everybody thought I was crazy. “Most Americans aren’t born with perfectly straight teeth. Haven’t you ever noticed that Americans you see in pictures usually have straight teeth?” They hadn’t, but I guess you wouldn’t, if no one had ever told you that you should care. When I told them that the orthodontic device cost a few thousand US dollars and that millions of Americans got them, they were speechless. Then one of them finally asked, “Why?” When one of my students saw my credit card, she asked me what it was. Abby, too, had encountered this information gap when she ran out of money on her Thai cell phone. She pressed The Blay, through his repeated
No
s, as to whether it was possible to add minutes over the Internet. He finally conceded, “Yes, you can do it on the Internet”—adding, by way of explaining why that wasn’t possible, “but you need ‘credit card.’” I passed my plastic around for show-and-tell, trying to describe how it worked, which some people sort of understood, but most people didn’t. When I wore my glasses to class, I brought along my contacts in their case and opened it for exhibition. After I described how I put them in, one of my students asked if he could try. (Absolutely not.) One day, at my afternoon class’s urging, I took down a list of things they wanted me to take videos of and send to them once I got back home, things they’d heard of but never seen. This is what it says in the margin of my school notes from that day:

And though he wasn’t one of my students, Htoo Moo, too, found me endlessly enlightening.

“Why do you think I have dark skin and you have white skin, and I have eyes like this and your eyes are like that?” he asked me one day as we took a break on a grassy knoll. We’d gone for a bike ride, so I wouldn’t get fat.

“Evolution and migration, I guess.”

He shook his head. “That is stupid.”

“What? It’s not stupid. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“Yes, I have heard. I don’t believe that.”

“Really? I think most people believe that.”

“Crazy people.”

“So you believe that God made you look Asian or something?”

He shrugged. “Also, you have all this.” He reached over and tugged on my arm hair. “So much of this. Why do you have all this?”

“It’s really not that much.”

“Yes, I think so.”

“That’s only because you’re freakishly hairless.”

It was hot outside, but not oppressively, another lovely and non-raining day. It was a perfect day for Frisbee, one of which I’d carried nearly ten thousand miles across land and sea only to have Htoo Moo scoff at me when I’d asked him to play earlier.

“Come on,” I said, trying again now. “Can’t we please play Frisbee? It’s exercise! It can be really hard if you play it right.”

“That is a game,” he said, which was what he’d said earlier.

“It’s a sport!” I said, which was what I’d said earlier.

“Maybe for a girl. Or children.”

Frustrating as that answer was, it was at least less heartbreaking than Htan Dah’s. “How can I play a game sometimes when there is a war?” he asked me back at the house.

He was, understandably, having a stressful day. The guys needed to make time for class because they needed to speak English to spread information to and from BA trips into Burma, but they also needed to keep BA running to be able to make those trips. That week, the week Abby and the guys from inside and the international human rights documentation organization trainers and the staff coordinators and the new staffers arrived, everyone was bogged down with conferencing and report making. One day, morning classes were canceled for meetings. Another day, Ta Mla and Htan Dah were absent, and then someone else was. At the beginning of another morning class, Wah Doh used his new letter-writing skills to compose me a note:

But then, finally, after a full week of meetings and two full weeks of teaching, everyone felt comfortable with me and had more time and turned in their homework and together we pressed grammatically onward—coordinating conjunctions, and conjunctive adverbs, and “We use articles before singular nouns, you guys, seriously, in English, every time”—starting off the next week with revitalized attendance, including several new beginner students who’d just returned to live in Office Two from a trip inside. Except then, one morning, though he’d left Office One on a motorbike immediately behind Htan Dah and me, Ta Mla didn’t show up for class.

HISTORICALLY SPEAKING,
Thais kind of hate the Burmese. In the sixteenth century, one of Burma’s fierce conquering kings, Bayinnaung, vanquished kingdoms from India to Laos, gaining still more territories when regions preemptively surrendered at the very prospect of his attack. When he asked his next-door neighbor Siam for a white elephant, that sacred animal of Buddhist reverence, it refused. Bayinnaung’s army invaded and took four, plus the king, along with thousands of other captives, and sacked the capital, Ayutthaya. Then the crown prince of Siam slew the crown prince of Burma on elephant-back in battle. Then, in the eighteenth century, Burma’s King Alaungpaya launched his own invasion of Ayutthaya, grand city of temples and art and palaces covered in gold, and demanded submission as the emperor of the universe. When Siam refused, Alaungpaya took Chiang Mai and all of what is now northern Thailand, and re-sacked Ayutthaya, burning the whole magnificent thing to the ground.

To this day, a lot of Thais are still pretty mad about that, and the relationship between the two countries has continued to smolder. Every Thai student learns that the jerky Burmese committed atrocities against them and their capital. Burmese military officials have been overheard at embassies making fun of the Thais for being whiny bitches. Newspaper clippings document scuffles that still go down on
the border: “Thai and Burmese troops have clashed twice in the past two years”; “Four Thai rangers were reported to have confronted 100 Burmese soldiers on the border near Phu Nam Rawn after the troops intruded into Thailand. . . . After tense negotiations the intruders stepped back into Burmese territory with the excuse that they ‘did not see the Thai flag’ which fluttered on a tall tree.”

And so, historically, the Thais have found common cause with the KNU, which happened to have an army positioned between them and their former war enemy. They had some common ideology, too. Though factions of communist leanings and alliances within the KNU developed and caused rifts in the early days, the organization ended up even more staunchly anti-communist than it had been during its alliance with the KMT. (Super-Christian, as well, with a Seventh Day Adventist president at its helm, strictly barring drugs and adultery and even booze.) These Karen may have been rebels, but they were no pinkos. Eventually they were wearing shirts that said “Karen Freedom Fighter: Anti-Drug, Anti-BSPP [Burma Socialist Programme Party], Anti-Burmese Communist . . . KAW THOO LEI—Never Accept Communism.” It was a pretty smart thing to put on a shirt. Who wouldn’t help these drug-eschewing, communist-hating Jesus-lovers?

Well, not the United States and all its arms and soldiers and democracy, which is probably what the KNU was going for. But Thailand did! In the ’60s, the country was terrified that the tide of communism might wash right over it. It was fighting a commie uprising within its own borders; China was supporting communists in Burma, some of whom were making worrisome alliances with the ethnic Shan armies on the northern border; the Karen had fought alongside the Thai- and US-backed KMT, had been a solid buffer against the Burmese for the British, and controlled plenty of teak to be plundered; and the Thais never really liked the Burmese anyway. So they sold the Karen arms and provided them sanctuary on Thai soil.

But nothing paves over old hatreds like money. As Thailand developed politically and economically, it made friends with Burma on paper,
cutting a trade agreement in 1990. And though the two countries have had a few mild modern military skirmishes, a full-on Burmese declaration of war on Thailand isn’t much of a threat anymore. But as a vestige of the good old Red Scare days, Thailand was, as I soon realized, still KNU-friendly.
²²
The Burmese exile paper
The Irrawaddy
mentioned a “KNU colonel”
²³
who was arrested in Thailand for transporting illegal migrants and firearms—which sounds pretty serious—but almost immediately released. A report in the Thai newspaper
The Nation
told of an accusation by the Burmese government that the Thais were giving leftover ammunition to the Karen guerrillas after joint US-Thai Cobra Gold military exercises. When my housemates’ arrests led to jail, they often called the KNU, which sent someone who could negotiate a cheaper bribe to get them out. When they made car trips inside Thailand, they were accompanied by KNU soldiers, in whose company they could more likely pass through Thai checkpoints.

Without KNU soldiers, my coworkers, who didn’t even have citizenship papers from Burma, much less documents saying they could hang around Thailand, traveled at great risk. The UN issued cards to some refugees that allowed them to travel in certain places, but the system for dispensing them was erratic, dependent on the camp where you were registered and when you’d got there. Htan Dah’s wife, for example, had a pink card and could travel back and forth from camp to Mae Sot. But neither Htan Dah nor Htoo Moo nor Ta Mla had cards, and so technically they could travel nowhere without the possibility of arrest.

The Blay was the only one who could go wherever the hell he wanted, because he had the best card of all: a Thai citizen ID. One of my students had told me that these were available for eighty thousand baht—more than $2,000. I thought this a hefty price for some paperwork at
the embassy or whatever, but of course it turned out to be an entirely black-market affair. Htan Dah explained to Abby and me over dinner one night that refugees could pay a series of huge bribes to Thai cops, who’d then do some paperwork and photo fudging that would allow the refugee to take on a legal Thai identity—of a dead Thai person.

When the Karen settled on the Thai-Burma border, they settled on both sides of it. Had the British drawn their border a little differently, all those Karen may have ended up Thai Karen. Which probably would have been fine with the Karen and the Thais, who got along relatively well. “As regards those populations that are dependent on the King of Siam,” wrote a French archeologist appointed to the area at the turn of the twentieth century, “there is a hierarchy with the Siamese at the top of the social ladder and the Kariengs at the bottom. They all live quite content with their lot, moving in their proper spheres with some degree of independence.” In the late 1800s, Thai Karen were granted citizenship by King Chulalongkorn. The ruler was fond of the race—and of writing poetry.

He also wrote one about how Karen girls were hot but stinky.
²⁴

But some Karen settlers ended up as Burma’s Karen, and some of those are now refugees, with citizenship in no country. If Htan Dah
had eighty thousand baht—more than thirteen years’ worth of his wages—he could start calling around to people who knew people who could put him in touch with a Thai Karen village headman who knew a family who had a son that had been born within a few years of Htan Dah and had died. Over a period of many weeks, he told us, he could travel to the village, meeting the family, and to local Thai police precincts and administrative offices, hemorrhaging money to every person who helped him in the arduous process of assuming the citizenship of the dead guy.

At this point, Abby and I piped up that people paid a lot of money for fake IDs in the United States, too.

“Why do you buy fake ID in the United States?” Htan Dah asked.

“To buy beer,” we said, and Htan Dah kind of looked at us like we were idiots, which, at the moment, we were.