Saving Fish From Drowning (21 page)

“Ten it is,” Bennie said firmly. “I insist. It is, after all, Christmas.”

Walter said he would make the necessary phone call right away. He would meet Bennie at the border.

After they hung up, Bennie thrust his hands deep into his luggage to drag out the CDs he had brought. He flipped through a stack encased in vinyl sleeves: There it was:
The Phantom of the Opera.

What luck that he happened to have that exact one. And how about these? Diana Krall. Sarah Vaughan. Gladys Knight. He would cull a larger variety from the others, Dwight, Harry, Moff. They should contribute
something
. They got themselves into this fix. In fact, if Walter was delighted with ten, what would he do for twenty? He’d 1 3 8

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have the red carpet rolled out for them. A couple of CDs apiece, that’s what Bennie would ask of his fellow travelers. Two each, or he’d present them with the choice of staying in unruly Ruili for another four days.

It was a lovely collection, I thought: from Bono to Albinoni, Nirvana to Willie Nelson, the disparate musical tastes of twelve Americans who cheerfully gave their best.

Let it now be known that I, too, had given my best. The night before, I had visited Walter late in the night when he was in the farthest shores of his sleep, for that was where I realized I could be found, in dreams, memory, and imagination. The sensory was no longer of any use to my existence. But I could exist in a free-floating consciousness not anchored to any reality. My consciousness could overlap his, now that it was so permeable. There I gave to him osmotically the memory that I had called with an urgent request. “Walter,” I said, “you forgot to change the entry date to four days earlier, from the twenty-fifth to the twenty-first of December. We discussed this, remember?” He became upset, for he is a meticulous person who never neglects details.

When he promised to attend to this change of dates, I sang to him

“Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again” from
Phantom of the
Opera
. He was immediately seized with longing for his father, who was imprisoned more than ten years ago by the military regime and never heard from again. Such beautiful music, the most touching words. Thereafter Walter would long to hear those same words over and over, the ones I borrowed from the CD that I found in Bennie’s suitcase.

This dream did not fade as dreams naturally do. I swam with it back to the deepest part of his memory, to the subconscious recesses where anxious people become more anxious. And so, when Walter awakened the next morning, he had a sense of urgency. He hopped on his bicycle and went to the tourism office, then dashed to the gov1 3 9

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ernment office to have the paperwork recorded and stamped. He then collected the driver so that they might make their way to Ruili posthaste.

THE ROAD TO MYANMAR is lined with Beheading Trees, so called because the more you cut them down, the faster and thicker they grow back. So it’s been with rebels from various periods of China’s history. Once they take root, you can’t eradicate them completely.

Between the Beheading Trees were Eight Treasure Trees, whose pendulous leaves were large enough to cover the body of a child. And there were plenty of reckless children along the road who might soon need a death shroud. Three boys who appeared to be five or six danced atop the ten-foot-high loads of hay on the backs of mini–

tractor trailers, their parents seated up front, seemingly unconcerned. To my friends in the bus, however, the children looked as if they were about to suffer brain damage. Mercifully, the boys appeared to have remarkable reflexes. They tumbled onto their bottoms, laughing gleefully, then stood back up on their stubby legs to prepare for the next tumble.

“Oh my God!” Wendy cried while continuing to snap pictures of each near disaster.

“I can’t look,” Bennie moaned.

“There should be a law,” Marlena said.

Heidi stared ahead at the road for large ruts that would jostle the children to their deaths. Finally, the tractor trailer turned down a small lane and continued, the carefree children receding from my friends’ view. The closer the bus drew to the border, the more colorful the world became. Burmese women walked about in flowery-colored skirts, their heads with turbanlike wrappings on top of which they balanced baskets of goods destined for the open market.

On their cheeks, they had painted yellow patterns with a paste made 1 4 0

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from the bark of the thanaka tree. As with Shanghainese people, Burmese women prize pale skin. The paste supposedly affords sun-blocking properties. But I tried it on past tours and can tell you that the effect is quite drying. While it may shield the skin, it parches it to the appearance of cracked adobe. I cannot say it was flattering to my face. I looked like a dried-up clown doll.

Bennie had the CDs for Walter in a sack. Everything was falling into place. He would hand over the bribe and they would get the paperwork and be approved to enter. He hadn’t told Lulu, for fear that what Walter was doing was on the side of illegality. Let her think that they got in on their own good luck. This morning she had said simply, “We must try. And if we are success, your Myanmar tour guide, Mr. Maung Wa Sao, will meet you at the crossing place.”

At the Chinese border station, Lulu presented passports and documents to the uniformed police. Armed guards stood nearby. After ten minutes of inspecting and stamping and huffing with authority, the border police waved us on, and my friends waved back cheerfully, but no one returned their smiles. After a half a kilometer, the bus stopped in front of a large white gate.

“Soon you and I must say good-bye,” Lulu said. “In a few minutes, your Burmese tour guide will meet you and take you over the border into Muse.”

“I thought we already crossed,” Moff said.

“You have left China,” Lulu said. “But to leave one place is not the same as entering another. You are in Burma, but you have not crossed the official border. So you are in between.”

It suddenly struck me that what Lulu had said described exactly how I felt. In between.

“Oh, great—we’re in limbo,” Rupert said.

Lulu nodded. “Yes, limbo. You do not yet know which way is coming, which is going. In China we are very use to this situation.”

I wondered how long I would be in my own limbo. The Buddhists 1 4 1

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say a dead person stays three days around the body, then another forty-six before departing to the next incarnation. If that was the case, then I had yet another month or so to go. Not knowing the prospects, I feared them.

As if reading my thoughts, Marlena asked, “Where will you go after this?”

“Back to Mangshi airport,” Lulu said. “Another group is coming.” She looked at her watch.

“Does it ever get boring?” Roxanne asked. “Having to take care of people like us all the time—what a pain.”

“Oh, no. You are very easy, no trouble. Not boring or pain.”

“You’re too kind,” Bennie said. “What was your most difficult group?”

“No one is ever too much a difficulty,” she said diplomatically. But then she sighed, looked down, and said, “Oh, maybe one time, it was more difficulties than the others. . . . Yes, that time, it was great difficulties.” She forced a smile and went on: “I just took a big group to airport, we said good-bye, and I am leaving. A young Bai woman, she comes up very fast and right away is asking me, Hold my baby, sister, so I can grab my suitcase. She hurried away. Some minutes already are passing by, the baby is crying very softly, and I pulled the blanket and I am seeing this baby—oh, she is very new, and oh-oh, she has split lip, empty space from mouth to nose.”

“Cleft palate,” Vera whispered to Bennie.

“Two hours later, I knew this woman is not coming back, so I took this baby to my parents’ house, decide what I should now be doing.

In baby’s blanket, we find money, hundred yuan, like ten dollars U.S., and also is note in simple writing, saying this baby girl is three days old. So we are not knowing what to do. We decide on keeping this baby. We make many plans, make clothes. And we know this baby will be needing the special surgery. But soon we are finding out she is not eligible because she is not registered to anybody. To register her, 1 4 2

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I have to adopt. But to adopt, I must be thirty. At that time, I am only twenty-five.”

My friends were absolutely silent.

“My parents also cannot adopt. Too old to qualify. So we are stuck, too young, too old. Even so, paper or no paper, we agree, we try to raise her ourself. But even we earn the money for the special surgery, she cannot have, because to hospital mind, she is not registered person. She is nobody. She does not exist. Then we know, with us, no future for her. She can never go school. She can never marry husband. In all situations, she is nobody. Because of this in-between situations, we finally decide it is better this baby is adopted by other people. Many American tourists already told me, Yes, yes, we want her, give her to us. But I decided, better she lives with people who look like her. That is why I gave her to a Japanese couple. So this experience, it is the time I had the most difficulties.” She stopped, and nobody spoke.

“That is the saddest story I’ve heard in a long, long time,” Marlena finally said.

“Sad only a short time,” Lulu said. “Today she is six years old.

Her face is so beautiful, mouth and nose already fixed, and no scar.

Every year I see her. She is always calling me ‘Auntie’ in Japanese.

Her parents are always calling me a good person.”

“But for you to give her up . . .” Marlena sympathized.

“My thinking is this: Her original mother, she did what she must.

I, her in-between mother, I did what I must. That Japanese couple, they also did what they must. One day, this little girl will grow up, and she will be doing what she must. So you see, we all do what we must.”

At that moment, a slim young man with fine features boarded the bus. Lulu greeted him and exchanged documents. “Ladies, gentlemen, please to let me introduce Mr. Maung Wa Sao.”

There he stood, a slight young man of twenty-six, in a collarless 1 4 3

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white shirt and dark slacks. He had shiny dark hair, conservatively cut. And his eyes were remarkable: lovely, kind-looking, intelligent, and wise.

He addressed his new charges: “Please, I prefer that you call me Walter.”

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• 6•

SAVING FISH

FROM DROWNING

Crossing the border into Burma, one can spot the same pretty flowers seen from the bus window in China: yellow daisies and scarlet hibiscus, lantana growing as plentifully as weeds. Nothing had changed from one country to the next, or so it appeared to my friends.

But in fact all had suddenly become denser, wilder, devouring itself as nature does when it is neglected for a hundred years. That was the sense I had in crossing that border, as if I, like H. G. Wells in his time machine, possessed the same consciousness but had been plopped in the past. Moff and Harry immediately took to calling each other “Rudyard” and “George,” after Kipling and Orwell, the chroniclers of old colonial Burmah. Like my friends, I, too, have found the literature of yesteryear intoxicating, engorged with the per

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fumes and pastiches of the exotic and languid life: Victorian parasols, stern pith helmets, and fever dreams of sex with the natives.

As for the more recent stories about Burma, how they pale. They are mostly distressing reports. The stories go more or less like this: Miss Burma is now married to a lunatic despot who has changed her name to Mrs. Myanmar. She has gone to live in Oblivion, so no one knows where she is. The husband is vile and beats his wife. The children have been abused as well, and now they bear scars and are hiding in corners. Poor Miss Burma, the former beauty queen, she would be gorgeous still if it weren’t for the gaunt limbs, the missing eye, the lips mumbling the same babble.

Naturally, we all have great sympathy, but who wants to read stories like that? Memoirs of sacrilege, torture, and abuse, one after another—they are so difficult to read, without a speck of hope to lift you, no redeeming denouements, only the inevitable descent into the bottomless pits of humanity. When you reach the end of such stories, you can’t sigh deeply and say to yourself, “Oh my, how glad am I to have read
that
.” Don’t tut-tut me. I
know
it’s an utterly ugly sentiment, and I would never have admitted it in public while I was alive.

Nobody would, if they had any common sense. But tell me honestly, who does read political books on horror-ridden regimes except scholars of history and those studying that particular part of the world? Others may claim they have, but more likely they skim the descriptions in
The New York Review of Books
, and then say that they are informed, qualified to make judgments. How do I know? I’ve done it. I just never saw the point in spending days and days reading stories only to disturb myself with problems I was powerless to fix.