The Emperor Far Away (30 page)

This was just the family’s Pangshang residence. The general and his wife were at their country house, in their home village three hours north. ‘We have houses in Tachileik and Yangon too,’ said Yilan. There was also property elsewhere in Pangshang, as well as in Thailand and Yunnan. Yilan told us excitedly that she and A-sui were overseeing the decoration of a new hotel the family were opening in Simao, a town in southern Yunnan with a large Wa population.

I never asked Yilan what exactly the general’s role in the UWSA was and Justin hadn’t talked to her about it either. I felt it was desperately inappropriate to ask my hostess if her father was a drug lord. But with vehicles worth close on half a million dollars parked in front of the house and a property portfolio spread across four countries, if you count Wa State as a nation, it was clear the general wasn’t just involved in overseeing military strategy.

Adding to the impression that the general was no conventional soldier was the appearance of James, his son-in-law and the husband of A-sui. He was a bear of a man, small in height but built like a rugby prop forward, his sleeveless vest revealing powerful shoulders covered in tattoos. Aged twenty-three, like A-sui, and from a prominent Wa family, James was already a major in the UWSA. The whole dynamic of the evening shifted with his arrival, the girls becoming less effusive and fading into the background, as James directed his conversation to Justin, Piero and me.

James was the original alpha-male and trailed supporters in his wake – a few of the family bodyguards. Dressed in a mix of UWSA uniforms and civvies, they were exceedingly polite and friendly to us but it was obvious that crossing them would be extremely unwise. They were taller than most Wa men, who don’t normally get above 5 foot 8, and, so Justin said, martial arts experts. With their easy, muscled manner of moving, I believed him.

Yilan and A-sui drifted off, saying they would see us tomorrow, and it became clear why there was a table-tennis table on the terrace. James was an avid fan and we had to take turns to play him. I disgraced myself, hardly able to get the ball over the net, but Justin was good enough to win a few games while Piero lost in style, playing his shots with the panache of a Latin tennis player.

It was a surreal scene. Like everywhere in South-east Asia, night descended swiftly, shutting out the sun as if someone had flicked a light switch, leaving the ridiculously grand chandelier to illuminate the games. The bodyguards acted as ball boys, chasing across the terrace after errant shots, while young servant girls padded around silently in bare feet, replenishing glasses, supplying cold towels at the end of each game and emptying ashtrays as soon as a cigarette was stubbed out in one.

Ping-pong was just the start of the evening’s entertainment. Around nine, James laid down his bat and summoned us to a room at the back of the house. Unlike the rest of the home, it was a spartan space with bare walls, decorated only with a few chairs, a table, cupboard and large TV. Next door was another room with a couple of beds in it, where the bodyguards could rest when they weren’t needed. ‘This is my office. I come here to get away from my wife and kids,’ said James, speaking in the English he had learned in Yangon.

Despite the Wa’s animosity towards the state of Myanmar, there have always been close contacts between the UWSA and the government. The heroin and
yaba
produced in Wa-controlled territory could not be smuggled out of the country without the collusion of senior officials. That makes it necessary for the Wa chiefs to speak Burmese. As the UWSA is very much a family business, their male children, like James, spend time at school in Yangon to learn the language. In contrast, Yilan and A-sui could barely speak Burmese; they had mostly been educated in Kunming.

Friends of James arrived and the room grew crowded. The bodyguards hustled around collecting half-empty plastic bottles of water, tin foil and straws from the cupboard, which they started to join together expertly. ‘
Yaba
,’ mouthed Piero. Sure enough, a tin full of small, bright-red pills emerged on the table. The water bottles, tin foil and straws were the paraphernalia needed to smoke them.

Yaba
is a Thai word, meaning ‘crazy medicine’. It is a highly addictive form of speed, a mix of methamphetamine and caffeine that was once legal in Thailand but is now proscribed there and everywhere else in Asia. Far cheaper than cocaine or ecstasy, it is the drug of factory workers and farmers and is popular everywhere in South-east Asia. But it can also be found in southern China and across India and Bangladesh, Japan and even North Korea.

Some time in the early 1990s, the UWSA began to diversify into the production of
yaba
. Opium requires land and labour. But to make
yaba
all you need to do is kit out a shack in the hills with some rudimentary equipment and a supply of chemicals. There are now so many jungle labs in Wa State that the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that the traffic in little red pills and other methamphetamines like ice is worth $15 billion a year, making it by far Myanmar’s most lucrative industry.

Although it comes in pill form,
yaba
is usually smoked in the same way a heroin user chases the dragon. The pill is placed on a piece of tin foil, a lighter flame is played underneath it until the pill starts smoking and then the fumes are inhaled. James and his friends, though, smoked
yaba
the sophisticated way. The bottle, straw and tin foil combination constructed by the bodyguards acts to burn off some of the pills’ impurities, while cooling the smoke by passing it through the water in the bottom of the bottle.

Before long, it became clear that the
yaba
was for us. While James was indulging in his own personal supply of ice, he insisted Justin, Piero and I start smoking the
yaba
along with his chums. Just as playing table tennis was compulsory, so was amphetamine abuse. The bodyguards, like good soldiers, followed his orders rigorously, not letting more than a few minutes go by between each pill being smoked before another bottle was held up for us and straws placed in our mouths.

Soon the room was filled with the distinctive, chocolate-sweet smell of
yaba
smoke. We were all suddenly more alert and talkative, full of energy despite a day spent travelling, yet also both hyper and confused from the drug. As the bodyguards started to double the hit by loading two pills instead of one on to the tin foil, I began to wonder where my
yaba
initiation was going to end.

Next to me, one of James’s friends was smoking a water pipe. A common sight in rural Yunnan, they are long cylinders with a little water in the bottom and a steel funnel sticking out of one side where tobacco is placed, the liquid acting to cool the rough smoke produced by the locally grown weed. But the sickly smell emanating from the water pipe of James’s friend indicated he was using opium instead of tobacco. He offered the pipe around and we started to smoke that too, thinking it might counteract the
yaba
, which was already toying with our nervous systems, tensing our muscles and jerking us up in our chairs.

A DVD started playing. It was hardcore European porn, featuring large blonde women with over-sized fake breasts moaning loudly in German. ‘I like western women,’ said James, smiling broadly. ‘They have big asses and tits.’ He had a beautiful Wa wife next door, but European blondes were as exotic to James as A-sui was to me and he wanted what he couldn’t have. I taught him the meaning of the word ‘curvy’, my main contribution to the evening, while James peppered Justin with questions about life in New York, talking wistfully of his desire to visit America.

He was drug-dreaming; senior UWSA figures are wanted criminals in the US. In Wabang, James was a god: an untouchable scion of its ruling class with unlimited resources to do what he liked. But Pangshang is a gilded cage, a place the Wa elite cannot escape from. Even though James had a Chinese passport, like many Wa State residents, Yunnan and Thailand were as far as he could go before questions would be asked about what exactly he did in his pseudo-country.

Time seemed to have stopped. But after midnight we all staggered out and piled into James’s pick-up truck, the back of which was emblazoned with a bumper sticker proclaiming, ‘Motherfucker Wants To Kill You That’s Right’. With hip-hop blaring and James’s friends and bodyguards following us, we drove in a convoy to the centre of Pangshang, passing the main Wa government building with its teenage sentries and the twenty-four-hour casino, where equally youthful prostitutes waited outside for customers.

Arriving at a nightclub, we were greeted with deference and ushered into a large private room, its windowless walls decorated in black and silver and lined with plush leather sofas which we sank into. The bodyguards were even more solicitous and protective here, making sure we always had a fresh beer to hand, while escorting us when we visited the dance floor or the toilet. We were temporary members of James’s gang now and so their responsibility.

Ten young women lined up in front of us, eyes demurely down to the floor. They were hostesses, whose job is to take care of the club’s high-paying customers and sometimes to go home with them. As the guests of honour, Justin, Piero and I were instructed to pick one each. The rest dispersed to James and his friends. All were from Yunnan and were mostly Han. My companion was a nineteen-year-old from Lancang. She had been lured to Pangshang by its reputation as a town where people have more money than they know what to do with, and the chance of earning far more than she could as a migrant worker elsewhere.

For the next five hours we sat in the room drinking, playing liar’s dice with the girls, where the object is to fool the other person into thinking you have higher dice than they do and the loser has to drink, and singing karaoke. Every so often, more
yaba
, which the girls refused to touch, would materialise in front of us. Before long, the walls felt like they were closing in on me. The smoke from the
yaba
and hundreds of cigarettes was stifling. As the night went on and on I was rendered barely capable of speech, although I felt no urge to sleep.

Only at dawn were we able to escape, driven back to James’s office where some of the group carried on drinking and smoking opium. I tried to sleep. After a couple of hours of lying on my bed wide awake, I went to find Justin and Piero. They hadn’t slept either and we decided to go into town. We walked uncertainly, like passengers at a distant airport just off a long flight. It was
yaba
-lag; we had skipped a night to emerge in a strange new country where the rules were very different.

Even in the morning sun, Pangshang defied any sense of normality. The casino was still crowded with punters, and soldiers with their guns were striding around. Two teenagers were carrying a tiger’s claw. They told us they had killed the animal in the hills and were going to sell the claw to a purveyor of traditional Chinese medicine. Using the body parts of rare animals in herbal remedies is now illegal in China, but demand for those medicines and aphrodisiacs remains high. Pangshang is full of dispensaries displaying leopard skulls, bear bladders and the remains of other animals I couldn’t identify.

At the main market, the local Wa women down from the hills in their traditional dress – black, bonnet-like hats and striped long skirts – were far outnumbered by Chinese Wa in western clothes. They commute daily from Yunnan to work. ‘Pangshang is better for business than Menglian,’ one woman told me. ‘It’s bigger and there’s more money here.’ There were also Han from further afield. ‘I came ten years ago because I had a friend doing business here and it sounded so mysterious,’ said a man from Hunan Province who was selling jeans.

Along with the other Chinese, he was unconcerned about living in a city controlled by drug traffickers and where children carry automatic weapons. ‘Pangshang is much safer than China. There’s no petty crime here. I don’t have to worry about people stealing from my stall, or business rivals trying to do bad things to me,’ he said. His only gripe was culinary. ‘I like the Wa but I can’t eat their food. If there wasn’t any Chinese food here, I’d starve.’

There was no danger of that, not with so many restaurants run by Han migrants, as well as an unlicensed outlet of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Its owners had brazenly copied the Colonel Sanders logo, packaging and recipes. They were safe. I thought it unlikely that any KFC executives would pass through Pangshang. There were western restaurants too, alongside Japanese and Korean ones. At lunchtime, we met Yilan in a café offering pasta, cakes and coffee, as well as Cuban cigars and single malt whiskies. It wouldn’t have been out of place in Beijing or Shanghai.

Yilan’s fiancé Ngo joined us. A year older than her, skinny and mild-mannered with a thick head of black hair and the beginnings of a moustache, Ngo was also the son of a general but a very different character to James. He was a rich kid with a social conscience. ‘Some of my family live in Thailand now. I could leave too, but I want to stay and help my people, so I give money to villages so they can build houses and buy food,’ he said.

Ngo was keen to show us the work he was doing. After lunch, we climbed into his three-litre pick-up truck. ‘I’m famous for how fast I drive,’ he said, grinning. ‘But don’t worry. I’ve been driving since I was ten.’ Piero and I hung on tight in the back as Ngo sped uphill through Pangshang’s northern suburbs. The houses here were the biggest I had seen yet. One was like a fortress, set behind high walls of grey stone and surrounded by a dry moat – a Wa version of a medieval castle. Ngo knew the owners. ‘It cost 20 million yuan [£2 million] to build.’