Under the Dragon (10 page)

‘And you are very handsome,’ she replied.

‘I love you bye bye bye,’ cried the other children, running away with their embarrassment, then threading the collected blossoms into garlands for their mothers to sell in the morning.

‘So where to tomorrow?’ asked Katrin. The evening air smelt of caraway and rattan, like the inside of an Eastern basket.

‘I want to find out more about Ni Ni.’

‘Do you really mean Ni Ni?’ she asked, raising her eyebrows. ‘Or her story?’

‘I mean the Rehabilitation Centre,’ I replied, correcting myself. ‘Colonel Than promised to arrange it.’

The next morning I was woken by memory. An eerie song echoed between the musty buildings, rang off crumbling walls, reached up into our hotel room. The deep, clear voice eased me out from a dream of industrious spiders and rare birds. I stood on the bed and looked out at the dawn.

‘
Pe-byouk
,’ called the voice. The sky was tinged by the flush of morning, and from a distance the singer looked no more than eleven or twelve years old. ‘
Pe-byouk
,’ she called again, her words pealing along the urban chasm. On her small shoulders she carried a yoke. Two lined bamboo baskets swung at her waist. ‘
Hawdiga hawdiga.
’ A yawning customer stepped out from a doorway, a banknote crumpled in her palm. The singer set down her load in the dust and spooned out a measure of beans.
Pe-byouk
are boiled beans, the staple food – along with rice – of a hungry people. Cyclists wheeled around the pair, carrying yard-high stacks of government newspapers. A raven dropped from a palm tree to pick at the rubbish adrift in a fetid alley. A few kyat changed hands and, before the young street vendor twisted herself back under the yoke, she paused to catch a loose strand of her hair. Only then, in that very feminine movement, did I realise that her slight frame and the soft morning light belied her true age. The singer was no child, but a mature woman. Her deep voice alone had not been checked by malnutrition. She called out again, her sales pitch more music than words, and carried on down the hot road. I remembered the same song, sung by her daughter or niece, on a similar street at an earlier dawn.

‘We’re not against prostitution,’ explained Simon Zehnder, a pragmatic Austrian with deep-set eyes. He spread his broad hands as if to embrace the five hundred women and children who had been helped by the Centre in its four years of existence. ‘It’s a part of society.’

Colonel Than, who seemed to know everyone in Rangoon, had told us, ‘Zehnder is a white-moustached rhinoceros in spectacles. If you go up his nose he’ll attack.’ I had promised not to irritate him and asked the Colonel to join us at the meeting. ‘I’ll take a rain check on that recce, my dear,’ he had replied.

A taxi had carried us west past Virgin Land Tours and Travel, beyond the signs for Foster’s lager and Pulpy C fruit drink, to the low-slung white building behind a green hedge. Katrin and I had left our sandals at the door and walked barefoot across the polished floor into the sparse office.

‘Our approach is pragmatic,’ continued Zehnder, leaning his chair back against the blank wall. He was a big man dressed in a pressed white shirt and black trousers. ‘We simply want to offer people a choice.’

In a lifetime of charity work he had cared for the orphans of war and famine, escorted humanitarian convoys into Bangladesh, watched friends die in Cambodia and East Timor. His compassion had been aroused when reading newspaper reports of the Burmese government’s execution of former prostitutes found to be infected with the HIV virus. At the time aid agencies – like all things foreign – had been banned from the country. But his rhino-like tenacity had ensured that the Centre became the first non-government organisation to be granted access to Burma.

‘But how could I, a European male, win the trust of the women?’ he asked. ‘It was Ma Aye Min who ensured our success.’

Ma Aye Min, the Rehabilitation Centre’s manager, perched on the edge of the bamboo sofa. ‘We think of ourselves as enablers,’ she said, ‘enabling people to think for themselves.’

She had been born into a wealthy Rangoon family, grown up with security and a good education. But rather than flaunt her advantages they had made her aware of those less fortunate. She had trained as a social worker, become the rising star of the Ministry of Health, until rapid promotion had taken her away from case work. She had paid off her bond and left the ministry to continue to work with individuals in need, and Zehnder.

‘The families we deal with have no money,’ said Ma Aye Min, an eagerness speeding her speech. ‘When Simon says that he has no money it means, maybe, that there is only ten dollars in his pocket. When I say it I might have a hundred kyat. But they have nothing, not even two kyat, and sometimes no father, never any state benefits, living with four or five relatives in a room so small that the men cannot lie out straight to sleep.’ I recalled Ni Ni’s father curled up beneath his worthless coins and banknotes in the tiny room on the Prome Road.

‘Into this world the girls grow up, full of ambition and natural desires,’ she continued. ‘And because there is no money they have to work, from the age of ten or eleven, helping to run the family cooking-oil stall, trying to make a few kyat each day just to buy food.’ She ducked her head, trying to hide her mouth behind her hands. ‘Under these circumstances, if the slightest problem befalls them, if a thief steals their food or the mother falls ill, they are thrown into a desperate situation. The girl must look for – how to call him? – a benefactor to lend her, say, three thousand kyat. This loan must be paid back
every
evening, so the girl will buy two or three sacks of rice to sell by the
viss
on the pavement, and give him 3,500 kyat at the end of the day.’

‘From which he will give her a hundred kyat for herself,’ added Zehnder, staring at us over his spectacles.

‘Or she might get a job on a construction site, carrying bricks and sand. It is very physical work and there are many men there, and often this is a girl’s first experience.’

‘They hang around tea shops and talk to friends and often they just fall into it. They grow familiar with the benefactor or a builder and keep on fulfilling his wishes and that’s it.’ Zehnder snapped his fingers. ‘The parents don’t ask any questions because the money buys the family a new cooking pot or pays for a younger brother to go to school.’

‘A younger brother?’ asked Katrin.

‘Yes,’ nodded Ma Aye Min. ‘The girls have nothing. They’re trapped, and often see their actions as the only means of escape.’

‘It’s our job to make things seem less inevitable to them.’

At first the Centre had counselled only the commercial sex workers repatriated from Bangkok, then it had extended its care to their families, their friends and in time to other vulnerable women on the point of being drawn into Rangoon’s own burgeoning sex industry.

‘How do you find them?’ Katrin asked Ma Aye Min.

‘Sometimes I go out into the neighbourhoods. Sometimes they are introduced to me by girls who we’ve already helped. But wherever it begins I have to be very careful in my communication. For example I never wear gold earrings or bracelets, but often the girls, who claim to be poor, appear wearing jewellery or an expensive shirt. At first I thought that they were misleading me and I asked them how they could afford it. They started to cry and told me not to be sarcastic with them. Then I began to understand that their appearance was an illusion, a wish to give a good impression. They would have borrowed the shirt from a neighbour, the bracelet from a friend. I show them that it is not necessary, that I am interested in them as individuals, and next time they wear normal clothes.’

‘It can be difficult to restore their individuality, especially if for years their only identity was as a number in a brothel window.’

‘They offered to help people and were abused, so when real help comes they are suspicious of it.’

‘And you can’t simply tell them “Don’t do it,”’ I said.

‘If I did they certainly would go straight out and do it doubly,’ laughed Ma Aye Min, raising her hands again to cover her mouth.

‘In the beginning they’re always reluctant to trust us.’

‘No, instead I say, “Please consider this alternative,” and we offer them training and guidance.’

‘Or money,’ added Zehnder. ‘The first women all wanted to start businesses, so we helped them to set up spice stalls or snack stands but it wasn’t a success. They had no schooling and the businesses failed because established traders were jealous and undercut the new competition.’

‘They failed too when a child fell ill and the capital was needed for medicine. When you’re so poor you’re desperate. The basics are just not there.’

‘So we learned to concentrate on education, offering vocational training here at the Centre, teaching the women how to weave baskets in a sheltered workshop.’

‘Simon then pushes them, demanding better and better work, guiding them, for I, like the girls, find it difficult to plan ahead. It is a flaw in the Burmese character,’ admitted Ma Aye Min. ‘And you know, they begin to do really good work and we tell them so and it makes them cry.’

A young woman in a salmon-pink
longyi
slipped into the room carrying a tray. She knelt beside the table and poured four tiny cups of tea. Ma Aye Min thanked her as she withdrew, but her eyes remained lowered throughout the episode.

‘We share knowledge; we never impose it,’ Ma Aye Min continued, her voice softer. ‘You see, I too have a great deal to learn.’ Her humility, and the acceptance that understanding requires an exchange, touched us. ‘I look after five hundred girls now, and they’re like our family. They look after me too; they’re quiet when I’m quiet, excited when I’m excited. I’m unmarried and I don’t have – or need – anyone else.’

‘Only last week one of the first women we helped came back,’ said Zehnder, ‘in her company car. We’d paid for her to go on a secretarial course and she found work with a joint-venture company.’

‘But another girl from the same group fell back into prostitution. An old client from Bangkok recognised her and threatened to reveal her history unless she slept with him. We lost her, I’m afraid.’

I wanted to ask Zehnder and Ma Aye Min if they remembered Ni Ni.

‘Ni Ni?’ he might have replied. ‘Of course. She came to us from Bangkok in the first group of ninety returnees. Half of them were diagnosed HIV positive.’

‘She was a quiet one,’ Ma Aye Min might have added, ‘but I think she rather enjoyed being teased by the other girls. Everyone likes a little attention. She died in our first year.’

‘We never knew much about her, other than her skill with her hands. She rarely spoke about her past.’ Zehnder might then have pointed to a finely woven container on his desk. ‘That’s one of her baskets there.’

‘Maybe you’d like to meet the girl she trained?’

We walked back across the polished floor and through a shaded almond tree courtyard. In a large, bright, open studio dozens of young women sat around long workbenches making bamboo baskets. We were introduced to a young maker with sensitive hands. She could have been Ni Ni’s student. I didn’t see the need to ask her about the past, for her careful, detailed weaving kept a memory alive. Katrin showed her the photograph of Scott’s basket.

‘I am pleased to have met you,’ said Ma Aye Min, her eye on the clock. ‘Thank you for being interested in our work. But please will you forgive me; I cannot be late for an appointment.’

‘Forty years ago when I first came to South-East Asia,’ said Zehnder as we returned to the main building, ‘Thailand was a modest country where men never touched women in public. Then came the American soldiers on r&r leave from the Vietnam War, and now in the clubs in Bangkok girls dance on counters and tables with numbers pinned to their petticoats, letting customers push money up inside them.’ He considered us again over his glasses. ‘Burma today is like Thailand was: a virgin land. Soon the jumbo jets will fly to Rangoon direct from Frankfurt and Los Angeles. The drop-outs who now live in Goa or Pattaya will come here too – for drugs, cheap living and that virginity – bringing with them their shit. Already I see Western businessmen with pretty Burmese girls on their arms, and I know that the man is only here for a few weeks or months. So when he flies away, what becomes of the woman? Is she a prostitute? Why blame the female because she expresses love or needs money? Who is wrong here?’

At the door we found our shoes and shook Zehnder’s hand. ‘There are those who disapprove of my working in Burma, of cooperating with this government,’ he said, not releasing his grip. ‘So I ask them, “Are you a politician or do you want to help people?” I don’t believe in forced labour or torture, but these girls must be helped. And their leaders must be given time to learn to think another way.’

That afternoon in the Maha Bandoola Park a man wearing a loincloth walked a treadmill to drive a ferris wheel. Above him its young riders squealed and chattered without a care in the world. Colonel Than sat nearby on a bench in the children’s playground, reciting Pali texts. ‘Ahoy, my dears,’ he hailed as we approached him through the clouds of exhaust fumes rolling off the Sule Pagoda traffic circle. ‘How did you get on?’

‘We’re off to Pagan,’ I told him.

‘A dusty place of spooky memories,’ he replied. ‘It used to be bewitched by
nats
and bandits, now it’s the tourists who haunt it. Why do you want to hare all the way up there?’

I told him about our visit to the Centre. Ni Ni’s student – or, at least, the woman who could have been Ni Ni’s student – had recognised the basket in the photograph. Its weaving had reminded her of the old Pagan style. We knew from his books that Scott had travelled to the ruined city at the end of the nineteenth century, so it seemed to be our most sensible destination. ‘There’s an express bus going as far as Meiktila tonight,’ I said.

‘Fair enough,’ said Than. ‘You’ve got on your shoes so we’d better pull up our socks. You’ll need to change money.’

In Burma, where organisation is often languid and careless, bureaucracy has the complexity of the Gordian knot. ‘The hotel offered us 118 kyat to the dollar,’ I said as we strolled around the
chinthe
lion sculptures of the Independence Monument. ‘They told us we’d get 120 kyat on the street, but I thought it might be risky.’