A Savage Dreamland

by David Eimer

  YANGON 2015

  Late October and the last days of the monsoon season seemed interminable. The rain had been falling since May, drumming off the metal roofs of houses and apartment blocks and flooding streets whose drains dated back to 1888. Mould had taken hold on walls and pavements, making the latter even more hazardous than usual. Now, when the rain stopped, the mercury rose quickly, resulting in a sticky, unpleasant heat. It was the final twist of the knife before November ushered in a few rain-free months of lower temperatures, the most pleasant time to be in Burma.

  Tim and I were in a beer station in Dagon Township, a mile north of downtown and south of the Shwedagon. We sat facing each other across a low wooden table, pockmarked with cigarette burns. Around us, the other customers – all men – sat with their legs crossed on plastic chairs, their longyi tucked up underneath them, sinking glasses of Myanmar Lager – the national beer – or sharing small bottles of Grand Royal, a local brand of whisky, and the spicy tea-leaf salads that often accompany alcohol in Burma.

  Outside, only the headlights of passing cars and a few dim street lamps penetrated the deep black of the night. But the semi-open-air, wood-framed building we were in was illuminated by strip lighting: dust-wreathed tubes that emitted a harsh white glare. Unlike a traditional English pub, with their separate bars and nooks shielded from view, there is no hiding place in a beer station. The television was showing a football match and a few ancient fans turned slowly on the ceiling, circulating gentle currents of smoky air around those sitting under them.

  No one moves to Yangon for the nightlife. Western-style bars are a new phenomenon and far too expensive for most locals. There are still only a small number of them in the city. Even the karaoke parlours, where you imbibe between songs, cost too much for the average person. Instead, ordinary people do their drinking at beer stations, like the one Tim and I were in. It is a predominantly male environment, as many Burmese women consider it disreputable to be seen in such surroundings.

  Pursing his lips, Tim made a kissing sound to attract one of the teenage waiters. It’s a uniquely Burmese way of getting service, although considered impolite in smarter restaurants. Two more beers arrived, we clinked glasses and Tim carried on telling me about how challenging it was returning to Yangon after more than a quarter of a century away.

  ‘It’s like moving back to a different country. So much has changed. It’s taken me a year just to find my bearings again,’ he said, sounding half exasperated and half excited. ‘Yangon was so quiet, so peaceful, when I was growing up here in the 1970s. We used to play on all the vacant land they are building on now. There was no television in Burma then, so my brother and I would sit out on the street and count the cars going by. We’d see maybe one or two an hour.’

  Life had moved on since both Tim’s childhood and my first visit five years before. The half-empty roads I had driven down from the airport in 2010 were a distant memory. Now they heaved with new cars, trucks and a fleet of buses with the name of the city of Busan written on their sides, part of an aid package from South Korea. Traffic jams had arrived in Yangon, just another consequence of modern life that Burma had previously avoided, and even the stray dogs had learned to look left and right when crossing the road.

  Accompanying the influx of vehicles were people like Tim: the Burmese who had gone into exile after the 1988 pro-democracy protests. The demonstrations had gone on for months, starting on university campuses in Yangon and then spreading across the country. But like every other attempt at ousting the junta, they ended in failure. Thousands died at the hands of the army, and many more were imprisoned or fled overseas.

  Now those émigrés were returning, along with others who had managed to leave Burma legally in search of a better life than the one offered by the military. Looking and speaking Burmese, but with different passports after having spent so long in Australia, Europe or the United States, the exiles weren’t locals anymore but nor were they foreigners like me. Instead, they were known in Yangon as ‘repats’, an amalgam of the words ‘returnee’ and ‘expatriate’.

  They were back because of the political and economic changes that had come in a rapid, dizzying procession since June 2010, when the generals swapped their jungle-green uniforms for longyi and announced the creation of a new political organisation, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP). Almost overnight, they transformed themselves into a nominally civilian government.

  Five months later, the former junta sprang an even bigger surprise by freeing Aung San Suu Kyi from fifteen years of on and off house arrest. She had emerged as the leader of the democracy movement and the principal opponent of the generals during the 1988 protests, when she co-founded the National League for Democracy (NLD) party. Since then, she had become the symbol of Burma’s suffering under military rule and her release was an unexpected shock both at home and around the world.

  By March 2012 I was in Yangon again, following Aung San Suu Kyi as she campaigned to become an MP at by-elections that saw the NLD win forty-three of the forty-five parliamentary seats contested. The locals in her future constituency had yet to adapt to the change in her status. Many still referred to her as ‘The Lady’: the pseudonym used for her before her release, when the mere mention of her name in public could result in arrest. Now, though, she was ‘Daw Suu’, or Auntie Suu, Daw being an honorific given to older Burmese women.

  With the generals seemingly gone, foreign aid, investment and loans started sloshing into Burma, unleashing a new, febrile energy. It was most obvious in Yangon and Mandalay, where those who could afford it scrambled to acquire previously unobtainable material possessions. But even in the countryside the slumber of the junta era was over, as people began moving to the cities in search of better-paid jobs, or headed to Thailand as migrant workers.

  More than anything else, Burma had embraced the mobile phone. In 2010, when my Blackberry went dark on arrival in Yangon, only North Korea had fewer mobile phones than Burma. Five years on and you could buy a Chinese-made handset for £20 and farmers who rode to their fields in ox carts were shouting into them. In the beer station Tim and I were surrounded by people sending, scrolling and swiping.

  Mobile phones presented men in particular with a problem, because the longyi most still wear doesn’t have pockets. They get round that by tucking them into the back of the garment. In the rainy season street vendors sell plastic wallets worn around the neck to keep the phones – the most treasured and expensive item for many people – dry.

  For Tim the lack of storage space in a longyi wasn’t an issue. He was in his usual jeans and short-sleeved shirt, his unkempt hair covered by one of the trilbies favoured by teens and twenty-somethings over the last few years. Tim is my age, fifty, so not especially young, but we both dress as if we have only just left college. ‘I didn’t wear a longyi for twenty-five years while I was in America. It feels weird putting one on now,’ said Tim.

  He had been back in Yangon for over a year, but Tim was still an exile, only now in the country of his birth. ‘Yangon doesn’t feel like home. Sometimes, I think I’ll leave again,’ he told me. ‘But you get to a point where your own needs are unimportant. Issues and causes are more important to me than where I feel comfortable. I feel satisfied with my life here, maybe not happy. But I don’t miss my job in the States.’

  Like many Burmese I had met, there was a quixotic streak in Tim. It was why he had swapped his Manhattan apartment and life as a financial analyst on Wall Street for a room in his sister’s house in Yangon, where he worked for almost nothing running a small NGO. That same idealism was perhaps what prompted him to turn his back on his privileged youth alongside the children of senior junta figures in the smart Yangon suburb of Golden Valley, and throw in his lot with the pro-democracy protestors back in 1988.

  His decision had come at a cost. Tim’s mother died in 2006, when any returning exile faced arrest, and so he had missed her funeral. His role as a cheerleader for his fellow students in 1988, encouraging
them to join the demonstrations, had meant that he had been forced to flee his homeland. ‘When I left in 1989 it was because I had no other options. They had already tried to arrest me a few times,’ recalled Tim.

  Not even the fact that his uncle had been a spokesman for Ne Win, the general who led the 1962 coup and who was still running Burma in 1988, could save him. Tim spent months in hiding around the country, before making an unlikely escape to the States by posing as a monk, one of a group travelling to Los Angeles for a meditation retreat. He picked up two degrees in California, before moving to New York for the last eight years of his quarter of a century away.

  Despite the political reforms that had allowed him to return to Yangon, he was still wary enough of the generals not to use his real name. Instead, Tim had taken the first name and surname of his grandfather, an English barrister. ‘He came to Burma as an official and had a relationship with a local woman, my grandmother. I still have my Burmese name, but it’s not on my passport. An Anglo name is a good disguise,’ he said with a wry smile.

  Names in Burma are nebulous anyway. Traditional surnames are unknown and most people employ composites of names previously used in their families, or choose symbolic, auspicious titles. It is considered perfectly normal to change them to mark different periods in one’s life. I thought Tim’s odyssey from Burma to Southern California, New York and back had given him the right to a new moniker.

  Compared to Tim, my journey to Yangon was far more mundane. I had made repeated visits to Burma since 2010, until I decided that I needed to be living here full time. This was a unique opportunity: both to chronicle the awakening of a country as it returned to the global fold after so long as a pariah state and to explore a fractured nation, much of which was closed to foreigners for decades. I have been roaming the backroads of Asia for as long as Tim was in exile, and Burma’s are some of the least-known of all.

  Moving to another country is always a leap of faith. But I found Burma to be a tougher prospect even than China, where I lived for seven years. The authorities were still getting used to the idea of westerners staying here, as opposed to visiting as tourists. My first hurdle was obtaining a long-stay visa, without which it is not possible to rent an apartment, and that can only be done before you arrive.

  Contacts in Yangon advised me to apply for a business visa. But writing is hardly a business in the conventional sense, and I lacked both a local company to employ me and the invitation letter required from them. Then I was given the name of Frankie, a travel agent in Bangkok who had a reputation for getting things done at Burma’s embassy in Thailand.

  Frankie was mournful and middle-aged, with a pageboy fringe and a soft drawl of a voice. On the wall behind his desk was a sign stating, ‘Don’t worry, ask Frankie’. I took the advice and explained my situation. He winced when I told him I wanted to live in Yangon to write a book. ‘You’ll never get a visa by saying that,’ he said.

  How would I get a visa then? ‘Everyone can be a businessman in Burma now,’ Frankie explained slowly, like a teacher for whom the summer holidays can’t come quickly enough. ‘There are a lot of opportunities opening up there. You could be trading, or going into partnership with a local company. And tourism is a big sector now. Lots of new tour companies are starting. How about working in the travel industry like me?’

  So it was decided. I was to be a tourism consultant: the potential business partner for a Yangon-based travel operator arranging tours for foreigners. For a financial consideration, plus two passport photos, Frankie would provide the necessary letters and deal with the embassy. By handing over the cash, not only would I get a visa but a new career as well.

  Of course, there was a catch: the visa system itself. As explained by Frankie, it was akin to the never-ending Buddhist pursuit of merit. My first visa would be a single-entry one for seventy days. Assuming I didn’t do anything to offend the authorities, the subsequent visa would be a double-entry one. The third would be multiple entry and valid for six months. Only after that would I reach the Nirvana of a year-long permit.

  Making merit is the goal of all devout Buddhists, for whom this is just one life of many. Doing good works is a way of ensuring that your next existence doesn’t see you reincarnated as a snake or a rat. Accumulating merit is taken especially seriously in Burma, one of the most religious countries in the world. Some of the former leaders of the junta have paid for giant gilded pagodas, in the hope that that will erase the litany of sins they committed during their time in power.

  Ordinary people set out jugs of water for any passer-by to refresh themselves, or are assiduous in handing food to the monks and nuns who make their daily rounds of neighbourhoods and villages collecting alms. Others give money to monasteries – the Shwedagon has ATMs for people to withdraw cash for donations.

  Our drinks finished, Tim headed back to his sister’s house and I set off up Shwedagon Pagoda Road towards Burma’s most sacred Buddhist site. Ahead, the gold zedi, or stupa, of the Shwedagon gleamed brilliant and bright, its colour accentuated by the darkness surrounding it, as it soared almost one hundred metres above the platforms and terraces that surround it.

  Much of Yangon is now a building site, as new apartment and office blocks zoom up, but the Shwedagon still stands in splendid isolation atop a small hill and remains visible from many of the city’s thirty-three townships, or neighbourhoods. It has always been Yangon’s focal point. In 1852 Charles Austen, brother of novelist Jane, used the Shwedagon to guide the invading fleet he was commanding into Yangon’s river at the beginning of the Second Anglo-Burmese War.

  Even now the Shwedagon is the true centre of Yangon, just as it was in 1583 when a Venetian merchant named Gasparo Balbi, the first European visitor to record his impressions of Dagon, as it was then known, observed the pagoda’s hold over the Burmese. Balbi wrote of how the Shwedagon, ‘is a place of great devotion amongst them and yearly multitudes of people come by sea and by land’.

  Day or night the complex is always busy. People stop by before or after work to pray, to promenade around the base of the vast zedi, or to sit and talk in its shadow. I preferred it in the early morning, arriving just as a pink dawn was breaking and the stupa began to glow until it appeared to be radiating rays of golden light. With everyone required to go barefoot, as at every Burmese pagoda, you could walk the marble-tiled floor in comfort, too, unlike later in the day when the sun heated the tiles up so much that you had to hop along.

  Almost every Burma journey starts at the Shwedagon, whether you are a tourist, expatriate or VIP, although not everyone goes to the lengths of putting on a longyi to visit, as Richard Nixon did in 1953. Somerset Maugham, who landed in Yangon in 1922, thought the sight of the towering zedi represented ‘sudden hope in the dark night of the soul’; a glimpse of heaven amidst the commercial cut and thrust of colonial Rangoon.

  To me, though, the pagoda captures all Yangon’s contradictions, corralling them in one single spot; a holy metaphor that you can walk around. Its likely origins as a Hindu shrine reveal how Yangon has always been a cosmopolitan settlement. The gold- and jewel-laden stupa acts as a reminder of how the city’s riches are nearly always out of reach for the vast majority of people who walk or travel for hours on overcrowded buses to pray beneath it.

  Above all, the shrine’s sheer longevity is a riposte to those who have sought to impose their own reality on Yangon, whether it was the Burmese kings of old, British colonists or the generals of the junta. The Shwedagon has survived wars, earthquakes and fires that burned the city below it to the ground. It predates the written Burmese language and is far older than the nation of Burma itself. No wonder all our journeys start here.

  1

  Down the Rabbit Hole

  15th Street was chaos. Cars were parked on both sides of the road, leaving just enough space in the middle of the street for vehicles to inch past the pedestrians and stray dogs avoiding the loose concrete slabs that passed for the pavements. Ladies selling vegetables out of baskets
occupied the top end of the road, along with a betel-nut vendor and a roadside food stand, a few plastic stools grouped around the proprietor, her noodles and condiments ranged on a table in front of her.

  Ahead of me, Nilar padded along in her velvet-cushioned, platform flip-flops, dressed demurely in a black htamein and white top, her face daubed with thanaka, a cream-coloured natural sunscreen made out of wood bark. Applying it with a generous smear across both cheeks and forehead, or sometimes in intricate patterns, is the first thing most Burmese women, and some men, do after waking up. Unique to Burma, thanaka is a guaranteed way of spotting natives of the country, whether they are working on a Thai island or in a Malaysian factory.

  Deftly sidestepping a man who was squatting on the pavement, Nilar came to a halt outside a dark doorway and turned to me as I joined her. ‘Everyone is trying to do their business. But there is no mutual understanding,’ she said with a sigh. Downtown’s congested streets, though, can be blamed on the British, like many of the problems Yangon grapples with.

  After taking full control of Burma in 1886 at the end of the Third Anglo-Burmese War and exiling its last king, Thibaw, to India, the British set about remaking Yangon in their own image. Or at least in the image of their other colonial possessions in Southeast Asia. Yangon was to mimic Penang and Singapore with its architecture, the role it would play as a port and trading hub and in how its indigenous population would be first swelled and then supplanted by Indian and Chinese immigrants.

  New streets were laid out on a symmetrical chessboard pattern, the standard design for freshly colonised cities. Major roads were named and minor ones numbered. But the lieutenant in the Bengal Engineers overseeing the planning decided that the smaller streets needed to be only thirty feet wide. By the 1920s, people were already complaining that they were too narrow. Now, even after individual streets have been designated as one-way traffic, travelling in downtown during the day is often a tediously slow process.