by David Eimer
Tedim’s most renowned missionary is Joseph Herbert Cope, who gave his name to the Cope Memorial Baptist Church. A white- and red-tiled building with two red steeples that rises above the main road through town, the church dates back to 1910, two years after Cope arrived in Chin from Philadelphia. He is legendary for devising a Roman alphabet for the Tedim dialect – every town and area in Chin State has its own local language – and translating the Bible into it.
Before arriving in Tedim I had already decided to attend the Christmas Day service at the Cope Memorial Church. But I discovered that there would be competition for my presence from other churches. ‘Brother, I see you are writing.’ I looked up to see a short, stocky, broad-faced man standing by my table in a tea shop. His hair was in a topknot and he wore round glasses. ‘I think you are a journalist or a writer. My name is John. I am a writer too.’
‘Brother’ is the standard greeting in Chin State between men who don’t know each other. We shook hands and I invited John to join me. Like many Chin he spoke good English. For the older generation it is often the consequence of a missionary education. Younger Chin pick up English from working in India and Malaysia. A familiarity with the gospels helps their grasp of the language as well. The Bible also provides the Chin with a stock of names to go along with the local ones they are given at birth.
John, though, had learned his English while studying to be a Catholic priest in Yangon. ‘I went to St Joseph’s Seminary for four years. Then I realised it was not my vocation to be a priest. My vocation was to have a family.’ There was no hint of regret or resignation from John over his decision to leave the priesthood, just a placid acceptance of his fate, signalled by a calm gaze. He was originally from Tonzang, a town north of Tedim and fifty miles south of the border with India’s Manipur State. Now John was thirty-one, married to a Tedim woman and father to two young daughters.
His writing career involved translating religious tracts from English into Burmese. ‘I’ve translated five books. The last one was a life of Mother Teresa. I’m translating 50 Questions about Catholicism now.’ His publisher was in India and I wondered if he got royalties, the question all writers ask. ‘No,’ he said with a brief grimace. ‘Some of the books are on their second and third editions now.’
He invited me to meet his family and asked where I was going to church at Christmas. He shook his head when I told him. ‘You don’t want to go there,’ said John. ‘Come to midnight Mass with me. The bishop is coming from Kalay. I’ll introduce you.’ I explained that I had never been to a Baptist service and so wanted to attend the Cope Memorial Church, but promised to come and meet the bishop on Christmas Day.
Rivalry between the different churches in Tedim is fierce, and there is some poaching of souls. John told me how one of his friends had fallen out with the local Catholic priest and so in a fit of pique had crossed over to the Evangelical Baptist Conference, the second largest Baptist congregation after the Cope Memorial Church and known by its initials ‘EBC’, and got himself rebaptised.
Another John, who I referred to privately as John the Baptist to distinguish him from John the Catholic in ecumenical matters, attempted subsequently to get me to join him at the EBC service. I wasn’t sure what the difference between the EBC and the Cope church was. ‘In the EBC we believe salvation is by grace alone. If you accept Jesus as your lord and saviour that is enough,’ explained John the Baptist. ‘The Cope Memorial Baptists believe you have to do some good works too. But we do good works anyway.’
Leaving John the Catholic at the tea shop, I went in search of lunch. Food, or rather where to find it over Christmas, was already occupying my thoughts. I had learned to my cost on previous visits to Chin State that there are hardly any restaurants and they are closed on Sundays and any Christian holiday, as are all shops, apart from those run by the handful of Buddhists. I hadn’t seen any Buddhist places in Tedim and I couldn’t rely on the few remaining animists either, as they all lived out in the surrounding villages. I made sure lunch was a big meal.
Glory laughed when I told her that I was stockpiling instant noodles for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. We had met on the bus from Yangon to Kalay. She had just flown in from Singapore, where she worked as a nanny, to return to Tedim for the holidays. I found her in her sister’s clothes shop, almost obscured by the racks of cheap shirts, dresses and jeans imported from India. Glory is tiny even by the standards of Burma, where many women are super-slight. ‘I am small size,’ as she put it succinctly.
She invited me to join her family for Christmas Day. But Glory is a member of the Bible Presbyterian Church, with a small congregation of 150 people. And I didn’t want to interrupt her reunion with her family after a year away in Singapore. She is one of seven children. Chin families are large, not only due to the high infant mortality rate – 9 per cent die before their fifth birthday – but because they are required to support their parents once they are too old to farm.
Her father had passed away when she was ten and four years later Glory was on a plane to Singapore for the first time. ‘I had an identity card that said I was seventeen,’ she recalled. ‘I wasn’t scared. Most of my friends went away to work at the same age, or a bit older, to Malaysia or India, some to Yangon, a few to China. My mum didn’t want me to leave school, but I wanted to. I knew she needed help. My mum is very old. She is sixty and can’t work.’
Now twenty, Glory has been employed by the same family for the last six years, initially as a maid. ‘The first time I went it was arranged through an agent in Yangon. He took seven months of my year’s salary,’ said Glory. ‘I deal with the family direct now. They are Chinese, rich. He owns a company making keys and she works for a bank. They have two kids, three and one and a half. They’re nice. I earn five hundred Singapore dollars [£270] a month. If I was working here in my sister’s shop, I’d earn maybe thirty dollars [£16] a month.’
Glory’s life in Singapore is mostly work. ‘I get one day off a week. I go to church and then go home. Sometimes, I’ll go shopping. I miss my family and friends often. Sometimes, I am crying. Then, I’ll call my mum. It was harder when I was younger. I cried a lot then.’ Her annual holiday at Christmas is the highlight of her year. ‘Christmas in Singapore is nothing. It’s Chinese New Year that is big,’ said Glory. ‘But here we’ll go to our church on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day and sing and pray and see our friends.’
Enveloping Glory was a vague melancholy which seemed at odds with her age, but which I had observed in other girls from Burma and China separated from their families at a young age to go to work. She would fall suddenly silent, as if some uncomfortable memory had muscled in to the present to harass her, or maybe my questions made her think of her imminent return to Singapore for another year away from home.
With the ease of youth, though, Glory’s personality could switch from the pensive to the animated in a moment. Her eyes flashed into life and her features became mobile when she talked about her love of playing guitar and singing – ‘My dream job is to be a musician’ – or her family and church and the children she looked after. ‘I can’t sleep when they’re ill or sad,’ she told me.
All the money being remitted back to Chin State by its migrant workers is having an impact. ‘Chin is definitely developing. Each time I come back I see new buildings. It is already very different from when I was young,’ said Glory, unaware that I thought she still was. John the Baptist had already mentioned the new houses that have sprung up on their stilts across Tedim in recent years, all financed by Chin children in far-off cities. ‘We call them dollar houses,’ he told me.
That night the power was off and Tedim was black by six in the evening. Only a few houses were showing lights, run off rare generators owned by people who must have had every child in the family working overseas to pay for them. Outside, the headlights of passing motorbikes lit up the potholes and the ditches that ran on either side of the road. But the darkness did allow for fine stargazing, the constellations arcing hi
gh over Kennedy Peak, a fitting portent for the onset of Christmas Eve.
Long before it was light I was woken by someone nearby blasting ‘Love Potion Number 9’ at full volume, drowning out the roosters that were beginning to stir. Within a couple of hours Tedim was busy. Carols and hymns floated out of open doors, as choirs and bands rehearsed, while in front of one church there was the sight of pigs being hacked up, their heads and trotters on display alongside the meat. In Chin, where turkeys are unknown, it is customary to eat pork at Christmas.
Invited for lunch with John the Catholic and his family, there was little to do after that but wait for the evening, when the churches held services, before people gathered at home with their families and friends. Fireworks popped and whooshed into the sky and the sound of ‘By the Rivers of Babylon’ and ‘Jingle Bells’, playing everywhere in town it seemed, reverberated across the Chin Hills until late.
Early morning on Christmas Day and the clouds were hovering above the valleys, a white sea of mist waiting to be burned off by the rising sun which bathed half the hillside in soft yellow light, while casting the rest into shade. The dawn chill in the air was long gone as I made my way to church beneath a gloriously blue sky. People were in their Sunday best, some in suits and western-style dresses, but many in traditional Chin clothing.
Women wear a version of the htamein, with bold horizontal or vertical stripes, and a close-fitting blouse. For men, it is loose fitting shirts and trousers, accompanied by loud striped jackets, waistcoats or a wide scarf around the shoulders, topped with a turban-like hat. Just as there are more than fifty different dialects in Chin State, though, so clothing styles vary in each district. All that is ubiquitous are the red, green, white and black stripes – the Chin colours – that decorate many of the garments.
Beijing was the last place I had attended a church service, when I went to midnight Mass at the Catholic cathedral one Christmas. But from the moment I arrived at the Cope Memorial Church I was made to feel welcome, shaking multiple hands and being wished ‘Happy Christmas’ over and over. I was offered a seat in a pew at the front, which I declined for a place at the back.
Inside, it was a full house with children wriggling on laps and latecomers standing. Light streamed in through the double rows of windows set in both sides of the white walls. Instead of an altar there was a stage for the choir and band, the five pastors and the most honoured members of the congregation. Two Christmas trees flanked either end of the stage. Above it hung a banner with a biblical text in the capitalised Roman alphabet invented by Joseph Cope.
Preach, pray and sing: the form of the service soon became apparent. There wasn’t much mystery to it. The pastors took it in turns to read from the New Testament and offer their own Christmas sermons, and we were down on our knees a lot. But the choir was excellent and everyone sang wholeheartedly. A high proportion of people in Burma have good voices, regardless of their ethnicity.
Towards the end of the service, as some of the congregation were being invited on stage to receive presents for good works performed during the year, I slipped out. Back on the main road I turned onto a dirt path and headed down the hillside to join Tedim’s Catholics at St Mary’s Church. Smaller than the Cope Memorial, there were three rows of plastic chairs outside the open doors to accommodate the Christmas overspill. The Mass was almost over and it ended with a rousing rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’.
Perplexed, I wondered if it was perhaps a Chin custom to sing the song in honour of Jesus’s arrival in the world. Then John introduced me to the bishop, Felix Lian Khen Thang. ‘It’s my birthday today too,’ he said with a smile. The song had been for him. Silver-haired, bespectacled and beaming, Bishop Felix was surrounded by people waiting to greet him but extended a generous invitation to me to join him for dinner that evening.
Back at the guest house, I was preparing the latest batch of instant noodles, happy at the thought of a real meal to come, when John the Baptist arrived fresh from the EBC service with a Christmas present of a large avocado, a kind gesture. He declined my offer to share it and the noodles, saying he had to get back to his family’s celebration. I ate outside on the guest-house deck, gazing out on the valley below, smoke rising from homes across the hillside as Christmas lunches were prepared.
Later, as dusk was falling, I returned to St Mary’s for dinner with Bishop Felix. John the Catholic was there, along with the NLD MP for Hakha, who, confusingly, was from Tedim, and various local dignitaries. We tucked into a decent pork curry, accompanied by a spicy salad. Bishop Felix enjoyed a modest birthday glass of red wine. Everyone else drank beer or whisky.
Bishop Felix’s diocese has Kalay as its headquarters, but extends south across northern Chin State towards Hakha. ‘It’s big geographically but not in people. Catholics are a minority here. There are far more Baptists,’ he said. ‘I try and get around the diocese as much as I can. I have a land cruiser and a driver for that.’ Bishop Felix had spent time in Rome as a young priest and, less than a year after we met, he oversaw Pope Francis’s visit to the country, the first by a pontiff to Burma.
After dinner, I thanked Bishop Felix and he wished me well and departed to stay with the local priest. Everyone else dispersed to their homes. The electricity was on and Tedim was bright and lively for the second night running as I walked back to the guest house. The same songs I had been hearing for the last three days were being given one last airing, before they were put aside for another year. Christmas in Chin was almost over.
7
The Road to Heaven
None of my Tedim friends advised visiting Siangsawn Village. When I asked Bishop Felix about the place, he rolled his eyes and said he hadn’t been there and would never go. Glory thought Siangsawn’s residents were ‘strange’. The mere mention of the village’s name made John the Baptist look sorrowful, as if he was including its benighted pagan population in his daily prayers. ‘It’s not that Siangsawn people don’t like Christians,’ said John the Catholic. ‘They don’t like anyone who isn’t from Siangsawn.’
Unique in Chin State, Siangsawn is neither Christian nor animist. Instead, its residents follow their own religion: the Pau Cin Hau Sect. Dating back to the late nineteenth century and named after its founder, its adherents believe in a deity whom they call ‘Pasian’, the Chin word for God. He sent his son, Pau Cin Hau, to earth as a prophet in human form to save the Chin from worshipping the animist spirits.
Pau Cin Hau was in fact born in Tedim and gained a reputation as a seer from an early age: he is said to have predicted the British invasion of the Chin Hills. But it wasn’t until he was forty, in 1899, that he realised he was the son of God. From then on, he toured the local villages searching out followers for his religion. His key selling point was that it didn’t involve ritual sacrifices.
Traditional Chin beliefs required animals to be sacrificed if someone was ill – to appease the evil spirits causing the sickness – and whenever there was a death, so the spirits of the dead animals could guide the departed to animist heaven. As there was no conventional medical treatment available in the region, and fighting between different villages was common, many locals were constantly in debt from purchasing beasts for sacrifices.
So persuasive was Pau Cin Hau that by the 1930s over 35,000 people believed him to be the son of God, and the British recognised his sect as an official religion. Around 4,000 Chin still adhere to it today. With its founder long dead, the mantle of leadership has skipped a generation and passed to a new prophet, Kam Suan Mang, the grandson of Pau Cin Hau. In 2007 he established a headquarters for the sect in Siangsawn, whose name translates as ‘heaven’, a village an hour’s walk north-east of Tedim.
One afternoon I took the road to heaven, striding away from Tedim’s centre. This was also the route to Tonzang, John the Catholic’s hometown, which, after the road leaves Tedim and descends into the valleys, follows the Manipur River as it runs south from its namesake state across the border in India. But after forty-five minutes o
f heading uphill past a succession of house churches, I turned right onto a steep path that tumbled down the hillside before rising up again on the final ascent to Siangsawn.
A sign next to the gate guarding the village read, ‘No Alcohol, No Drugs, No Tobacco’. It reminded me of flying into Brunei, where the customs officers confiscate your duty-free and the only stimulant legally available is coffee. Once inside the gate, though, it soon became obvious that not only is Siangsawn different to other Chin villages, it was unlike any place I had ever been to in Burma or elsewhere.
Wide and long dirt lanes are lined with square, hollowed-out stones painted white, with plants for decoration inside them, and the bungalow-like houses on both sides of the streets are mostly built of brick rather than wood. They are spaced evenly apart from each other, their gardens neat vegetable patches of black beans, tomatoes and avocados. Villages in Burma are not known for their order or cleanliness and Siangsawn appeared unnaturally tidy: not a speck of litter to be seen, no chickens pecking about, no dogs, goats or pigs nosing around.
Looking down on the village’s main street, up a slight rise, was a noticeably larger house painted pink, its second-storey terrace commanding views across the valley to Tedim. Subsequently I learned that it is the home of Siangsawn’s prophet, Kam Suan Mang, built and paid for by the other villagers. I wondered why his house needed to be so much bigger and more luxurious than anyone else’s.