“Let’s go to the next village.”
We hurried down the veranda steps and, walking stick in hand, I pushed through the audience and continued towards the northeast, across some paddy fields. A group of women were taking their afternoon bath in a nearby stream. They looked up but made no attempt to hide their nakedness when I strode past bad-temperedly.
The next village was if possible even more unsuitable for a halt than Keng Khan. A temple festival was on and hundreds of people were gathered in the centre of the village. Some boys were going to be ordained as novices in the local monastery and the rhythmic throbbing of gongs, cymbals and drums reverberated through the valley. Groups of people danced along the village paths and the young postulants were carried on the shoulders of men who were swaying to the beat of the ecstatic music.
“Sit down and wait. I’ll find a guide,” Aye Tan muttered curtly and disappeared into the village.
I was left alone with the mule and its driver. Groups of drunk men of all ages stumbled past, arms around each others’ shoulders. I felt nervous until two uniformed CPB officers came up to me.
“You! You! Where you go?” one of them said, probably using the only English words he knew. As he spoke, he blew alcohol fumes in my face.
I got up with a sigh and elbowed my way through the crowded paths of the village in search of Aye Tan. I found him sitting relaxed on a veranda, drinking with some local people.
“I’ve had enough of this nonsense. Where’s the guide?”
“Why are you so angry when all the people here are having a good time enjoying themselves?”
“God damn! Wasn’t the order to keep our movements secret? How the f**k can we do that in this village where there are hundreds of outsiders?”
Aye Tan apparently thought one argument was enough for the day. He reluctantly shuffled down from the veranda and beckoned one of his drinking partners with him.
“My friend knows the way. Let’s go.”
“Yes. Let’s,” I snarled.
The charm of the Mong Wa valley had evaporated. During the drawn-out hours of the tense afternoon it had become, to my mind, a haunt of spies, government informers and inquisitive drunks. I was pleased when it shrank below us as we trudged up the mountains towards Man Hpai.
Halfway up the mountain, I heard gunshots at close range. I looked out over the rough hillside and spotted on the path just ahead of us the two drunken CPB officers I just had escaped from. One of them was on horseback, brandishing a pistol and firing erratically in the air. The other was laughing hysterically and stumbling along beside the horse.
“This is just too much,” I said to Aye Tan. “That man has to be disarmed immediately. Is he one of your officers?”
Aye Tan said nothing but, his face red with anger, quickened his pace and soon caught up with the trigger-happy rider. It was too far away to hear the argument as I waited, squatting on a log in the forest.
“It’s clear now, I’ve told them to stop shooting,” Aye Tan mumbled when he returned, apparently annoyed himself. “When we pass them, say nothing.”
The two drunks had halted where they were and stared sullenly at us as we marched past them. The onward climb was not easy. But my renewed irritation over the CPB’s troops’ lack of discipline served to keep my head of steam up and, puffing and blowing, I reached the top of the mountain well ahead of anybody else.
It was dark when the others had caught up. We entered Man Hpai together, accompanied by packs of howling dogs. The guide took us to the local party office, a large mud-brick building with an earthen floor. Faded portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao Zedong looked down from the walls. There was no other furnishing or decoration apart from a wooden table and a couple of chairs. A houseboy in green fatigues served us hot tea and biscuits.
“We won’t stay here,” Aye Tan said. “It’s the same story. Too many outsiders. We’ll go by jeep to a secret camp ten kilometres from here.”
It sounded sensible and I began to regret my earlier bad temper.
“Hope you’ll forgive my annoyance this afternoon. But I definitely didn’t want to be seen by outsiders. We’ve been sent back from China once and this time we have to make it.”
“I understand. Please forgive me for being so careless.”
“That’s all right. After all, it’s April Fool’s Day today. That’s maybe why everything went wrong.”
We both laughed and were glad to put our quarrel behind us. I did not want Aye Tan to return to Panghsang with the impression that I had been a haughty guest. I would not have bothered if the CPB realised I was critical of their policy and many aspects of their organisation. But if would have found it highly disturbing if they had thought I was obnoxiously arrogant.
We shovelled my luggage, which had been unloaded from the mule, into the jeep’s rear and set off in the night. The road was narrow and bumpy and the jeep jolted over rocks and through potholes—until the engine started to shudder spasmodically and then chugged to a halt. The driver, an Akha boy from Man Hpai camp, turned the engine repeatedly until the spark plugs were flooded and the engine totally useless. He turned to Aye Tan and said something in Burmese.
“I’ll go out and push. You must light up the road ahead of us with your torch. The battery seems to be flat so we can’t use the headlights.”
I pulled out my torch and flashed a narrow beam out of the window beside my seat. Aye Tan and some soldiers who had come along from Man Hpai jumped out and started pushing. When we got to a slope, the speed was tremendous and the driver tried to start the engine, but failed. The soldiers came running behind the jeep and pushed it once more, until the next slope. The same thing happened again.
I had difficulty in pointing my torch in the right direction for the driver to see the road in front of us. When the jeep swerved and my torch beam shone on the right side of the road, I discovered it followed a narrow shelf on a steep hillside. The driver was constantly looking down as he fiddled with the ignition key which made the hairpin bends he had to turn around twice as hazardous. And still, the engine did not start. It was ludicrous. I decided I was not going to die in a road accident a few kilometres from the Chinese border after everything else I had been through.
“Stop it! This is crazy!”
“There’s no other way to start the jeep.”
“Then I’d rather walk! It’s better to get there late than not at all.”
When there was no reaction from the panting pushers behind the car, I put my torch off and jumped out of the jeep. The driver, overwhelmed by the sudden darkness ahead of him, stood on the brakes. The jeep stopped with a jerk. Aye Tan and the others almost fell on the rear of the vehicle. “That’s it,” I said. “Let’s walk or we’ll have an accident.” But the driver protested vehemently and shouted at one of the soldiers. He promptly ran off, back towards Man Hpai.
“What’s that all about? Is he going to get more people to push the jeep?”
“No,” Aye Tan replied. “He told him to go back and get a tractor instead.”
In the face of such thoughtfulness, I admitted defeat. Crouching by the roadside, I lit a cheroot and decided to leave the rest of our journey to fate. I sat in the grass for more than an hour without saying another word. Eventually, the roar of an engine came from the distance and I could see a single headlight moving down the serpentine, narrow road along the hillside. It was obviously a tolache.
We abandoned the jeep and got into the tolache’s trailer. Since it had no shock absorbers, the journey was extremely uncomfortable. I thought of how fast it would have been if we had walked all the way from Man Hpai instead of sampling the marvels of motorised civilisation.
Just before midnight, I saw light in front of us and assumed it must be the camp we were headed for. Fortunately, it was. The tolache pulled up outside one of the bamboo houses. I got out, covered in a layer of dust and stretched to check if I was still in one piece.
Some people in the camp were obviously expecting us. An
other young CPB activist, ex-student presumably since he spoke English, came out to shake my hand.
“Oh, you’re so late. Dinner was ready several hours ago.”
“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting. We had some minor mishaps on the way.”
I was physically and mentally so exhausted I hardly said anything over the meal. The plate of cold rice and pork that had been put in front of me was finished within five minutes. I swigged down a large glass of country liquor, then fell onto the mat on the floor and into a deep, dreamless sleep. It had indeed been April Fool’s Day.
I felt considerably refreshed when I woke up the next morning. Aye Tan left after breakfast and I settled in to wait for the arrival of Hseng Noung and Hseng Tai. A CPB officer showed me to a bamboo hut which had been put at my disposal. It was located on a mountainside, overlooking the Mong Wa valley—and a big range beyond it where the Burmese Army maintained a couple of outposts.
The Nam Loi effectively forms the border between the CPB’s base area along the Chinese frontier and the guerrilla zones south of the river—and then, on the other side of the opposite mountain, there is the government-controlled valley of Mong Yawng which houses a major garrison.
The mountain range which constitutes the no man’s land is populated by Akhas. But the insecurity of the position of their small villages—right in the fire zone between the CPB and the government’s forces—has prompted many of them to migrate to safety elsewhere, even as far south as Thailand.
Over the next few days, I became acquainted with the English-speaking intellectual who had met me on my arrival. His name was Chit Tan and he was even taller than I, but considerably skinnier. He wore spectacles and his hair was almost curly. I was at first puzzled by his South Asian looks. But he explained he was of Indian origin, Bengali as a matter of fact, but born and raised in Mandalay where he also later attended university. His English was excellent and he spoke Shan and Akha as well as his native Burmese and a little Bengali.
Like so many other activists in the mid 1970s, he had been harassed by the government’s secret police and forced to flee to the insurgent-held territories along the Chinese frontier. But in accordance with the CPB’s line of a revolution led by the proletariat, allied with the peasantry, he as all the other young ex-students in the party had been given a post which hardly matched his intellectual capabilities: he was a medical orderly at the local hospital near Man Hpai. But since he was the only English speaker around, he had been assigned to act as my interpreter during my stay at the secret border camp.
At night, we often sat on the veranda outside his house, which was just below mine, discussing politics and his experiences of the civil war. Although he was born in Burma, his Indian descent made him a “foreigner” according to Burma’s discriminatory citizenship laws. Technically, he was stateless. But he told me one of his brothers had left for Calcutta some years before the student unrest in the mid-1970s and been granted Indian citizenship.
“He’s still there, I think. But I don’t know what he does or where he lives.”
I sometimes got the impression that he, too, wished he had gone to Calcutta instead of marking time in these remote mountains. I could well imagine him among the other Bengali intellectuals, who spend their afternoons debating the world’s problems at the Indian Coffee House in Calcutta’s College Street.
Time went by as I waited for Hseng Noung and Hseng Tai. I stayed inside my hut as much as possible to avoid being seen by the local villagers. Occasionally, people from the Chinese side of the border—easily distinguishable in their blue jeans and smart baseball caps—strolled along the road just below the camp as well, and I did not want any rumours to begin circulating about the presence of a Caucasian in the Man Hpai area.
I had ample opportunity to contemplate the long journey which now was almost over. Late at night, I would sit at my bamboo desk and read through my diaries and notebooks by the light of a kerosene lamp. Old memories became vivid again: the drama of Hseng Tai’s birth in Kohima, the weird Iphai oracles and the battle in the Naga Hills, our happy days in the Kachin Hills, all the blood that had been spilled over the barren Hsi-Hsinwan, my trek through Kokang and the Wa Hills, and the intrigues at Panghsang. We had reached and even gone beyond the Land of Jade which had beckoned us during the long wait in India.
But many of my thoughts centred on the plight of the people in Burma’s wartorn frontier areas. I remembered the children at the school in N’Gum La who had to have their classes in the forest because of fear of bomb raids. The morning attack on the small village near Manghseng in the Wa Hills also came back to my mind. I wondered if all these people ever were going to experience peace and a normal life.
Part of the problem is that the frontier areas are so isolated from the rest of the country; it is a world apart from Rangoon, Mandalay and the other towns in central Burma. Few people there are even aware of the full extent of the sufferings in the remoter areas of the country which makes the whole task of a national reconciliation an almost insurmountable challenge.
I discussed this with Chit Tan one night on his veranda and he agreed:
“When I lived in Mandalay, I never dreamt that parts of Burma are like this.” He made a sweeping gesture towards the distant mountains with their scattered Akha villages. “And if someone had told me the government’s army could kill poor villagers in cold blood, force them to walk ahead of troops to clear minefields, burn down villages at random and press-gang civilians to become porters, I’d never have believed it. But here, it’s everyday reality for most people.”
The civil war in Burma is by no means less intense or cruel than other armed conflicts in the region. But because of Burma’s self-imposed isolation and the remoteness of the war zones, the only way news about the fighting can reach the outside world is if some foreign correspondents hazard their lives by penetrating these jungles and mountain ranges. So in that sense, I felt our journey had been an accomplishment and that we had done something worthwhile—even if it meant we had to put our newborn baby at risk. Burma and all its peoples would always be close to our hearts.
When ten days had gone by at the camp, and Chit Tan and I were sitting as usual at night on his veranda, I heard a familiar laugh in the dark outside. It was Hseng Noung and another girl. They climbed the steps up to us. Little Hseng Tai smiled when she saw me, and taking her from her mother’s arms, I hugged her and sat down again with her on my lap.
“We came from Jinghong today,” Hseng Noung said shaking her head. “Our journey was a real mess.”
As it turned out, she had tried to go by bus from Meng A. But the Chinese police had carried out identity checks on the road ahead, so she had had to go back to Panghsang and walk with Hseng Tai to Mong La. From there, she had crossed into China and gone by bus and tolache via Jinghong down to the border opposite Man Hpai.
“I met Sai Noom Pan,” she went on. “He talked a lot about you. And Michael Davies was there also. He was so sad to have missed you. But he sent you this.”
She put a plastic bag full of tinned food from Thailand on the table and handed me a black and white studio portrait. His features were clearly Eurasian.
“He asked if it would be possible for us to try and find out where his father is these days.”
I looked at the yellowing photograph. One more family sundered by the civil war, I thought sadly.
Our immediate problem was how to arrange the final crossing into China. Hseng Noung could go back to Jinghong via Man Hpai at any time. But I would have to trek for another two days to the northeast and then cross the border at a point where there were no Chinese border guards. I would then have to make my way to Ta Mong Long, the Shan village near the frontier that was open to tourists.
But there was also bad news.
“I don’t think Frank’s got our letter with the passports. There were lots of tourists in Jinghong for the water festival. But no message on the board at the tourist lodge.”
Hseng Noung looked de
pressed and sighed.
“Well, we have to go to Jinghong anyway. We can contact the Swedish Embassy from there. If the local authorities check up on us, we can always tell them we’re tourists who’ve lost our passports.”
Hseng Noung had thought of everything. She had got hold of a tourist map of Jinghong and Sipsongpanna, and even managed to exchange some of our Chinese money into “foreign exchange certificates”, the kind of local “hard currency” tourists are obliged to use when paying for hotels and tickets in China.
“And this will come in handy.”
She gave me luggage identification tag for the flight from Kunming to Simao, the airport nearest to Jinghong. I was astonished.
“Where did you get hold of all this stuff?”
“I got talking to some tourists in Jinghong. Since they seemed reliable, I told them a bit about what we we’re going to do. They were very helpful.”
We were all set to leave. Hseng Noung and Hseng Tai would go back to Jinghong as soon as possible and take with her our film, notebooks and video tapes.
“We can leave them in a friend’s house in Jinghong. It’s not good if you carry the stuff. If you’re arrested, the Chinese will confiscate it all and two year’s efforts will be wasted.”
We would have to move fast once I had reached Jinghong and met up with Hseng Noung and Hseng Tai. First, we would have to check at the tourist lodge whether Frank had made it with our passports. If not, we would have to find some reliable foreigner willing to carry our bag with the sensitive material either to Beijing or, even better, Hong Kong. Once that was done, it would not matter so much if we were apprehended by the local authorities. Whether that happened or not, contact would have to be made with the Swedish Embassy. With luck, we would be swiftly deported.
Land of Jade Page 47