I take a particular interest in a Burmese dissident writer named Min Zin, who comes to camp to distribute political writings and update the activists living there on the latest democracy news from the border markets outside.
Min Zin was a teenager during the 8/8/88 protests, organizing students inside Burma before dozens of his friends wound up missing or killed. When his name turned up on the military’s target list, he went into hiding in an attic in Rangoon. Nine years later, in 1997, he escaped to Thailand. He found himself a mimeograph machine and a few like-minded activists and they started printing The Irrawaddy, Burma’s democratic newspaper in opposition. He brings copies to camp every so often and to the border markets that dot the riverbanks. He’s in his twenties by the time I meet him. Tall and slender, with wire-rimmed glasses. There is something otherworldly in him. A scholar fleeing an army to write his people free.
When I finally find the guts to approach him, I ask if I can write a profile about his work for one of the local papers. He smiles and says, “So you do talk.”
He’ll take me to see his newspaper in action, he says. But only if I’ll wear a blindfold till we get there. He apologizes for the melodrama. After years in hiding, he’s not keen to have his new home discovered. Understandable, I say, and I laugh, because it’s surreal and because he’s so earnest.
I hold on to him on the back of his motorbike, my eyes pressed shut against the checkered cloth he’s tied behind my head. I can feel him breathing. The road gets rougher, and it’s clear from the smells and the shadows and the sounds that we’re in the jungle. It begins to rain.
When we finally stop, and I pull the cloth free, we’re both speckled with red mud. My hair is pasted to my face and neck. We’re in a cluster of houses on a dirt track, deep under the canopy. I follow Min Zin as he crosses toward a ladder, then climbs up toward a platform on stilts above us. He disappears through the rectangular hole at the top, and when I do the same, I emerge into a bamboo room and it feels like birth. The floor is covered with typewriters and ashtrays. In one corner sits the mimeograph machine. And everywhere, on all sides, there are books. Alexis de Tocqueville and Václav Havel. Democracy and philosophy and logic and ethics. Like the contents of Oxford University’s library, pored over, dog-eared, highlighted, and piled ten volumes deep in a treehouse in the jungle.
I meet Ko Moe Thee, a hulking rebel fighter; he is sitting cross-legged on a bamboo mat, smoking a clove cigarette as a cat sleeps in his lap. I meet Ko Ma, a former political prisoner. His face is hollow and his hands shuffle through pictures of his wife. She died in prison, pregnant with their son. The stories are brutal. But the determination to stand up to such an all-powerful evil is electrifying. I return the next week. And the week after that. Until I am there most afternoons, folding papers or looking up quotations.
Min Zin drives me to and from the treehouse, and on the way we stop to meet activists or drop off bundles of the latest edition. He doesn’t make me wear the blindfold anymore, but I still hold on to him when the road gets rough. One day, he puts his hand on mine.
That touch is more charged than any of the high school fumbling I’ve known until now. Tender and erotic and deep and forbidden. He’s going to run for office one day. That, we all understand. He’s going to return to a democratic Burma and build a future for his people. A relationship with an American girl doesn’t figure into that plan. But he kisses me in the soft evening rain, the two of us at the entrance to the camp with water in our hair.
“See you tomorrow?” he asks, and I nod.
We never touch at the treehouse. All day we work amid the others. Every evening, his hand rests on mine as we tumble through the jungle dark. One kiss per night. That is our ration.
A few months into this treehouse life, Min Zin and Ko Moe Thee call everyone into a circle on the floor. There are protests coming: 9/9/99. An echo of the bloody massacre of 8/8/88. We’ve been marking Burmese banknotes with the upcoming date for weeks, using stamps carved from potatoes, then spending the money in the border markets to silently spread the word. Now Ko Moe Thee poses a question: What if the military shoots into the crowd again? In 1988, there were no journalists there to capture the killing. There is no Tiananmen Square–style photo of what happened in Rangoon. If things go wrong again, he says, we need to be sure the world knows. We need somebody to be there. To bear witness.
Min Zin’s eyes hold mine. He is telling me he knows I am going to go and asking me not to and saying that he is proud of me, all at once. The others sense our silent conclusion, and without any discussion, Ko Moe Thee turns to me and asks, “How will you get a visa?”
It’s a good question. The Burmese embassy in Thailand has stopped issuing both student and tourist visas in retaliation for international sanctions. But the junta is desperate for revenue, and business visas are still available if you can show proof of legitimate work. Ko Moe Thee is smiling. “Do you have a secret business in Rangoon you haven’t told us about?”
“No,” I answer. “But I might know somebody who does.”
Daryl is a British thirtysomething investment banker and amateur filmmaker I met at a Free Burma conference while I was researching my high school paper. He works for a Japanese firm that invests in Burma. He can’t afford to quit, he told me then, but he loathes the idea of making the generals any richer. So he volunteers his filmmaking skills to the Free Burma movement by way of atonement. We talked for only an hour or so. And it was almost a year ago now. But it seems worth a try.
Min Zin drives me to a pay phone in the little town of Mae Sot, right at the jungle’s edge. I call Daryl collect. Miraculously, he accepts the charges.
“How would you feel,” I ask, after reminding him who I am, “about taking two weeks off work, flying to Thailand, and pretending to be married so we can get into Burma on your business visa and film the regime at work?”
To Daryl’s eternal credit, he says yes.
The treehouse crew and I set to work doctoring satchels, so we can film while we’re cycling, and buying Bic pens we can take apart to hide film in when we leave. When Daryl arrives, we pick him up at the airport in Bangkok and go straight to Khaosan Road, where a few dollars can buy a forged anything. We pick up a marriage certificate and make our way to the Burmese embassy to apply for a visa. At the desk, we stage a fight for the clerk. “Who wants to spend their honeymoon on a work trip,” I complain.
“Who pays the bills?” Daryl shoots back.
The clerk squints at us for a minute. Then he suddenly looks very tired.
“Next window,” he says. And stamps our application “Approved.”
Min Zin puts us on the plane on the first of September and I can see in his eyes the lived and relived pain of his years in the place I am going. We say our public good-byes, and I feel the private press of his hand against my back. “Remember ABC Café,” he tells me. “If things go really wrong, check the bathroom stall at ABC Café.”
Daryl and I settle into our plane seats. I’m the only female in our cabin. And the only Westerner, other than Daryl. The steward peers at us from the galley. I channel my inner honeymooner and flick through a magazine without reading the words.
When the aircraft door opens an hour later, the first thing I notice is the smell. The stale wetness of decay. Like a warning against some secret, hidden beneath the surface. It cloaks us as we walk to the terminal, flanked by minders in military dress. It occurs to me that my mom doesn’t know where I am. No one knows where I am, except Min Zin and the boys at The Irrawaddy, smoking their cigarettes in the jungle. I take Daryl’s hand.
There are immigration desks inside, covered by record books, thicker than Bibles, filled line by line with the names of the people who’ve come before.
The smell follows us indoors.
“You’re married,” the soldier says, when we get to the front of the line. I think about how I don’t know Da
ryl at all.
“Yes,” I say and give my fake husband a kiss on the cheek. The soldier scowls. In his hands, our passports are opened to our visas. He picks up a fountain pen and copies our information into the book, adding notes we can’t read in the looping figure eights of Burmese script. The metal nib scratches against the page. On our left, I watch a businessman pass a soldier his documents. There’s money tucked inside.
“Stay with your tour guide,” our officer says. We nod, and Daryl holds his hand out for our passports.
“When you leave,” the officer says, tucking our lifelines into a file on his right. We stand there for a beat, two small people stripped of our states. “Or you choose to leave now?” he asks and nods at the door we’ve just come through.
“That’s okay, thank you,” I say. “One less thing to hang on to, right, darling?”
“We should have gotten a receipt,” Daryl says as we make our way to the cavernous luggage hall, littered with railway scales and ashtrays.
“And submit it where?” I laugh. Daryl laughs, too.
A man is walking toward us. He’s Burmese, wearing a centaur-like outfit, Western on top, with a blazer and a crisp collared shirt, Eastern on the bottom, with a folded cloth lungyi hanging down to his sandals. He introduces himself as our tour guide, and we understand that he is our minder.
We follow the man out the sliding doors to a car. It has blinds pulled down on the insides of the back windows. Through the front windshield, the traffic is mostly mopeds and military trucks. A red billboard reads:
PEOPLE’S DESIRE
Oppose those relying on external elements acting as stooges holding negative views.
Oppose those trying to jeopardize stability of the State.
Oppose foreign nations interfering in internal affairs of the State.
Crush all internal and external destructive elements as the common enemy.
Around us, on the sidewalks and under corrugated tin awnings, there are children. They lurk behind doors or parents or curtains. They have the look of deer, alert to passing hunters.
We arrive at the government guesthouse, and the tour guide shows us to our room. Teak carvings and golden-threaded bedclothes. I wonder if this is what the generals’ houses look like, in this land of empty rice bowls. The smell is here too, coating the decadence with decay.
We behave like tourists as we secretly await the protesters we hope will flood the streets on September 9. We visit the shimmering sweep of Shwedagon Pagoda, where there are said to be eight strands of hair from the Buddha, where Daw Suu addressed the protesters before they were gunned down. I watch the monks light incense in their saffron robes. Time feels fluid here. On that fateful day—August 8, 1988—this space was filled with noise. The cacophony of college kids, aflame with youth and hope and bluster. Two weeks later, the sounds had turned to wailing. Thousands of families burning their dead. And two weeks after that, these same stones were bathed in silence, the pagoda locked down by Humvees and canvas-covered trucks. The vehicles of the State Law and Order Restoration Council. The SLORC. Like something from Lewis Carroll—the SLORC and the Jabberwock—they sound like monsters too absurd to be real, except one of them is. And in this very place, it bared its claws.
The monks sit straight and passive here, amid all the echoes of the past, drawing on something even the SLORC can’t kill. Their faces don’t register the rumble of army convoys. I recognize something of the secret they’re experiencing. It’s familiar, like a scent from my past, the stained-glass dappled stillness of cathedral afternoons.
That evening, in our guesthouse, I can still feel it. The tiles are covered with a thin film of murk. In the corner, under the sink, a spider is eating a centipede. It isn’t the sort of place where I’d expect God to hang out. But nonetheless, suddenly and forcefully, God is there.
Daryl comes back from a trip down the hall.
“Our tour guide is wondering if we’d like to enjoy some dinner,” he says. I’m growing to like Daryl. He’s dry and funny and brave. The world doesn’t have many bankers who feel the need to make up for their employers’ investment choices with their own love and labor. It has even fewer who manage to do it without bragging.
“Such attentive hosts,” I answer. “ABC Café?”
He smiles. “Where else?”
I’m looking forward to leaving a note for Min Zin’s network. We’ve been in-country a few days, and it’s time to check whether the system’s working.
ABC Café is situated on Maha Bandula Street, a few blocks from Sule Pagoda and the notorious Traders Hotel, where military officers meet with Chinese drug lords while sipping Singapore slings. The café has the look of an old western saloon, and I like it immediately.
“I’m going to the bathroom,” I tell Daryl; he nods on his way to find us a table. Min Zin has told us to leave our notes in the water tank of the toilet. I pull a piece of paper towel out of the dispenser and write a few lines. No identifying information, in case it’s intercepted. Just confirmation that we’re okay and a request for him to reply so we know the plumbing’s intact. I needn’t have worried, though. When I lift the porcelain tank lid, there’s a scrap of paper already taped there, with an amaryllis flower drawn on the outside. I unfold it and read:
“Order the French fries.”
It’s like teleportation, having him there with me in the slender strokes of his pen. His characteristic humor. Never one to take himself too seriously. Even in the midst of a full-fledged revolution.
We order fries, as instructed; they arrive with chopsticks and a side of hot sauce. The waiter looks back and forth between us. “You are welcome here,” he says, and for the first time since we landed, I know that we are. I can imagine Min Zin here, in the safe energy of secret comrades. His attic—his hidden home for all those years—is a few streets over. It must have been a comfort, once he was stuck there, to know that his underground clubhouse was so near.
We eat in peace, ignoring our minder, whose head periodically pops over the saloon doors to check that we are still where he left us. A singer takes the stage and belts out “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” For some reason, it makes me want to cry. Never was a place less wild or free than this military hostage of a town.
Small groups whisper around tables. The music is cover for forbidden conversation. Daryl is watching them, too. We’re wondering the same thing, I know. Are they talking about the protests planned for the ninth? Will they still be here to talk about them on the tenth?
We leave the restaurant’s glow and step back into the Rangoon night, into the minder’s car, and return to the room.
I run my finger against the dresser mirror as I pretend to fix my hair. Min Zin told me that a one-way mirror has no space between your fingernail and its reflection. This one seems fine. But I turn to Daryl with a tinge of mischief.
“Guess they’re probably expecting us to have sex. I mean, we are newlyweds, after all.”
Daryl laughs. “Get outta here, kid,” he says and throws a pillow at me.
It feels good to have addressed it, the nights in a shared bed stretching out ahead of us. With that elephant ushered from the room, I change into pajamas and fall asleep with him beside me, like a guardian in the dark.
We need to clear out of the capital in the lead-up to the protests to avoid suspicion about the reasons for our trip. Travelers used to visit an old fortress town to the north called Mandalay, before the junta shut down the tourism sector to any without a business visa. It makes the perfect diversion, and the next morning we set off for its ancient red stone walls via overnight train.
We buy tickets for a sleeping compartment, where the seats are supposed to slide down their creaking rails to become a long, flat bed. Our seats turn out to be broken, stuck forever upright. But before the rooftops of Rangoon are gone, our minder falls asleep, propped
up between the backrest and the window. It’s the first time I’ve been able to take him in, the first time it’s felt safe to watch him for longer than a moment. He looks tired, even in rest. I wonder about his family and his choices and the things he grapples with in the quiet of the night. The sting begins to fade from my idea of him. Would I stand up to the military in my own country? Or would I go along to survive, once they proved beyond sufficient doubt that resistance meant death or worse for my mother, my sisters, my father, my brother? I realize in the dimness of the compartment that I have no way to answer. We talk with certainty while our lungs are filled with freedom, but it’s harder here, in this suffocating place, to be sure we’d all fight back. At the beginning, maybe, when victory seems possible and it’s only our own skin we risk. But after the claw has closed tight around the throats of those we love? Of that I can’t be sure. And in the staleness, I feel the minder’s despair, choosing between slavery and death.
The window is pitch-black now, as though it’s been given the once-over with a tar brush. The train is moving, making its way north, but we can tell only from the jolting of the seats. Outside, there isn’t even enough light to sense the passing of shadows. “Guess this is what the SLORC means when it talks about its modern economy,” Daryl says, but neither of us laughs. We just stare into the darkness of a nation blacked out from the map, deprived of electricity by the generals who drink beneath the chandeliers of Traders Hotel. Hour upon hour, we watch the darkness pass behind our own reflections. Mile upon mile, I imagine the schoolwork and the cooking undertaken in the void.
We wake to bright sunlight. Children play along the tracks. Their mothers offer food through the windows. Cooked meats and insects on sticks. Juices in tied plastic bags with straws sticking out. One older girl, eleven or twelve, herds her siblings. It looks like she’s telling them a story. I watch her as long as I can. She is a glimmer of hope in this place. The first spark of tomorrow I’ve seen since we arrived.
Life Undercover Page 4