Life Undercover

by Amaryllis Fox

  On the other track, a train passes. There’s a flatcar in front of its engine to ensure that any land mine it might encounter won’t derail it. And on the flatcar, there are people. Families. Parents huddled with their children and bags. Ready to face death by explosion for the chance to escape the civil war to the north. The junta’s fighting half a dozen of these conflicts against indigenous tribes who still resist their rule. They’ve left torched villages and poisoned rice paddies in their wake.

  Soon the Mandalay train station emerges from the city’s cooking smoke: more pagodas and white brick, just like the station in Rangoon. More rusting filigree and soft black mold. But the platform has a peacefulness about it as passengers disembark in the gentle morning mist. I wonder if they know, up here, about the demonstration to come. Wonder if they’ll risk a repeat of 1988, when the rivers ran with blood.

  6

  Mandalay looks like Rudyard Kipling’s poetry, if the colonists were Burmese and they all drove tanks. The buildings still have their air of imperial indifference. Today they house the junta’s offices, no more attuned to the needs of the people than the Brits who came before. It’s cooler here than in Rangoon, but the smell of the south is also the smell of the north, the stale air of a country broken by its yoke. The streets are littered with razor wire, looped in circles around black-and-red-striped barricades.

  Our hotel is more central here. Our room is an unobserved perch from which to watch the street life pass by, unaware of the outsiders in its midst. The cooking fires burn from dawn till dusk, sending coal smoke up toward us in great, inky fans. Children watch the rumbling of army trucks from the steps of the clock tower in the center of the traffic circle. Across the way, a university building stands empty. All college campuses have been shut since the protests of ’88. A nation devoid of future doctors and lawyers because the generals are afraid of youth-fueled dissent.

  For the next few days, we trail behind our minder as he takes us to the tourist showpieces. We bide our time before heading back to Rangoon and, we hope, to the protests that will tear down this window dressing for good. On the last day before our train leaves for the south, our minder delivers us to a small boat on the Irrawaddy, the river for which Min Zin’s democratic newspaper was named.

  “Day trip,” he says, and we exchange a look, wondering if “day trip” means “sleep with the fishes.” It’s not on the tour itinerary, and the dark energy of this place is Orwellian enough to make disappearing two newlyweds sound plausible. We’ve heard stories of activists disappearing while on government-sponsored tours. At least one of them turned up dead in a prison in Rangoon. This particular boat doesn’t look very threatening, though. There’s nothing for it but to keep our wits about us and climb in.

  It’s a traditional wooden river craft, with room for three or four passengers, propelled by a man standing on one end with a pole. We set off, the man working against the current, his face serene in the heat of the sun. On this little floating island, a good swim from either shore, the junta rests and the four of us are quiet. The pole makes gentle splashes and we pass a singing fisherman. Nobody speaks until finally our pilot presses his weight to the right and propels us toward land. Our minder firms back up.

  “Traditional Burmese village,” he says as we step onto a wooden dock. Above us, at the top of the sloping bank, a line of people wait in national costume, like the actors at the Epcot Center World Showcase we visited as kids. Behind them, a mock village stands like a film set. There is no sign of daily life, no livestock or litter, just a table covered with lunch. In another country, it would be a mediocre tourist excursion. Here, it is more sinister. Some hundred miles from us begins the trail of smoldering villages that used to look like this one, before the military arrived to tame the tribes who fought them. Karen, Kachin, Karenni, Shan. Ancient peoples who refused the SLORC’s rule and paid with their homes and their children and their lives. The thatched roofs here are textbook illustrations of the ones refugees describe being set alight. The rice on our lunch table is a monument to the paddies booby-trapped with mines. The quiet is a reminder of children taken from their homes, girls for soldiers’ “comfort,” boys to fight and kill. This shiny replica is perfect in every detail, save one. The people here are smiling. It’s a North Korea–style propaganda village, and today, we are its guests.

  We sit at the table as they describe the food. Who are these people and where do they really live, when they take off their costumes and wearily walk home? The women watch me, then look down when I meet their eyes. On their cheeks they wear thanaka, a paste made from tree bark to protect their skin from the sun. Each has applied hers in a different pattern. Dots and circles and swirls. A visual language played out across their faces. We saw thanaka in Mandalay and Rangoon, too. It’s the only part of this town that feels real, the only glimpse of these women’s true selves. The designs hint at this one’s pluck, that one’s sense of humor.

  On the way home, the boatman notices the sun’s touch across my nose. He pulls out some thanaka of his own and kneels to press a smudge across my forehead, then uses the excess to protect my nose and draw designs across my cheeks. It feels sacred, like an anointing, a welcoming to the fold. The minder does not interrupt, and in the sun-drenched river, the current carries us back to Mandalay.

  * * *

  —

  Morning brings a second train journey, back down the same track, and I wonder if there are families riding out ahead of our engine, hoping the flatcar doesn’t explode. Tomorrow is the ninth, the morning of truth, the day we hope the students will rise.

  We try for dinner at ABC Café. We want to sense the mood. But when we arrive, the saloon doors are stiff and the sign says “Closed.” We head back to the guesthouse with empty stomachs on empty roads. It’s not yet curfew, but the streets are darker than usual. In the windows above them, the blinds are drawn shut. Soldiers pull barricades from the backs of army trucks. The walkways they block are already deserted.

  “They know,” Daryl breathes against my cheek as we walk from the car to the guesthouse door. We eat a few stashed saltines and fall asleep in silence.

  The following morning, the roads are still closed, but by the time our minder takes us to town for lunch, the sidewalks are returning to their ordinary bustle and ABC Café is open, albeit quiet and empty. I make a beeline for the bathroom.

  “It was over before it began,” the note in the toilet says. “Several hundred arrested yesterday. Effective preemptive strike.” The handwriting isn’t Min Zin’s. But the tone and the knowledge of where we would come looking reassure me that it was penned by a friend. “Trip can still be useful. ASSK would like to see you. We’ll send a car on the 15th at dawn.” ASSK is Aung San Suu Kyi, and the fifteenth is six long days from now. I fold the note and put it back where I found it for Daryl to read while I order us fries.

  We came to document the way this junta handles dissent. But how do you film the crushing of an uprising when it’s crushed before it rises? There’s nothing to record now but the silence.

  The morning of September 15 dawns streaky gold on the eastern shore of Inle Lake, and we wait outside our guesthouse, as instructed by the toilet tank note. At five a.m., it’s still early enough that our minder hasn’t yet arrived at our hotel. Neither has the contact we’re awaiting. “Maybe they were arrested,” I say when the road is still empty a few minutes later. “Maybe the SLORC knows about us the way it knew about the protests.” The thought chills me. But then a car grinds out of the dust and stops beside us. We climb inside, and I see the hotel night manager dial his phone as we pull the car door shut.

  We set about checking our things. We have our camera and the Bic pens we brought to hide the film. We have our notebooks with cryptic reminders of the questions we want to ask. We have our tools to inquire and record. But that is all. Our passports are back at the airport. Our bags are still in our room. It’s terrifying to defy th
e rules of this ruthless regime with no protection except a bag of film and pens. Nevertheless, we’re in the car now. We’ve crossed the Rubicon. And there’s no choice but to plunge into the unknown.

  The meeting is at Suu Kyi’s party’s headquarters, the only place she’s allowed to go outside her home. Its plain brick façade looks more like a storefront than a hive of resistance. Only a flag bearing the silhouette of a peacock gives away the building’s fiery true purpose. The fighting peacock is the symbol of Burmese democracy: fierce gold against a blazing background of red, one claw raised in preparation for battle. The flag hangs in the second-story window, across from the army’s observation post, like a matador’s cape to a bull.

  It doesn’t look like the soldiers have stirred yet this morning. There’s no motion as we pull up. Their cooking coals are cold. Our car crawls down an alley, and we climb out into the dawn. The stagnant smell lingers, but a slight breeze stirs the dust.

  “This way.” The driver is out of the car and shuffling us toward a side door. Still no response from across the street. We’re not used to roaming this city freely. It doesn’t feel as good as I’d imagined. When the minder is with us, the threat has a form. Without him, it becomes a nebulous, all-powerful force. Empty doorways and shapes among the shadows.

  When we get to the door, I press down on the latch and it opens. Locks are just window dressing here. The soldiers will come and go as they please. I admire Daw Suu’s party for not bothering with the game of pretend.

  The ground floor is an unfurnished space, open to a rickety balcony above. On the wall is a picture of Suu Kyi speaking at the balcony’s edge to a packed crowd of supporters below. But today, it’s only us.

  “Please,” the driver says and motions for us to climb the stairs. At the top, beyond the balcony, is a narrow hallway. He overtakes us and knocks on the door. After a beat, it opens.

  She is smaller than I expected. She has no entourage, no security. She stands on the wooden threshold, welcoming us into an empty room. Her hand fits in mine like a child’s.

  “Please come in.” Her accent is British with a colonial residue, the kind that is still taught in the private schools of Mumbai. Her posture is immaculate, every bit as disciplined as the soldiers across the road. In her hair, she wears flowers, just as she did in the photo on my high school bedroom wall. Just as in that picture, there is steel in her eyes. And here in person, I see that somewhere under the steel, there is love.

  “Thank you for seeing us,” Daryl offers.

  “Any friend of Min Zin’s,” she says, and when she smiles, the room warms.

  We sit at the long wooden table while Daryl unpacks the camera. There are bars on the window.

  “If you get this film out,” she says, “ask a news outlet to broadcast it back into Burma on shortwave, so it can’t be blocked. We won the elections almost ten years ago, but still it’s impossible for people outside of Rangoon to hear what I say.”

  Over the hour that follows, she talks about the economy, human rights, the cleansing of ethnic minorities. She condemns slave labor at the nation’s gas pipelines and the drug trade that enriches the elite. Years from now, she will face accusations of abandoning these same people, but in this room, on this day, she is fierce and resolute.

  She says Burma was known as the rice bowl of Asia, before Ne Win, the head of the military, decided that nine was his lucky number. Overnight, he voided all currency not divisible by nine. With no banking system, families kept their savings in hundred-kyat notes, stashed away in their homes. Burma’s wealth was wiped out. Having been one of Southeast Asia’s richest nations, it quickly became the poorest.

  Ne Win bathed in dolphin blood to stay young and did as his soothsayers told him. One night he ordered the main thoroughfare in Rangoon shut down so he could walk across a bridge backward, dressed as an emperor. Behind the scenes, he bought his power by paying the generals millions of dollars via bank accounts in Switzerland—using the profits from turning a blind eye to trade in humans and drugs.

  When the students objected to the rape of their country, Ne Win ordered those same generals to shoot into crowds from Rangoon to Mandalay. Those were the protests of 8/8/88, when Suu Kyi took on her father’s mantle and Min Zin was driven to his hideout in the attic. Thousands were killed, and Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest. Eleven years later, she still can’t leave her home except to visit the very building in which we are sitting, its door guarded by the soldiers across the street.

  Before we finish the interview, she describes the villagers forced to work as slaves along the pipelines that make the generals rich. She tells us about volunteer lawyers from America who have found a hundred-year-old law, written to prosecute pirates for crimes on the high seas. They think they can use it to hold the California-owned gas company accountable, maybe even the generals, too. The lawyers may have to take it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. They are going to fight for Burmese villagers half a world away.

  I’m mesmerized, listening to this tiny woman tell me the ways nonviolence in the streets and the courts can deliver a ruthless military to its demise. But for now, she’s still under house arrest. She hasn’t defeated the junta yet.

  In order for her words to make it farther than the open room downstairs, we have to take the film apart and hide it. While we unscrew the plastic casings, Suu Kyi talks about her husband, Michael, an Oxford professor of Tibetan Studies who died of cancer a few months ago. Her two boys, still school-aged, are without either parent now. The military will let her leave Burma anytime she chooses. She could have gone to Michael’s bedside before he passed. She could go now to hold their grieving children. But she knows that if she leaves, she will never be allowed to return. I imagine being one of her sons, in the quiet of an English country house, with newspaper clippings instead of a mother. I wonder if they are more resentful or more proud. I think of my own father in Russia and his empty seat at my high school graduation.

  When the film is liberated from its plastic, I begin to thread it into the pen casings. Suu Kyi puts her hand on mine. “Those are fine for the decoy film,” she says. “The scraps you want them to find so they think they’ve gotten it all.” Then gently, like a patient godmother, she adds, “For the real footage, the film you actually want to get out, nature has given you a better hiding place.” She rolls the film of our interview into a cylinder smaller than a tampon and seals it in plastic wrap. She hands it to me and says, “The bathroom is down the hall on the left.”

  When we walk out the front door, fifteen minutes later, the soldiers are awake and at their post. We can hear the metallic clicking of a camera shutter snapping our departure. Neither of us turns to look. We walk toward the main road, where Suu Kyi has told us we can catch a taxi if the soldiers let us leave.

  The film concealed inside me contains more than just comments on the economy and civil wars. It contains a rallying cry for the people of Burma, a plea not to give up, a demand that they rise again. These are the most seditious words Suu Kyi has uttered in some time, provoked by the preemptive jailings last week. And it’s our responsibility now to make sure those words are heard.

  “There’s a taxi,” Daryl says. But before we can reach it, a military pickup truck pulls up beside us and a man with a gun says, “Get in.”

  Min Zin has warned us: If soldiers engage us, we’re to be meek and obedient. No flashy resistance or moral outrage.

  “Your victory will be getting out of there, hopefully with footage intact,” he told us. “Don’t do anything to jeopardize that goal, however tempting it might be to spit at their feet.”

  We climb into the back of the truck, and the soldiers lace the canvas closed behind us. I can feel my pulse in my fingertips, and everything slows down, the way a car accident feels right before you hit.

  Even though there’s no one in the back with us, instinctively, we do not speak. I try to kee
p track of the turns. After a few minutes, I give up.

  When we stop and the driver cuts the engine, we can still hear the sounds of city traffic. They haven’t taken us too far. Certainly not far enough to reach Insein Prison or any of the detention centers outside of Rangoon. Relief prickles my arms like rain.

  We hear the soldiers get out of the cab. A minute later, the canvas opens. We are outside a strange hotel. “Get your things,” the taller soldier says.

  “This isn’t our hotel,” Daryl replies.

  The two soldiers talk between themselves for a moment, in Burmese. Then they close the canvas again and return to the driver, who’s waiting up front. The truck lurches back into motion. Were they buying time? Was it a genuine mistake? What will happen after we pick up our things? Daryl holds my eye. He’s telling me it’s going to be okay.

  We pass the temple sounds of Sule Pagoda. Then the cries of the vendors at Aung San Market. Two weeks ago, I’d never been to this city. Now I can feel my way through its streets by sound. Beyond the canvas are monks and merchants and militants and mothers. All victims of one madman with a gun. In some way I can’t explain, I’ve come to love them. I wonder if the children at the tea stalls are watching our truck pass beside their games.

  We stop again, and when the canvas opens, we are in the driveway of our hotel. Daryl smiles his dry British smile.

  “Get our things?” he asks. The tall soldier nods. He’s annoyed by Daryl’s show of humor. But that small joke reminds me that we are still ourselves. I squeeze Daryl’s hand as we lead the men to our room.

  The first thing they do is collect all the money they can see. Then they ask us if we have any more, and we produce a few rumpled notes. The shorter soldier holds up the pile without counting it.