Burmese Lessons

by Karen Connelly

  ALSO BY KAREN CONNELLY

  Fiction

  The Lizard Cage

  Nonfiction

  Touch the Dragon: A Thai Journal

  One Room in a Castle: Letters from Spain, France, and Greece

  Listen to the Reed: A Dialogue with Fereshteh Molavi

  Poetry

  The Small Words in My Body

  This Brighter Prison

  The Disorder of Love

  The Border Surrounds Us

  Grace and Poison

  IN MEMORIAM

  Sayagyi Tin Moe

  November 19, 1933–January 22, 2007

  For Suragamika,

  on the long journey

  For Lucas, beloved

  Looking back on what has gone before, one cannot help but think that each event, each moment, could not have happened any other way. But this confuses an honest accounting of the past with another kind of denial. Each moment of life is filled with choices. Should I keep my hand moving over this page? Should I continue the narration as planned? As it has been written before?

  Or am I free to imagine?

  —from A Chorus of Stones by Susan Griffin

  PROLOGUE: FIRST WORD

  In a quiet street near Sule Pagoda, a woman smiles at me for no reason. I smile back and stop walking. She whispers to the little boy playing on the ground between us. He hops forward and takes my hand, pulling me up the steps past his mother (his aunt? a neighbor?) toward the entrance of a narrow cement building.

  At the threshold, he stops. I stop, too, and crane my neck to look inside. Surrounded by flowers, the Buddha sits at the back of the dark room. The boy does a little faux bow, suggesting that I bow also.

  Why not? I slip off my shoes to enter the candlelit place, then kneel and genuflect three times. The woman and the child and a few other children stand behind me, framed in the doorway. After I bow, the little boy claps his hands. The others laugh. At the boy? Or at me? Or with delight that I am willing to pay homage to the Buddha? The boy, then two little girls, two more boys, and a toddler come barefoot into the room, sidling against one another in shyness. I think I’ve happened upon the neighborhood shrine for children. Soon there are a dozen kids clustered around me in the candlelight. As flowers surround the Buddha, I am encircled by thin brown limbs, open faces, an assortment of wide or cautious smiles.

  Thus I learn my destiny. I will never leave Rangoon. I will return to this street and find a house here and adopt children as beautiful as these ones, or as beautiful as these spirits, it doesn’t matter if they have cleft palates and missing limbs, I will love them, I will live here until I die. The Buddha smiles from his cowl of jasmine and marigold, his eyes half closed. As is the custom, I light more incense, a candle, and bow again. The room is small, the air close and cloying, filled with the sweetness of joss sticks and flowers and candle wax. I wipe trickles of sweat away from my nose, my neck.

  What are their names? I do not know.

  How do you say “What is your name?” in Burmese? I will learn that soon, maybe this afternoon, or tomorrow.

  My knees and elbows touch the children; the children put their hard little hands into my hands. One small girl climbs into my lap, pure affection, but the others tease her and she tumbles away, embarrassed. Pyramids of oranges and apples sit before the Enlightened One, along with cups of bright yellow liquid, and a gold-edged tea set, each cup full of tea. Yet the Buddha never drinks. A dozen children and two women stare at me as my eyes adjust to the dim light. Sunlight pours down in the street behind me, but I’m in another world now.

  A heavy lady with tattoos on her arms and a wad of betel in her mouth squeezes into the room; somehow there is more space to accommodate her. That is the nature of life in Asia—there is always more space. She places a glass of the fluorescent yellow liquid before me and urges me to drink. I take a small sip. She smiles. The stuff is thick, sweet, and cold. Three of the older children bow again to the shrine. Then they back away, out of the house.

  A few minutes later, they return with a tray of food separated into lacquered black bowls: deep-fried nuts and beans, roasted sesame seeds, pickled tea leaf. A tiny silver spoon matches each portion. The tattooed lady hands me a checkered napkin. The room becomes even darker as the entrance crowds with neighbors. An earnest boy who wears large, heavy-framed glasses—owl eyes, the kind I used to wear, too—leans into the room and asks in the most pure-water English, “Excuse me, miss, hello, are you a Buddhist?”

  “Not really. But when I was a teenager I lived with a Buddhist family.”

  He opens his eyes very wide. “In Burma?”

  “No. In Thailand.”

  “Oh, I see, I see.” His voice carries the inflection of an era when white women in high-waisted dresses sipped the iced tea brought to them by boys like this clever one, who asks me, “Did you like to live with Buddhists?”

  I reply, “I did. Very much. It was a long time ago, when I was just a little older than you.”

  “And Buddhism remains with you.” A flawless sentence, and true.

  “Yes. I loved my Thai family. And the Buddha believed in peace,” I add. There is an irony, mentioning peace in Rangoon. Yet when he turns to translate I hear only sincerity in his voice.

  Our listeners murmur approval, or at least interest. The tattooed lady lays a soft, shiny hand on my inner arm. “Hla-deh,” she says. I echo, “Hla-deh,” in response, trying the word out. The children laugh. I say this word to each of them, which elicits giggles, shrieks, downcast eyes from the older girls.

  Keen to make conversation, but also shy, the bespectacled young man says over the children’s black heads, “Please excuse my broken English. I study only one.” He corrects himself immediately. “I study alone.”

  “But you speak English very well. Please excuse my broken Burmese.”

  He smiles, translates for the benefit of the neighbors. Then he excuses himself. “I am going to fetch my best friend. He would like to meet you. He is a teacher.”

  The boy leaves and a woman enters, beautifully dressed in a lavender blouse and a purple sarong. First she genuflects before the Buddha, lights more incense, a candle. Then she turns and bestows upon me a radiant smile. Speaks. I don’t understand a word. After a moment of peering at my face, she rises and disappears into the back of the house. For this is a house, a family dwelling; only its small, open-to-the-street sitting room serves as a shrine.

  She returns with a round disk of stone and a thick stick of wood. It must be thanaka. The people, especially the women, wear it as a kind of powder, to absorb sweat and to protect their skin from the sun. Ground into a paste, it has a faintly sweet fragrance and a texture like fine wet clay. I wonder if it has healing properties; former political prisoners on the Thai border told me about using the paste on their scabies and insect bites while they were incarcerated. Men don’t wear it in an obviously cosmetic manner, as women do, but every man was once a small boy, and his mother smeared the delicate cream on his bare skin before he went outside to play.

  Now the woman splashes the smooth stone disk with water. She pushes the heel of her hand against the soft wood; an ivory wedge has opened in the bark at the base of the stick. She rubs the thanaka against the stone in slow circles, adding more water every few seconds until the ground wood becomes a creamy paste. We watch her silently. It’s a simple daily thing, something all the women do, but it becomes the first ritual of my arrival, a ceremony attended by children, women, the Buddha himself, glowing there. The woman mimes putting the paste on her own face, then gestures at me, at my cheeks, asking if it’s all right. I smile. With soft, cool fingers, she smoothes the hair away from my face. The intimacy of the act makes my chest tighten. Food and drink are spread out before me, and a strang
er touches my face. Without design or craving. Just thanaka.

  She pats the wet stone then touches me again, smearing the mixture on one cheek, then the other. She makes two spiraling circles. Then sits back on her bare heels to look at her work. Touches the stone again and draws an ivory line down the center of my nose. “Hla-deh! Hla-deh!” The aspirated sound at the beginning of the word makes it soft, a breath, though the first syllable has a bright, rising tone.

  I point at her with my chin. “May May hla-deh!” May May means “Mama.” My voice elicits more laughter from the children, the women, the lady of thanaka, the boy in large glasses, who is back, I see when I turn around, with his friend and a few more neighbors. The woman with tattoos claps her hands.

  This is my first day in Burma, my first two hours in Rangoon.

  Hla-deh is the first lesson the people give me. It is the word for “beautiful.”

  CHAPTER 1

  THE DINNER PARTY

  I said that I would find the place myself. I wanted to walk through the city, into Chinatown. “No, thank you. I do not want a ride, it’s all right.”

  The pause at the other end of the phone was so long that I thought the line had gone dead.

  “Are you still there?”

  He asked again, “You … want … to walk?” Judging from the hesitating formality of the telephone exchanges we’d had earlier, I’d decided that my volunteer guide, San Aung, was over fifty, and a dedicated worrywart.

  “I do want to walk. Please tell me again the name of the restaurant. And how to get there.”

  He did. He described it all carefully. He said, “But it can get dark in the evenings. You will be all right alone? I do not want you to get lost.”

  How dark could it possibly get in a city? I said, “There is no possibility that I will get lost.”

  • • •

  I set off gamely enough. The light coaxes me out of weariness and into intoxicating newness: the tea-shop stools, the bottle caps pressed like ancient coins into the hardened mud of the streets; the scowling face of a boy as he pours steaming water into a large pot, then tosses in a load of dirty dishes. As I cross the street, a woman reaches up to a yellow-waterfall tree—laburnum?—snaps off a lemony sprig, and tucks it like a bird into her braided hair.

  Even the dirt draws me in, the realness of dirt that lines the edges of millions of flip-flop-clad feet, including my own, which I wash every evening before I sleep, as I am unable to get into bed with dirty feet—a habit ingrained a decade ago, when I lived with Pee-Moi and Paw Prasert in northern Thailand. It comes flooding back to me in the flood of Rangoon, that early time cascading into this one.

  I experienced a surge of those memories when I first moved back to Thailand six months ago, a vivid unrolling of the past in a small Thai town, my long-ago life with my Thai family. When I was seventeen, I went to live and study for a year in northern Thailand. It was a Rotary Exchange Program—a dry-sounding moniker for an experience that was utterly transformative. I was a precocious teenager, already publishing my poems and stories, and chafing for more contact with the big world. Living in a strange, brilliant, difficult place gave me something specific to write about, and the book I eventually published about my life in Denchai—Dream of a Thousand Lives—became a bestseller. It also financed several more years abroad and set me up, at twenty-five, as a bona-fide writer.

  Earlier this year I returned to Thailand, but now I live in the welter and roar of Bangkok, a city I both love and hate for its chaos. At the height of the after-work rush, Rangoon seems much quieter than Bangkok, more manageable, less noisy. Though noisy enough. The glorious disorder slowly organizes itself into the busy face of evening. Where at first I moved, dazed and jostled, in a thick crowd of bodies, now I float from one stream of rushing humans to another. Young office men with soft faces, housewives confounded by the price of chicken, students who glimmer with intelligence. On Anawrahta Street, small-time salesmen with slicked-back hair have spread their wares—nail clippers, small electronic gizmos, hand mirrors, ballpoint pens, sunglasses, bottles of cologne, and loads of used clothes, much of it smuggled in from Thailand or Bangladesh, since Burma produces very little—on swaths of the wide sidewalk.

  One of these salesmen, white-suited and handsome, like a Burmese version of an Italian gangster, is picking his nose when he meets my inquisitive eyes. He smiles at me unabashedly. Women walk home with their baskets of greens and onions, and other women stride in the opposite direction, toward the river and the boats that will ferry them across it. Four young Indian children in their pyjamas, their eyes kohled and their cheeks swirled with thanaka, play a checkers-like game on a set of broad steps. Normally I would stop to watch, but I must not be late for dinner.

  Here is Chinatown, with its blue and green buildings, wooden shutters and elegant roofs, looking romantic in the gold leaf of dusk. The paint on the buildings is new, thin and lime-based, making the whitewashing both literal and figurative. The SLORC—that is, the State Law and Order Restoration Council, the group of generals who rule Burma—recently decreed it for all the buildings of Rangoon. Not so long ago, the SLORC also forcibly moved entire communities of the city’s poorest people into primitive shantytowns on the periphery of the city so that foreign visitors like myself are not burdened with the sight of them.

  The city is being beautified because, after decades of a socialist isolationist policy—the Burma Socialist Program Party was created by General Ne Win, who staged a coup d’état in 1962—the regime has changed its stripes. This is Visit Myanmar Year, and the government wants foreigners to visit, spend money, come back, and, most important, do business. The usual weeklong visa has been extended to a month; business visas last longer. There are Lucky Strike and Chivas Regal billboards on the streets; a few big hotels are already standing and more are under construction, most of them built jointly by the SLORC and its favorite business partners, the Chinese. The shift to a free-market economy came abruptly, in 1989, after decades of mismanaged and increasingly non-functioning nationalization schemes. The aged General Ne Win handed power over to a group of generals under his sway—the SLORC—and within months “the Burmese way to socialism,” as it used to be called, became the Burmese way to rampant capitalism fueled by the opium trade and the plunder of natural resources. The beneficiaries of this extraordinary economic shift are the generals—all of whom are ethnic Burmans and Buddhists—and their business partners and friends, who are often Sino-Burmese with connections to the Chinese business world and black market. There are Thai, Singaporean, German, French, American, and Canadian companies in Burma as well, operating factories, mines, pipelines in direct association with the generals, but their presence is minuscule compared with that of the Chinese. In less than a decade, most of Mandalay’s shops, hotels, restaurants, and prime real estate have been sold to Sino-Burmese and Chinese people, who are able to buy the identity papers of dead Burmans for a few hundred dollars. The same shift of ownership is happening in Rangoon as impoverished Burmese people are forced to sell their properties. When I left the guesthouse, I asked Myo Thant, the clerk, the best way to get to Chinatown. He laughed and said, “You’re in Chinatown already.” I shook my head, misunderstanding. “The whole city,” he said. “It is becoming Chinese town.”

  But I’m in the heart of old Chinatown now. And I am lost. Darkness falls quickly, as it does in the tropics, and falls hard, as it does in Rangoon, because none of the lights on these streets are working. I take a moment to get my bearings and consult my map, which happens to have several errors on it—that is, if I’m reading it correctly. Soon I am rushing around in the dark, flustered and big-eyed and without composure, approaching and retreating from the wrong pools of light and people, my glasses slipping down my nose.

  But I do find my dinner party, finally, when San Aung sees a woman stumbling by on the broken pavement and calls out, “Miss Karen,” accent on the second syllable, Ka-rén, like the ethnic group that has been at war with the Burmese m
ilitary for half a century. I approach the table, smiling and sweating in equal measure as I greet everyone, a dozen or so dinner guests gathered together by San Aung, who is not in his fifties at all but is a good-looking man of perhaps thirty-five with high cheekbones in a long Indian face. With his gorgeous head of gleaming hair and his immaculate clothes, he looks like a movie star. He wears a blue pin-striped shirt and a dark blue longyi; both seem to have been lifted off an ironing board five minutes ago. He shakes my hand three times, then lets go and turns to introduce me to the others, giving me condensed biographies as we make our way around the table of mostly Burmese writers. But a lawyer is also here, and a history professor who works at the Japanese embassy (the pay is much better, the university is a shambles), a burly ship’s captain who loves Gorky (he announces this immediately, as an intellectual credential) a woman who collects Burmese folktales, and a Swedish journalist, Anita. Even though she’s sitting down, I can tell that she is very tall.

  Plates of food are already arriving, heaps of greens and noodles and two whole fishes. And a pile of twisted, glistening stuff: very possibly a platter of silver worms. The ship’s captain and a very rotund poet make a place for me between them and, once I’m seated, the introductory quiet closes up with voices again, like steady waves after a lull. Streams of Burmese rush around me, and English strides out into the air, directed to Anita, to me, and to a man I’d assumed was part of the local contingent but who is, in fact, Johnny, a Filipino photographer employed by Time magazine.

  Everyone talks about books and writers, passing the names back and forth like gem dealers handling sapphires and rubies, marveling at the riches. Though at the mention of Tolstoy and Anna Karenina, San Aung pushes out his bottom lip in contemptuous-Frenchman style and huffs, “But it was too much, all those characters. I couldn’t keep them straight. There were too many of them at the beginning and too many at the end.” He laughs. “I did not read the middle, but I’m sure it was the same problem.”