Burmese Lessons

by Karen Connelly

  Outside, the air seems washed with orange; the clouds are clamped over the city like a rusty lid. The baseball-cap painter makes his own pun. “It’s the new light of Myanmar.” The New Light of Myanmar is the name of the state newspaper.

  “No, no,” his colleague rejoins. “This is the old dark of Myanmar.”

  Saya says, “Let’s go into the garden.” When he stands, San Aung and I follow suit, and the three young painters spring into action, picking up the chairs and rearranging them on the rough gravel in the courtyard. They won’t allow me to lift my own chair.

  When we are sitting again, the young painters return, spontaneously, to the subject of censorship. One of them says, “When I was twelve or thirteen, I sketched some soldiers during the big Army Day celebration. There was something funny about the picture. I made the generals who were watching the march look like pigs. My father used to talk about the fat generals all the time, but when he saw my sketch he was angry. He asked, Did you take it to school? Do your teachers know about this? He made me tear it up. And he hates the government! But he was afraid of his son’s getting into trouble.”

  The baseball-cap painter adds, “Now we are adults, but our father is the Censorship Board. The board always says no and don’t, just like a father. That’s all they do. It’ so boring.”

  “Why do you think they want to control you?” I ask. “What are they so afraid of?”

  Saya speaks while waving away the mosquitoes around his ankles. “Oh, that is simple. They are afraid of us because we can see.”

  If the artist is a historian of the personal, the images he creates are artifacts—evidence of lives lived, lives broken. Subjectivity doesn’t detract from the reliability of personal history; it adds to it, makes it irrefutable truth. This happened to me, to my family, my people. Here is the record I have made.

  The third young man, who has been so quiet, speaks carefully. “They are even afraid of colors. The Censorship Board does not like red in our paintings. Or black. We try not to use red and black, but it’s hard.” He shakes his head. “They don’t like anything with strength or strong emphasis. If the pictures are not monks or elephants, if they are abstract, they accuse us of criticizing the government. Whether or not we are allowed to hang the paintings depends on their interpretation.”

  “Everything depends on their interpretation!” Saya exclaims, his tone betraying exasperation for the first time. And then irony: “Some of the generals are great artists.”

  “Some of the greatest in the world!” agrees the baseball-cap painter.

  “So they know what they are talking about,” Saya finishes.

  The orange light has faded into deep rose. We talk until we’re sitting in the dark. But we can still see one another. We listen to the frogs. Crickets ring in a second chorus. I listen to the growing choir of creatures singing around us. How free they are, frogs and insects and the final birds of the day. When a clap of thunder crashes above us, we jump in our seats, shaken from our separate reveries.

  Saya says, “You hear that big sound? That is exactly what we want to tell you. That is how we would like to speak. But we cannot.”

  *The Shan leader and druglord Khun Sa died in Rangoon on October 26, 2007, of complications from diabetes and high blood pressure. He had lived in seclusion and relative luxury in the Burmese capital for over a decade. Though he had been at war with the Burmese military regime for much of his life, the generals gave him amnesty in 1996 and refused the U.S.’s request to extradite him on heroin trafficking charges (for which he had been indicted by the U.S. District Court in New York in 1989). In return for the protection of the generals, Khun Sa disbanded his powerful Mong Tai (Shan) Army.

  CHAPTER 7

  HORROR WITH LAUGHING

  On our way back to the guesthouse, I tell San Aung about the editor who is now in jail.

  “Yes, I heard about it while you were away. He is well known. Every month, after the publication of each issue, he would say, ‘Maybe they’ll come and get me now.’ So they went and got him. It’s no surprise.”

  “Are you afraid sometimes?”

  “Of what?”

  “Of going to jail?”

  He grunts. I’m not sure if this means yes or no or if he’s just showing his disdain for the question. “I like to think the military intelligence network isn’t interested in me anymore. I don’t do much.”

  “But you do enough. Don’t you?”

  He thumps the big, bare-looking steering wheel. “This is enough. Driving around with you, an external destructive element.” This is a joke, a reference to one of the SLORC’s ubiquitous red-and-white propaganda billboards: Crush all internal and external destructive elements as the common enemy.

  “What did you used to do?”

  “You asked me that already.”

  “I’m just curious.”

  “Don’t you have a saying in English about curiosity? And dead cats?”

  “Curiosity kills the cat.”

  Another grunt, and a lurching lane change. There is not so much traffic on the streets in this part of town, but somehow we’re stuck in a little posse of cars with ailing mufflers racing down the wide thoroughfare. “I used to work with underground agents. Find places for them to stay, food to eat. I’m retired now. But I should not tell you anything about it. If the MI agents pick you up and torture you, please don’t mention my name.” He laughs.

  I say, “Ha-ha.”

  “It wasn’t such a great job. The pay was bad.” It’s hard to tell if he’s joking or not. “You know when you go back to your guesthouse and write things down?”

  “Yes?”

  “Things that you see, the talks we have, about what happens here? You know?”

  “Yes?”

  “For you it’s notes on paper. For me it’s my life.”

  Silence. But not really: the close roar of traffic, to which I add, “I’m trying to understand that.” He takes a sharp corner onto Mahabandoola Street and I sway toward him in the narrow car.

  “Sorry.” He’s referring to the turn, though he doesn’t sound apologetic.

  I try, and fail, to hold my tongue. “Do you think it will always be your life?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Even when democracy comes to Burma?”

  He clears his throat of phlegm and spits out the window. “In ’88, we thought the change would come immediately. The military would step down and a caretaker government would rule, then we would have free elections. You would not believe what it was like—the protests, the streets filled with people. So many people!” Now he flings his hand out the window, toward the past, when the entire nation was convulsed with indignation and propelled into action. “Then the soldiers killed thousands. And many others left. But we still had plans. There was Aung San Suu Kyi. We thought, All right, two years, five at the most—there were still many people in the movement. But now we don’t know. She is not really free, even though the house arrest is over for now. She can’t travel. They will let her speak for a while, but they will make her be quiet again. And what if she had power, right now? The military will not disappear.

  “Right now, not many things work in my country. The university system has been destroyed by all the shutdowns. If you get sick and have to go to the hospital, you need to bring your own bandages, your own plastic bags, your own blankets. And if you get a blood transfusion you might get malaria or HIV. Or hepatitis. A friend of mine got two at once: hepatitis and malaria, from an operation on his leg. And he had already paid for the blood that infected him! There is no money for schools and hospitals because the generals keep it for themselves. I understand why the intelligent people are leaving.”

  “Do you think you’ll ever leave? There are many exiles in Thailand and India.”

  “I know someone who was on the border for a long time, but then he got sick and had to go into the U.N. refugee camp. Now he lives in Norway. What could I do for Burma in Norway? I would be very busy learning to speak t
he Norway language, like my friend. I know the exiles on the borders are working hard, but here we are also working, fighting. Quietly.

  “That drives some people crazy—to fight and to be quiet at the same time. And nothing’s getting better. People in outer Rangoon still get malaria during the rainy season. Right here, in the city, malaria kills people! I spent my youth doing politics—going to meetings, copying and distributing strike manuals, waiting, translating documents, copying U.N. reports out in the middle of the night. Then we finally did it, we had our people’s revolution. And it failed. Some of my friends died. My two cousins went to prison. My uncle went to the border. I did not leave. Now my mother is sick and I can’t go anywhere. Thirty-six and I am an old man, taking care of an old woman. I haven’t traveled the world. I haven’t been free.”

  “You have every right to be bitter.”

  San Aung laughs. He has the habit of laughing before offering up a particularly scathing observation. “Yes, I am bitter. Many of us are. We are angry, we are sick of this shit. But most people will not talk about that, especially with foreigners. Why would they tell you? Regret is not a very Buddhist emotion. How can my Saya show his unhappiness to you, his guest? It would be inhospitable. Bitterness is un-Burmese. Saya is a great artist whose work will only be recognized in twenty or fifty years, long after he’s dead. Maybe. Or maybe not. The Burmese people of the future will not be interested in his paintings. They will be more interested in … computers. And these things called mobile phones. The Japanese people who come here on tours can’t believe we don’t have them.”

  “It was sad today, how the painters were afraid to talk to me.”

  “It’s not just because they are afraid of stupid journalists. It’s because sometimes they don’t know how to talk about their own experiences, even in Burmese. It’s hard for people to talk about what they don’t have. It’s hard to imagine.

  “But we will smile for the foreigners. We are happy to talk about all the old writers over dinner—Gorky and Lu Xun, people no one in the West reads anymore because there are new writers now, writers we don’t know. The country was closed to the outside world for over thirty years, and now that it’s open what do we get? Art exhibitions and new translations of literature? New schools, medical journals, hospitals? No. We get high-rise hotels and the sex trade, like Thailand. That’s what the government is giving us. Tourism and HIV.” His voice changes suddenly, just as serious but no longer angry. “You will write a book about Burma. Just as Sayagyi Tin Moe said.”

  “I wonder. I don’t know.”

  He acts as though he hasn’t heard me. “You will write about something that the tourists never see. That is why you have come here. That is why I met you. To help you.”

  He stares straight ahead as we barrel down Mahabandoola Street, as if he has made up his mind. I wait for a speech, a list of reasons why I should write a book about Burma. But he says, “I’ve read too many English and German books. I’ve often thought, reading Kafka, that I could not possibly experience anything more un-Burmese. His world is so Western, so cold. His people are cut off from each other. Yet he describes exactly how our government works, and how funny it is. Horror with laughing. That’s very Burmese.

  “Two years ago someone brought me a copy, in French, of Fernando Pessoa. Though my French is not good, I think he is another absurdist. He has many names, no? He knew that there are several men in one man. That is like Burmese people, too. The activists used to have two or three names, even four, to confuse the MI. Maybe the next time you come you could bring some Pessoa in English?”

  “I will try. It might not be so easy to find his poetry in Bangkok.”

  “When do you go back?”

  “In a week.”

  He smiles at me and murmurs, “A lot can happen in a week.” He comes to an abrupt stop half a block away from my guesthouse. “Maybe it’s better if I let you out here today.”

  “Sure,” I say, hiding my bafflement. “Whatever works for you.”

  He gives me a serious, penetrating look. “I will try to call you in a few days. But I don’t know if I’ll be able to see you before you leave. I have a lot of work to do. I may have to go out of town on business.”

  “That’s fine. If you can call, great. If not, I’ll see you when I come back. Thank you, San Aung, for all your help.”

  Confused by the sudden farewell, I hop out of the car and watch him drive away.

  CHAPTER 8

  WHO COMES TO THE LADY’S HOUSE?

  Dark-bellied clouds hang above Rangoon. The heat carries the threat of rain but none of its coolness. I am one among hundreds of people who don’t care if they’re caught in a downpour. We stand and crouch and sit along the curbs and on the little patch of earth outside the gates of 54 University Avenue. Old people wearing straw hats are here, and young men with stylish eyeglass frames. Men who must be hard laborers—judging from the size and shape of their hands, their threadbare clothes—crouch and smoke cheroots. Girls with thanaka on their cheeks are pressed close to one another, and dozens of burgundy-robed monks stand on the periphery of the growing crowd. A hawkish Indian man with thick eyebrows stares at my pen as I make notes; I resist covering the paper with my hand.

  Like so many others, this man sits cross-legged on an empty rice sack. Though it has rained heavily in the past two days, I didn’t think to bring anything so practical. The woman next to me offered up a square of newsprint, making the joke that it was a government newspaper and “fit to sit on.” The good-humored neighborliness of the crowd includes the odd jab at the SLORC. People know there are military intelligence officers circulating, snapping photographs, watching, waiting for the Lady like the rest of us. Some people I’ve interviewed have refrained from using even that moniker, simply referring to Aung San Suu Kyi as “her.” But it’s hard to imagine this lively throng whispering the Lady’s name. If they feel fear, they do not show it. It seems that just waiting for the famous opposition figure gives them courage. Twisting around, I scan hundreds of faces, perhaps more than a thousand.

  Not only here, but everywhere I’ve been in Burma, faces turn to my face as I cross the street or sit in a tea shop or walk into a market. The eyes look at me so directly; their aliveness is shocking. In most Western cities, strangers avoid eye contact. Our glances are usually fleeting—it’s impolite to look too long. If you smile at a stranger or talk to a child you don’t know, many people will disapprove. Some will fear that you are mentally deranged.

  People in the crowd smile at me; they smile at one another. More remarkable than the smiles are the stories the mouths can tell. I’ve heard some of them simply by going to tea shops and little biryani joints and sitting around for hours at a time. People don’t always want to talk, but sometimes they do. If we have time and enough common language to move past the preliminaries, I try to scratch below the surface.

  How easily the gold flakes off the Golden Land. People want to tell the stories that are forced under the surface of daily life. Everyone knows these stories, yet they are treated as secrets. The father dead in prison, or at a work camp in the North. The husband, son, sister, brother in prison. The fear of prison and the fear of hunger: these are the twinned specters in my impromptu interviews with strangers. One afternoon, when the lunch rush was over, a tea-shop boss came to my table and sat down for a chat. “You ask me what Burmese people think about the government,” he said. “Now I have time to find an answer. You know what? A lot of them don’t think about the government. They think about eating. They think about their children, eating.”

  Some ex–political prisoners are so weakened by malnutrition, torture, and disease that their physical bodies, to say nothing of their minds, are never the same again. One such man told me that food didn’t seem to make a difference. He still felt as if he was on prison rations.

  Familial separation is another common fear. Burmese family ties are strong. The potent glue of the family holds an individual’s world together, further secures th
at world in the firmament. Yet many families here are broken, not by divorce but by imprisonment and exile.

  Aung San Suu Kyi also lives this experience, separated as she has been for years from her husband* and children, who remain in Britain, where she lived before returning to Burma in 1988. The SLORC has mostly denied them the right to come and visit her. Most of her first continuous six years of house arrest were passed in profound isolation; even letters didn’t reach her. This family tragedy—the mother lost to her children, the husband separated from his beloved wife—is the most well known of thousands of similar stories that make up recent Burmese history.

  Suu Kyi’s famous, revered father, General Aung San, was the architect of Burmese independence from the British and later, during the Second World War, from the Japanese. He was a brilliant young statesman whose early assassination left Burma vulnerable to the military he’d helped create. His name has become the prefix for her own, to remind the ruling junta that people still remember her father as a heroic freedom fighter, and that she is following his path.

  But people are not here just because of who her father was. She has become a politician and a leader in her own right; years of house arrest have not been enough to erase her from people’s minds. The generals continue to publish slanderous, mocking articles about her in the state-run press, but the burgeoning crowd around me proves that government hate campaigns haven’t succeeded. She is joined to her people not only by the will to change a corrupt political system but by a common experience of loss and sacrifice.

  Here they are, the people: expectant, patient, ordinary, remarkable. Their military leaders have failed them badly and with increasing violence over a period of fifty years. Behind closed doors, many would say that Burma is governed by murderers and liars. When the National League for Democracy, with Aung San Suu Kyi at its head, took over eighty percent of the country’s votes in the 1990 federal election, the generals had already placed Suu Kyi under house arrest, “for her own protection.” Instead of taking her rightful position as the leader of the country, she remained locked up in her childhood house on University Avenue, the old colonial-era building behind the blue gate.