Burmese Lessons

by Karen Connelly

  After the bicycles, on the tree-lined boulevard that will take us to Mingaladon Airport, billboards blur by, advertising foreign cigarettes and liquor, and blaring the usual propaganda in English and Burmese, that people must oppose external elements and foreign stooges. No wonder I want to visit a temple.

  But there is no time. We have reached the ocher-colored houses on the outskirts of the city. A cow walks down a muddy road, following a little boy.

  There is no pagoda in sight. It is a simple balm, to touch one’s head to the earth. Good soil, hard dirt, solid rock: another sort of holy trinity. Several river stones from the wide Irrawaddy weigh down my bag. I rarely buy Buddha icons, or any other religious paraphernalia, but I covet rocks with an odd fervor, and carry them around with me.

  Many images of the Buddha show him touching the ground with his right hand. The traditional story has it that, upon achieving Nirvana, he touched the earth so that it could act as a witness to his enlightenment. But why would he need a witness? And why would it be the earth? The Buddha’s hand touching the ground is a gesture to the earth, honoring animist religions that Buddhism displaced.

  The earth is already enlightened. It is itself, purely, in this moment, solid and ever-changing. Lower the vulnerable forehead to any stone floor and the third eye sees that even the dust is sacred.

  Soon I will be high above the Buddhas and the dust, in a plane passing over green trapezoids and yellow rectangles, crops squared off and parceled out in an orderliness that deceives, suggesting that the wild grass and the weather have no agenda of their own. Flying south to Bangkok, I will look down at the wide rivers and the glimmering tributaries dropped into the mud of the Irrawaddy Delta like a handful of silver chains. The silver thickens and pours blue into the Gulf of Martaban, the Bay of Bengal.

  I’ll have no problem getting on that plane. An immature part of me wishes that an MI agent would stop me. I would weasel my way out of difficulty with my voluminous wit and charm. Stupid. I don’t actually want anything bad to happen to me. I just want it almost to happen, so that I’ll have the story.

  But my departure is uneventful. Leaving is my consummate and cursed talent.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE CITY OF FILTHY ANGELS

  The sound of birds.

  A raucous argument among birds wakes me. The voices fly through the screens, dive up, down, crash against leaves. The birds—jackdaws? parrots?—roost in two tall trees that grow near this concrete block. New place, new sounds. Rangoon is gone.

  I am dislocated, like a bone, and in pain.

  In the middle of the night, a lizard woke me. How does it manage to live in the roaring city? “Too-kay! Too-kay!” The sound seemed to be inside the room, at the foot of the mattress, but that was just a clever reptilian trick with echoes. The tukae, a big gecko. It must have been outside, clinging to the balcony wall.

  The light was so bright I winced and swore aloud at the streetlights. Then squinted and rose clumsily from the mattress on the floor. But it wasn’t lights: it was the full moon gaping through the window.

  Afterward, I lay in bed, frowning at the glow on the walls. I kept thinking of the question. On the plane from Burma, a curious man asked, But where do you actually live?

  Presently, in a small rented apartment on a soi off Phaholyothin Road. A friend of a friend owns the place, empty but for this mattress and a fridge. And a working phone line, thank God.

  But I won’t be here for long. I want to go to the Burmese embassy and get a visa to return as soon as possible. And find out the bus schedule to Mae Sot, a border town where many Burmese exiles live. I need to get in touch with Anita, too, though I suspect that she has already left for Sweden.

  But first, breathe. Breathe. When I came back to Thailand over a year ago, I went to visit an old Thai monk. His unsolicited advice was identical to that of the monks I met in Mandalay: “You just need to sit. And breathe.”

  How do they know?

  And why do they give such harsh counsel? Monks are used to tremendous rigor. They probably forget their old lives. Breathing in and out is supposed to be enough to keep the mind from running around like an ax murderer. Some small measure of calmness would be good, though enlightenment is out of the question; I can’t sit still long enough to apply nail polish.

  And, right now, I’m hungry. I roll off the mattress and prepare to meet the city.

  To leave Rangoon and land in Bangkok is to leap from the nineteenth century into the future of the entire planet. Think Blade Runner without Harrison Ford.

  The rush of the morning hordes flays me awake. Millions of people are on their way to work and school. Those who commute from one side of the city to the other have been traveling for two hours. I walk in the direction of Pratunam with a bathing suit in my bag. If I can stand the smog, I’ll get there an hour before the bus does.

  In Thai, Bangkok begins with the syllables Glung-tape, but the full name is several lines long. A small part of that extravagance translates into “city of angels.” If angels still reside here, they must be filthy, asthmatic, and covered in mange, like the torn-eared dogs that plod across my path. I’ve been outside for less than forty-five minutes, but a thick layer of grime coats my arms and face.

  What are you? I ask the place as I walk through it, dazed by the car and bus exhaust, shaking from too much caffeine in the blood or from the press of bodies in the street, or both. What are you? The angels refuse to answer me. The beggar outside the neighborhood shrine waves away the flies that feed on the raw stump of his amputated leg. The journalists I used to live with told me that the beggars wound themselves, so I shouldn’t give them money. But after standing over his stump for a whole minute I pull out a few baht and drop them into his cup. I feel obliged, because I’ve been watching a squirmy cluster of maggots have their breakfast. I ask him, “Shouldn’t you take those off?,” meaning the maggots, but he just puts his hands together in prayer position against his head, thanking me for the money or wishing for more.

  Receptionists and office workers in high heels walk past (making me self-conscious about my clunky shoes), along with salary men, factory employees, pizza deliverers (at ten in the morning), and dozens of teenage girls (wearing the same navy-blue-skirt-and-white-blouse uniform I hated when I was seventeen). The crowd spreads over the broken sidewalks, hurrying toward the new Asia. The Mercedes and Saabs inch by slowly, trapped in the traffic like the cheaper cars and buses.

  City of filthy angels and garbage, metropolis of smog and children. The gleaming tops of the pagodas disappear among the skyscrapers, Siam’s new temples, the usual gilded and gleaming centers of commerce. They are flanked by an architectural cancer of shopping malls that has destroyed most of the city’s old buildings.

  What makes so much noise? Revving cars, the traffic cop whistles, two-stroke engine motorcycles, three-wheeled whining tuk-tuks, much human- and machine-generated clamor around building sites (which are ubiquitous), sledgehammers falling, rising, falling beneath the slow pirouettes of cranes, and here in front of me: a man tapping together finger cymbals to entice people to his fruit cart.

  Only money makes this much noise.

  The stinking, lung-burning serenity of the traffic impresses me. Few drivers honk; no one screams. Buddhist patience informed by habit civilizes the mayhem: people listen to music, talk on their cell phones, and do crossword puzzles. Unwilling to walk any farther, I stop at a corner and enter into negotiations with a motorcycle taxi driver. After a deal is struck, I follow his lead and hop on the back of his huge bike. He hugs the gas tank and enters the gridlock, weaving between vehicles. Perched behind, higher up, I try not to grip the young man’s hips too hard with my thighs. This is not so easy, because my first loyalty is to my kneecaps, which must remain attached to my legs as we speed past jagged fenders and side mirrors.

  To keep themselves safe from harm, the motorcycle drivers wear strong amulets. Strong helmets are not as popular, though they sometimes use plastic caps, like the
one I’ve got on my head, held on with an unraveling, sweat-stained chinstrap. These young entrepreneurs know that hundreds of people die on Bangkok streets every year, sometimes bleeding to death on the pavement because the traffic is so thick that ambulances can’t get through. The police occasionally have to fly in helicopters to crane-lift wrecked cars—to get the traffic moving again, not to save the accident victims. Self-appointed squads fight over who gets to clean up the bodies.

  The traffic makes me miss Rangoon. Away from that beleaguered city for less than twenty-four hours, I am already nostalgic. Less development—read grinding poverty—means fewer cars, less noise, not so much pollution, thousands more trees. I know the generals have kept it that way, inadvertently, through mismanagement, corruption, and lousy public relations. As we cut through the diesel-y nooks and crannies of Bangkok traffic, I mentally compose a letter.

  Dear Generals:

  Look at what you’re missing. Computer chips as abundant as grains of rice. Art galleries thick with rich white buyers. Crates of real Johnnie Walker Black Label. Never mind your little mountains of opium and the brisk trade in methamphetamines. If you really want to make money, drop the nasty isolationist neuroses and liberate your citizens! Their freedom will free up your markets. The world will come begging for everything you’ve got.

  P.S. What I really mean is, don’t sell the works to China. There are many other suitors salivating in the wings.

  Thailand has responded enthusiastically to the multinational come-ons. The West promises prosperity for all, or at least for a showy few, forever and ever, or until the market crashes. Thailand, black eyes shining, laps up the dream of a rich future and smiles its famous smile. Unlike every other little country in the region, old Siam was never colonized. The Thai people never struggled vociferously for independence from foreign rulers. Instead, Thai kings and their envoys managed to make alliances and deals with various Western countries, preserving old Siam’s freedom while learning the art of compliance. The most obvious recent example of this gift for accommodation took place during the Vietnam War, when the country became a major site of R and R for American soldiers. Their presence helped create the blueprint for sex, tourist, and service industries that have brought Thailand some financial prosperity and a lot of painful problems.

  My motorcycle driver deposits me a couple of blocks away from the Regent Hotel, so I squeeze through the Pratunam Market district, where shops are stuffed with gorgeous bolts of fabric and stalls almost disappear amid piles of clothes and gadgets. I love the anonymous intimacy of market streets. People push behind me, beside me, until they get past; and I push past other people coming in the opposite direction. Strangers rub against each other matter-of-factly. Your body is also a thousand bodies, two thousand, more, all of us platelets of blood bumping together then giving way as we slip through the artery, rushing onward to do our little blood-tasks in the giant pulsing organism of Bangkok.

  I cross a large intersection and begin a perilous walk beside a sprawling construction site, tripping over broken chunks of cement, blowing dust out of my face. The workers’ heads are wrapped in cloth and sometimes hidden under wide-brimmed straw hats. Bandannas cover their mouths, though the cloth will not protect them from the stronger poisons of the trade or the smog in the air. I pause in my walk to look up at a mountain of bricks, upon which sits a young man, cross-legged, eating dust and diesel with his rice. He pulls the bandanna up from around his neck, wipes his mouth, and smiles down upon me, beneficent. I wave back.

  Construction workers’ shifts here are twelve hours long. Why smile?

  When the day crew finishes, the night crew begins, hammering and hauling and welding—usually without protective glasses—under floodlights. The building sites are hardly different from the ones in Burma, though there is a merciful absence of child laborers. At this site, and at the dozen others my motorcycle driver sped me past, the dark hands of men and women carry buckets of rock and dirt, moving out the debris of the old city as they build the new one.

  What is this building-in-progress? No billboard shows the shining computer-generated structure that will rise from the rubble. There is only a vast block of the rubble itself, and people carrying it around. The great boxcar-shaped loads of bricks seem like a beginning. Of what? More established civilization is just a few meters away, across the road.

  On the other side, I buy some pineapple from a squat middle-aged man with inflamed acne and layers of acne scars. He bears an uncanny resemblance to the thorny fruit he sells. Using his machete, he hacks a yellow pineapple into chunks and gives me a quarter of it. I take the fruit, hand him the money, and ask, “What are they building over there?”

  “Condo,” he says, the second o lifting, stretched out in a rising tone. The word makes me think of the dearth of prophylactics in Pagan.

  “How long have the people been working here?”

  “Several months. They took down the other buildings.”

  “The workers are from the North, right? Esaan?”

  The pineapple man looks offended. “No! I am from Esaan. We don’t want that kind of work anymore. All of them”—he waves a dismissive hand toward the construction site—“they are kohn baa-maa.” Burmese people.

  I see the scene before me anew. Burmese migrant workers. Unable to speak Thai. If they have work permits, they’re still vulnerable to the unscrupulousness of their employers. I eat my fruit as I watch the men and women hoisting, scurrying, carrying. No wonder there are no earthmovers. Burmese laborers are cheaper than machines.

  On the next block, I find myself walking up the gentle slope to the entrance of the Regent Hotel. As casually as I can, I step between the tall white pillars. Thai doormen in pith helmets nod at me solicitously.

  Now I’m no longer part of the throng. I am a white woman. I try to look the part as I walk among the carp and turtle pools, realizing that scruffy khakis and a T-shirt are not the best costume for an illicit visit to a fancy hotel. But here I can be a mess because of my white woman—ness. I could be staying here, slumming it among the natives. I ascend the wide staircase and smile into the Thai employees’ eyes. Their deference is horrible; I don’t deserve it. I’m an impostor.

  I’ve brought my bathing suit because I want to go swimming in the hotel pool. The proper way to return to Bangkok is with a ritual bathing in turquoise-tinted chlorine.

  In the change room, I scrub my face with a linen hand towel. Gray water swirls around the sink. Whatever I blow out of my nose is the color of the roads I’ve recently crossed. I get into my bathing suit and walk out to the shimmering aquamarine rectangle. Water belongs to peace and freedom and that Mediterranean island where you can swim six months of the year. I dive into the pool and put the last harrowing weeks in Burma out of my mind. I think of the Aegean, and remember Seferis:

  … the road left us miraculously by the sea

  The eternal sea to cleanse us of our sins …

  CHAPTER 15

  THE ACTIVIST AND THE ENEMY

  “The thing is, you were indiscreet.”

  How to answer this accusation? I often am indiscreet, by nature and by choice, but I think she’s wrong about this incident. Unfortunately, I’m not good at arguing, especially with older women. I so badly want them to like me that I perform the metaphorical equivalent of whining, rolling over, and pawing the air: a submissive bitch. Later, on my own, I abhor my groveling and spend hours defending myself.

  She continues gravely, “What you did—or, rather, didn’t do—put other people, Burmese people, in danger. You should have switched guesthouses.”

  I am still silent, puzzled by the sanctimonious tone I’ve never heard her use before. Where is the Marla I knew before I left for Burma, the tough-talking American activist and journalist, the storyteller who gives impassioned speeches about the Burmese cause? She has two distinct oratorial traits: she punctuates her main points with staccato gestures of her long, thin hands and, when finished with a story, she throws her heavy d
ark hair over her shoulder with the finality of someone closing a door. I like her very much.

  Or, rather, I think I like her. I have liked her in the past. She tutored me before my trip to Burma and introduced me to Burmese people, both here and inside the country. But something fishy is going on.

  “I don’t understand why you wouldn’t have changed places after the first protest. You and most other foreigners were probably being watched from the moment you appeared at the demonstrations.”

  Despite the glacial air-conditioning in the coffee shop, Marla’s chest and neck have flushed red. “It’s like you weren’t taking the danger seriously. I’ve stopped phoning into the country, because phone lines are tapped. We have to be careful. We don’t go into the country to endanger Burmese people.”

  “Marla, there were protests every day for over a week. I would have called more attention to myself by repeatedly changing hotels. Besides, not everyone changed hotels. One reporter who worked for a major American newsmagazine stayed at the Strand from beginning to end. I chatted with him the night of the Hledan Junction showdown, and he said he was going back to the hotel to file his story over the phone.”

  “But he was staying at a big hotel. No one person would have to take responsibility for his behavior—calling out on a line that was probably bugged. No one person could get in terrible trouble because he was staying there.”

  “Well, I can’t afford to stay at the Strand.”

  “That’s not the point. I told you that if the situation got tense it was best to switch guesthouses.”

  Frankly, I was just too tired to switch guesthouses, but I don’t want to admit this to her, so I cast about for some ammunition. “Anita didn’t switch guesthouses.” I hear the petulance in my voice.