Book Read Free

Burmese Lessons

Page 20

by Karen Connelly


  Consequently, I spend a lot of time watching the men in the gem-trading street. My cover is photography. The camera is a way to move among and stare at them. Dozens of men hunker down at low tables, poking at the glassy, glittery stones with silver pincers. The buyers are mostly Chinese-Thai and Thai; the sellers are Indo-Burmese and Burmese. Buyers squint through magnifying loops and dubiously thrust out their lower lips. Sellers flash their gold watches toward the sun with insistent gestures. This is where much of the region’s gem trade becomes Thai; just a few days ago, all this jade, all these cut and uncut rubies, sapphires, emeralds were Burmese.

  Other men hover at the edges of the business. They usually wear well-pressed, clean clothes, but that doesn’t fool me. They have a different look about them. More cautious, a tension in the limbs, an animal wariness in the movements of the head. They appear to be standing around, smoking or reading a newspaper, but they’re also doing what I do, which is why we’re aware of each other. We watch. Are they the smugglers themselves, or hired thugs who work for the smugglers? Burmese government agents? Informers? I promise myself that I will not ask; I will not allow myself to speak to them.

  They attract me sexually. Danger can arouse, heighten sexuality. But I’ve never been into criminals or physically dangerous men, so I can’t understand why these ones intrigue me. Their physical tension could spring into violence; I sense that that’s part of their job description. Yet I would like to bring one of them back to my mildewy mattress, get him to fuck me for an hour, then fetch another one after dinner for the evening session.

  That is seediness at work on me.

  I try to take a photograph of the man with tattoos on his forearms, but he raises his hand in front of his face, palm out. I lower the camera. He drops his hand, too, then holds my gaze as his mouth curves into a good-natured, mocking smile. I saw him yesterday, and the afternoon I arrived. Already we know each other well. His eyes flicker over my face and down, exploring my neck, chest, breasts, until I turn and walk off, toward the other market, fruits and vegetables, deep-fried grasshoppers, pigs’ heads on the massive cutting tables. Safer subjects.

  In one of his letters, Graham Greene wrote that seediness has a deep appeal because it feeds our nostalgia for something that has been lost. But what? Wildness? The grimy underbelly of civilization, a place where we can still act like beasts and tell morality to fuck off? I’m not so sure. I think certain people are drawn to seediness because it flourishes on the site of a wound. Wounds are like magnets, variously repelled by and pulled to each other. The wound outside draws us because of the wound inside. That is the unsavory attraction.

  So. What is my magnetized wound? And why does a wound seek a dangerous, emotionally disconnected pleasure? A pleasure that is also a betrayal (of my lover, of my healthier instincts).

  I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. How many ways can you not know something? I think back through my life to times of violation—the attempted rape in Spain, the teacher who used to make comments about my body whenever we were alone together, the man in Paris who stalked me through the streets until I lost him by hiding in a stairwell. A few other minor incidents. Yet each of those experiences undid me—sent me into paroxysms of anger, uncontrollable crying, loneliness. Shame. They also sent me back to another time, an early part of my life that I can’t remember. I was too small to remember. Remember what? I don’t know.

  After turning away from the tattooed stranger, I bought some mangoes and returned to the guesthouse, where I sat eating at the big teak table and reflecting on the weight of morality, of being a moral creature. I wasn’t thinking about my promise of monogamy to Maung. I was thinking about Mae Sot. For me, it is wrong to have lustful, mute, slavish sex on the site of a wound.

  But it seems to work well for a lot of men.

  Every year thousands of Burmese girls and women enter Thailand through the Thai-Burma border towns of Mae Sot, Mae Sai, and Ranong. Agents recruit them from poor villages, sometimes with the promise of well-paying domestic or factory work. When they arrive in Thailand, they’re in debt to the men and women who have brought them overland, fed them, smuggled them into the country, arranged their job. But that job is often not what they expected.

  The bedroom is the workplace: a curtained cubicle just large enough for a narrow bed where the women are supposed to have sex with a dozen or more strangers every day. There can be as many as thirty to forty clients per day on weekends and during festivals. Sometimes the men refuse to use condoms, making HIV infection an occupational hazard. Even when Burmese women come to Thailand expecting to enter the sex trade, they are often shocked, after they arrive, by how much they have to work and how few choices they have. Brothel owners keep passports. In Thailand illegally, the girls and women are afraid of the Thai police, who sometimes work with the brothel owners to receive a cut of the profits.

  If a defiant girl refuses to have sex with clients, she is beaten and raped until she is compliant. This is called “seasoning.” A similar term exists in dozens of languages, in dozens of countries where women are trafficked into the sex trade by a global crime network. Human trafficking, predominantly of women and children, is organized crime’s third largest economy, superseded only by drugs and weapons. Yet governments all over the world still don’t take it seriously; traffickers, brothel owners, pimps, and the local officials who help them are rarely prosecuted according to the severity of their crimes.

  I know these facts from talking to NGO workers and from reading human-rights reports from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, UNICEF, the International Labor Organization, and so on. How many ways can we know something and still not be able to face it?

  I decide I would like to meet some of the women. I begin to make inquiries, phone calls, ask people at Dr. Cynthia’s clinic. But something stops me. On the surface, visiting a brothel feels voyeuristic. I wouldn’t be able to spend enough time with the women. Second or third visits would be difficult to manage. As the human-rights reports show, many people have already documented the horrifying circumstances of their lives. Do women who work in the sex trade want to talk about the cage they live inside? The brutal enormity of the problem frightens me, and its locus in the individual woman’s body makes me feel physically ill. I shy away from the subject because the damage is too immediate, too near, dangerous in a way that arouses nothing in me but fury—a fury that is all the more enraging because it’s impotent.

  Yet no one can spend time in Mae Sot without seeing the evidence. The little twinkling lights on the house, so pretty at night: that’s a brothel. The tea shop beyond the market, where such young girls serve: also a brothel. The decrepit building on the road out of town. The karaoke place near my guesthouse. Even a small café and ice-cream shop run by a local family—the back courtyard is lined with little booths, quiet during the day, busy at night.

  Last night I went to a bar often frequented by NGO workers and dissidents. It sounds like a joke: a Canadian writer walks into a bar and sits down to drink with a Médecins Sans Frontières doctor, a Burmese dissident, and an American teacher. But there’s no punch line. I’d met the doctor earlier in the day, at my guesthouse, and I’d met Win Myint Aye at the Chiang Mai Christmas party, but he seemed a different man now, with dark circles under his eyes and a haggardness in his face that wasn’t there before. Yet he greeted me warmly and asked how my work was going, then told us how glad he was to meet the doctor, because he had studied medicine before leaving Burma and was still interested in medical work. The two of them immediately started talking, so I turned to the strawberry-blond American woman. She’d been teaching English and basic math among Karen and Karenni refugees for almost five years. Though she was a shy, self-effacing person, the way she spoke about her work—with knowledge, intelligent humor, and enthusiasm—was an unconsciously displayed CV of her talents.

  Often these spontaneous drinking parties among border-dwellers involve subtle jockeying for status among the foreigners, somethi
ng the teacher and I discussed. As an independent writer, I’m one of the lowlier white entities, though not as lowly, apparently, as a refugee-camp teacher. She pulled her chair closer to me and whispered, “All those experts who fly in for a week or two and make their pronouncements on the Karen, or tell the medics what they should be doing, they can be really irritating.”

  Not five minutes after these words slipped into the smoky air, there was a lull in our conversation, and to our joint amazement we heard the Médecins Sans Frontières doctor say, “But the Thai-Burma border refugee camps are an easy gig. I mean, comparatively. The refugees here live in luxury compared to the ones in Africa, who really suffer.” We stared at him, speechless, shocked that a doctor could turn suffering into a competitive sport. Win Myint Aye angled his chair away from the table, a look of pained disappointment on his face.

  We didn’t hear any more of the doctor’s pronouncements, because a small drama unfolding behind us interrupted him. A young Burmese woman stood up, talking loudly. She gestured at the end of each sentence with a wild swing of her arms or a raised fist, and she addressed her tirade to the Thai and Burmese men at her table. Another young sex worker sat there, too, but she sucked her pink drink from a straw and ignored her friend, who was so unsteady on her high heels that she had to press her thighs against the tabletop to brace herself. The slippery fabric of her turquoise-blue dress rendered this balancing technique ineffective; twice it looked as if she was going to topple over. She began to shout, her beautiful made-up face contorted with anger.

  I had no idea what she was saying. The linen-suited Thai man beside her reached out, laughing, and grabbed one of her arms. On the fingers of the hand he used to hold her, he wore two rings, jade and ruby, both set in gold so yellow it looked orange. He pulled her down toward her seat, but she yanked her wrist from his grasp and stumbled away from the table, losing her balance finally and keeling over. She caught herself with her outstretched hands flat on the dirty floor, her bum in the air. The entire table erupted in laughter, and the Thai man looked at one of his companions and asked, “What the fuck is she saying?”

  At that moment, Win Myint Aye stood up so suddenly that his heavy wooden chair fell backward with a loud clatter. Several people looked over at our table, wondering what would happen next. But he had already turned away from the scene and strode across the bar; he pushed through the swinging doors and disappeared into the street. I looked back at the girl and saw that her white high-heeled shoes were at least a size too big for her; no wonder she was unsteady on her feet. As if to follow Win Myint Aye, she walked, swerving and swearing, out of the bar, her voice grown ragged; she was close to tears. One of the Burmese men, still grinning, got up and went after her.

  The teacher, the doctor, and I were silenced by the sounds emanating from the table behind us: the men were imitating the girl’s gestures and making fun of her. The other young sex worker sat without smiling, her drink empty before her, her face empty, her hands upturned and empty on the littered tabletop. For the first time I noticed how crooked her lipstick was, falling away from the line of both the bottom and the top lip. She’d put it on the way a little girl does.

  The American woman and I watched the doctor, as though waiting for him to declare that women in Africa suffer more. But all he said was “Let’s get out of here, shall we? I’ll ask for the bill.”

  CHAPTER 29

  THE HOUSES OF SLEEPING CHILDREN

  Rock Hudson’s Asian doppelgänger appears in the courtyard this morning and sits down at the table where I’m having coffee. The massive teak slab could seat twenty people, so the man’s presence is not an infringement of personal space. I think he has come for the TV, which he watches while chatting with the Karen housekeepers as they go about their morning tasks.

  He speaks Karen—so I can’t even try to eavesdrop—but from the camouflage jacket and the furtive manner I suspect he is Burmese-Karen, not Thai-Karen. In another moment I know it, because he catches my eye and introduces himself. “My name is Tennyson. Like the poet. A lot of Burmese-Karen are named after English people.” With a casual wave, he asks who I am. I answer with my name and nationality.

  “Ka-rén?” He looks thoughtful. “It must be fate.” No, I think, just a misplaced accent. He relaxes back into the chair, his handsome toughness falling about him like a loose uniform. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

  “I want to visit Huay Kaloke.” That’s the name of the big refugee camp near Mae Sot.

  “The Burmese attacked it ten days ago.”

  “I know.” The photographs have been in the Thai papers almost every day. “That’s why I’m here. To visit the camp.”

  “They burned everything,” Tennyson continues in a subdued voice. “The little market was burning, the school, our church, the clinic, all the houses. They burn the camps down to make the refugees go back to Burma. It’s crazy.”

  “It does seem like an insane way to treat people.”

  “Is someone going to take you into the camp? An NGO or someone? The Thai guards don’t always let visitors through the gates.”

  “I don’t know yet. Even if I can’t get in, I’ll spend more time at Dr. Cynthia’s clinic. I’ve been there a couple of times.”

  “Did you meet her?”

  “Just for a few minutes. She’s very busy. One of the medics showed me around the clinic. It’s an incredible place.”

  In 1989, when the soft-spoken thirty-year-old Dr. Cynthia Maung set up a clinic in a barn outside Mae Sot, she worked straight through her own attacks of malaria and dysentery, treating sick and injured Burmese people seven days a week. She used a rice cooker to sterilize her few medical instruments. Now the Mae Tao Clinic has grown into several clean, sturdy buildings that serve a population of more than 100,000 Burmese people, from both inside and outside Burma. Dr. Cynthia and her medics help the sick, train new medics and midwives, counsel women in reproductive and dietary health, and refer the most seriously ill to the Thai hospital in Mae Sot—a reciprocal relationship that the doctor and her colleagues worked hard to build. They also equip backpacking medical teams that enter Burma illegally to serve poor and isolated communities. Though she’s Baptist and married with two kids, no wonder the woman is often called “the Mother Teresa of the border.”

  Tennyson asks, “Why do you want to know about all this, Dr. Cynthia’s clinic, and the camps? What are you doing?”

  “I’m writing a book about Burma.”

  He sits up straighter. “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you will write about the struggle of the Karen people?”

  “Yes.”

  He places his palms flat on the teak table and stares at me. “I work for the Karen army. The KNLA. You know?”

  “Yes, I know. The Karen National Liberation Army.”

  “Right! I will take you wherever you need to go. Show you things.”

  This stranger turning up to offer his services seems too easy. He reads the distrust on my face and shakes his head. “Don’t worry. I know who you know. I am a friend. Everyone at Dr. Cynthia’s clinic knows me. I know Moe Thee Zun, from ABSDF. And I know Maung.” He goes on, naming people I’ve met or have heard of, declaring his credentials. I wonder if Maung has sent him to help me. Or to check up on me.

  “Do you want a cup of coffee?” I offer.

  “No,” Tennyson replies in a gruff voice. “I want to help you.”

  In the 1930s and ’40s, the minority Karen people fought beside their British colonial “masters” against the Burmese independence fighters. Throughout their long reign in various territories, the British colonizers became experts at manipulating cultural and societal inequities in order to consolidate their own power. By bringing education and medical facilities to isolated, long-neglected Karen outposts, they created a loyal ally.

  Many Karen people saw the British as their saviors, because they promised to help the minority ethnic group negotiate for and construct a state of its own—an a
lmost Shangri-la-like land called Kawthoolei. With the crumbling of the British Empire, that grand promise never came to fruition. In 1947, General Aung San negotiated the country’s independence from Britain. Later the same year, he and most of his cabinet members were assassinated, plunging the country’s future into uncertainty. The shaky new democracy didn’t have time to resolve the tensions between the central government and the ethnic groups. Another military man, General Ne Win, staged a coup d’état in 1962 and became Burma’s ipso facto dictator for the next twenty-six years. In 1989, he handed power over to the SLORC.

  The Karen have never stopped fighting for their autonomy. They are in a similar position to many other ethnic groups of Burma—the Karenni, the Shan, the Wa, the Mon, the Kachin, the Rakhine, the Naga—except that the Karen are the only ones who are still openly fighting against the generals. The others have signed cease-fire agreements with the junta in exchange for a fragile peace and an unobstructed, mutually lucrative opium trade. Thus the Karen resistance—which enforces the death penalty for opium trafficking—finds itself alone, slowly being crushed by a superior military power.

  Hundreds of thousands of Karen people are internally displaced within Burma, cut off or shut out from their ancestral lands in the southern delta region, in central Burma and farther north. Sometimes they are forced to live in SLORC-run compounds while they work on government projects, or they hide from the soldiers in the jungle, trying to avoid capture and forced relocation and the labor that comes with it. Every year brings a new tide of refugees into Thailand.

  The stories they bring with them are terrifying. I learn one thing, essentially, from the human-rights reports I’ve been reading. Something is broken in the human race. Is this brokenness another name for Thanatos, the death impulse that battles with and often overrules Eros, the life force? But the Freudian opposition seems too reductive, and does nothing to help me understand the nature of evil.

 

‹ Prev