by David Eimer
Much of the narcotics business in the Golden Triangle is controlled by the UWSA. Myanmar supplies 10 per cent of the world’s opium annually and most of it is grown in Wa State, as well as in nearby parts of southern Shan State that are under Wa supervision. It is refined into heroin there too, as well as increasingly in Yunnan. The UWSA is also believed to be behind the manufacture of yaba, the amphetamine pills that have become an epidemic across Asia. It is the profits from the drug trade that have enabled the Wa to carve out a country for themselves, one complete with its own flag, government, banks and tax system.
Few outsiders penetrate into Wabang. Myanmar bars all foreigners from travelling there. But alone out of the special regions, Wa State is the sole place in the country where the government has no official presence. There are no Tatmadaw checkpoints to pass through, no police to arrest a stray westerner. That made Wa State the place for me, if only I could establish the contacts to get across the border. I had no wish to arouse the ire of the Wa by turning up uninvited.
Fate was kind. A friend introduced me to Justin, a lanky New Yorker in his early thirties who, in one of his many previous jobs, had taught English to the daughter of a UWSA general. He had stayed with her family in Pangshang, the capital of Wa State, and had an open invitation to return. We met late one afternoon in Kunming and bonded over a few beers, drawn together by our similar histories. Our fathers were both Jewish and engineers, we were the children of divorced parents and had spent much of our lives outside our home countries.
Justin promised to find out if we could visit. A couple of weeks later, he called to say the trip was on. We arranged a rendezvous in Lancang, the nondescript capital of Yunnan’s Lahu Autonomous County in the south-west of Banna. I arrived to find him slurping noodles with Piero, a Venetian photographer whose lugubrious demeanour concealed a warm heart and utterly sound personality.
They made a fine double act, with Piero the gloomy straight man and Justin the wisecracking, outgoing one. Justin has a knack of winning people over. He speaks fast and fluent Mandarin, his enthusiasm overriding its lack of grammatical accuracy, and combined with his broad smile it makes the locals warm to him in a way they do with few foreigners. Justin was always the centre of attention, while Piero and I lurked on the fringes, surfing the waves of goodwill he generated.
From Lancang, we moved south-west into Chinese Wa territory: first by bus to Menglian and from there by taxi through a landscape of banana and rubber plantations to Monga, a tiny village on the border. The driver knew our ultimate destination and called ahead so that three motorbikes were waiting to take us to the Nam Ka River, which divides Yunnan here from Myanmar and Wa State.
Then it was a scramble down the banks and a swift ride on a shaky raft made of six bamboo poles lashed together, squatting on our haunches as the boatman punted us across the river, and we were in Wabang. After waiting so long to take advantage of Banna’s wide-open frontiers, the ease of the journey was something of a letdown. I had imagined a march through thick jungle to reach an isolated point of the Nam Ka, but we crossed into Wa State by what seemed like a very public route.
Groups of Wa were waiting for a ride to Yunnan as we disembarked. Climbing up the banks, we were greeted with amusement by a dark-skinned woman selling cold drinks and a group of young lads whose motorbikes acted as transport into Pangshang. There was no linguistic divide here. Mandarin is the local language, along with the various Wa dialects, just as Chinese money is the currency.
A-sui, one of the general’s three daughters, picked us up in a land cruiser covered in the sticky yellow dust that envelops all of Wa State and bearing licence plates that said ‘Wa’ in capital letters. Slim and pretty, she knew Justin from his previous visit. A teenage girl sat in the front clutching a baby, the youngest of A-sui’s three children. A-sui had been married at sixteen and was still only twenty-three.
We accelerated up a track to a checkpoint where two boys and a girl, none older than sixteen, were lolling in chairs in the shade, an AK47 rifle near to hand. They wore olive-green uniforms, those of the boys bearing the patch of the UWSA and its distinctive logo: a shining red star surrounded by yellow shafts of light above green hills and set against a blue background representing the sky. The design dates back to the 1960s and 1970s, when the UWSA was allied with the Communist Party of Burma in its fight against the generals who then ran the country.
Checking our passports was the girl’s responsibility. She wore a badge identifying her as police, but she also sported a furry hairgrip that only reinforced how young she was. She was clearly nonplussed by the sight of three foreigners. I was equally startled at seeing teenage soldiers. But the Wa recruit children as young as ten into the UWSA. In Pangshang especially, it is commonplace to see boys and girls who are scarcely in their teens armed and in uniform. The adult soldiers are needed to guard the ‘borders’ with Myanmar further west, north and south, to repel any possible invasion by government troops.
No record was made of our names or nationalities; A-sui’s presence vouched for us. It was another few kilometres to Pangshang itself, a route which took us on to sealed roads and past the official border crossing, a bridge over the Nam Ka River. Wa State may not be a formal country but China still maintains a frontier and customs post manned by the Wu Jing, like it does with all the other states it borders.
Pangshang, sometimes spelled Panghsang, is a jungle town, set in a shallow depression beneath hills covered in thick green foliage which look down on the other side of the Nam Ka and Yunnan. Home to around 50,000 people, it is rather more impressive than most Chinese cities of an equivalent size and some thought has gone into its design. When I climbed up to the vast all-metal memorial to the Wa war dead atop the hills, I found it surrounded by neatly landscaped flowerbeds.
Soldiers were everywhere, mostly male teenagers but some girls, in forage caps with their AK47s slung over their backs and holstered pistols dangling from leather belts. They gazed at us curiously, sometimes offering a smile, but no one ever asked what we were doing in Pangshang. That we were here at all meant we were guests; we would never have made it past the checkpoint otherwise.
Gaudy, newly built three- and four-storey houses line the more salubrious streets leading up the hillsides. They are a mix of Burmese and Chinese contemporary styles: all white and blue tiles with balconies supported by grandiose columns. High walls topped with coiled barbed wire and metal gates guard them. They were the first sign of how the profits from the heroin and yaba trade have turned Pangshang into one of the most unlikely, and least known, boomtowns in Asia. It is the jungle equivalent of an offshore tax haven, where no questions are asked providing you have cash and connections.
Equally incongruous in this remote enclave was the parade of new cars roaring up and down the streets, sending up huge clouds of dust that hung in the air, interspersed by the elongated golf carts that act as buses in Pangshang. ‘There are more cars than people in Pangshang,’ A-sui told me. I remembered the Toyota pick-up trucks I saw being unloaded at a remote jetty in Shan State when I sailed down the Mekong. Now I knew where they had been headed.
More evidence of how vehicles outnumber people in Pangshang was on show at the general’s home. It was really two houses, the smaller of which was for the family’s servants and bodyguards, behind the inevitable gates which opened to reveal a concrete forecourt the size of a car park. Seven land cruisers and pick-up trucks were lined up, all Japanese and American brands. Such vehicles sell for £40,000 each in Pangshang, a result of them having to be imported illegally from China or Thailand.
Jutting into the forecourt was a covered terrace as big as a small apartment leading to the entrance to the family home. The floor was polished marble, with a star etched in it, and the tables and chairs strewn across it were all fine teak. Two Chinese-style vases, as big as grandfather clocks, sat either side of the double doors leading into the house. A table-tennis table was an unlikely addition. Above it was an ornate chandelier which wouldn’t have looked out
of place in a nineteenth-century ballroom.
Waiting on the terrace was Yilan, the general’s daughter Justin had taught English to. A plain, smart and lively twenty-four-year-old, Yilan was quick to joke with Justin but rather more reserved with Piero and myself. Plying us with delicious cherries, she relayed the news that she was to be married at the end of the year and that we would get to meet her fiancé the next day. She wanted Justin to come to the wedding and he promised to attend.
This was just the family’s Pangshang residence. The general and his wife were at their country house, in their home village three hours north. ‘We have houses in Tachileik and Yangon too,’ said Yilan. There was also property elsewhere in Pangshang, as well as in Thailand and Yunnan. Yilan told us excitedly that she and A-sui were overseeing the decoration of a new hotel the family were opening in Simao, a town in southern Yunnan with a large Wa population.
I never asked Yilan what exactly the general’s role in the UWSA was and Justin hadn’t talked to her about it either. I felt it was desperately inappropriate to ask my hostess if her father was a drug lord. But with vehicles worth close on half a million dollars parked in front of the house and a property portfolio spread across four countries, if you count Wa State as a nation, it was clear the general wasn’t just involved in overseeing military strategy.
Adding to the impression that the general was no conventional soldier was the appearance of James, his son-in-law and the husband of A-sui. He was a bear of a man, small in height but built like a rugby prop forward, his sleeveless vest revealing powerful shoulders covered in tattoos. Aged twenty-three, like A-sui, and from a prominent Wa family, James was already a major in the UWSA. The whole dynamic of the evening shifted with his arrival, the girls becoming less effusive and fading into the background, as James directed his conversation to Justin, Piero and me.
James was the original alpha-male and trailed supporters in his wake – a few of the family bodyguards. Dressed in a mix of UWSA uniforms and civvies, they were exceedingly polite and friendly to us but it was obvious that crossing them would be extremely unwise. They were taller than most Wa men, who don’t normally get above 5 foot 8, and, so Justin said, martial arts experts. With their easy, muscled manner of moving, I believed him.
Yilan and A-sui drifted off, saying they would see us tomorrow, and it became clear why there was a table-tennis table on the terrace. James was an avid fan and we had to take turns to play him. I disgraced myself, hardly able to get the ball over the net, but Justin was good enough to win a few games while Piero lost in style, playing his shots with the panache of a Latin tennis player.
It was a surreal scene. Like everywhere in South-east Asia, night descended swiftly, shutting out the sun as if someone had flicked a light switch, leaving the ridiculously grand chandelier to illuminate the games. The bodyguards acted as ball boys, chasing across the terrace after errant shots, while young servant girls padded around silently in bare feet, replenishing glasses, supplying cold towels at the end of each game and emptying ashtrays as soon as a cigarette was stubbed out in one.
Ping-pong was just the start of the evening’s entertainment. Around nine, James laid down his bat and summoned us to a room at the back of the house. Unlike the rest of the home, it was a spartan space with bare walls, decorated only with a few chairs, a table, cupboard and large TV. Next door was another room with a couple of beds in it, where the bodyguards could rest when they weren’t needed. ‘This is my office. I come here to get away from my wife and kids,’ said James, speaking in the English he had learned in Yangon.
Despite the Wa’s animosity towards the state of Myanmar, there have always been close contacts between the UWSA and the government. The heroin and yaba produced in Wa-controlled territory could not be smuggled out of the country without the collusion of senior officials. That makes it necessary for the Wa chiefs to speak Burmese. As the UWSA is very much a family business, their male children, like James, spend time at school in Yangon to learn the language. In contrast, Yilan and A-sui could barely speak Burmese; they had mostly been educated in Kunming.
Friends of James arrived and the room grew crowded. The bodyguards hustled around collecting half-empty plastic bottles of water, tin foil and straws from the cupboard, which they started to join together expertly. ‘Yaba,’ mouthed Piero. Sure enough, a tin full of small, bright-red pills emerged on the table. The water bottles, tin foil and straws were the paraphernalia needed to smoke them.
Yaba is a Thai word, meaning ‘crazy medicine’. It is a highly addictive form of speed, a mix of methamphetamine and caffeine that was once legal in Thailand but is now proscribed there and everywhere else in Asia. Far cheaper than cocaine or ecstasy, it is the drug of factory workers and farmers and is popular everywhere in South-east Asia. But it can also be found in southern China and across India and Bangladesh, Japan and even North Korea.
Some time in the early 1990s, the UWSA began to diversify into the production of yaba. Opium requires land and labour. But to make yaba all you need to do is kit out a shack in the hills with some rudimentary equipment and a supply of chemicals. There are now so many jungle labs in Wa State that the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that the traffic in little red pills and other methamphetamines like ice is worth $15 billion a year, making it by far Myanmar’s most lucrative industry.
Although it comes in pill form, yaba is usually smoked in the same way a heroin user chases the dragon. The pill is placed on a piece of tin foil, a lighter flame is played underneath it until the pill starts smoking and then the fumes are inhaled. James and his friends, though, smoked yaba the sophisticated way. The bottle, straw and tin foil combination constructed by the bodyguards acts to burn off some of the pills’ impurities, while cooling the smoke by passing it through the water in the bottom of the bottle.
Before long, it became clear that the yaba was for us. While James was indulging in his own personal supply of ice, he insisted Justin, Piero and I start smoking the yaba along with his chums. Just as playing table tennis was compulsory, so was amphetamine abuse. The bodyguards, like good soldiers, followed his orders rigorously, not letting more than a few minutes go by between each pill being smoked before another bottle was held up for us and straws placed in our mouths.
Soon the room was filled with the distinctive, chocolate-sweet smell of yaba smoke. We were all suddenly more alert and talkative, full of energy despite a day spent travelling, yet also both hyper and confused from the drug. As the bodyguards started to double the hit by loading two pills instead of one on to the tin foil, I began to wonder where my yaba initiation was going to end.
Next to me, one of James’s friends was smoking a water pipe. A common sight in rural Yunnan, they are long cylinders with a little water in the bottom and a steel funnel sticking out of one side where tobacco is placed, the liquid acting to cool the rough smoke produced by the locally grown weed. But the sickly smell emanating from the water pipe of James’s friend indicated he was using opium instead of tobacco. He offered the pipe around and we started to smoke that too, thinking it might counteract the yaba, which was already toying with our nervous systems, tensing our muscles and jerking us up in our chairs.
A DVD started playing. It was hardcore European porn, featuring large blonde women with over-sized fake breasts moaning loudly in German. ‘I like western women,’ said James, smiling broadly. ‘They have big asses and tits.’ He had a beautiful Wa wife next door, but European blondes were as exotic to James as A-sui was to me and he wanted what he couldn’t have. I taught him the meaning of the word ‘curvy’, my main contribution to the evening, while James peppered Justin with questions about life in New York, talking wistfully of his desire to visit America.
He was drug-dreaming; senior UWSA figures are wanted criminals in the US. In Wabang, James was a god: an untouchable scion of its ruling class with unlimited resources to do what he liked. But Pangshang is a gilded cage, a place the Wa elite cannot escape from. Even though James
had a Chinese passport, like many Wa State residents, Yunnan and Thailand were as far as he could go before questions would be asked about what exactly he did in his pseudo-country.
Time seemed to have stopped. But after midnight we all staggered out and piled into James’s pick-up truck, the back of which was emblazoned with a bumper sticker proclaiming, ‘Motherfucker Wants To Kill You That’s Right’. With hip-hop blaring and James’s friends and bodyguards following us, we drove in a convoy to the centre of Pangshang, passing the main Wa government building with its teenage sentries and the twenty-four-hour casino, where equally youthful prostitutes waited outside for customers.
Arriving at a nightclub, we were greeted with deference and ushered into a large private room, its windowless walls decorated in black and silver and lined with plush leather sofas which we sank into. The bodyguards were even more solicitous and protective here, making sure we always had a fresh beer to hand, while escorting us when we visited the dance floor or the toilet. We were temporary members of James’s gang now and so their responsibility.
Ten young women lined up in front of us, eyes demurely down to the floor. They were hostesses, whose job is to take care of the club’s high-paying customers and sometimes to go home with them. As the guests of honour, Justin, Piero and I were instructed to pick one each. The rest dispersed to James and his friends. All were from Yunnan and were mostly Han. My companion was a nineteen-year-old from Lancang. She had been lured to Pangshang by its reputation as a town where people have more money than they know what to do with, and the chance of earning far more than she could as a migrant worker elsewhere.
For the next five hours we sat in the room drinking, playing liar’s dice with the girls, where the object is to fool the other person into thinking you have higher dice than they do and the loser has to drink, and singing karaoke. Every so often, more yaba, which the girls refused to touch, would materialise in front of us. Before long, the walls felt like they were closing in on me. The smoke from the yaba and hundreds of cigarettes was stifling. As the night went on and on I was rendered barely capable of speech, although I felt no urge to sleep.