by Dave Eggers
Gunshots. He clutched his bag and jumped to his feet. Nobody screamed. The boy with the bullet holes started running, new blood rushing from the wound in his ass. Htoo Moo took off, ahead of even the village chief, reaching a flat-out run, crashing shoulder-first through tall croppings of bamboo in his path, before realizing he had no idea where he should be going. He stopped, turned around a couple of times, and considered ditching his camera. What if the SPDC caught him? What if they saw that he'd been taking pictures of gun-shot farmers, prisoner-porters with skin disease, cigarette burns, knife wounds, raw and infected shoulders that bore the permanent scars of carrying over mountains for days or weeks at a time? Though he felt like a coward, he fell back into the middle of the throng. By the time they stopped at nightfall, news had spread through the crowd that one man in the rear had been shot dead.
Htoo Moo listened to the men next to him talking. Of the 200 people, four had guns, four or five rounds apiece. One admitted that he had only three bullets left. "No problem," another told him. "You will just aim very well."
After three days of squatting and swatting bugs in the jungle, Htoo Moo told the chief that he wanted to leave. Sometimes, villagers hide out for weeks because they don't know if it's safe to go back yet. Sometimes, it never is. Htoo Moo needed to get back to work.
"I will take you myself," the chief said. "I am ready." He was in no hurry now. He'd heard over the radio that the soldiers had killed the pigs and the chickens, and then burned the village to the ground. There was nothing to go back to.
To slow down the SPDC advance, the KNU had set up scores of new land mines, and the way in was no longer a safe way out. Htoo Moo and the chief trudged through the jungle for three days to a KNU headquarters, where they shook hands and parted, and Htoo Moo asked a KNU insurgent to guide him the rest of the way. Shortly after they started off, the parasites that had been multiplying in his liver since entering his body via mosquito burst through the cells that hosted them and flooded Htoo Moo's bloodstream. He trekked slowly, through his fever, stopping when the retching brought him to his knees. "Don't rest there!" his guide screamed when he moved toward a smooth patch of soil just to the side of the path. He'd nearly knelt on a land mine. It took another two days to reach the riverbank, where he bought antimalarial tablets with his last few baht and boarded the boat toward Thailand—which had, by default, become home.
***
"Do you have picture?" Htan Dah asked one evening. "Of your friends?"
"Let's go to the computer room," I replied. Thus were several Karen refugee activists of Mae Sot, Thailand, bestowed with one of democracy's greatest gifts: that of wasting exorbitant amounts of time on social networking websites. I logged in to MySpace, and clicked through some of my pals' profiles, talking about who they were, or where they were, or what they were doing in the pictures. Htoo Moo, working diligently at the next computer, glanced over as nonchalantly as possible. Htan Dah said very little. Once, he asked me to clarify the gender of the girl I was pointing to on the screen. "Are you sure?" he asked. "She looks like a boy." I laughed and told him that she was a lesbian, my ex-girlfriend, actually, which seemed to clear it up for him. Other than that, he mostly just stared at the monitor in stunned silence, for so long that it started to weird me out.
"What do you think?" I asked him when I'd finished the tour.
"Wow," he said quietly.
"So, those are my friends," I said. He made no move to get up or take his eyes off the page.
I asked him if he wanted to see how the website worked. I showed him the browse feature, dropping down the long list of countries whose citizens we could gawk at. "How about Myanmar?" he asked, spying the junta's official name for Burma among the options.
I was surprised it was there, and even more surprised that our first search turned up 3,000 profiles. The junta has some awesome restrictions on owning electronics, especially computers. In 1996, Leo Nichols, former honorary consul for Scandinavian countries and friend of Burmese activists, was sentenced to three years for the illegal possession of fax machines and phones. (Taken into custody, he was tortured and died.) There are Internet cafés, but café workers are required to capture customers' screenshots every five minutes and submit their Web histories, along with home addresses and phone numbers, to the state. Humanitarian geeks in other countries, though, work full time to give Burma's citizens Internet access, with proxy servers that they update when the government figures out how to block them. From the look of it, they were doing their job.
On MySpace, ink-haired Burmese teens and twentysomethings stared at us: the chin-down-sexy-eyes-up shot, the haughty chin up/ eyes half-closed look, the profile with eyes askance. Their faces were surrounded by HTML-coded sparkles, animated hearts and stars, slaughtered English colloquialisms. Htan Dah paused long and hard at each picture that came up.
"I don't know them," he said finally.
This conclusion struck me as pretty foregone, since he'd never lived in Burma. "Did you think you would?"
He looked at me, realizing his mistake. "I don't know," he said softly. We made Htan Dah his own profile, and he stayed logged in long after I'd gone to bed.
At dinner the next day, Htan Dah, Htoo Moo, and another refugee, Ta Mia, spent a fair amount of time watching me and muttering to each other in Karen.
"Something on your mind, tiger?" I asked Htan Dah.
"We are talking about your girlfriend," he said.
Yeah, I'd thought that conversation had ended a little too easily. "All right. You can talk about it with me."
"Do you ever have boyfriend?"
"Yes. I've had boyfriends and girlfriends."
This produced a moment of confused silence, which I filled with a lame description of the sexuality continuum, along with an explanation of the somewhat loose sexual mores of modern American gals like myself. Htan Dah responded by telling me that they had heard of gay people, since a visitor to the house had informed them of their existence—last year.
"Last year!" I hollered.
"Yes!" he yelled back. "In Karen culture, we do not have."
"There's never been a gay person in a Karen village in the history of Karen society." All three men shook their heads. "Come on."
"If there was a gay person, they would leave," Htan Dah said. "It is not our culture."
"Let's just say there was a gay person," I said. "Couldn't they stay in the village?"
"No," Htan Dah said. "I would not allow gay people in my village."
"Are you kidding me?!"
Htan Dah held my gaze, though his seemed more uncertain the longer it went on.
"Are you going to make me leave?"
"No! For you, in your culture, it is okay," he said. "You are not Karen. But in our culture, it does not belong." Htoo Moo and Ta Mia were nodding, and I scowled at them.
"You're a refugee," I said. "And it sucks. It's ruining your life. But you would force another villager to become a refugee because they were gay?"
Nobody said no. I turned on Htan Dah; I was maddest at him, and he was probably the only one who could follow my fast, heated English. "If there was peace in Burma and you lived in a village and there was a gay Karen person," I asked again, "you would want to make that person another Karen refugee by making them leave?"
That, or my anger, shut him up. "I am interested in your ideas," he said, evenly, after a minute. "I think it is important to keep an open mind."
I shut up, too, and focused on eating rice for a few awkward moments.
"So," I said eventually. "Do you guys have sex?"
Htoo Moo and Ta Mia shook their heads while Htan Dah said, "Sometimes."
"Ever?" I asked Htoo Moo.
"No," he said.
"Why not?"
"Because, I am not married."
"What about you?" I asked Htan Dah.
"Yes," he said, nodding hard once. "I am married."
"You're married?"
Htan Dah laughed. "Yes! I am married."
"I didn't know that. Where is your wife?"
"She is in camp. With my kid."
"You have a kid?"
Other things I didn't know: that everyone currently in the house—save The Blay and Htan Dah, who were married, apparently—was a virgin. This extended even to kissing. They hailed from the parts of Burma that had been heavily influenced by Christian missionaries, and premarital sex was taboo. Htoo Moo volunteered that he wasn't actively looking for a girlfriend, and that he wouldn't know what to do with her even if he found one.
Htan Dah told me I had to show them MySpace again. We crowded around a computer, our cheeks flushed with satiety and humidity and new camaraderie. Htoo Moo interjected burning questions about American life as they came to him.
"Do you eat rice in America?"
"Yes. Usually I eat brown rice."
"Brown rice?"
"It's rice with the hull still on it. Do you know what I'm talking about?"
"No. I don't believe that ... Have you ever eat tiger?"
"Eaten tiger. No."
"Have you ever eat ... monkey?
"'Have you ever eaten monkey,' you mean. No."
"Are there black lady in America?"
"Ladies. Yes..."
"What language do they speak?" Htan Dah chimed in.
"English."
"Really?"
I gaped at him, disbelieving, but before I could formulate a response, Htoo Moo said, "In America, you have cream to grow hair." He ran his hand over his baby-smooth jawline.
"Yeah. I think that's true. I think it's generally for people who are bald, though."
"Do you have that?"
"Hair-growing cream? Oh, yeah. I use it on my ass."
The sarcasm seemed to translate, since they laughed for minutes.
We made Ta Mia a MySpace profile, and he and Htan Dah started giving the other guys tutorials as they wandered in. My work here was done.
A few days earlier, when I'd asked my students what they did for fun, I'd had to explain the concept of "fun" for about five minutes before anyone could answer me, and then the answers were "Nothing," "Nothing," "Watch TV," and three "Talk's. By the time I went upstairs, every computer screen was lit, the guys scrolling through the faces of Burma, a window into a world they considered home but where some had never been and probably none would ever live again.
***
Htan Dah diligently kept me company during meals. "You are so slow," he said one morning, watching me chew every bit of rice into oblivion. "Why don't you eat fast?"
"Why should I?" I asked. "I'm not in a hurry."
"But what if you are under attack, or have to run away?"
I scoffed at him. "I'm from Ohio."
"Yes, but I am refugee! We are taught to eat fast."
Be that as it may, we were in peacetime Thailand, so this attack seemed like an incredibly hypothetical scenario, and even though Htan Dah had mentioned something about refugee camps getting burned down on the very first day of class, I'd kind of dismissed it.
So boy did I feel like an asshole when he turned in an essay with this intro the next day:
Having been fallen a sleep at midnight, my parents, sister, aunt and I heard the children's screaming and the voice of the shelling mortars simultaneously came about, and suddenly jumped through the ladder from the top to the bottom of the house to get away from the attacking troops' ammunitions without grabbing any facility.
For a while, Htan Dah's family and all those other asylum-seekers in Thailand were safe, relative to the Karen still in Burma. If they ventured out of the squalid camps, they were subject to harassment and arrest from one of the world's most corrupt police forces, but at least Burmese soldiers were less likely to march into a sovereign country to attack them.
What the Burmese army could do, though, was help a rival Karen faction to do so. They called themselves the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army, or DKBA. There had been discontent within the Christian-led KNU for years, complaints of abuses of power, religious discrimination, and grueling jungle-warfare conditions. In 1994, by which point there were 80,000 Karen living in the Thai camps, a government-allied monk persuaded several hundred Buddhist KNU soldiers to defect. The junta was only too happy to support their cause—which included attacking refugee camps filled with Christian Karen.
The huts at Htan Dah's settlement of Huay Kaloke were cloaked in thick, warm Thai darkness as DKBA soldiers moved in on the 7,000 refugees living there in January 1997. Residents generally went to bed early; there was no electricity, and flammable materials cost money nobody had. But Htan Dah's mother sometimes hired herself out as a laborer, plowing fields for about a dollar a day. That was far less than what the legal Thai workers alongside her made, but she needed money to buy nails—her scavenged-bamboo-and-thatch hut wasn't going to hold itself together—and candles, since she wasn't wild about her kids using homemade lamps, essentially tin cans filled with gasoline.
The small encampment had become overpopulated, so that there wasn't even enough space to play soccer, and Htan Dah barely ever left it. But a Christian organization had donated some books, and NGOs were running a full school system now. Htan Dah had exams the next day; he had stayed up past sundown studying and had been asleep for hours by the time the sound of gunshots reached his family's shelter. Some children somewhere screamed as they leapt out of the elevated hut. They ran, backs and knees bent, low to the dirt, for the surrounding woods as DKBA troops set fire to the camp. The huts burned hot and fast. Htan Dah kept his head down, so that he hardly registered the other people running alongside, not even noticing that some were in their underwear. "Please, God," he prayed. "Oh my God. Save me. Save my life," over and over again. It was a few days before his sixteenth birthday. He prayed and ran until he reached the forest, where, like everyone else, he stopped, turned around, and stood silently watching the camp—bedrooms, books, photos, shoes, a shirt woven by a grandmother—burn to the ground.
The next day, the refugees returned to the smoldering plot and made beds in the ash. They began slowly rebuilding, though none could have any illusions that the Thai security posted at the front gate would protect them. They had long ago noted that the function of the guards was not so much keeping danger out as keeping the refugees in, collecting bribes from those who wanted to leave the camp to work or collect firewood or make a trip to the market. Their attackers met no resistance on their way into Huay Kaloke that night. And less than fourteen months later, when vehicles full of DKBA soldiers drove in again, no one stopped them. Again.
"How do you know the Thai soldiers just let them drive right in through the front gate?" I interrupted Htan Dah as he told me this story on the reading bench in my room. That an army would allow raiding foreign troops unfettered access to 7,000 sleeping civilians—twice—seemed frankly a little far-fetched. "Maybe the soldiers were trying to protect the gate, but the DKBA just went around or something."
Htan Dah had told this story before, and to several foreigners, but never to one rude enough to suggest that he was a liar. He cocked his head. "Because," he said, "there is only one road. The only way into the camp is through the front gate!"
For a second time, Htan Dah awoke in the middle of the night to gunfire and shouting; for a second time, he fled with his family and the clothes he was wearing for the safety of the surrounding trees. But this time, the soldiers also shelled the camp. This time, a pregnant woman was shot dead and two girls from Htan Dah's school who hid in a well suffered burns that killed them. This time a seven-year-old died of shrapnel wounds and dozens were injured—and nearly the whole damn camp was burned down again.
"We accept that we were inactive," the secretary general of Thailand's National Security Council conceded later. Thai authorities decided to close the camp. Htan Dah's family set up a temporary shelter made of sticks and a raincoat, under which they lived while they were waiting to be moved elsewhere.
The trucks didn't arrive for almost a year and a half. When they did, Htan Dah
and his family were shipped to a camp in the mountains, where the population in exile eventually became 20,000 strong, where Htan Dah eventually grew up and got married and had a baby of his own, where the cold, wet winds cut through the shacks stacked high in the hills of central Thailand, far away enough to be safer from the DKBA.
My days fell into a strange routine. I taught two classes of English a day, beginner and intermediate. After and between classes, and before the evening of drinking began in earnest, I snacked on coconutfried cashews I bought at the 7-Eleven while helping the guys translate their HRD interviews or fill out applications for asylum. They kept filling out the applications, even though they had little chance of success—certainly no chance of resettling in the United States, which, under the Patriot Act, had effectively declared all Karen from the contested highlands terrorists for providing "material support" to the "terrorisf KNU.
After class one day, one of the guys wanted to show me a word he saw all the time so I could explain its meaning: marginalized. (He grasped the concept pretty quickly.) He also wanted to know what the thing used to bind people's feet together was called. I told him I didn't think we had a word for that in English. (I was wrong. Though archaic in noun form, the word exists: "fetters.") When Htoo Moo asked me later for the word for systematically slicing open the skin on someone's forearm, I told him I didn't think we had a word for that, either.
Another day, I sat outside holding an impromptu pronunciation lesson on some of the words in an HRD's report.
"Repeat after me," I was saying. " Rape."
"Rop."
"Try again. Rrraaape."
Another day, a Burma Action staffer I'll call Lah Lah Htoo asked if I wanted to see a video. He loaded a DVD of some footage taken in eastern Burma by aid workers, mostly Karen, some of whom are also medics, called the Free Burma Rangers.