Coming from such a drastically different and faraway culture, I built on this educational foundation with inadvertent lessons in the random and semi-useless. I mentioned that as a teenager I’d had braces, but nobody knew what I was talking about, and when I explained what they were, everybody thought I was crazy. “Most Americans aren’t born with perfectly straight teeth. Haven’t you ever noticed that Americans you see in pictures usually have straight teeth?” They hadn’t, but I guess you wouldn’t, if no one had ever told you that you should care. When I told them that the orthodontic device cost a few thousand US dollars and that millions of Americans got them, they were speechless. Then one of them finally asked, “Why?” When one of my students saw my credit card, she asked me what it was. Abby, too, had encountered this information gap when she ran out of money on her Thai cell phone. She pressed The Blay, through his repeated Nos, as to whether it was possible to add minutes over the Internet. He finally conceded, “Yes, you can do it on the Internet”—adding, by way of explaining why that wasn’t possible, “but you need ‘credit card.’” I passed my plastic around for show-and-tell, trying to describe how it worked, which some people sort of understood, but most people didn’t. When I wore my glasses to class, I brought along my contacts in their case and opened it for exhibition. After I described how I put them in, one of my students asked if he could try. (Absolutely not.) One day, at my afternoon class’s urging, I took down a list of things they wanted me to take videos of and send to them once I got back home, things they’d heard of but never seen. This is what it says in the margin of my school notes from that day:-clubs
-strippers
-city/skyscrapers
And though he wasn’t one of my students, Htoo Moo, too, found me endlessly enlightening.
“Why do you think I have dark skin and you have white skin, and I have eyes like this and your eyes are like that?” he asked me one day as we took a break on a grassy knoll. We’d gone for a bike ride, so I wouldn’t get fat.
“Evolution and migration, I guess.”
He shook his head. “That is stupid.”
“What? It’s not stupid. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“Yes, I have heard. I don’t believe that.”
“Really? I think most people believe that.”
“Crazy people.”
“So you believe that God made you look Asian or something?”
He shrugged. “Also, you have all this.” He reached over and tugged on my arm hair. “So much of this. Why do you have all this?”
“It’s really not that much.”
“Yes, I think so.”
“That’s only because you’re freakishly hairless.”
It was hot outside, but not oppressively, another lovely and non-raining day. It was a perfect day for Frisbee, one of which I’d carried nearly ten thousand miles across land and sea only to have Htoo Moo scoff at me when I’d asked him to play earlier.
“Come on,” I said, trying again now. “Can’t we please play Frisbee? It’s exercise! It can be really hard if you play it right.”
“That is a game,” he said, which was what he’d said earlier.
“It’s a sport!” I said, which was what I’d said earlier.
“Maybe for a girl. Or children.”
Frustrating as that answer was, it was at least less heartbreaking than Htan Dah’s. “How can I play a game sometimes when there is a war?” he asked me back at the house.
He was, understandably, having a stressful day. The guys needed to make time for class because they needed to speak English to spread information to and from BA trips into Burma, but they also needed to keep BA running to be able to make those trips. That week, the week Abby and the guys from inside and the international human rights documentation organization trainers and the staff coordinators and the new staffers arrived, everyone was bogged down with conferencing and report making. One day, morning classes were canceled for meetings. Another day, Ta Mla and Htan Dah were absent, and then someone else was. At the beginning of another morning class, Wah Doh used his new letter-writing skills to compose me a note:To,
Teacher
I feel a little bit sick. So, please let me to take a rest for oneday.
Sincerely,
Wah Doh
But then, finally, after a full week of meetings and two full weeks of teaching, everyone felt comfortable with me and had more time and turned in their homework and together we pressed grammatically onward—coordinating conjunctions, and conjunctive adverbs, and “We use articles before singular nouns, you guys, seriously, in English, every time”—starting off the next week with revitalized attendance, including several new beginner students who’d just returned to live in Office Two from a trip inside. Except then, one morning, though he’d left Office One on a motorbike immediately behind Htan Dah and me, Ta Mla didn’t show up for class.
VIII.
HISTORICALLY SPEAKING, Thais kind of hate the Burmese. In the sixteenth century, one of Burma’s fierce conquering kings, Bayinnaung, vanquished kingdoms from India to Laos, gaining still more territories when regions preemptively surrendered at the very prospect of his attack. When he asked his next-door neighbor Siam for a white elephant, that sacred animal of Buddhist reverence, it refused. Bayinnaung’s army invaded and took four, plus the king, along with thousands of other captives, and sacked the capital, Ayutthaya. Then the crown prince of Siam slew the crown prince of Burma on elephant-back in battle. Then, in the eighteenth century, Burma’s King Alaungpaya launched his own invasion of Ayutthaya, grand city of temples and art and palaces covered in gold, and demanded submission as the emperor of the universe. When Siam refused, Alaungpaya took Chiang Mai and all of what is now northern Thailand, and re-sacked Ayutthaya, burning the whole magnificent thing to the ground.
To this day, a lot of Thais are still pretty mad about that, and the relationship between the two countries has continued to smolder. Every Thai student learns that the jerky Burmese committed atrocities against them and their capital. Burmese military officials have been overheard at embassies making fun of the Thais for being whiny bitches. Newspaper clippings document scuffles that still go down on the border: “Thai and Burmese troops have clashed twice in the past two years”; “Four Thai rangers were reported to have confronted 100 Burmese soldiers on the border near Phu Nam Rawn after the troops intruded into Thailand. . . . After tense negotiations the intruders stepped back into Burmese territory with the excuse that they ‘did not see the Thai flag’ which fluttered on a tall tree.”
And so, historically, the Thais have found common cause with the KNU, which happened to have an army positioned between them and their former war enemy. They had some common ideology, too. Though factions of communist leanings and alliances within the KNU developed and caused rifts in the early days, the organization ended up even more staunchly anti-communist than it had been during its alliance with the KMT. (Super-Christian, as well, with a Seventh Day Adventist president at its helm, strictly barring drugs and adultery and even booze.) These Karen may have been rebels, but they were no pinkos. Eventually they were wearing shirts that said “Karen Freedom Fighter: Anti-Drug, Anti-BSPP [Burma Socialist Programme Party], Anti-Burmese Communist . . . KAW THOO LEI—Never Accept Communism.” It was a pretty smart thing to put on a shirt. Who wouldn’t help these drug-eschewing, communist-hating Jesus-lovers?
Well, not the United States and all its arms and soldiers and democracy, which is probably what the KNU was going for. But Thailand did! In the ’60s, the country was terrified that the tide of communism might wash right over it. It was fighting a commie uprising within its own borders; China was supporting communists in Burma, some of whom were making worrisome alliances with the ethnic Shan armies on the northern border; the Karen had fought alongside the Thai- and US-backed KMT, had been a solid buffer against the Burmese for the British, and controlled plenty of teak to be plundered; and the Thais never really liked the Burmese anyway. So they sold the Karen arms a
nd provided them sanctuary on Thai soil.
But nothing paves over old hatreds like money. As Thailand developed politically and economically, it made friends with Burma on paper, cutting a trade agreement in 1990. And though the two countries have had a few mild modern military skirmishes, a full-on Burmese declaration of war on Thailand isn’t much of a threat anymore. But as a vestige of the good old Red Scare days, Thailand was, as I soon realized, still KNU-friendly.22 The Burmese exile paper The Irrawaddy mentioned a “KNU colonel”23 who was arrested in Thailand for transporting illegal migrants and firearms—which sounds pretty serious—but almost immediately released. A report in the Thai newspaper The Nation told of an accusation by the Burmese government that the Thais were giving leftover ammunition to the Karen guerrillas after joint US-Thai Cobra Gold military exercises. When my housemates’ arrests led to jail, they often called the KNU, which sent someone who could negotiate a cheaper bribe to get them out. When they made car trips inside Thailand, they were accompanied by KNU soldiers, in whose company they could more likely pass through Thai checkpoints.
Without KNU soldiers, my coworkers, who didn’t even have citizenship papers from Burma, much less documents saying they could hang around Thailand, traveled at great risk. The UN issued cards to some refugees that allowed them to travel in certain places, but the system for dispensing them was erratic, dependent on the camp where you were registered and when you’d got there. Htan Dah’s wife, for example, had a pink card and could travel back and forth from camp to Mae Sot. But neither Htan Dah nor Htoo Moo nor Ta Mla had cards, and so technically they could travel nowhere without the possibility of arrest.
The Blay was the only one who could go wherever the hell he wanted, because he had the best card of all: a Thai citizen ID. One of my students had told me that these were available for eighty thousand baht—more than $2,000. I thought this a hefty price for some paperwork at the embassy or whatever, but of course it turned out to be an entirely black-market affair. Htan Dah explained to Abby and me over dinner one night that refugees could pay a series of huge bribes to Thai cops, who’d then do some paperwork and photo fudging that would allow the refugee to take on a legal Thai identity—of a dead Thai person.
When the Karen settled on the Thai-Burma border, they settled on both sides of it. Had the British drawn their border a little differently, all those Karen may have ended up Thai Karen. Which probably would have been fine with the Karen and the Thais, who got along relatively well. “As regards those populations that are dependent on the King of Siam,” wrote a French archeologist appointed to the area at the turn of the twentieth century, “there is a hierarchy with the Siamese at the top of the social ladder and the Kariengs at the bottom. They all live quite content with their lot, moving in their proper spheres with some degree of independence.” In the late 1800s, Thai Karen were granted citizenship by King Chulalongkorn. The ruler was fond of the race—and of writing poetry.
So tranquilly they plant their rice,
birds in paradise, the dense woods.
Glad bodies entice; minds at ease,
they scorn worldly progress.
He also wrote one about how Karen girls were hot but stinky.24
But some Karen settlers ended up as Burma’s Karen, and some of those are now refugees, with citizenship in no country. If Htan Dah had eighty thousand baht—more than thirteen years’ worth of his wages—he could start calling around to people who knew people who could put him in touch with a Thai Karen village headman who knew a family who had a son that had been born within a few years of Htan Dah and had died. Over a period of many weeks, he told us, he could travel to the village, meeting the family, and to local Thai police precincts and administrative offices, hemorrhaging money to every person who helped him in the arduous process of assuming the citizenship of the dead guy.
At this point, Abby and I piped up that people paid a lot of money for fake IDs in the United States, too.
“Why do you buy fake ID in the United States?” Htan Dah asked.
“To buy beer,” we said, and Htan Dah kind of looked at us like we were idiots, which, at the moment, we were.
The Blay came from a big, relatively well-to-do family that had pooled serious resources to buy their son the safety of a dead man’s life in Thailand. All Htan Dah had was a KNU card that identified him as a member of the organization, to use as a bargaining tool with Thai cops. It never got him out of paying bribes, but it had so far kept him away from prison or deportation. It did have the downside that if he ever wanted to resettle to the United States through the United Nations, it proved him an actual card-carrying member of a terrorist organization. But Htan Dah wasn’t planning on resettling anyway, because he thought it amounted to abandoning his “duty” to his people. He was born on January 31, 1981, the thirty-second anniversary of the day the Karen rebels declared war, earning him the “Htan,” or “resist, against,” in his name. On his application to become an employee of BA, under the question of how long he thought he’d work for the organization, he’d written, “As long as it takes.” Deciding to get the KNU card was no contest.
The day that our morning class had been canceled for meetings, Htan Dah had driven me to the post office to mail some postcards. Inside, as I got in line, he retreated to a corner, then came over and whispered to me that he wasn’t legal there, as though I’d forgotten, so maybe I should try another, faster line, then retreated again, came back and whispered that maybe I should just stay in the line I was in so as not to draw attention to us, gave a little nervous laugh, then walked tightly back to his corner. When I finished and turned around to give him the tilted “Let’s go” nod, the smile that broke open exhibited more relief than I’d ever seen on anyone’s face.
A couple of days after Ta Mla’s near arrest at the gas station, Ta Mla drove around town having his picture taken and taking it to the right people to get his KNU card. It was the closest thing to even a modicum of protection he could obtain, but still, it wasn’t enough.
IX.
Wed, 19 Jul 2006 07:49:47 -0700 (PDT)
To: HelloFromThailand list
Subject: Fuck the police
Yesterday, one of my students was forty-five minutes late for class. He’d gotten a ride to the other office, where we hold the sessions, from another BA worker. Mu Na suggested we start anyway, and Htan Dah said, “Yeah, maybe they got arrested,” which I laughed at, because I thought he was joking. Not so much. It’s about two miles from the office in which we live to the one in which I teach, but Ta Mla and That Khaing were stopped by the police and detained on the way there. They showed up eventually, as the cops had just wanted to be paid off. They kept That Khaing and told Ta Mla to go get them what they asked for; he returned with a bottle of 100 Pipers whiskey, which he bought with money pooled from the rest of the staff, and they both were released.
So they walked into class, which we hold on the tile floor of the main room of the office/house, and they told their story. They left one minute behind Htan Dah and me, so I was surprised they’d had trouble. “We passed a checkpoint,” Htan Dah said. “Didn’t you see it?” No, dude. I wouldn’t notice a Thai police checkpoint unless it sat on my face, as it is of absolutely no consequence to me. Htan Dah hadn’t panicked as we’d driven by because he’d assumed, correctly, that he wouldn’t be stopped if he was wrapped in white girl. We all talked about how cops sucked and the situation sucked and not being legal sucked for a few minutes, and then all the students just looked at me. I said something too quickly and quietly for them to understand about how I felt stupid now, because it seems ridiculous to tell Wah Doh that the sentence he wrote contains a verb tense inconsistency when Ta Mla and That Khaing are sitting in the corner trying not to throw up because ten minutes ago, they thought they were going to jail.
The other day I found out that for $2,500, the refugees can get citizenship papers. As I mentioned in a previous email, these guys only make $13 a month, so they could obviously never afford it w
ithout a lot of outside help (before considering the logistics of it, I asked in response to this information, like a total jackass, “So, are you trying to save up?”).
So basically, I’ve decided to buy Htan Dah (whose name, by the way, means “resist,” as in injustice) his papers. He’s really smart, and dedicated, and while a lot of these guys are applying for resettlement with the UN and trying to leave the country forever and forget about Burma, he’s not leaving until either democracy is established or he dies. He has a chance to go to a journalism school in Chiang Mai on a scholarship from some do-gooder American organization, where he’d take intensive English courses, and learn about, well, journalism, and I think he could really make a difference in this struggle, and in this organization, between his intelligence and his abilities and his charisma. But he can’t go to Chiang Mai, because he’s illegal, and if he’s caught on the bus he could be jailed, or deported, and his refugee status cripples him in so many ways with the work he’s trying to do (besides in, like, trying to go buy eggs). Anyways, he’s my friend, who keeps me company and makes me nasty-Thai-chicken-less meals, and if any of my friends back home told me that two grand would save his or her life, I would, of course, find a way to get a hold of it. I’ve got an apartmentful of furniture that cost about that much, and I guess I feel like a person is worth more than a couch set and a bookshelf.
For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question Page 11