For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question

by Mac McClelland

  She turned her attention to the baby. “And how are you?” she asked in a high pitch, in the way that people do. The kid didn’t start crying. “Wow, Htan Dah!” Abby said. “Your baby is hanging out with white people!”

  “And he’s sober,” I said.

  “Yes,” Htan Dah said. “He is becoming adjusted to you.” He smiled proudly.

  “Hey,” Abby said, eyeing the Free Burma Rangers logo on my chest. “That’s a nice shirt. Where did you get that?”

  After class, I took advantage of an open spot in the computer room to email home the progress I was making on depleting my savings and reiterate that everyone should send me money. Or at least I tried to. Three-quarters of the way through the composition, the power went out.

  “God . . . dammit,” I said.

  Htoo Moo, working near me, turned his head. “Why did that happen?” he asked.

  I sighed, and because I was frustrated, and because that wasn’t the first time I’d lost work that way there, and because one of my students hadn’t shown up to class earlier—because, we thought, he’d been arrested, so we sat there waiting and worrying for thirty minutes even though it turned out he’d just broken the chain on his bike—I said, “Because Thailand sucks.”

  Htoo Moo laughed. Htan Dah, who was also working in the room, did, too, but chimed in, “Yes, but you cannot compare with Burma.”55

  “Yes, I know, Burma is much worse!” I said. “Can’t you guys quit with your cool perspective for five fucking minutes?” Neither of them understood what I’d said then, I was sure, but my getting frustrated and swearing was always funny, so they chuckled, which was further frustrating. “It doesn’t change the fact that this is a pain in my ass.”

  “Compare with IDP,” Htan Dah said.

  “You can’t compare anything with that!” I shouted. I pushed my chair away from my desk, getting up to leave the room full of useless electronics.

  Upstairs, I plopped down next to Eh Soe on the reading bench in our room. “What are you doing?” I asked him.

  “Nothing, at this moment.”

  I opened a notebook and pen. “Let me ask you a thousand questions.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, I ask everybody lots of questions.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Because I’m curious. Because you’re sooo fascinating.”

  “Okay.”

  “How long have you been in Thailand?”

  LIKE TA Mla and Wah Doh, Eh Soe came to Thailand to go to school. His primary-school attendance was difficult, though not because his village wasn’t big enough to provide that level of education, and not because he had to bribe his teachers excessively, but for a different kind of trouble: forced labor.

  In 1955, the government of the Union of Burma ratified the Forced Labour Convention of the International Labour Organization, the UN agency charged with promoting labor rights. And since 1964, the ILO has been sending requests to Burma that it please quit using its citizens for unpaid internationally illegal forced labor. In February 2009, the ILO and the Burmese government extended their supplementary understanding, “which provides a mechanism for Myanmar Citizens to lodge complaints of forced labour through the ILO Liaison Officer in Yangon [Rangoon]” and “ensures freedom from harassment and retribution for complainants and other persons who support the operation of the complaints mechanism.” A month later, an internal ILO paper reported that the agency was very concerned about the harassment of complainants, and that one of the persons who supported the operation of the complaints mechanism had only just been released from prison. Overall, it pointed out, though the government had signed an agreement with the ILO years ago to eliminate forced labor, government-forced labor was still rampant in the country.

  The Burmese government, naturally, says that it does no such thing, that people in Burma work on infrastructural projects for no money because they want to, they love to and they love their country, and it’s a selfless Burmese tradition that we self-interested Westerners just can’t understand. But Htoo Moo has documented it, of course, risking his life running around Burma like a crazy person interviewing escaped, very unwilling, prisoner-porters. In 1999, two people were arrested for having taped forced labor. They’re still in prison. In 2002, the Karen Human Rights Group published a volume of SPDC written orders for forced labor, which KHRG had collected over the course of about a year; the book was 187 pages long. The aforementioned PBS Frontline video shows footage of hundreds of people working under Burmese soldiers’ watch. “Grandmother, how much are you paid for each load of stones?” the cameraman asks an old woman. She fixes him with a long, cold look, then says, “I don’t know anything about that.”

  I hadn’t realized that Eh Soe had been subjected to servitude. The only person at BA who’d said anything to me had been Eh Na, my student who didn’t work but lived at Office Two and was covered in scars. He’d told me about it between teaching sessions one day, while we sat on the cool blue tiles of the room we used for class, his brown eyes framed by the chin-length pieces of hair perpetually escaping his short ponytail. He’d come to Thailand pretty recently from a big Karen village, Aung Soe Moe, where his family farm had rice, nuts, and vegetables. He went to school and worked his field, and in the cool rainy-season nights everyone warmed up around rice wine and other villagers’ company. And every day, Burma army soldiers came and took two, or five, or twenty villagers as short-term slaves.

  When Eh Na was eighteen, for example, he encountered some troops on his way to his family’s farmland. “Come with us,” they said, and at gunpoint gave him a load of ammunition to carry, an unbearably heavy basket to strap to his shoulders. For four hours, he trudged through the jungle with them in his flip-flops, his skin slick with sweat, his back and neck searing, his steps heavy and stiff with the weight. He concentrated on avoiding land mines and fantasized about having a glass of water. He knew better than to think he’d be paid for his contribution, but he had been holding out hope for some food or something to drink before the soldiers turned him around for his four-hour trek back. Not so much.

  In the last three years before he fled to Thailand, Eh Na estimated he had to do “only” ten forced labor stints. When he was twenty, he passed some Burmese soldiers on his way to visit a relative in a nearby village. “Carry this sick person,” they said, raising their weapons, and he walked holding up one end of a stretcher for five long hours, which would have been bad enough even if the invalid hadn’t been fat. Once, he and nine other villagers were forced to haul rice, beans, and wine for an entire day, which meant they had to walk back home in the middle of the night. Once, he was part of a crew that cleaned and built a fence around an army compound. Once, he was part of a crew that cleaned and built a fence around an army compound that was infested with flesh-eating jungle ants. On both occasions, the villagers had to find their own water and food, and on one, had to contribute their own tools and construction materials to the project they were being forced to work on. Once, Eh Na helped build a road by hand, crouching, sweltering, crushing rocks with tiny tools and laying them in the ground. The demands for forced labor were so consistent that some of the three hundred households in Eh Na’s village had designated family members to do it, ones who were sturdy enough to survive it (unlike diabetic grandfathers) and whose work someone else could cover in their absence (unlike breast-feeding mothers). But it wasn’t until six people in his village were killed by passing soldiers as they walked back from a betel nut field that Eh Na decided he’d had enough and moved to Thailand.

  Eh Soe said, when I asked him for an estimate, that he couldn’t possibly count the number of days he’d spent as a child doing grueling labor for the Burma army. His community of a hundred didn’t have enough slaves to share the work very liberally, and his parents were so poor that they had no choice but to accept the 5¢ from wealthier families who could pay others’ children to do their drudgery for them.

  “Weren’t you mad?” I asked Eh Soe.
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  “No.” He waved his hand and shook his head briskly. “I didn’t think anything about it. It’s the culture. They had guns. Whoever has power can order people to do whatever they want. I couldn’t hate, because I didn’t have any idea about anything different.”

  “I guess that’s a good thing about living in camp; most of the guys here didn’t have to do forced labor.”

  “Yes, but they suffered the war. Their parents were in war. They had to flee. They had to live in the jungle. That is much worse. Me, I just have to work for a day, go home at night.”

  So that’s what he did, until he finished primary school and his aunt paid for him to go away to high school in Moulmein, Burma’s third-largest city, in the southeast of the country. After that, he earned his certificate at a Rangoon computer school, and spent two months in leadership-management classes in Pegu, another big city, nearby. But there aren’t a lot of jobs in Burma, and Eh Soe was out of money, and he certainly wasn’t interested in joining the armed resistance, so he moved to a refugee camp, re-enrolling in high school at the age of eighteen so he could work on his English, joining Htan Dah at Huay Kaloke. And then you know what happened there.

  After two years of English in two different camps, Eh Soe taught fifth-grade science and sixth-grade math and Burmese to other refugees. He had a brother and sister working legally in Bangkok, but Eh Soe had registered as a refugee with the UN, which made him ineligible for a work permit. Not that he could afford one anyway; they cost more than $100 and require at least five trips to Thai government offices. So now he worked at BA, as a community organizer, attempting to fight apathy one villager at a time. It was difficult for him that most of the people he worked so hard to get to—those border mountains were no joke—just wanted to farm, to be left alone by both soldiers and uppity educated refugees come to tell them that their health and empowerment could affect a war they were tired of talking about.

  “Some Karen people don’t care about education,” he told me.

  “That’s not just Karen people,” I said. “My best friend is a teacher in a remote part of Ohio, and she has the same problem with some of her students.”

  “Real?”

  “Sure. Their parents are farmers, and the students want to be farmers, so they don’t see why they should take the time away from farming to get an education.”

  “That’s right, that’s right. Some Karen people say to me, ‘You have an education, and I don’t, but we eat the same rice.’ But it is very important for Karen people. If they have low education, they have intolerance. That is why Buddhists say to Christians, ‘You’re not Karen! You have Western religion!’ That is why DKBA has split from KNU. If they do not have knowledge, they cannot solve problems. If you’re educated, you can live in a house with different beliefs.”

  “That’s very deep, Eh Soe.”

  “Real! Here, we have Sgaw Karen, Pwo Karen”—and these two groups shared something of a long and complicated rivalry—“animist, Christian, Buddhist. . . . If you have two people who are uneducated and not alike in a house, they cannot live together.”

  “Seriously, Eh Soe, you’re so wise.”

  He swatted at me.

  “So are you going to keep working for BA?”

  He shook his head. “I have no idea for the future. What am I going to do? I have no idea.” And then, with understatement: “It’s a problem. We have no country. You can choose whatever you want. The government provides much for you. You are lucky you were born in America. We have no country.”

  SITTING AT the table Thursday morning, I was less delighted by my early kitchen duties than usual. Though I’d carried the cutting boards and dragged the stone mortar and pestle into the dining room/garage and talked over the meal plan with Htan Dah, who was bright and lovely and had washed the rice and set it cooking, filling the downstairs with the warm nuttiness of it, and I was turning bags full of onions and garlic and vegetables into neat little friable piles of potential breakfast, I wasn’t happy. I’d spent the previous night, ridiculously, warring with my ex-girlfriend, via an online chat program, even more ridiculously. We had a ten-year history of being a bad fit and breaking up and redating, both badly, and it had somehow come to yet another head while I was in every sense a world away, thanks to the magic of instant messaging. So now, I was crabby. I was in need of a thing that I felt stupid and guilty about needing, which was making me crabbier, and that was a thing harder to find in this house than justice, or money.

  However much time we spent together and tight our friendship, I knew I could not count on Htan Dah for sympathy. When we were talking once, and I hadn’t even been looking for it, he’d said, “You don’t have any problem that is as serious as my problem.” It stung, his implying that I wasn’t self-conscious enough to be conscious of that very obvious reality. So I’d said “Of course,” but then pointed out that all problems are relative, and that even he didn’t have any problem that was as serious as some people’s problems (though, honestly, it was hard for me to imagine who those people were). To which he’d agreed that some person, maybe a person in Africa, was worse off—adding, a little scathingly, that he wouldn’t dare complain to them.

  What I needed was Eh Na, who, while we’d waited the half-hour for class to begin the day before because someone had probably been arrested, had sat patient and peaceful as stone. Eh Na, whose eyes were so wide and quietly eager, like a doll’s, that when he’d once asked me what had happened to my knee, which was covered in giant dark-pink bumps, I’d indulged in self-pity and whined, “I got attacked by mosquitoes. It sucks.” Eh Na, who wasn’t like Htoo Moo, who, had he been there, would have pulled up his shirt and shown me some thick jagged tissue where a village doctor had sewn up a tiger swipe with razor wire and no antiseptic or something, or would have said something like, “You know what sucks? Forced labor.” Eh Na, who, despite his scars and the fact that on his first visit back to Burma, post-fleeing, to see his family, he was abducted by government soldiers and given the choice of building a road by hand, with aching, bleeding fingers, or being beaten to death, and on his second trip back found his village burned to the ground, had looked at me compassionately and said, “Oh, that is very terrible,” and shaken his head gravely. But Eh Na wasn’t here.

  When Eh Soe, after we’d already all eaten and cleaned up and the guys had gone back in the house to work, finally dragged his ass out from under his mosquito net and came downstairs and sat at the table, I almost kissed his round little cheeks. Eh Soe had a lot of girl trouble! Most recently, when I’d walked in and started talking to him while he was on the phone with his girlfriend, she started a fight with “Who’s that girl in the background? Why are you talking to her?” Eh Soe was clearly my man.

  “That girl you think looks like a boy is driving me crazy,” I told him.

  He started laughing.

  “Seriously, Eh Soe, I’m in such a bad mood. We got in this huge fight last night. We’re always fighting, and I know it would be better if we didn’t talk, but at the same time, it’s really hard for me not to have her in my life.” Eh Soe gave the matter some consideration. “If you buy a shirt,” he said finally, “if you can’t exchange it, for some reason the shop won’t let you, you will wear it until it wears out and is no good anymore even if it’s stupid or too big.”

  I thought about that for a minute. “What?”

  “If you start running, you don’t stop until you reach your goal.”

  I thought about that for a minute, too. “Eh Soe! What the fuck are you talking about?”

  He waved his hand dismissively. “Love is very mysterious.”

  “Great, Eh Soe. Thanks. That’s totally helpful.”

  He shrugged.

  It was Htan Dah’s second-to-last possible day of class, since he was leaving on Monday. The day before, he’d missed again, and he’d seemed to feel bad. He was concerned, too, that his continued absence meant that I was still getting rides with the unsteady Ta Mla. So today, he freed himself
of whatever afternoon work and family obligations he had, came up to me when I was getting my papers together, and said, “I will take you to class today.”

  When we arrived, Collin was holding his guitar. Ta Eh Thaw was killing time sweeping the classroom tiles, stooping over a short wooden broom with long, feathery bristles. She stopped, suddenly, and held it up and looked at it, and I looked at her, and she looked at me and asked, “Do you have?” Pointing to the implement. “In America?”

  Collin strummed a few tentative chords while he talked with Wah Doh. I looked over my lesson plan, until I started to recognize a melody.

  “Are you playing ‘Country Roads’?” I asked. Veteran aid workers and volunteers know that the folk classic is wildly popular in Burma. Among the Karen, it’s basically the national anthem. This was only one of many, many, many times I’d hear a refugee get down with John Denver.

  Collin smiled his shiny eyes crinkly. “Do you know it?”

  I tsked. Please. “I’m from the Midwest,” I said, which didn’t mean anything to anybody there. “That song is about a state that borders Ohio.” Which it is, if you consider the first line to be “Almost heaven, West Virginia.” Collin asked me if I could sing, and I said that I could, but I had to stop for lack of knowing the words, apparently, four syllables in.

  “Almost heaven,” he sang, “free Karen State ...”

  I laughed, and the guys laughed too.

  “Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River,” I started singing, but Collin was singing “Taw Nor Mountain, Salween River.”

  My participation dissolved into hysterical admonitions about the real words, so Wah Doh picked up my harmony, and on they went.

  “Life is old there, older than the trees / Younger than the mountain flowing like the breeze / Country roads, take me home / to the place I belong / to Kaw Thoo Lei / Mountain mama / Take me home, country roads.”

  They stuck pretty faithfully to the lyrics after that, but I couldn’t keep up with the surprises (“misty taste of rice wine”). Eh Na watched them, and me, alternately, wide eyes, silent, as usual. Collin handed me a sheet of paper with the lyrics printed on it the next day, so I could learn them, as well as the (unaltered) words to the Carpenters’ “Top of the World.”