My students wanted to plan a party. It was, they maintained, appropriate that I throw myself a going-away celebration stocked with all the Thai goods my American money could buy and invite all of them to it. And actually, since there were two offices, and it wasn’t safe for these mostly Office Two residents to motorbike the ten minutes to Office One, though they did it all the time, it was only fair that I throw myself two parties, one at each Mae Sot BA branch. I wasn’t leaving for almost two weeks, but I, too, was always happy to talk about parties, so I devoted the conversation-practice part of our class to the subject. We went around the room and everyone had to tell me, in complete English sentences, what they hoped to consume at their party. Beer. Several students mentioned that they’d like to see multiple kinds of meat. Foods from Thai restaurants and stalls. It was widely insisted that I acquire whatever it was that I drank at American bars, so I promised to find some vodka.
“Have you heard of that?” I asked.
No one had.
We went over their homework after that, but it wasn’t easy to concentrate on verb tenses—I mean, their language only had one; were all these conjugations really necessary for white people to express themselves to each other?—with all the excitement, and the weather.
It was glorious outside, again. The rain had let up, and the sun shone brilliantly on the driveway outside the open door. When class was over, I went out while Htan Dah finished talking with his coworkers. The rays were hot, but the breeze from the thick-forested hills cooled the spot where I stood. Through the doorway, in the house, Htan Dah stood with his back to me, speaking soft tonal monosyllables, his cropped pants cut off at the shin, giving way to thick calves and wide bare feet. I watched him while I warmed my face and waited, wondering how he was managing to make capri pants look good.
Back at Office One, I had another class, an impromptu pronunciation class, with Eh Soe. There was an awning at the front of our house, on the left side, a tin-shingled archway just before a big wooden door that opened into the living room. There was a table and some wooden benches out there, under the porch, where Eh Soe was sitting when Htan Dah and I pulled up. I didn’t realize until I joined him there that this was actually the front door; it was never open, for the rain or for the secrecy. Eh Soe was translating an interview he’d conducted in Burma, and I helped him with the words. That was what we were doing, in the afternoon breeze, when Abby found me.
“Repeat after me,” I was saying. “Rape.”
“Rop.”
“Try again. Rrraaape.”
Abby wanted to know if I wanted to go out to dinner. The Blay’s wife had run away from camp for a visit and brought the better part of a dead pig. Someone said she bought it at the market; someone said she had killed it herself; someone said her family was somehow prosperous in camp and had given it as a gift. Either way, the carcass was on the dining room/garage table, being skinned and hacked into pieces. Htan Dah had gone off somewhere, so wouldn’t be doing the cooking, so wouldn’t be making any less-gamy pork-intensive dishes for our delicate American palates. The house smelled like blood. The Australian administrator had asked Abby if she wanted to join her later at the Italian restaurant in town, so we went to a bar to kill time, then went out for pizza.
By the time I got home at ten, the garage door was shut. Even the door into the kitchen from the dining room/garage was closed. I’d never realized that my housemates locked us in so thoroughly at night. Tonight, they were locking in their company, too.
I’d passed the truck parked in the driveway, and when someone let me in the kitchen door, I found red mud all over the floor. In the living room, three Karen guys I’d never seen were sitting in front of the little TV. Another one was messing with the wires in the back. They were subtly rough-looking. I tried talking to them in English, but only Karen came back at me. Since I didn’t know how to say anything in that language but “thank you,” “white person,” “love you” (because that’s what Eh Na’s name meant), and “eat!” I just smiled at them and walked upstairs.
Htan Dah was wide-awake, splayed on his stomach on the floor of the big room, reading a newspaper.
“What are you doing up?” I asked.
“I cannot sleep. I had coffee.”
I sat down next to him, cross-legged. “Who are those guys downstairs?”
“The dark guys?” he asked, his eyes still on the paper.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Soldiers.”
“Why are there KNU soldiers watching TV in the living room?”
“They drop off someone from BA who was inside.”
“They don’t speak English.”
Htan Dah looked up, at me as if I were a very slow child. “They live in the jungle.”
“Yes, I get that now.”
He looked back at his paper. “I wish I lived in the jungle. It is very simple. You don’t have to make decision. Just, farming, and living, and hanging around.”
“So why don’t you just move to the jungle?”
“Because(!). I don’t want to fight like them.”
“Fair enough.” To my left, a couple of guys were asleep on the floor. I looked around. “Where are your wife and baby?”
“Today, they went back to camp.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that. Are you sad?”
“We cannot do anything. It is usual. Where have you been?”
“Why, did you miss me?”
Htan Dah hesitated, but still didn’t look up. “Yes.”
“I went to a bar with Abby—”
“Crocodile Tear?”
“Yes, the Crocodile Tear, and then we went to Casa Mia, you know what I’m talking about? Everybody there was white, the white people who work with refugees, I think. They were all wearing T-shirts from NGOs. It seemed weird that they were all out together but only with their white coworkers.”
“Uh-huh.”
I reached out and tucked my index fingers into Htan Dah’s hair near his part, separating out a thin lock with each hand. I pushed the one in my right hand into my palm and held it there with my other three fingers, using my index finger to grab another piece, and then started on a tight, slim braid. “I wished that you were there. I missed you, and Eh Soe, and Htoo Moo.” I didn’t have a rubber band, so I just held the braid for a second after I finished, looking at it. The pieces slid apart almost as soon as I let go, and I started on another one.
“Uh-huh.”
“Htan Dah,” I said, staying my hands and looking at him, though he continued to look at the paper. “You’re not listening to me.”
“Yes!” he said. “I am listening! It is usual for you to hang out with white people. It is not usual to live with refugees. Usually the white people who come here do not live in the house with us.”
“Wait, what? Your volunteers don’t live here?”
“No! It is . . . optional. Usually they stay in hotel, or in another house, like Abby.”
“Really?”
“Yes!”
“I didn’t know that.”
I dropped another braid. It disintegrated.
“Htan Dah, I don’t want you to leave. I’m not ready to go home.”
Eh Soe bounded up the stairs. “Darling, where you have been, I have missed you very much,” he said, sitting cross-legged on the other side of Htan Dah.
“Aw, Eh Soe, I missed you too. Didn’t you hear me say I was going out to dinner?”
“No! I asked everyone where you were, but they didn’t have any idea about that.”
“We went to the Crocodile Tear, and Casa Mia.”
“Are you very drunk?”
“No. I was maybe a little bit drunk earlier, before dinner, but not now.”
“Oh! I thought you would be very drunk.”
“Really? Why?”
“Because, you are fighting with your girlfriend.”
We talked about girlfriends for a while before Eh Soe went to talk to his and I got up to go to bed. There was light coming from the do
or to the balcony, so I poked my head out. Htoo Moo had set up camp there, lying on top of a mat of green and yellow woven plastic, a wool blanket about him and mosquito net hanging from two of its corners, ready to be strung up by the opposite two when the time came, the mesh in a pile around his legs for now. Someone else was sleeping in the living room, so he’d moved. I said goodnight to him before closing the door, while he continued to read an English/Burmese dictionary of military terms.
FRIDAY MORNING, the boys were all business again as they crowded into the living room for the weekly staff meeting. They took their places on the floor, Htan Dah Indian-style at the front of the room with a dry-erase board, facing them. Eh Soe sat among the crowd with a notebook and pen ready. The people around him murmured to one another, waiting patiently for the engagement to commence.
The kaw la wah—white people, that is, Abby and me—however, had worked ourselves up to total frenzy. One of my erstwhile advanced students had walked in the door with eyes red and sticky looking; he’d just come back from some assignment in camp, where he’d contracted pinkeye. He stuck his finger in one infected eye while explaining this to me, eliciting my desperate plea that he keep his hands away from his face and go wash them immediately. He just laughed at me, and continued to rub his itchy eyeballs while walking around the house touching things, computers, doors. Htan Dah had looked up alarmed when I burst into the computer room before the meeting and shouted “Don’t touch your face!” at him. Abby went on a mad search of the house for disinfectant. Some of the guys laughed at us when we warned them of the impending ocular-disease epidemic. Some of them laughed at us while asking if we thought we would die from pinkeye. Abby didn’t give a shit. When Ta Mla’s slaughtering of two chickens in the kitchen before breakfast coincided unhappily with 1) our running out of dish detergent and 2) the Bangkok Post’s running a front-page article about a massive resurgence of bird-flu outbreak, she ran to 7-Eleven to buy cleaning products.
The hush and calm of the meeting could have spread to Abby and me, who were present, sitting on the edge of the room in chairs. Htan Dah had written the abbreviations of different departments or projects within the organization at the top of the board and was very orderly calling on their representatives for reports and then very meticulously summing up their lulling Karen speeches in one English sentence on the board. Eh Soe, who was acting as secretary, was keeping diligent notes, and saying, anytime he missed something, “Please repeat that.” Ta Mla and a guy everyone called The Mechanic, who didn’t speak a word of English and therefore never spoke to me, and who sometimes wore black fingerless gloves, had their hands on each other’s legs and feet, comfortable. They were both wearing T-shirts they’d gotten in school at camp bearing the enumerated tenets of the KNU revolution. So many of the guys had so many of these shirts that it wasn’t uncommon for two to be making the ubiquitous, heavy political statement on the same day.
1. For us surrender is out of the question.
2. Recognition of Karen State must be completed.
3. We shall retain our arms.
4. We shall decide our own political destiny.
Everyone was lounging. Everyone was quietly attentive. But Abby and I were already on edge, and then, soon enough, Htan Dah called on the guy the KNU soldiers had dropped off the night before.
Eh Kaw looked bad. His face seemed gaunter than even his slim frame suggested it should have been, and his dark skin was dull, ashen. He’d been on some type of surveying trip in Burma, checking on the progress of a school, it seemed, as well as carrying in some of BA’s rations from the Thailand Burma Border Consortium to distribute them. He looked tired as he said whatever it was that made Htan Dah write on the board, “Both of teachers are afraid of SPDC and DKBA.” Eh Kaw talked a little bit more, and all the guys started laughing. Htan Dah wrote, “One of the teachers got shock when she heard the firing.” He stopped, considering for a moment before adding, “She is timid.” Eh Kaw went on for a few more moments, and everyone nodded.
“He has malaria,” Htan Dah translated out loud for Abby and me, looking at us.
“Oh no,” I said, because I felt bad for him. The personal implications of his misfortune dawned on me surprisingly slowly: This guy and I slept and socialized an easy mosquito’s flight away from each other. Lots of my roommates had had malaria before, but Eh Kaw had it right now. As I wasn’t taking any prophylactic medication, this was pretty bad news for me.
Days ago, I’d been at the table when the mosquitoes started pouring in and attacking at dusk, and a visiting BA staffer from Bangkok had said, “You’re going to get malaria.” Technically, according to the research I’d done before I left, Thai cities had eradicated malaria. But I knew by now that the disease was raging just over the border, which these guys regularly hopped—them and millions of other refugees and migrants, so that the disease was a risk in this border town where I sat.56 I’d told the visitor, a chubby Karen guy with glasses and impeccable English, that I could probably survive a bout of malaria. “Not necessarily,” he’d said. “If it goes to your brain, it will kill you.” It was true that cerebral malaria required immediate treatment. If I were infected and didn’t get medicine, I could wake up feeling fine and be dead by the next morning. And I wouldn’t be the first BA volunteer to die this way.57
Htan Dah was sounding similar alarms now. “There is a lot of malaria in that area,” he said. “You can die easily.” I wasn’t positive whether he was being dramatic for my benefit or if he was just being perfectly candid and the content made it seem dramatic. I suspected at least a hint of the former, though what he was saying was, of course, true.
He went on to announce that one of the BA trainers had been arrested on his way to camp and had to pay twenty thousand baht—some six hundred dollars—for his release. Abby and I balked at this number. The staff seemed concerned, though not surprised. Htan Dah continued, in English, that they were all at increased security risk, as Thai work permits expired soon and there would be more cops and more eagerness to check IDs and arrest people. As a final announcement, he said he had been selected, along with eleven others, to attend the upcoming fall semester at the journalism school in Chiang Mai.
“Oh!” I said involuntarily, and clapped once, but no one else said anything, and Htan Dah never broke his impassive meeting face. Only Abby and I were stirring, I squirming in my seat, she asking me if I had known that. I hadn’t.
“When did you find out you got in(!)?” I asked, accosting Htan Dah in the computer room after the meeting.
“They sent me email . . . maybe . . . couple days ago.”
“A couple days(!)? I can’t believe you didn’t tell me! That’s so exciting! Why didn’t you tell me?”
Htan Dah shrugged. “I forgot.”
One of the other staff guys came up to me and handed me a mailing envelope. “For you?” he asked. He’d just picked it up from the office PO box downtown.
It was indeed addressed to me, from Columbus, Ohio, and had the size and heft of a hardcover Che Guevara biography. I started jumping up and down.
“Do you know what’s in here?” I asked, tearing it open.
“No,” Htan Dah said, watching me.
I pulled out the cream-colored tome. The jacket had been lost somewhere, or maybe I’d never had it, since I’d borrowed the book from a New Orleans library before Katrina. “What’s in it?” Htan Dah asked. “Money?”
That irritated me a little, though I knew it wasn’t an unreasonable question; these guys sent money, if any money was ever to be had to be sent, in books. The Blay’s brother had decided to leave Burma to study in India a couple of years ago, getting there, and back, the only way he could afford—walking—and while he was gone, The Blay had sent him money in books. But “This is that Che biography I was telling you about!” I said. “What do you mean, ‘What’s in it?’ There’s nothing in it. There’s a book in it. It’s a book. It’s for you.” I handed it over.
“Wow,” Htan Dah said, taki
ng it. “Thank you very much.” He stuck out his free hand.
I took it, and shook it, but while doing so said, “We’re not shaking hands!” and then grabbed him into his second hug ever. He put his arms up, like the Canadian had shown him, but though they were on my back, they didn’t give in to the gesture, and neither did his perfectly rigid body, because it hadn’t been taught to like mine had.
“Here, let me have this for one second,” I said, releasing him and taking the book back. In my mother’s house, it was a sin to gift anything with a cover without writing something on the inside of it. I gave it back to him a little while later, inscribed.
For one stylish and attractive revolutionary, the story about another.
May you find it as rousing as I find you.
I went to class. When I got back, I sat down in the living room next to Htoo Moo and watched music videos with him. Before long, he stood up and started doing squats. He put his arms out in front of him and clasped his hands together, standing next to my chair, tilted his ass up and then dropped it nearly to the floor, bending at the knees, his eyes on Eminem on the screen. The sets came closer together and became interspersed with an occasional crack of the neck or shoulder roll as it got later. It was time to play football. Or soccer, as I was keen on calling it. No one seemed to know how it had started, but everyone knew that the hour-long game started at five on weekdays.
“I want to come watch today,” I told Htoo Moo. “Is that okay?”
“Yes,” he said, smiling. “Very yes.”
“Htan Dah, you should come,” I said when we walked past him in the kitchen, on our way out.
“I don’t think so(!),” he said. “Maybe some other time. Right now I am too fat.”
Htoo Moo nodded. I knew he thought Htan Dah was fat; he’d told me so several times.
For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question Page 23