“Oh, yes. When we have malaria,” Eh Soe volunteered, “the doctor says, ‘You have one hundred and two fever.’”
“Yeah, right. So that’s your temperature on the Fahrenheit scale. That’s the scale we use in the States. So guess how many degrees it is in here right now.”
Htan Dah shrugged. “Six?”
I rotated my head on his posterior and turned to Abby. “How many degrees is it in here right now?”
“Eighty.”
“Yeah, see, I was going to say seventy-eight. So obviously that’s about what the temperature is.” Abby and I were smiling at each other. “We know that scale well enough to be able to tell the temperatures of things.” We were really impressive.
“Why?” Eh Soe asked.
“Because, if you know what the temperature is, you know, like, what to wear if you’re going outside,” Abby said.
“We have temperatures,” Htan Dah said. “Hot . . . not so hot . . . cold. ...”
“Yeah, but we live in a place with seasons, and we need to know exactly what the temperature is so we know if we need to take a sweater, or a coat.”
Htan Dah and Eh Soe said nothing, because they were polite, but their faces clearly weren’t buying our assertion that they’d never survive with just an adjectival scale in the West, where total accurate internalization of an established scientific unit of temperature measurement was essential. I couldn’t say, now that I was actually thinking about it, that I was convinced, either. I would have traded that superpower for the one Htan Dah had that told him when an egg was done boiling, or the one that’d enabled him to wake me up in a windowless hotel and say, his voice low and soft and even in the boozy dark, “Dawn is coming,” and be right.
We tacitly agreed to drop it, quiet for a moment. Abby passed the lull by looking over my lounging configuration as though registering it for the first time. “Are you comfortable?” she asked me.
“On this ass?” I tapped the back of my head against its shapely rest. “Absolutely.”
Eh Soe laughed. “If Htan Dah’s wife catches him on the floor like this with a Karen girl,” he said, “she will cut off his . . . rations.” He laughed harder. “His skin rations.” And harder. “The rations at night.”
“We get it, Eh Soe,” I said. “But I’m not an actual girl, right, because I’m kaw la wah.”
Eh Soe nodded while he wiped his eyes. “That’s right, that’s right.”
Abby went to bed, and Eh Soe went to go get ready for bed, and just like that, it was time for bed on my last night in the Mae Sot house of BA.
Htan Dah and I sat up, across from each other, cross-legged on the floor.
“Thanks for keeping me fed, and keeping me company,” I said. “Even on the first morning, you kept me company when I had breakfast.”
“Yes. I worried that you will be lonely, or homesick. I didn’t want you to cry.”
“Isn’t it weird that people come to help you and just cry all the time?”
He shrugged. “It is normal.”
“Well, seriously, I’m very grateful to you. Thank you.”
“Thank you!” He smiled. “And, you are welcome!”
We counted the hours back from my morning bus departure to determine what time we’d have to wake up to go to the market. The answer was, really, really early.
“I’ll cook for you,” Htan Dah said. “I can go to the market and cook. You can sleep.”
I shook my head. “I can sleep anytime. I can’t spend time with you anytime.”
“That’s true.”
I climbed under my mosquito net onto my mattress, and he crawled to the foot of it, lay on his back on the floorboards, and went to sleep.
MY ALARM went off before dawn.
I reached for the dull, subdued beeping and slapped it quiet, pushing myself onto my side. The objects around me began to take shape—wide mosquito net, tilted window slats, lifeless figure a few feet away. I slid underneath the netting.
“It’s time to get up,” I said, sidling up to where Htan Dah lay with his body rigid against hard wood, exactly as he’d lain down. I pressed the length of my body against his arm. I was still for a moment. “Htan Dah,” I said. I shook him gently. “It’s time to get up.” These refugees were used to packed rooms. They slept like the dead.
Htan Dah breathed in hard when I said his name and shook him again. “You can sleep,” he said, just above a whisper. “I can go to the market alone.”
“Stop it.”
We pulled onto our side street on his motorbike. Mae Sot was silent in the darkness. Out on the main thoroughfare, even the roosters were tranquil. Passengers in Asia may not generally hold on to their drivers, but I wrapped my arms tight around Htan Dah’s waist. We were alone on the road. He drove slowly. I watched stray dogs pass and the stately white municipal building approach from my usual place behind him, his hair catching on the wind we were making. He leaned back and turned his head toward me a little so I could hear him.
“Time is so fast,” he said.
We pulled through the only intersection on the route big enough to have a light, toward the shortcut through the temple grounds strung with lights, and I dug my fingers into him, pressed my face between his shoulder blades, and cried.
We had two hours before we had to leave for the bus station. Though the time was disappearing fast, consumed by a rash of banal errands, the moments moved weirdly, exquisitely slowly: turning my hips to miss a table corner in a narrow walkway in the market. Palming a head of cauliflower, hard florets against my fingers like braille. Laying a knife on a garlic clove, parallel to the cutting board, and pressing until the skin cracked. Laying my weight on my mattress to push the air out. Considering, as I repacked my bag, how stupid it was to bring these shoes that I hadn’t worn since the plane, as though I’d have needed an alternative to flip-flops, while Htan Dah watched and speculated that we’d see each other again in 2008—in two years—and I insisted sooner than that. Explaining to Eh Soe that I’d left that shampoo in the bathroom on purpose, so they could use it. Instructing Htoo Moo that these blue bullet-like pills were calcium, good for his bones, he would absorb more of the nutrients if he took them with food. Standing in the driveway in a circle of Eh Soe and Htan Dah and Htan Dah’s friend who’d happened to show up, the three of them debating how to best divide up our bodies and my luggage on motorbikes to get to the bus station, Ta Mla and Htoo Moo ambling around waiting for them to decide so it’d be time for them to officially say goodbye to me and go back in the house and get back to work. Next to the idling bus, I leaned my back against Htan Dah’s chest, and Eh Soe and I stared alternately at each other and the ground. In my bus seat, I watched the two of them watching me through the window and then they were gone. They went home and changed into red and white Karen shirts, respectively, and took Abby, soon on her own way out of Mae Sot, to an annual Karen ceremony on the day of that August full moon, swarming with thousands of migrants and refugees who ate fried yellow beans and banana stem soup together and then rubbed strings on each other’s forearms to call their spirits back to their bodies before binding them together at the wrist with the string. Several days later, the guys slipped into Burma to attend the 56th annual commemoration of martyrs of the KNU’s war.
BACK IN the States, I rolled out of bed late to pull together school clothes and syllabi, passing hot, jet-lagged nights in front of hours of syndicated sitcoms. When I slept, I dreamed that my grade-school best friend and I walked into a small town somewhere in America with our arms slung around each other’s shoulders. She became concerned that this group of guys, buff and in tank tops and following us a little too closely, was going to start trouble. Maybe they for some reason thought we were transvestites, she speculated, and this wasn’t the type of town that took kindly to that. When they confronted us, forming a half circle in our path that we couldn’t escape, we explained that we weren’t doing anything wrong, that is, that we were biological women, but it didn’t matter. They were the
re, I knew, to fight us for the ease and the fun. My friend punched one in the face and we ran, and thought we’d lost them, but ultimately their shadows crept over us as we squatted in a lonely patch of grass with the sun at our backs. They chased us into a souvenir shop and cornered us, and I screamed at the two employees who stood watching to call the police, call the police, I was impossibly alert and alarmed, and the employees didn’t move and I knew that there were no police who would help, and the men closed in around us, calmly smiling, and as my hope for getting away died I felt the blood under my electric skin give up and give in, the cells bursting at the realization of predictable and unpreventable horror. When I woke up, I tried to calm myself with gratitude that it wasn’t happening, it’s not happening, look, see, you’re in a bed. Safe girl. Lucky girl. But my brain couldn’t make my body move, paralyzed, still, by my heart’s hard-pounding panic, whatever I told it. It’s not happening, shhhh, safe girl, lucky girl . . .
IN MAE Sot, Htoo Moo woke up around seven. He opened his eyes to the mosquito net surrounding him, and beyond that, the underside of the overhanging roof. He got up, peed, washed his face, and walked back out onto the balcony, wrapping himself in his gray wool blanket to write in his journal while the early chill pricked his cheeks.
Eh Soe rolled on his bench, groaning, reluctant. In the big room next door, Ta Mla and Gaw Say weren’t sleeping, but they lay still on the hardwood floor. Downstairs, Htan Dah was standing at the sink rinsing six cups of rice. He could hear over the water running into the big metal pot that it was raining, hard; the drops met the tin roof in steady sheets. He looked straight ahead, not looking, as he scooped up handfuls of the grain and rubbed the granules between his palms.
Soon, Eh Soe plodded downstairs, turned on a computer, and brought the jumpy, metallic notes of the BBC Burmese news stream theme into the room as other staff members came in, still rubbing their eyes, to immediately take their places at the desks. Ta Mla did the dishes from last night, dropped the stone mortar gently on the table, and pestled herbs and peppers into curry paste. The morning had started. Htan Dah pulled himself away from the sink and the soothing swoosh of rice through his fingers and put it on to simmer, grabbed his keys, straddled his motorbike, and got to work, pushing himself out into the driving rain.
It was indeed 2008 the next time I saw Htan Dah.
He was standing on a sidewalk, squinting against the sun at my approach, power lines overhead. We were in the San Francisco Bay Area, where we both lived.
The year I volunteered for BA, 2006, nearly five thousand people from Burma resettled to other countries through Thailand. That’s just 3 percent of the number of Burmese refugees at that time, but it was double the number that had done so the year before. Then in 2007, the 2006 number tripled.
The difference was made by Condoleezza Rice. In May 2006, two months before I arrived in Mae Sot, the US secretary of state granted a waiver of material support for Burmese refugees who lived in Thailand’s Tham Hin camp, which was disgustingly overcrowded and increasingly crime-infested. It didn’t get those who actually were terrorists—former or current soldiers or card-carrying members of the KNU—off the hook, but it opened the door for those refugees in Tham Hin who’d been ineligible to become Americans for having given rice or a glass of water to a rebel.75 A few months later, three weeks after I left, Rice extended the waiver to more Karen refugees in Thailand. In January 2007, the US extended eligibility to all refugees who’d provided material support to the Karen National Union. In 2008, the Karen National Union had its designation as a terrorist organization under the Immigration and Nationality Act removed altogether.
In 2009, the fifty-thousandth Burmese refugee processed for resettlement in Thailand was shipped out of Asia, in the largest UN resettlement program in the world. Most of them go to the United States, which accepted nearly fifteen thousand in 2008 alone. That year, Htan Dah and his wife and son arrived in Northern California.
I started jumping up and down when I saw him, and he smiled a little and I ran and threw my arms around his neck. He put his arms up in reciprocation because he was supposed to, but neither they nor any other part of his body gave in to the hug, and I apologized for violating his customs, but I couldn’t help it.
“It’s so good to see you! Oh my god how are you(!)? Are you so excited to be in the United States?”
He wasn’t.
“When I moved here, our neighbors,” he told me, speaking of the Karen family that lived next door, that had been in the United States for years, “they said, ‘Now that you are in America, you have to be afraid of everyone.’ So now I’m a scaredy-cat.”
“You don’t have to be afraid of everyone. Who are you afraid of?”
“I don’t know! Maybe . . . hooligans.”
“Hooligans! Htan Dah, that’s absurd. I walk around all the time, all over the place, all by myself.”
“For you it is different! You were born here. You’re an American.”
At some point, I asked him if he had gone to any bars in his neighborhood.
“I’m too scared to go to white-people bars,” he said.
“There’s not really any such thing as white-people bars. You can go wherever you want. You live in California. There are tons of Asians here. People will just think you’re Chinese.”
“But I do not want to go outside! My neighbors also. Like me, they just stay inside, and eat, and sleep, and watch TV.”76 The only time he left was for his ESL instruction, twenty hours a week worth of class with other immigrants, Mexicans and Vietnamese. He went to that only because he had to in order to keep getting his $680 welfare check. For his family of three. He said he wasn’t well enough to walk around America. He said he and his family were all still airsick. They’d been here for a month.
The next time I spoke to him, on the phone, I tried to talk him into letting me pick him up and drive him and his son to the state fair. When he refused vehemently, I told him that he had to go outside at some point, especially if his wife, who spoke no English, wouldn’t, since he’d told me their kid was tired of being in their apartment all the time and begged to be let out. I swore to him that there would be lots of people of different races together, so we would blend in with everyone else, and no one would pay him any attention.
“People will look at me!” he shouted. “I have no idea what I am doing, what to do!” His voice caught, panicked. He was getting increasingly agitated, and I’d never heard him so worked up. “People will think I am some kind of . . . monkey!” He sounded like he was panting, or choking, even. “I do not know how to act! I am refugee, from the jungle. My son wants to go outside all the time, but I don’t want to take him. He has only been in refugee camp, so he is curious about everything, and he cries when I won’t take him outside. I wish I was IDP.”77
“Shut up. You do not.” He laughed guiltily, imagining, I imagine, hundreds of thousands of IDPs rolling over in their living jungle graves. He did calm down, eventually—and agree to go to the Sacramento fairgrounds.
After more than a year, he was still “a little bit” sad to be here. Like I’d inwardly threatened to call Delta and book the next flight back home my first night in Mae Sot, Htan Dah still threatened to return to Thailand every time I talked to him. “I want to go back to the place where I was born, where it is familiar, with my people,” he said. “I miss my friends. I miss working at BA. I feel like I have a big load to carry.” He was not, understandably, all that pumped about becoming part of the American underclass. He still wasn’t working, because he was working to get his GED, and was eager to get a job, though he knew that finding one was hardly the end of his problems. “People have to have many jobs. They work long hours and then come home and go to bed and just start over. That is American life. I have no idea how I will pay my rent, and electricity, and food. Here, I have no time to work for my people. I have to work for my family, for survival, for food. If possible I would like to go back.” Worrying that he was overworrying me, he added,
“But it’s no problem. I will cope with my situation, in maybe five or six years. I’m good. I learn from everything. There’s no time to be sad. It’s time to learn.”
Part of Htan Dah’s reluctance to give his all to the massive readjustment was his absolute reluctance to leave Southeast Asia in the first place. He’d always been, together with Walt, the strongest BA proponent of staying and (peacefully) fighting, and his new American inaction—however arguably ineffective his old Thai action—plagues him. He and his wife fought bitterly over the issue of resettlement; she turned in their family’s application behind his back, and he ultimately conceded that it was the best thing for their son, which was hard to contest. Even Htan Dah, after he’d trekked deep into the Thai hills to pay off villagers and headmen and civil workers and had his picture taken, and papers were forged and the identity of a dead Thai Karen had been assumed—even after he’d stopped getting arrested, thanks to his several-thousand-dollar ID—he still hadn’t been able to shake the panic, out of doors, the fear that he’d be found out for being what he really was. He’d still mostly avoided traveling. He was born in a refugee camp, and his kid was born in a refugee camp, and if he’d stayed in Thailand his kid’s kid probably would have been born in a refugee camp, too.
Maintaining that status quo is certainly the junta’s plan. In 2009, the two sides of the China-EU summit failed to reach an agreement about whether the world should stay out of Burma’s business. Media in the West were fretting about a North Korean ship breaking Korea’s arms-exporting sanctions to deliver weapons to Burma, while media in the East were broadcasting photographs confirming years-old suspicions that North Korea helped the junta build a top-secret underground tunnel system near the new capital; outlets in both hemispheres have turned out such headlines as BURMA, NORTH KOREA IN AN UNHOLY MILITARY ALLIANCE and IS BURMA THE NEXT IRAN? and IS MYANMAR GOING NUCLEAR WITH KOREA’S HELP? and IS THERE A BURMA-NORTH KOREA-IRAN NUCLEAR CONSPIRACY? Even US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged “growing concerns about military cooperation between North Korea and Burma, which we take very seriously.” Some Southeast Asian politicians suggested that Burma be suspended from ASEAN, but not enough of them. Nicolas Sarkozy and Gordon Brown and Barack Obama and Julia Roberts called for the release78 of Aung San Suu Kyi, who was tried and had her house arrest again extended after she hosted a misguided middle-aged American fan who stole into her compound uninvited. The Obama/Biden campaign had promised that the two “will press China to end its support for regimes in Sudan, Burma, Iran and Zimbabwe.” But the president’s unwillingness to press that Most Favored Nation and major US stakeholder to do anything was always pretty clear, even before Hillary Clinton said China and the US would just have to “agree to disagree” on things like human rights when there were problems such as the economy to be dealt with. The administration unveiled its new Burma policy, which involves a combination of the sanctions that have never worked and “engagement,” which ASEAN has been using with Burma totally unsuccessfully for years. The Genocide Prevention Task Force, led by Obama adviser and former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, put Burma on the genocide watch list, not that watching has ever been a particularly effective form of assistance to people on the business end of a genocide. The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the Sudanese president, and so the president of East Timor, José Ramos-Horta, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, swore he was going to talk the court into similarly charging Than Shwe. And while a few people made some noise about trying to make Burma do something, the junta continued construction on an elaborate new airport that will accommodate its commerce further exploding.
For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question Page 30