by Pico Iyer
Having seceded in this curious fashion from the world at large, Burma had retired, half monk and half misanthrope, to live amidst the changeless furnishings of the past. With the absoluteness that can come of isolation or idealism, it had also remained resolutely democratic in its mistrust of every aspect of the foreign, and the modern, world; an equal-opportunity recluse, it had no time for the West, no patience with the East. A founding member of the nonaligned movement, it was also the first to quit, charging that the body was no longer innocent of politics. The so-called Burmese Way to Socialism bore a fair resemblance to a one-way trip to solitary confinement.
For years, foreigners had been allowed to visit Burma for no longer than twenty-four hours. Recently, the maximum length of stay had increased to seven days. But Burma was hardly eager to attract tourists. Visitors were permitted to enter the country only by air. That meant flying into Rangoon. That in turn meant leaving from Kunming, Dhaka, Calcutta, Singapore or Bangkok. And the handful of carriers that plied these forgotten routes—the national airlines of Burma, Thailand, China, the Soviet Union and Bangladesh—did so only a couple of times each week. Arriving in Rangoon was difficult. Arriving at the right time from the right place was more difficult still. Managing to leave, exactly seven days later, for one’s chosen destination, was nigh impossible.
I had enjoyed a taste of the Burmese Way to Socialism well before my arrival in Rangoon. At the Burmese consulate in New York, I had, in applying for a visa, submitted an Arrival Form, a Tourist Visa Application Form, another Tourist Application Form and three recent pictures of myself. A day had passed, and then a few more. I went back to the consulate to consult the man in charge. He was, he said with genuine courtesy, very sorry, very sorry indeed, for the delay. His country, he explained, did not have sophisticated technology. Were there no computers? “Oh no.” Could we telephone? He shook his head sadly. What could I do? Well, he said, he could send a telex through New Delhi to Rangoon. But once it got to Rangoon, who could tell what would happen. I shrugged. He shrugged. Three more days passed, and then a week. I was due to leave in a matter of days. The man at the consulate handed me back my passport, minus a visa, and apologized. “Perhaps it will be easier in Bangkok.”
As soon as I arrived in Bangkok, I hurried to the regally dilapidated Burmese consulate. Two men were sitting next to chaotically overcrowded desks behind a booth on a terrace marked “Visas.” I would like to apply for a visa, I said. The office, they said, was closed. Could I get a form at least? The office, they said, was closed; I should come back the following day. I came back the following day. I would like to apply for a visa, I said. Where, one of the two men asked, was my plane ticket out of Burma? There seemed little point, I said, in getting a ticket out of Burma before I knew whether I could get into Burma. The two men shook their heads gravely. Soon, they said, the office would be closed.
A few minutes later, tucked away between snack shops and money dealers, I came upon a dusty, lightless little cell that looked like the back room of a warehouse. Inside, the Burma Airways head office was empty, save for a three-year-old boy wandering around vaguely among unpeopled desks. A few cheerless black-and-white posters of the homeland were stuck on the walls. A short typewritten schedule for such destinations as “Kathmadu” lay in an old Air-India folder. A postcard or two. Nothing else. Finally, a round-faced matron, huffing impatiently, shuffled up to the counter. I asked whether I could buy a ticket. She looked gloomy. It was difficult, she said. I asked why; she said nothing. At last, with lugubrious reluctance, she pulled out a Dickensian ledger and a fountain pen and entered my name on a list. Was that all? It had to be; after all, there were no typewriters in the place, and certainly no computer terminals. If I actually wanted to buy a ticket, she warned, I should go to Nepal Tours; their prices were much better than Burma Airways’. With that, she padded back into her room.
Proudly bearing my receipt, I returned to the two men at the consulate. The office, they said, was closed; I would have to come back the following day. I came back the following day. I would like to apply for a visa, I said. One of the men scrutinized my receipt unhappily. All right, he said. But he would have to warn me that his office could provide no staples.
HALF AN HOUR after arriving at the Strand, I turned off the fan in my room and walked across town to the central offices of Tourist Burma. There a middle-aged lady with black glasses, a severe bun and an air of hockey-mistress briskness began informing me of my rights. Tourists, she said, were allowed to visit only five places in Burma. It was possible to take the train, but—here she looked portentous—there were many delays. Given the seven-day limit, she did not recommend the train. Much better was to take a Burma Airways plane. An aircraft connected the country’s four main sights each day.
She stopped and peered at me for a moment. Was I American? Not really. “Ah,” she said with a relieved chuckle. “That is good. Americans do not like our ways here. Sometimes a plane will not leave because the pilot is sitting drinking tea. They do not understand that. They do not understand that here in Burma we live in the eighteenth century.”
With that unsettling parenthesis, Miss Tourist Burma resumed her litany of rights. There was one good hotel in every town; it was not possible to stay anywhere else, unless one procured a special voucher from the Tourist Burma office. Often, she said, the office was closed. There was more or less one restaurant in every town (in the hotel), though Rangoon boasted two. And I should not on any account forget to list every transaction on my financial form. The gist of her message was clear: it was possible to choose any way at all of seeing the country, so long as it was the Tourist Burma way.
Thus reassured, I made my way back past cricket greens and stern libraries, regimental statues and white-columned institutes. Popping into a local bookstore, I found faded copies of Alistair MacLean, Angus Wilson and Trollope. Back at the Strand, black-tied men in curry-stained white coats were serving pots of tea on tarnished silver trays, accompanied by cardboardy pieces of cake last wielded, in my experience, by unsmiling school matrons at elevenses. One entire section of the menu was devoted to “Porridge.” But the pièce de résistance of the hotel was clearly the five-course meal whose centerpiece was bacon and eggs. The bacon arrived in hefty black slabs as thick as expensive chocolate. I set to cutting into my meal, and a piece of meat ricocheted across the table. No wonder, I thought, Burma was such a cult favorite among my friends from British boarding school.
It all, I suppose, made a peculiar kind of sense. For in locking the modern world out, Burma had mostly succeeded in locking in the fading legacy of the long-ago outside world. By now, as a result, Rangoon had been turned into a sepia-colored daguerreotype of the Raj. And what had the Raj been in any case but a classically no-nonsense British institution, a public school writ large and transported to the colonies?
Rangoon had now, therefore, come to resemble a kind of cobwebbed, treasure-laden attic in the home of some imperial Miss Havisham, an anomalous old place cluttered with yellowed letters, ageless heirlooms and moth-eaten keepsakes left over from the days of Empire. The metaphor acquired an almost literal truth in the celebrated Lost-and-Found case at the Strand. The dusty museum case was a veritable treasure trove of ancient objets trouvés: ladies’ fans and officers’ cuff links; fin de siècle pince-nez and rusted fountain pens; grandfatherly razors that reminded me of Kipling’s startling claim that, each night in the tropics, he was shaved by his servant while he slept; and all the other forgotten props of an age of vanished elegance when military men waltzed with memsahibs before repairing to the veranda for a drink.
By comparison, storied Raffles Hotel in Singapore seemed little more than a tourist’s version of Empire, where sacraments were arranged as studiously as in some period-piece movie: plaques outside the rooms commemorated the stays of Coward and Maugham (and Arthur Hailey!); a home movie at teatime trumpeted forth the raffish history of the place; carefully framed pictures depicted elephants and mustachioed gentlemen;
and a signposted trail guided visitors through a tale of the time a tiger was shot in the billiards room. In the Strand, however, the souvenirs were exactly where they belonged—everywhere in sight and nowhere in particular. Like Burma itself, the place brought to mind a down-at-heels wastrel who still preserved a misbegotten kind of propriety, dressing up for every occasion in a three-piece suit and hardly noticing that his clothes were ill-fitting and threadbare and a little sad.
And therein lay the country’s charm. Having sequestered itself for decades from the splendors and sophistries of the modern world, Burma had continued to cultivate a suspicion of the new that was itself old-fashioned. Almost alone among the countries of the Third World, it seemed not to seek more Western sophistication, convenience and flash, but less. Burma was one of the only countries I had ever seen that was not goosestepping (to the sound of the Bee Gees) toward a brave new world of videos and burgers, but was content to mind its own business and go its own way. Having freed itself from servitude to the Empire, it had chosen to commit itself to a self-created ideal. Its dreams might seem wonky or zany or, worse than that, high-and simple-minded, but at least they were not shiny synthetic imports that changed with the seasons. “They do not need the glittering baubles described in the advertisement sections of American magazines,” Norman Lewis had written more than thirty years ago. “The Burmese way of life has never been based on unnecessary consumption, and there is no reason why it ever should. It is as good as any, as it is.”
The astonishing depth of Burma’s innocence hit me fully only as I wandered around the capital. There were no high rises in Rangoon, no glass buildings or fast-food joints; there were no girls on sale, and no drugs. The massage parlors here offered massages (for innuendo, the shorthand of worldly corruption, was as absent as the corruption itself), and there was no danger, no meanness in the frayed and scruffy streets. Smuggled cans of Coke could, it was whispered, be procured for $3 at a few blue-chip black markets, but for the rest, one had to settle for rusty-capped bottles of “sparkling” Vimto that looked as though they had been fresh on the occasion of Churchill’s final visit. It was rumored that one local newsstand carried Time and Newsweek, but copies could be purchased only by residents in possession of special vouchers—a possibility so remote that the official price of both magazines was 50 cents, a quarter their cost in every other country of the globe. As for the vendors who lined the roads of Rangoon, they offered nothing more topical than a three-year-old copy of Good Housekeeping and some dog-eared issues of Reader’s Digest. I did notice the Snow White Pastries shop, the Flying Fish Store, and the Hope TV and Video Service. But the closest thing in Rangoon to a bright new boutique seemed to be a run-down shack with a wooden board outside, on which had been painted, decades ago, “Hollywood Beauty Parlor.”
There were, I discovered, two English-language newspapers in Burma, The Guardian and The Working People’s Daily. Each contained six pages, one of which was filled with lists of Model Workers Grade III, one of which concerned the minutes and seconds of sundry committees and one of which discussed, in elaborate detail, the world of golf. Both papers were entirely indistinguishable, and both were written in the featureless style of an Izvestia account of a town-hall meeting. For avid readers, however, that had to suffice: in Burma there were no libraries.
Television had come to the country in 1980, but both national stations came on the air only at 7:30 each night and closed down by 9:30. When I consulted the viewing schedule one day, the main attractions were “Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy” and “Cat Happy Pappy.”
A local cinema had decorated its walls with posters of such former triumphs as A Man, a Woman and a Bank, The Story of the Mountain of Dreams, and The Girl in Gold Boots. But when I went to the movies in Burma, the best picture on offer was an aging native classic. I paid my fee and entered. The place was almost empty. It reeked of spices and strong tea. A few children were slithering over parents and crawling under seats. Hardly had I sat down, however, when the few doughty souls around me sprang suddenly to their feet. A somber tune came scratchily up on the sound system and a few flags began flapping on screen. Then, just as suddenly—and well before the national anthem had concluded—everyone sat down again.
Frames flickered, numbers whirled and onto the screen came a Pathé-newsreelish documentary on Burmese dancing. For twenty minutes, a stately troupe glided, with precise delicacy, around a stage, and then the screen shook again, and shivered, and whirred, and on came the middle of the black-and-white main feature. Gangs of naked-chested hunks with caveman coiffures performed, somewhat ponderously, a handful of kung fu routines. A pair of perfumed Osrics tiptoed into view, swapping catty barbs about something or other. There was a marriage, and a parental heart attack. Two young lovers astride a motorcycle rode cheerfully through the empty streets of a travelogue-perfect Rangoon. A ten-month-old baby stared out at the audience in bemusement. The audience stared back, snickering. The martial artists, to dramatize their deaths, pounded heavily on their hearts and then, with a thump, keeled over. It was a violent genre, but the treatment seemed quite amiable.
Apart from such entertainment, there was just about nothing to do at night in Rangoon. A Burmese teenager asked me once if there were discos where I lived. Accustomed to such wistful inquiries and always ready to smuggle in a few images of the Good Life, I assured him that there were plenty of snazzy, loud, laser-beamed places. Then, almost rhetorically, I asked him whether he would like one day to see one. “What is the point?” he said quietly. “Why go to disco?”
Small wonder, then, that the only neon in town flashed above the heads of the giant Buddhas in the Sule Pagoda. For even as the streets emptied after nightfall, the central pagoda grew ever more frantic, jostling, high-spirited. Part bustling bazaar, part amusement park, part town square and part central shrine, it turned, each evening, into a beehive of frenzied activity. The neon lights blinked above the statues, prayer wheels with fortune-cookie compartments began spinning, groups of gossips clucked to themselves in corners, white-robed nuns knelt in silent prayer, palmists muttered, teenage kids tittered and paraded, what looked like an adult-education class recited slogans in what seemed to be a classroom, puppies for sale barked feebly and lines of citizens padded around antechapels wallpapered with photos of shaven-headed monks.
This, of course, was the metropolitan capital; as I traveled up-country, I realized that Rangoon marked the zenith of Burmese sophistication. Along the road to Mandalay, Burma’s second city—its Leningrad or Chicago—the favored mode of transport was a horse-drawn tonga. There was a golf course in Taunggyi, but it was equipped with nothing but a tiny hut around which a few locals shuffled in their longyis. And Pagan, the country’s main tourist sight—regarded by many as the most remarkable site in all Asia, with its thousands upon thousands of eleventh-century temples, golden and ocher and a blinding white, jutting up in lonely splendor across plains as flat and open as the scrubland of New Mexico—consisted of nothing but a puddly, one-lane village. One thatched hut had a sign outside that said “Post and Telegraph,” but it was, in my experience, always open and never manned. The water that gushed out of the hotel taps was black.
In the entire country, I later discovered, there were only a third as many hotel rooms as in the Las Vegas Hilton. Most of them in any case were empty. I saw a few bearded, earringed young men accompanied by stringy-haired girls with sun-bleached shoulder bags. For them, it seemed, Burma was just another stop on a life they didn’t want to get started; they were happy to go anywhere so long as it was not home. I saw some mad dogs and Englishmen who were paying tribute to the last outpost of the Empire and had come to inspect the national style of shabby gentility, and sometimes to incarnate it too. Beyond that, nothing.
THROUGHOUT ALL THIS, whether as cause or effect of its indifference to Western frippery, Burma seemed to bump along with a winning blend of merriment and strictness. If it was a malfunctioning guinea pig of fundamentalist socialism, that may have b
een because it was a model of strict Buddhism. And, one way or another, Buddhist precepts of compassion seemed always to subvert the rat-a-tat-tat of socialist slogans. One favorite sign, seen everywhere, advised: “Be Kind to Animals by not Eating Them.” Another, on a hotel reception desk, implored foreigners to return the smiles they received. On a blackboard inside a tiny riverside inn was chalked up an even more plaintive appeal: “Please do not take photographs which create a bad impression for the village.” And even more engaging than the boastful mottoes (“The King of Cars”) daubed across the sides of bilious old wrecks were the injunctions of skewed firmness with which the authorities went about enforcing their regulations. “No Feet Wearing,” said the sign at the entrance to every pagoda. “Smoking, Drinking and Flesh is Strictly Prohibited with in the Sikh Temple premises,” read a sign outside a shrine, before adding, in a footnote that nicely covered an option ignored by the first injunction, “A Drunk Person is not Allowed Admission.”