Miss Burma

by Charmaine Craig

  “How have the negotiations been going?” Benny found himself sputtering loudly in his English-inflected Burmese. He meant the negotiations with the British aggressors, of course. The negotiations for independence. But it wasn’t clear at all if Ne Win had heard him.

  A moment passed before the general turned to him with an inconvenienced stare. Then a bizarre smile rose to this sensual mouth. “You’re the Jew,” he said, disconcerting Benny to the point that he couldn’t quickly come up with a rejoinder. In all Benny’s days in Burma, no one had ever accused him of that. Being Jewish here simply wasn’t—or hadn’t been—something to slight someone for, unlike, regrettably, being Indian. “The rich Jew,” the general went on. “The Jew who is so good at making mountains of money.”

  “Is that what they say?” Benny laughed, trying to match the general’s touch of theatricality.

  The man’s eyes cast around the humanity before him again, as though he wanted to be sure of having been observed while making his cutting point. Indeed, the women who had been pretending not to flirt for Benny’s benefit had fallen into the false notes of forced conversation. They were listening, all right—on alert for Benny’s fall from the general’s favor.

  “Tell me,” Ne Win said now, with a seriousness that caused Benny to stiffen. “What do you make of what they did to all those Jews in Europe?”

  For a while, Benny just stood with his emptied tumbler in his fist, staring into the unhappy eyes of the man who was now breaking into a stupid grin. He felt as if he were looking at the unsightly reflection of his own inability to confront what had happened halfway around the world. And he hated himself. Hated himself as much as he hated this man who had stooped to threatening him with the unspeakable suffering of others. He set his tumbler down and forced out his hand, half expecting the general to touch fists with him, to declare the start of their fight to the end. But Ne Win wouldn’t touch him.

  “Saw Bension,” Benny said. “You’ll have to excuse me.” And that was how he came spontaneously to invent the new moniker for himself, one that was still Jewish but unmistakably Karen.

  Two days later Aung San’s party held a public rally. So many thousands showed up to hear the Burman leader speak that the entire city shut down—all the Rangoon shops and the roads whose impassability would no doubt cause the ice blocks in Benny’s idling trucks to melt. The rally was relocated from overfull city hall to Fytche Square, where, on the cloisters near the Sule Pagoda, across from Queen’s Park, a platform was erected and the usual banners unfurled (INDEPENDENCE WITHIN ONE YEAR! GO BACK! BURMA IS OUR LAND, BURMESE OUR LANGUAGE!). With a pang, Benny saw his old friend’s flat, still standing at the edge of the gardens in which, a lifetime ago, they had strolled under the fragrant blooming trees, getting to know each other.

  At last Aung San took the stage and the tide of humanity surged toward the platform, pulling Benny from the periphery of the square into the crowd. Even if Benny hadn’t been a head or two taller than the others, he would have understood immediately that the leader had the luminosity and magnetism that was utterly deficient in his fellow lord, Ne Win. There was Aung San’s chiseled head, for one, close-shorn and angled slightly toward the tops of the nearby thicket of coco palms. There were his eyes that stared unblinkingly down at the crowd. And then, as soon as he had opened his mouth, there was, if not what one would ordinarily call rhetorical talent, a meticulousness of conviction that at once lifted him toward the gods and insisted on his place among the ordinary populace—a populace that had been victimized by more than just imperialism. “Capitalism has called forth irreconcilable antagonism between man and man, race and race, nation and nation!” the man broodingly announced. “Even before the war, most people in our country were poor, while only a few—chiefly Europeans and foreigners—were rich. Place this alongside the havoc wreaked by the war . . . We need to take money out of the keeping of the rich, fix prices of essential commodities, and curb the activities of profiteers and hoarders!”

  Listening to this chastising yet effervescent young man, Benny felt himself shrink into the crowd, as if Aung San were targeting him in particular. After all, Benny had been amassing a good amount of money of late (a disconcerting amount that just might be plain unfair, much as he had also pulled some eight hundred employees out of the postwar economic wasteland along with him, not to mention the dockworkers, the export outfits that relied on his trucks, the citizens near and far whose perishables lasted a few days longer on his ice), and for several seconds he nearly convinced himself that, in Aung San, this beleaguered country had indeed found its solution to people like him.

  He was all but ready to slip out of the crowd in shame when the leader suddenly called for a nationalism that, to Benny’s ears, sounded like nothing less than a denial of difference. “What is nationalism, anyway?” Aung San asked, almost as though to dispense with the question by raising it. “It’s having to lead one common life. Sharing racial or linguistic communities, traditions that make us conscious of oneness and the necessity of oneness. It’s the unity of the entire people. What’s important isn’t that parties other than ours exist or not, but that they refrain from partisan activities detrimental to national interests.”

  There wasn’t evil anywhere in the man’s face that Benny could spot. There was anger, ancient anger, to be sure, and the focused ferocity of someone who would stop at nothing to free Burma’s people. But as Aung San suddenly absented himself from the platform, leaving the crowd too momentarily stunned to respond, Benny couldn’t help wondering exactly what menace Aung San was seeking to free his own people of.

  At last, a delayed applause thunderously rolled over the park, followed by an eruption of cheers for the same old “One blood, one voice, one leader!” And Benny, feeling dazed, turned and spotted a familiar face twenty feet off, a face so unabashedly swept up—so transported, so expressive of something appearing like amorous love—that a moment passed before he realized it belonged to Ducks­worth, the Anglo-Burman Pax Britannica apologist, who had been so besotted by his British inheritance. Now, riding the trajectories of history, Ducksworth appeared to have recast himself as another chosen one—as a Burman, maybe even a Thakin. There he stood, slightly apart from the throng of his countrymen: clapping exultantly, red-cheeked, aglow with righteousness, ready to claim his rightful place in a Burma reborn.

  While the crowd dispersed, Benny dejectedly angled for the street that would lead him to his office, and took one last lingering look at his old friend’s flat. That was when, by what initially seemed like an implausible second coincidence, he saw another ghost from his past—Saw Lay, standing on his stoop, smoking a cigarette. Benny was still so disoriented by having spotted Ducksworth, and so accustomed to imagining that he had glimpsed Saw Lay here or there—at the wharves where they’d met, or in this neighborhood where Benny often was brought on business—that at first he didn’t believe his eyes. As the departing rally-goers jostled him, he stopped about fifty feet from the flat, luxuriating in this specter of his old friend. Only when the man on the stoop dropped his cigarette and stiffly stubbed it out with the toe of his boot did Benny begin to trust that he was looking at Saw Lay in the flesh.

  Saw Lay caught sight of him while Benny was closing the distance between them. He seemed about to step back, to disappear behind his door, but then he braced himself on the rail by the stoop and stared at Benny with a kind of painful tenderness, as though he were steeling himself to face an affection that was almost more than he could bear.

  “I didn’t know . . .” Benny said, when he was at the foot of the stoop.

  “Will you come in?” Saw Lay answered.

  Inside, Benny waited in a chair while Saw Lay put on the kettle and rolled himself another cigarette. Saw Lay hadn’t smoked before the war, and as Benny watched him put the burning thing to his lips, he was moved, and saddened, by how much had changed about his friend. Saw Lay’s hair was almost all white now, and the
re was a kind of secret on his face—some evidence of struggle beneath the quietness of his aspect, which itself had lost much of its polished elegance. He’d suffered, no doubt. But he would never speak of it; no, Benny knew from the way his friend sank into a chair across from him and closed his eyes when he inhaled, only sporadically looking at Benny without apology or shame or resentment, that whatever had happened in Saw Lay’s personal past would remain there.

  “You’ve been back . . .” Benny started.

  “Oh, a few months now,” Saw Lay cagily confessed. “And how . . . how are the children?” he asked with a sincere smile. “Louisa must be very aware of her own superiority to the rest of us by now.”

  Benny chuckled as tears came to his eyes. If he was sad, it was because he identified with Saw Lay’s despair. And he was reminded for some reason of his mother, and how protected he’d felt by her against the inevitability of loss and pain. He had meant always to protect this friend from pain, but instead they had brought pain on each other. This is my wife’s former lover, he thought. This is the progenitor of my own little daughter.

  The kettle began to scream, and Saw Lay stubbed out his cigarette and limped to the kitchen—he’d been wounded, Benny observed. When he returned, it was with a single cup of milky tea, which he foisted on Benny, and an open bottle of beer for himself; perhaps he needed Benny to stay sober as much as he personally needed to be loosened.

  “I want to ask you something,” Saw Lay said, sinking back into his seat as he took a long swallow of beer. “Do you suppose that the British—that any of the Allies—would think it would be reasonable for the Jews to trust the Germans again? I mean to live peaceably under the Germans, under their government?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Benny said. If he’d been short, it was because Saw Lay’s question had struck his ears—and his heart—as a latent insult, because it presupposed that Benny was so much an outsider that a comparison with the Jewish condition had to be drawn in order for him to understand that of the Karen people. But there was also something painful about how easily Saw Lay had started down the path of political discussion, as if picking right up from where they’d left off years before—painful because it had been so absent from Benny’s life.

  Saw Lay sipped his beer without meeting Benny’s eyes. “You probably haven’t heard,” he said quietly, “that we wrote a memorial of sorts, a letter, to the British secretary of state before the war was even over.”

  “We?” There it was, the excluding “we.”

  “The Karens leading the effort against the Japs,” Saw Lay said, putting his beer down. “We wanted to remind the British of the slaves the Burmans made of us before they came here, of the huge role we played in the British army and police forces all along.”

  “And did you ask for something in return?”

  Now it was Saw Lay who became very sober, staring at Benny as he might at a fool. “The creation of our own state, of course,” he said, but there was no conviction in his words, and his eyes seemed to follow the dispirited train of his thoughts as he looked to the window that faced the park and the place where Aung San had stood. “No response,” he said quietly. “And with every one of Aung San’s rallies, with every one of his mass strikes, the Brits come closer to all-out capitulation. How can they expect us to trust the Burmans after what’s been done to us?”

  “You don’t think Aung San has . . . reformed?” Benny ventured.

  Saw Lay gave him a sidelong, disbelieving look.

  “You don’t think it’s possible that he actually wants something like democracy here?”

  “Democracy,” Saw Lay said, his tone full of contempt. “Yes, this is the word that makes the British sit a bit easier with themselves now. One of the things they don’t seem to understand—that no one outside Burma seems to understand—is the duplicitousness of most Burmans, even those who are highly educated and who seem to have the ‘Frontier’ peoples’ interests in mind. How very Western to trust the word of a man who speaks fluently, intelligently, even brilliantly. How very Western to trust that he has the same code of honor. How naive to think that because he makes one sweeping gesture toward Western democracy he couldn’t possibly at that very same moment be plotting a systematized form of inequality—a state in which one ‘dominant’ race rules and is sanctioned to discriminate against others—against ‘minorities’—minorities that together make up half of the population, though no Burman would ever admit that!”

  The alcohol and tobacco had done their work, relaxing Saw Lay’s agitation so that he openly seethed as he spoke. Benny wanted to say something to soothe him, but he sensed any speech would only further incense his friend.

  “I’m so tired of their story that we’re only minorities!” Saw Lay cried, jumping up from his chair and going to the window. The sun had finally begun its descent, bringing with it a breath of cool air, which Saw Lay loudly inhaled as though gasping for life itself. “We Karens are a national group on a given territory that is our homeland,” he said. “They were the invaders. We were here centuries before—”

  “Isn’t what you’re speaking of, Saw Lay,” Benny interrupted him gently, “a kind of tribalism?”

  Now Saw Lay turned to him with outright reproach in his eyes.

  “What I mean to ask is,” Benny carefully went on, “isn’t Aung San correct in a sense—that the best thing would be for us to form a perfect union, as the Americans put it? We could, after all, rise to the top in such a union, instead of always being the outsider, the other.”

  If Benny had felt excluded by Saw Lay’s “we” before, the frostiness that came over his friend now left him entirely out in the cold. Saw Lay went to the table where he kept his tobacco and mechanically rolled himself another cigarette, which he lit and held to his lips. “You surprise me, Benny,” he said, after he had exhaled. “Aung San’s talk of unity . . . Surely you know ‘unity’ is just the word tyrants use before heads begin to roll . . . But very well. Let us take your American example. I’ll pass over the very obvious case of the American Indians, who have been incorporated into that perfect union with such stunning success—”

  “Saw Lay—”

  “Suppose—” the man persisted, but with a trace of his old politeness, “suppose that your Americans suddenly found themselves being overrun by Japs. Say Hiroshima never happened and so on. Say that we had lost the war, and suddenly America is overrun. Americans are no longer permitted to speak English in any governmental setting; their children must learn their lessons in Japanese, learn a ‘history’ that mocks their ‘minority’ perspective. Say that in theory their children can rise to the top rungs of the social and political ­ladder—but only by adopting Japanese values, a belief in the superiority of Japanese blood, and even a disdain for American primitivism. American religion—be it Christianity or anything else—is, if not formally stamped out, labeled crude, ‘aboriginal.’ Or say something more radical happened . . .” He had begun to pace, and as Benny watched him, as he listened to him, he felt drawn into an old comfort: some slip of his old cautious friend had reappeared, had survived after all, in spite of the setbacks. “Say that these Japanese rulers institutionalized handicapping Americans by cutting off their hands if they were found with reading materials or writing implements, so that before long—without a written language, without a written history, without access to education—Americans were as ignorant as the Japs said they were. If, instead, these Americans refused to relinquish their writing and language and values and culture and history so easily, would that be ‘tribalism,’ as you call it?”

  “But—” Benny started, and Saw Lay held up a hand to silence him.

  “But,” Saw Lay went on with a fanatical gleam in his eyes, “in the better of these two scenarios, these Americans would have the right to speak their own language and practice their own religions in private, you argue! Why should they insist on educating their children in English,
and on practicing a form of government that coheres with their American cultural tenets?”

  “That wasn’t going to be my argument! You’ve conveniently chosen an example of a group not bound together by racial sameness! Not to mention the fact that the Burmans made slaves of the Karens hundreds of—if not a thousand—years ago.”

  “And so what? It is time for the Karens to accept their lot—like the American Indians? Oh, yes, I know how this argument goes . . . It’s the history of the world, one group invading another’s territory, swallowing them up. But we’re still here! And you’re conveniently forgetting that our problems were largely resolved for a century under the British—resolved until a mere five years ago! This is a critical juncture! When, for all intents and purposes, we won the war for the British in Burma, and thereby aided the Allies’ overall effort in the Pacific—and therefore have a right to expect something in turn. And you’re absolutely incorrect that the Karens are racially homogeneous—there are more subgroups and dialects of Karens than I care to name. Black Karens, White Karens, Red Karens—­Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, animist—all Karens with a shared vision of self-determination. You, for example, are Karen and racially different from me.”

  This last point, delivered with a smile, had the effect of making Benny smile unexpectedly in turn, of disarming him at precisely the moment that Saw Lay proceeded to discharge his most explosive point.

  “Mark my words, Benny, with or without Aung San, the Burmans will try to wipe us out. And Aung San’s insistence on a union will lead to Burma’s destruction. Which is why, with or without the British, we are forming our own union. The Karen National Union. If London truly wants to secure future peace, the only course is to divide Burma into autonomous nation-states.”