Burma’s Spring: Real lives in turbulent times (22 page)

Times had changed. The following Monday, Zayar’s daughter Tone Tone Chit, born amidst the turmoil of Cyclone Nargis, would begin her education at Botataung Township Basic Education School No 1. Her new black shoes, a regulation white blouse and knee-length green skirt were laid out ready in the family’s small home. Her mother had tamed the five-year-old’s fine black hair with a sensible pudding-bowl cut. When Zayar went to the school to enrol his daughter, he was handed a set of forms. He sat down at a low school desk in a classroom, empty for the summer holidays. The questions were straightforward enough, until he reached ‘Occupation of Father’. He paused. He looked out of the window, through the rusting mosquito netting, to where the sun fell on the small concrete yard where his daughter would play. For the first time on an official form he dared to reveal he was a journalist. ‘I wrote “Editor,
Maw Kun
.” I felt proud and sick at the same time.’

*

While marvelling at these small, positive steps, Zayar was phlegmatic about the practical impact of Burma’s political transition on his family. He was now a father of two: his baby son was eight months old. His family was still crammed in a ten-by-fifteen-foot room. His priorities, his worries were just like anyone else’s. Uppermost was the education system, so dreadfully undermined and neglected under military rule that it had already spawned what was mournfully referred to as a ‘lost generation’.

Burma’s generals had set the tone for their relationship with academia shortly after they seized power in 1962. On the morning of 8 July, they sent soldiers to dynamite the Student Union building of Rangoon University, retribution for a peaceful demonstration the day before by students concerned about falling standards. The regime’s attacks on education continued apace for the next half-century. Schools and universities were desperately underfunded: government spending on education accounted for a tiny fraction of the annual budget, while at least 30 per cent was earmarked for military spending. Universities, feared by the junta as breeding grounds for subversion, were intermittently closed down and standards systematically eroded. On a visit to Mandalay University’s main library, an academic friend of mine watched as the sole librarian locked away the small collection of books in a cupboard at closing time. Across the country, schools were left to decay. Teachers’ salaries were so low (averaging around fifteen dollars a month) that a student’s grades were often more a reflection of their parents’ ability to stump up money for bribes than of their academic ability.

With her family unable to afford a private school – the choice today of any middle-class Burmese family who can scrape together the $1,000 annual fees charged by the most budget establishments – Tone Tone Chit was about to start her education in a government school much like the one her father had attended. The classroom
would be bare, the teachers uninspiring and unhesitating in their willingness to use the cane or the slipper to enforce discipline. Even at the age of five, Tone Tone Chit would be required to sit perfectly still with her classmates at ancient wooden desks. Learning would be by rote. ‘This is a parrot-learning state,’ Zayar said. ‘If you reproduce what the teacher says, even if you don’t understand it, you will pass.’

The next edition of
Maw Kun
would tackle the issue of Burma’s educational decline, possibly its greatest burden. Even in a country that values education above all else, it will take a generation for the poorly schooled populace to catch up with the rest of the world. The education budget has been doubled, but it is still lamentably inadequate and a tiny fraction of the government’s spending on defence. There are computer science graduates whose professors were the only ones allowed to touch the PCs, doctors who have qualified without going near a patient.
Maw Kun
runs a regular section on ‘Things We Have Forgotten’, and, along with the red post-box and the school slate, there was a piece on university dorms, which all but disappeared after the military government restricted attendance at urban campuses in favour of so-called ‘distance learning’, in which the students were given audio cassettes to take home.

‘We need a psychological change. This system has made us unquestioning, uncritical. We are followers. I personally, I was one of them. I had to force myself out. I had to do it alone. But as a nation, it’s hard for us to break out,’ Zayar says. ‘In our next issue we want to come up with ideas, we are speaking to professors, teachers, students, education experts… We want to help. We want the decision-makers to hear us.’ Zayar believes in a shared responsibility in the struggle to create a new, better Burma. ‘We are all responsible for reform, not just the government, all the people. And it is our responsibility in the media to persuade the people that their own contribution is important.’

*

The light starts to fade and a black cloud of crows swarms to the trees outside Zayar’s office window. The birds settle on their perches and begin a chorus of noisy squawking, a daily ritual and prelude to the rapid, tropical nightfall. Zayar leans back in his white plastic chair. He is silent for a moment. His life has changed so much, he has so much to tell me, but he’s searching for the perfect anecdote, so that I really understand.

U Tint Swe was a man loathed and feared by every Burmese journalist. Round-faced, with a school-boyish crown of hair, he was a faithful servant of the military government and head of the Press Scrutiny Board until its dissolution in 2012. His duty was clear, and, with a pot of sharpened pencils on his desk, he carried out his work with precision and dedication. ‘This was the man who had power over my life,’ Zayar grins. ‘He was the one who cut my stories. He cut so many of my stories, I can’t even count them.’

Zayar had rarely spoken directly to U Tint Swe, known for his bad temper and sharp tongue. The chief censor’s bidding was carried out through his scores of underlings, most of them women, who trawled through every news article with their red pens in hand. But then, in late 2012, Zayar received a call on his mobile phone. It was U Tint Swe. ‘At first I couldn’t speak at all, I was so shocked that he was calling me,’ Zayar said. ‘He was very friendly. He asked about my magazine, he asked about my family.’

U Tint Swe said he was helping to organise a conference about the future of the media in Burma, and the purpose of the phone call was to invite Zayar to moderate one of the sessions with him.

‘I did it,’ Zayar said. ‘I sat with U Tint Swe, like police and thief together. At the end, he thanked me, he shook my hand. That’s when I thought: Now things have changed.’

THIRTEEN

It’s Not Easy Being a Punk

The first time I saw Darko he was on stage at Club 369, opposite the Chinese market. To be introduced first to his sweaty, shouty performance persona made the thoughtful, solicitous man I met later all the more intriguing. Darko’s punk band, Side Effect, was playing support to a Montreal-based indie group, the Handsome Furs, who were in town for one night only. Burma, blighted by its pariah image, obscurity and disobliging bureaucracy, was not on the itinerary of any big international names, in fact, of any international names at all. To anyone’s recollection, this was the first time a foreign band had played in Rangoon (a much anticipated visit from Engelbert Humperdinck failed to come off), and the evening attracted an eclectic crowd of foreign diplomats and aid workers plus the city’s small, indigenous community of hardcore punks.

The gig was a leap into new territory, and a great success. The grimy club, its black walls sweating lager, could not have been the Handsome Furs’ grandest venue, but the band seemed charmed by the unexpected, gentle hospitality they had received. Behind its iron-fisted reputation, they had discovered Burma’s secret humanity. ‘Thank you, from the bottom of our fucking hearts,’ the female singer croaked at the end of their touchingly earnest, synth-based set. But it was Side Effect – bare-chested and tattooed – who stole the night. Their raw, guitar-fuelled sound (their music evokes Green Day or the Strokes) electrified the crowd, which surrendered to a rare sensation of freedom. In the heaving mosh pit, Britain’s cultural attaché, well into middle age, pogoed joyfully with some of Rangoon’s perfectly Mohicaned and pierced punks, who could have been teleported from the King’s Road of the 1970s.
For drummer Tser Htoo, it was a chance to use a full kit instead of his usual piles of books of differing heights. Darko, the frontman, leapt around the stage, leaning out in screaming communion with the front row and then skidding with his guitar on his knees to elicit some blaring feedback from the speaker. All around, the audience surprised themselves with their involuntary yells and bouts of headbanging. ‘
Chezuuube
!’ ‘Thank you!’ Darko shouted. But the 369 did not rock till dawn. At 11 p.m. the lights came up on this island of anarchy – police regulations, we were told – and quickly we were back in the regulated Rangoon we knew, our heads pulsating with the glorious memory.

*

There was an unfinished air to Darko’s neighbourhood of high-rise apartments painted peach and pastel green. I waited outside his block, and right on time, he strolled up the street in black jeans and T-shirt, a pork-pie hat perched at a perfect angle on his head. Darko is skinny and handsome, with a beautiful white-toothed smile. He is an unfailingly courteous punk, with instinctive good manners. He greeted me and held open the door to a lobby that still smelt of paint and concrete dust. We took the lift to the fifth floor. This was a new, middle-class neighbourhood, but still a group of mangy dogs had gathered outside Darko’s padlocked door. He shooed them off with a swing of his foot and they limped reluctantly away. He unlocked the door and directed me to a soft, grey velour-covered sofa. He disappeared off to the kitchen and returned with a glass of chilled water, which he placed carefully on a lace coaster on the coffee table in front of me.

Darko’s singing career began by chance. He was a student at Rangoon’s University of Foreign Languages, bored and uninspired by the daily routine of rote lectures in windowless, airless lecture halls. He was studying English, but the course
gave no opportunity for him to speak the language, merely to listen to second-rate lecturers, hardly fluent themselves, drone on about the subjunctive. You could obtain a first-class degree there without uttering a single sentence. Sitting at home on his concrete floor, Darko started writing songs with his acoustic guitar. His friend heard them, and, fancying himself as a rock star, booked a studio for them to go and record some tracks. But it was Darko, not his friend, who emerged as the singer. ‘It turned out he couldn’t sing at all,’ Darko smiled, leaning in to flick ash from a Red Ruby cigarette into a glass ashtray. ‘In the studio he totally fucked up. He gave up, so I decided to sing them for myself. My songwriting is a bit strange anyway, so only I could really get the style right. Only I can really represent my songs.’

Probably thanks more to his forensic study of popular music than his degree, Darko speaks excellent, idiomatic English in a gravelly drawl. His first musical inspiration, he said, came from Kurt Cobain; his drive came from a desire to break out of the conformity of Burmese society. He was sick of listening to cover songs, the staple of the Burmese music scene – Western rock songs dubbed over with syrupy lyrics. ‘That’s all we had when I was growing up. I just didn’t want to listen to that shit any more.’

Darko was raised in a Burmese timewarp. Ne Win’s eccentric political blueprint took the once cosmopolitan country down a path of isolation and regression. In 1988, seven-year-old Darko watched from his window as a mass of student protesters, some with scarves wrapped around their faces, marched past his apartment building. He saw his neighbours prepare slingshots and bows and arrows and build bamboo barricades at the end of the street, ready to defend the community against government soldiers. His school was closed. When he heard the first bullets his mother shouted to him to hide under the bed with his baby brother. The uprising was
crushed, ushering in a new military junta to be led by General Than Shwe, and with it a market-based economic system but an era of more rigorous political suppression. ‘That brought the Dark Ages. That was what it was when I was growing up. There was no system then, just a dictatorship,’ Darko said. Through the 1990s, Burma went further into retreat. As indie sounds such as Pulp and Garbage exploded around the globe, Darko was trapped in enforced seclusion. The only MTV he knew about was the unrelentingly dull Myanmar Television, and the Internet would not appear in Burma until well into the twenty-first century. ‘We missed out on the 1990s rock thing. In the 1990s in Burma, we listened to ’80s rock. That was when I was in high school. My favourite band was Guns n’ Roses. Can you believe that?’ he asked, recoiling at his own bad taste. ‘We missed out.’

The teenaged Darko sensed there was more out there, and he sniffed out new music with the commitment of a bloodhound. On Saturday mornings, he would leave his schoolfriends and take a bus downtown to trawl through Rangoon’s three small music stalls in Bogyoke Aung San Market, carrying with him a stack of blank cassette tapes. Browsing through the old LPs and precious cassettes, he came across the same people week after week, guys a few years older than him, cooler than him. They would sit on a litter-strewn embankment by the rail track behind the market, smoking cigarettes, swigging beer from brown glass bottles, listening to music on a small boom box. To save the battery, rewinding and forwarding would always be done by winding the tape round with a pencil. Darko had to put up with their condescending remarks, but he didn’t care; he listened, he devoured their scraps of wisdom. If they recommended a new band, he would search for the music, hand over his tape, a few kyat, and then go back the following week to pick up the recording. But there was only so much he could do. Some bands just didn’t reach Burma. While rock fans on
other continents were discovering Korn and Limp Bizkit, Darko had to make do with Meatloaf and Bryan Adams.