Burma’s Spring: Real lives in turbulent times (7 page)

This was the backdrop to Mu Mu’s young life, and I understood why she thought twice about coming with us to Rangoon. For her and her friends, the opportunities were in prospering Thailand, not in floundering Burma. Her own family’s story seemed to underscore that, and I think part of her wanted to forget about them, move on. At first, Mu Mu had declined our invitation to accompany us to Rangoon. But duty to family runs deep through Burmese veins. With us, she had the opportunity to earn her Bangkok salary on the other side of the border – she could visit home, and begin sifting through the wreckage of her family’s life.

With visas pasted in our passports, our family of four took a Thai Airways flight from Bangkok to Rangoon, landing in the semi-darkness of the early evening on a runway slick with monsoon rain. A few days later, Mu Mu, passportless, walked across the muddy border to the Burmese town of Myawaddy. Wasn’t that dangerous? ‘Going back is not a problem, it’s very easy,’ Mu Mu told me. ‘No one is trying to go that way.’

THREE

Burmese Shadows

A few days after our arrival in Rangoon I discovered an old business card in my purse. I thought I had purged my belongings of anything that could identify me as a journalist, and in my anxious frame of mind I ripped it up into little pieces and threw it into the waste-paper basket in the apartment that was our temporary home while we looked for somewhere to rent. It was in a serviced block, like a hotel, and maids came to the door each day to clean it. The bits of business card lay there, a jigsaw puzzle waiting to be pieced together again. Fearing one of the cleaners could be a spy, I picked up the small white pieces of card, stuffed them into an empty drinks can, swilled a bit of water around in the bottom, put it on the floor and crushed it with my foot.

We had landed in Rangoon at a time of intense paranoia and scrutiny. After its shameful handling of Nargis, the regime launched yet another crackdown on suspected dissidents. The popular comedian Zarganar was handed a forty-five-year jail term for daring to criticise the government’s slow response to the cyclone. The twenty-seven-year-old rap star Zayar Thaw received a six-year sentence for belonging to the youth group Generation Wave that was formed during the Saffron Revolution. More than a hundred activists, including Buddhist monks, students and bloggers, were convicted of spurious crimes during the month we arrived in Burma, and dispatched to squalid jails across the gulag. The round-up appeared to be aimed at eliminating all opposition to the junta before national elections – the first in two decades – were held in 2010. Foreign journalists were strictly banned from reporting from Burma; those who were discovered were interrogated, deported and blacklisted. I had come to Rangoon hoping
to use my status as a ‘trailing spouse’ as cover to continue my newspaper reporting, but, for the moment at least, it was not the time to take risks. I decided to embrace my role and discover the city just as an expatriate housewife would.

*

My memories of Rangoon from my week reporting the uprising were limited to a few vivid snapshots of fear: my taxi careening away from me, protestors running, a strained silence in the hotel lift. I had seen only seen a city in trauma, now I would be able to explore it at its resting rate. Rangoon was bustling, enchanting, but having just lost its status as capital, it was a metropolis in gentle decay. On its cracked pavements, tea shop owners had arranged low wooden stools around tin tables set with rolls of rough tissue paper in plastic holders, tooth picks and bowls of sweet jaggery. Women sat cross-legged, fanning themselves next to bubbling cauldrons of sweet corn. A cobbler with a pitch next to a thundering generator glued on a loose sole, and white-shirted officers directed traffic at intersections, the lights still out of action after the storm.

The port city of Rangoon became Burma’s capital in 1885, when the British completed their conquest of the north. The colonial masters built the city to a grid plan, with the streets running up from the Rangoon River identified by ascending number and the cross streets named after British colonial statesmen (Phayre, Dalhousie, Fraser), and since renamed to recall the great Burmese king Anawrahta, the nineteenth-century resistance fighter Mahabandoola, and independence hero Aung San. The British left in 1948, bequeathing a messy political legacy but also an array of grand buildings that survive to this day – a remarkable, living colonial film set. From pavements spattered with the red spit of betel-nut chewers, I looked up at pale green Victorian-era tenements, flowers of mildew staining the peeling paintwork, with
shuttered windows, filigree balconies and steep wooden stairs. Around the corner were sturdy red-brick buildings reminiscent of Manchester or Sheffield, and white, neoclassical edifices that once housed thriving colonial enterprises.

In air thick with diesel fumes from decrepit Japanese cars, it was a challenge to imagine Rangoon as it had been a century ago, when the city boomed on exports of rice and timber and its infrastructure and municipal services were considered to be on a par with London. Then, the immaculate shop floors of the Rowe & Co. department store, one of the largest and most stylish emporiums in pre-war Asia, were brightly lit and replete with European fashions, homewares and familiar comforts for homesick British colonialists. Consulting my map, I located the building a block east of City Hall. Its grand entrance was boarded up, its windows were smashed and its listing wrought-iron portico sheltered stalls selling tangerines and pirated DVDs, and a tailor with a foot-powered Singer sewing machine. A little further north, the turreted redbrick Secretariat – scene of the assassination of General Aung San, father of the opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi – was fenced off and used as a barracks for a large city centre presence of police. A few streets away, the imposing police headquarters, with its two-storey Corinthian columns, was home to more battalions of officers, its grand rooms used as dormitories or makeshift kitchens, while washing lines for navy police uniforms were strung up along its carefully proportioned balconies looking out to the Rangoon River.

A walk around almost any part of the city seemed to be rewarded with the discovery of a new treasure. Hidden behind a tangle of trees and creepers on a busy thoroughfare in the diplomatic quarter was the teak-walled Pegu Club, where British imperial officers had smoked cigars and played billiards, and whose eponymous cocktail – a mix of gin, lime juice, orange curaçao and bitters – is still served in plush
hotels the world over. I had wanted to find it, imagining that my great-uncle Douglas had drunk at its bar before fleeing the Japanese invasion of the Second World War. I approached warily, under the watch of security guards employed by the Russian embassy next door. One of them came towards me, and I expected to be shooed off. But in fact he wanted to be my tour guide, and, accompanied by a pair of curious dogs, led me to the front of the building to open a creaking, unlocked door. A layer of dust and rat droppings covered the parquet floor, but the Pegu Club’s magnificent teak bar, sweeping staircases and original black Bakelite light switches were still in place.

The survival of Rangoon’s colonial buildings, albeit in assorted states of decay, owed more to Burma’s retarded development than to a strong will to preserve these architectural gems. In 1962, the military junta seized power and began to cut Burma off from the world. Over half a century, the isolationist policies of Burma’s reclusive generals throttled foreign business dealings and provoked American and European sanctions. While cities such as Bangkok, Shanghai and Manila underwent frenzies of development, sprouting skyscrapers from every square foot of land, Rangoon’s city centre remained remarkably untouched. In 2005, reportedly on the advice of astrologers, the military government abruptly relocated the capital to Naypyidaw, a newly constructed city two hundred miles north in Burma’s central scrublands. Rangoon was left as a mouldering testament to another era.

One afternoon, I took the ferry across the Rangoon River to the suburb of Dala, just a ten-minute ride over grey waters but a world away from the faded grandeur of Strand Road on the city side. Clustered around the ferry pontoon was a small village of wooden houses, still under repair after the cyclone, as well as teashops, a hair salon and some small clothes shops. The village was built around a lattice of narrow concrete lanes, just wide enough for a pedicab. A short walk took me
quickly into flat, open countryside. I hired a motorbike taxi (permitted only on this side of the river) and we headed east. There were fields of wheat and maize, dissected by irrigation channels and dotted with little bamboo houses. On a raised dyke between the fields, I saw a father and his daughter, perhaps three years old, making fuel pats out of cow dung. We rode out to a riverfront village half an hour away, downstream of the city. Wooden fishing canoes were lined up on the shore and in the water were the brick mounds of old jetties, a monument to healthier economic times, but long since collapsed. The village was poor. Wooden houses were raised up on stilts from the boggy ground, the balconies at the back of each home not for relaxing but for keeping pigs. It was late in the afternoon and children were everywhere, running between houses, sitting on benches watching adults playing billiards around a large, tarpaulin-sheltered table. On the step of one house was a pile of little flip-flops and tattered shoes. Through the doorway I could see school textbooks open on the floor, and children working with their pencils.

*

If Rangoon’s physical landscape was easy enough to navigate, its human terrain was not. Save for a brief interaction with a second-hand bookstall owner, estate agent or taxi driver, my conversations with Burmese people were scarce and insubstantial. Few people were comfortable talking openly to a foreigner; such conversations would attract the unwanted attention of the authorities. There were smiles and stares, but apart from street children selling postcards, people kept their distance. After the dramas of the past months, the city seemed to be keeping its collective head down, staying out of trouble. There was a Burmese phrase, which I would later learn, ‘
ma lou’, ma shou’, ma pyou
’ – ‘Don’t do anything, things won’t get messed up, you
won’t get fired’. It applied specifically to the workplace, but its sense of purposeful passivity seemed to sum up Rangoon’s prevailing mood.

We found a house to rent near both the international school and the Australian embassy in Golden Valley, a well-to-do district of substantial houses set in generous tropical gardens near Inya Lake. From the first-floor balcony there was a view across the rooftops to the golden, bell-shaped stupa that dominated the city’s low-rise skyline. Our landlord, a retired sea captain, had shown us around our new home with an air of melancholy, while his wife waited patiently in the passenger seat of their small saloon car. The whitewash of the 1970s-built house was bruised purple and green from the lashings of monsoon torrents. The concrete driveway was cracked and coated in slimy green moss. A broken drainpipe hung limply down the side of one wall. But it was the garden that was the most convincing witness to the elemental drubbing that Rangoon had recently endured. At intervals around its perimeter were wooden stumps, marking the graves of once shady trees that had been toppled by the cyclone. With the greenery shorn away, we were left with the tender sight of barbed wire looped along the top of the garden wall, and a view of our neighbour’s water tanks and outhouses. Once Rangoon’s residents had absorbed the shock of the cyclone – the loss of life and the damage to their homes – they had turned their attention to another casualty of the storm: thousands of the city’s trees. ‘It is a great pain for us, a great tragedy,’ our landlord said softly as we paced around the garden, examining the messy tangle of plants and shrubs that remained. The destruction of so many of Rangoon’s venerable old banyans, mahoganies and rain trees had stripped away its charming, leafy canopy, leaving the hardscrabble city beneath painfully exposed to the sun’s glare.

As required, we registered with the neighbourhood State Peace and Development Council, where the flag of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar (soon
to change to a new design in an overnight directive from the junta) hung on a pole outside. The authorities kept a list of all the residents in each house, including children, complete with ID or passport details. No one else was permitted to stay in our home; any overnight guests would need to register their names with the local SPDC office. The household lists were part of a pervasive system of control that reached from the top of government all the way down to the home. The regime’s secret police units were used to intimidate the civilian population and monitor people’s movements, keeping a particular eye on potential dissidents such as community workers, journalists and artists. Phone lines were tapped, foreign embassies were bugged and even the military government’s own officials spied upon. At a local level, each SPDC office had an intelligence agent assigned who oversaw a network of informers, ideally recruiting at least one per street. On the phone, on the bus, in the teashop, people were always careful; they never knew who was listening in.

But Burma was a country of contradictions. Despite the bureaucracy, the Orwellian surveillance, to an outsider Rangoon could feel like a surprisingly hospitable place. The expatriate community was small and close knit; my daughter got a place in the nursery of a thriving international school; I arranged swimming lessons for her with a gentle, elderly man who had once represented Burma at the Olympics. There were parties, film festivals and tennis matches on shaded courts by the lake. This privileged scene was the preserve of foreigners and a small group of wealthy, middle-class Burmese, however. I found it hard to get a sense of the lives of more typical Rangoon residents: the man at the junction on Dhammazedi Road who sold strings of jasmine flowers for five cents apiece; the armed policemen who manned the sandbagged position at the foot of our lane; the women who wandered the
neighbourhood selling winter strawberries in little woven bamboo boxes. It was dangerous to initiate conversations, to ask questions, and my early impressions of Burmese life were restricted to casual observations and happenstance.