Burma’s Spring: Real lives in turbulent times (9 page)

We boarded a number 43 bus. Travelling against the rush-hour traffic, we managed to find space on a wooden bench. As a foreigner I attracted curious looks, not at all hostile, and plenty of shy smiles. I smiled back, chatted to Zayar, and enjoyed Rangoon’s eclectic cityscape from the bus window. A wonky wooden house with stained-glass windows and elaborate cupolas nestled in the shade of tamarind trees. An unexplained patch of waste ground was strewn with twisted plastic bags. A jarring new apartment building of smoked glass and metalwork painted in primary colours bore the sign ‘Motherland’. I tried to convince myself that our cover story – that I was an English teacher with a fascination for the Burmese way of life, such a fascination that I was driven to take notes and even record conversations on my tape recorder – was actually credible.

At a stop on a busy highway we got off and walked single-file along the verge for a hundred yards before turning into the narrow streets of Daubon Township. Daubon was a shabby neighbourhood of wooden or simple brick houses built along a grid of roads just wide enough to take a car but used mostly by pedestrians and bicycles. Some of the streets had been paved with big concrete blocks; others were simply compacted earth that turned into rivers of mud during the monsoon. Banyan and banana trees lent charm to the down-at-heel suburb and at the centre was an airy Buddhist monastery with a sparkly gold arched entrance and a weed-coated pond buzzing with mosquitoes. We ambled along the walkways, past hungry dogs and toddlers with dirty vests and bare bottoms and a woman bathing with two buckets of
water in her front yard, maintaining her modesty with a cotton
longyi
which clung to her wet body as she scrubbed her arms and neck.

We came to a wooden shack called the Sky Café and took a table under the green tarpaulin awning. Old women smoking cheroots, young mechanics with oil-stained hands and women breastfeeding their babies drifted in and sat down on low plastic chairs. Like everyone else, we ordered the strong, sweet tea served in small glasses with an inch of condensed milk that sinks to the bottom. As the clock ticked up towards midday, the waiter revved up the generator to power the big TV that was hooked up to a satellite dish on the roof. The café’s patrons shuffled in their seats, stretched their necks, made sure they had a view of the screen. This was what Zayar had brought me to see. In an atmosphere of mounting anticipation, the crowd of labourers, hawkers and housewives was waiting not for a football or horse-racing result, but for the price of the Bangkok Stock Exchange index at its lunchtime close. These were people who had never owned shares in anything – their interest was not in the performance of the stock market, but in the random, final two digits of the share price, on which most had bet at least half of their daily wage.

On came the cinematic theme music for the noon newscast on Thai Channel 9, and two elegantly coiffed presenters, a man and a woman, smiled at us from the television screen. The pristine environment of the news studio – the male presenter’s starched white cuffs, the woman’s glossy pink lips and the glinting diamond at her throat – seemed at odds with our own grungy surroundings. No one in the Sky Café understood the newsreaders’ warbling Thai vowels, but no one was interested. Their eyes were fixed on the ticker scrolling along the bottom of the screen, showing us first the temperature in Bangkok, then the baht exchange rate and then, yes, the stock index price, and most importantly, those last two digits after the decimal point. After a
moment of straight-backed hope, all eyes on the screen, the crowd slumped. A short silence marked their disappointment, and the hubbub of chat resumed.

*

In 2009, Burma was a country with no political freedom, few economic choices and little hope. In the crowded townships of Rangoon, in declining market towns and impoverished rural villages, everyone, it seemed, was trying to bet their way out of a miserable existence. That afternoon, Zayar took me to meet Kyaw Kyaw, (pronounced Jaw Jaw), who worked for his family business in Daubon, repairing motors and generators on the ground floor of their house. For him, betting was something to look forward to. ‘Twice a day, I am happy. I have hope,’ he said, trying to explain why it was worth losing so much of his meagre income. ‘If you are on your way to the market with 1,000 kyats (one dollar) in your pocket, you think you are a poor man. You can’t buy much. But if you spend it on a lottery ticket, you have bought the chance to be rich.’

Kyaw Kyaw, thirty-five and single, gambled on the ‘two digits’ lottery both lunchtime and evening, giving a dollar each time to the saleswomen who go door to door taking bets. Those women took a 10 per cent cut and handed over the bets to the bigger bookmakers. Like all of Burma’s small-time gamblers, Kyaw Kyaw lost nearly every day. But the wins were what he remembered. ‘When I win I’ll go out and buy lots of food, we’ll cook for my family and friends. It’s like a party every time,’ he said.

I was sitting on the lino floor of Kyaw Kyaw’s house, with its aroma of engine oil and curry spices, my notebook back in use after several redundant months, just talking to people. My legs were folded beneath me and I could feel the sweat behind
my knees. Kyaw Kyaw’s eighty-one-year-old grandfather was sitting cross-legged by my shoulder, on a wooden bed base with a woven bamboo mat on top. He was silent but seemingly content to be in the company of the busy workshop, and I was happy to be in someone else’s house on the other side of Rangoon, away from my limited expat world.

As Kyaw Kyaw’s mother crouched down to place the tea tray between us on the floor, a middle-aged man sauntered in through the open front door. He had the self-possessed look of someone I identified as a regime spy. He was head of the neighbourhood State Peace and Development Council and word had reached him that a foreign woman was around, asking questions. There were tense smiles and handshakes and offers of tea. Zayar explained that I was a teacher, newly arrived in Rangoon. They chatted a little in Burmese. ‘Where’s she from?’ the official asked. ‘Manchester,’ replied Zayar (this we had established during our chat the day before). The name of my native city prompted the customary response and the official began to list Manchester United players –
Rooney, Scholes, Giggs
. With a tense smile, Zayar encouraged him, trying to lighten the atmosphere. When the agent asked for our names, Zayar confidently wrote down his details on a piece of paper. He handed it to me. I was panicking, I was about to use my writer’s pseudonym, but that still seemed too close to the real me. Somehow I became Sarah Irish (maybe the Irish bit would confuse them?) and wrote my correct address with the wrong house number, frightened that an attempt at a complete fabrication would expose me as a fraud. Apparently satisfied, the SPDC agent folded the paper into his shirt pocket and left.

‘Did you give him your real name?’ I asked Zayar.

‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘It’s no problem.’

*

The kind of unsophisticated subterfuge I used with Zayar could only get me so far; chats in teashops, markets and taxis were never going to generate any real scoops. Sometimes I got lucky. One morning, after dropping off my daughter at nursery, I went to use the Wi-Fi in the marble-floored lobby of the Summit Parkview Hotel. The comfortable couches were usually occupied with tourists, the occasional businessman and wealthy Burmese for whom the hotel was a popular venue for weddings and parties. I sat down and opened my laptop to send some emails, but found myself tuning into a conversation led by a smart Burmese woman with Gucci glasses and a YSL bag perched on the next sofa. Speaking in English, she was delivering a pushy sales patter. She was clearly confident about what she was selling, but it took me a while to work out what it actually was. Slowly it dawned on me: her product was people. ‘We supply only strong bodies,’ she said crisply. ‘That is our guarantee.’

I tried not to look at her, and strained to hear above the tinkling of a wooden xylophone being played by a man in traditional Burmese dress. I started to take notes on my computer. The woman was a supplier of workers for deep-sea trawlers, and her stock of men came from Burma’s beautiful but impoverished Inle Lake, where fishing the tranquil waters no longer made enough to feed a family. ‘These are just simple fishermen; they are not educated, but what we promise you is strong bodies,’ she said, using a phrase she repeated again and again.

Her potential customers were middlemen, probably Chinese. Through a translator, they discussed placing the men on boats in the South China Sea, trawling for tuna. With the aid of pictures on her laptop, she described a selection process worthy of a livestock market.

‘We make them stand in the sun for one hour,’ the woman said. ‘In the middle of the day when it is very hot. We see how they manage, if they look uncomfortable.’

The group leaned in to view the photographs on her computer. ‘We make them carry twenty kilos, like this,’ she continued, showing them pictures I could not see. The middlemen sucked on 555 cigarettes. ‘For deep-sea fishing, they may need to carry very big fish for long distances across the ship.’ Then came the seasickness test. ‘We put them in here,’ the woman said. I couldn’t see the picture, but I thought it must have been an enclosed truck or some sort of container on water. ‘Then we start to move them around. If they are sick or find it hard to breathe we don’t select them. This is how we select the best bodies.’ She looked expectantly at her potential clients who lit more cigarettes and began to discuss the price.

This depressing insight was certainly a story for me, but so many questions were left frustratingly unanswered because of my fear of being exposed as a journalist. Real journalism depends on asking questions, demanding answers, building sources, door-stepping officials and holding those with power to account. I could do none of that. Foreign reporters caught at it were unceremoniously deported – I had seen many examples – and others who came and left undetected were swiftly blacklisted once their articles were published.

With no Internet access at home I moved around Internet cafés and used the Wi-Fi in hotel lobbies to write and file my stories. My articles were published under my pseudonym, of course, but I was always anxious about who was watching me, who knew what was on the screen of my computer. I opened new email accounts in different names, all with different passwords, which I tried to commit to memory. Some of them I forgot. I liked to think that if I couldn’t get into my accounts, the
Military Intelligence agents couldn’t either. Reporting was never easy, but the frustrations were far greater for Burmese journalists. This was their story, but they were not allowed to tell it properly.

*

Zayar’s first job in journalism, at
Modern Weekly
, came with a salary of thirty dollars a month. There were only a few computers in the office and he would have to wait his turn to use one, often writing out his articles by hand. The power supply was intermittent, and when it was off, he would have to contend with the noise and heat of the generator thundering away outside the door. The journalists had no budget for reporting stories; they got around the city on foot or by bus and used a notepad and pencil rather than a tape recorder. Only the editor had a mobile phone, and permission was needed even to make a call from the office landline.

Once their articles were written, the next stop was the censor. Since the 1962 military coup, all parts of the Burmese media had been strictly controlled. Newspapers and TV broadcasts, songs, poetry and films were censored to filter out any criticism of the government, or indeed any bad news about Burma. Journalists had to submit every newspaper article, TV and radio script to the Press Scrutiny Board. The board’s favourite stories included reports on the daily activities of Burma’s senior generals – opening a new bridge, for example, or dishing out helpful advice to rice farmers. Anything perceived as even mildly critical of the military regime was excised with a red pen. Big chunks of text were expurgated, rendering the rest of the article nonsensical. Often entire articles, books or poems were banned. News of the president was moved to the front page; anything negative – even stories about crime or a bad harvest – was deleted or shortened and relegated to an inside
page. The country’s old name of Burma was always substituted with the new, official name: Myanmar. Journalists complained that even the news articles that survived the censor would take so long to make their way through the arcane system of the censorship board that they were out of date by the time they reached the reader.

The only alternative to this numbing censorship was a highly risky one. Since the advent of military rule, international media organisations had started broadcasting into Burma from overseas, using reports smuggled out to them by clandestine reporters. Most of the contributors to the so-called exile media were already journalists working for the Burmese press. They kept their activities top secret, even among their most trusted colleagues. The price they would pay for getting caught was certain imprisonment.

The BBC and Voice of America both broadcast into the country with their Burmese language services. Standing on the fourth-floor balcony of a friend’s downtown apartment one evening, we looked across the street to the open, lit windows of the colonial tenements opposite. A spider’s web of wires radiated from the Internet café on the ground floor, leasing bandwidth to the apartments within reach. At 7 p.m. the familiar theme tunes of the dissident news broadcasts struck up from across the street and above and below us, as families unfurled plastic mats on the floor and set out dishes of curry, rice and clear, sour soup for dinner. This was how the Burmese people got the real news.

The Democratic Voice of Burma, or DVB, was started in 1992 as a shortwave radio station. It was hosted by the Norwegian government, and I sometimes wondered how the small group of committed, exiled Burmese editors who ran the station from Oslo had adjusted to the crisp cold of their new Scandinavian habitat. In 2005, DVB moved into video transmission, relying on the growing number of satellite dishes in
Burma that received foreign television broadcasts. By that time there were estimated to be around 1.5 million satellite receivers in Burma, and given that one dish, such as the one at Sky Café, might serve several dozen people, that promised fairly good coverage among a population of some sixty million.