Ultimately, after the second attack on Huay Kaloke, Thailand accepted the UNHCR’s help. It also announced that it would close the camp, which the Karen had established more than a decade earlier, and move the residents to other camps farther from the border. Htan Dah’s family set up a temporary shelter made of sticks and a raincoat, under which they lived while they were waiting to be shipped elsewhere.
The trucks didn’t arrive for almost a year and a half. When they did, Htan Dah tried hard not to get sick as he was driven for two hours along narrow, winding roads to Umpiem Mai, where he and his family, together with relocated refugees from some of the other destroyed camps—Mae La, and Sho Klo, and Maw Ker, and Don Pakiang, Ta Per Poo, Kama Lay Kho, Mae Ta Waw, Kler Kho, and Mae Ra Ma Luang were attacked and burned, too—joined the growing number of inhabitants there and set up house again, this time where the population in exile eventually became twenty thousand strong, where Htan Dah eventually grew up and got married and had a baby of his own, where the cold, wet winds cut through the shacks stacked high in the hills of central Thailand, far away enough from the attackers.
FINALLY, AFTER
a week and a half in the house, I was starting to feel secure in my routine and surroundings. I had been sleeping long,
restful, clothesless nights in my own room, going downstairs mornings, to chat with Htan Dah while he cooked, or after he finished and came to fetch me, saying, “Now you can eat, because you are always hungry,” teaching class four hours a day with an hour break in between at Office Two, and coming home to Htan Dah waiting in the dining room/garage amid parked motorbikes and rice and oily piles of fried green beans, which he’d been making just for me. But when I came home the night after Htan Dah had turned in his Huay Kaloke story, not only was he not in the dining room/garage, but a dozen people I’d never seen before, including another white person, were.
I found my friend in the computer room, where I walked up behind him and ran my hand down the back of his head. “What’s going on?” I asked him.
“HRD,” he said. “They have come back from inside. Also, we have new volunteer. She is from Israel, I think.”
Moments later, I ran into said Israeli as I walked through the living room. “Hi, I’m Abby,” she said. In perfect East Coast American English.
“It’s nice to meet you,” I said, shaking her hand. “Where are you from?”
“New York.”
I didn’t know how long she’d been there in the house teeming with chattering Karen dudes, but she sure looked happy to see me. She asked me how long I was staying, and where I was from, before she got to what she really wanted to know.
“Do all these people really share one bathroom?”
“Yeah.”
“Really? Do you really just fill the bowl up in that trough and like, throw it on yourself for a shower?”
I, of course, replied with another nonchalant “Yeah,” as if I’d been filling up bowls of freezing water full of dead mosquitoes and throwing them at my naked body my whole life. When she asked me if I
drank the same water the guys did, I responded similarly. And truly, I
had
been drinking from the two giant plastic tubs beneath the simple clay filters into which the tap water was poured. As of exactly eight hours ago. The Blay had offered me the nonbottled business on my first night, saying that “maybe nothing would happen” to me, but as that was an enormous maybe in Thailand, where you could contract not just vomiting and diarrhea but also hepatitis and typhoid from the water, I’d somewhat huffily refused. I’d been drinking and brushing my teeth with bottled water until that very morning, when it was explained to me that previous volunteers had partaken of the big tubs with no trouble.
17
Though I’d been doing it only half a day, I told Abby that it was fine, expertly filling my new role as the person who had been there longer and was, therefore, cooler.
“Well, you seem like you have it under control,” she said, finding my display of assimilation utterly assuring.
“Yeah, you’ll be fine. What do you do?”
“I’m a strategic planner.”
Ah, so that was the source of The Blay’s confusion.
“I was set up as a volunteer here through the American Jewish World Service.”
And that was the source of Htan Dah’s.
“Oh my god, Htan Dah,” I muttered as I turned away from her to walk back into the computer room. When I got to the desk he
was sitting at, I bent down low into his face. “That volunteer is not Israeli!” I whisper-yelled.
“Really?”
“Yes!” I hissed. “She’s an American! Did you think she was Israeli because she’s Jewish?”
Though a lot of remote hill-tribe people have probably never heard of Judaism, and would fail to associate the word “Jewish” with Israel, or maybe with anything, some Karen have learned it in their indoctrinations into Christendom. In 1812, Massachusetts Baptist Adoniram Judson set sail on the very first ship of American missionaries to go overseas. When he landed in Rangoon, he had high hopes of making converts of Burma’s deeply Buddhist natives. It took him six years to get just one. The fellow was baptized on a June day, in a pond watched over by a giant Buddha. When Judson finally gave up on the Burmans and walked into a Karen village, however, he hit the missionary jackpot.
To hear a Christian tell it, the Karen, who were mostly animist and some Buddhist, had an ancient legend about a god called Y’wa, who had created woman from the rib of man. Also, the couple lived in a paradise of fruit trees until they cursed themselves by eating from the one that had been forbidden. Also, you could probably guess which kind of reptile talked them into doing so. And it got better: Karen mythology told of a younger white brother who would deliver the race when he came from overseas. Bearing a book of truth.
But then to hear a historian with a doctorate in Oriental studies tell it, the idea that those ideas got there before a Christian planted them is nonsense, and the Karen wholly and happily embraced Christianity because it was a way of attaining literacy and higher (advanced/Western) civilization while sticking it to the underestimating Buddhist Burmans.
Either way, the conditions were ideal for Judson. So many Karen converted so enthusiastically that the Karen village became the
hottest missionary spot on the globe.
18
So much energy—and fundraising—was being devoted to the Burmese minority that when the trend started to fade, a 1907 report announced “a very marked decline in the cult of the Karen.”
Pros: The missionaries built schools. And churches. And a seminary. They devised a written language for one that had been only oral, into which they translated the Bible and for which they created dictionaries and a grammar book, converting many rice-farming Karen heathens into educated and potentially capable professional Christians—which was part of what made them so appealing to the colonialists.
Cons: The American missionaries were complicit in the British smear campaign against Burmese (read: Buddhist) character that helped justify later wars, writing well-publicized tracts about how without the white man (and his god), the whole country was evil (“almost to a man dishonest, rapacious, prone to robbery, and to robbery ending in blood”), beset by evil (“ever since the English governed the country the tigers do not seem so ferocious as they were when the Burmans governed it”), and full of little brown pagan babies destined to “go down to the tomb without God and without hope.” Famed supermissionary Judson even explicitly endorsed the second war as “the best, if not the only means of eventually introducing the humanizing influences of the Christian religion.” The prevalence of Christianity in the Western ruling government and infrastructure like churches, schools, and hospitals undermined the benevolent influence and long-established importance and authority of a crucial institution—the Buddhist monkhood—in a country where the social structure was already being upended. It was also a source of ultimately violent division between Karen and Burmans,
who started burning down churches and reportedly crucifying converts, as well as between Karen and Karen—as anyone who lived at Huay Kaloke could well attest.
So the seminal overseas American mission of one Baptist left quite the legacy: By the time Judson died, in 1850, there were seventy-four Christian churches attended by eight thousand converts in Burma. Today, estimates of the occurrence of Christianity among the Karen in Burma range from 20 to a whopping 40 percent. And today, as in Judson’s day, there are still many Christians involved in Karen aid and education efforts, albeit with the setting largely changed to refugee camps—where
60
percent of Karen are Christian. Some of these aiding and educating Christians still believe, as some missionaries two centuries before them claimed, that the similarities in the Bible and Karen lore were inspired by God and predated Christianity itself. Others, who found that idea too good to believe, even for believers, have speculated that the Karen must have run into the Nestorians, mid-migration, somewhere around the eighth century, and others that an Italian missionary had made it all the way out to Karen territory and spread the story of the white brother-savior in the mid-1700s—which would explain why a British diplomat who went into Karen territory in 1795 caused something of a stir when excited villagers mistook him for their messiah.
19
And still others couldn’t help making the leap that the Karen are one of the lost tribes of Israel. Most of my housemates had been to camp, and so been aided and educated by Christians, some very conservative: It was why the unmarried ones were avid virgins, and why, the guys told me, they’d heard of birth control only in their last year of high school, when one visiting Irish instructor spilled the beans. It was also why Eh Soe said to Abby over dinner,
“You know, I might be Jewish, too.”
Eh Soe, pronounced like the ExxonMobil fueling omnipresence Esso, was one of the newly arrived guys, just back from several months in Burma. He was short, even shorter than the other guys—who were mostly a couple of inches shorter than my five feet, nine inches
20
—with a little potbelly and black hair that stuck up perfectly on end from all over his head. He talked fast and gesticulated liberally and spit red juice from the betel nut that stained his teeth and thick lips. He was very agitated because he’d been in the jungle so long that his Yahoo email account had been deactivated for inactivity. He was also very agitating to me.
There’s no privacy in a village, much less in a packed refugee camp, or a Karen hut. But though dudes wandered in and out of my room at will, they assumed they shouldn’t wander in too much when the white girl was actually in there, and certainly never at night. I’d been somewhat selfishly using their discriminatory politeness to my advantage. This was a safe house and place of employment, after all, but after my screaming-cold after-dinner showers I stretched out in the privacy of my own space, nude under the sheets, reading books and writing notes in the silence, listening to the call of the tokay lizard in the ceiling come like clockwork, every night, once a night, calling out a midpitched and perfectly articulated “uh . . . oh,” and then waiting a couple beats before another “uh . . . oh,” and then another one of those again before, with longing and decreasing determination, “oh . . . oh . . . oh,” while I listened below him, beaming, luxuriating in the calm and euphony and fresh cleanliness.
Eh Soe was either unaware of or completely indifferent to the etiquette the guys and I had established, and when I got out of the shower that night I found him on my reading bench. He’d set up
camp with a big blue mosquito net, a cell phone, and a pack of cheroots, and was smoking one of the long, thin, supercheap cigars.
“Oh, Eh Soe,” I said with insincere apology, as if I were explaining to a customer service representative that there’d been some kind of mistake. “I sleep in here.”
“Okay,” he said.
“So ...” I stood in the doorway, and he didn’t make a move. “I’m about to go to bed.”
“Okay,” he said, and continued chatting on his cell phone and smoking, while I begrudgingly put my dirty clothes back on and got into bed, tossing exasperatedly around as he kept me up for hours.
Abby, on the other hand, was not about to put up with such systemic disregard for personal space and such an absurd bathroom-to-users ratio, and announced that she was moving out, into the vacant little house next door, and would come over just to work and eat.
It
was
pretty hectic in there. Eh Soe was one of several guys who were back. One of the coordinators from Bangkok had come up to Mae Sot for several days of meetings, as had the guy who recruited bright young future refugee activists from the camps, who’d brought with him the newest crew of recruits, who had collectively been arrested en route and spent five days in Thai jail before paying thirty-five thousand baht—a staggering $900, a huge blow to BA’s budget—to get out. (When I asked one of them how jail was, he said just, “Boring and dirty.”) Some international human rights documentation organization that was going to train staff had arrived, plus Abby, plus Htan Dah’s wife and baby, who were taking a reprieve from the hard rain in camp, where, Htan Dah liked to tell me, the monsoon-season climate and insufficient shelter “kills kids.”
One upshot of the flurry of activity was that Htan Dah had less time to cook. The second morning of the new order, he bought a pumpkin and asked me if I could do something with it, plus potatoes. Did I know how to make potatoes? “For my kid,” he said. “I want him to eat potatoes, so he can grow up strong like American.” Really, the
problem was that when Htan Dah stuck some rice in his son’s mouth, he immediately spit it back out.
“You’re in a lot of trouble,” I said, “if that kid doesn’t like rice.”
He laughed, but then said, forlornly, “Yeah.”
That night, after class, I got busy in the dining room/garage, chopping onions and garlic and chilies for a pumpkin curry simmered in coconut milk. The Blay and Eh Soe and Htoo Moo all found my doing culinary labor hilarious, and made fun of me as they passed through. “Ooooh,
you’re
cooking?” then laughing, that sort of thing. That frazzled me, combined with the fact that it was hot as balls outside and hotter still next to the gas range, and the guys were all getting hungry and I was making food for the whole group, food I was afraid they might hate. Though I’d seen my father do up fried potatoes a thousand times, I’d never actually done it myself, and Daddy hadn’t been using a soybean-oil base and a wok. “Yes, I’m making dinner,” I barked at Htoo Moo. “And if you don’t like it, you’re fucked.”