Once upon a time, this town had indeed been KNU controlled. In 1974, ethnic rebels and the government had, just like in the movie, fought right here, and this very place had been burned out, a fox-
hole-and-barbed-wire-surrounded battlefield. The Karen held their line for days. The government obliterated it with a series of air raids, jet strafing and bombing that blew up an oil depot and sent hundreds of grazing cattle scattering while Thai spectators watched the action from across the river. There was no sign of that battle here now, any more than there was of the battle still going on between the same groups not so far from where we stood. Pascal Khoo Thwe, who lived in both cities and villages in Burma until the late ’80s, has written about how the greatest dearth of information about Burma occurs within Burma itself, comparing its citizens to the Germans who said they really didn’t realize what the Nazis were up to. Burma’s government contends to its people, just like it does in press releases that talk smack on the United States, that stories of burning villages and bullet-riddled ethnic villagers is guerrilla propaganda. It’s not just the rest of the world that doesn’t know what’s going on here. Trips to the cinema start with preshow propaganda featuring news clips about, for example, the country’s infrastructural progress and end with guerrilla bad guys being roundly and deservedly defeated. Even Pascal Khoo Thwe had believed it, until he arrived at and personally witnessed the devastation in a village—not twenty miles from where he’d lived most of his life.
Our spy suggested that we visit the nearby Shwe Muay Wan temple. We moved on and turned right off the main road. Though he was moving his short legs rapidly, Abby and I gained some distance.
“Can’t we ditch this guy?” she asked.
“I think this is his job,” I said.
She sighed. “He’s really bothering me. Can’t we tell him we want to be alone? Can’t we tell him we really don’t want company or something?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I guess you can try.” I didn’t want to spend any more time with shady slick, either, but had resigned myself to his presence. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to avoid being followed.”
We three took off our sandals when we got to the temple. We
strolled around the complex, the sky-blue tiles between the gilded stupas hot beneath our bare feet, looking at the giant porcelain-white and gold faces and taking obligatory pictures of big Buddha after big Buddha. The man was quiet. The spare worshippers were quiet. The city seemed quiet in this sacred place, like any sacred place.
Back on the street, the man procured a bicycle rickshaw with a chubby driver and told us to squeeze onto the narrow wooden seat in front. The man perched on the side of the cart as the driver started pedaling us, laboriously, at a walking pace, up the gentle hill to the market.
“Your friends are Karen?” the man asked. Abby and I stared at him blankly. The driver panted hard while bikes and running children passed us on the nearly carless thoroughfare. “I see your motorbike drivers. They are Karen?”
Htan Dah and Htoo Moo had driven Abby and me, respectively, to the bridge. We’d hopped off the bikes and stood talking for a moment before the boys turned around and went home. We realized now that the man had been watching us for a while. We realized now that we were being followed for good reason.
“We don’t know,” I said. “They saw us walking and just asked us if we needed a ride.”
“I think they are Karen. I think you work with them or are friends with them,” he said pleasantly.
“I think they’re Thai,” I said. “They just picked us up on the road.”
“No, they are Karen,” he said. Big smiles. Everything was okay here.
“How can you tell?”
“I can see by their features.”
“Oh,
really
?” I asked. Abby asserted that those guys had sure looked Thai to her, and I that all Asians looked the same to me, the both of us shrugging like we were some kind of morons.
“I think you work with them. I think they are your friends,” the
man said again. We kept denying it and shaking our heads, and whether he was being insistent or just wasn’t very good at using past tense was hard to say.
“Where did you get that?” he asked me. He pointed to the bag, the strap of which was slung across my chest, in my lap. The street crawled by as our driver pedaled. Everyone stared as we passed. My bag was a traditional Karen purse, woven out of rough, colored cotton, the type everyone at the house carried. I had taken this beige and white one out of Eh Soe’s closet that morning.
“In Thailand,” I said saltily, and the man said that it was a Karen bag, said that I could buy one cheaply in his country but that the Karen make them, started to say something else but neither of our American faces were friendly anymore, so he didn’t.
The covered market was crowded. We chose our directions in the maze of narrow walkways randomly, turning tight corners around rice baskets big enough to climb into, piles of quickly overripening fruit, stalls stacked with soaps, shampoos, dresses, shoes. The man followed us and occasionally suggested that we might want to buy some cheap jewelry or toys. We touched the velvet flip-flops, picked up and pretended to study some of the noodle packages printed in alphabets that meant nothing to us, but emerged from the market empty-handed. Outside, women squatted in the muddy side street selling cruddy vegetables and meat off mats on the ground. The man seemed embarrassed by this, and walked us quickly past. He told us, his voice low, that we probably didn’t want to purchase any of it, because it was not so nice.
Our trio reboarded the rickshaw and set off for another temple at the man’s suggestion, turning off the paved main road and onto another, mucky avenue. Adults and children lined the street, some standing around, some walking places, many who caught our eyes and waved or yelled “Hello!” I shouted greetings back. The man was silent, watching the exchanges, until Abby asked him if she could take this road to Rangoon.
The answer is no. Foreigners visiting Burma aren’t allowed to
continue unattended on the road past Myawaddy, though in theory the Asian Highway connected the cities, could provide a route all the way to eastern Europe. (“All that is needed is for Myanmar to get its act together,” grumbled one unusually candid travel feature on Thai Airways’s website.) To get to the famous port town from where she was now, Abby’s guidebook recommended hopping a series of state-run buses and trains and even a boat. The man told her that no path went straight there, she’d have to go way out of her way and follow the roads roundabout and anyway, why was she asking? Did she want to see the capital?
“Didn’t they move the capital?” Abby asked.
The answer is yes. Rangoon, on the Andaman Sea side of Burma’s peninsula, used to be the country’s commercial and political center. It was home to major schools, industry, extensive infrastructure, government buildings. But in late 2005, the junta started moving its ministries a couple hundred miles away into the mountains. The administration built new offices, apartment blocks, even a replica of Rangoon’s ancient, three-hundred-some-foot-tall landmark Shwedagon Pagoda in what used to be a rural village no one’s ever heard of called Naypyidaw. It wasn’t just expensive; it was also incredibly inconvenient, not only for the locals who were enslaved to build all the magnificent nonsense but also for the government, whose civil servants were given two days to pack up their departments and lives and report to work way up north. The BBC quoted the information minister as having justified the trouble by saying that the government needed a more central, and therefore more strategic, location. Al Jazeera reported that he’d given two answers different both from that one and from each other: that the government was expanding, and couldn’t find adequate space to do so in Rangoon, and that the regime desired a neater, greener, more gardeny capital. Journalists and analysts suggested that the government feared a US naval invasion, or the wrath of its own people, some five million of whom lived in Rangoon. Others said the powers that be wanted to move their
bureaucracy closer to the front lines of their war against the ethnic minorities. Many also pointed that Than Shwe, Burma’s current dictator, carried the long-burning torch of Burmese superstition and was likely motivated at least in part by the advice of fortune-tellers.
Regardless of the reason, the move had occurred only several months before our visit; maps certainly hadn’t been changed. Our spy laughed at Abby’s awareness of it, but didn’t sound happy.
“How did you know that?” he asked. The answer, of course, was that she currently worked and ate and partied with a crew of activist refugees. But she scowled at him as if he’d insulted her worldliness when she said, “The news.”
The shrine at which we arrived shortly was what a travel guide might euphemistically call “unique.” An enormous painted metal crocodile with a rectangular temple atop its wide, green back sat gape-jawed in the middle of a giant fenced-in pond. It looked like an attraction at a subpar amusement park, and Abby and I traded reasonably irreverent remarks about it as we circled around to its backside. The entrance to the temple was there, a bridge to the reptile across the pond, beset by an archway with two big pink posts. The one on the left was painted with blue letters we couldn’t read. The one on the right carried the translation: DON’T CLIMB LADY.
Beyond the reptile was another, more conventional structure, into which we gals were allowed; it contained a Buddha backlit by a wheel of flashing disco lights around its head. The wood floor was bare, the walls covered in murals. We and our spy wandered through the spacious, echoing room and out to the balcony at the back of the building.
We could see the tall, narrow stupas of Shwe Muay Wan across town. Just below us a patchwork of trees and small shacks made of cardboard, plastic, planks, corrugated metal, thatch spread across our field of vision, toward the main road. We leaned on the railing and looked over the community, at the tumbledown homes. Abby asked me if I just wanted to go back to Mae Sot. I did. Though we’d not been in Burma but a couple of hours, we were exhausted.
On the way back to the rickshaw, the man suggested undertaking more sightseeing, but we didn’t seem to be listening. He asked us for perhaps the fifth time if we wanted to go sit down and eat. Between the heat and the guard we’d been keeping up, we were spent and ravenous. But we both continued to decline, though we weren’t positive whether we should impose the only kind of sanctions two girls from the Midwest and Northeast could: refusing to spend money in Burma.
When Rangoon launched its “Visit Myanmar Year” campaign ten years prior, in 1996, Aung San Suu Kyi requested that visitors stay out of the country in protest of the junta that hoped to gain legitimacy and cash through tourism. Those who support the boycott maintain that funding the government with tourism dollars helps perpetuate the status quo. What’s more, “Visit Myanmar” created construction projects that were completed by citizens who were torn from their homes and forced to work without compensation—refurbishing Mandalay palace’s moat, for example. Visiting Burma as if it’s any other tourist destination, some say, implies that there’s nothing wrong going on there, and using roads built by slaves to see sights at which they toiled insinuates a similar approval. Some guidebook companies don’t even publish a volume on the country, and those that do, as well as travel magazines, advise visitors to consider their vacation decisions very carefully before spending dime one. Abby had nearly refused to accompany me on my border run because of the entrance fee she’d had to pay the government.
On the other hand, critics of the boycott argue that travelers should show up to let people in Burma know that the world hasn’t forgotten them and bear witness to what’s going on, be inspired to learn the history or spread the word. Theoretically, tourists could also act as a sort of protection for the oppressed if they swarmed and spread out around the country, as human rights are less likely to be violated in front of wandering Occidental eyes. Additionally, cutting off the country means cutting off its economy, and it’s the people
who bear the brunt of Burma’s financial difficulties. Shopkeepers in cities like Myawaddy depend on customers to keep their businesses alive. Anyway, visitors are unlikely to bring the junta to its financial knees by keeping away money from tourism, which doesn’t even rank on the list of the country’s valuable industries.
Regardless, our shadow seemed like the kind of guy who’d go to a restaurant run by goons. And we’d developed an intense dislike of him. Maybe he was being paid by the government, or maybe he was just fishing for info so he could trade officials for favor or cash or a break, or maybe we had just become paranoid, too. Either way, we didn’t want to be subjected to it anymore. Gloriously, as visitors, we didn’t have to be.
“We want to leave,” we told him.
We traveled along the main avenue for the last time. “Except for these occasional signs for Internet, this could be fifty years ago, couldn’t it?” Abby asked. She remarked again that our surroundings looked kind of like Thailand, but worse.
She was right. Hot, crowded, friendly but sad Myawaddy looked like Thailand might if Thailand experienced twelve times the infant mortality and fifteen times the child mortality—the second-highest child mortality rate in Asia, after Afghanistan’s—if the life expectancy were nearly a decade lower, and if its GNI were a fifteenth of what it was despite its having abundant natural resources. It looked like Thailand might if Thailand, which is just a little bit smaller and a little more populous than Burma, spent 40¢ per capita on health care rather than $63, or provided 0 percent of childhood vaccinations instead of 100 percent, or were one of only five countries in the world that forbade Boy Scouts, or were the poorest country on the continent and one of the seven poorest countries in the world but had still managed to double the size of its military troops and buy billions’ worth of weapons over two decades despite not being at war with anybody but its own run-down people. Myawaddy looked like similar cities in Thailand might if Thailand had long ago run out of
fresh paint and spirit. Or as the fat old officer on the Thai side of the bridge that morning put it while he was checking my passport: