“Where are you going?”
“To Burma.”
Tongue-clucking. “You don’t want to go there.” Frowning. “It’s no good.”
Or as Doctors Without Borders called it, one of the top ten humanitarian crises in the world. Or as Human Rights Watch called it, the country with the most child soldiers on the planet. Or as the United States State Department called it, one of the world’s eight worst violators of religious freedom and one of the world’s ten worst human rights violators. Or according to Transparency International, less corrupt than only Somalia (and tied with Iraq for second most corrupt). Or according to
Parade
magazine, home to earth’s fourth-worst dictator.
43
It’s not surprising that this government always wins in movie fights with the Karen National Union, given the one singular title it has won of its own, courtesy of the
Far Eastern Economic Review
: “world’s most pleasant and civilised guerrilla group.”
When our rickshaw arrived back near the bridge security checkpoint, Abby and I hopped off and reached into our bags for money. Our spy, who spoke for the non-English-speaking pedaler, pulled an ugly old tourism trick and said that the price was twice what he’d said earlier; that quote had been per rider. We rolled our eyes, but didn’t argue for some reason, and shoved more cash at the man.
He followed us as we cleared the Burma checkpoint and started back toward Thailand, chatting. We barely responded, walking briskly to the single white line painted across the middle of the
Friendship Bridge, that which denoted a border he apparently wasn’t going to cross again that day. He stopped as soon as we arrived at it.
“Do you want to give me a present?” he asked—you know, maybe some money, a token, since we were good friends and he had spent so much time trying to make our day pleasant and had helped us find a good rickshaw driver and had negotiated such a good price and shown us so many good things.
“Eat me,” I muttered as we turned away from him, stepping fast over the middle-of-the-Moei demarcation, ignoring his goodbyes and leaving him talking and watching after us as we walked farther into Thailand and didn’t look back, until we’d climbed into the back of a songthaew on the eastern riverbank.
When we arrived home, Htan Dah was waiting on Abby’s front porch next door. The deep awning off the little house she was renting was supported by two wood poles sunk into a wide, waist-high block of cement people sometimes sat on to chat. He looked at us expectantly as we walked through the gate. He was wearing a black T-shirt featuring a sweet-faced Karen infant and the message, in English, that we must work so that the next generation doesn’t suffer.
“Your country sucks,” I said, pulling off and dropping Eh Soe’s Karen bag, and I slumped down next to him on the concrete.
I told him about our spy. I told him how Myawaddy was covered in a layer of something, hush and hopelessness and grime, how I actually felt totally overwhelmed by his obstacles to achieving a peaceful and fulfilling life pretty much all the time. He was quiet, mostly, listening to me and watching, soft nods here and there, until I was done talking about Burma, and then we were talking about whatever, in the way that we did, and then one way or another we were talking about gays again, and then before I knew it he was on his feet and we were hollering at each other.
“For Karen people, we cannot allow it!” he was shouting. “For you, it is no problem, but in my culture, it is not so easy to say it is okay about gay people.”
“If you’re going to call yourself a human rights activist,” I yelled, “you have an obligation to stand up for human rights. Are you really gonna look me in the face and tell me you think gay people don’t count as human? They don’t deserve rights? You want to say they are lesser people like the Burmese government says about the Karen?”
“I understand what you are saying! For me, I know you are right!”
“But because you’re Karen and it’s your culture it’s okay for gay people to be persecuted? It’s not just your culture that doesn’t tolerate people! It’s my culture, too! That’s everybody’s culture!”
“You are right! It is not so easy, but I know I should stand up for them! If I see people, gay people, are being persecuted, I would stand up for them!”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes! I would stand up for them with my voice!”
Passing housemates walked around our conversation, stopping for a moment to watch and listen on the edges before continuing on their way out of or into the house. Shaky and slightly panting both, Htan Dah and I ultimately joined everyone else. Inside, a couple of Office Two guys had come over and rolled the Ping-Pong table into the middle of the living room floor from its resting place folded up against the wall. They looked up, paddles in hand, when I walked in. One of them was my student, and he looked embarrassed to see me; he wasn’t wearing pants. I walked upstairs and into my room and past my bed, to where my towel was hanging in front of the open slatted window. When I turned around, I saw the cat.
The gray stray had been hanging around since long before I had, and though she didn’t belong to the house, she was part of it now. The day before, she had started bleeding; there’d been blood on the floor where she’d been sitting. Now, she was in my bed, where I never allowed her, lying on top of the coarse woolen blanket I slept with every night. She’d bled out so far that I could see the pool even without moving her.
Downstairs, after I’d had some of Htan Dah’s fried egg curry for dinner, after I’d stepped onto the wet cement floor of the bathroom with my hair tied high, after I’d closed the oversized door and stripped off my dusty, sticky, patriotic yellow polo and loose black khakis and scooped up a bowlful of cold water and held my breath and thrown it at my naked chest, after my heartbeat had calmed some with each successive dousing, gasping at the impact, rinsing each arm, and then leg, and then my face of sweat grease and sunscreen, after I’d wrapped my thin seafoam towel around me and walked back out of the bathroom and toward the steps, I felt cleaner, stronger. I got dressed in my room. Eh Soe was nowhere around, so I sat on the reading bench. Htan Dah came in and joined me.
“The cat bled on my bed,” I said.
He frowned. “Yes, me too. And That Khaing’s.”
“I’m sorry I was yelling before.”
“I don’t mind(!),” he said. “I try to keep open mind. It is important to be flexible . . . to . . . hear other argument.”
“I think the world would probably be a better place if more people were like you.”
He shrugged.
“Do you wish that you could go to Burma like Abby and I can?”
“I have been(!). Sometimes, after I was born, my mother went across the border, sometimes in Thailand, sometimes in Burma, depending on the war. But I cannot remember. I was very young.”
“Did you ever go when you were older?”
“Yes(!). Last year, me and my friend, we swim across the river. We wore dirty clothes so that we look like villager, not from Mae Sot, in case anybody sees us. When we go inside, we know it is very dangerous. We know we can die at any time. But we go because we must fight so it will be better. We must take back what is ours.”
“What was your parents’ village like?”
“I do not know,” he said, shaking his head. “I have never been to my native village. I would like to visit, but I dare not. If I go to my
village, to meet my family, maybe SPDC soldier will come and say, ‘Who is this guy?’ and my family will have trouble.”
Htan Dah’s older sister had been back there, a long time ago, when she was ten. She left her immediate family at the border and followed a monk deep into the delta, where Htan Dah’s parents, lowland Karen settlers, were from, where she’d lived as a child before everyone had fled the flames of the village in a Four Cuts attack, where her grandparents still lived and needed taking care of. She was arrested for being the child of her father, a KNU soldier—a “revolutionary,” as Htan Dah always called him. She was released only after the entreaties and vouchings of a former teacher. In a country where activists’ families and even lawyers were sometimes imprisoned, sometimes for nothing more than their proximity, as an activist
and
son of a revolutionary, Htan Dah certainly wasn’t going to endanger himself and relatives he’d never even met by dropping in on them.
“So then what did you do when you went to Burma?”
“We walked four hours to a village. We talk about the war, tell the villagers about the government, what they are doing, tell them they should empower themselves, they should learn what is going on in their country, so they can start grassroots.”
“What did they say?”
“They say, ‘We rely on our leaders to make decisions.’ They do not want to talk about the war. They just want to farm, to live in the jungle. Like me too.”
“Like . . . what do you mean?”
“I just want to live in the jungle.”
“How do you know? What if you live in a village and you don’t like it? You’ve never even lived like that, have you?”
“Yes, but it is how my people live. It is tradition. We need to have land so that we can have culture, have freedom. Everything in the jungle is very simple. You don’t have to make decision, or worry about police.” He shrugged his mouth, turning the corners down. “Just . . . farming, and raising family, and living.”
“You have a lot of city skills though. You’re up at dawn reading the newspaper everyday online. You’re really good at navigating this town and this work, and you love learning about new things. Like, there’s no electricity in a village. You’ve never even had land before. Do you even know how to grow rice?”
However valid that last point, guilt rushed in the moment it left my mouth. Htan Dah just looked at me.
“I can learn,” he said finally, flatly.
“At least you seem to like your job.”
“I have to like.”
I nodded.
“I have to tell you,” he said then, “I am leaving.”
“What?”
“I am going to Mae La to do training for new staff. I think maybe I would go end of August.” That was after I would already have been gone. “But I have to go next week.”
“How long are you going to be gone for?”
“Maybe one week.”
“A week? All next week? Aw, Htan Dah, I leave the week after that.”
“I know(!). I was hoping the training would not be at that time, but they told me, I must go to Mae La.”
I looked at him, a little at a loss, not trying to control the amount of sulking happening on my face. “Htan Dah, that’s really sad.”
“Yes,” he said, nodding.
I shook my head, and my shoulders sunk themselves; the grip that came with bad news I couldn’t control wrapped itself around my rib-cage and squeezed. “That’s really, really sad.” We both looked at the floor. “Can I go with you?”
“I don’t think so! It is not so easy to get white people in the camp.” I’d already been told that visitors weren’t allowed anymore. When they had been, Karen refugee camps had become something
of a tourism trend, which was embarrassing for everybody. Eh Soe had told me how he remembered seeing them, white people driving by, staring, as he’d sat in the door of his hut. Personally, he hadn’t really cared whether they visited or not; with or without them, he’d kind of felt like he was living in a zoo. Sometimes, when he’d noticed them watching him from the windows of their four-wheel drives, he’d waved. “What about your students?”
“Yeah, I have class next week. Maybe I can meet you there for one day or something. Can you get permission to get me in?”
“Yeah, maybe. I can ask the section leader. I can try.”
I trudged down the stairs with Htan Dah behind me. When I stopped suddenly on the last step, he nearly plowed into my back. “Oh, no,” I said, pointing, and he peered over my shoulder. Big, thick pools of plasma dotted the tile floor. “The cat.”
“What should we do?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” Htan Dah’s son came running with hard feet and wide stance when he saw his dad. “You should probably keep your kid away from this blood, though.”
“I think maybe her babies are dead inside her. What do you think?” Htan Dah grabbed his son’s hands over the boy’s head, keeping him from walking further than the length of the toddler’s upstretched arms.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Where is she?”
We checked the living room and computer room before finding the cat in the dining room/garage in a corner lying still. Htan Dah stood over her, frowning. “I feel so bad for her. I am . . . pity. A lot.”
“I don’t really think there’s anything we can do,” I said. “Maybe we should just leave her alone.”
Htoo Moo was sitting at the picnic table, watching us silently, the unhappiest I’d ever seen him. When Htan Dah walked back in the house, I sat down on the bench across from him.
“Hey, Htoo Moo.” I addressed him in a voice for a hospital visit, soft, consoling. “How’s it going?”
“Fine,” he said, quietly. He didn’t smile at me, though he always smiled at me, and everything else. The last time we’d been sitting here, at these exact same places, he’d been telling everyone how when he was last in Burma, he’d stayed at a village having a funeral and celebrated as if he’d known the deceased, loving the community festivities, dancing and getting tanked on homemade whiskey. The only problem, he’d told us, was this withered old man who’d followed him around with his five marriage-age granddaughters in hopes that Htoo Moo would drunkenly tell one of girls he’d marry her so the grandpa could hold him to it. Which had prompted one of the guys to ask, naturally, if the girls had been ugly. “No, no, I would marry them,” Htoo Moo had replied. “But they have hillside land. Growing rice on a hillside is terrible.” His housemates had laughed because that was a ridiculous reason to not take a wife, but man did Htoo Moo not want to spend his days standing on an incline to cut down all the vegetation that had grown over a fallow field, tilling a hill, harvesting a bluff. He
knew
that was a ridiculous reason to pass up a kind and beautiful woman, so he’d laughed the hardest, wiping his eyes and chuckling at himself long after his friends had stopped.