“That’s very deep, Eh Soe.”
“Real! Here, we have Sgaw Karen, Pwo Karen”—and these two groups shared something of a long and complicated rivalry—“animist, Christian, Buddhist. . . . If you have two people who are uneducated and not alike in a house, they cannot live together.”
“Seriously, Eh Soe, you’re so wise.”
He swatted at me.
“So are you going to keep working for BA?”
He shook his head. “I have no idea for the future. What am I going to do? I have no idea.” And then, with understatement: “It’s a problem. We have no country.
You
can choose whatever you want. The government provides much for you. You are lucky you were born in America. We have no country.”
SITTING AT
the table Thursday morning, I was less delighted by my early kitchen duties than usual. Though I’d carried the cutting boards and dragged the stone mortar and pestle into the dining room/garage and talked over the meal plan with Htan Dah, who was bright and lovely and had washed the rice and set it cooking, filling the downstairs with the warm nuttiness of it, and I was turning bags full of onions and garlic and vegetables into neat little friable piles of potential breakfast, I wasn’t happy. I’d spent the previous night, ridiculously, warring with my ex-girlfriend, via an online chat program, even more ridiculously. We had a ten-year history of being a bad fit and breaking up and redating, both badly, and it had somehow come to yet another head while I was in every sense a world away,
thanks to the magic of instant messaging. So now, I was crabby. I was in need of a thing that I felt stupid and guilty about needing, which was making me crabbier, and that was a thing harder to find in this house than justice, or money.
However much time we spent together and tight our friendship, I knew I could not count on Htan Dah for sympathy. When we were talking once, and I hadn’t even been looking for it, he’d said, “You don’t have any problem that is as serious as my problem.” It stung, his implying that I wasn’t self-conscious enough to be conscious of that very obvious reality. So I’d said “Of course,” but then pointed out that all problems are relative, and that even he didn’t have any problem that was as serious as some people’s problems (though, honestly, it was hard for me to imagine who those people were). To which he’d agreed that some person, maybe a person in Africa, was worse off—adding, a little scathingly, that he wouldn’t dare complain to them.
What I needed was Eh Na, who, while we’d waited the half-hour for class to begin the day before because someone had probably been arrested, had sat patient and peaceful as stone. Eh Na, whose eyes were so wide and quietly eager, like a doll’s, that when he’d once asked me what had happened to my knee, which was covered in giant dark-pink bumps, I’d indulged in self-pity and whined, “I got attacked by mosquitoes. It sucks.” Eh Na, who wasn’t like Htoo Moo, who, had he been there, would have pulled up his shirt and shown me some thick jagged tissue where a village doctor had sewn up a tiger swipe with razor wire and no antiseptic or something, or would have said something like, “You know what sucks?
Forced labor
.” Eh Na, who, despite his scars and the fact that on his first visit back to Burma, post-fleeing, to see his family, he was abducted by government soldiers and given the choice of building a road by hand, with aching, bleeding fingers, or being beaten to death, and on his second trip back found his village burned to the ground, had looked at me compassionately and said, “Oh, that is very terrible,” and shaken his head gravely. But Eh Na wasn’t here.
When Eh Soe, after we’d already all eaten and cleaned up and the guys had gone back in the house to work, finally dragged his ass out from under his mosquito net and came downstairs and sat at the table, I almost kissed his round little cheeks.
Eh Soe
had a lot of girl trouble! Most recently, when I’d walked in and started talking to him while he was on the phone with his girlfriend, she started a fight with “Who’s that girl in the background? Why are you talking to her?” Eh Soe was clearly my man.
“That girl you think looks like a boy is driving me crazy,” I told him.
He started laughing.
“Seriously, Eh Soe, I’m in such a bad mood. We got in this huge fight last night. We’re always fighting, and I know it would be better if we didn’t talk, but at the same time, it’s really hard for me not to have her in my life.” Eh Soe gave the matter some consideration. “If you buy a shirt,” he said finally, “if you can’t exchange it, for some reason the shop won’t let you, you will wear it until it wears out and is no good anymore even if it’s stupid or too big.”
I thought about that for a minute. “What?”
“If you start running, you don’t stop until you reach your goal.”
I thought about that for a minute, too. “Eh Soe! What the fuck are you talking about?”
He waved his hand dismissively. “Love is very mysterious.”
“Great, Eh Soe. Thanks. That’s totally helpful.”
He shrugged.
It was Htan Dah’s second-to-last possible day of class, since he was leaving on Monday. The day before, he’d missed again, and he’d seemed to feel bad. He was concerned, too, that his continued absence meant that I was still getting rides with the unsteady Ta Mla. So today, he freed himself of whatever afternoon work and family obligations he had, came up to me when I was getting my papers together, and said, “I will take you to class today.”
When we arrived, Collin was holding his guitar. Ta Eh Thaw was
killing time sweeping the classroom tiles, stooping over a short wooden broom with long, feathery bristles. She stopped, suddenly, and held it up and looked at it, and I looked at her, and she looked at me and asked, “Do you have?” Pointing to the implement. “In America?”
Collin strummed a few tentative chords while he talked with Wah Doh. I looked over my lesson plan, until I started to recognize a melody.
“Are you playing ‘Country Roads’?” I asked. Veteran aid workers and volunteers know that the folk classic is wildly popular in Burma. Among the Karen, it’s basically the national anthem. This was only one of many, many, many times I’d hear a refugee get down with John Denver.
Collin smiled his shiny eyes crinkly. “Do you know it?”
I tsked. Please. “I’m from the Midwest,” I said, which didn’t mean anything to anybody there. “That song is about a state that borders Ohio.” Which it is, if you consider the first line to be “Almost heaven, West Virginia.” Collin asked me if I could sing, and I said that I could, but I had to stop for lack of knowing the words, apparently, four syllables in.
“Almost heaven,” he sang, “free Karen State ...”
I laughed, and the guys laughed too.
“Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River,” I started singing, but Collin was singing “Taw Nor Mountain, Salween River.”
My participation dissolved into hysterical admonitions about the real words, so Wah Doh picked up my harmony, and on they went.
“Life is old there, older than the trees / Younger than the mountain flowing like the breeze / Country roads, take me home / to the place I belong / to Kaw Thoo Lei / Mountain mama / Take me home, country roads.”
They stuck pretty faithfully to the lyrics after that, but I couldn’t keep up with the surprises (“misty taste of rice wine”). Eh Na watched them, and me, alternately, wide eyes, silent, as usual. Collin handed me a sheet of paper with the lyrics printed on it the next day, so I
could learn them, as well as the (unaltered) words to the Carpenters’ “Top of the World.”
My students wanted to plan a party. It was, they maintained, appropriate that I throw myself a going-away celebration stocked with all the Thai goods my American money could buy and invite all of them to it. And actually, since there were two offices, and it wasn’t safe for these mostly Office Two residents to motorbike the ten minutes to Office One, though they did it all the time, it was only fair that I throw myself two parties, one at each Mae Sot BA branch. I wasn’t leaving for almost two weeks, but I, too, was always happy to talk about parties, so I devoted the conversation-practice part of our class to the subject. We went around the room and everyone had to tell me, in complete English sentences, what they hoped to consume at their party. Beer. Several students mentioned that they’d like to see multiple kinds of meat. Foods from Thai restaurants and stalls. It was widely insisted that I acquire whatever it was that I drank at American bars, so I promised to find some vodka.
“Have you heard of that?” I asked.
No one had.
We went over their homework after that, but it wasn’t easy to concentrate on verb tenses—I mean,
their
language only had one; were all these conjugations really necessary for white people to express themselves to each other?—with all the excitement, and the weather.
It was glorious outside, again. The rain had let up, and the sun shone brilliantly on the driveway outside the open door. When class was over, I went out while Htan Dah finished talking with his coworkers. The rays were hot, but the breeze from the thick-forested hills cooled the spot where I stood. Through the doorway, in the house, Htan Dah stood with his back to me, speaking soft tonal monosyllables, his cropped pants cut off at the shin, giving way to thick calves and wide bare feet. I watched him while I warmed my face and waited, wondering how he was managing to make capri pants look good.
Back at Office One, I had another class, an impromptu pronunciation class, with Eh Soe. There was an awning at the front of our house, on the left side, a tin-shingled archway just before a big wooden door that opened into the living room. There was a table and some wooden benches out there, under the porch, where Eh Soe was sitting when Htan Dah and I pulled up. I didn’t realize until I joined him there that this was actually the front door; it was never open, for the rain or for the secrecy. Eh Soe was translating an interview he’d conducted in Burma, and I helped him with the words. That was what we were doing, in the afternoon breeze, when Abby found me.
“Repeat after me,” I was saying. “Rape.”
“Rop.”
“Try again. Rrraaape.”
Abby wanted to know if I wanted to go out to dinner. The Blay’s wife had run away from camp for a visit and brought the better part of a dead pig. Someone said she bought it at the market; someone said she had killed it herself; someone said her family was somehow prosperous in camp and had given it as a gift. Either way, the carcass was on the dining room/garage table, being skinned and hacked into pieces. Htan Dah had gone off somewhere, so wouldn’t be doing the cooking, so wouldn’t be making any less-gamy pork-intensive dishes for our delicate American palates. The house smelled like blood. The Australian administrator had asked Abby if she wanted to join her later at the Italian restaurant in town, so we went to a bar to kill time, then went out for pizza.
By the time I got home at ten, the garage door was shut. Even the door into the kitchen from the dining room/garage was closed. I’d never realized that my housemates locked us in so thoroughly at night. Tonight, they were locking in their company, too.
I’d passed the truck parked in the driveway, and when someone let me in the kitchen door, I found red mud all over the floor. In the living room, three Karen guys I’d never seen were sitting in front of the little TV. Another one was messing with the wires in the back.
They were subtly rough-looking. I tried talking to them in English, but only Karen came back at me. Since I didn’t know how to say anything in that language but “thank you,” “white person,” “love you” (because that’s what Eh Na’s name meant), and “eat!” I just smiled at them and walked upstairs.
Htan Dah was wide-awake, splayed on his stomach on the floor of the big room, reading a newspaper.
“What are you doing up?” I asked.
“I cannot sleep. I had coffee.”
I sat down next to him, cross-legged. “Who are those guys downstairs?”
“The dark guys?” he asked, his eyes still on the paper.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Soldiers.”
“Why are there KNU soldiers watching TV in the living room?”
“They drop off someone from BA who was inside.”
“They don’t speak English.”
Htan Dah looked up, at me as if I were a very slow child. “They live in the jungle.”
“Yes, I get that now.”
He looked back at his paper. “I wish I lived in the jungle. It is very simple. You don’t have to make decision. Just, farming, and living, and hanging around.”
“So why don’t you just move to the jungle?”
“Because(!). I don’t want to fight like them.”
“Fair enough.” To my left, a couple of guys were asleep on the floor. I looked around. “Where are your wife and baby?”
“Today, they went back to camp.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that. Are you sad?”
“We cannot do anything. It is usual. Where have you been?”
“Why, did you miss me?”
Htan Dah hesitated, but still didn’t look up. “Yes.”
“I went to a bar with Abby—”
“Crocodile Tear?”
“Yes, the Crocodile Tear, and then we went to Casa Mia, you know what I’m talking about? Everybody there was white, the white people who work with refugees, I think. They were all wearing T-shirts from NGOs. It seemed weird that they were all out together but only with their white coworkers.”
“Uh-huh.”
I reached out and tucked my index fingers into Htan Dah’s hair near his part, separating out a thin lock with each hand. I pushed the one in my right hand into my palm and held it there with my other three fingers, using my index finger to grab another piece, and then started on a tight, slim braid. “I wished that you were there. I missed you, and Eh Soe, and Htoo Moo.” I didn’t have a rubber band, so I just held the braid for a second after I finished, looking at it. The pieces slid apart almost as soon as I let go, and I started on another one.
“Uh-huh.”