LAH LAH
Htoo sat with a guitar in his lap. At the last party, he’d played a hard-twanging, pentatonic melody on the Karen instrument while he sang flowing minor notes, a traditional song, apparently about a river, that was so haunting that the drunk French girl and I had nearly wept. But that instrument was back at Office One, and the one Lah Lah Htoo held now was idle, as well, as he tipped his head back and looked at me through half-closed eyes.
“Do you think that we will see each other again?” he asked, one arm dangling over the body of the guitar.
This had been a popular question lately. Three days prior, I had answered in the affirmative to Saw Kaw, who thought about my “yes” for a moment before nodding, concurring, “I believe before you die, we will meet again.” In the meantime, I’d told him, we could write, and drew stars and squiggly lines around my email address on the back of his notebook. “Don’t forget,” I’d written. Underneath, he’d added, “I never forget it.”
“Of course we’ll see each other again,” I told Lah Lah Htoo. I looked at Htan Dah. “I’ll come back to Thailand soon.”
“When?” several voices asked.
“Probably next summer. I have to figure it out with work, and money.”
“So,” Walt said, “we will see each other again maybe next year.”
“I hope,” I said. “Hopefully next year.”
“When we see each other again,” Lah Lah Htoo said, “it will be in Burma.” The other guys cheered. “When we see each other again, you will come to Burma. And you will not need a visa to enter. And I will pick you up at the airport.” His face was barely wide enough for his smile, and he was hollering a bit, over the approving shouts of the other guys. “In a car. In
my
car!” Lah Lah Htoo had left his village when he was a teenager, when SPDC troops had come to capture people for portering, when he’d run away with the rest of his family and neighbors, and hadn’t been back since. A silence settled over his coworkers in the wake of his fantastic predictions, and they all smiled softly and looked off or at the floor or at the wall as they considered cars and airports, and I thought about doomed POWs in movies who know their fate is sealed but talk anyway about how they’re going to eat a big cheeseburger when they get back to America, and I kept quiet as long as the guys were quiet, bowing my head as if in reverence of something that had died.
OUR TWENTY
-four 22-ouncers of Chang were poured out one sloshing glassful at a time. Sticking to screwdrivers, I watched as the bottles were continuously picked up and dumped artlessly over ice. That Khaing frowned at a particularly foamy pour, setting the glass in front of him to wait for the head to subside.
“Look,” I said, “do you guys ever do this?” I rubbed my index finger against the right side of my nose, into the crease where my nostril met my cheek. Then I stuck my finger in That Khaing’s beer.
He and Saw Kaw looked from the violated beer to my face.
“No,” Saw Kaw said. “We don’t ever do that.”
“Yeah, I actually never do it either,” I said. “I just remember these guys I went to college with doing it. I don’t really know why I’m doing it now. But look!” I pointed to the glass with my free index finger. “Grease makes the bubbles go away.”
“Oah? I see I see I see.”
That Khaing seemed not to be following us. Scowling, he asked Saw Kaw for clarification. In Karen.
“English, That Khaing!” I shouted, startling him. He laughed, embarrassed, when he registered what I’d said.
“I am sorry,” he said.
“I’m sorry, too.” I was. His English was barely beginner-level. “I know it’s hard, and it’s late, but you’re never going to get better if you don’t try.”
Walt, sitting next to me against the wall, took the cheroot out of his mouth. “So,” he said. “You must take off your fucking pants.”
“
THERAMU
,” COLLIN
said, meaning “teacher,” his eyes twinkling ferociously.
“What?”
He hesitated. He seemed nervous.
“What, Collin?”
“Will you show us . . . Ohio . . . kiss?”
I narrowed my eyes. “What’s this?” Everyone else laughed, also nervously. “What do you mean, ‘Ohio kiss’?”
“A kiss for greeting,” Collin said, “in Ohio. How you do a greeting kiss in Ohio.”
“You guys never kiss as a greeting, you’re saying. You’ve never kissed your mothers.” A couple of the guys shook their heads, though these were statements more than questions; it stood to reason that they didn’t kiss hello or goodbye if they didn’t hug. “Uh, okay.” I turned to Saw Kaw, who was sitting to my left. “Pucker your lips.” I puckered my lips and leaned toward him, possible hepatitis transmission be damned, I guess, and he attempted to imitate what I was doing and failed somehow.
I leaned back. “No. Pucker your lips. Like this.” I showed him again what I meant, and he again tried to purse his lips, but they wouldn’t come out and together at the same time, and the rest of the men in the room were trying as well, and also failing. “I don’t ...” I shook my head. It seemed like it should be funny, but I was just
confused. “I don’t understand how it could be hard to do what I’m doing. Saw Kaw. Look at me.” I puckered up again. He leaned toward me and failed to push his lips away from his face, like I was doing, but he at least pushed them together, and this time not so tight that they disappeared into each other like a frustrated Muppet’s.
Close enough. I pressed my mouth to his, then quickly away, backing up with the light smack of breaking my lips a little apart. Which Saw Kaw didn’t reciprocate, of course, just keeping his mouth as close to the way I’d shown him as he could, immobile, so that the sound and smooch fell dully against his unresponsive face.
WAH DOH
had disappeared. One of my beginner students, an older, handsome soft-talker, slipped through a wooden door I’d never been behind before and found him. “Wah Doh,” he said, returning, “would like . . . to talk to you.”
The room on the other side of the door was cozy, not too much bigger than my Columbus apartment bathroom. The air felt like it hadn’t been moved around in days. Wah Doh was supine on the floor amid shallow layers of blankets and longyis. By the count of mosquito nets rolled up against the walls, at least four guys slept in here.
“What’s goin’ on?” I asked, lying down next to him.
“I have this question,” he said. His voice was light and raspy. His eyes were closed. Though his words were coming fast as usual, he wasn’t shoving them out of his body with all his tiny might. They escaped, instead, with the quiet urgency of a deathbed whisper. “How to sacrifice myself for my people.”
I said nothing, which was what I usually did when Wah Doh started relieving himself of a stream of consciousness.
“I am excited to be . . . village organizer. I want to help my people. It is important to work for change, for . . . freeing oppression without violence. I want to fight. I don’t want to fight with violence. I don’t want to resettle because I will want . . . to come
back . . . to Thailand. Only I can resettle if I know I have way back to Thailand, only to resettle long enough to get . . . education, then come back to Thailand, because I can help my people here. If I resettle I will stay away too long, maybe four years, five years, at least, before I can get back. But how to get education in Thailand or in my country?”
This question was meant as a rhetorical rephrasing of a statement: I cannot get an education in Thailand or Burma. It was hardly the least of the things he couldn’t do in either country, of course; it wasn’t safe for him to walk into his front yard in this one, and when he’d visited his parents in Burma two months prior, authorities were arresting any nonresident Karen who came through, on suspicion of their being rebels or sympathizers. They were even detaining merchants who’d just come to sell rice, and Wah Doh couldn’t afford to pay off the officers. Though he’d planned to stay with his family for two months, he’d had to leave after hiding for four days.
“If I get arrested, I cannot work for my people, so I don’t want to get arrested. Aung San Suu Kyi is arrested because she is too well known in Burma. I must be unknown in Burma . . . but well known ... everywhere else. If I am famous, I will give speeches in Burma and everyone else will hear about Burma in the news. This is my plan. I think I can make my plan by the time I am sixty.”
He laid his hand in my upturned palm, grabbed loose hold of my fingers as the guys sometimes did to each other at meetings or parties, we both on our backs, he looking at the inside of his eyelids. With my thumb and pinkie, I encircled his wrist, where an elder had hammered small blue dots into his skin with an inked needle. They freckled his temples, too, for protection, like the legendary tattoos of the followers of an anticolonialist monk, Saya San, whose marks had failed to keep British bullets from killing them.
“I am writing proverbs.” Wah Doh was fading. He picked up his
wrist, and mine with it, and landed the back of my hand onto his perfectly inert mouth before dropping our arms back down. “To stand, you need not only gravity and pressure, but also your energy.”
I couldn’t help but make a face at that.
“I need more education. If we have strong education, no one can kill us, because they dare not to.” He picked up my hand and pressed it lightly against his stationary lips again. “When I was born, I brought nothing, but before I die, I will leave something for my people.”
OUTSIDE, A
breeze was trying to slog through the humidity. Htan Dah and I started back across the suburbs of Mae Sot, late, my having promised to protect him—from feral dogs—out of the way. All was silent but for the occasional barking we stirred up as we passed in the dark.
“I think Wah Doh was asking me for money,” I said.
“Really?” Htan Dah’s face was pained. He hated his peers’ asking me for money like he hated taking it, even when it had been for his personal safety, or food. “What did he say?”
“He was talking about how he needed to get more education, but didn’t want to resettle. I think he wanted me to tell him I could somehow get the UN to accept him for resettlement and then pay for him to go to America and then pay for him to go to school and live in America and then pay for him to come back to Thailand.” These requests were motivated as much by a gross overestimation of my personal wealth as by desperation. Two days earlier Eh Na, too, had asked me for money, however much I thought necessary to bring a load of Karen children out of the jungle, build them a shelter in camp, and indefinitely keep them in school supplies and supplemental rations once they were installed in it. It was hard to explain to him that I couldn’t afford it—even if I hadn’t just transferred a vast amount of savings to Htan Dah—because he’d asked
me just a day before how much money I made, and I’d said eighty thousand baht, or some two grand, a month, to which he’d replied, after letting that sink in for a minute, “I don’t think in my life I will have that much.” He’d shown me all the money he had in his life currently, the only kind of money a lot of Karen had, passed down from grandmothers, from times that were more prosperous, from times when they were on the winning team: two ancient rupees folded in a cloth.
I’d told Htan Dah how bad I’d felt about turning Eh Na down. I’d also told him, several times, laughing, about how anytime Eh Soe saw me pull out my wallet, he said, “Can I have some money?” Now Htan Dah was frowning.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be sorry. I mean, I get it. If I had no options, I’d ask anyone I met for money.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I didn’t tell him anything. He didn’t really ask. Just kept talking, hoping I would offer, I think.” We’d turned out of the subdivision and onto the highway toward downtown, toward Office One. “He was doing this totally weird thing to my hand while we were talking, though. He kept putting it on his mouth. But he didn’t like, do anything with his lips, just touched us together. Like this.” I took Htan Dah’s hand and connected the back of it with the lower half of my face.
“Yes,” he laughed. “I think he was very drunk. He was kissing you.”
“He was kissing me? What do you mean? Why was he doing it like that?”
“Because! That is . . . how we do it(!).”
“Do what? Kiss? What do you mean, that’s how you do it?”
I clucked my tongue. That’s how we do it, he says. But then puckering up was mission impossible.
“Hold on!” I stopped him and put my hands up—
wait a minute
—
and raised my voice. “That’s how you guys kiss, with your faces totally straight and relaxed like that?”
“Yes!”
“
Reeealllly
?”
Htan Dah stood on the side of the road, on the other side of my exclamation, speechless, tense. I was, suddenly, screeching at him.
“You really don’t pucker your lips like this(!)?”
“No! Didn’t you notice that we didn’t know what we were doing?”
“Yes! But it never occurred to me that that was why!”
“Why not?”
Because I just couldn’t have imagined that. Because for all the distance between our worlds, with the land-mine-dodging and child-soldiering and starving on rice soup and midnight-burning refugee camps and murdered fathers—this,
this
was crazy. “I just can’t believe that! Do you ever open your mouths?”
“No.”
“
Ever
?
REALLY
?”
“No!”
“You don’t use your tongues!?”
“I have seen,” Htan Dah offered, “in movies.”
“In
movies
!” I exploded.
“Yes!”
“Are you seriously telling me that you guys don’t kiss with your mouths open or use your tongues!?” Clearly, he was seriously telling me that, but I couldn’t help the screaming.
He laughed self-consciously, and at me. “No! We don’t do it!” he shouted back. “I didn’t know . . . that people really do that.”