On MySpace, ink-haired Burmese teenagers and twentysomethings stared at us from the angles of people who’ve taken their own pictures: the chin-down-sexy-eyes-up shot, the haughty chin up/eyes half-closed, the profile with eyes askance. Their faces were surrounded by HTML-coded sparkles, animated hearts and stars, slaughtered English colloquialisms. Htan Dah looked at the profiles, pausing long and hard at each picture that came up.
“I don’t know them,” he said finally.
This conclusion struck me as pretty foregone, since he’d never lived in Burma. “Did you think you would?”
He looked at me, realizing his mistake. “I don’t know,” he said softly.
I felt bad. Guilty. Embarrassed, actually. There had been a time when I’d called myself a refugee, just the summer before. Though I hailed originally and most recently from Ohio, I’d lived in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit. There’d been a big to-do in the media about whether we New Orleanians displaced around the country should be called refugees, and I’d ardently defended the word’s use. Nay, I’d
insisted
on it. I’d brought nothing on my evacuation from the Gulf Coast but an extra pair of underwear, a toothbrush, a serape, and a deck of cards, and when the levees had broken, I’d been broken down for days, for lack of a job and an income and certainty. Calling myself a refugee had made my plight sound as heavy and traumatic as it had felt, even after I’d moved back to the city four months after the storm and then, just weeks ago, unable to take the stress, back out again. Here’s what I
had
had, though, I realized,
sitting next to Htan Dah: Citizenship. Domestic peace. The right to work, own property, travel, vote, believe in the possibility of future opportunities. Refugee, my ass.
We made Htan Dah his own profile, and finally, he’d had enough MySpace for one night. He left the computer room, and I checked my email. But five minutes later he reappeared. “I want to practice,” he said, and logged in, staying up long past the time Htoo Moo had quit work for the night, after I’d gone to bed.
BREAKFAST THE
next day was business as usual, with my asking Htan Dah how he was doing and his saying “I am great! I am living!” with glittering eyes and teeth. When I sat down to dinner that night, though, he and Ta Mla and Htoo Moo spent a fair amount of time watching me and muttering to each other in Karen.
“Something on your mind, tiger?” I asked Htan Dah.
“We are talking about your girlfriend,” he said.
Yeah, I’d thought that conversation had ended a little too easily. “All right. You can talk about it with me.”
“Do you ever have boyfriend?”
“Yes. I’ve had boyfriends and girlfriends.”
This produced a moment of confused silence, which I filled with a lame description of the sexuality continuum, along with an explanation of the somewhat loose sexual mores of modern American gals like myself. Htan Dah responded by telling me that they had heard of gay people, since a visitor to the house had informed them of their existence—last year.
“Last year!” I hollered.
“Yes!” he yelled back. “In Karen culture, we do not have.”
“What do you mean you ‘do not have’? You guys read the newspaper. You have the Internet.”
“But in a village, Karen village, we do not have,” Htan Dah said.
“There’s never been a gay person in a Karen village in the history of Karen society?” All three men shook their heads. “Come on.”
“If there was a gay person, they would leave,” Htan Dah said. “It is not our culture.”
“Let’s just say there was a gay person,” I said. “Couldn’t they stay in the village?”
“No,” Htan Dah said. “I would not allow gay people in my village.”
“Are you kidding me!?”
Htan Dah held my gaze, though his seemed more uncertain the longer it went on.
“Are you going to make
me
leave?”
“No! For you, in your culture, it is okay,” he said. “You are not Karen. But in our culture, it does not belong.” Htoo Moo and Ta Mla were nodding, and I scowled at them.
“You’re a refugee,” I said. “And it sucks. It’s ruining your life. But you would force another villager to become a refugee because they were gay?”
Nobody said no. I turned on Htan Dah; I was maddest at him, and he was probably the only one who could follow my fast, heated English. “If there was peace in Burma and you lived in a village and there was a gay Karen person,” I asked again, “you would want to make that person another Karen refugee by making them leave?”
That, or my anger, shut him up. “I am interested in your ideas,” he said, evenly, after a minute. “I think it is important to keep an open mind.”
I shut up, too, and focused on eating rice for a few awkward moments.
“So,” I said eventually. “Do you guys have sex?”
Htoo Moo and Ta Mla shook their heads while Htan Dah said, “Sometimes.”
“Ever?” I asked Htoo Moo.
“No,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because, I am not married.”
“What about you?” I asked Htan Dah.
“Yes,” he said, nodding hard once. “I am married.”
“You’re
married
?”
Htan Dah laughed. “Yes! I am married.”
“I didn’t know that. Where is your wife?”
“She is in camp. With my kid.”
“You have a
kid
?” They were all laughing at me now, because I was raising my voice. “I can’t believe I didn’t know that.” Other things I didn’t know: that everyone currently in the house save Htan Dah and The Blay, who were married, apparently, was a virgin. This extended even to kissing. Their society was way removed, literally and figuratively, from the Asian cultures in which prostitution is a mainstay. And these guys hailed from the parts that had long been converted to Christianity, which had brought premarital-sex-forbidding to the traditionally less conservative animist tribes. Htan Dah asserted, obtaining the agreement of the other guys, that if an unwed couple was caught fooling around, a village chief might force them into marriage on the spot. Htoo Moo volunteered that he wasn’t actively looking for a girlfriend and that he wouldn’t know what do with her even if he found one.
We’d long since finished our meals. Though I was, as always, ready to lie down by nightfall, Htan Dah told me I had to accompany the three of them into the computer room and show them MySpace again.
“Not for me,” he said. “For Ta Mla.”
Of course.
The rainy-season air was sticky. Ta Mla and Htan Dah and I crowded around a computer and played on the Internet, our cheeks flushed with satiety and humidity and new camaraderie. After I got up to pee, the sweaty Htan Dah stripped to the waist, so that when I got back, he was all sculpted arms and torso.
I’d assumed that the bulk underneath his baggy clothes, beneath his wide, round face, was soft. Just before I’d left for the bathroom,
I’d even tried to use as delicate a translation as possible when referring to a chubby girl on the computer screen. I shouldn’t have been so surprised by Htan Dah’s abs, since he’d told me earlier that sometimes, when the guys were bored, they exercised compulsively, doing marathon push-ups like prisoners or something. But his toplessness and his shape caught me so off guard that “Look at you, sexy!” fell out of my mouth. And that caught him off guard, and he laughed.
Htoo Moo, meanwhile, continued working at a nearby computer, even though it was late, and a weekend. The communication gates between us had evidently opened, though, so he interjected burning questions about American life as they came to him.
“Do you eat rice in America?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Usually I eat brown rice.”
“Brown rice?”
“It’s rice with the hull still on it. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“No. I don’t believe that.”
“Htoo Moo, I swear, it’s rice, and it’s grown in the same way, but it’s brown, because it’s still hulled.”
“Have you ever eat tiger?”
“
Eaten
tiger. No.”
“Have you ever eat . . . monkey?
“‘Have you ever
eaten
monkey,’ you mean. No.”
“Are there black lady in America?”
“
Ladies
. Yes. . . .”
“Are they tall?”
“It depends. What the hell do you mean?”
“What language do they speak?” Htan Dah chimed in.
“English.”
“Really?”
I gaped at him, disbelieving, but before I could formulate a
response, Htoo Moo said, “In America, you have cream to grow hair.” He ran his hand over his baby-smooth jawline.
“Yeah. I think that’s true. I think it’s generally for people who are bald, though.”
“Do you have that?”
“Hair-growing cream?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah, totally.”
Htoo Moo and Htan Dah’s eyes widened at the prospect of a beard. “Really?”
“Oh, yeah. I use it on my ass.”
The sarcasm seemed to translate; as disappointed as they must have been, the two laughed for minutes.
We made Ta Mla a MySpace profile, and he and Htan Dah started giving the other guys in the house tutorials in Karen as they wandered into the computer room. My work was done here. When I finally tried to leave, it was hours past my usual bedtime.
“You cannot go to your bed,” Htan Dah said. “The Blay called and said he will have a very important meeting with you when he return.”
It was ten-thirty. I looked at Htan Dah skeptically.
“Yes,” Htoo Moo piped up. “He will be back soon. He said, ‘Do not let her go to sleep. I have very important matter to discuss with her.’” As I made my way through the living room, I could hear them calling after me that The Blay was going to be very disappointed.
The other day, when I’d asked my students what they did for fun, I’d had to explain the concept of “fun” for about five minutes before anyone could answer me, and then the answers were “Nothing,” “Nothing,” “Watch TV,” and three “Talk”s. If college kids with all the freedoms in the world were pumped about social networking, these peers of theirs, who were effectively under house arrest with no games and few books, were fucking elated. And they managed fine at it without me. Still another profile had been created by the time
I finished brushing my teeth, and when I went upstairs, every computer screen was lit, the guys gathered around and talking to each other quietly about what they’d found, looking at pictures of girls and boys Japanese and Brazilian, and scrolling through the faces of Burma, a window into a world they considered home but where some had never been and most would probably never be a part of.
VI.
“EVERY GUN
that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” President Dwight Eisenhower famously said in his speech “The Chance for Peace.” “This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” True story. By 1950, Burma was in progressively rougher shape. Where there’d been world war, there was now deeply divisive and ceaseless civil war that had brought anarchy and rebels and bandits and a total collapse of infrastructure. And things really didn’t improve when the Truman and Eisenhower administrations flooded the country with weapons, driving the government to build the military machine that commands Burma to this day.
Under the chaotic circumstances after independence, Burma was vulnerable to the worst sort of people who might be interested in it: commies. “Communist control of Burma would be a great strategic advantage to both the Chinese Communists and the USSR,” the CIA warned. “It would drive a wedge between India-Pakistan and Southeast Asia, facilitate Communist penetration into Indochina
and the other countries of South and Southeast Asia, and in a psychological sense give impetus to the claim that Communism in Asia is an irresistible force.” Preach on, State Department:
British and American officials generally agree that the situation in Burma is deteriorating at an alarming rate, that Burma is the ‘soft spot’ of Southeast Asia and that because the Government and people of Burma are apathetic to the Communist threat and highly suspicious of British and American motives, it is difficult to find any way in which we can render assistance.
“Assistance” is sort of an interesting way of putting it, but in any case, some of Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalist army, the Kuomintang (KMT), had retreated into northeast Burma after their whupping by the Communist Party of China. The KMT had set up house on Shan lands, where it was enlisting warriors, organizing an army, building a resistance to Mao Tse-tung’s government.
Ideological proxy war! The KMT started receiving arms, organizing, and funding from the United States of America, in the CIA’s very first secret war. China had been lost to communism, and Burma was not about to be let go the same way. The US built a surrogate occupying force that ultimately comprised some 15,000 soldiers, with the aim of deliberately breaking the country into “racial and geographic units” that could be used as bases to attack China, which would also draw Chinese soldiers away from their (other) front with the States, the Korean War. But even after the Korean armistice, CIA support to the KMT continued. The Burmese government was convinced that the United States was provoking China to invade Burma, or at least trying to get Burma significantly threatened by the prospect of invasion that it would align itself with the US for protection. (
The New York Times
also reported that that was the general idea in a special report on the CIA many years later.)
Rangoon asked Washington to halt the incursion. Washington
denied, denied, denied. When Burmese soldiers killed three white guys fighting alongside the KMT, on whose bodies they said they found notebooks and diaries containing New York and DC home addresses, the US Embassy in Bangkok claimed they were Germans; Thai police concurred—two French Foreign Legion defectors and a random bandit, they said. Either way, even the United States ambassador to Rangoon was lied to about his country’s involvement.
13
Indeed, the US was so innocent and friendly that it was kicking the Burmese government tens of millions of dollars in military aid, to help defend against threats like, I don’t know, a rebel Chinese army that somehow found itself armed to the teeth with American weaponry.