Bamboo People (20 page)

On the far bank, coming down the trail where I’d carried Chiko, are four men. Their leader plods wearily in front, but he holds his head high as he reaches the sandy shore.

I recognize him immediately.

“Peh!” I leap to my feet.

Sa Reh and I race to the shore on this side, my heart soaring. The sun sparkles across the valley and the roosters sing in chorus.

Peh is splashing through the water—he sees me, and his smile is brighter than the sun.

There’s so much to tell, so much to hear.

I stand proudly on this side of the river, waiting for Peh to join me.

A rickshaw carries me home. My heart starts beating faster as we get closer. Mother doesn’t know I’m coming—there has been no way to get the news of my discharge to her before my arrival.

I know she’ll embrace me, leg or no leg, just as the old Karenni man told me. But how will Lei like watching me shuffle around? Will my new leg be repulsive to her? Sometimes it is to me. When I take off the prosthetic to wash my stump, I have to choke back my disgust. I’m not always successful; I’ve lost even more weight, thanks to the

limited amount of food I manage to keep in my stomach.

As the house comes into sight, I try to remember Frodo from
The Lord of the Rings,
who lost a finger on his journey.
No hero comes back unscarred,
I remind myself. I’m still the same Chiko inside even though I’m stick-thin and disfigured—I’ll have to convince Lei of that. But somehow I’ll have to believe it first myself.

I hitch up my
longyi
a bit so they’ll see my leg right away and I can get the bad news over with fast.

The rickshaw stops in front of the familiar house. “I’ll be back with the fare,” I tell the driver.

Why didn’t I run more with my feet when I had both of them? I should have sprinted, jumped, leaped, danced, skipped, bounded here and there like a rabbit. Now I limp slowly to the door, but it flies open before I reach the threshold. And Mother is with me in the path; she’s crying hard and holding tight to my arm.

“You’re so thin, Chiko!” she says when she can finally speak. “I can’t wait to start feeding you again.”

What? I’ve lost my leg, and all she can think about is food? Maybe she hasn’t noticed.
“They made me a new one, Mother,” I say, pointing to it.

“I know, my son, I know,” she says. And then, to my amazement, she tosses her standards of appropriate behavior aside and stoops to kiss my Karenni leg, right in front of the gaping rickshaw driver.

The door flies open again, and I can’t believe my eyes. Because Tai runs out of the house—our house—and hurries past us to pay the rickshaw driver.

Mother, embarrassed over her show of affection, gets up. “Don’t tell Chiko
anything
until we’re all inside, Tai!” she calls, and disappears into the house. I figure she’s probably headed straight to the kitchen to start boiling rice.

Once the driver is satisfied with his fare, Tai races back to clasp my hands and gives me that familiar grin. But it fades as he catches sight of my injury.

“Oh, no!” he says. “Your leg, Chiko! Your leg!”

“It got me home,” I say.

“But it should have been me. Not you.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” I say. “I don’t have a sister to protect. Where is she, anyway?”

“Inside, because your mother asked us to stay here,” he tells me as we walk to the door. He moves slowly to match my pace.

“I told you she would,” I say as we walk inside. “So what’s the big news?”

“I can’t say anything until we’re all in the room,” Tai says. “Your mother will want to see your face.”

“I’m just putting the rice on,” Mother calls from the kitchen, making me smile at how well I can predict her actions. “I’ll be there in a minute!”

I’m curious, but I’m so glad to be home that I don’t mind waiting for whatever the big announcement is.

Everything in the house looks the same, from the white elephant on the wall to the table and chairs set for dinner. Sawati comes in carrying an extra plate, and she, too, stops to stare at my leg. “Can I touch it?” she asks.

“Certainly,” I say.

She puts the plate on the table and raps the prosthetic with her knuckles. “Hard as a rock,” she says. “If you kick someone in the head with this thing, you’ll kill them.”

We laugh, and Tai seems to relax. Now Mother’s there, too, handing me a glass of juice. “Quiet, Sawati,” Tai says. “I have to tell Chiko something. I’m working at army headquarters now, and you’ll never believe this, but—”

The front door flies open again. It’s Daw Widow, of course, coming to inspect the commotion. She sees me and stops, tears coming to her eyes—it’s the first time I’ve ever seen her cry. Even more amazing is that for once she doesn’t seem to be able to say anything. Daw Widow, speechless? This is truly a day to remember. Mother rushes to her side, and they cry together.

And then I catch my breath. Lei, the sparkling, colorful,
real-life
Lei, comes into the house, looking more beautiful than ever. Her eyes travel down to my leg and back up to my face, but she’s smiling, happy tears in her eyes, too, not a shred of disgust in sight.

“You’re home, Chiko,” she says. “I’m so glad.”

Daw Widow wipes her face and takes a deep breath. “Tai told us how brave you were,” she says. “Well done, boy. I knew you had it in you.”

“My leg—” I start again. Why doesn’t Daw Widow see it? Why do I have to be the one to point it out?

“I know, I know,” Daw Widow says. “Noticed it right when I came in. It’s not bad. Rubber, metal, and plastic, right? Who made it?”

They
don’t
care about the leg. The old man was right. “The Karenni. They saved my life.” If I want to keep my promise to Tu Reh and let all of Yangon know, telling Daw Widow is a good place to start.

She turns to Tai. “Did you tell him the news?” she asks.

“I tried,” Tai says. “I’ve been trying.”

“Well, tell him now, boy,” Daw Widow says. “It’s all your doing, anyway.”

Suddenly everybody’s talking at once. At first I can’t understand anything they’re saying. Then I hear Mother’s voice, chiming like a temple bell above the others. “Your father—he’s coming home, Chiko!”

“What?”
I can’t have heard right, can I?

Again they answer at the same time, making my head spin as I turn from one person to the other.

“Tai found out where he was—”

“I went to see him right away—”

“He was so ill, Daw Widow convinced them—”

“He’ll be released in a month, Chiko. A month!”

I don’t say anything. I can’t. Instead I take my precious photos out of my pocket.

“You kept those safe all this time?” Daw Widow asks.

The flesh-and-blood Lei is here now with a face full of love. I hand her photo back to Daw Widow. “Thank you so much for that,” I say. “But I prefer the real version.”

Daw Widow and Mother exchange significant looks as Lei smiles at me.

I’ll keep the other photo until Father gets home. His image sustained me through everything I endured. I gaze at it again, remembering how Tu Reh said he saw the same expression on my face.

I glance quickly at my reflection in the glass of the white elephant picture.

He was right.

I see it now, too.

Slightly smaller than Texas in size, the country of Burma shares borders with India, Laos, China, Bangladesh, Thailand, and the Bay of Bengal. It’s a land of diversity, with over one hundred languages, several religions, fertile plains, and rugged highlands. The country was once described as the “rice bowl of Asia” and enjoyed one of the highest literacy rates in Southeast Asia.

Sadly that didn’t last. Today about ninety percent of Burma’s people live at or below the poverty line, and the country’s health system is ranked second worst in the world. About ten percent of children die before the age of five, and the literacy rate has been plummeting each year.

How did the region’s “rice bowl” become a place of suffering, disease, and hunger? It’s a sad story of injustice and corruption.

Once ruled by Britain, Burma became an independent parliamentary democracy in 1948. Ethnic groups like the Shan, the Karen, and the Wa wanted to keep their independence and avoid being controlled by the Burmese majority. Despite tension and strife, the country survived as a representative government for fourteen years. In 1962, however, military leaders staged a coup and took control of the country.

Things went from bad to worse—the army shut down free elections, took over newspapers and businesses, and clamped down on freedom of expression, association, and assembly. People tried to resist, but the military brutally crushed student and worker demonstrations in the 1960s and 1970s. The government tortured and imprisoned anyone brave enough to speak out. At the same time, ethnic groups along the country’s frontiers continued to struggle for independence. To fight these “insurgents,” as they were labeled, the government began forcing young Burmese men into the army.

On the eighth of August, 1988 (8/8/88), hundreds of thousands of people gathered peacefully and demanded that the military regime step down in favor of an elected civilian government. But the nonviolent protest didn’t work. Soldiers opened fire on unarmed marchers, killing thousands, and arrested and tortured thousands more.

Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of one of the first leaders of Burma who had been killed in 1947, helped to form a political party called National League for Democracy (NLD). The military government put her under house arrest in 1989 and threw many of the top senior NLD officials in prison. Even when the people voted resoundingly for Suu Kyi and the NLD in a 1990 election, the military refused to step down and seat the new leaders.

The government has only become more repressive since then. When Cyclone Nargis hit Burma in May 2008, the government initially blocked international aid and put more people in jail without just cause. By the end of 2009, the total number of political prisoners in Burma was over two thousand.

The military makes money by controlling industries like mining, logging, oil, transport, manufacturing, apparel, and electricity, and by regulating exports and foreign investment. What happens to all that income? Half is spent on the military and next to nothing on health care and education. And the rulers are lining their own pockets, of course. While the elite live in luxury, the vast majority of Burmese don’t know if they’ll be able to feed their families tomorrow.

As for the ethnic groups, the army tortures and kills minorities, uses them for hard labor, and burns their villages. Thousands of people hide in the jungle as internally displaced people, while some flee across the border to Thailand to seek shelter in refugee camps. About one hundred forty thousand refugees live in nine camps along the Thai-Burma border. Since 2004, over fifty thousand refugees representing different minority groups in Burma have been resettled in other countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and Norway. The Karenni, however, were not allowed into the United States until 2009. At the time of this writing, the situation for the majority of Karenni still in Burma or Thailand remains grim.

For three years my husband, children, and I lived in Chiang Mai, Thailand. While we were there we visited the Karenni refugee camps along the Thai-Burma border. I was astounded at how the Karenni kept their hopes up despite incredible loss, still dreaming and talking of the day when they would once again become a free people. I was impressed, too, by how creatively the Karenni used bamboo. Homes, bridges, transportation, weapons, food, storage, irrigation—all these and more depended on the resilient and ecologically efficient bamboo plant. I began to think about that plant as an excellent symbol for the peoples of that region.

During that time I also began to understand how tough life is for Burmese teenagers. Only about a third are enrolled in school, and most can’t find jobs. According to international human rights organizations, Burma has the largest number of child soldiers in the world, and that number is growing. These young soldiers are taught that the Karenni and other ethnic groups are the cause of the problems in their country, and they are rewarded with money and food if they burn, destroy, torture, and kill ethnic minorities.

In my travels far and wide, I’ve learned that all people feel powerful negative emotions, and we all face choices when it comes to acting on them.

What would you do if your mother was hungry and your only option to feed her was to fight in the army? What if you saw soldiers burning your home and farm while you ran for your life? Wouldn’t you be terrified, like Chiko? Wouldn’t you be angry, like Tu Reh?

I hope you connect with Tu Reh and Chiko as you read
Bamboo People.
If you want to promote peace and democracy in Burma or help refugees fleeing from that country, please visit
www.bamboopeople.org
,
where I provide resources, a teacher’s guide, and suggestions for involvement.

You may not find the country of Burma listed in some books printed after 1989. That year the military government changed the country’s official English name from “the Union of Burma” to “the Union of Myanmar.” Although the United Nations switched to Myanmar, the USA, the UK, and Canada are among the nations that refused to recognize the new name.