Burmese Lessons (10 page)

Her words tumble out breathlessly. “Yes, it’s me. I remembered the guesthouse you were staying in—that’s how I found you. I’ve been wondering how you are. No, no, everything’s fine. Could you meet me for a drink at the Strand around seven? It would be lovely to see you again.”

I go back up to my room, close the door. How odd. Anita is on a tight schedule. She cannot be calling me just to have a drink.

•    •    •

S
he needed a partner, a fellow watcher. For the past four nights, we’ve gone out together to small student protests, which have been held in or near busy downtown pagodas. We try to keep an eye on each other, especially when the soldiers come. The rallies begin with a group of twenty to forty students; some of them hold up pictures of the Lady’s famous and beloved father, Aung San. He is particularly beloved by politically minded young people because he was one of the country’s first student activists, a fervent protester turned revolutionary against the British colonialists.

A young woman who had a small photograph of him pinned to her shirt told me why she and her classmates were protesting. Three months ago, after a minor argument between a small group of students and a tea-shop owner, police arrived on the scene, arrested the students, and beat them up in a nearby police station. Apparently, the tea shop was owned by an MI agent. The students were eventually released, but several had been seriously injured, and all were angry about the unjust treatment. When Rangoon University administrators refused to support them in their demands for a public inquiry into the affair, the students began to organize these small demonstrations.

As the young woman gave me this background, drawing maps of Rangoon University’s campus and listing the names of the main participants—she had a photographic memory and was an excellent sketcher—I was struck by how familiar the story sounded. It was almost a play-by-play repeat of the incident that launched the 1988 democracy uprisings, when a student was killed by the police after an argument at a tea shop. This time, too, police brutality has ignited a firestorm of indignation. The university students are like a collective human barometer that reveals how frustrated and angry the entire population is. Often they arrive at the protest site empty-handed and begin yelling political slogans that attract sympathetic passersby. Small but supportive crowds gather quickly and join in with the chanting students. The most rousing slogan now was also the rallying cry of marchers in 1988:
“Do-ayey, do-ayey!”
Our business, our concern!

I felt a mixture of awe and anxiety the first time I saw one of these shouting knots of protesters. After so many hushed conversations and so many descriptions of the 1988 marches and how violently the army quelled them, I was amazed to watch these brave young people claim public space yet again, volleying chants back and forth, clapping their hands whenever someone yelled new words of protest above the din.

One young man recited their collective goals: “We want justice for the students. We want the SLORC to stop shutting down the university every few months.” He looked around at his friends’ faces, and I did, too, moved by the pure vulnerable youth of them.

New indignation entered the young man’s voice: “We want a new government. We want democracy. Our government has nothing good to offer us. And our teachers are cooperating with the government because they are afraid. Instead of accepting these conditions, it is better for us to risk our lives!” With that pronouncement he started yelling again, punching the warm night air with his fist.

The student-led revolt of 1988 spawned a strike that spread across the country. I doubt the students will be able to manage that again. Along with the crippling university closures, increased SLORC surveillance on campuses all over Burma has kept student bodies from organizing and mobilizing. Even these guerrilla protests—or hit-and-run rallies, as Anita calls them—are a feat of organization, arranged without the benefit of cell phones or email. Inevitably, after about half an hour or so, the army and the riot police arrive in their big trucks, and people scramble into side streets, away from the uniforms and the guns. Some of the students are caught, but their comrades move on to another pre-selected site. In the past three days, hundreds of soldiers and riot police have spent hours running around Rangoon, trying to catch up to these bands of ingenious young activists.

The soldiers have set up a large barricade of wood and barbed wire blocking the way to Aung San Suu Kyi’s house; she is no longer allowed
to give her weekend talks, and the young people holding the rallies say that before long she will be put under house arrest again. There’s a visible army presence in Rangoon, hundreds of machine-gun-toting men in berets and boots. Some of the students being held in detention have been badly beaten. A writer whom I had arranged to visit two days ago sent a message to the guesthouse canceling our appointment. Her note said, “Now is not a good time to talk.”

Yesterday afternoon, Anita and I arrived too late to witness a student march down Insein Road. We were stopped at a barricade after riot police had broken up the march and detained dozens of students, whom we saw confined in big blue cagelike trucks. A girl stuck her hand through the bars and waved at us. As surreptitiously as possible, standing behind Anita, I shot a few photos. But a commander saw me and ran across the road, yelling. A soldier let him through the barbed-wire barricade; he rushed at me and grabbed my camera. There ensued a frightening yet horribly comic scene as he struggled to remove the film, screaming the entire time. When he managed to get the roll out, he pulled at it until all the black film lay twisted on the ground. Then he thrust the camera into my chest. “Thank you,” I said in Burmese, pissed off about losing my pictures but grateful that he hadn’t smashed the Nikon. The day before, a Japanese photographer had had both his still and video cameras confiscated. Then he was deported.

He was one of several foreign journalists who have arrived in Rangoon to cover this latest outbreak of unrest. The young activists have told us that a much larger, more significant rally is planned for tonight at Hledan Junction, a historic spot near the Rangoon Institute of Technology, where political marches have taken place for decades.

I’ve spent the afternoon trying to rest in preparation for the evening, but I can’t sleep. I’m wound up tight with adrenaline and the excitement of so many unexpected events. I’m also plagued by a feeling of uselessness. Why am I not a journalist, like Anita, who has been filing reports for the
past several days? She has been here for the past month because she’s researching a book, but she also writes for a couple of major newspapers. I should be doing the same thing right now, telling the world what I’ve seen.

I sit up on the prickly bedcover and listen to the sounds of the midday street, si-car bells and honking horns and the cries of fruit sellers. It sounds so … normal. As if nothing untoward were happening outside. This doubleness makes me feel unbalanced. That is how life is every day for Burmese people, even those with uncommon privileges. Here is the surface—the sun shining down, the man on his bicycle, the nun with a deformed face selling candles, as usual, at the corner. There are the schoolboys in their green shorts and white shirts playing on the curb. But another reality also exists, hidden though in full view, known by all but secret. That is the nature of life in any politically oppressed country: reality itself has a personality disorder. I know this intellectually, but for the first time I feel it in my gut.

After scribbling these notes, I flip back through my book, rereading. Then I find a felt marker—bought this morning, for this purpose—and start blacking out particular names and meeting places, erasing the list of people I’ve met with here. Unexpected things are happening these days, and several people have asked me to be careful with their names. Anita has told me about activists and journalists who have had everything confiscated by the MI agents—computers, notes, address books—and she has learned to keep all her contacts on a single piece of paper that can be disposed of quickly.

It’s amazing how easy it is to become paranoid. Suddenly the inquisitive taxi drivers who want to know my name and my friend’s name and “What are you doing at the pagoda?” could be informers. And they could be. A network of informers and spies really does exist throughout the country; it is no longer something I read about in a book.

Two days ago, I interviewed a Shan man whose father had been executed by the regime in the 1970s. The Shan people are one of many ethnic groups who have demanded land and language autonomy from the central
government. They’ve been locked in conflict with successive regimes for half a century. The man I spoke with lost not only his father; he lost the land and the way of life that had belonged to his extended family for generations. The government stole their ancestral property, impoverishing thousands of people in the process. He asked me not to record our conversation on tape, because “I trust only myself. People do things we do not believe that they will do. You have to be careful, Karen. Especially when the generals are upset.”

I am cautious enough, I think. I hope. I’ll be leaving the country in a few days anyway, and the MI agents must be very busy tracking down student activists and organizers.

However: Myo Thant said that a Burmese man he has never seen before came by the guesthouse yesterday, asking for me. Anita also had an unknown visitor, but she, too, was away from her hotel when he came by. He waited for her in the lobby for a full hour, then went away without leaving his name. Neither of us has found out who our mystery callers were.

When we arrive
, Hledan Junction is already crammed with people, most of them under twenty-five. We are on the street—in the middle of the large intersection, in fact, where Insein merges with Pyay Road and University Avenue. In the thick of this mass of people, it seems like we’re inside a vast circular stadium, with apartment blocks surrounding us instead of rising seats. Several thousand more faces look out on the protesters from the windows and balconies of these apartments. Many people call out slogans of their own, to encourage the students. Some throw down packets of food. We watch a man carry out a box of water bottles, which he hoists into the arms of one of the students, then he hurries back inside his building.

This gathering is nothing like the small rallies of the past few days. Those felt like taunts, gadfly stings at the authorities. Anita and I estimate that there are between two and three thousand people here. Row upon row of faces shine under the chalky streetlight. We walk through, burrowing into layers, sometimes pausing to talk to other foreign journalists and observers.

When we get to the core group of several hundred at the center of the crowd, we stand and listen to the speeches. Young men and women yell through bullhorns, their voices sometimes strong, sometimes hoarse—they’ve been speaking for hours. They gesticulate as they make their speeches, outraged by the events of the past few days. They invoke names from the last generation of young activists: Min Ko Naing, who has been in prison since 1989, and Moe Thee Zun, who left Burma to become a revolutionary on the Thai-Burma border. Between speakers there are often a few moments of group chants, and the most popular one is in English: “We want demo-cracy! We want demo-cracy!” In 1988, the people yelled the exact same words.

Suddenly I hear someone behind me start to cry. I slide through the crowd until I reach the source. A young woman is pleading with her parents. They want her to leave the rally. Her hair swings over her shoulders when she whips her head from side to side, spreading her arms to indicate her friends—the hundreds of people, thousands, her comrades. How can they take her away? She wears a white blouse and a green longyi—the uniform of the high-school student.

The mother does the talking, moving her hands to and fro, weaving the reasons that her child should come home. I can tell she’s winning the girl over. The older woman glances nervously, beseechingly, at the onlookers. Hers is the tear-stained face; she is the one who was crying before, and now she begins to cry again, shamelessly.

Who knows what their story is? A son might be dead, or he might be a guerrilla soldier on the Thai border. Maybe they never lost a child and cannot bear the possibility of losing this one, a pretty girl who walks slowly into her mother’s arms.

A few young women come forward and hug their friend, but it’s too late to argue. The mother has clamped her arm around the white-bloused shoulders, and the father walks behind the two women, a hand clasped on either elbow.

Not long after the girl’s departure, a murmur runs through the crowd,
building quickly, transforming from sound into attention. Everyone turns toward the massive lights far down Pyay and Insein Roads and University Avenue. The trucks have arrived. Or maybe they’ve been there for a long time already, and the lights were off. I wonder if the girl’s parents, on their way to find their daughter, passed the five fire trucks—I can see them now—and the six trucks loaded up with soldiers, and the empty cage trucks ready for the students they intend to arrest.