Burmese Lessons (35 page)

Maung is the first of my Burmese companions to nod off. This gift for sleeping has been bestowed upon many Southeast Asian people, but no amount of cultural immersion changes my general insomniac state. Instead, I lose myself to the entanglement of green and dust-washed plants by the trail and to the more richly shining greens far beyond it. To extend
my vision over the land makes me remember what a balm nature is. Green stuff. Dry yellow chaff. Deep blue sky. Birdsong flutes up when the truck slows for potholes. The dry heat huffs in our faces.

Bumping along the track dislodges the sadness in my body. Sadness for those who have told me their stories. For Aung San Suu Kyi, who is once again under house arrest. For the Karen refugees in their camps, rebuilding shacks that may be burned down again next year. The air smells of dust and vegetation, a wilder and richer scent than that of fresh-cut hay. I breathe in, my eyes on the hills. As we drive farther and farther away, toward the beginning of the jungle, I give myself over to the living strength of the color green.

H
ours later, we arrive at a wide stream. Someone tells me that if I followed it I would reach the great Salween River, which divides Thailand from Burma. Along a stretch where the banks widen into a stony beach and the roots of a banyan tree hang in the air like sailing lines, the earth rises up and buckles into a high hill. “The camp is on top,” Maung says. “Getting water is a real drag.” He has returned from the land of the free with some useful slang and more contractions in his everyday speech. “But don’t worry. We won’t make you work too hard.”

“I don’t mind working hard,” I respond, and hop out of the back of the truck. The bamboo huts are invisible from the stream, but a stairlike path up the incline signals human habitation. The steps are so newly cut they look wet.

They
are
wet. People begin to descend the steep hillside to meet us, slipping and sliding. Everyone jumps out of the truck and we splash through the stream. I know a handful of people here, having met them elsewhere along the border. The greeting on the rocky beach is full of affection. The men clap each other on the back and let their arms remain around each other’s necks and waists; the women take each other’s hands. Everyone talks or embraces or opens their arms in greeting; older children
have come down, too, and they smile and jump in the water. It’s a powerful moment of homecoming, but something about it strikes me as odd, unexpected. Maung swings bags of gear and provisions to his friends. People shout from the top of the hill.

When I go back across the stream to get my bags, the distance allows me to realize that it’s the first time I’ve ever heard Burmese people make so much noise in an uncontained space. They are outside; they are not behind compound walls. In the cities and towns of Thailand, these men and women move carefully and quietly in public. Despite the hard living and the danger, no wonder dissidents in the cities and towns of Thailand often express nostalgia for the jungle camps.

A man I recognize but cannot place comes loping through the water, insisting in Burmese that I can’t carry my own bag. “I can,” I keep saying. “I can!” When I refuse to give the backpack over, he turns and lifts his hands toward Maung, who yells, “Just give it to him! He wants to help you!”

Then I know who he is. Maung’s bodyguard, a thin, dark-skinned man who often wears the baseball cap he is wearing now. I haven’t seen him since before Maung went away. He has small, glittering eyes and betel-dark lips, which upturn in a smile as he lifts the pack off my back and slings it over his shoulder. In gray shorts and a khaki T-shirt, he blends into the trees as he tramps away with my bag.

I’m not allowed to help unload supplies from the truck, let alone carry so much as a package of batteries up the hill. Instead, a young man leads me up the slippery clay steps, turning often to make sure I’m all right. We reach the plateau, which is ringed by thatched huts in two sizes, small and slightly larger; several more rise up an adjoining slope.

It feels hotter here than it was in Mae Sarieng, though that seems improbable. I smell the woodsmoke of cooking fires. The young man delivers me to a hut not far from the edge of the hill and introduces me to a pretty young woman who has just lit up a cheroot. A Burmese paperback is splayed open against a rock beside her. “Oh, hello!” she says, putting the
cheroot down on another rock. She stands and brushes out the wrinkles of her sarong. Her bobbed hair is pinned in a little curl at the nape of her neck. “It’s nice to meet you,” she says formally. “I am Khaing Lin.”

“I am Yee Yee Cho,” I respond, which cracks her up.

“Yee Yee Cho! Who gave you such a nice Burmese name?” It basically means “sweet smiler.”

“Members of ABSDF.” Maung, actually, but there’s no need to mention that. I smile. “See?”

“I see! You have the—” She twirls her index fingers in her cheeks.

“Dimples.”

“Dimples!
Ayun cho-deh!
So sweet!” She laughs and plucks her cheroot off the rock. She draws on it quickly, but it has already gone out. “Please come in. I will show you everything.” Once inside the two-room dwelling, she glances around with a scowl and laughs again. “Somewhere is my lighter.” Then louder, as if she were calling to the missing object, “Somewhere in this universe, my lighter!”

Within a few minutes it’s clear that I will be staying here with her, her daughter, and two other women. This is the single women’s hut, she explains. Oh. Obviously that means I won’t be staying with Maung. He and I have repeatedly referred to
our
trip to the jungle. Thus I had it in my mind that we would stay together. Not just in the same camp but in the same hut. Khaing Lin chatters on. I try to listen, but the only words I hear for a minute are booming in my own head. Why didn’t Maung tell me about this?

My hostess leads me into the second room, where a little girl sits on the raised bed platform, a hairbrush in her hand. She holds the brush out, bossily, to her mother; as Khaing Lin begins to fix her daughter’s hair, the girl talks like a four-year-old version of her mother, propelled through language by curiosity and sparky irreverence.

I interrupt her to tell her that she’s cute. She looks at me as if I were trying to give her a headless doll. Khaing Lin chides, “Say thank you!”

Dutifully, without feeling, she thanks me.

I try again. “What’s your name?”

“Decembaa.”

Khaing Lin tugs the brushed hair smooth, parts it, and expertly divides it into two long pigtails. December throws herself off the bed platform and runs outside to play.

“Why did you call her December?”

“Oh, because it’s such a beautiful word. Isn’t it?” She pats the bed platform. “You can leave your bags here.”

I move to put my bigger pack on the dirt floor, but she shakes her head and nods at the bamboo platform. “Up, up. To avoid bugs and snakes.”

Ah, right. I lift the bag.

Two platforms are built on either side of the entrance, which has no door, just a curtain. They double as shelves that hold large, striped market bags. I’ve seen so many of these nylon sacks in exiles’ rooms and offices—containers for people’s clothes, books, and personal effects.

“Let’s go out to check the fire. I’ll make some noodles, then prepare your sleeping place. Are you hungry?”

I follow her out the back of the hut to the cooking area, where a large aluminum pot sits in a fire. With sure movements and a blackened fork, Khaing Lin rearranges the scarlet embers.

“I forgot to look for the lighter!” The cold cheroot is stuck behind her ear. “Never mind!” She pulls a twig out of the fire, blows out the flame, and uses the live coal to light her cheroot. “Ahh. Very good, the cheroot. Do you smoke?”

“No. I love the smell, though.”

“Be careful! That means you may smoke soon.”

As she cooks our noodles, we compare notes on the people we know in common along the border, moving through ABSDF members, NGO workers, and English teachers. Then the conversation drifts to Burmese writers and poets. Khaing Lin shows me her small pile of books inside the hut. Several novels, collections of Burmese poetry, and a few recent literary journals make up the treasure.

I pick up one of the novels. “I met this writer when I was in Rangoon.”

“Really?”

“Yes, I interviewed her, and we had lunch together, too. She’s a good talker.”

“Yee Yee Cho, you are so lucky! I would love to talk to other writers. I write poetry, too, and some journalism. But it’s not easy to do that here.” She gently takes the book from me and presses it between her palms. “Who else did you meet there? Did you talk with other writers?”

I describe my dinner with Sayagyi Tin Moe (she shows me a dog-eared collection of his poetry) and the ship captain who talked like a professor. I tell her about two afternoons I spent with Ludu Daw Ah Mar, the famous fiction writer. “I thought it would be hard to find her house, because I didn’t have directions, but when I showed the address to a si-car driver he knew exactly where she lived.”

“Yes, everyone would know her house. The people love her books.”

“That’s what he said. He’d read everything she’d written.”

Back outside, using two rags to hold the handles, she lifts the pot and takes it to the hillside. She speaks through billows of steam as she pours out the water. “Burmese people love books. The country used to have the highest literacy rate in Asia. Before the dictatorship. Even the women, hundreds of years ago. The monastery schools taught boys
and
girls to read. As for me, I used to love going to the library. I was always involved with a book.”

The noodles congeal in the pot as Khaing Lin and I talk, jumping from one literary subject to another. Eventually she stands up, flattens out her sarong in a businesslike way, and asks, “Do you like chilies? I put them on everything because the food here is boring.”

She gets some bowls and sets aside December’s portion before dousing the noodles with chili oil. “She will be home soon. She always knows when the noodles are ready.”

We eat quickly, then go back into the hut to get my “bed” ready. This consists of a blanket and an elusive mosquito net.

“I wonder where I put it,” Khaing Lin says. “You have to use a net.” She pulls a bag off the platform and unzips it. “Aha!” The gauzy white mass unfurls under her hands. “Even if it’s very hot, make sure you use the net, okay?”

“Some people say that it’s hard to get malaria in the dry season.”

“It’s true, we don’t have so many mosquitoes in the dry season. But one mosquito is enough.”

I see Maung
at dinnertime, in a communal kitchen shelter. He is obviously happy, surrounded by talkative men who fall silent when he speaks. He has also changed into a longyi and jettisoned his Marlboros for a cheroot. He’s in such high spirits that I don’t want to spoil it with my disappointment about the sleeping arrangements. I smile as he introduces me to everyone. In due course, I discover their various titles and jobs: information officer, military strategist, radio operator, commanding officer of such and such battalion. Apparently a group of soldiers are here from the front. Right now they’re bathing in the stream, and soon they’ll come up the hill and devour all the food in sight.

The information officer says, “The soldiers are always hungry. They work hard and the food out there is not so good.” He smiles at me enthusiastically. He has a thick scar through his upper lip, which emphasizes his fine teeth. “Maung says you are a writer. Do you know Gorky?”

His tone suggests that I may know Gorky personally. “Well, I know his name. And that he was Russian. But I haven’t read him.”

The radio operator is thrilled. My ignorance provides him with a marvelous
chance to narrate Gorky’s life story, from his humble beginnings to his revolutionary activities in czarist Russia, from his great friendship with Lenin to his eventual disgust with the Bolsheviks’ savage disregard for human rights. A couple of times the other men join the conversation, but his love of Gorky is the star, and it speaks, and through that love shines his knowledge.

I presume he also knows a lot about radio systems.

I sit back to listen, saying, “Hmm” occasionally and “Really?” at the appropriate spots. Sometimes he interrupts himself to ask his companions in Burmese for the right word in English. He reminds me of the qualities I most admire in Burmese people: their love of literature and art, their openness to the world, their ability to bring the world into their own experience, their intellectual generosity, their enthusiasm for learning and for teaching. Because, of course, he is teaching me. Just as I realize how serious my Gorky deprivation has been, he asks, “Would you like me to lend you one of his books? I have a photocopy of
My Universities
, in English.”

I thank him for the offer, genuinely pleased. I’m always short of reading material.

After dinner, Maung walks me back toward Khaing Lin’s hut. We walk slowly because it’s not that far. It’s also dark, though the froth of the Milky Way glitters above us. A moon glow shows above the treetops in the direction of the stream.