Burmese Lessons (49 page)

O
n my first visit back to the border in 2001, friends filled me in on the news, and I saw evidence of it myself. One significant development was that international and Burmese NGOs had begun to focus directly on women’s issues, and the result was awe-inspiring. Burmese women dissidents had become a force in their own right. Some spoke two or three ethnic languages as well as Thai and English, and they were articulate, impassioned, and fiercely intelligent in every tongue. Maung had fallen in love with and married one of these remarkable women. Friends explained that he had left the ABSDF, formed his own NGO activist group, and made a home in Chiang Mai. Revealing my own unfulfilled longings, I immediately asked whether or not he had children. No, I was told, not yet.

What a hard emptiness opened inside me then. I had no children, either, no husband. Where were those brown-eyed babies we might have had? They were ghosts in my body. His life was different now, more stable. Perhaps I had been too impatient, as usual. I returned to the apartment I was staying in—the same place I’d been staying when Maung left
for China—and I lay down on the thin, anonymous sheets and cried. What if …? My yearning made no sense, but yearning doesn’t have to adhere to logic. It needs only to yearn.

Later that week, I went to meet a friend at a conference at the University of Chiang Mai and there he was, Maung, walking down a wide set of concrete steps. White cotton shirt, dark trousers. Him. Deep brown skin, hair thick and shining across his forehead. My friend and I were standing with several other people. I saw him seconds before he saw me, but it was no advantage. When he reached the bottom of the steps, he was standing directly in front of me, his mouth open, his eyes on my face. He began to talk, as he would, to my friend, whom he had worked with occasionally. She didn’t know who he was to me.

Who was he to me?

I blinked at him, my ears ringing. “How are you?” he said.

“Surprised.” Stunned breathless.

He smiled back. Ah, yes, the mouth. “Me, too. I didn’t know you were here.” Our eyes locked. He looked so familiar, my own kind. It was difficult to believe that we no longer had any claims on each other. No children. No future. Just a time, some years ago. Yet there was in the air, like an invisible cord around us, the possibility of touching.

I mean, the impossibility. We said goodbye. I didn’t watch him walk away.

I am grateful to everyone, without exception, who appears in these pages, but I am especially grateful to Burmese friends, colleagues, and strangers who told me their stories and sometimes made me promise to publish them. Thank you, Ler Wah Lobo, for the help with translations. I remain indebted to the journalist Heather Kelly, who invited me back to Thailand in 1996, and who encouraged me to visit Burma. Despite some harsh judgments in this book regarding the Fourth Estate, which reflect my experiences and my thoughts at the time, I am thankful to many journalists, of various nationalities, whose work has provided me with not only facts but also with deeper insight into Burma and the politics of Southeast Asia. Everyone at the magazine
The Irrawaddy
, working in both Thailand and clandestinely in Burma, has my sincere gratitude.

I owe a special thanks to the people who help turn manuscripts into books, and who put up with my extraordinary ability to miss deadlines: Jackie Kaiser, my agent, and my editors Anne Collins, Lorna Owen, and Nan Talese.

The Canada Council and the Ontario Council for the Arts—meaning,
the people of Canada and of Ontario—funded some of my early work on this book, at a time when I wasn’t sure that I should be writing it.
Tzey-zu-tin-ba-deh:
thank you. I finished a good portion of the manuscript while I was Nonfiction Writer-in-Residence at the Toronto Reference Library, where many good people made being a writer more enjoyable and less solitary. I would also like to acknowledge the publications where some of the chapters first appeared in altered form:
Brick, Outpost, Prairie Fire, The Irrawaddy, This Magazine, Shambhala Sun
, and the travel anthology
AWOL
.

To dear friends and colleagues Anne Bayin, Linda Griffiths, Diana Bryden, Ann Shin, Mireille Katirzoglou, my sincere appreciation. I could not have written
Burmese Lessons
without the work of child-care providers Angeline Ducado and Grace Fernando, to whom I remain obliged for many things, including, perhaps, my sanity.

And to Robert Chang, my husband, thank you for the spacious world we live and work in together. I could not be more blessed.

Karen Connelly is the author of nine books of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry.
The New York Times Book Review
compared her novel of Burma,
The Lizard Cage
, to the works of Solzhenitsyn, Mandela, and Orwell. It was nominated for the Kiriyama Prize and won Britain’s Orange Broadband Prize for New Writers. Raised in Calgary, Connelly has lived for extended periods of time in different parts of Asia and Europe and now has two homes, one in Toronto and one in Greece.