The Emperor Far Away (31 page)

Without warning, the outskirts of Pangshang gave way to the countryside. One moment we were on a paved street going past mansions, the next the road had become a winding, deeply rutted track flanked by trees. Ngo raced along it, so giant clouds of dust billowed behind us while Piero and I bounced high off our seats. ‘The Wa government keeps the roads outside Pangshang bad deliberately. If the Burmese come, it’ll make it difficult for their tanks and armoured personnel carriers to get to Pangshang,’ Ngo explained.

Ascending to a ridge which curved sharply ahead for as far as I could see, I spotted an open-cast mine far below us. ‘For rubies,’ said Ngo. Further out to the west, jungle-covered hills rolled towards Shan State proper. This was the real Wabang, where the vast majority of Wa State’s estimated 600,000 people live, although accurate population figures in Myanmar are impossible to come by and there are likely many more.

Another thirty-odd kilometres on and Ngo swerved left down a steep track that led to one of his villages. We stepped out on to yellow earth that exploded in puffs of dust with every pace we took. It clung to our clothes, while creating a haze that made everything appear to be hidden behind a thin layer of gauze. The village was as poor as the Akha homes I’d seen in the hills of north-west Laos – miserable one-room houses with thatched straw roofs, the people dirty and dispirited. There was no electricity or running water. ‘The people here are mostly Wa, but there are a few Lahu too. They earn about £6 a month,’ said Ngo.

As well as Lahu, there are also Akha, Dai and Burmese in Wa State. Many of the migrants from inland Myanmar run shops in Pangshang, or are monks. ‘We Wa don’t have a problem with ordinary Burmese and a lot come to Wabang,’ said Ngo. ‘This is the most free part of Myanmar and if you need to hide from the government, this is the best place to do it.’ But Ngo, like all the Wa I met, was vehement in his dislike of the regimes which have run Myanmar since independence. ‘We don’t want to be ruled by people like them. It doesn’t matter if it is the generals or Aung San Suu Kyi, we will never accept that.’

In Pangshang there are monasteries and churches, but many rural Wa are still animists, or follow a hybrid religion which blends elements of Buddhism with their ancient beliefs. There was a strange, spooky shrine in the village, decorated with figures cut out of white paper. They were sinister double-headed icons, barely resembling humans. Inside one of the houses, I saw a table loaded with incense sticks, offerings of food and a Japanese sword captured in the Second World War. The same white-paper icons hung from the ceiling above it. Ngo wasn’t sure of their significance, saying only that they were to keep evil spirits away.

Beyond the village was a hill where rubber plants stood in neat lines. ‘This was all opium until five years ago,’ said Ngo. ‘A Chinese rubber company rents the land now. The government doesn’t give the villagers any choice over renting their land out. They need the money the Chinese pay. They think only about fighting and the army. They’re too preoccupied with that to do anything to help the ordinary people.’

Rubber and opium are two of the few profitable crops that can be grown in Wa State. Even in the nineteenth century, the region was known for opium because its arid soil is unable to support much else. With poppy production in this area stopped and their land in the hands of a Chinese firm, the villagers were helpless and fortunate to have Ngo taking an interest in them. He distributed sacks of rice and handed out small amounts of cash, but I suspected that not many members of the Wa elite were similarly generous.

Workers from Lincang, a town in southern Yunnan, were building a new accommodation block for the rubber farm’s employees, who were all Chinese too. Their overseer joined us, a pistol strapped to his waist. I asked him why he was armed. ‘There are tigers in the valley and snakes as thick as this,’ he said, holding his hands wide apart. I didn’t believe a handgun would be much defence against an onrushing tiger, or if he stepped on a deadly reptile. He was more likely worried about the locals turning nasty.

Renting out land for rubber farms has pushed the opium fields deep into the hinterland, while raising additional cash for the UWSA and enabling it to claim it is preventing people from producing poppy. The reality is that opium cultivation is rising in Wa State, and the rest of Shan, just as it is in Laos. Most of the heroin refined from it is destined for the unknown millions of addicts in China.
Yaba
production continues to increase too, an adept shift of strategy by the Wa as it is not a drug exported to the US and so is of little concern to Washington.

Lines of water buffalo were being herded down the track by farmers as we drove further into the hills, before reaching another settlement named Cawng. The houses were more substantial here, the residents better dressed, and there was even a concrete path running through the village. ‘The people here are Wa and Dai. The headman used to be in the UWSA, so he has good connections in Pangshang and the village gets some help from the government,’ said Ngo.

Scruffy children crowded around, shouting at the sight of strange men, while their parents peered at us from the houses. At the end of the village, perched on the crest of a ridge overlooking the deep valley below, was a small monastery. The younger monks were playing football in bare feet, their robes tucked up around their waists. ‘We always have a game at the end of the day,’ said one with a grin. It was a Dai monastery and the scriptures the monks studied were in the Tai Lue language. A few of them had been to Wat Pajay in Jinghong and they told us monks from there sometimes visited.

Watching the novices kick the ball around in the shade of giant, gnarled trees, with a spectacular view across the valley to the thickly forested hills rising and falling out to the west, it was hard to believe that twelve hours before I had been trapped with James in the Pangshang nightclub. Cawng was by far the most peaceful and pleasant place I visited in Wa State. But as we walked back to the truck, past the Dai-style houses on stilts, I could smell the unmistakable sweet odour of
yaba
smoke. Even in the shadow of a monastery, Wa State’s principal product was present.

Back in Pangshang, over a late dinner in a Wa restaurant, Yilan was less impressed by Ngo’s philanthropy than I was. ‘He needs to sort his own life out and decide what he is going to do before he helps other people,’ she said. It was typically pragmatic of Yilan who, like A-sui, was much more aware of the oddity of life in Wa State than any of the men I met there. The women of the Wa elite don’t spend their time fighting on the front line or trading narcotics. In the traditional, macho world of Wa State, they raise families, and that gives them far more perspective than can be gained from the extreme existence James led.

When I said to Yilan that I was surprised by how developed Pangshang was, she looked at me quizzically. ‘You think Pangshang is a nice city? I think it is a frightening place because of all the drugs.’ Yilan must have known where the family money came from but that didn’t mean she had to like it, or wasn’t aware of its consequences. It was obvious that both she and A-sui would rather be living on the other side of the border in Yunnan.

Nights out with Yilan and A-sui were very different from an evening with James. They moved in a mob too, always accompanied by some of the girls who worked for the family, as well as the inevitable bodyguards, but the atmosphere was far more relaxed. They told jokes for a start, albeit Wa-style ones. One of the girls had a crush on Piero, and Yilan teased him, saying the young woman had never had a boyfriend but that he should be careful because she came from a ‘scary’ village where people still took heads. When we returned with them to the same nightclub we had gone to with James, we stayed sober and sang Chinese pop songs.

Once, though, we were driving through Pangshang when Yilan pointed to a woman emerging from a shop. ‘She just sold her baby to a Chinese couple.’ Yilan said many childless couples from Yunnan come to Pangshang to buy infants. ‘It happens more with the country people. They’ll sell their babies for as little as 2,000 yuan [£200].’ Such things happen in rural China too, but I was still shocked at how stoically Yilan accepted the market for children as just another fact of life in Wa State.

Maybe it is a consequence of living in a jungle city where the streets are safe to walk, but the laws regarded as important almost everywhere else in the world are broken daily. Even during my short spell in Wa State, I grew used to the child soldiers and teenage hookers, the precious gems sold next to vegetables and the huge contrast between the palatial houses of the wealthy and the huts in the countryside where people merely subsisted. Above all was the unspoken understanding that all this is happening because of the
yaba
and opium being produced in the hills beyond Pangshang.

One day, it was time to leave. We returned to the banks of the Nam Ka and joined the queue of people waiting to cross to Yunnan. On the other side, we were picked up by two Chinese Wa friends of Yilan’s family who had driven down from Simao for a visit and offered us a ride back. Everyone was silent, preparing to adjust to life back in China. ‘I always like going to Wabang,’ one of the men said after a while. ‘But I wouldn’t want to live there.’

20

Women for Sale

Aba looked like an ordinary fifteen-year-old girl, her face still showing signs of puppy fat, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and clutching a prized mobile phone. She was more nervous than most teenagers, with a shy smile and a voice that rarely rose above a whisper. But I assumed that was the natural reaction of a Kachin girl confronted with the first westerner she had ever encountered. It was only later, after she had told me her terrible story, that I understood why Aba had every reason to be timid and uncertain around strangers.

We met in Ruili, a border city notorious across China as one of the nation’s crime capitals. Part of the Dehong Dai and Jingpo Autonomous Prefecture in the far west of Yunnan, Ruili is indelibly associated with smuggling and women-trafficking – a consequence of its proximity to Shan and Kachin States. It is separated from the town of Muse in Myanmar by an ancient metal fence. Aba, who had lived all her life in Muse, had climbed through one of the many holes in the fence for the first time when she was just twelve. A female neighbour of her family had persuaded her to visit Ruili, promising to take her home the same night.

It was a dreadful lie. Aba didn’t see her parents again for three years. Like thousands of other girls and women, she had been duped into coming to China so that she could be sold as a bride to one of the increasing number of Chinese men who cannot find a wife any other way. Soon after Aba had crossed into Ruili, she was taken on a three-day journey across China and deposited with a Han family on a farm in a place she still does not know the name of. She endured routine beatings during her enforced stay there, while never being allowed to communicate with her family or even go outside on her own.

Worst of all, Aba was destined to be married to the son of the family who had bought her as if she was one of the chickens which ran around their farm. ‘I was sold for 20,000 yuan [£2,000],’ Aba said. ‘I was too young to get married when they bought me. It was later they told me I had to get married to their son. I was lucky in a way. If I had been two or three years older when I was taken, I would be married to him now.’

At first, I thought it odd that she considered herself fortunate to have been kidnapped so young. I know I wouldn’t have done if I had been stolen as a child and sold into virtual slavery. Later, though, I realised Aba was right. Most of the Kachin and Shan women tricked into coming to China to be unwilling wives are not rescued, nor do they manage to escape. They never get to see their families and homes again.

Just as in Banna, the minorities in Ruili and Dehong Prefecture are tied to their cousins across the frontier by a shared ethnicity and culture. But the Dai here are Tai Neua and have far more in common with their relatives in Shan State than they do with the Dai in Banna, who are Tai Lue and speak a different language. The 130,000 Jingpo in Dehong are the same ethnic group as the Kachin people in Myanmar. Also present in the region are the Lisu, found all over Kachin State, and the De’ang, known as the Palaung in northern Shan State where they are far more numerous.

Being Kachin and coming from Muse dramatically increased Aba’s chances of becoming a victim of the gangs who trade in women. As well as bordering China, Muse sits almost on the boundary between Shan and Kachin States, the two places where the majority of the women trafficked into China now come from. Vietnamese and North Korean women are also sold as wives, or as sex workers, but in recent years it is Myanmar which has been the main source of forced brides, a consequence of the wide-open frontier between Muse and Ruili.

So ineffective a barrier is the fence which separates the two towns that some people cross over from Muse in the morning to go to work, return home for lunch and then travel back to China in the afternoon. A couple of hundred metres away from the official border post, gaps have been prised open in the rusty railings and at all hours there is a constant parade of people going through them. During the day it is migrant workers from Muse coming to Ruili to work on construction sites or as domestic servants. In the evening prostitutes arrive, while Chinese gamblers head to Myanmar and the casinos in nearby Maijayang.

All manner of contraband moves through the fence each night from the Ruili side: chickens, pigs, sacks of rice, phones, computers and even light machinery. Under-developed, cash-strapped Myanmar can’t offer much in return. But there is a big market for three of the things it does have plenty of: drugs, jade and women for the ever-growing army of single Han men in search of wives.