For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  I.

  II.

  III.

  IV.

  V.

  VI.

  VII.

  VIII.

  IX.

  X.

  XI.

  XII.

  XIII.

  XIV.

  XV.

  SOURCING

  SOURCES

  ABBREVIATIONS

  Copyright Page

  BURMA

  USEFUL

  DATES

  “Do you want a cigarette?” I ask Htan Dah, holding up a pack of Thai-issue

  Marlboros. We are sitting on opposite sides of a rectangular table, the type I’d call a picnic table, talking over the spread: three bottles of vodka, two cartons of orange juice, plates of sugared citrus slices, nearly empty bottles of beer and bowls of fried pork, sweet corn waffles, pad thai, a chocolate cake. We share the benches with two guys each, and half a dozen others hover. Most of them are listening to Poe K’Ler Htoo, who is working through a light slur to tell his new favorite story. This morning, he sent an email to Htoo Moo, the coworker around whom he’s draping his arm, asking if he’d finally finished a report. Htoo Moo somehow accidentally cc-ed the rest of the staff—including the administration of the organization that employs them—when sending back a simple response: Fuck you, Poe K’Ler Htoo.

  The men are all in their twenties. Most of them are solid and strong and hunky, tight pecs and asses nearly all around. Their faces shine sweaty because they’re drunk, and it’s July. A few of them are smoking. One holds a guitar. They laugh when Poe K’Ler Htoo gets to the climax. Some of them received the email or have heard the punch line already and nod, smiling, into the post-anecdote silence, young professionals talking about interoffice inbox blunders, like outgrown frat boys unwinding after another tedious workday. Except that they’re stateless. They are all penniless. They speak three or four languages apiece. Two of them had to bribe their way out of Thai police custody, again, yesterday because they’re on the wrong side of the border between this country and the land-mine-studded mountains of their own.

  Htan Dah’s silky chin-length hair slips toward his eyes as he leans forward. My Marlboros picture a baby reaching for the cigarette of the man who holds her, absentmindedly exhaling a cloud of smoke around her face. It’s an episode in a series of legally mandated photographic deterrents, scabby hospital patients hooked up to respirators and cancer-rotted mouths and throats, but it doesn’t deter Htan Dah. Nor is he deterred by the fact that he doesn’t smoke. Tonight, he is flushed with heat and booze and the virility and extreme hilarity of his comrades. Tonight, as always, he is celebrating the fact that he’s still living.

  He takes a cigarette. “Never say no,” he says, and winks at me.

  I.

  EVEN ON a Saturday, the refugees were up at dawn. The roosters of Mae Sot had been crowing for hours already, the packs of stray and unleashed domestic dogs fighting intermittently throughout the night, the wiry migrants working overtime at the construction lot across the verdant residential street since darkness had begun to fade.

  Downtown, the western central Thailand city contains several blocks’ worth of congested, though hardly happening, streets lined with stores full of jewelry and bikes and food processors. At its center is a market—flip-flops, live frogs, long green beans—and on the fringes a few guesthouses and bars that cater largely to the community of well-tanned aid workers supporting the city’s exiles.

  Though Mae Sot is a major receiving hub for people, pirated teak, and other goods that enter the country illegally from Burma, and the population is loaded with smugglers, dealers, documentless immigrants, and slaves, the atmosphere of the border town is serene. Beyond the city center, past factories and karaoke joints, the alternating fields and rice paddies and shack-filled villages and suburban homes and temples and rickety corner stores are all quiet. Out there, just a couple of miles from downtown, the noise is reduced to the occasional outburst of Buddhist bells or motorbikes whizzing by. Though everyone was awake at the office and staff quarters of Burma Action (BA), it was quiet in there, too.

  The employees—twentysomethings all, males, except one—who hadn’t yet crawled from their sleeping spaces on the floor and rolled up their cobalt mosquito nets for the day could hear from their beds the light clangings of breakfast preparation: pots being washed in the stainless steel sink, motorbike keys hung on metal hooks after a market trip, knives slid off the stone counter and carried toward the cutting board. Upstairs, they were too far away to smell the steam that escaped the rice cooker in the kitchen. A couple of them had already gotten up and stumbled, still rubbing their eyes, straight into the computer room. Since it was the weekend, their work hours would be healthily interspersed with naps and guitar playing and Ping-Pong. Technically, they didn’t have any schedule at all, much less mandated hours on Saturdays; they worked at will, with only occasional deadlines to direct them. Still, some took their places in front of the four computers and turned them on, chatting and stretching in their seats while they waited for the machines to boot up so they could get some work done before breakfast.

  Half a dozen employees were there now, and as many more were out on long field assignments. Almost all the organization’s work was done by refugees, though a few Thai citizens and Western do-gooders helped with administration at headquarters in Bangkok. Sometimes, the office hosted volunteers sent by charities or aid groups. The pale auxiliaries from Australia or France or the US or UK stayed anywhere from a few weeks to a couple of years. Those times, like today, a staff member took a motorbike to the bus station to wait for a foreigner to off-load. This time, on the first of July, 2006, the bus, my bus, arrived in the late afternoon. I wasn’t connected to any organizations—I’d just happened upon BA’s website and, interested in the crisis in the Texas-size Southeast Asian country the page was going on about, eventually volunteered via email—so my background was something of a mystery to the staff. No one in the house could pin down its origins, but there was a rumor that I was Norwegian.

  I walked up the driveway in the early evening, through the gold-detailed black gate that stood heavy sentry at the road. I’d followed The Guy who came to meet me, whose name wasn’t The Guy, but whose actual name I hadn’t caught when he’d mumbled it twice in a row and then just shaken his head and laughed when I’d asked him to repeat it one more time, in a three-wheeled tuk-tuk from the station. I watched him, compact and strong looking, buzzed black hair, sharp cheekbones, cinnamon skin, sliding the gate slow and screaming shut behind us as my hired driver puttered away. The house was big but run-down, two stories of worn wood and dirty concrete with a balcony on the left, cement garage on the right. We entered the latter, where The Guy pushed his shiny red motorbike in among a couple of dingier ones. Behind them was a picnic table with benches, and behind that, against the back wall, a single metal range hooked up to a propane tank. We cut around the table, to the left, into the house.

  “Kitchen,” The Guy said. It had a sink and some dishes; the cooking took place out in the dining room/garage. He took a few steps farther. “Bathroom.” He gestured into a cement block through an oversize wooden door. There was a squat toilet, of course, set into the floor, and in lieu of toilet paper a shallow well, serviced by a tap, a little plastic bowl floating on top. There was also, running the length of the left wall, a giant waist-high cement trough filled with water and dead mosquitoes.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Water.”

  Sure. “For what?”

  “A bath.”

  I looked at it, jet-lagged, h
azily noting some of the differences between this bath and my conception of a bath. This wasn’t my first time in Southeast Asia, but I’d only ever taken showers. I wondered if I was supposed to hoist myself in there and splash around. I wondered if he wondered what I thought a bath was.

  “How does it work?” I asked.

  He exhaled hard through his nose, a whispery snort. “Like this,” he said, pantomiming filling a bowl with water and dumping it over his head. “Are you hungry?”

  Back in the dining room/garage, I sat at the table with a plate of rice and some durable pieces of fried pork. I asked The Guy what was in the soup he offered me.

  “I don’t know the word in English,” he said. “Leaves?”

  Close. Twigs, actually. The Guy pulled a stump of wood up to the short, benchless edge of the table, next to me, content to perch there quietly and watch me chew through the sautéed woody stems.

  “So, where are you from?” I asked.

  “Me?”

  Silence. He wasn’t asking rhetorically.

  I nodded.

  “I am kuh-REN. Everybody here, we are all kuh-REN.”

  Oh, man. It was starting to come together now.

  When I’d landed in Bangkok, a BA employee had picked me up at the airport to make sure that I found the bus station and the right eight-hour bus north. She was tiny and Thai and heavily accented, and repeatedly told me during our cab ride that everyone I was about to be working with was Korean. It seemed sort of weird that a bunch of Koreans would move to Thailand together to work for peace in Burma, but I thought that was nice, I guessed, and even wrote in my journal, relievedly, inexplicably, “Koreans tend to have excellent English skills.”

  When I’d arrived at the Mae Sot bus station, the clearly Southeast Asian The Guy had asked if I was his new volunteer.

  “Yes,” I’d said. “You’re not Korean.”

  I’d done my homework before I left the States. I had read about the Karen. Unrelatedly, I even had a brilliant National Geographic- style coffee-table book with pictures of women adorned with stacks of gold rings, members of the few remaining long-neck Karen tribes of not-so-distant relation. But I’d only seen the word written down, and had assumed, incorrectly, that it sounded like the name of my parents’ blond divorced friend. I didn’t know how it was pronounced any more than most Westerners would’ve been certain how to say “Darfur” ten years ago.

  IMAGINE, FOR a moment, that Texas had managed to secede from the union, and that you live there, in the sovereign Republic of Texas. Imagine that shortly after independence, a cadre of old, paranoid, greedy men who believed in a superior military caste took over your newly autonomous nation in a coup. Your beloved president, who had big dreams of prosperity and Texan unity, whom you believed in, was shot several times in the chest, and now the army runs your country. It has direct or indirect control over all the businesses. It spends .3 percent of GDP on health care, using your oil and natural gas money to buy more weapons, which Russia, Pakistan, and North Korea have been happy to provide, and the agricultural sector has nearly collapsed. Free press is illegal. So are gatherings of more than five people. A trial, much less legal representation, in the case of your arrest is not guaranteed. In the event of your interrogation, be prepared to endure tactics of the awful and the totally queer: crouch like you’re riding a motorbike, for hours, be hung from the ceiling and spun around, and around, and around, burned with cigarettes, beaten with a rubber rod, put in a ditch with a dead body for six days, locked in a room with wild, sharp-beaked birds, made to stand to your neck in a cesspool full of maggots that climb into your nose and ears and mouth. But if you do manage to stay out of prison, where most of your activists and dissidents have been rotting for decades, you are broke and starving, and you’re trying to personally teach your children to read, assuming they’ve survived to be children, since there’s a 30 percent chance that they’ll be devastatingly malnourished under the age of five and a 10 percent chance they’ll die before they reach that birthday. What’s more, you and your fifty million countrymen are trapped inside your 268,000-square-mile Orwellian nightmare with some 350,000 soldiers who are on active duty, not reservists, not just enlisted and awaiting a tour, but actually armed and deployed all the time. They can snatch people—maybe your kid—off the street and make them join the army. They can walk into your neighborhood and grab you as you’re going out to buy eggs and make you work construction on a new government building or road, long, hard hours under the grueling sun for days or weeks without pay, during which you’ll have to scavenge for food, since you don’t have any money, lest you work yourself to death. You’ll do all this at gunpoint, and any break will be rewarded with pistol whipping; it’s possible, and entirely permissible, that you’ll be killed for malingering, or getting smart, whether you’re an old lady or a priest or what, at forced work, walking down the street, wherever. Your life in the Republic of Texas sounds like a dystopia a screenwriter made up. Your life is roughly equivalent to a modern-day Burmese person’s.

  Now imagine that you belong to a distinct group, Dallasites, or something, that never wanted to be part of the Republic in the first place, that wanted to either remain part of the United States, which had treated you well, or, failing that, become your own free state within the Republic, since you already had your own infrastructure, and social structure, and community leaders and culture all in place. Some Dallasites have, wisely or unwisely, taken up their rifles to battle the government, and in retaliation for this armed rebellion, whole squads of the huge army have, for decades, been dedicated to terrorizing your city. You and your fellow Dallasites are regularly conscripted into slavery, walking in front of the army to set off land mines that they and your own insurgents have planted, carrying hundred-pound loads of weaponry and supplies under severe beatings until you’ve lost your use, which is to say you’ve become permanently injured or died. If you’re so enslaved, you might accompany the soldiers as they march into your friends’ neighborhoods and set them on fire, watch them shoot at fleeing inhabitants as they run, capturing any stragglers. If you’re one of those stragglers, and you’re a woman, or a girl older than five, prepare to be raped, most likely gang-raped, and there’s easily a one-in-four chance you’ll then be killed, possibly by being shot, possibly through your vagina, possibly after having your breasts hacked off. If you’re a man, maybe you’ll be hung by your wrists and a fire will be built under you and burn you alive. Maybe a soldier will drown you by filling a plastic bag up with water and tying it over your head, or stretch you between two trees and use you as a hammock, or cut off your nose, pull out your eyes, and then stab you in both ears before killing you, or string you up by your shoulders and club you now and again for two weeks, or heat up slivers of bamboo and push them into your urethra, or tie a tight rope between your dick and your neck for a while before setting your genitals on fire, or whatever else hateful, armed men and underage boys might imagine when they have orders to torment, and nothing else to do. You can’t call the police, which are also run by the armed forces. And though you’ve been sure for decades that the United States can’t possibly let this continue, it’s invested in your country’s oil and will not under any circumstances cross China, which is your country’s staunch UN and economic ally, so you really need to accept that America is decidedly not coming to save you. Nobody is. Now your life is pretty equivalent to a modern-day Burmese Karen’s.

  THOUGH THEY’D been speculating about the new volunteer all the way into this early evening, no one created any fuss when I turned the corner from the kitchen into the large living room. Four pairs of dark eyes looked from a small TV screen up to me. I smiled, but no one said anything. The Guy, leaning against the wall with his arms folded, didn’t make any introductions, so I approached the only other girl in the room, who was standing in the back, and asked her name.

  She looked nervous, but after sucking in a breath she uttered three syllables, completely unfamiliar Sino-Tibetan sounds fast in
a row, and I didn’t understand. I towered over her tiny frame. When I leaned in closer and asked her to repeat her name, she backed away while she did. I still didn’t get it well enough to say it back to her, but told her my name in return. She just nodded.

  I sat on the marble floor among the legs of the white plastic chairs the guys were sitting in, quiet in the surrounding rise and fall of their soft tonal syllables, deep, bubbling, like slow oil over stones. The TV blared Thai. As it grew dark, mosquitoes sauntered in through the screenless open windows. In season on the mosquito-transmitting menu at the Thai-Burma border: malaria, dengue fever, Japanese encephalitis. My breeding and upbringing left me with no natural resistance to the two latter, and I’d opted against taking the sickening drugs for the former. Not wanting to further alienate myself by being the white girl who ran upstairs to hide under a mosquito net at dusk, I watched the guys laughing and talking, like a partygoer who didn’t know anyone where everyone was having too good a time to care. They were fit, bare calves and feet splayed in front of their chairs, their smooth faces smiling easily. I pulled my air mattress out of my bag and started blowing it up. I incurred some mosquito bites. I shifted my sit bones on the shiny tile. I stood up.

  “I’m going to bed,” I told The Guy.

  He nodded, and looked at me for a second. It was seven-thirty. “Are you okay?” he asked. I’d just taken twenty-seven hours of planes and automobiles and felt exhausted and alone. He wasn’t sure if I was going to lose it, but clearly I looked like I might.

  I said that I was fine. He knew I was lying, but what could he do? I’m like a baby I get so incapacitated and pessimistic when I’m sleepy. I wasn’t sure if I was going to lose it, either. But I’d glanced the phrases “Forced marriage” and “Human trafficking” on a piece of copy paper taped to the scuffed flat paint covering the wall behind the computers in the adjacent room, so even though I didn’t know what that was about, I suspected that in this crowd, the circumstances didn’t warrant a breakdown.