For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question Read online

  I’ve heard a dirty rumor that these emails get forwarded to people who forward them to people who forward them to people, and my goal is to get at least fifteen of those people to pledge to send me checks for $100 (I’ve got three promises already). I hope others will make up the difference with smaller donations of $50, or $20, or even $10, and if that fails, I’m going to strip down to my skivvies, hold a bikini car wash at the end of the street, and earn the money one soapy motorbike at a time. If you’re not moved by the plight of the refugees, maybe you’ll consider patronizing your faithful friend or blogstress. Or just try to keep her from doing anything in her underwear on a Thai street corner (Grandma). So don’t be shy; email me and let me know how badly you want to financially support my mildly insane vision (or just say hi; I don’t really leave the offices, since they can’t really leave the offices, so email has become sort of absurdly exciting).

  TWO DAYS before Ta Mla and That Khaing,25 who’d newly arrived from inside, got arrested, Htan Dah had finally said yes when I asked him if he wanted help cooking breakfast. He’d given me a cutting board and several small heads of garlic, and I’d dutifully begun peeling the fibrous skins.

  “I miss you, Htan Dah,” I’d said, my eyes on my sticky fingers. “We haven’t spent so much time together lately.”

  His head had been dipped low, his hair hanging in sheets above the heavy marble mortar in which he was pounding chilies with a matching pestle. He’d looked up and stilled his hand for a moment, the front, shortest layers of his hair landing on his cheekbones. “Yes,” he’d said. “Why not?”

  “Because you’re very busy. You have your work, and your wife, and your kid. You just haven’t had so much free time.”

  He’d continued looking at me, then gone back to pounding. “Yes,” he’d said. “I miss you, too.”

  The morning after the arrest, we were chopping and slicing and smashing at the table when the rest of the house got up and started bustling around. It was agreed that they should all drive the most out-of-the-way back way to wherever they were going. Each incident with the law renewed the fear of the Thai in them for a little bit, though it wasn’t like it was anybody’s first time or anything. It wasn’t even Ta Mla’s first time.

  Previously, he’d been arrested along with a friend, a girl, who’d started sobbing when the cops said Ta Mla could go but she couldn’t. He hadn’t been about to pay his way off with a woman, so they’d charged him ten bucks for each of them when he’d refused to leave without her.

  “How many times have you been arrested?” I asked Eh Soe when he came into the dining room/garage.

  My relationship with Eh Soe had improved somewhat. Every morning, I crawled out from under my mosquito net shortly after dawn and walked past him on my way out the door. Every morning, I went straight downstairs and started helping Htan Dah cook rather than just watching him. And every morning, Eh Soe walked into the dining room/garage an hour or so later and punched me in the arm. When I’d asked Htan Dah what was up with the guys hitting me all the time—Htoo Moo had also taken to slapping me if I was standing near him, or at the very least pulling my arm hair—he’d smiled paternally and said it was because they loved me.

  Indeed, Eh Soe and I had started getting along by treating each other like nine-year-old siblings. I had colored and hung an anti-smoking sign above my reading bench, which had become his bed. He had lain underneath it and continued to smoke. He had repeatedly told me to shut up while I yelled at him to go smoke and talk on the phone somewhere else while I was trying to sleep, but then told me after he hung up that I wasn’t staying long enough, and should stick around for a year. He’d told me I wasn’t his boss, and I’d told him that he could stand to be a better roommate. He thought that was hilarious, and reason to mock me, and had taken to saying “Okay, my roooommaaaate” and “Yes, my roooommaaaate” before completely disregarding whatever courtesy I was asking of him. So even though I kind of wanted to kick Eh Soe in the dick, we were communicative, sometimes chatting from our separate beds at night, like at a sleepover.

  “Two times,” he said, answering my question. “In two years with BA.” He smiled. “Once a year. Once, I paid five hundred baht. I show my ID”—Eh Soe had a student ID from Burma, a real one, since his aunt had put him through some school there—“and say, I’m Burmese! I’m Burmese student!” At this point, he started laughing hard, which made Htan Dah and Htoo Moo, who’d sat down as we prepared to fry up breakfast, do the same. “But he knew I was refugee, and so I said, Okay, I will give you two hundred fifty baht. But he said, No, no, it’s not enough. So I had to pay him much more.”

  “Why don’t you ask Htoo Moo how many times he has been arrested?” Htan Dah asked me.

  “Okay,” I said. “Htoo Moo, how many times have you been arrested?”

  “Six times,” he said, which set the other guys giggling again. Htoo Moo got arrested the most and let go the least. Usually, he spent a day or four in jail, then was offered freedom for cash. Once, he was leaving a refugee camp on a bus and the police got on and asked him for ID. I don’t have one, he said. I am a student. He had seen in movies that students were respected. Where do you study, they asked. In a monastery, he said. What’s the name of it? I don’t know. He was taken off the bus and to a jail, where he spent one day and one night. Then they transferred him to another jail, just this side of the Thai border, with men and women in one room. Girls were crying. The cops punched one of the prisoners in the stomach and back of the neck until he spit up blood, then said they’d let people go for three hundred baht. Htoo Moo had only eighty. But ten people bought their way out and left. In a while, the cops came back and said, Okay, two hundred baht. Five or six more prisoners left. The cops came back and said, Okay, one hundred baht. A few more captives straggled out. When the cops announced that ten people needed to go clean the garden, Htoo Moo volunteered, and even after it was clean, he still swept at the ground like a madman, like the work would never be done, because inside, people were getting beat up. In the end, the cops drove the broke hangers-on, eleven of them, over the border and dropped them off in Burma—though luckily, not directly at an SPDC holding center. So Htoo Moo and the others walked along the river for a while, pooled their cash to hire a boat, and got dropped back off on the Thai side. But they were lost. Htoo Moo asked his companions if they knew the way; nobody did, so they walked until midnight, when they heard monks chanting and followed the sound. The monks fed them rice, told them they got people like them every day, and showed Htoo Moo the way to his brother’s village, nearby. An older gentleman asked the monks if he could stay with them forever. Another guy said that he had twin babies and a wife and no bus fare, so Htoo Moo gave him twenty of his remaining forty baht and set off for his brother’s. But sometimes when he got arrested, he just had to pay five hundred baht or so, and he preferred those times.

  “Why do you get arrested so much?” I asked. “Is it because when you’re on your motorbike you’re always looking over your shoulder? Because you always do that, and it makes you look really suspicious.”

  “Also,” Htan Dah laughed, “he looks Burmese.” Htoo Moo’s smile lit his dark, oval face. “As for me, maybe I can pass for Thai.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I think my face looks a little bit Chinese.”

  Still, Htan Dah had been arrested three times in the last two years. Once, he paid five hundred baht. Once, he and the three guys he was with, two of whom didn’t have KNU cards, paid two thousand baht each. Once, he was just sent back to camp. (That time, he’d been caught by a member of the Thai army—a less crooked organization, according to the refugees, than the Thai police.) Worst, a few months ago, he’d been driving down our street when a neighbor pulled out of her driveway without looking and hit him with her car. She convinced him that it was his fault because he hadn’t gotten out of the way. Regardless of how untrue that was, she gave him the option of being turned in to authorities as an illegal or paying her $
250. Lucky for Htan Dah, BA covered the bribe, which was two years’ worth of his earnings.

  “Yesterday,” Htan Dah said, “I see the police on our way to Office Two. We didn’t get arrested because I was praying.”

  “Oh yeah?” I asked. “You don’t think that could have anything to do with the fact that you were with me?”

  Htan Dah laughed and nodded. “Maybe if I go with Ta Mla, I would already be in jail.” That hypothetical made him laugh even harder. “That Khaing is lucky Ta Mla came back with whiskey,” he choked out. “If Ta Mla disappear, That Khaing is screwed by the cops.”

  When we hopped on his motorbike on the way to class that morning, he went the same cop-laden way as ever. “If I get stopped,” he’d said before he left, buckling his helmet, “you have to protect me.”

  I got a ride back from Office Two from a different student, who, like most everyone else, drove tensely even along the alternate route. At the house, Htan Dah was nowhere to be found. What’s more, his assertion that if he didn’t cook nobody would turned out to be true.

  There still wasn’t any dinner at seven, and still no Htan Dah, who usually started cooking around four. I hoped he was just busy, and since I didn’t see any groceries to cook with, I sat down at the table with a bowl of rice. The Blay started frying some thin, crispy wafers made of beans and rice powder. “Poor dinner,” he said, laughing.

  That’s where I was when Htan Dah finally came home. Though he was safe, and though he was, as always, perfectly cheerful, there was horror behind his smile. Finding his American houseguest eating a bowl of plain white rice was like seeing your visiting mother-in-law relegated to eating the ketchup packets out of your fridge.

  The next morning, Ta Mla passed cops again on his way to class, but they were already busy with two other people. He sped up anyway. At the break between classes, I followed Wah Doh, the wired, wiry kid who had written the sick note, into the little Office Two computer room to help him with his HRD translation, as I often did. Today, he also wanted to show me a word he saw all the time so I could explain its meaning to him: marginalized. (He grasped the concept pretty quickly.) Once, he’d asked me the name of the thing that people used to bind other people’s feet against their will. I told him I didn’t think we had a word for that in English. (I was wrong. The noun he was looking for was fetters, the verb being to fetter, but it’s a very old word and one that is, for good reason, not currently supercommon. When Htoo Moo asked me later for the word for systematically slicing open the skin on someone’s forearm, I told him I didn’t think we had a word for that, either.) In return for my English help, Wah Doh blathered at me in Karen for a couple of minutes, as he liked to do, gesturing wildly and unhelpfully, with the idea that this was a way of instructing me in the language.

  I didn’t even try to follow him this time. When I’d come downstairs to cook with Htan Dah before breakfast, he was gone. Eh Soe had served Abby and me a pile of raw green beans he pulled from somewhere, so I hadn’t eaten anything substantial since the morning before. I was considering going to the only Italian restaurant in town later to pick up a ton of takeout, maybe introduce the guys to pasta.26 But for now, I was hungry, which I handled about as well as I did being tired, so I found Wah Doh’s immersion session annoying at best. When he finished, I just stared at him.

  “Do you know what I said to you?” he asked.

  “I know you know I don’t.”

  “I said, ‘If you eat too many eggs, you will get fat.’”

  Back in the classroom, the afternoon session was awfully empty. I wandered into the other room, which held the little TV, and a dozen sleeping refugees at night. Mu Na, the only girl in the advanced class, was standing in the middle of the floor, swatting the ass of the guy who’d bent over to pick something up next to her.

  “Good butt,” she said, laughing, when she saw me looking at her. “Good butt for slapping.”

  Indeed. “Where are my students?”

  Only Ta Mla, Eh Na, and Collin came to my beginner class that day; everyone else was busy. The four of us sat in chairs—a rare departure from my having my legs folded under me on the floor at the front of a crowded classroom. Eh Na didn’t even work for BA, but had joined the household and the class when he’d recently escaped from inside. His face was remarkably wide, and he bore the pink scars of bites and cuts from doing jungle labor at gunpoint. He was as quiet as he was dark-skinned, serious cocoa, not the softer brown of his colleagues. Collin was a chatty fortysomething with twinkly eyes and a bowl cut. He meant to use the paltry attendance to get more gabbing than work done.

  “May I ask what is your religion?” he said.

  “I don’t have a religion,” I told him. “I was raised Catholic, but I don’t believe in God anymore.”

  He gave a tight nod, registering that. “You are . . . atheist?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you are atheist, what do you do when you are in trouble?”

  This made me laugh, not because it didn’t make sense for him to ask me that, but because it did, perfectly, sadly. “I guess I try to find a solution.”

  He nodded again. Then, “You don’t pray?”

  “No.”

  “Never?”

  “Ever.”

  “What if your trouble has no solution?”27

  “I’m from Ohio, Collin.” My shoulders dropped with pity. “I know it’s difficult for you to imagine what I mean, but I really don’t have the same kind of trouble as your trouble.”

  After I got home, I told Abby I’d join her to buy souvenirs for her boyfriend. We walked into town, though I was limping slightly. The squat toilet had finally bested me, as they seemed to on every trip; they can be treacherous when they’re wet, and they are, of course, always wet, since after every use water is thrown into and all over them. I’d been careless stepping off ours, one foot at a time in the squat position, letting my balance slip as my first foot hit the ground, smashing my other foot into the ceramic toilet platform, crushing it underneath my body weight. Though I’d avoided plunging my foot into a urine-filled toilet bowl, my big toe was seriously suffering, and I shuffled painfully along the highway in my flip-flops in the late afternoon heat.

  The most interesting thing that had happened to Abby that day, she said, was that Eh Soe had walked up to her and asked, “What is the word when a man and a woman sleep in bed together before they are married when it is not polite?” When she’d asked him if he meant “premarital sex,” he’d confirmed that he had, and asked her to write premarital on his hand. (He knew how to spell “sex,” he’d told her.)

  I wasn’t sure, I mused, what the most interesting thing that had happened to me recently was. Ta Mla had told me he was looking for two things: a wife and a way to get out of Thailand. As for the former, he wasn’t particular: “I will marry white, Thai, Karen; as for me, it doesn’t matter.” Regarding the latter, I fielded questions about how people get married in the United States and then scandalized him into speechlessness and hard blush by saying that if he were so inclined, you know, he really didn’t have to get married to have sex, if he didn’t want to.

  But then again, the more interesting conversation may have been with Htan Dah, who had told me that That Khaing had chest hair, and then made That Khaing lift up his Che shirt and show it to me, and then asked me if I was familiar with this sort of thing, chest hair.

  When Abby and I got back to the house with some of the ubiquitous yellow shirts that commemorated the Thai king’s yearlong sixtieth-anniversary celebration, making the populace one nation under color coordination, Htan Dah was in the dining room/garage with fried green beans and fried eggs with onions. He looked like he’d been waiting.

  “Just for you,” he said, smiling at me and gesturing at the food. And indeed it was; none of my housemates sat down to dinner with me.

  “I am sorry about the poor food,” The Blay said, passing through.

  I objected to his apology, pointing happily at Htan Dah’s eggs and be
ans.

  We made more of the same for breakfast the next morning. It was Friday. So soon enough, the BA employees who lived in Office Two started arriving in pairs on motorbikes and filing in through the dining room/garage door. I wasn’t particularly interested in the weekly all-staff meeting, since I knew by now that about five phrases would be translated for me during the whole hour-long affair. When I’d finished eating, I went upstairs to reclaim my old reading bench and rest before class.

  “What are you doing?” Htoo Moo asked, popping into the room. He was wearing his pleated navy-blue Dickies with a loose black tank top. The sunlight coming in through the open balcony door shone off his cleavage.

  “I’m resting,” I said without moving.

  “Why? What did you do today?”

  “I’m going to teach English today. I taught English all day yesterday.”

  “Oh, wow,” he said. “Was that heavy?”

  “Shut up, Htoo Moo,” I said as he started giggling. “Have you ever taught English before? It is actually really hard.” The more I defended myself, the harder he laughed. “You have to make a lesson plan, and be ready to be flexible given your students’ needs. Plus it takes a lot of energy to engage your students, especially when there’s a language barrier.” The harder he laughed, the louder I yelled, which just exacerbated the former. I forced myself to stop talking, and just lay there shaking my head and clenching my teeth until he walked away, laughing all the way down the stairs.