For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question Read online

  The wooden steps that wound from the living room ended upstairs at the front of the house. To my right was a big open room, its floorboards littered with straw sleeping mats. Straight from the steps, across a short landing, was a bedroom, my room, wide but shallow, more wood floors and walls, containing the door to the balcony. I dropped my air mattress in the back right corner, under the big blue mosquito net, and lay down.

  Maybe I’d thought it was going to become clearer upon my arrival, but I realized I had no idea who these people were, or what they did here, or even what I was going to do here. I appeared to have my work, whatever it was, cut out for me, since The Guy seemed to be among the few who spoke English. My digestive system had its work cut out for it, too, since these guys apparently ate sticks.

  A 1911 census reported that the Karen lived in Burma “peacefully, quietly, unobtrusively . . . avoiding all contact with the tribes they passed . . . preferring the hardship and obstacles of hills, jungles and uninhabited regions to the dangers of conflict with fellow beings.” Every missionary, explorer, and ambassador who ever encountered the ethnic minority that had for centuries farmed the mountains along the Thai border commented on their docility. And, lying there, feeling left out because I couldn’t participate in a language I didn’t understand, listening to my housemates laugh and holler downstairs, the Karen seemed nice to me, too. I couldn’t have guessed then, drifting to sleep to the sound of their amiable chatter, that every last one of them was a terrorist.

  HTAN DAH dropped a pile of thinly sliced onions and whole garlic cloves into a wok of hot soybean oil shortly after dawn. He’d been up in the middle of the night, waiting alone in the living room for one of the World Cup matches, most of which aired at seriously inconvenient hours in Thailand. I’d been up, too, and had seen him in the chair he’d placed a few inches in front of the little TV when I’d gotten up to go to the bathroom. “Don’t you ever sleep?” I’d asked him, but he didn’t respond, or if he did, I didn’t hear it over the broadcast.

  His coworkers had inadvertently slept through the match. Most of them were still sleeping now. I climbed out from under my mosquito net and walked softly out of my room and past a few of them sprawled on the floor of the big open one. When my feet hit the cool tiles at the bottom of the steps, I turned toward the sound and smell of searing allium.

  Htan Dah stood at the gas range, which spat oil at his baggy longsleeved shirt. It was the same thing he’d been wearing the day before, when he had strode into the living room as I tried to figure out how to blow up my air mattress, sitting on the floor with the limp plastic splayed over my knees, surrounded by guys not speaking to me. When I’d looked up into his wide, round face framed with chin-length black hair, he’d given me an amused smile and asked, “Can I help you?”

  I sat down at the picnic table in the dining room/garage, a couple of feet from where he was cooking, and we exchanged hellos. He was a little chubby, I thought, watching him in his loose clothes. He picked up and tilted the wok, concentrating harder than he needed to on the swirling herbs. Htan Dah was worried about me. As the office manager of Burma Action for the past two years, he’d heard the nighttime weeping of plenty of self-pitying philanthropists, who tended to arrive tired and instantly homesick. The last girl, a Canadian with a lot of luggage, had started sobbing almost as soon as he’d picked her up from the bus station, and couldn’t be calmed even by the hours she spent taking calls from her boyfriend back home. She’d cried for days.

  Indeed, I’d had a very sad moment last night when, after my air mattress deflated shortly after I lay down on it and my angles pressed hard into the wood floor, and I realized that the ants patrolling the grounds were trekking right through my hair, I’d actually hoped for the worst, hoped that I had contracted malaria or Japanese encephalitis from the mosquito bites raging hot and itchy on my legs so I had a legitimate excuse to bail back to the States. That way, I wouldn’t have to be mad at myself for being too chickenshit to hack it through loneliness and less-than-ideal bathing arrangements. I’d even considered taking the bus back to Bangkok and calling my airline, betting myself that there was room on a flight out. If there wasn’t, I reasoned, I could just hang out on Khao San Road and read books. I hated Khao San Road, with its hennaed European backpackers and incessant techno and beer specials, but at least it was familiar. I’d realized then that I might start crying. But I was determined not to. Instead, I saved the tearing up for when Htan Dah put another bowl of stick soup in front of me now and asked, “How long are you staying?”

  “Six weeks,” I said, my throat tight.

  He was too shocked to notice. “Six weeks!” he hollered. “Why not four months? Or six months?”

  “Six weeks is a long time to go out of the country in America,” I said. “Besides, I was in Thailand for a month two years ago.”

  “How many times have you been here?”

  “Twice.”

  “Wow,” he said. Then, more softly, “You have traveled a lot. That’s nice.”

  He had no idea, even. “Have you traveled?”

  “No, I cannot.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because! I am Karen!”

  “So what?”

  “So, I cannot go anywhere.” He dumped chunks of raw, pink meat into the oil, which sputtered furiously. “If I go outside, I can be arrested.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes! I am refugee!”

  Htan Dah’s exclamations suggested that none of this should have been news to me—though I soon realized that this was also just how he talked. But all I really knew was that I was working for an organization that promoted democracy in Burma. The books I’d read about its evil dictatorship hadn’t said much about refugees, or mentioned that most of the Burmese refugees in Thailand were Karen, and BA hadn’t told me that my housemates were from Burma, or were refugees. I’d only just figured out that no one here was Korean.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Why would you be arrested because you’re a refugee?”

  “Because(!), I don’t have Thai ID. I am not Thai citizen, so, I cannot go outside refugee camp.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes! I can be fined, maybe three thousand baht.” That was nearly a hundred dollars’ worth of Thai currency, in a country where the average annual income was about three thousand bucks. “I can go to jail, or maybe, be deported . . .” We looked at each other, and he nodded in my silence, emphasizing his point with a sharp dip of his chin. “You have a lot of experience. You have been to a lot of places.”

  “Did you live in a refugee camp before?”

  “Yes. Before I came to BA.”

  “How long have you lived here?”

  “In Thailand?” Htan Dah asked. “I was born in Thailand.”

  A BA staffer with a slight frame and sweet face had sat down on my side of the picnic table, but as far from me as possible on the bench. I’d looked at him several times while talking to Htan Dah, trying to include him in the conversation, but he’d so far produced just a fixed, nervous smile. “How long have you lived here?” I asked him directly.

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you.”

  “Maybe . . . six . . . years,” he said.

  I asked him his name but, as usual, didn’t grasp it the first time. I asked him again.

  Ta Mla wrote the romanized version on a piece of paper and said it again. His name was pronounced just like it’s spelled. I asked him to spell everyone else’s, which were also transliterated mostly phonetically, but that the beginning hs were silent and something additional was off about the spelling of “Htan Dah,” the pronunciation of which I still hadn’t quite caught. Ta Mla seemed to know as many English words as Htan Dah did, but couldn’t call them up as quickly, and his pronunciation was often difficult to understand. We repeated ourselves a lot while we traded names and birth dates. He was born in 1979, which made him a year older than I was. And Htan Dah was a year younger still.

  “Will you go . . . to . .
. market? Today?” Ta Mla asked.

  “I hope so,” I said. I hadn’t brought a towel, and The Guy had promised last night to take me to buy one that afternoon, so I could bathe. “You guys don’t have a hot shower, do you?” I asked. Ta Mla looked at me blankly. I turned to Htan Dah, who wore a scowl that meant he didn’t understand the words I’d just used.

  “What?” he asked.

  Of course, most everyone in the developing world doesn’t take hot showers. But they are by no means unheard of in Thai cities, and I’d seen a tiny, on-demand water heater on the bathroom wall. “You guys have a water heater in the shower. Does it work?” I explained what I was talking about, but neither of them had ever known what that thing was for. It didn’t work, it turned out, and everyone here used the cold-water trough for bathing anyway, and if they hadn’t showered here, and they’d lived in refugee camps before. . . .

  “Have you ever taken a hot shower?” I asked Htan Dah.

  He frowned and shook his head briskly.

  “Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  He nodded. “I have heard of it,” he said. His face suggested he was lying.

  I turned to Ta Mla, who was watching us with severely creased eyebrows. “Have you ever taken a hot shower?” I asked him.

  He hesitated. “Hot?”

  “Yeah, hot. Like, you take a shower, but the water is warm.”

  He hesitated again. “Hot shower?” he asked.

  “Yeah. In America, we take showers with hot water. Have you heard of that?”

  He looked between Htan Dah and me, still making that face. Finally, he shook his head. “No, I do not know it.”1

  “Oh, man, you guys should take a hot shower sometime,” I said. “It’s great. We could heat up water in the teakettle and fill up a bucket or something.”

  Htan Dah immediately said that he would like to try. But Ta Mla considered for a moment, just to imagine the novel repugnance of it. “I think cold is better,” he said.

  Having finished cooking and seen that someone was keeping me company, Htan Dah excused himself and left me at the table with Ta Mla. We sat in silence for a bit, smiling often at each other.

  “What do you do?” he asked finally.

  “I’m a teacher.”

  “Oah? A teacher! That is ... very ... wonderful.”

  “Yes, I like it.”

  “In Norway?”

  “No.”

  IT WAS sweltering in Bangkok. During the dry season, it’s hot up in Mae Sot, too, dry air crawling across the continent toward the sea. But in the summer, when wet air blows in off the water, a cool wind rushes through the mist shrouding the tree-covered hills, softening the temperature up west beyond the central plains. Often, it rains for days, hard, persistent downpours from leaden skies, or light showers tinkling in sunlight. Today the air came warm and calm through the windows above a wide wooden bench in my room. I was falling asleep with a book when Htan Dah appeared in the doorway.

  “I think you are hungry,” he said.

  He was right. I’d chewed through only a few pieces of the hard fried pork nuggets he’d made for breakfast and hadn’t finished my rice, which I’d wetted down with salty stick soup. Htan Dah explained that The Guy, whose name turned out to be The Blay, was busy today. “I can take you to market,” he said. “Maybe you want to buy some food.”

  I sat up. “Okay. And a towel?”

  “Okay. Yes, after. I think it will be okay if you go with me.”

  I couldn’t see any reason to think otherwise; he seemed as capable of running an errand as The Blay. “Okay. ...”

  However brave I was on plane, boat, or foot, when it came to motorbikes I was a pragmatist—which is to say alarmist. Reportedly, dozens of people died in Thai motorcycle accidents every day, and hundreds more were injured, many of them permanently, horribly, disfiguringly, I imagined. I panicked quietly in the driveway while Htan Dah backed his bike out of the dining room/garage. He stopped next to me and looked up expectantly. He didn’t offer me a helmet.

  Passengers in Asia don’t hold on to their drivers as do girlfriends in American music videos and ’80s movies, so I gripped the seat under my ass as Htan Dah pulled out onto our street, slow and sure. Most of the houses were behind gates and greenery, though the structures varied from more two-story spreads to one-room stilted huts, most of those made at least partially of tattered wood. We drove on the four-lane boulevard that led to the freeway, past a water buffalo grazing in the grassy median, then turned down an alley before reaching the narrow, busy sois, or streets, of downtown. People and stalls with banana roti, whole grilled chicken, grilled chicken parts on a stick packed the fronts of the stores. Among them was the big bright Hong Long Minimart, in front of which we parked tight in a long row of other motorbikes.

  Htan Dah kept his head down, lost his grins and volume as we walked through the store, as if we were in church. “What are you looking for?” he practically whispered.

  “I don’t know.”

  I didn’t. Though the Hong Long had the look of a shimmering American supermarket, I knew there was no wheat bread or peanut butter. We walked past shelves of shampoo and whitening cream, canisters full of socks, novelty-ice-cream freezers, shining displays of cosmetics. Htan Dah shuffled close behind me as I wandered around orderly, well-lit aisles stocked with cheap candy and ramen and shrimp-flavored peas. When I yelled “Look! Yogurt!” he gave me a stiff smile. I looked around to see if everyone else was being quiet. They weren’t.

  I spent a small fortune—nearly $20, half a week’s stay in a guesthouse—on what staples I could find: containers of dairy, cashews, the store’s single package of cheese, which was orange and processed. I was hungry, or my upwardly mobile Western version of it, and when we stepped out onto the sidewalk and the sun hit my face with the spoils hanging from my fingers in plastic bags, I was triumphant. “Tada!” I sang. My companion looked at me, his face expectant and then vaguely confused. He had turned automatically when I’d trilled the self-satisfied interjection.

  “Oh my god! That’s your name, isn’t it?” I asked. “Do you know that phrase? It means ‘Look what I did!’ or ‘Hooray!’” But Htan Dah’s smile was still pained, and he nodded just barely perceptibly, though I was blathering excitedly, though everything he said in the house seemed to be punctuated with exclamation points. His movements became tense, his steps halted and cautious as we made our way to the motorbike.

  “Didn’t you notice the police(!)?” he asked when we got home.

  No. I hadn’t registered the officer while we were leaving the store. I had noticed Htan Dah’s discomfort and, earlier that morning, that he’d peered out the dining room/garage door repeatedly while we’d been eating breakfast. He’d ultimately gotten up and closed it, blocking out much of the light and the view of anyone who might be walking by. Htan Dah was registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. It said “refugee” right next to his picture on his UNHCR papers. Which is why he’d identified himself that way when I asked him if he’d traveled. He would continue to remind me, a little impatiently, as a substitute for a negative when I’d ask him if he’d ever been to the movies, or driven a car: “I am refugee.”

  But he wasn’t, actually. Thailand never signed the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, and wasn’t bound by the international treaty to recognize and protect them. Though the country formally accepted UNHCR assistance with Burmese refugees in 1998, the agency didn’t have the authority to grant them refugee status there. Thailand refers to the 157,000 Burmese refugees in nine camps within its borders as “displaced persons fleeing fighting”—indeed, the No. 1 answer camp dwellers give when asked the reason for having left Burma is “running away from soldiers.” They are not protected under any laws. Outside the confined sanctuary of the refugee camps, the undocumented nonnationals are, as in most countries, violating immigration statutes.

  Enter one of the world’s most notoriously corrupt police forces,
whose members generate a whole other income by robbing refugees. Those who are caught doing anything outside camp—working, shopping, walking—can be arrested and jailed, fined, deported. The UNHCR has acknowledged that rounded-up refugees have, despite carrying official UNHCR paperwork, been sent back to Burma. Everybody knows, though, that every scuffle with a Thai police officer can be ended with a bribe. Those who can’t afford bribes or, less likely, are picked up by an honest Thai cop, pay too: In the mid-’90s three refugees who were arrested while collecting bamboo outside their camp were sentenced to three years in prison.

  So everyone who lived in the house did so illegally. Every one of them had been arrested at least once, and when Htan Dah said that he could be arrested if he went outside, he didn’t mean that he maybe could possibly be arrested, hypothetically. He meant that if he went outside, his being arrested was entirely, any day, likely—unless he was accompanied by a white person, in front of whom the cop, who looked at our faces and then walked right past, wouldn’t want to do something so unsavory as to blackmail an indigent war victim.

  I had misunderstood Htan Dah before we left. He’d said, “I think it will be okay if you go with me,” not “I think it will be okay if you go with me.” He’d meant not that I would be okay, but that he would. It was ironic that a young woman of European descent was his antidote, since his country’s last 120 years of international and civil war and humanitarian crises partially started with one.

  II.

  PEACE HAS never been Burma’s strong suit.

  Well before the first century BCE, a people called the Pyu settled in what is now north and central Burma, in the great river-veined plains that give way to vast tracts of forested hills. The Pyu were so devoted to love and Buddhism, legend has it, that they wouldn’t even wear silk for fear of imposing on the worms that excreted it. Archeological evidence shows that they set up lovely cities, with irrigation systems, and prayed, and made inscriptions in stone—and warred with each other for power. And then they got sacked.