For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question Page 3

  Though the Pyu’s religion ultimately survived as Burma’s primary, they were absorbed into other migrating and conquering cultures. One was the Mranma, typically transliterated as Myanma, colloquially pronounced Bama, also called Burman, now commonly called Burmese.2 Today, they are Burma’s dominant group, in all meanings of the word. But back then, they were just one ethnocultural group intermarrying and -mingling with other ethnocultural groups in their kingdom, which was in the north of the country. There was also the Mon kingdom in the south, and princely Shan in the northeast, and elsewhere Chin, and Kachin, and Arakanese. And among yet many others, there was another group, who some historians have posited were actually Burma’s original settlers. Nobody quite knows where they came from; likely, it was from the north. But whenever, and from wherever, the Karen got to Burma, many settled in the hills running the border with what is now Thailand. They came to call the land Kaw Thoo Lei: land of—depending on the interpretation—white flowers, or no blemishes, or no evil. For centuries, they lived, as French explorer Henri Mouhot commented in the mid-nineteenth century, “on almost inaccessible heights . . . for the sake of their independence.” Though remote, those inaccessible heights are fertile, covered in mixed deciduous forest: hardwoods, ferns, bushes, bamboo, a lush flush of green over the mountains, which they quietly farmed.

  Since Htan Dah grew up in a refugee camp, he’d never lived on that land, but it was what he struggled to regain as an employee of BA. If he inhabited a peaceful Kaw Thoo Lei, currently labeled on a Burmese map as the misleadingly autonomous-sounding Karen State, his life would look much like that of the area’s original settlers. He would live in a hut he’d built, with the help of his neighbors, out of bamboo and thatch. He’d fetch water for drinking and cooking and cleaning from a stream or river running near the village, in which he could also catch fish. He’d collect eggs from his chickens and maybe there’d be pigs living under his elevated house, and after a rice-based breakfast he’d spend some of the day cultivating more rice and vegetables in a nearby field before returning to his home, which would rest in the shade of coconut palms and papaya, in a village of twenty or a hundred households. At the end of the day, fires would be lit all around to prepare rice with produce and meat, probably caught, possibly turtle, snake, fish, lizard, monkey, boar. Once in a great while, and even less often these days, given their dwindling numbers, someone might kill a tiger. And as daylight and the smell of cook smoke dissolved, frangipani would perfume the crisp, tree-filtered air while Htan Dah visited with other villagers over rice wine, gossiping over the sounds of settling livestock and screeching creatures coming out to take over the night. A general outline of his year could be sketched by the Karen names for the thirteen months of the lunar calendar: tha lay, searching; tay ku, cutting; thwee kaw, drying and burning; lah kli, seed; de nya, lilies; lah kü, month of the farm; lah nwee, seventh month; lah ho, eighth month; lah köo, many lizards; si muh, little sun; si sah, little starlight; lah naw, oilseed; lah plu, spirits of the dead. To ensure the feeding of his family, he would work hard and often, together with other men and women of his village, independent, irenic, all set about with acacia trees.

  Or as British Major John James Snodgrass would put it in the early nineteenth century:The houses of these strange people are of the most miserable description—mere pigeon houses perched in the air on poles, with a notched stick, as the sole means of egress and ingress to the dwelling; they are, however, well adapted for protecting their inmates from the ravages of the periodical deluge, and the still more destructive inroads of prowling tigers, in which the woods abound. The Carians, although the quietest, and most harmless people in the world are nevertheless of the strongest and most robust frame. . . . The women generally bear the marks of premature old age, probably from a too liberal share of the hard work falling to them, which, in more civilized countries, devolves wholly upon the male inhabitants.3

  These tribes’ lifestyle had long been disparaged by the Burmans, too. “Karen” was, to them, a classification for illiterate, swiddenfarming, animist (read: non-Buddhist) lowlifes—not a particularly respected culture, not when some of the other cultures were building a magnificent civilization.

  Even back in the time of the Pyu, Burma was an important trade route, nestled, as it is, between south-central China and easternmost India, on the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea, the western edge of the Southeast Asian peninsula. By the sixteenth century, it was a center of world commerce, with towns modern, rich, and populous, where you could get anything: painted cloth from Masulipatam, Bornean camphor, Sumatran pepper, Chinese porcelain and cotton and sandalwood, wools and velvets and scarlets from Europe. Rich in trade, metals, and gems—and with flatlands of Mesopotamian fecundity—Burma was valuable indeed. Westerners passing through, whether Italian, Portuguese, or English, were uniformly impressed. “The accounts [of] all these travelers,” commented a writer later reviewing their reports, “even when every deduction has been made for glamour and its consequent exaggeration, prove that this empire, established on the delta of the Irawadi, was in the sixteenth century possessed of a might, a wealth, a splendour and an importance which have never since been approached in these regions.”

  But what Burma also boasted in abundance was war. In 1057, one Burman king had kicked off a fight for dominance of the whole country, from which point on the Burmans and Mon and Shan engaged in constant and mighty battle. And though the fights were largely for property and plenty, they certainly weren’t free from ethnic issues. One eighteenth-century Burman king, Alaungpaya, recruited forces to take the country back from the Mon with a partly us-versus-Mon platform, then sent his opponents the gift of a thousand bodiless Mon heads. And where there was war and ethnic chauvinism, there was brutal Karen oppression. Being backward and backwoods and considered little better than dogs, they were subject to slave raids and the heavy taxation of whoever was winning—usually the Burmans. And, Karen lore has it, Alaungpaya’s troops destroyed their villages when passing through en route to eastern military campaigns, just for fun.

  So when the British came into Burma swinging in 1824, the Karen had little trouble picking sides. Alaungpaya’s son was waging a policy of wild expansionism that his conquer-happy father had instituted, and he’d finally extended his territory right up to the edge of British India. Britain had some military might and hostility to spare now that it had dispensed with Napoleon. The civilizations had failed to achieve adequate diplomatic ties; the time had come for them to clash. When Burmese armies encroached into a British protectorate, the soldiers of the English East India Company went to war. And not everyone they encountered in what was technically enemy territory was hostile. Major Snodgrass, whatever his feelings about the Karen standard of living, was quite a bit more gracious in describing their character, writing again in his awesomely titled Narrative of the Burmese War, Detailing the Operations of Major-General Sir Archibald Campbell’s Army, from Its Landing at Rangoon in May 1824, to the Conclusion of a Treaty of Peace at Yandaboo, in February 1826:These people appeared heartily glad to see us, and cheerfully assisted in repairing the roads; they also brought ducks, fowls, and other articles for sale, for which they found a ready and most profitable market. They willingly undertook to carry letters and communications from one corps of the army to another; and no instance occurred of their having deceived or disappointed their employers. They seemed most anxious for the expulsion of Maha Silwah, from Mophee, (only five miles distant,) and gave much useful information regarding his strength and situation. . . . [The next day] The column marched in order of attack upon Mophee, and arrived in front of the old fort about eight o’clock in the morning: the advance guard immediately pushed forward to the work, and the enemy was seen rushing into the jungle in the greatest dismay and confusion. Our approach seemed to have been wholly unknown and unexpected; we found their dinners cooking, and every thing bore the appearance of a hasty flight. It certainly reflected no small honour on the good faith of our Carian friend
s, that our movements, known to so many, should have been so inviolably kept secret.

  But however well things were going with the Karen, not so much for the war with the rest of Burma, which was, by one historian’s estimate, the longest and most expensive in British India, costing it 15,000 soldiers. The Burmese fought like hell. Even after Burma’s king realized his forces were far outmatched by Western firepower, even after the destruction of his entire navy and army and officer corps, he threw an army of conscripted, barely armed peasants at the British, the only men Burma had left, before finally giving up—after two years—some territory and a lot of reparations. The Burmese were hardly itching for another go-around less than thirty years later, when the British, looking for a fight and more territory, invaded again in 1852. Again, the British engaged the resisting Burmese and won, much more easily this time, and annexed the southern province of Pegu, dividing the country into sovereign Upper Burma and Lower Burma of the British Empire.

  In addition to the battle, that Second Anglo-Burmese War sparked two other ugly fights. Party to the European victory were the Karen, who had once more acted as guides for the invaders. The British stormed Shwedagon Pagoda, the ancient 300-foot-tall golden stupa that enshrines eight of the Lord Gautama Buddha’s hairs, the most sacred site in a devoutly Buddhist country; the Burmans destroyed the crops of nearby lowland Karen, murdered children in rice mortars, and burned villages for miles around.

  The other nasty scene was unfolding in the ruling palace of what was left of Burma, where a war between loyalists and revolutionaries ended when Mindon Min overthrew his half-brother king and assumed the crown. That coup begat more violence: After Mindon Min’s death one of his sons ascended the throne by executing many of the other heirs. So it was that the Royal Thibaw Min, King of the Umbrella-Bearing Chiefs, the Arbiter of Existence, the Great Lord of Righteousness, was consecrated Burma’s final monarch amid the (depending on whom you ask) strangling or clubbing or elephant-trampling to death of princesses and princes in big pretty red velvet sacks, dozens of royal family members slaughtered. It was just a regular old reign-securing measure, but it made a mean splash in newspapers in England,4 which was looking for an excuse to depose the sovereign leader and take over the rest of the lucrative Southeast Asian kingdom it already largely controlled.

  Such an excuse, the story goes, finally presented itself in the form of that aforementioned young woman of European descent: Mattie Calogreedy, a half-Greek, half-Burmese palace maid who was having an affair with a French engineer of the Burmese king’s. When Pierre (seriously) went home to Paris and returned with a French wife in tow, a scorned Calogreedy slept with a Burmese administrator in exchange for an incriminating secret document, which she handed over to the British, which contained proof of their worst nightmare: an alliance between the Burmese and the French(!). The Times of London called for war. The French, who’d tried to take India and were well on their way to establishing French Indochina, neither confirmed that they had Burma’s back nor denied that they were up to something. The Burmese, conveniently, fined a Scottish trading company for failure to pay royalties. The British demanded, among other things, that Burma submit the matter to an arbiter and, oh, relinquish its sovereignty in the manner of Afghanistan before it. Thibaw, the last king of Burma, the Arbiter of Existence, prepared for combat. He couldn’t win, and he knew it, but the Burmese were going to die fighting before they’d live without trying to maintain rule over what was rightfully theirs.

  Having prevailed in the Third Anglo-Burmese War in just a few weeks, the British deposed Thibaw and shipped him and his wife off to exile. It was 1885. The Western victors didn’t realize it at the time, of course, but their battles on that field were just beginning—as were those between the Burmans and the Karen.

  III.

  “SO,” THE Blay said, smiling at me in a way that was more cocky than friendly, the way I soon realized was just the way he smiled. It was my second morning at BA. He’d asked me to a meeting after breakfast, and he, Htan Dah, and a couple of other guys sat across from me in the living room, in the white plastic chairs. Htan Dah was holding a notebook and ready pen, which for some reason made me nervous. “You are English teacher.”

  “Yes. ...” It was true that I taught college composition, and that in America such courses are generally classified as “English.” I suspected, though, that this was a cultural nuance that didn’t translate. I hadn’t explained it in my introductory email to BA that said, “Hello there. I’ve been interested in volunteering on the Thai-Burma border for some time. I am an English instructor at the University of New Orleans. Do you need volunteers?” because I’d assumed that if they did need volunteers, a longer dialogue about my possible contributions would ensue. Instead, all that followed was a message sayingWe welcome to be the volunteer with BA.

  We would like you to teach English writing skills such as memo, letter and statement writing to our staff and/or share your skills of computer, for example Microsoft offices program, or helping staff for translating document to English.

  For accommodation, if you stay and live with our staff (the staff share bedroom together), you can learn their lifestyle, learn more on Burma issues and have experiences. If you are flexible about food you can eat with us (traditional food).

  And then one more asking what time someone should meet me at the airport. And apparently even that limited job description, written by someone in Bangkok, hadn’t made it to Mae Sot before my arrival.

  “I’m sorry,” The Blay was apologizing. “I thought before you were strategic planner.”

  “I don’t even know what that is,” I said, though it did explain why The Blay had, over stick soup my first night, told me he had some objectives or something for me to look over, to which I’d responded, though I’d had no idea what he was talking about, “Okay.” Ta Mla must have cleared up the confusion, relaying what he’d learned at breakfast yesterday about my profession. His vocabulary seemed so limited that I hadn’t tried clarifying the difference between an English teacher and an English teacher to him, either.

  So here was The Blay asking me if I could organize and teach two classes, one in basics to beginning students, like Ta Mla, who barely spoke English, and one in article/essay/memo/letter writing to advanced students, like The Blay, who spoke it pretty well. The advanced class would run from ten in the morning to noon, and the beginners’ from one to three, every day. The Blay was either not daunted by or not comprehending my explanation that I had approximately no qualifications for teaching English as a second language, particularly to students whose language I didn’t speak. I had two days to prepare.

  “I need to be at professional level,” The Blay said. He moved to the table against the front wall of the room, where his laptop was set up, and clicked on something that launched “Say You, Say Me” on loop, adjourning the conversation. As the rest of the group dispersed, Htan Dah ushered me into the adjoining narrow, cramped computer room, where three of the desks were occupied. He gestured at the lone available one and told me I was free to use it for my classwork.

  I sat down at the computer with a notebook and pen. Originally a Midwesterner and constitutionally a nerd, I was instantly energized by being handed an assignment that was potentially too big and too far outside my abilities to complete. And I’d been feeling much better. I’d been negotiating the squat toilet without incident. Also, the night before, I’d walked into the bathroom with my towel, shut the giant wooden door behind me, and stripped off my clothes. I’d stood next to the high trough holding a plastic bowl of icy water and taken just a few breaths before dumping the contents down my neck and chest. My body went rigid and my heart into hard beats with the shock of it, and it took a lot of goes before the wet became more refreshing than traumatizing, but I was clean. We’d had more from that bottomless pot of stick soup, but I was snacking on yogurt and nuts, so my stomach wasn’t so achingly empty. At night, the darkness in my room was so complete that I felt warmly, tightly wrapp
ed in it, and I fell asleep listening to the lizards chirping on the ceiling, one of which had crapped on me. Now, my morale high, I started searching the Internet for do-it-yourself ESL courses while the same soothing Lionel Richie song played over and over in the background.

  After several hours, I took my notebook back into the living room and sat down to do some brainstorming on my lesson plan. Near me, in a chair in front of the TV, sat an unfamiliar face bearing a wicked scar. His hair was cut military close, and he was lean but well cut, like most of the other guys.

  “Very beautiful,” he said after a while, and I looked up to see him nodding at Christina Aguilera dancing around the screen in bursting silver lamé.

  I smiled and agreed.

  “Where do you come from?”

  “The United States,” I said. “Do you live here?”

  “No. In camp.” Christina Aguilera went through three costume changes in her music video before he asked, “Do your parents have divorce?”

  “Are my parents divorced?” I started laughing. “Yes, actually, they are. Most people’s parents are divorced in the United States.”

  He nodded steadily. Yes, he’d heard of this. “You are very lucky!” he said with his eye on the TV. I wasn’t sure what to say to that. “You have democracy! You want divorce, you get. You want go, you leave. How did you get here?”

  “I flew here. On a plane.”

  More nodding. “How much it costs?”