Burma’s Spring: Real lives in turbulent times (11 page)

The nationalisation of their business set the royal family on a track of downward mobility, their declining fortunes mirroring that of Burma itself, which slid down the league tables of economic prosperity. Taw Paya’s four sons have led unexceptional lives – a boat builder, a security guard, a policeman and a driving instructor. His nephew, the great-grandson of King Thibaw, is a failed artist and down-and-out. ‘Quite honestly, he lives in a mud hut,’ Taw Paya told me, allowing himself a little chuckle. The heir to the throne himself had recently downsized to the bungalow, where his two daughters looked after him. He seemed happy with his lot. ‘We have a TV in every room,’ he said. ‘And I’m very fond of the
Reader’s Digest
.’

*

Under its new name of Pyin Oo Lwin, the colonial haven of Maymyo grew as a military base under the junta’s rule, as the home to the Defence Services Academy, Burma’s equivalent of Sandhurst or West Point. The next morning, a Saturday, I sat in
a coffee shop and watched young army cadets in white starched jackets wandering through town on their morning off, swinging plastic bags containing their purchases of toothpaste, biscuits and blankets. In the booth next to me, a pair of young soldiers sat in desultory conversation with two demure, beautiful, long-haired girls.

Each April, Burma’s hottest month, the then junta leader Than Shwe would come to Maymyo for a holiday, and stay at Flagstaff, the residence built for the British commanding officers. ‘When they come they bring a huge entourage,’ said Taw Paya. ‘The whole town is closed down.’ Than Shwe’s pretentions to royal status were well known. His palatial residence in Naypyidaw had pillars of jade and marble, and his family reputedly referred to each other using royal titles. Footage of his daughter’s lavish 2006 wedding, leaked on to the Internet, showed the bride wearing a necklace of cherry-sized diamonds and her new husband pouring champagne over a cascade of glasses. At Flagstaff, the wives of the commanding officers would attend to Than Shwe’s wife like ladies-in-waiting. The president’s court would treat Maymyo like a playground, the prince said, commandeering taxis and restaurants with no suggestion of payment, and the wives of senior officers would get dolled up and walk around town, taking things from shops whenever they felt like it. ‘They think they’re entitled,’ Taw Paya harrumphed.

Thibaw’s living heir had no political aspirations. Would he like to be king? ‘Don’t be foolish. Politics is such a cheating game. I’ve never thought about it.’ He did allow himself a little royal vanity, however. When we met, his life story had just been serialised in a popular Burmese women’s magazine. Remembering this, he leapt up from his chair, rummaged through a pile of books and papers, and pulled out copies of the articles complete with black and white photos of his parents and grandparents. Scanning the Burmese text wistfully, he translated parts for my benefit.
Taw Paya’s identity was defined by events that occurred before his birth, and having it all laid out in print seemed to be a comfort. ‘These articles were very popular actually,’ he said, shyly. ‘The sympathy for us is still quite strong.’

That evening, rather than face the dining room at the hotel, I went into town for dinner. The town’s horse carts lined up in a rank by the Purcell clock tower, a gift from Queen Victoria. There were fruit and flower stalls, a well-lit shop selling baby clothes and plastic toys from China, a pharmacy and a photography studio. Several shops had knitted cardigans and sweaters hung up outside for sale – this was one of the few places in Burma where you would need them.

Maymyo has a large Gurkha population, descendants of colonial Indian Army soldiers who have lived in the town for generations. I followed a handmade sign to a small Nepalese restaurant on a back street behind the main shopping drag. The restaurant consisted of a few plastic tables on the ground floor of a wooden house with a bare dirt floor. Two women in saris were cooking in the back, and my waitress was a friendly girl in jeans and a jumper, who presented me with a feast of vegetable and chicken curries, pickles and chapattis on a stainless steel plate. I was the only customer, and the waitress stood right next to me and watched me eat. She had just completed a geography degree at Mandalay University. I told her I had studied geography too, in London. ‘Really?’ she said. ‘I would like to go there. I would like to go there too and study geography again.’ It would be expensive, I warned her, but there might be scholarships she could apply for. ‘Oh, money is not a problem for us,’ she said, sweeping her arm in a proprietorial arc across the dingy restaurant. ‘This is all ours.’

SIX

Born on 8.8.88

If Monk Owen hadn’t left his village he would be spending each day cutting wood in the forest, looking forward to watching a Korean soap opera on the black-and-white TV, a night’s sleep, then doing the same again the next day. His horizons would be bounded by the Irrawaddy River on one side, the forest on the other. He wouldn’t have known that although its people were poor, Burma was rich in jade, teak and natural gas. He wouldn’t have wanted to make a difference. Monk Owen is the perfect example of how education can change everything.

Owen’s parents were woodcutters in the small village of Chaung Ma Gyi in Sagaing Division in upper Burma. When their second child, a boy, was delivered in their bamboo and thatch hut on the auspicious date of 8 August 1988, or 8.8.88, his mother was delighted. Astrology and numerology are highly significant in Burmese culture, and Owen’s birthdate heralded good fortune for her firstborn son. Living in remote, rural Burma, with only the doctored news of the state television channel for information, Owen’s mother did not know that on the very day she was giving birth, tens of thousands of demonstrators were on the streets of the Burmese capital Rangoon, demanding an end to one-party rule. Nor did she know that by the end of the day, a bloody crackdown had begun. News of the uprising wended its way up the four hundred and fifty miles of rutted highway, dirt track and silty river to reach the village in time for the baby boy’s Buddhist naming ceremony, held, according to tradition, some three months after the birth. Sanda Kyaw Htin, ‘Famous Brave Revolution’, his proud mother named him, as a line of maroon-robed monks chanted from the holy texts.

If a sense of destiny surrounded Owen’s entry into the world, his early years in the village were unremarkable. Like characters in a Grimm Brothers fairy tale, his mother and father, each armed with an axe, laboured in the forest all day. The children were left to roam the woods, climbing trees, sometimes fishing in the river. Each monsoon season, the rains would wash away the dirt road, leaving the village accessible only by the river. The family usually had enough to eat, but in lean times they would seek extra rice from the village’s Buddhist monastery. Owen’s infant years were carefree, but from an early age, he had a sense that something was missing. ‘I knew I wasn’t getting an education. I was very eager to learn. In the next village there were children who went to the government school, they wore green and white uniforms. I really wanted to go to school like them.’ Although state-run schools in Burma are nominally free, the extra costs of uniforms, books and under-the-desk payments to teachers mean that the very poorest families cannot afford to enrol their children at school. The alternative for hard-up Buddhist parents is to send their offspring to monasteries as novice monks and nuns, where they are taught to read, write and memorise religious texts, subsisting on food collected in their black alms bowls. By the time he was eight years old, Owen had four younger siblings, and the family’s economic situation was deteriorating fast. Owen’s parents were left with little choice: they shaved their son’s unruly black hair and packed him off to the whitewashed, gold-tipped monastery.

*

The history of Buddhism in Burma is believed to date back more than two thousand years, to the Buddha’s time. In the eleventh century, King Anawrahta introduced the Theravada tradition, practised by some 90 per cent of Burma’s population today. It is a religion is woven into the fabric of daily life. A column of serene, shaven-headed
monks gliding down the roadside at daybreak is one of the country’s enduring images. Burma has an estimated 400,000 monks, both those ordained for life, the
pongyi
, and boys whose families send them to the monastery as novices. Many Burmese men also take up temporary monastic residence later in life, and some return regularly for brief periods, as a kind of retreat. Most Burmese Buddhists follow the Theravada school that holds strictly to the teachings of Lord Buddha, as contained in a collection of his writings. Life as a monk is austere, with no possessions permitted except for their robes, velvet slippers and an alms bowl. A Buddhist monk should not eat after midday, should sleep on a hard surface, and eschew money and consumer goods. Buddhism esteems selflessness and good works, or ‘making merit’. Although the clergy, the
sangha
, are in close contact with the Burmese people, on the streets, in the market, and even in private homes where they go to receive food offerings, they are the most revered members of society. A layperson must be careful not to step on a monk’s shadow.

The fabled city of Mandalay, once the seat of Burmese kings, is the country’s spiritual heart. Today it is a scrappy, low-rise sprawl, rising from the haze of the Irrawaddy plain. But it is also home to tree-shaded teak monasteries and tens of thousands of monks. In a tin-roofed teashop across the street from the walls of Phaung Daw Oo Monastery School, Monk Owen is sitting with his friends, a crimson-robed shoulder hunched over a glass of sugary tea. Behind him, a chef ladles the custardy mixture for rice pancakes on to an oily griddle, generating a perfect pile of air-filled mon’ pyar thalet with a balletic economy of movement. The customers, including a group of uniformed police officers sitting cross-legged on the low plastic chairs, have an eye on a football match from the English Premiership – Fulham versus Liverpool on an LG flat-screen TV. Owen is twenty-three. He has a shaven head, of course,
broad smooth cheeks, and the tilt of his chocolate-brown eyes suggest a perpetual smile. He has capable English; he keeps having to raise his voice to compete with the babble of the teashop, the excited football commentary, Burmese pop music and revving motorbikes on the street outside.

Owen grew to adolescence in the rural monastery. He was bored. He had read every spiritual text, every pamphlet and book he could find in the village. He still yearned to go to school. One day, a trader from Mandalay arrived, selling Chinese-made plastic goods – baskets, basins, pegs and twine. He came to the monastery to meditate. ‘I asked him where I could go for an education for free,’ said Owen, and the merchant promised he would make enquiries for him at the monastic school in the city. He was true to his word. The fairy tale had a happy ending. ‘I was fifteen when I made it to Mandalay,’ Owen told me. ‘They tested my level of knowledge and I was put into the kindergarten with kids who were five years old. That’s when my life began.’

Owen learned very quickly, and his first discovery was how little he knew. ‘I didn’t know anything about the world, about history, about my country,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know anything beyond my forest and Buddha.’ He eagerly sought out facts, inhaling information that he had missed out on in childhood. He practised his arithmetic, perfected his handwriting, studied maps and took an English dictionary to his sleeping mat after evening prayers. He asked a British woman visiting Phaung Daw Oo to give him an English name; she chose Owen. He sped through the academic years, and devoured the books in the monastic school’s small library. He soon began to learn things about his country that made him angry. ‘For example, I did not know that Burma is a rich country. It has many natural resources, but in our country the people are very poor, and the rulers are very rich.’ He discovered that the
military government’s spending on weapons and defence dwarfed its budget for health and education. He found out that Burma used to be the world’s greatest rice exporter but was now as poor as a sub-Saharan African nation. He lowered his voice conspiratorially. ‘I read a lot. We have teakwood, jewels and natural gas. We have jade and rubber. Where does the money go?’

*

Owen clutches my elbow and charts a dangerous course across a street busy with bicycles, speeding motorbikes (permitted in Mandalay),
saiq-kas
and overloaded commuter pickup trucks. We walk through the unmarked gate of the walled monastery. The harsh heat of the day is easing, and young novices, their robes tied up like bulky nappies, are playing football on the patch of open ground that sits beside a brand-new three-storey dormitory block, built with ‘merit-making’ donations. Their day’s study and prayer over, groups of teenage monks lean out over the balconies, chatting and laughing. The school, which opened in the early 1990s, now has more than six thousand pupils, including two hundred and fifty novice nuns in their fine, pale pink robes. The children come from all over upper Burma, the sons and daughters of poor farmers from the northern states of Shan, Chin and Sagaing. They are the lucky ones; they have left behind illiterate parents and siblings for this golden opportunity of a free education. In the school office, open to the garden on two sides, a group of students is huddled around a large, old PC, and skinny cats stretch out in arcs on the warm marble floor. Bunches of bare electrical wires run across the top of the walls and a sign is taped next to a poster of the Lord Buddha.

Here! The Children can pursue their studies cheerfully

Without charging entry fee or certificate fee

Without collecting monthly or yearly fee

Without receiving offertory for teachers

Any fee is not charged!

The young monks rise at 4 a.m., wash their faces and clean the monastery for the first hour of the day. They go on their early morning alms round, collecting food in their bowls for breakfast and lunch. Breakfast is eaten at 8 a.m. The children study until midday, break for lunch (the remnants of their alms) and take lessons again until 4 p.m. The students meditate, pray and do their homework. It is a simple, disciplined day, but Owen feels greatly privileged. ‘We are the fortunate ones,’ he said. ‘We are learning, as young people should. When I see children working in the teashop or picking up plastic bags and empty bottles I feel bad. It should not be like this. Burmese families cannot afford to send their children to school or look after them, so they go to work for a few kyat a day.’