Burma’s Spring: Real lives in turbulent times (24 page)

‘After I finished my performance I felt really grateful, really light. It’s hard to find venues to do this sort of thing. It’s not normal in Burma. Of course I couldn’t just do that sort of thing anywhere, like in the street. We’d be totally screwed if we tried to do that.’

*

‘Why are we still here?’ They laugh. They complain about the excruciatingly slow Internet connection, petty corruption and frequent power cuts. ‘It’s the same old shit,’
Darko says. But despite their youthful dreams of fleeing Burma, Darko and Emily seem happy where they are, comfortable on home turf and inspired within their close group of artistic friends. Burma is starting to change, they are discovering new freedoms and opportunities, and at last Rangoon feels like a city of possibilities. Is that why they have stayed? In fact, it is for a deeper reason. As for many young Burmese, the Saffron Revolution of 2007, and the government’s violent crackdown, was a turning point in Darko’s life. It made him see, with new, sharp clarity, what his country was really like, and what it really needed.

In September 2007, Darko and his friends had joined one of the street protests. It had felt safe: day by day the protests had grown bigger, and the involvement of thousands of monks seemed to have lent the demonstrators a protective shield. But then the crackdown began. Darko and his friends had left the main march and were walking together through a quiet part of town. A truck of soldiers drove into the street and started shooting; later he found out they were rubber bullets. ‘But they weren’t demonstrators on the streets, they were just people from the streets,’ he said, still confused and disturbed by the memory. ‘I didn’t mean to run. I just ran. We all ran into a building, up the stairs. We were banging on doors, begging people to let us into their apartments. One minute we were heroes, marching along, shouting slogans. But then we were really scared. Very quickly.’

From their vantage point they could see a boy who worked in a teashop. The soldiers approached him. One soldier picked up a stool and hit him hard round the head. He fell down, blood seeping from a cut on his forehead. ‘We were watching from the top of the stairs. We were shaking. He was sent to the hospital. We wanted to tell them that he was just the boy from the teashop.’ A woman walked down the street, carrying a small basket on her way to the market. ‘Get on the ground, get on
the ground!’ yelled one of the soldiers, pointing a rifle in her face. She started to kneel down but, as she did so, she tried to explain to the soldiers that she was just going to the bazaar. A mistake. The soldier slapped her round the face. ‘We could hear that slap from the top of the building,’ Darko said. ‘She fell on the ground. The soldiers screamed at her. “Don’t talk unless I ask you!”’ Bearing witness to this brutality, this injustice, changed Darko’s mindset for good. ‘I changed my mind about leaving,’ he said. ‘I decided to do something for this country. We are not politicians, but what we can do best is be artists. We need good musicians, good poets, good painters. Before that day I was trying to leave my country as soon as possible, but then I realised something. I couldn’t desert this place. This country needs people like me.’

*

Ironically, it was only after Darko had made his decision to stay in Burma that the opportunities to travel abroad actually came up. In 2007, the idea that Side Effect would perform abroad was unimaginable. But five years later, as Burma started to emerge from its cultural hibernation, the band received its first international invitation – to play at an indie music festival in Bali, Indonesia. They played on the same billing as legendary Bali punk band Superman is Dead, and made enough money to buy a drum set for Tser Htoo, and release their debut album
Rainy Night Dreams
.

Next, two documentary makers, Alexander Dluzak and Carsten Piefke, came to Rangoon to make a film about the Burmese punk scene and left with a plan to bring Side Effect to Germany. In December 2012, Darko, Jozeff and Tser Htoo landed in snowy Berlin. It was their first experience of freezing weather, twinkly Christmas lights and short, frosty winter days. They survived wearing borrowed long johns and eating pizza. Two gigs were planned, one at a small club in Hamburg and the second at a big venue in Berlin. Darko loved playing to a more sophisticated audience than he
was used to. ‘In Burma the sound is still quite new to people. It doesn’t fit into their categories and they don’t know how to react.’ In Berlin, the crowd was bouncing from the first beat. When the band played their English-language song ‘Change’ they were wild, some were even stage diving. Darko could hardly believe it was happening. ‘It was dreamlike, magical,’ he told me. ‘We felt like we were in a movie.’

The filmmakers had lent them an apartment, but the band had arrived with virtually no money. They just didn’t have any. ‘We would go into the shop, we didn’t know what to buy, so we just bought frozen pizza every day and put it in the oven. There was a pain in my stomach the whole time. The others were even worse. They just couldn’t stop thinking about rice.’ The Berlin experience reinforced Darko’s love of home, his need to be there, and not just for the food. ‘We’ve realised that this is not like the music scene in the rest of the world. If we were a band in New York City or Berlin we would be just like hundreds of others. Here there is no one else. This city needs Side Effect. I want to show people here that they can have the same things too.’

*

Just after his thirty-second birthday, Darko is reclining on his sofa, resting his bandaged, broken right foot. He’s desperately hoping that the outer metatarsal heals before Side Effect’s next planned trip to Berlin and Copenhagen in the summer. The fracture was caused by a few too many Jägermeisters before a gig, followed by an ill-advised onstage leap. Darko is flossing his teeth as he speaks; he has recently given up his packet-a-day smoking habit. (‘Easy,’ he says.) Emily pops back briefly from the shop in Yuzana Plaza. She has a big order for some brown military-style security guard uniforms and needs the photograph to show her seamstress. Things are changing in Burma, but most of the time things don’t seem dramatically different for
Darko and Emily. They are chronically short of money. ‘You wanna know about everyday life?’ Darko vented in a Facebook post, ‘Quick answer is fucking boring. If boiling hot weather amuses you, that’s fine. If seeing poor people working the whole day for low income makes you feel amazing, that’s okay. If talking with closed-minded people makes you feel like a wise man, no problem. But I’m not okay. I’m stuck and fucked up.’

Of course Darko isn’t satisfied. He is a punk after all. He sees the beginning of a new Burma, some small steps. He no longer has to submit his lyrics to the censor board, and Emily doesn’t need pre-approval for her performances. There is a long way to go, Darko believes. To make his point, he hoists himself up from the couch, hobbles towards me on his steel crutch, pulls up a stool and lifts his leg with two hands to rest his broken foot beside me. He is sitting very close. ‘Freedom means continuing to fight. In the new Burma there are still a lot of things to fight for. They are still the same guys, right? They just took off their uniforms and got another place in power. We can’t be fucking happy till they’re gone.’

FOURTEEN

New Realities

I stepped out of the airport doors into the familiar embrace of Rangoon’s heavy, musty air. Above the taxi rank was a dot matrix display board, confirming the fares to various parts of town. New. I was already starting to lose count of the new things I had noted since I landed forty minutes ago. First the plane was crowded with tourists: middle-aged American couples in Rohan pants and sensible sandals with velcro closures, young German backpackers with ankle tattoos, a Chinese tour party with too much carry-on baggage and brand-new YSL handbags purchased in Bangkok. New. No nerves at the immigration counter. New. Two money exchange counters near the baggage carousels offering competitive rates. New. (Gone was the official counter that used to offer a kyat-dollar conversion more than a hundred times lower than the black-market rate.) Through customs (no more worries about whether they would search my bag, find something incriminating on my laptop) to a counter where I could hire my own mobile phone and SIM card at a very reasonable rate. New. (There was still no international roaming service in Burma, hence the need for a rented phone, but I was far from disappointed – my expectations of communications technology in Burma were extremely low).

Outside there was a line of pristine, white, air-conditioned Toyota taxis and minivans, all with their engines purring, waiting for fares. But when I reached the head of the queue and my cab crawled up, I saw with nostalgia it was an early 1980s, decrepit old banger. I sank into the saggy dampness of the back seat, feeling like I was back in the old days, until – again – I saw something new. In front of me on the
dashboard was a collage of stickers – portraits of the Lady, her father and the peacock emblem of her National League for Democracy party. Two red NLD flags on little cocktail sticks were stuck to the top of the rear-view mirror. The driver looked back at me in the reflection.

‘Do you like our Lady?’ he asked, smiling.

‘Er, yes,’ I hesitated, looking back at him, worriedly. Was that the right answer? Was it a trick? Only two years ago, just whispering Aung San Suu Kyi’s name, even an oblique reference, would have been dangerous. A disgruntled taxi driver might risk a generic ‘life is difficult’ to convey his dissatisfaction with military rule, but many would have been uncomfortable even with that. ‘Yes, Burma very good,’ they would say, with a bitter laugh. Now the once-banned image of the opposition leader was adorning my driver’s car. What’s more, I saw, as we rumbled into town, windows down, that her face was everywhere, on posters pasted to walls and on T-shirts sold from street stalls at every junction.

In a city that had been sealed tight and preserved for decades in mouldering isolation, the signs of change were everywhere. My face at the open window, already covered in a gritty scum from the wet, diesely air, I mentally itemised what was new as we dodged through traffic on Insein Road; a steel-and-glass apartment building at eight-mile junction; an ATM machine built into the side of the shopping centre; a row of neo-classical mansions a half-mile further down the road which had been abandoned mid-construction, now complete and inhabited. We turned down Parami Road with new kerbstones and walkable pavements and a windowless breeze-block building bearing the sign ‘Public Toilet’. Along Kabar Aye Pagoda Road we passed the Sedona Hotel, with its ugly façade of faux-traditional tiered roofs and towers, the
vista that greeted Aung San Suu Kyi each day through her years in captivity in her house across the lake. We crossed the junction and there was a hole in the skyline. What was there before? I couldn’t remember. Whatever it was had been demolished, and the site was cordoned off by corrugated-iron hoardings, ready for redevelopment. We turned right across the traffic into the lane that led us to Golden Valley. On one side of the road was an empty space where once stood my favourite Rangoon store, certainly the most picturesque: a blue, classic VW combi van, stacked up on bricks, one wing removed, selling bananas, baskets of mangos in season, cigarettes, coffee mix and dried noodles. One of the nicest by-products of Rangoon’s time capsule economy was the city’s fleet of fabulous vintage cars, including sleek 1960s Mercedes and the smiling VW vans.

*

It was September 2013 and I was back in Rangoon to teach a week-long journalism course held at a diplomats’ club with a clear blue swimming pool and neatly tended garden. The smell of fried food lingered in the dining room: fish and chips and pie and mash were mainstays of the menu. A former diplomat pitched up at the club at eleven every morning, sweating from his hot car journey, and ordered a Myanmar Beer. Excited by Burma’s nascent economic reforms, he had quit his diplomatic career to set up a business consultancy with his Burmese wife, to advise twenty-first-century prospectors on how best to make a buck out of the new Burma. He didn’t have an office yet, so he had set up a workspace next to the bar.

Unsure about how open we could be in this fast-changing nation, the course organisers had chosen a safe venue and we had worried that the young Burmese participants would be nervous about talking politics. But the journalists quickly pointed out our misconceptions about what was holding back their freedom of speech:
‘We can say what we like on the Internet, it’s just that we can’t afford to use it!’ They arrived an hour early each day to take advantage of the free Wi-Fi and coffee. Most of them in their early twenties, they talked as if the big news landmarks of the last quarter century – the 1988 uprising, the 1996 student revolt, the Saffron Revolution of 2007 – were just notes in history; they seemed ready to move on. At an end-of-course drinks party at the same panoramic restaurant where I had nervously interviewed the former prisoner Win Tin, I met the respected Burmese author and newspaper editor U Pe Myint. He wore a formal apricot-coloured jacket over a white shirt, and ankle-length
longyi
. I told him about the confidence of the young journalists, their high expectations. ‘Those of us who are older have felt so many disappointments, it’s hard for us to feel like this. But the young people don’t feel it. They don’t know how it feels to be disappointed.’

The next afternoon I had the novel experience of asking the driver of a taxi I flagged down on the street to take me to the NLD offices on Shwegondine Road. I felt no fear, and he exhibited no surprise: the crowded, ramshackle offices of Aung San Suu Kyi’s party had become a magnet for foreign tourists. They were unlikely to catch a glimpse of the Lady herself, who now spent most of her time in Naypyidaw as a sitting MP and had drastically cut down her media interviews and public appearances. But visitors were at least able to stock up on NLD kitsch – stickers, key chains, mugs and T-shirts, bearing the Lady’s image or the peacock emblem of her party.

The military intelligence agents, once a constant presence across the road, were gone. People moved freely in and out of the offices, which had changed little since my last visit: peeling walls, creaking fans, images of Suu Kyi gazing down from every wall. The hot downstairs room was full to bursting, despite the new overspill premises the party had leased next door. Informal committee meetings were convened at trestle
tables, a photography exhibition was being set up at the back. I looked for Peter, the young NLD volunteer with whom I had chatted while waiting to interview Suu Kyi. He wasn’t around, but plenty of other young party members were – fresh blood for what had once been an ageing party. The NLD’s technologically savvy twenty-somethings had established a new research unit, an attempt perhaps to decentralise power from Suu Kyi, for whom the transition from dissident democracy heroine to a working politician had not been an easy one.