Burma’s Spring: Real lives in turbulent times (27 page)

*

It was time for evening prayers in the Muslim dominated suburb of Mingalar Taung Nyunt, and the wooden cubbyholes outside the entrance to the mosque were filled with shoes. Young boys in white crocheted caps kicked off their flip-flops and hurried inside to the madrasa to join their classmates reciting the Koran in a collective, high-pitched drone. Headscarfed women sat at pavement stalls frying golden samosas for when the worshippers emerged. Cars growled up the street behind them, their progress slowed by potholes, food wagons and barely supervised children playing under the dim sodium lamps. The scene was just as it should have been at nightfall, and as it had been for decades. But if I had come to Mingalar Taung Nyunt just a week before, I would have found something very different.

For several months after the deadly riots in Meiktila, normal life in Mingalar Taung Nyunt came to a halt. Residents were frightened, and, having no faith that the police would protect them in the face of attack, went about organising their own defences. The road where I was standing had been closed to traffic, and each end shut off with makeshift corrugated tin barricades. Every side street and alleyway was guarded by a group of men, and at intervals along the street were stashed wooden clubs and iron bars, kept under lock to be used in the event of attack. The men of the neighbourhood had organised themselves into vigilante cells and, taking it in turns to sleep, would patrol until dawn. The familiar rhythm of life had disappeared, their businesses shunned, their children taunted at school. ‘Go back to India! Go back to Bangladesh!’ the son of one of the vigilantes was told. ‘My son was totally confused. He always believed he was from Burma. I too have always considered myself as a Burmese.’

But as months passed without violence, the Muslims of Mingalar Taung Nyunt felt an easing of tension. Eventually, the community leaders decided to dismantle the barricades that divided them from the Buddhist quarters next door. The arms caches were removed, and I walked freely down the little side streets to peer into the living rooms which had always opened directly on to the street, where families ate and watched television, with little distinction between their private and public lives. At the corner teashop, where cigarette lighters hung down on strings for customers to light their cheroots, an old man with a grey stubble beard and milky blue eyes came and sat down next to me. The violence of the past year had not been spontaneous, he told me; hardliners in the military, perturbed by the pace of reform, were fomenting trouble, creating a pretext for the army to maintain power in Burma. In Sittwe, Meiktila and Lashio security forces had stood by while Muslims were killed, the elderly man said.
In the lead-up to elections in 2015, sectarian relations would deteriorate, he predicted. The old man was born in Burma, as were his ancestors, for as far back as the family can remember. ‘My great-great-grandfather was a soldier in the royal army of King Mindon,’ he said. ‘I have records, I can show you.’ This man was born under Japanese occupation. His family had survived the war and avoided the mass expulsion of the 1960s. He had suffered discrimination all his life, he said, but had never experienced a time like this. ‘This transition time is dangerous,’ he told me. ‘Some people are winners; some are not. They want someone to blame, and it is we Muslims. For us, this is the worst time we have known.’

*

Back downtown, at the Bengali Sunni Jameh mosque, Maung Maung Myint’s phone kept bleeping at his belt. Respected for his cool head and his sensible decision-making abilities, he had become a leader of the neighbourhood watch groups across the city, with activities coordinated by SMS. ‘If anything happens I hear about it in a few minutes. Across the country, I know what is happening. Just fifteen minutes at the most and I will have a report.’ Maung Maung Myint knows retaliation could spell disaster for Burma’s Muslims. ‘We supervise our community not to be violent,’ he said, but acknowledged he was a dove among ever-proliferating hawks. He had lost weight in the last year and some of his instinctive good humour. The stress of moderation had taken its toll. But he would not hear talk of leaving Burma. ‘This is where I was born,’ he said. ‘I am loyal to this land, and,
Inshallah
, this is where I will die.’

SIXTEEN

Come Back Home

Things are better now, Mu Mu says, now she has a passport, a proper ID. No one can get her now. She’s safe. She’s got a good job, for an American lady, a single mother – well, almost a single mother: the daddy isn’t around much, he’s usually in Jakarta or some other city. There are two children and a very big dog; she was scared of the dog at first, but now she’s used to it. Jenny pays her well, and she can cook now. She forgot to tell me that Jenny has taught her all sorts of recipes and she cooks the family meal every night. They all sit down together to eat. ‘Can you imagine,’ she says, ‘Me as a cook?’

Mu Mu is back in Bangkok. I emailed her and she agreed to meet me on a Sunday evening as I passed through the city on my way home from Rangoon. We are sitting in my small hotel room, me on the edge of the bed, she on the chair. I offer her a drink – some tea, something from the minibar? She has anticipated that, and pulls out a small carton of juice from her bag, with a little straw attached. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve got my own,’ she says. Mu Mu hates to be any trouble.

It’s more than a year since she left the refugee camp. She is still carrying the extra weight she gained at the crisp factory: her short limbs look rounded and puffy, her once tiny waistline has thickened. She points all this out to me, of course. And she has aged. There are no creases or dark spots on her still beautiful, twenty-seven-year-old face, but a new hardness – eventually, the disappointment and injustice were bound to exact their toll.

*

Mu Mu’s friend Wan was one of the last to leave Mae La for America. The ritual of waving off the air-conditioned buses, as the chosen few headed for the glass-and-steel airport in Bangkok and onward to a new life, had lifted the spirits of those who remained behind. A few more left the camp for ‘third countries’ but after that there seemed to be a noticeable drop-off in activity by United Nations staff, and then they stopped coming altogether. The camp’s residents were told nothing. Mu Mu’s life continued as normal, drinking tea in the cool early morning, off to work at the potato chip shack, then back to wash her clothes in her plastic basin, dinner cooked over a charcoal burner, a gathering of friends in one of the huts. But, with no punctuation, the simple life began to lose its appeal. The realisation that there would be no happy ending to her story, not this time – no airline tickets, no visas, no warm jackets and proper shoes – descended on her slowly, silently, until it weighed on her so heavily she could no longer ignore it. The resettlement programme was ending. As the world saw it, things were getting better in Burma, while getting worse in plenty of other places. Around the globe there were new crises, new despots to worry about and new refugees whose needs were greater. The persecuted people of Burma had become last decade’s cause.

Across the border from the camp, in Karen state, Mu Mu’s homeland, the world’s longest guerrilla struggle had come to a standstill. The Karen National Union, the insurgent army that had been fighting the Burmese government without pause since 1949, had agreed to cease fire. With dreams of creating its own mountain state with the mythical-sounding name of Kawthoolei, the KNU had held out through every truce agreed by the other ethnic groups over the decades, its demands unmet and compromise inconceivable. But, in 2011, there came a push by Burma’s new civilian
leaders to bring an end to the long and costly war, which had been the theatre of some of the most despicable atrocities – rape, child abductions and sadistic executions – of the modern age. An historic ceasefire agreement, signed in early 2012 in Mu Mu’s hometown of Hpa’an, would help the Burmese government persuade foreign powers, such at the United States, to relax economic sanctions. President Thein Sein was starting to normalise relations with the Western nations that had once spurned Burma, and by November that year his reform efforts were given the highest endorsement – a visit by Barack Obama, the first serving US president to set foot in Burma.

Against this backdrop, officials met in Washington and Bangkok to discuss the long-running programme of resettling Burmese refugees overseas. Since 2005, the United States alone had taken more than 105,000 people, mostly ethnic Karen refugees from the camps along the Thai-Burma border, offering them citizenship and a new life in America. But now there were more pressing needs elsewhere, refugees from Syria, Iraq and Congo. With the fighting paused, the Karen people who had fled across the border would have to start thinking of going home and, what’s more, money for the camps would be cut. The United States and other donors had decided to spend more of their aid money inside Burma, as a way of encouraging and rewarding the political reforms.

Mu Mu didn’t know this, she wasn’t told and didn’t have the means to find out, but it became clear to her nonetheless. By the time she had made the decision to leave Mae La, she had been told the only country still offering asylum to refugees from the camp was Russia. ‘That was the only place,’ she said. ‘I don’t know about Russia, all I know is that it is cold there, always snow, and also I have no friends there. That’s when I decided to give up.’

*

When Mu Mu and I lived in Bangkok, we shared the same neighbourhood, the same sunlight and polluted air, we used the same shops and tuk-tuks, but our experiences were completely different. My skin colour afforded me special, colonial-style privileges, I was a routine beneficiary of the Asian obsession with a fair complexion. Mu Mu had brown skin, a hill-tribe nose and an accent that marked her out as a migrant. She had walked into Thailand without a passport, and all she had was a ‘pink card’, a kind of amnesty document given to Burmese domestic workers at a price, allowing them to work in the homes of their employers.

One afternoon, when walking down our
soi
, off the busy shopping thoroughfare of Thong Lor, Mu Mu was arrested. I thought I knew the two policemen who did it – they were friendly enough, in their brown, belted uniforms; they would melt with delight when I strolled past pushing my blond-haired, blue-eyed daughter. They would lean down to pinch the chubby folds of her arms, like a couple of doting grandmothers.
Narak! Narak! –
So cute! – they would say, seemingly thrilled each time we passed by. They were not so friendly to Mu Mu. The hot sun directly overhead, she stepped in front of them carrying her small wallet and a plastic bag of supermarket shopping. They called out for her to stop. They were serious, unsmiling. She put the bag down between her feet. They demanded to see her ID, and she retrieved the dog-eared pink card. It was a noisy, busy intersection, motorcycle taxi drivers in orange vests leaned into the corner just inches from her back. There was a wedding dress shop behind them and a street stall selling grilled fish and som-tam to their left. Pedestrians rushed past, heads down, keen to get to the shade of the fig trees beyond. If they had looked, they would have seen the officers passing the pink piece of paper between them, one of them jabbing his finger at it, questioning the girl. Then
they would have seen Mu Mu, in a pink T-shirt, pedal-pusher jeans and little plastic-heeled sandals, climb behind an officer on to one of the police motorbikes, her head down, clutching the bag of shopping on her lap.

At home with my daughter, starting to wonder what had delayed Mu Mu, I received a phone call from her friend Mie. Mu Mu was in Thong Lor police station, they had found something wrong with her pink card, Mie and her husband would go and sort it out, they would take money. I heard nothing more for three hours. Mu Mu’s phone was switched off, Mie wasn’t answering. Then, just as it was getting dark, I heard the gate to our front yard squeak and Mu Mu’s kitten heels clicking on the concrete. She came in, sat down on the living room floor, apologised for causing trouble and began to cry. My daughter climbed into her lap. ‘Did they hurt you? Did they touch you?’ I asked. No, she said, but she was scared. They told her there was an error on her pink card (it was written in Thai, which neither she nor I could read), she would have to pay money. ‘They shouted at me,’ Mu Mu said. ‘They called me some bad things.’ The negotiation was led by Mie’s husband, and they ended up paying 2,000 baht, more than $50, to get Mu Mu out. It was a reminder of how vulnerable she was. In Bangkok, Mu Mu occupied two very different spaces. In our safe, domestic haven we liked to think of her as one of the family. But out on the streets, Mu Mu was just another illegal migrant.

*

So, Mu Mu has a passport now. It’s not a full passport, but it allows her to move freely between Burma and Thailand. The passports are a new thing, an acknowledgement of the massive amount of human traffic across the border, an attempt to regularise it. Mu Mu can now move around legally in Thailand; no more trekking over mountain passes,
no more hiding under tarpaulins in the backs of trucks, and a simple trip to the supermarket no longer holds fear. On a practical level, things are good for her: she has a secure job, she is valued by her employer, she is paid well. She can buy things for herself, new clothes, a nice handbag and books. Mu Mu loves reading, she enjoys history, military history especially, she says. But her favourite books are of the motivational, self-help genre; she has become quite addicted to them. A little bashfully, she pulls one out of her bag to show me, with the title
The Successful You
. ‘I don’t know why,’ she says, ‘I just can’t stop reading these ones.’

But as straightforward as her life seems now, leaving the camp, letting go of the dream of America, had been another disappointment, another small death inside her. ‘My dream is broken,’ she says. ‘I’m still waiting for my life to start.’ At her insistence, her parents have sold their house in Hpa’an, have paid off their creditors as best they can, and are living, working, scraping by in the small town of Myawaddy on the Thai border. Migrant workers often keep going with the thought of the house they will build back home, the bricks and mortar that will be the dividend of their hard work and their security in the future. Mu Mu has absolutely nothing to show for her years of toil. She used to be someone who loved to be surrounded by friends and laughter. Now she guards the time she has alone. She likes to sit in her room at Jenny’s house, and think about her ex-boyfriend Saw Myo and the happy times they spent together, when they were in love. Those memories are her only valued possession. ‘When I am alone, I can miss him,’ she says.