Burma’s Spring: Real lives in turbulent times (3 page)

But as well as privileged, I felt compromised. Simply not being able to tell people I was a journalist left me tongue-tied and frustrated. I had never had to hide my real identity or intentions before; in fact, being a journalist had generally been a positive, even in the most fragile situations. In Burma, I couldn’t approach government officials, academics or business leaders; meetings with opposition activists carried risks on both sides. I was there under the aegis of my husband’s aid organisation, and a false move on my part could have threatened its operations. As a foreigner, my conversations with locals could attract the scrutiny of Military Intelligence agents; if they were willing to chance that, my interviewees would have to trust me to change names and details that could identify them. On-the-record interviews were limited to diplomats or foreigners working for UN agencies. As a nervous, undercover journalist, I carried out some of the lamest
vox pop
interviews of my career on the streets of Rangoon – trying to fall into conversation with people in shops or on the streets in a quest for snippets that could liven up my articles.

During three years in Burma, I wrote for the
Independent
, for whom I had reported on the Saffron Uprising and whose foreign editors had a keen interest in Burma and Aung San Suu Kyi. Such was Suu Kyi’s international celebrity, even if my stories weren’t about her, she was invariably included as a point of reference. The accepted narrative of Burma was constructed through the prism of a struggle between
the imprisoned Suu Kyi and the ruling generals, a simple story of good versus evil. Of course, it was more complicated than that, but many of the finer nuances were lost amidst a dearth of verifiable information. As the unwinding of Burma’s long dictatorship began in March 2011, the boundaries within which the media had operated gradually started to be redrawn. For a long time, however, it was not clear where the new limits lay. ‘We slowly started to push the door to see how far it would open,’ Burmese journalist Zayar Hlaing told me. The reforms of the new government (led by general-turned-civilian president Thein Sein) were met with suspicion at first, especially by the international media. For a while, we foreign reporters clung mistrustfully to our pen names, until it became clear that new freedoms of expression were a genuine dividend of Burma’s political transition.

Frustratingly for me, these changes began to take root just as the time came for us to leave Burma. Packing up for departure, I had a nagging sense of business unfinished, of stories untold. Limited by the constraints of a uniquely difficult working environment and my domestic obligations, I felt that the sum of my journalism had failed to articulate the richness of my experience in Burma – the fortitude, the kindness and the beauty. I could have done more. From this sense of incompleteness grew the kernel of this book, a snapshot of the lives of some of the people I had encountered during my stay. Some I knew very well, some I had met on just a few occasions. Many of the stories were recorded in my notebooks or are based on interviews stored as audio files on my computer. Some I had committed to memory. To me, all of my subjects, from Aung San Suu Kyi to the migrant worker Mu Mu, are remarkable characters. Together, I hope their stories provide an alternative perspective on Burma as it moves through these extraordinary times.

ONE

The Storm

Zayar talked fast and sometimes I had trouble understanding him. We were sitting in the Parisien Café on the central Rangoon street where the soldiers had gunned down protesters a year before. Stalls selling betel leaves, cigarettes and steaming noodles elbowed for space next to hulking yellow and red generators that juddered into action each time the municipal power grid failed. I had just crossed the road using the concrete footbridge, home to a one-legged beggar with a cardboard sign and a six-year-old girl wearing a filthy nylon cardigan buttoned over her bare chest. She was sitting by an unfenced thirty-foot drop with a sticky-eyed baby on her lap, and signalled to me that they were both hungry by putting her hand to her mouth and then waving her open palm and shaking her head. I handed her some grubby
kyat
banknotes. Beneath the bridge, lines of ancient buses exhaled puffs of gritty fumes.

We were on the café’s mezzanine floor where there was no one about. A little ball bounced along the words on a karaoke screen in the corner, and the loud Burmese pop music gave us cover to talk. This was the first time Zayar and I had met, having been put in touch by an American journalist in Bangkok, but we had already skirmished over who would buy the drinks. As a foreigner in Burma, I was cast in the permanent role of ‘guest’ and therefore could not pay for anything. But this was a fancy place, and the coffees cost about one dollar each. The bill of two dollars would probably exceed Zayar’s daily income as a junior reporter. I insisted on paying, but I wasn’t sure that buying myself out of the guilt was worth the pain it inflicted on him.

He piled sugar into his latte and stirred it intently. He just needed a few minutes to recover. Then he was off, jabbering away in his proficient but sometimes hard-to-
understand English. Zayar Hlaing was a young journalist who had cut his teeth reporting on the devastation wrought by Cyclone Nargis. He explained how difficult it was to be a journalist in Burma: the low pay, the patchy Internet access, the unobtainable luxury of a mobile phone. He explained about the damned censor, how limiting and distorting it was, how hard it was to tell the truth. As well as writing for a weekly Burmese newspaper, Zayar also helped foreign reporters visiting Rangoon, coming up with story ideas, setting up interviews and interpreting. Now he was going to help me. I trusted him immediately. To my amateurish eye, he didn’t have the look of a government agent; he was smooth-skinned with a goatee beard, a simple but stylish dresser in graphite-rimmed glasses, a well-cut T-shirt, dark denim jeans and velvet flip-flops. He wore a canvas satchel across his chest. But more telling than how he looked was Zayar’s commitment to telling Burma’s story, so ardent it could not be fake. Our meeting put him in greater danger than me, but he seemed excited to take me out to report, and was brimming with ideas like a tour guide eager to show off his city.

*

Six months earlier, on Friday 2 May 2008, Zayar had sat quietly as usual in the morning editorial meeting, his spiral-bound notebook and pen in hand. He was
Modern Weekly
’s most recent recruit, and had only written half a dozen stories. The small TV in the corner of the office was tuned to CNN, and a satellite image showed an angry grey swirl spinning over the Bay of Bengal. Computer-generated graphics indicated that the cyclone was on course to hit Burma’s Irrawaddy Delta, the mouth of the mighty river that springs in the Himalayan foothills. The journalists swivelled round to look at the screen. Since the previous year’s crushed uprising, the country had barely warranted a mention on international news channels. Now, the presenter informed them, a big storm was brewing, and headed for Burma.

Modern Weekly
’s editor turned back to his team and asked for a volunteer to go to the delta. No one responded. ‘I really wanted to go,’ Zayar told me later. ‘But I was just a junior reporter.’ The editor asked each journalist in turn, and each mumbled an excuse. The editor’s eyes landed on Zayar. The assignment was his. The editor ushered him into his office and closed the door. He gave the novice reporter his mobile, the newspaper’s only mobile phone, which at that time in Burma was worth $2,500, the most expensive item Zayar had ever handled. The editor clicked open the safe behind his desk and pulled out two lakh: two small bricks of dirty 1,000 kyat notes, each bundle equivalent to around $200, about seven times Zayar’s monthly salary. Zayar was to go home, pack a spare set of clothes, a torch, and tell his wife he would be gone for three or four days.

He arrived back at his ten-by-fifteen foot, one-room apartment near Rangoon’s port just before lunchtime. His wife Aye Aye was at home with their baby daughter, sitting on their woven bamboo sleeping mat. The room was in a 1920s tenement block built by the Scottish-run Burmah Oil Company for its labourers. In the corner there was a single water tap and a gas ring run off a cylinder that served as a kitchen. Zayar’s books and newspapers were stacked up against the wall, and next to them a small area had been set aside for their modest collection of baby paraphernalia, a pile of pink and white clothes, special soft towels and tenderly folded blankets with appliquéd teddy bear faces. Just a week after the birth, Aye Aye had gone back to work at the accounts department of the Myanmar Port Authority, taking her daughter with her in a Moses basket. But today the baby was feverish, and Aye Aye had decided to stay at home. Zayar stuffed a few things into a small rucksack, wrapping the money, phone and his camera inside his clothes. Repeating his editor’s words, he
told his wife he would be away for three or four days. ‘I told her I was going to the delta. I told her not to worry,’ Zayar said. ‘She didn’t say anything.’

*

Excited to be on his first proper assignment, Zayar boarded a bus to the city of Pathein. The single-lane highway connecting Rangoon with Burma’s fourth city skirts the top of the Irrawaddy Delta. As the bus juddered over patches of hand-broken stones awaiting their tarmac coating, the passengers looked from the windows with increasing alarm at palm trees bent almost double by the strengthening wind. The frowning driver, a cigarette lodged in the corner of his mouth, gripped the wheel as southerly gusts buffeted the left side of his bus. As it grew dark a tree branch crashed on to the windscreen, its limbed silhouette clinging on for a second, and flung away. The passengers gasped, then quietened, staring ahead, some gripping the headrests in front of them, others thumbing strings of smooth, jade beads.

It was late evening by the time Zayar arrived. His head down, clutching his rucksack to his chest, he battled his way through torrents of rain and winds that nearly lifted him off his feet. He banged on the door of a guesthouse close to the bus terminal. The power had cut out. The wind rattled the thin glass in the windows as Zayar sat alone in the candlelit dining room and ate a plate of cold chicken curry and rice. He went to his room and lay on the narrow hard bed, listening to the angry noises: a howl through the slatted glass of his window, a distant, ominous rumbling, a bang and a crash from outside. The square, concrete building trembled in its shallow foundations. Zayar slept fitfully for a few hours, waking with the light. He sat up, fully clothed, grabbed his bag and went out to the street.

In the calm after the storm, unrested residents emerged from their houses to survey the damage. Motorbikes had been tossed on their sides and up the street, trees sixty or seventy years old had been toppled, along with telegraph poles and road signs. Corrugated tin sheeting had been ripped from roofs; the storm had sheared tarpaulin awnings. There were days of clearing up ahead, but lying just north of the cyclone’s direct path Pathein had survived without major damage. The bustling city would soon be up and running again, minus its shady green foliage. Zayar made his way to the police station. He wanted to know the extent of the damage deeper into the delta, closer to the ocean. Phone and power lines were down, but there had been some radio traffic. The police had a report from Hainggyi Island, at Burma’s south-western-most tip. It had been badly hit, the police officer said, dozens, maybe hundreds of people killed. That was where Zayar would head for next.

He wandered down to the banks of the Pathein River, one of the distributaries of the Irrawaddy that glides through paddy fields and mangrove swamps to the Bay of Bengal. The riverbank was already crowded with people, worried about relatives downstream, trying to hire boats. The boatmen, inspecting the damage to their battered vessels, refused all offers, even an inflated bid from Zayar, who had the newspaper’s cash in his rucksack. An ocean liner was grounded on the far side; the water was littered with the flotsam of the storm. Zayar waited on the muddy bank, sprinting off with the pack at each false rumour that a boat would sail. He offered around cigarettes and chatted, memorising what people were telling him. In the fraught atmosphere, he didn’t want to risk taking notes. There was no phone signal. His expensive mobile was useless. At mid-morning, around five dozen soldiers – sleeves rolled up, khaki trousers tucked into black leather boots – came trotting along the brow of the bank. Their commander, picking his way through the debris-strewn mud with the aid of a stick,
brought up the rear, barking orders. The soldiers clambered down the sticky slope to the jetties to talk to the boatmen. Each bare-chested,
longyi
-clad sailor shook his head and pointed further up the bank. There was shouting, a huddle, the commander came down to seal the deal. ‘It only took them a few minutes,’ Zayar said. ‘The soldiers commandeered a boat. They didn’t pay.’ Hainggyi Island was home to a naval base, and the troops had orders to inspect the damage. Despite what was already emerging as a major disaster, there was no other relief effort taking shape on the riverbank from this, the delta’s second major port. Survivors of the storm would be left to fend for themselves.

It looked like a two-hundred-foot barge, used usually to transport rice, would be the only vessel sailing that day, and the anxious crowd clamoured to get on board. Zayar elbowed his way forward, leapt from the jetty, had a quick word in the ear of the ship’s captain (dropping a few names from the Port Authority) and secured his spot on deck, squatting down, hugging his rucksack. Others clambered from the listing wooden pier, frantic, heaving with them jerry cans of water and sacks of rice. They kept on coming until the tense, sweating captain yelled at them to stop, and the rifle-bearing soldiers manhandled them back on to the jetty. There were shouts and recriminations from the bank as the young deck hands untethered the ropes. At 1 p.m., the ship drifted from its moorings under a porcelain blue sky, the water calm, the air fresh and still.