Burmese Lessons (3 page)

The table has fallen silent and we attend him, respectfully, knowing who the unnamed woman is. His time in prison had as much to do with his unequivocal support of Aung San Suu Kyi as it did with his writing.

“Did you know”—he turns to me—“that each new book a writer produces here must be copied out four times and given to four different censors? For a Burmese writer, that is a great expense. Then each censor puts lines through any offending passages. After that, the manuscript has to be rewritten without those passages. This is not the way any normal writer likes to write. It’s the way the censors like to write. One of my friends, a popular novelist, not a political writer, had to write her last book five times. It almost drove her crazy. But she had to do it. She wants to write her books. She doesn’t want to go to jail and get tuberculosis.”

“Like Ma Thida,” I say in a low tone.

“Do you know her?”

“I know of her. One of the reasons I’ve come here is to find out more about her. I do some work for a group in Canada that has made Ma Thida an honorary member, and we’re lobbying the Burmese government for her release.”

“Amnesty International?”

“No. PEN Canada. It’s an international organization. I’m a member of the Canadian chapter.”

“Ah, yes,” someone says. “They support U Win Tin also.” U Win Tin
was detained at the same time that Suu Kyi began her house arrest. His sentence was recently extended because he had made an attempt to inform the U.N. about the appalling conditions of Burmese prisons.
^*

“Ma Thida and I worked together,” says the old poet. “She is like a daughter to me. She’s a dear woman, and a fine writer.”

“Do you know much about her situation?”

“The tuberculosis is under control. But she also has some—I don’t know, some female problems. I’m not sure. She suffers with that, but she is doing a lot of meditation. For many hours a day, meditating. That is how she survives in the prison.”

“Vipassana meditation,” the folktale collector clarifies. “That is how Buddhism helps many political prisoners.” She lowers her voice. “While the Lady was under house arrest, she used to sit vipassana every day, for some hours. Do you ever meditate?”

“I try. But I’m not very good at it.”

She laughs. “That’s normal. We need to practice every day or it remains difficult. Sometimes I go into retreat at a monastery near Mandalay, and by the end of two weeks I start to feel calm!”

Sayagyi Tin Moe snorts. “By the end of twenty years, you would be extremely calm.”

“No,” says the woman reflectively. “I think I would be insane.”

“Insane in Insein,” intones San Aung in a jokey voice. Insein is the name of the prison where many political prisoners are held, including Ma Thida.

Sayagyi Tin Moe says, “If you are a writer in this country, going to Insein is an occupational hazard. I am not allowed to publish anymore, not even magazine articles. My old poems are in the school books, but my books are banned.” He looks across the table and says something to the
folktale collector, who breathes a few words—a consolation or a whispered condemnation, I don’t know. It’s not the moment to ask for a translation. Everyone at our table is silent, as though in a show of respect for all the banned words and writers, which throws the noise of the street and the voices of the other diners into sharp relief—the ongoing clatter of plates and cutlery, the hum of gaslights and music playing nearby.

Suddenly the poet lifts up his hands like an orchestra conductor. “Keep talking! Talk, talk.” He raises his voice. “It is a good thing to do. We can still talk!” Then he has such an energetic coughing fit that he has to put down his cheroot. After recovering, he raises the dark green cigar and addresses it, “My good friend.” Then, to me, “It is like a companion. The tea shop, the cheroot, and the writing. They go together.”

“It’s like that in Canada, too,” I say. “And Greece. Writers love to smoke and drink.”

“An international brotherhood,” remarks the lawyer.

“And sisterhood,” adds the folktale collector, with her mauve smile.

Sayagyi Tin Moe turns his big head toward me and asks, “Will you write a book about our country?”

Memorably, I answer, “Uh … I’m not sure. I’m …” How to dodge the question with some grace? “Right now I am still reading books about your country. I have so much to learn.”

W
hich is absolutely true. The purpose of my visit, ostensibly, is to collect enough material to publish a few articles about political prisoners here. Because I’ve been living in Bangkok for the past few months, it seemed a logical step in my work for PEN Canada to come to Burma and try to make contact with former political prisoners and the friends and families of current political prisoners. Ma Thida is only one of more than two thousand. I’ve become attached to her because of the similarities between us—and the gaping differences. At twenty-nine, she is very close to my age. While I am free to write my books and live my adventurous life, Ma Thida
is in solitary confinement, ticking the days off her twenty-year sentence. Her crime? Writing short stories that are critical of the military regime.

Both of us are young women writers. Is that where the similarity ends? The single great accident of human existence is geography: where we are born in this bordered, divided, largely unjust world. My life would have been different if I had been born elsewhere. This is an obvious enough notion, but when I was a child I used to think of it as a kind of magic. At the age of eight, when our Filipino neighbors moved in next door, I had an epiphany: “I” would not exist if I had been born in another country, to other parents. “I” was contingent upon so many things that “I” had no control over. It was a dizzying concept, and I have never ceased to feel its power. If I had been born in a country like Burma, who would I be? What would I look like?

In the depth of a Canadian winter, Ma Thida’s photograph had haunted me. Framed by black hair, the attractive round face wore a small, impish smile. She regarded me with a calm gaze. It was hard to believe that she was in prison even as I thought of her; that she was suffering from tuberculosis as I prepared to return to Asia, packing up my apartment—a place I had lived in for less than six months—putting all the necessities for a year or two of travel into a small suitcase and a backpack. The least I could do was try to find out more about her, and write a couple of articles about the situation in Burma. Then, after another month or so in Thailand, I would return to my little island home in Greece and stay put, just writing and gardening, for a good long while. The past couple of years have been a whirlwind of book tours and research trips across three different continents. Though weary of traveling, I felt that this journey to Burma was crucial. And would be short: a few weeks at the most.

That was the modest, reasonable plan of a few days ago, before the plane touched down in Rangoon. Now my mind has been tossed upside down by these people. Yesterday my cab driver said of the ruling generals, “They have guns, but no brains.” He grimly bared his teeth. “But guns kill us.” And the merchant I chatted with at a tea shop: when I quietly
asked him about the Lady—a discreet way of referring to Aung San Suu Kyi—he was so taken aback that he said, “No, I am sorry. I am afraid to talk about that.” Then he stood up and left me sitting there, ashamed that I had not anticipated his fear, that I do not have the mechanism of fear myself. At least, not the fear of speaking.

P
lates of fruit arrive. The end of the evening has come, but the lawyer asks me about Noam Chomsky, which in turn leads to a discussion about the failures of democracy, and how those failures are preferable to the bloodier failures of dictatorship. As the tables around us empty, we’re talking about art. Anita describes the beauty of the Musée d’Orsay (her long hands in the air like white sculpture), and Sayagyi Tin Moe invites us to a gallery opening. San Aung says he knows a group of painters and asks if I would like to meet them. The fruit is finished and we are drowsy—the old poet has nodded off, twice, snoring so loudly that he wakes himself up again—but my companions are still hungry for more information, more news, more evidence of the ongoing life of the world, and how their own country, how they themselves, are connected to that world—the realm of freely circulating ideas and books and newspapers and technologies. Freely circulating people, in fact—Anita and Johnny and myself bring our worlds with us. In an isolated place like Burma, this kind of meeting is also communion that vivifies, renews, the way color comes as a mind-sparking pleasure after weeks in a monochromatic hospital ward.

The boys who clean and stack the night tables are swishing rags over the wood and the cracked Formica and sluicing the dirty water down the gutters. Our party cannot stretch the evening any further; we need to sleep. No, no, the folktale collector says, shaking her head theatrically and pressing my hand, you must not walk back to your guesthouse. San Aung will see you home—he has a car.

Goodbye, goodbye. We turn to one another with a curious mixture of formality and friendliness, not quite bowing but almost, smiling too,
laughter igniting without reason, just the punchiness of being so tired, so pleased with the company.
“Now-mak dwei-may,”
I say, which brings another laugh, the colloquialism comical in the mouth of someone who cannot speak the language. “See you later.”

The poet shakes my hand and whispers in his gravelly voice, “Very quickly you will learn Burmese. That will help you.”

“Help me what?”

“Write the book.”

During the days
, I walk among the Buddhas of Pagan. Sometimes the coat of whitewash is gone, revealing the Holy One’s countenance as deep red, the same color as the bricks people still bake near the river’s edge. These statues are eight hundred, nine hundred, almost a thousand years old, naked of the gold and gems that once made them so famous.

Twice in the fresh dark of morning, I have hired a horse-cart driver to take me to the farther sites. I can die now, for I have sat atop one of the great temples of Pagan and watched the sun rise as its own true self, a great globe of fire. My head burned with the vision, which doubled on my retina when I blinked. My young driver, Min Ley, sat on the stone rampart without speaking, his back to glory. He watched me for the sunrise and its dénouement. After the dark plain caught red and gold fire, the mist burned away to reveal the land’s bounty: more than two thousand white-and-gold-tipped stupas, crumbling pagodas, sister and brother temples, lines of toddy palms, the immense gray Irrawaddy River, wide as a small lake.

Can I remember the word for “beautiful”? Humans meet a landscape like this and all our words become second-rate. The beauty is mythical,
mesmerizing; from elsewhere, I thought, then corrected myself. The plain of temples was just there. It is I who come from elsewhere, which is why the driver stared at me with such patient interest. His was not a sexual gaze, which would have made me nervous out there at dawn in the middle of a vast ruined kingdom, in my bare feet, my shoes far below at the temple entrance. He watched me as though observing a strange animal.

I stared at the plain of fire with equal fascination, and more longing. After the familiarity of my makeshift room in Bangkok, I have become once again an absolute foreigner in another country, my notebook filling with words spelled in crude phonetics, my mind reeling, my body craving stability. Why do I keep doing this to myself—leaving, beginning with nothing, gathering other people’s stories? I want to go home now: the small stone house in Greece, a view of the sea between olive trees. So why have I come to a nation ruled by a superstitious and brutal bevy of generals, with their menacing billboards and their malnourished chain gangs of intellectuals and students?

Barely two weeks in, and Burma is changing me. I know that what I see here, what I choose to write about, could be transformative. But how? Why? What has drawn me in so quickly? Several mornings in a row now, I have woken to the absolute conviction that I have to stay in Burma longer, as long as possible. A month, two, three. How long can I stay? And I must write about Burma, and the political situation here, just as the old poet suggested.

There, at the top of the temple, I thought how ephemeral the human being is, how light. I saw myself from high above: a speck of blood and bone in that extraordinary landscape. Yet still so loaded down by thoughts and desires. The Buddha knew what he was talking about when he declared that desire was the root of all suffering. When I returned to Thailand last year, I started meditating again, sporadically, even in the throb and clamor of Bangkok. Just being in Southeast Asia was enough to make me sit down and shut up, become unself-conscious, even for a breath.

Many times in my life I have wished to be a fish, or a tree, or an otter. Swimming in the Greek Aegean, hiking in the Rockies, watching seals near Protection Island: if only I could slide through the membrane, like a magician or a subatomic particle, and become something other, there would be peace. In Pagan, sitting at the crown of a world that no longer exists, I reached the bottom of such wishes: a lichen-red stone would be enough. Turn me into the temple flagstone under the driver’s foot and let me give in, with igneous equanimity, to the ravages of time and sunlight.