Burmese Haze
Reporter’s Notes:
*I use the name Burma to refer to the country some call Myanmar, and the name Rangoon to refer to the socio-political capital also known as Yangon.
**This article is published at a time when the people of Burma have, once again, been pressed under the thumb of the ruling military junta, known as the Tatmadaw, following a coup in February that ousted democratically elected officials, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. Though her role in the genocidal displacement of the Rohingya has soured her image and tempered her fandom in the West in recent years, Suu Kyi remains the only formidable and respected political figure among the mass populace. In fact, she remains an adored heroine more than 30 years after she rose to power on the back of her father’s name, was imprisoned and then awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
***This story is a reflection on Burma during a different time. It is a personal and true account that, it is my hope, reflects the benevolence of so many of the Burmese people, and the corrupted influence of those in power.
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The man behind the counter at the Burmese embassy in Bangkok stared at me with either suspicion or confusion — I’m still not sure which — but he never saw through me. I kept my cool beneath his dark, beady glare and grimaced brow, which seemed to say, I’m on to you.
I spoke as little as possible, gently biting my lip in subtle, habitual panic, scratching my beard to mask more obvious hints of unease, and sharing few details of my fabricated life.
Perhaps one blink, one gulp, one nervous twitch or stuttered word would give me away. I started counting breaths and reminded myself not to hold eye contact for too long. My perfectly placed lies had disarmed the stout, stern official, thus far, I reasoned, and my passage into the largely isolated, tourist-forgotten former British colony seemed assured.
In a few years, an American president would visit, making this unfolding cat-and-mouse game seem pretentious, at best, but then an ethnic and religious minority would learn to pronounce incalculable death in their native tongue, and reporters would translate it in English as genocide.
But this was 2009, a time when Burma’s biggest political celebrity was still under house arrest, when an American from flyover country decided to swim to her lakefront confines, caught before drowning, just the day before I arrived by plane.
I had even offered to pay a little extra for a same-day visa. Money sure is persuasive, especially when it comes in the shade of American green. But would it be enough?
I had arrived in Thailand a week prior thinking mostly about the country formerly known as Burma and still called so by dissidents of the ruling military junta. My interest in traveling there stemmed from my work as a journalist, and this background is precisely what I wanted to remain concealed.
In 2007, Buddhist monks took to the streets of Rangoon, the social and cultural heartbeat of the country, to protest rising fuel prices in what became known as the Saffron Revolution. But dissatisfaction with local economic matters was merely a veil for deeper political, even existential, objections to the ruling ways of the military dictatorship.
The clampdown began in earnest nearly 20 years earlier in response to the rise of the National League for Democracy and its charismatic leader, “The Lady,” Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.
Suu Kyi’s father, the revered General Aung San, had led Burma’s charge against British rule and is credited with slaying the last remnants of colonial dominance even though he was assassinated shortly before the country’s declared independence in 1948.
By 1990, The Lady had made her own name.
Suu Kyi spirited Burma’s first pro-democracy movement, becoming the country’s leading political reformer and an international sensation. She would later be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
That year, Suu Kyi and the NLD won nearly 90 percent of the popular vote in the country’s first free elections in more than three decades. But the military generals voided the results, placed Suu Kyi under house arrest for 15 of the next 21 years, instituted martial law, cinched their hold on power, ramped up its war with ethnic minority rebels and began operating under a string of Orwellian names, such as the State Law and Order Restoration Council and State Peace and Development Council. The junta even abandoned Rangoon some years later — leaving blocks of government, warehouse-size buildings vacant across the city — for Naypyidaw, a new capital literally cut into a dense forest canopy eight hours north by wobbling tour bus.
Following the 2007 uprising, which left Buddhist monks either dead in the street, imprisoned or forced back into quiet protest, the United States government expanded its mission to resettle Burma’s political and civilian refugees.
The Win family was among the thousands of Burmese refugees that year to be given an opportunity to claim a new life and home in America. I met them while researching an article about the populous refugee community in the neighborhoods of metro Atlanta, Georgia, where the low cost of living and broad job prospects made for an ideal transition point for refugees — or, perhaps, a place to grow roots.
At first, I thought I might spend a few hours with the Wins, inquiring about their lives, perhaps sharing a meal or two. But there was an evident affection between us and it grew beyond my expectations. Soon I was attending the children’s birthday parties and teaching the father how to drive a car.
The Wins showed me the essence of Burma — its food, culture, language, hopes and hardships — within the confines of a worn apartment in a neighborhood populated with refugees from Somalia, Iraq, Bosnia.
Steven, the adopted English name of the family patriarch, walked with a gentle strength, showing the kind of quiet dignity reserved for those who have slept as a denizen in hell. He was slight and slender, but calm and measured in ways that made him seem impenetrable in heart and mind.
A teacher in Burma, it was a speech Steven gave to his students espousing the primacy of education in changing the political and social dynamic of the country that turned the paranoid scorn of military officials his way. Soon, the Wins had their home and livestock confiscated, forced to flee the ancestral mountains settled by their pagan, animist forebears.
They made their way to Rangoon and, a few months later, Steven sailed by night to Malaysia, leaving his family behind. He connected with refugee advocacy groups in Kuala Lumpur, learning the ropes and hurdles of the United Nations refugee resettlement process while living in a squatters hut with a dozen other men, earning wages so low in construction work that they’d be considered criminal in the developed world.
After three years, Steven was able to pay smugglers to sneak his family out of Burma. And within a year, the Wins had that apartment in Atlanta.
The parents struggled to learn English and pay bills in the first few months while the children played catch-up in the local public schools. But despite the obstacles, the Wins embraced their adopted country with an optimism and grit known only to first-generation immigrants.
The children’s appetite for education was inspiring. The father’s apologies for his broken English revealed his determination to succeed. And the mother, a stalwart even when battling regular illness, held the family together with her warm, consoling smile and to-die-for noodle soup.
There were times, of course, when they rallied their nostalgia. Music videos of Burmese pop singers spliced with aerial shots of the forested mountains and deep river valleys the Wins once called home played on a small television in the corner of the living room nearly every time I visited. It seemed to momentarily satisfy that urge to remember, to feel an innocent past, be comforted by it.
The Win family, raised in the Roman Catholic tradition thanks to the successes of British proselytizing, prayed hard and worked harder, knowing that while so many things lay beyond their grasp, hope was never one of them.
Six months passed before I published a profile of the Win family in a small area magazine, but that would not be the end of our journey together.
A few months later I was making plans to quit my writing job and vagabond through Southeast Asia for a few months. I told the Wins about my intention to track down their relatives in Burma — some aunts and uncles and cousins and family friends — if possible and if the family was OK with it. I didn’t want to jeopardize the safety of their relatives, but the Wins, though cautious, were excited about the prospect. They told me where to find their family in Rangoon and cautioned me about what to say to authorities when I arrived.
Julia, the eldest child, acted as my liaison, corresponding via email with her relatives and advising me on how to navigate the muddy waters of the junta’s spy game.
“Joshua,” she wrote in an email once I was on my way, “i told everyone that you are from my college .. ok?? thats not true.. but.. you know it.. right??”
It was like we were caught up in our own imagined conspiracy, wondering if anyone would uncover our scheming. The stakes were low, sure, our intentions hardly threatening. And though our ruse was innocuous, it came with an undertow, a humble subversion of power and abuse in a simple act of correspondence. Our careful fantasy made us feel like we were part of a whispering majority in the streets and cafes and pagodas and hostels and homes of Rangoon, confident we could outlast the life of censorship and surveillance and repercussion alongside those who truly endured that brutal legacy.
So there I found myself in Bangkok, standing outside the dank, drab Myanmar embassy, which resembled a cheap takeoff of Soviet-era architecture, hoping to hide my good intentions. Soon, I thought, I’ll be drinking tea with relative strangers.
I had rehearsed lines in my head, cultivated a back-story that would sound bland and unworthy of second thought (for example, my occupation was listed as a salesman of restaurant cooking and cleaning supplies) and arrived early enough to find myself first in line.
After an hour delay, embassy officials finally propped open the front doors. I led about ten other Westerners inside, where we scrambled for the proper paperwork to fill out, dropped hints about our willingness to pay extra for a quick turnaround on the visa application and chatted about what Burma held for us.
The gray, concrete interior of the embassy, with its musty smell and dim lighting, seemed built for the exclusive purpose of discouraging Westerners from applying for a visa. And the personalities of embassy officials mirrored the graveyard opulence of the building.
But I had come to expect as much. I was ready for the challenge. I even couldn’t resist throwing in some one-upmanship.
I had heard that embassy officials routinely denied foreigners entry without cause. And I knew that a quick Google search of my name would give them plenty of reasons to keep me out. They’d surely find my article on the Win family and that would immediately doom my prospects. Journalists are perhaps the least welcomed people anywhere. This was my biggest fear. So I needed to convince them I was harmless.
“So, why you want to go to Myanmar?” the official asked while thumbing through my paperwork.
“I hear it’s very beautiful and lovely and the people are wonderful,” I responded.
A grimace appeared on the official’s face. He looked at me like I was mad, as if I had just told him that the stained rim of a toilet bowl resembled art of a resplendent order, fit to be hung in the halls of a church — or pagoda, for that matter.
“Also, I was invited by my friend. I will be staying with him.”
I had heard that name-dropping could be advantageous in getting a visa, and the application even asked for the name, address and telephone number for where I would be staying in Burma.
Of course, I didn’t want the official to know my plan to visit the Wins’ relatives, so I gave him an address for a hostel in Rangoon and a name that, though common, would surely throw the official off his mark. I lied like I had somewhere to be, someone to meet.
“Who do you know?”
“His name is Ne Win. I met him in America.”
“You know Ne Win?” the official asked with that look of suspicion or confusion. Or perhaps he was just impressed.
See, Ne Win is the name of a Burmese general who usurped power in a coup in 1962, ruled as head of state until 1981 and was responsible for spearheading the “Burmese Way to Socialism.”
But if the name Ne Win had an American brother, you might know that sibling as John Smith.
In the end, Ne and the surname Win are so common and ordinary that I could have been referring to any number of average Burmese men, not just the former general who died in 2002 — or the family I had befriended back home.
“That’s right,” I affirmed, knowing I’d taken a risk in deploying this smartass tactic to get the upper hand. I knew this line of deception could torpedo my chances of getting a visa. But I also was smiling inside at the thought of having pulled one over the official.
He nodded eventually and told me to come back in a few hours. I knew I was in.
Getting a visa to Burma might not be so difficult these days. At least I suspect you won’t be enticed to play the games I did.
The military junta has turned its gaze in the last 18 months, cracking open the door to substantive political reform. Suu Kyi was released from house arrest and allowed to re-organize the NLD, which had become all-but-defunct and powerless in the preceding 20 years or so. Other prominent political dissidents have been released from prison and the military heads of state appear intent on engaging Western nations rather than continuing to be a pawn, and patsy, for Chinese energy and economic interests.
In response to these positive, albeit tenuous, changes, this past fall Secretary of State Hillary Clinton became the most senior American official to visit Burma in some 50 years, promising a new dawn for relations between the two countries.
In April 2012, Suu Kyi and other NLD party members won seats in Parliament, sweeping 43 of 45 districts. Following this landslide result, my friends in Burma reported that their hopes have begun to step back from the edge. They can see freedom on the horizon. But they are not gullible. They know this change might be revealed as an illusion in time.
All this means that more and more foreigners are likely to travel to Burma in the coming years. And while tourism can play an important role in both stabilizing and energizing a country emerging from political, social and economic repression and stagnation — and also act as a measure of the military’s commitment to ending human rights abuses — it brings new, foreign influences to a culture already brimming with transformation. Spillover can be dangerous. But the right temperature will keep things edible.
Letting the world in always brings its share of ruin to what once was. But a regular-day Burmese man might also find that being discovered by the world is worthy in consequence. His name is John Smith. He’s waiting to find out.
