30 Hours North

Many things in Asia are small. Seats, leg room, doorways. I usually knocked the top of my head against something once a day. My beds were never long enough. I always felt ungainly. The steps leading to my hotel room in Mandalay were maid of slick granite treads, shallow and with an overhang. Half my foot hung out into the air when I walked up or down. It was treacherous, slippery, ankle breaking territory, and I found myself hanging onto the banister like an old man. Leaving for the last time, I slipped on the second flight, bags and bottles sent tumbling down as I bounce-slid down the last steps. My right leg collapsed under and across, twisting my knee grotesquely beneath my body. It hurt, but not so much physically as visually. Instead, I felt a faint popping sensation, and an oddly empty feeling, as though most of the inside of my knee had been newly devoted to airspace.

I knew something was wrong as soon as I stood up; my leg felt like jelly. The last two flights took an eternity. Hobbling into the reception area, I tried to smile to the guy behind the desk. Paying him for the room, I collected my bags and left with a wince.

Myanmar is an exceedingly protozoan-shaped country, gangly and longitudinal. I was headed to Myitkyina (pronounced mit-chee-na), in the upper lobe, as far north as tourists are allowed without paying for special government permits. It was also the farthest north I would have been on the entire trip. The idea to go sprang from a certain preoccupation with latitude. Just the possibility that I could go that far north made the journey a compulsion. So far in one train ride. I would be covering three and a half degrees of latitude overland in thirty hours. Then my plan was to take the slow boat back down the Ayeyarwady River to Mandalay, a four-day journey on the brown spill that cuts the country in half.

The train north did not leave for four hours, but the thought of hobbling around the fumey streets of Mandalay on a busted knee sounded less than appealing, so I caught a motorbike ride straight to the station, where I sat on a hard plastic chair in the waiting area and decided to feel horrible.

I grumped and moaned and wrote things in my notebook like, I feel terrible. I want to go home. I can’t shake the exhaustion and my stomach is fizzing.

I felt grimy and wet, like a puddle everyone was staring at, coupled with a sense of hopelessness. The waiting room was dreadful, but it was my only option. There were two trash cans. One was green, which was for miscellaneous plastic everything. The other, adjacent, red, was color coded for betel juice spit. It was almost overflowing with the rank, tannic-scented bubbly liquid. The air smelt like acetone and I was breathing heavily; I felt so exposed. In solitary confinement surrounded by the sound and smell of human, the flustered atmosphere of heavy transit thrummed all around. The standard procedure here was for a six person family, sweating heavily, to unload fifteen to twenty fully stuffed suitcases, plastic bags and bundled sacs, then sprawl on the dirty floor around their mountain of luggage, waiting for their train to be called. Everyone seemed to be moving and yelling; there was never any quiet. Motorbikes were driving into the station and honking for attention. And I was suffocating. I couldn’t feel the flies crawling over my arms and legs anymore. Or maybe I just didn’t care. I needed a wide-open field, cold wind. Not a single other human. 

I brought out the book and turned to a page at random.

Whenever I am not aware of what I am thinking, then my thoughts are liable to be quite childish and unreasonable.

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On the platform, squatter communities had set up camp. Families sprawled out on their mats and tried to make a few bucks selling water and beer to people on the train. Their cluttering presence lent a sense of urgency to the atmosphere on the platform. Families bustled and yammered while the train stayed stationary. One man lay on the ground with his toddler-aged boy, who was naked. The child’s dreaming was impervious the echoing metal container he found himself living in. Lying on his back, the sleeping little boy sported a prominent erection, which the father ashamedly attempted to cover with his cupped hand, looking around to make sure no one saw. When he saw me looking that way, poorly disguised by sunglasses, he prodded his boy awake. The child started screaming; his dream must have been a nice one. I turned away to find my carriage.

“There is no sleeper,” the officer told me when I showed him my ticket. “You have to sit in Upper Class.”

I had paid for a sleeper seat, but this train didn’t have a sleeping car. Instead, it was split into ordinary class, first class, and upper class. Contrarily, first class was not the nicest. Upper class meant reclinable, semi-soft old leather and metal seats. They looked ancient and smelled industrial. In Ordinary, people did their best with wooden benches set at a rigid ninety-degrees. My back hurt looking at them. First class fell somewhere in the middle: Hard backs with soft seats. Still no bend.

Outside the upper class carriage, a woman was directing the porter on how to stuff her things through the window. She had enormous wrapped picture frames, bulging wicker baskets, and five small trees, whose roots had been wrapped in plastic and tied for the ride.

“You sit here,” said the conductor, pointing to one of the widows with an adolescent ficus jutting halfway out of it.

I stuffed myself into the chair between the tree and a monk in need of deodorant. The seats were set along the carriage in groups of four, so that two sets of two faced each other. I was looking at an older Canadian couple, the only other westerners on the train. Like me, they were going north to go south, to take the ferry from Myitkyina down the Ayeyarwady River. The monk didn’t speak English, but across the aisle from him was a woman determined to practice her tongue. She was a dumpy woman, a mother and a matriarch, and she was the one with the trees. She carried a lot of accessories and at every station would lean out the window to buy meat, fruit and drinks. Her name was Toi An, and when I sat down she hung her head across the aisle and bellowed into my face: “YES. NO. THANK YOU.”

“You speak English?” I asked.

She held up a thumb and forefinger. A little. “What name?” she asked.

I told her.

“How ole?”

“23” I held up two fingers and three fingers.

“OOOHhhhh!,” she squealed. “I love you.”

“Thank you…?”

“I be your train mama.” She passed me a can of Orange Crusher across the aisle. When I was hot, she wrapped a block of ice in a wet nap so that I could dab the back of my neck with the condensation.

My spirits picked up remarkably in the presence of my new Train Mama. Her enthusiasm for me was unbounded. Once the train whistle moaned and we pulled away from the station, the melancholy that had gripped me sitting on the plastic bench seemed like a forgotten dream.

“What country?” Train Mama asked later, once we were on our way. When I told her, she was ecstatic.

“America!” and she gave a thumbs up. “President Bush!” Another thumb. “Jesus!” Two thumbs.

“Yes, Bush and Jesus. I’m not sure if there’s actually anything more to say on the matter,” I said.

“You Jesus?”

“Me no Jesus. You Jesus?”

“Me Jesus.” She rummaged in her purse and pulled out a rumpled looking notebook, flipping through with a serious look. She found a page near the back and held it out to me. It was in English. “Read,” she commanded.

I read out loud.

USA a wise and wealthiest country They reach till the moon and showed cobrigedo. I knew, I understand of my life. They show their pride of Ego Life. They canceled the word of god falsely, a great world trade center was drawn. Hi jet they could not a leiod.

                       

People come with repentant heart again. All live are found only by grace. U.S. Presidence Bush is save a life. He saw the world sleepless and helpless. There’s no more sneering and quit criticism. He is the shield of the world and he is called real God’s son Mr. Bush. God use with you and Jesus’s love.

Then she began singing. She clasped her hands together under her chin, closed her eyes and pointed her head up. I recognized the hymnal quality of the melody, but the words were in Burmese. She didn’t stop, and it was loud, but no one else seemed to mind the commotion. Just more background noise in the sweaty crowd.

Like most things in Myanmar, the train was late. It left four hours after it was scheduled, and made frequent stops. I had hoped to watch the sunset over the plains of central Myanmar that first night, but by the time we left the station, it was already black. The bright fluorescent overheads were the only source of light, a blinding spray of white hedged by a cloud of mosquitoes and gnats. Sweaty slapping of appendages filled the compartment as people began to drift to sleep at nine o’clock.

It’s perfectly acceptable on Burmese trains to spread out and sleep on any available horizontal surface. The standing area between carriages was the first to get claimed. People spread out along the aisle, under fellow passengers’ feet, outside the jostling door to the rank toilet. Rattan mats were spread out, and as people rolled in their sleep and the train jostled back and forth, the yellow fibers would shred and split and scatter across the wooden floor. By morning, the aisle looked like a barn stall. It was somewhat fitting, because the floorboards looked like they belonged in a barn. Twisty, fragrant, with wide space between that let light and air from under the train peek its way through, the dark, dusty wood rumbled and groaned as the train shuddered north. The boards rubbed against each other in protest, literally screaming back and forth as the train swayed and pounded its wheels.

I wrapped a bandana around my eyes to block out the naked light and tried to curl up into a ball. The monk and I had our backs pressed to each other, giving into the communal aspect of the shared green leather. But with so much movement, sleep was impossible. I found my medicine bag and pulled out my book, My Name is Red, which I started reading when we boarded and ended up finishing by the time we docked in Myitkyina

I popped an Ambien.

The great thing about Ambien is that it makes you sleep. It guarantees eight unconscious hours. The bad thing about Ambien is that it makes you sleep. The drug is a short-acting hypnotic; it basically hypnotizes you to sleep within fifteen minutes. Like with regular hypnotism, you can fight the effects, and this becomes even easier when you’re on a noisy, brightly lit train from the forties that feels like it’s having a seizure and your swollen, injured knee is bashing into the metal armrest. But unlike a human hypnotist, Ambien is a chemical, and chemical hypnosis is much harder to fight. It will work. People that fight the sleep can end up a hypnotic semi-awake trance. Some people will drive for hours and have no recollection of it, or cook elaborate seven-course meals in a blackout state. It’s like the worst kind of sleepwalking, and can be dangerous.

It can also make you hallucinate. And since it’s a form of hypnotism, you might not know that you’re hallucinating.

It made me hallucinate.

I lifted my bandana to a bewildering new reality. The Canadian woman across from me was still asleep, but her clothes were now nefariously awake. The zippers on her zip-off pants were un-securing themselves. The metal coiled over on itself and gripped its own arm in the little circular mouth, peeling back the layer separating pants from shorts. The disembodied green metal strands flung out and attached themselves to the window, anchoring the woman’s legs there, cinching her tight.

I wanted to tell my monk neighbor, but when I turned to warn him, his voluminous maroon robes were unfurling themselves into the face of an ancient, wrinkly-faced dragon with a stringy, Mephistophelian goatee. The dragon stared into my eyes. His gaze was accusatory, eerie in its silence. The head and face were stationary but the body continued to coil and slink through the air, light and puffy and ineffably textured. The maroon folds seemed to somehow inhale and silence the background clatter of the train. Beyond frightened, but somehow calm, I pulled the bandana over my eyes as consciousness fluttered away.

I woke up puffily, took off my eye cover, and saw a mother holding her toddler son up to the window to let him pee out onto the tracks. The train was crawling through the early morning mist, spiraling up a woody hillside that looked like a New England forest that had been subjected to fifty years of slash and burn. Dead, brown, dry season leaves covered the ground. They reminded me, along with the heat, of Indian summers back home. A beggar with enormous yellow eyes had crawled on at the last station and was limping up and down the aisle, holding an arm that looked dislocated. “Please sir, help me,” he said to me.  I found my book on the ground and walked to the dining car.

To keep from going completely insane staring at the same six people for thirty straight hours, for most of the journey I made my refuge in the dining car. I’d order beer and water, and when we stopped at little village stations, I’d lean out the window and buy oranges from pretty local girls. The car had its own regularity, which pleased me. The same three monks were always sitting together at the same table, chain smoking and playing rap music on their cell phones. The staff, all wearing sarongs and white tank tops, would hover over my shoulder as I wrote notes and read. As soon as I drained the last sip of beer, the bottle would be whisked away and replaced. There were always two surly looking policemen in the corner who yelled a lot and bossed all the staff around, but would smile at me. And there was one man who sat alone, smoking cheroots, staring at the world from behind reflective yellow sunglasses.

 

The food in the dining car was shit – greasy and with weird temperature differentials. But the beer was cold, the windows wider, and the seats were mercifully of a different design. I’d still order food, just because I liked to see how the cook made it. We were jack rabbitng down the track constantly, everyone hopping in place in our seats as we labored forward.  The cook in the dining car used the bounce to his culinary advantage. Anticipating the vertical thrust of the carriage, he’d flip the wok, sending rice, chicken, veggies all flying through the air on the up. Then they’d collapse in an oily orgy of sizzle and pop as the car fell back into its springy crater. 

All throughout the day, we patiently ambled across the northern half of the country, puttering to a halt at the smallest villages. Four or five bamboo shacks, where all the women and little kids would hurry down the hill to hawk wares at the passengers. A common sight was a little girl with two buckets of water suspended from a bamboo yoke across her shoulders. She would drop the buckets to the ground and use a plastic bowl to take out a small scoop of water, which people could hang out the train window and use to wash their faces. Bottles of whisky and packets of sunflower seeds were put on platters and balanced on heads. Little boys held out bottles of beer larger than their torsos. Baskets overflowed with salted fish and sugarcane and rice that had been steamed in bamboo. Big hunks of pale, not-very-sweet watermelon were popular. Every stop had the look and feel of a country bazaar, and for twenty minutes the train would be surrounded by the sing-song chanting of rural Asian commercialism.

Then the train would start to crawl forward again, without a warning blast, and everyone that had piled out to stretch their legs would run to the nearest door and jump back on. People on board would hustle to shut the glass windows, a panic of jostling the pesky metal latch bolts and sliding wooden sashes. It was the beginning of the annual Thingyan water festival, which commemorates the beginning of the New Year and the hottest stretch of the dry season. People celebrate by throwing buckets of cold water on anyone and everyone, no exceptions. Trains make an easy target. Kids would line up along the tracks with buckets of water and small bowls, and hurl as much as possible at the passing carriages. Their laughing screams pealed through my window; they were so much fun to watch. But after a small wave careened into my lap, I learned to scramble and drop my window whenever the train started moving.

Northern Myanmar is an extensive sprawl of flat farmland and woody hills. Most of the rice paddies had been harvested and lay smoldering in various dun colors – a patchwork that extended forever into the horizon. Solitary huts were perched up proud in the middle of the fields, where old men sat slowly smoking on the porch. As we passed they would stare and wave and their children would run alongside, screaming at the white guy sticking his head out the window. At one village I bought a packet of sunflower seeds. It felt good to chew and spit the seeds for breakfast. When we started moving again and the shacks fell behind, I stared out the window and saw countless flat, yellow square miles devoted to sunflower farming: Local food.

Young, nubile woman kept coming to my window throughout the day, singing to me, selling to me. In every country I had been in so far, when I locked eyes with a pretty girl she would blush and quickly hide her face in her hands. The shyness was endearing, a sense of beauty that’s reticent but not diminished – I could always tell that something strong and sexual lay beneath the cultural reserve. But in Myanmar the girls exerted a far more determined exotic pull. Girls were quick to lock eyes, and I was happy to stare back. One of the most interesting things about Burmese women is the custom of thanakha, a paste made from the wood, bark and roots of a specific tree that’s been ground with a small amount of water. The beige putty is applied to the cheeks, and sometimes forehead and the bridge of the nose, as a moisturizer and sun block, and has a slight sandalwood perfume about it. The paste is a similar tone but significantly lighter than the typical Burmese skin, and at first I found the look conspicuous and gaudy, that it drew attention away from the women instead of adding something to it. But as I encountered face after face looking up at me through the train window, I began to recognize a subtlety of application. The facial designs were as variant as the women who wore them. The simplest and most common design was two rectangles on the cheeks. It’s a stately look. But there are endless alternatives, which I began to identify with differing aesthetic personalities. There were stripes, three or four fingers of color drawn laterally. Some were streaky and muddled, and covered most of the cheeks and foreheads like static, like a veil. Some girls preferred whiskery-looking designs, giving a catlike opulence to their eyes. Others were light and feathery – wispy and subtle. But my favorite was when girls would paint a single curving line around the cheekbones, just below the eyes. It was the most understated and powerful look. And when we inevitably stared into each other’s eyes and smiled, I felt like our expressions would blossom in front of each other. Now I was the one that was blushing, and I had to resist the temptation to grab my bag and leap out the train window and bend down on one knee. No one said that the world’s longest-lasting military government was hoarding a massive population of eminently marriage worthy women.

In the daylight, I could see that the entire five hundred mile stretch of rusty track was flanked by non-biodegradable waste. Cigarette packs, soda cans and water bottles; a spree of plastic bags in every conceivable color; opened, but resiliently unflattened Styrofoam take away containers were spread across the ground, revealing the ass-ends of discarded passenger meals. A yellowish oily skein, maybe a few uneaten long beans, a dried chili pepper or the vertebrae of a scrawny unfortunate fowl. Refuse and dregs piled up like little walls. Trash. It was the defining landscape of Myanmar. My monk neighbor kept leaning across to throw his garbage out the window, and once, when I placed an empty water bottle between my feet on the ground, he picket it up and chucked it too, then turned and gave me a thumbs up and a smile.

By the twentieth hour, it smelled like two things: dry, singed, post-harvest air seeping from the brown farms out the window, and concentrated uric acid steaming out form the impossible-to-close bathroom door. As night fell for the second time I had been on the train, we rolled past a stream where an entire village was bathing. In the purplish evening glow I could make out mothers scrubbing clothes, fathers scrubbing hair, and a dozen little naked boys splashing and throwing mud at each other. It was the happiest five-second scene I’d yet witnessed in this county.

With the government oppression and the rampant pollution and the overwhelming poverty, everything about Myanmar reeked of despair. The landscape of despondency out the window reflected my own fatigue. But within the hellish vistas were sights like this, of simple happiness. Of joy and life. And it seemed like everywhere I went in Myanmar I kept running into the most genuine, eager people. Everyone wanted to help and learn. Hardly anyone seemed sad, but many that I talked to felt aggravated. I was constantly being shown powerful examples of humanity. It gave the entire country a feeling of earnestness.

__________________________________________________________________________________

In the evenings, I sought out the local watering holes, known in Myanmar as Beer Stations. What sets them apart is that they have a keg on draught, and men can spend the night sipping cheap Myanmar Beer. The Beer Stations boast a typically masculine vibe; the only women I ever saw were foreigners in Mandalay. They are the type of place where smoke in the air makes it too hazy to see across the room, where you can fill up on peanuts and beer, where the soccer game is always on.

They also tend to attract more colorful personalities. During my first night in Myitkyina, I saw a man wearing a shirt that was designed to resemble the schedule board at an airport. In black and gold lettering it read:

Next Romance …………………delayed

New Job……………………….delayed

Good Luck…………………….delayed

Alcohol………………………boarding

Self-Improvement……………cancelled

Money ………………………cancelled

“That’s a nice shirt,” I told him.

“Thank you,” he said. “What is your name my friend?”

I told him, and told him why I was in Myitkyina. “I want to ride the ferry all the way down to Mandalay.”

“Oh, I am sorry my friend, but that is impossible now. By the way Daniel, you can call me Cho.”

“Are you sure about the boat Cho? People in Mandalay said it would be easy.”

“Cannot do from Myitkyina now. The water is low, and there is too much fighting still.”

I mentioned that a couple weeks ago I had seen something on TV about a cease-fire to the fighting in the north.

“No. No. Come on. That’s all propaganda. Government propaganda. They say there is reconciliation. They hold a meeting and people shake hands and they can broadcast it to the world. But there is still domestic fighting. There is still a civil war going on here in Kachin.”

“Why is there fighting in Kachin?” I asked. Kachin is one of the largest states in Myanmar, and the local ethnic group, the Kachin, began a military insurgency against the national government in 2011.

“We’re fighting for rights. For respect. Not Autonomy. We are proud to be part of Burma, but we are not Burmese. And we want the same rights as the majority.” He sipped his beer before continuing. “The government is letting China build a dam here, in the north, which will bring power from Kachin through Yunan state in China. The Burmese government says that they cancelled the project but there are still Chinese engineers up there working. China gives billions every year to Myanmar and the recourses go straight from Kachin to China. None of that money comes to Kachin.”

“So you are fighting for your land rights?” I asked him.

Cho sat back and stroked the hair on his chin. He was a younger man, with a premature beer-gut and long black hair. “Yes. For land rights. But it is more than that. There are now 100,000 internally-displaced people in Kachin. So many foreign people have come to Burma in the past few months. Your Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came. Your government gave the Burmese government one billion dollars. The UK gave two billion pounds. They say that now because there are reforms they will lift sanctions and we will see things get better. The outside world, everyone talks about change, change, change. But the reality is, inside Burma there is no change. It is still the same. For sixty years Kachin has been struggling. We need real change. We need concrete change. That is why KIA – Kachin Independent Army – started fighting again ten months ago. We want respect.

“It’s a domestic problem, not international, so people don’t know. You stay in your own area code, you know? But for us, the infrastructure, the transportation, it is all stopped now. There is no busses, no boats. It is impossible to go anywhere because of the fighting. It is OK though. We wait. Kachin has waited for sixty years. I know we will win.”

His conviction reminded me of something I had read in The Book,

Beware the fury of a patient man.

“Only four months ago, there were explosions every day in Myitkyina. The KIA, they blew up empty buildings, government buildings, maybe bridges built by government, to strike terror in the government forces.”

Maybe more fitting was actually,

Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a barbarian.

Or,

Weakness on both sides is, as we know, the motto of all quarrels.

“Why would Kachin people blow up buildings in their own capitol?” I asked. “Wouldn’t that make people that live here angry at the KIA?”

“No. Everyone in Kachin supports the KIA. Every Kachin boy, when he turns eighteen, has to go north and train in the army for six months. So everyone has family in the army. Everyone supports KIA. And now we control the border near China, north of here. The Chinese told the Burmese government that the border needs to be cleared. So that’s where the fighting is now. There is no more fighting in Myitkyina.” 

We sat quietly for a while, both of us staring at the flickering light of the television and sipped our beers. I was astounded by the militancy of his speech. I had been told by numerous people in Myanmar that fighting in the north had ceased, that the minority groups here had signed a peace agreement.

“Look,” said Cho, pointing to the TV. Aung San Suu Kyi was giving a speech. “NLD won the election.”

“Yes, they won many seats in parliament, right?”

Cho drained the rest of his beer before dramatically slamming the glass back on the wooden table, causing the nearby bowl to jump and eject a swarm of peanuts in the air. “Yes, but it wont matter. The military automatically holds the majority, they don’t have to be voted in.”

“But if the NLD got enough seats to have some say, do you think things would change for the better?”

He made the kissing sound and a waiter zoomed over. Cho pointed to the two empty glasses and the young man whisked them away. We waited for the arrival of the new beers before continuing. “NLD is – they believe in democracy – but they are still not good for Kachin. We don’t care about that stuff. We just want freedom for Kachin.”

I asked him if Kachin would have its own government if they gained the freedom they wanted.

“Yes we would. Right now there is a minister from the Burmese government, but he is so stupid. He doesn’t know anything about Kachin. He doesn’t even know our language.”

We drank in silence for some time, until the TV began playing clips of military exercises – soldiers goose-stepping; naval officers firing ship-mounted cannons; a fleet of helicopters coursing over a patch of green farmland; soldiers crawling through mud on their elbows – all set to triumphant patriotic battle music.

“Is there a lot of this kind of stuff on TV?” I asked.

“They are always showing military propaganda on TV. They always show them helping people. Loving kindness, that kind of thing. All the soldiers have stars on their shirt to show that they are never injured. In the movies we see, the Burmese soldiers never die. Except for…” and he collapsed into a fit of giggles. “When Rambo 4 came out. You know Rambo 4? He has to save two Americans that get trapped in Burma, so he fights the Burmese army. And he kills so many of them. In that movie the soldiers are devastated. We had never seen anything like that. My niece and nephew, when they saw, their jaws dropped. Then, the government cut our satellite for six months. We could not watch TV, because the international movie channels were showing Rambo 4. Then after six months, like that, it just comes back on.”

We killed our beers and ordered two more.

“Do you want to go on a midnight ride?” asked Cho. “I have a Jeep Wrangler. We can drive up along the river.”

“Let’s do it.” We chugged our last two beers and paid the tab. Out on the street, the bugs were swarming under the two streetlights that lit up the block.

“Over there, see,” said Cho, pointing. “Jeep Wrangler.” He was swaggering a bit; his mental dick was growing bigger by the minute as we walked to the car.

What he thought was a Wrangler was actually a Willys Civilian Jeep. It looked like it was the CJ – like, from the 1950s. Everything about it looked like it had survived a war zone, which, I caught myself thinking, was completely possible. The dents in the passenger door could have been from KIA grenade shrapnel. 

We peeled out through the dirty streets of the town center and made our way north and east towards the river. Here on the northern reaches of the Ayeyarwady, the air was brisk and breathable. Without any doors or roof, we were soaked in wind. It filled my sinuses, rejuvenating the inside of my head in a cooling unscented bath. Then we came to the bank of the river. It was so much wider than I had expected, an abyss of black that had been poured out to the horizon, challenging the night sky in stature and absoluteness.

“Wow,” I hummed as Cho cut the engine. “That’s quite impressive.”

“Yes. We are very proud of the river.”

“Now it is my turn to ask you questions,” said Cho, smiling.

“Ok. That sounds fair.”

He cracked his knuckles and leaned his seat back. “First. Why did you come here?”

“It’s the end of the line. This is as far north as I can go.”

“No, no. Not Kachin. Myanmar. Why did you come to my country?”

“Because it’s there I guess. But also because most people in America no very little about Myanmar, myself included. I wanted to learn about what life is like here.”

“What other countries have you visited?”

I counted off on my fingers. “On this trip I’ve been to Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore.”

“Why do you visit so many?”

“Perspective.”

“Could you elaborate, please?”

“You know, you should consider becoming a journalist, man. You’re good at this interview stuff. I guess what I mean is that when I come to a place I do my best to try and understand how people there approach life. It’s difficult, impossible, really, because I never speak the language and I’m only ever passing through. But if I can even get a little glimpse, and can hopefully understand the different cultural perspectives I see, then I have one more tool for examining my own lifestyle and my own choices. How can you be critical of yourself if you only have one way of looking at the world? Travel is one way to learn about that.”

“That’s very interesting,” said Cho. “You make me want to travel. But I never leave Myanmar. I cannot afford, and my family needs me.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Where would you go if you had the choice?”

“Australia I think. Because there is so much open space. But I am not finished with asking questions.”

“Oh, sorry. Go for it.”

“You must have been gone a long time to have visited so many countries. What does your family in America say?”

“It has been a long time. About six months. Luckily my family is supportive. I try to talk to them when I can.”

“Do you get tired?”

“Yes. Sometimes it can be very exhausting. Sometimes I get afraid that I will keep going, keep spending money, and just be totally blank. Like I’m saturated, or a sponge that has already soaked everything up. I don’t want to keep looking at new things and not be able to process them.”

“So then why keep going?”

“I can’t really help myself.”

“That is a long time to be running.”

“Who said I was running?”

“You did. Just now.”

“Oh. Well I don’t have much of a life to go back to. No job or anything.”

“Then this is my last question: What are you running from?”

To achieve the marvelous, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought