Mandalay

The Yangon bus station had the feel of an intimidating dusty bazaar, filled with diesel fumes and sand. It was an enormous makeshift community with its own affable avenues and ignorable slums. There were nice restaurants, run down bars, mobile phone restaurants and roving booksellers. They were the first of their kind I’d seen since Saigon, with stacks of flimsy paperbacks piled into hand-me-down brown canvas slings of the type popular with monks. I got excited when I saw the first one walking through the outdoor bar where I sat, and I beckoned him over to my table. He opened each book and flipped through, showing me hundreds of pages of indecipherable Burmese, not understanding that I cant read a word. Burmese is one of the most unique looking written languages in the world, with lots of thinly scrawled perfect circles and squiggly appendages. I often found myself comparing it to a futuristic alien glyph; in reality it’s an ancient text; the first written accounts are attributed to stone inscriptions from the ninth century AD. The rounded appearance of the script is from the ancient form pens took – palm leaves – which would have torn under the stress of a straight line.

“I’m sorry, I cannot read,” I told him.

“English.” He pointed to the book in my hand and gazed over my shoulder to see what I was reading (The Wind-up Bird Chronicle).

“You can read English?” I asked.

“I can read.”

“Do you have any English books?”

“No. My friend.” He hollered into the dusk and another bookman trotted into view. He deposited a purple paperback decorated with a yellow sun and rainbow colored birds. Burmese was scrawled across the front.

“I cannot read Burmese,” I repeated. 

“No. Look.” He flipped through. It was a book of self-help aphorisms, printed in English and Burmese. I paid for it immediately, hoping to read through it in my spare time as an access point into the Burmese soul.

“How many books do you sell in one night?” I asked him.

“One thousand five hundred.”

“Wow. That’s a lot of business, man.”

“That how much.”

“For one book.”

“Yes.”

I realized that I hadn’t paid yet, and that the clause “how many?” in my question had simply registered as “how much.” I dropped the money on the table and then tried again.

“How many books do you sell tonight?”

“One thousand five hundred.”

“OK.”

“OK. I very happy to meet you.”

“I’m happy to have met you as well. I’d say good luck with the business, but it doesn’t sound like you need it.”

In the back of the bar was an evil smelling outdoor bathroom attached to the kitchen. The only thing separating me from the food was a four-foot high bamboo wall that the teenage girl cooks could peek over to stare at me, which they did unabashedly. I tried to focus my attention down, at the oddly shaped urinal filled with leftover lime rinds, but a howling noise was distracting me. I looked up through a series of great, torn palm leaves hanging in front of the fence, and through, to a bright green field ablaze in the waning sunlight. Next to an idling bus, a Muslim man in starched white robe and kufi hat was kneeling down on a prayer mat and praying towards the setting sun, and beyond, to Mecca. He chanted and bowed to his own internal rhythm, oblivious to the creaking geckos, the gurgling engines and the honking horns pealing through the sky. His self-assurance gave me a boost of hopeful confidence for the upcoming ride, which I was not looking forward to.

I left Yangon on the “Two Star Express” to Mandalay. The bus was a model called the Hino Rainbow, and that was the best thing about it. The seats seemed to have been designed to perfectly accommodate one and a half people, so that my neighbor and I played a battle of shoulder jostling for the twelve-hour ride. When the seats ran out, plastic stools were distributed down the center aisle, and when we stopped, women with three or four bags would try to navigate to the furthest back seat without breaking an ankle in the dark. When those filled up, new passengers camped out on the roof. The driver’s assistant, who stayed up all night drinking Orange Crusher (not Crush, Crusher, which tastes like Orange Crush that’s been left in the sun for a couple days), hung out the unclosable bus door and shouted our destination into the dusty air whenever we passed through another town. Occasionally we would pass by a night crew working on the road, not a man among them. The road construction was done entirely by teams of women, who sorted through gravel, flung sand out onto the road, and gossiped to each other on the dark highway.

Sleep was unobtainable, so I dug out The Book I had bought at the station and tried to educate myself. It was separated into chapters dealing with such everyday topics as “Experience,” “Truth,” “Victory,” “Advice,” and “Life”. I marked pages with quotes that seemed timely to my current state.

Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we make ourselves happy, but how we make ourselves worthy of happiness.

Three days of uninterrupted company in a vehicle will make you better acquainted with another man than one hour’s conversation with him every day for three years.

The man’s happiest moment is his weakest.

Whilst the morning shines, gather the flowers.

When the sun crept over the eastern horizon to announce the morning, I didn’t see any flowers. I felt like I was on another continent. Where Yangon felt ripe and rank, the air in Mandalay was desiccated and rusty. My throat already felt constricted by the sand that blew through the dust-covered streets. From the bus stop to the taxi stand, a fine gray powder had already been beaten into my skin.

“You wait here, I go and bring bike,” said the motorbike man. He had pointed to a cart where a woman displayed an electric cooking pot and a vase of flowers. The bubbling pot was powered by a car battery, also on the cart, which she kept pouring cups of water on in an attempt to cool it off. I stepped back and waited around the corner.

The contrast with Yangon was remarkable. The open sewage and burning hair were gone, replaced with wide roads and the scent of ash. Sidewalks were still a negligible presence, but the asphalt tended to transform into packed dusty earth where people tramped on the sides of the street. Every morning, shop owners would perform a ritual cleansing of the area outside, sweeping away the trash and then pouring buckets of water all over the dirt in an attempt to limit the choking dust storm that would come midday when people traipsed over the baked copper-colored sand. The absolutely futile practice had a patient, steady quality to it, a sense of inevitability: It’s not going to get any better, but we can keep it from getting too much worse.

That morning, I had a trishaw driver bring me to Mahamuni Paya, the largest pagoda in the city, which, among other religious artifacts, boasts a pilgrimage-worthy thirteen foot golden Buddha statue. Over the past 2000 years, so much gold leaf has been applied to the Buddha’s body that in his repose he looks rather like an armored tortoise, with the exception of his face, which is polished daily and hurts to look at.

There were so many people crowded around the Buddha viewing area that I preferred to walk through the courtyards. Shoes are forbidden in any religious area in Myanmar, although apparently cigarette butts and spitting are ok. Even the pagoda had the feel of a bazaar. In the four tunnel-like entrances to the main courtyard, glittering avenues of holy wares had been erected. The air was cast with the choking perfumes of gold paint as squatting men decorating assorted religious iconography, transforming stained tin into holy gold.

I young man sweeping cigarette butts across the stone floor stopped to chat with me. His name was Ny Ny. After the cursory questions about where I’m from and what I like to do, he asked, “Do you want rubies?”

“Excuse me?”

He beckoned me into a dark corner and reached into his pocket to dig out a little cellophane bag. He laid the bag on the ground and spread ten little gemstones on top of it.

“These are rubies,” he pointed. “These two sapphire. This one peridot. This amethyst, and these jade.”

“How do I know they are real?”

“I show.” He brought out a little mirror and, taking the ruby, scratched the surface of the glass. Then, the brought out two coins (a rarity in itself as there are no coins in Myanmar). He placed one on the ground and put the ruby on top of it. With the other coin on top, like a nickel and ruby sandwich, he slammed a brick down on the whole pile. When he picked it up, the coin on top had been bent down around the shape of the stone, which remained gleaming and unscratched. I know nothing about geology or rocks or gemstone authenticity, but this was exciting to watch. I began to haggle with him over the price of the big peridot, which is my birthstone.

“Thirty dollars,” I finally got him to agree, “ and I can pay you in Thai Baht.” Ny Ny’s face lit up. Every vendor and souvenir hawker had asked me the same question: “Do you have foreign currency? I need it for my collection.” I had 1000 leftover Baht in my pocket, about $33.

“Why does everyone ask for Thai Baht,” I asked Ny Ny.

“Because for souvenir.”

“No. Come on. Really. Why?”

“Because foreign money, I can get friends in China or Thailand to buy me mobile phones. Then I bring back to Mandalay and sell. So I sell, sell, sell. Always selling.”

“So rubies to Baht to cell phones to more rubies.”

“Yes, exactly. That is Myanmar black market.”

It was blacker than I was happy to admit. The gems he sold came from mines in Shan and Kachin states, in areas that are off limits to foreigners. The military junta controls and owns most of the country’s gem mines. 90% of the world’s rubies come from Myanmar, and the government relies on the hard cash derived from gemstone auctions. Human Rights Watch reports that conditions at the mining sites are “…deplorable…land confiscation, extortion, forced labor, child labor, environmental pollution and unsafe working conditions for miners are rampant. The absence of health care an HIV prevention information and services has accelerated the spread of HIV/AIDS and drug resistant malaria and tuberculosis in mining areas.” Anyone who enters Myanmar is acquiescing to allow some of their money to find its way into the government’s pockets. Buying black market gems doesn’t help.

During my second day in Mandalay, I went for a long walk through the western part of town. The concrete buildings came to a halt, the streets narrowed and the noise pollution died. These were quiet scenes of village life hidden in the city. Around the corner, in the back alleys, shade and laughter were the tone. Houses leaned into each other, bamboo siding bridging the gap between addresses. The tree-lined paths were too narrow for cars, so old Chinese motorbikes and trishaws weaved in and out of children playing outside.

People seemed surprised to see me. In a one million-person city, many corners were left untouched. When I passed by a house, windows and doors were normally propped open to relieve the bearing assault of the midday heat. Children, mothers, fathers and grandparents would all stick their heads out together and chant “Hello,” or “Minglaba,” (literally: “auspiciousness to you”), and I would wave and then faces would blush, darting back into the shade.

Children ran through the streets, chasing each other and kicking soccer balls. But when I walked past the games were put on pause so everyone could stare. Then the screaming and waving would commence. As soon as someone was brave enough to chant “Hello,” his peers would take up the call, echoing on all sides as they parted to let me though. “Hello, Hello, Hello,” they would keep up the refrain until I waved or smiled or said “Hi,” to each individual.

At one point a bridge crossed over a stagnant canal. On one side, trash was piled high, a floating dam of plastic bags and old rubber tires. Caught in the refuse were fourteen dead dogs, slowly oozing into the black water. Matted fur and raw pink skin caught my eye, and before I could figure out what the shapes were, the constricting taste of wet dog, concentrated a thousand times and tinged with the putridity that rotting flesh brings, burrowed through my sinuses and down into my stomach, inciting a body-clenching gag reflex. I ran back off the bridge and took my first left, up a dirt path that lined the water. It was a slum. Bright green liquid streamed and collected in little puddles around each house. The children playing in the street looked like they had been doused in motor oil, and the men all smiled with black teeth.  They collected around me like a fragrant entourage, pointing at laughing to each other. The attention was unnerving. I was too nervous to take pictures. Every step I took was under the omnipresent gaze of an entire street. Few tourists visit Myanmar; fewer still visit the slums. It felt good to be the center of attention. I was never going to forget that I was an outsider, but the city felt determined to remind me. It was a high pressure situation. When everyone is looking so closely at you, you look at yourself closer too.

A drunk looking man walked towards me, on the same side of the road, hiding in the rank shade next to the ramshackle houses. He looked drunk, plodding diagonally. In his hand he held a small branch covered in pink flowers, and he waved them at me, grunting. I walked straight towards him; I didn’t have a choice. When we were face to face he took my palm and stuck the branch in my hand. I noticed that he had purple fingernails and, under his straw hat, orange hair. In exchange, I gave him my empty water bottle, which he took gladly and began waving it in the air, shouting in Burmese. He looked to me for a response, but I just smiled. He shouted again, saying the same thing.

“I don’t know. I’m sorry,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. He grunted, nodding affirmatively, and shook my hand. He didn’t let go, and began walking, but when I stood still, his limp grip faltered, and he continued down the road, shouting at the empty water bottle, spitting betel juice on the ground.

I still hadn’t gotten used to the revolting nation-wide addiction to betel leaf. On every street corner, vendors sell wrapped-to-order packages of betel. Chopped, red areca nut and dried tobacco is wrapped in a betel leaf slathered in a white lime-based paste. The whole wad is placed in the cheek, and, like chewing tobacco, the combined chemicals of the assorted plant pieces work their way into the bloodstream through the gums.

Chewing betel is a bit like munching and sucking on dirty, bitter gravel. The nut and the tobacco, kept in an alkaline form by the lime, cause the saliva glands to kick into overdrive. The resulting spit is stained deep red from the plant matter, and the longer it’s held in the mouth, the more stimulant is absorbed into the body. But after a while, so much bitter liquid will have accumulated that there is no choice but to spit. Red fluid missiles get launched out of car windows, bombard the ground from second floor balconies, spatter across the floor of outdoor cafés. On bus trips, I might hang my arm out the window, only to have the driver lean out and spit, and a bloody mist fly through the air to blotch my arm. Betel stained the dusty streets to rusty mud; it turned teeth into dark stumps; it was everywhere.

Because of the heat, I could only spend a few hours walking outside before I was forced back to my hotel, which was conveniently located across from an ice cream shop that stayed open late serving beer and psychedelically colored frozen treats. I spent most evenings reading there, alone under the fluorescent lights, happily staring at my book as my accumulating empty beer bottles stared accusingly back at me. It was all I could do to stop myself from boiling alive. The streets had the evaporating bake of the desert. I was forced to drink six or seven liters of water a day from the abused looking plastic bottles sold on every corner. Besides that, my diet mainly consisted of cold beer and inexplicably green, cream soda flavored ice cream. The ice cream was prepared the old school way, starting from an enormous block of ice. It was one young man’s job to stand outside all day hacking the four foot cubes apart with an ancient, rusted saw with wide, inch long teeth. He swung it like a sledge hammer down onto the slippery ice until the smaller pieces were collected in a bucket and someone else brought them inside, where they were fed into a crushing machine. 

One night I was sitting alone, as usual, when an old man at the adjacent table leaned over towards me. “I like your shirt,” he said. “Democracy!”

I looked down to see where he was pointing. I was wearing my Vietnam flag shirt – bright red with an enormous, single star. The design is similar to the flag of the National League for Democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi’s political party. There had been an election held the day before, and the Nobel laureate and former political prisoner won her district by a landslide majority. For the first time ever, the country’s national hero was going to be allowed a seat in parliament. Around the world, governments and NGOs were praising the “free and fair” election process as a serious step forward for the country. People were marching in the streets that very moment, chanting “NLD! NLD!”

I didn’t want to confuse the man. “Oh. Thank you. Actually this shirt…”

“NLD. Yes of course. She won yesterday!” The man had thin, wiry hair, dyed bright orange, and he wore a loose, white tank top that didn’t quite make it all the way over his gut. Across the chest was printed a picture of General Aung San, Suu Kyi’s father.

“I know. I heard the people marching and chanting in the streets last night. Everyone seems very happy.”

“I have been to the United States,” he blurted. His English was almost perfect.

“Oh really, that’s where I’m from. Where did you visit?”

“In California. I was studying engineering there in 1960 as part of a G to G program: government to government.”

“Wow. 1960 must have been a very interesting time to be a student in California.”

“I liked America. American people are very like Burmese people. You are very hospitable to your guests.”

“Thank you. Everyone here has been very kind to me. I am very impressed by the people of Myanmar.”

“Thank you. You are a guest. Guests get good treatment. But I don’t see many people from America in Myanmar.”

“I think it’s because people in the US know very little about Myanmar.”

“But you know about our military government. That is why people do not visit. Although this year there are more tourists because of the reforms.”

“Yes, but even with that, we still know very little.”

He picked up his beer and moved to my table, then launched into an enthusiastic explanation of Burmese history, breezing through sixty years while I struggled to keep up in my notebook.

“We Burmese gained independence from Britain in 1947. General Aung San led us to independence. You know who he is? The father of Aung San Suu Kyi He was a good leader, the best leader Burma has ever had. But the next year he was shot.

“For a while after we had a good leader. U Nu. He was Aung San’s right hand man, and he tried to do good for Burmese people, but even then there was still much fighting in Burma. All the minority people, they formed rebel groups, and the entire country was at war. That is why we changed to military government in 1962.

“Then, in 1988, there was real revolution. People, they came in a jeep to the capitol building in Rangoon. They came in a jeep with guns. Ratatatatatat. They shot everyone. That was the start of SLORC and we had a very bad leader. His name was Than Shwe. People west of the Ayeyarwady River began an insurgency, so he sent the army in. They killed so many people. Even monks and even novices. Small boys. So many people.

“The bad leader, he didn’t care about Burmese people. He thought only for himself and the army. Because of that, he made lots of money. But Burmese people were still very poor. We began selling all of our resources to China, and that was very bad for Burma. The Chinese people are very high-minded. They have always looked down on the Burmese people.

“How old are you?” he abruptly asked.

“I’m twenty-three,” I told him.

“My son is the same age. He was born in 1988. The same year as the revolution,” he said, referring to the 8888 Uprising. “When he was just born, people were protesting in the streets. My and my friends, we marched in the streets of Mandalay. We said ‘No’ to the new government. We said that having a military government was wrong.”

“That must have been very scary,” I said.

“Yes, it was very scary. For a very long time it was very scary. But I watched and saw everything very carefully. That is why I am still alive. After the revolution, in 1988, there were police everywhere. But many were secret police. They didn’t dress in uniform. They wore plain clothes. But in their belt or maybe in their pocket they would wear a microphone. They heard everything.

“People couldn’t speak. I was afraid to say anything then. Everyone was quiet, because people knew about the police. But if they did not know, they might accidentally speak to the wrong person. Then the police hear it, and at night the person would be asleep. At 12 o’clock, 1 o’clock, it’s dark, night time. Then they come. They knock on the door. They take the person and bring them to the torture prison. It was very bad. They used many kinds of torture. And before they tortured people, they asked many questions. After the torture, then they kill them. Or sometimes, if they don’t kill, people were brought to a prison island. No one would see that person again. They would disappear forever.

“Even now, now that Than Shwe has stepped down, things have not really improved. Our new leader, they say he is new and different, but the military is still behind him. Thein Sein, he was chosen by Than Shwe. They still control him. For many years it has been this way. Everything was the military. They make every decision.

“Only now, now might be different. This election proves that we can move forward. Some things are changing. Now we can talk.”

“So maybe I chose a good time to come and visit,” I said.

“Yes. You came at a good time. Now we can talk and not be afraid. Before, no one would talk about these things.”

“Thank you for telling me so much.”

He patted me on the shoulder. “Old soldiers never die,” he said. “They only fade away.” And he exited the ice cream shop.

The Book:  

The greatest homage we can pay to the truth is to use it.

I had a lot to think about. The country was undoubtedly changing, hopeful and on the verge of possibility. But I wondered if the optimism was a little premature. Even with so called “free and fair” elections, even with a new constitution that was ratified earlier this year, the military still automatically holds more than 25% of parliamentary seats, and the Union Solidarity and Development Party, which currently holds more than 50% of seats, is staunchly pro-military. Their decisions are made by block voting. Aung San Suu Kyi will get a new pulpit to speak from, but can real change come to Myanmar?

So much of the country needed it. There were power shortages everywhere I visited in Myanmar, but in Mandalay they were the worst. Electricity couldn’t keep up with the sprawl. The entire block would go dark at night and a long, deep beeping noise would echo through my hotel. Fans would stop spinning and I would sit there in the dark, sweating, staring up at the invisible ceiling for five minutes until someone jogged up the stairs to switch the breakers on each floor. It was specifically conspicuous at the hotel I was staying in, which was attached to a diesel generator store at the ground level. The manager would jot down someone’s passport and visa info and then jog next door to start tinkering on a hulk of greasy metal. Despite the contradictory appearance of a powerless generator store, customers still filed in to peruse the shelves by flashlight.

Myanmar always seemed to leave me with the impression of having stepped sideways in time. With the ancient automobiles, bootleg gemstone business and all women road construction crews, the country was a world apart. There were child bricklayers drinking Orange Crusher and chewing betel.

With the successful elections, the NLD won forty-three of the forty-five open seats in the lower parliamentary house. Aung San Suu Kyi was elected to parliament. In theory, that merely makes her another one of the 664 members. She doesn’t get any special power or podium. But the symbolism was what mattered to the people. It was also apparently what mattered to the outside world. Within twenty-four hours, western nations were lifting decades-old sanctions against the government. Blacklisted Myanmar officials were suddenly allowed to travel in Europe. The United States announced they would name an ambassador to Myanmar, the first since 1990. The world seemed determined that Myanmar joined the twenty-first century. I couldn’t stop the guilty sensation from creeping into my thoughts: If I come back here in five years and everything is different, if the country has lost its funky backwater idiosyncrasies, would I like it as much?

Since we cannot get what we like, let us like what we can get.