Thursday, 15 January 2009

• My Adventure in Burma - Meeting the Burmese People

  Guest post submitted by Izaxpix
  

  Monks on a Train
  

  After waiting a month for a visa, and a week for a bank transfer in Thailand, I had the place* pretty much to myself.  With the previous year’s political crackdown, the cyclone, and the fact that off-tourist-season weather can be really, really unpleasant, not too many foreign people were there.  In that, it was like Bangladesh, except that Burma has built up some (real) tourist infrastructure, which was almost completely empty. There were still a bunch of do-gooder types hanging around in Rangoon, and a  few do-gooder tourists trying (and often failing) to get involved with cyclone relief, but, in the rest of the country, major cities had 5 to 15 tourists at a time, and smaller ones me and maybe some other guy.  Though I was resting comfortably on the supply-demand curve with regards to cheap lodging and attention paid me, it was a bit depressing seeing the poor souls in the employ of the Burmese tourist machine having to scramble so hard.  Many assured me at the beginning of the trip that this would soon turn around, as it was the beginning of the “Spanish holiday,” which in previous years has seen them flooded with Mediterranean folk.  As the month dragged on, I heard about this less and less. 

  One can only guess
  

  Pyin U Lwin and the Panish Doctor
  

  In Pyin U Lwin I went to supper and got invited to the table of a group of guys from my hotel that I’d played chinlone with earlier.  I seldom got service at a Burmese eatery without walking up to someone and tapping them on the shoulder, but locals know what to yell, and whom to yell at.  We chatted, in their extremely limited English, about a few cross-cultural universals, namely: food, music, and Mr. Bean**.  They were a film crew, and each felt an individual need to point out an older guy in glasses, at another table, as the director.  Others proudly identified themselves as the video editor, camera man, and musician.  I didn’t, for lack of language, ask what their movie was about, but that is probably for the best, judging by later inference.  Later in the evening one of their friends arrived: 

  Burmese Guy: “That one is panish doctor.  You know panish?”

  IS: “Spanish? Not really. A little.”

  BG: [with suggestive sign language] “No, no.  Panish doctor.”

  “Testy,” interjected another Burmese guy helpfully, “Bachina.  Testy.”

  I decided to leave it at that. 

  Later I caught up with an American guy I’d met in Hsipaw, after his trip to Pyin U Lwin.

  AG: “I met a film crew there.  They invited me along for one of their shoots.”

  IS: “Oh yeah?”

  AG:  “Yeah.  I left after a while though.  It all just got a bit uncomfortable.”

  Thoughtful pause.

  AG:  “There is a really large homosexual population here.  Have you noticed that?”

  Trishaw Driver Who Has Been Listening In : “What is homesesual?”

  AG and IS : “Don’t worry about it.”

  TDWHBLI: “No! I want to learn English!”

  
  The Hills
  

  The seldom seen fasting Buddha
  

  About halfway through, I hired a guide to take me up into the Shan Hills.  It was rainy and the clay/dirt roads were slick, limiting how far we could get.  We passed some trucks that had been stuck for days. 

  One village had provided shelter to the survivors of a plane crash in WWII, keeping them hidden in the monastery for the months it took them to heal and get out.  We took a side trip there, but the monks were busy building a latrine, so we didn’t get to see the parachute and other paraphernalia the airmen left behind. 

  

  On the way, we stopped in a ‘pub’ where we met a man medicated for the mumps by means of white gloop all over his face.  A toddler was sitting around in a pink sweater, and his grandmother came up through the floor on a ladder.  Seeing me, she started talking to the kid, which Guide translated as “This foreigner has come to take the little children away because they cry too much.”  The kid, who had been staring at me curiously, immediately fixed his gaze on his foot.  It was funny, but to get your kid to survive in the hills you apparently have got to toughen him up with more than a brief jest, because soon his mother came in and started saying the same thing, while Guide elaborated, presumably about all the kids I had kidnapped in previous villages.  The kid’s foot got more and more interesting, but they weren’t done yet:  “If you carry him off now, I think he will cry!” I declined, but Guide insisted, so, looking to the poor kid’s grandmother and mom to lift me off the hook, and not getting lifted, I went over and gave a half-hearted tug at his sweater sleeve.  He jerked his arm away, and much merriment ensued.

  This woman is Chin.  I felt a bit of a tool taking a photo, but she was very gracious.
  

  Heading back from the monastery, I was befriended by a village girl who wanted to practice her English.  We went to her house to drink coffee from 3 in 1 packets, and work out just what she was trying to say in her laboured, vaguely phonetic way.  Then the skies really opened up, and the family invited us to spend the night.  The food was fantastic, with variations on fresh pumpkin greens and vegetables, along with a pork stock soup, all seasoned with a salty shrimp crumb concoction.  The girl showed me her slingshot, armed with clay bullets, whose purpose remains somewhat mysterious. Guide said something about self-defence, which sounded a bit suspect.  The young lady was a masterful shot.  I tried to hit a vertical bamboo pole about 50 feet from the front porch, and missed by a couple of feet (still a lucky shot, I imagine), but she got it on the first try, after which the pellet ricocheted into a neighbors house, and we all went inside.

  

  That evening we visited the local movie theatre, a boarded-in area under one of the houses on the main street (dirt path), with a 20 inch tube television and Chinese DVD (maybe VCD) player on a bureau at the front.  I think they were powered by a generator.  There were about 50 people crammed onto low wooden benches.   We watched a Chinese movie set in Thailand, which did not make it easy for me to establish place initially.  The language was probably Cantonese, as the protagonist was from Hong Kong, with poor English subtitles that no one there except Guide and I could read.  It was kind of a cross between Rocky, Breakin’, and any movie where the hero dies.  The acting and montages were broad enough that everyone understood, and even Guide got into it by the end: “Quite good, actually.”

  

  The girl’s older sister was a teacher (of 3 year groups, all in a big room, they take turns being taught) at the village school, and in the morning we visited.  I tried, badly, to teach the oldest ones English for half an hour.  It is part of the required curriculum, but the teachers do not know it at all; the best they can do is reciting the alphabet with the kids, and sounding out words from text. 

  The government provides no electricity to the hills (or much of the rest of the country).  The Chinese are due to start letting the whole north-east feed off their grid soon, but in the meantime well-to-do houses often have a waterwheel generator down in a valley stream wired to their house.  If it rains a lot, which it did, there is enough power to watch TV and use incandescent bulbs; otherwise they must make do with the morgue-like ambience of fluorescent lighting.  There was no TV one of the nights; apparently it had rained too much, and the wheel had become clogged with detritus. 

  The tea-growing hill Shan I visited were relatively well off, given the enormous demand for their product around the country. They can even afford to hire Burmese labourers from the cities during picking season.  At one house we stopped at, the women were all a-twitter because one of them had been robbed, an occurrence almost unheard of in these tiny remote villages where no one is unknown.   The labourers from the lowlands were suspected. 

  

  Tea is known as Lephet <left hand-maybe…> according to a story I heard, like most the stories I heard, while on the back of a motor scooter.  Anyway, at some point someone gave the Shan leader a tea plant saying, this is the path to riches.  The Shan accepted it with his left hand (shocking!), and the name commemorates this breach of etiquette forever more.  I might have who used the left hand backwards.

  Burma puts other tea-loving countries to shame.  Not only is tea constantly sipped in both black and green varieties, it is also eaten (or more hilariously), as a vegetable/snack food/dessert.  My introduction to tea-eating was as part of a salad (Lephet Thoke – I have seen this spelled more ways than I can count) consisting of sliced green tomatoes, peanuts, bits of coconut, and various dried pulses, all tossed in lime juice.  The tea was a dark green leafy mush, reminiscent of a bitter pesto.  I never again got a tea salad quite as good as the first one; out in the villages it was generally eaten straight, with some nuts and other dry bits as garnish.  I ate mounds of the stuff, until I was near sick of it, and had trouble getting to sleep at night.    
  

                    

  I heard some other stories on the scooter, one had something to do with a Burmese King thinking his Shan queen’s ruby earring was enchanted and casting her out as a witch.  Somehow this resulted in curse, such that all Shan girls are either attractive in the face, with an ugly body, or the other way around, so there would never again be a Shan princess in the Burmese court.  I might be mixing two legends up.

  

  On my last day in the hills we dropped in on a wedding.  No one seemed to mind my crashing much, and oddly for Asia, no undue attention was paid to me either.  It was, as weddings tend to be, pretty dang boring.  We first dropped in on the bride’s house where we were fed, and then sat around sipping and eating tea, smoking cheroots, and chatting for a very long time.  When they found out I liked Lephet Thoke they gave me a big plastic bag full of it.  All the while a slow but steady stream of folks finished their meal and meandered over to the groom’s.  We eventually followed, although we were briefly barred at the door by a group of the groom’s friends whose job it was to keep a representative (an older lady) of the bride’s family out.  We then sat around drinking a lot more tea, and eating charred jackfruit seeds.  The womenfolk and many men were sitting in another room watching a terrible Chinese historical soap opera.  Meanwhile, the bride’s party arrived and sat around in the sun, waiting for the old lady to talk her way past the human chain barricading the door.  The groom and his friends were in a backroom the whole time, drinking lots of rice wine.  When I saw him he was passed out, or feigning it convincingly.

  Finally the old lady broke in, and the bride’s party followed. She was in a pale yellow dress, and looked young and scared.  She got escorted to the threshold of the room where the groom had crashed, and a lot of laughter, clapping games, songs, and encouragement went on until she finally entered the room to cheers.  They both came out and the TV was turned off as the couple knelt before a monk who recited something for about two minutes.  The couple said some stuff, and bowed complexly, the monk recited a bit more and it was over.  The son touched his head twice to the foot of a weeping woman who could only have been his mother, and his buddies barrelled out of his room yelling, with his mattress and a trunk full of his things.  His friends and he joined the bride’s party, and returned to her house, where he is to stay. 
  

  Propaganda and Entertainment
  

  The Democratic Voice of Burma operates from Oslo.  Their TV channel is available via satellite (available is a strong word, kids were often sent out every minute or so to adjust the dish when the signal broke up), and watched all over the place.  The times I was in on a viewing they were usually showing a comedy troupe’s live show (safe over the border in Thailand) satirizing the post-cyclone UN visit.  It was a bit broad.  By a bit broad I mean they had a guy in blackface playing oblivious to Asian foot phobia by inadvertently shoving his shoe in the face of Burmese officials while crossing his legs.

  

  Another major entertainment was listening to battery-powered hand radios, which were tuned to the BBC,  Voice of America, or Radio Free Asia.  The Generals are not happy with these; a banner in the Government newspaper was translated for me as: “The BBC are liars, the Voice of America is a pack of fools, and Radio Free Asia are malcontent dissidents who disrupt unity,” or something to that effect. 

  On my last day at Inle Lake, I got to watch the Burmese news.  The international bit was hilarious, a poorly edited jumble of news clearly videotaped from real TV stations like CCTV, Al Jazeera, and the BBC, with occasional commentary and introduction by Burmese anchors with dated hair in a dated studio.  The local news was glorious, with severe white lettered blue screens intermittently flashing with messages about ignoring/reporting pernicious elements creating fake video footage of cyclone destruction (On the streets of Rangoon hawkers were selling CD’s titled “Internet of Nargis” with grisly photos on the front, so maybe they were referring to that).   The good news was a bridge opening, complete with a government minister giving speeches, and gotten-up girls singing and dropping flowers off it.  This all seemed a bit much for a very simply engineered wooden plank bridge, like this one:

  

  The Burmese love western music, with a sort of bizarre unconditional love that transcends genre and performer.  The junta only allows Burmese lyrics, but are either not bothered about copyrights, or are perhaps not sophisticated enough to recognize the rewritten tunes they get as imperialism in disguise.  Asians singing romantic gobbledygook over karaokified arrangements of western songs is nothing new, but the Burmese take the theft to another level, using actual live bands, and by searching out some relatively obscure/old stuff.  Reworkings of songs like Soul Kitchen, and The Way, were contemporary hits.  Whenever I asked what a song I recognized was about, it was always the same: “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?- Love.  Blowing in The Wind? – Love,” etc. 

  

  There was a rotation of about five concert DVDs playing in buses, hotels, cafes, and beer halls all over the country.  It’s not bad etiquette to sing along.  Each concert tended to range from heavy metal to schmaltzy pop, touching all stops, including country and hip hop.  On one (26 stupid hour) bus trip I was seated between a grizzled, red-toothed, paan spewing day labourer, and a young woman just a few years out of teeny-bopperdom, and they could both sing along with about half the catalogue.

  

  The Moustache Brothers are an A-Nyient (Burmese vaudeville) troop, who have had various members in and out of jail over the years, and are championed in the world press.  I kept stopping in to see a performance and being the only audience member (minimum of 3 required).  There weren’t many people around to ask along.  I once made a date with a Spanish couple to eke out the minimum, but they stood me up, leaving me, like the tourist industry, hanging around waiting for Spaniards who were never going to come.

  

  The Celebrated Jumping Cats of Nga Phe Kyaung Monastery

  

  The guidebook and monks all try to act like there are better reasons to go into yet another monastery, but only the truly soulless would not want to see a cat jump through a hoop.  Unfortunately, the cats mostly behave like cats anywhere and just lie around the place.  The monks, who by rights should have been forcing the cats to jump, were all too busy sleeping, or putting up signs that were all ‘Buddhism aims at universal peace through control of mind gained through meditation upon the eight tenets and sevenfold this,’ and ‘these Buddhas represent an interesting syncretism of Lankan Buddhism and Shan animist that.’  They also had this gem of a painting, which they were too asleep to explain.

  

  A depressing coda to the cats

  * Most Burmese anti-junta groups still use Burma; I usually do too, mostly because it is easier to say.

  ** There is no country or culture that does not love Mr. Bean.

  
  

  Some women daubed thanaka under their eyes, others smeared it all over their face and neck, acquiring a ghostly appearance.  Some were more decorative.

  

  

  Bagan (Pagan)

  

  Fishing with a car battery
  

  Mingun Paya, or at least the beginning of it, was huge.
  

  They oppose Modernism, Liberalism, Ecumenism, Formalism and Worldliness, bless them.
  

  It was rainy at Shwe Dagon
  

  This bus lost some important rubber bit, and kept flagging down oncoming traffic on narrow mountain roads to ask them if they had a spare.
  

  

  

  Curing cheroot wrappers
  

  Later on a couple of guys put on the Elephant and went around town dancing to some gongs and xylophones
  

  
  

   

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