Stickman's Guide
to Bangkok
Mangled Minds in Myanmar
By Korski
A great choice of discount Thailand hotels:
• Bangkok Hotels
• Chiang Mai Hotels
• Koh Samui Hotels• Krabi Hotels
• Pattaya Hotels
• Phuket HotelsIt's late afternoon and you're sitting at a three-legged table near the street in a restaurant without a face on a road that could use some pavement when two kids with shaved heads and wearing the pink of novice monks approach you. Their small faces are expressionless and dry, like chalky stone. They're holding at chest level orange bowls the size of desert plates. You look at the kids, and the bowls, knowing what they want. You put their ages at six or seven, the wildest of guesses because of the shaved heads and their stone faces. Their exact ages matter; you're not sure why.
One of them reaches inside his layered drapery and pulls out a 200 kyat note and puts it in his bowl. Now do you understand? the bent and dirty note says, the expressions on the young kids unchanging. These are the same twosome you saw a couple of hours earlier as you were leaving the ten-dollar guest house where you're staying in this place of many spellings—Kengtung, Tong, the one favored in your mind at present. These are the same kids to whom you gave a 200 kyat note earlier. Maybe that's also the same note you gave them, the one now wobbling like a seesaw in the orange bowl of the kid on your right.
You stare and you think, Buddhist monks are a shameless society of beggars. The scam
that no one dares call a scam.
He's thirty and has three children and spent ten years in a monastery and now peddles a trike every day of the week, fighting hard for the simple things of life. Most of all finding a way to pay the 8,000 kyats a month rent for a small cement block house with a single light bulb for everything and everyone. He tells you this, and then adds that the poor people of Mandalay are being forced to move to the countryside because the Chinese and Indians and others with money are continually raising rents.
He charges 200 kyats a ride: that's about twenty-five cents US, calculating in black market dollars, more or less 850 kyats to the dollar. Everywhere he turns he's faced with competition, he says. You see the point; how can you not? Trike drivers in every direction are sleeping and slouching on their bikes, when not shouting at a passerby for business.
He's peddling you through the night and through the water-choked streets of Mandalay around 77th and 26th, pointing out all the nice and new three- and four-story skinny houses, saying again and again that they belong to the Chinese. It's obvious that he's right. You only have to look at the Chinese characters on the second floor wall and the distinctive red lanterns to confirm the claim.
He points to the cars that are few in number on these streets to the north and south and east and west, the new Hondas and Nissans, the Mercedes and the Toyotas. They also belong to the Chinese, he says. These are the people who are deep into the very heart of this country going nowhere but backward, paying for whatever they want, getting whatever they want, controlling much of the trade in heroin. Along with the military, of course, which is the same as the government in this oppressive police state that desires nothing so much as to keep the masses down-at-heel, feeding only themselves and the needs that come from owning the huge white mansions behind the high walls that once belonged to the British. Homes you have been repeatedly warned are not to be photographed.
He tells you as others have that people like him do not like this government, not at all, and they want change. But they can do nothing. They do not have power, or guns, and to speak out is to risk imprisonment, or worse. But they do speak out to people like you because you are from that great land of freedom called the U.S. , and they love your country as much as you do. They do, they really do. You can see it in the eyes and the smiles. You have seen that look repeatedly in taxicabs and on the streets lined with mud and garbage and the faded mint green pools, the uninviting daily residue of the Southwest monsoon.
In Yangon one day you are caught in the leaden and continuous rains that have now come to this part of Asia . You have been walking one stretch of eight or nine blocks for hours, back and forth, stopping, pausing, bending, shooting with your camera; and looking for and trying to measure a pulse rate, the small automatic gestures and hand movements of the hot and cold food vendors. Even that of the old fat gray-headed woman with the nine-inch cigar in her mouth sitting on a step in front of the movie theater, that lady who stares at you with smirking curiosity one moment and then right through you the next, a stone
pillar in a tan baseball cap with a huge black nose of a sort she has never before seen.
Your mind never wanders far from the small children with all the pasty circles and parallel lines that cover their cheeks, sometimes their foreheads, sometimes the bridge of the nose. It's traditional, you hear. You also hear, just as often, that it's sun block--that's the word used, and the sun block is used to keep the nice complexions you never see nice.
You're standing beneath a cloth overhang, staring at the children across the street who are naked and running about and sitting in the water that covers the street like a thick blanket wrestling with the wind. They're laughing, knocking each other down, splashing water, mindlessly venturing forth into the traffic of cars and taxis and pickups and bicycles, and there is not a motorbike anywhere in sight.
There are almost no motorbikes in this city of millions, the seat of the military dictatorship and the generals who rule and think geography all the time: the geography of how to maintain control over territory, keep out snoops, require permits to go just about anywhere, force people to work for nothing crushing rock and improving and extending roads and mining precious stones. The generals are preoccupied with effectively shrinking the national territory, because by so doing it is easier to know what malcontents have in mind, how they intend to rebel. This is a state strongly reminiscent of Cuba , but worse you think. Well, not worse than Cuba ; no, surely. But then maybe it is? What do you know after so little time here?
You look down a six-lane one-way road in central Yangon and you see only taxis and
cars and pickups, and then a bus. Five minutes go by and these are the only vehicles you see, with the exception of a single bicycle ridden by a girl with legs too short for the pedals. You have this thought: Give a class of advanced undergraduates a lecture on economic development and talk about transportation modes and mixes as a surrogate measure of development. Show the class, at the end of your lecture, photos of busy streets in Ho Chi Minh City and Bangkok and Manila and Los Angeles and Des Moines and several other First and Third World cities, all to illustrate just how good the transportation measure is as a way of judging stage of development. Then say to the class, Look at the next slide and guess the stage of economic development of the country. The slide is of this six-lane one-way road in the heart of Yangon .
Will one in fifty students even be in the ballpark with their guesses?
The first story you hear that explains this anomaly, one where only in Yangon motorbikes are outlawed--except for government people and the police--is that one day about five years ago a kid on a motorbike passed in front of a general's car and tried to shoot him. After that, motorbikes were outlawed in Yangon . One instance, one terrorist, a plague on everyone in a city of millions.
The second story you hear is that the son of a high-ranking minister, or general, got killed on a motorbike in Yangon , and that was the end of motorbikes in the city, except for government people and the police. One instance, one accident, and a plague on everyone in a city of millions.
The third story you hear is that several kids on motorbikes were racing around Yangon and a general saw them and was displeased by their behavior, and this was the end of motorbikes in the city that is the command center for the military dictatorship. One general, one instance of bad behavior, and a plague...
You suspect that none of these stories is the real reason that motorbikes were outlawed for the masses in Yangon , for you have come to suspect that whatever the real reason it makes less sense than the stories you have already heard.
You decide that the fact of no motorbikes for the masses--what your eyes can see--is more important than any reason that could be given for this fact.
Can this conclusion be right?
An attractive middle-aged woman in the tiny catch-all snack and food store in front of which you are seeking shelter from the raging rain comes to you and offers you a plastic bag in which to put your camera. You put it inside the bag and then she offers you another one; you don't need it but you use it anyway. How can you possibly refuse this kindness from nowhere?
You thank her and you offer her money, and she won't take it. You smile, knowing that you will smile the good smile all day long and in the days to come, thinking about this woman and this kindness from nowhere. You will feel good because this small gesture of concern happened on a street and in a country obviously poor, so poor you cannot see far enough into the future to imagine when all this will really look much different. Clean streets without garbage and pavement without holes and roads that are not rutted, the all-too-familiar and repetitive environment of the hopeless Third World . Just a bit worse here than most places you've been.
You are on a mountain trail high above a river whose name you do not yet know, and you are told that the cleared hills to your left and beyond the horizon were completely covered in forest a mere three years ago. They were cleared for the teak, which was sold to the Chinese. The Chinese--a word that you hear more than you hear the words Myanmar or Burma or Burmese. A word that is starting to make you feel hostile, because these predators from the north are taking over this country, taking it over as certainly as if by military force. Stripping it clean of the resources that it wants and claims to need. Owning or buying up what it does not clear-cut, or mine, or grow--the opium, of course, which the Chinese also control along with the military dictatorship that posts signs on roads warning of the dangers of drug use. Signs that are enough to make some believe that the government is as clean as a newly anointed saint. People will believe anything...
On a flight north you meet a twenty-nine-year old American who is tall and hefty and healthy and attractive and full of inviting smiles. He has four children; and a wife he loves beyond words, he tells you. All of them have been living in Chiang Mai , Thailand , for some six months. For four of these months Greg and his wife have been learning Thai and about Thai culture. There is no particular purpose in mind to all of this, he tells you in the early part of your chance meeting. You believe him. Who would not believe a man who looks so clean and honest and made it clear that unlike you he is a Christian, and a good man.
Greg's story slows begins to take form, and then slowly mutate. You learn that Greg has a Master's degree in Divinity from Southwestern in Dallas, and yet this doesn't mean anything at all with regard to what he and his wife are doing in Thailand, because they're on their own, sponsored by no one, he claims. The money to support the six of them seems to come from nowhere.
He is on his way to Hsipaw and points east--east and north of this place you wouldn't think of going to but are now going to because of whim, the way you do so much in your life. Greg is going there merely to see what there is to see, just as you would do, are now doing. He has long done this in Africa and elsewhere. He is a man of curiosity, and with this curiosity comes a smile that radiates happiness at every turn. Greg unconditionally believes in the Bible, every word of it, literally, and he can quote at length from it. But none of this, you understand, has anything to do with leaving a wife and four children behind and going to a distant corner of northeast Myanmar .
Why is something caught in your throat, and why do you continue so persistently to ask him questions about what he's really up to?
The conversation veers off onto prostitution in Thailand and what you think of it and what he thinks of it, and it is obvious from the beginning that how you see it and how Greg sees it are worlds apart. Prostitution is bad, Greg says, because it spreads disease and it is not natural; and it is bad because of what the Bible has to say about it, and because of what he as a Southern Baptist believes and knows to be the difference between right and wrong. It would be very good if prostitution in Thailand were eliminated. Greg would not force this change on anyone, he insists. He would just try to get these fallen sinful women to see the light and to accept Jesus Christ into their lives, and then they will--not through him--but through Jesus Christ and the teachings of the Bible, see clearly the wrongness of their ways. See everything that is not at all clear to you--you unbelieving heathen, you.
But it you, now, who is the missionary, and you argue and lecture with the power of words at your command and you do not let up about the need to leave these women alone, to understand not just their needs but the needs of their large extended families, to
understand that the attitude toward sex in Thailand is different than that in the Christian and sin-filled West from which you both come. You talk of cultural disruptions, unforeseen consequences--this most of all. And then you circle back to the inability to appreciate the needs of these women and their poor families from Isaan and elsewhere in Thailand . It is, you tell him, as if he is injecting a very harmful virus into the very needy lives of people he barely understands, and the result will be worse than his anything but benign intended cure.
And what will he do to give them genuine alternatives, alternatives that are not merely the words and the hopes of a hippie that lived two thousand years ago?
It is about economics, you tell him repeatedly. You sense he does not hear your words, and how can he since the Bible is about hope and vision and a hereafter and sin and damnation, and not fundamentally about getting by in a world that does not provide for those with children and no husbands and families on the margins of existence. Economics, Greg, and you need not have heard of Marx to know this.
He begins to understand that you really are a heathen, and he wonders out loud why Jesus Christ has brought you into his life. You understand that Jesus Christ has brought you into his life so that he can work you over, erode your sinful ways and mistaken beliefs, tell you how to find Jesus Christ just as Greg did at the age of thirteen in Norman, Oklahoma. You assure him that others have tried to make you see the light, and they have tried harder and had more time than he will have to try, and their efforts were fruitless. But try as you might, you tell him, because you're listening. You'll listen to anyone about anything. Even someone who claims to have never had a taste of alcohol and never had pre-marital sex and never took a drag on a joint.
You tell him with the force of a shout down a student's throat sitting at the edge of your lips that the story which he takes literally, the basis for everything he does, is a story of no consequence but to people like him because it was written long after the fact. It is, you tell him, no better than a thousand fictions you could pull off your shelf at random.
He smiles the eternal smile of love. Love like sin is a word he uses with abandon.
You tell him you are not sure what love is. He goes for the Bible.
How long have you disliked missionaries?
You are in a hundred-year-old monastery on high ground above a river whose name you do not know, and you amble about and head toward the rear on the squeaky wooden floors and peer out. Your eyes immediately are drawn to a boy of ten or twelve with a shaved head and dressed in the deep red dress of a monk. He is holding what very much looks like an AK-47, which on seeing you he raises and aims directly at you.
You step to one side, not at all sure that this is not a real AK-47 that he's got pointed at you. But you reason that it cannot be, for no novice monk of ten or twelve would have a real gun this deadly, and least of all in a monastery where there are ten such children and four full-fledged monks who are caring for them and indoctrinating them with the teachings of Buddha.
This time you are right. The AK-47 is made of wood, and this kid was just playing with you. Playing as you see all of these kids playing, even when slamming the brass gong during prayer time, and at other times running about and playing like all kids everywhere play no matter what they wear. These kids are, someone tells you in a confiding moment, kids that are here because families have too many of them and this is one of the places they get rid of one of the mouths that is difficult to feed. Maybe another mouth that cannot be fed is sent to the military where the growing child learns how to use a real AK-47, thanks to the Chinese.
You walk some twenty blocks in an area where there should be--would be in almost any other country, no matter the level of development--an Internet site. You finally find one, and it's a slow connection, and it costs close to a fortune, even to you who is not keeping a tab of how much you are spending; and then you find that your web mail site gets as far as the password and then shuts down. Again, and again, and again. Bad connection, you conclude. Site overload, you conclude.
You are not yet in the proper mindset.
You are much closer to the proper mindset when you find, by accident, an Internet Cafe, and it is upscale, and you are no closer to getting your mailbox open than you were before. This didn't even happen, not once, in out-of-the-way places in Thailand or Vietnam or the Philippines . Someone doesn't want you to be able to send or receive e-mails.
You learn that it is a general's son who owns this e-mail site, one of the few you have heard about.
A pedal trike driver takes you out to the local fringe of Mandalay , a city you've concluded is among the dirtiest cities you have ever been in, and you've been in a lot of Third World cities. He takes you to a bar on a dimly lit street, one whose face on this black night is framed in Christmas tree lights. It is a karaoke bar.
You order a couple of beers and you look around and you see two young and somewhat plump girls in blue jeans and without sunscreen on their cheeks walking about, sitting down, anxiously moving to and fro in their chairs. Maybe they're waitresses, maybe not, you cannot tell. There is something different about their behavior, you think.
Your trike driver guide for the night tells you that you are looking at "country girls" and they make ten dollars a month working every day, and their job is to sit with local boys in a room with a large semi-circular leather couch and a TV screen and two huge microphones and sing the words that appear in lines at the bottom of the screen. Their job is also to get the local boys to drink and eat as much as possible, boys who will have to pay a small amount for the use of the room and a pittance for the company of the girl. A girl who the boy is permitted to touch and grope anywhere he so desires. He can do anything with his hands with this girl, but he cannot have sex with her in this karaoke room, or any other room in this bar on the edge of a city in a country that almost no one has heard of.
You wonder how First World feminists and other academics would describe and talk about this young country girl who is paid ten dollars a month to have a hundred different hands exploring every inch of her dark country girl skin. You conclude that they would rather talk about how bad and imperialistic is the rich country that feeds them so well. Like so many people on the Left in your country, they are in love with self-hatred.
You arrive in a town to the east of Mandalay , a town to which the British would come to get away from the oppressive heat and the dust of this city that seems so dirty to you. A town to which those with money in Mandalay come for a weekend. A town with big and old and memorable homes built a hundred years ago by the British. You want a place to stay in the center of the town so you can walk the streets and once again look for telling details, something you have never before seen. But the first two hotels you go to for a room turn you away at the door because you are a foreigner.
You walk down an alley past a woman breast-feeding a child, who is next to a woman surrounded by garbage and doing her wash in a tub of dirty water sitting on mud and black rocks. You continue on, past a pagoda and then come to a large hotel of many stories. You are certain that you can get a good room and may have to pay good money for it, but so what?
The room you are shown only costs three dollars and it looks musty and like a home to armies of bedbugs. You decide there's no need to stay in a three-dollar room with bugs that like to bite and with mold all over the wall so you say thank you and continue the search for a simple place to sleep for the night.
Your eyes are once again dumb: two more three dollar rat holes, and you begin to think that maybe sleeping by the side of the road, just to be near the town center, may be the desirable alternative. But you walk on, persistent. Then you see a foreigner with a woman who looks like a local and you ask him where he is staying and he says the Grace Hotel and it's close and it costs fourteen dollars a night. Perfect, you think, and you get a horse-drawn stagecoach too small for your not-very-large-frame to take you to the hotel, which is not nearly as close to the center of town as you would like. The size of the center of this hill station for the British of long ago is expanding in your mind.
The best room in the Grace Hotel is decent and clean and spacious and the pillows on the bed don't look like they've been used to clean toilets, and it will cost you five dollars rather than the fourteen you expected to and were willing to pay. You fill out the hotel registration form, identical to those you have been filling out since arrival. Detailing who you are and your purpose in traveling and where you were yesterday and where you will be tomorrow and how long you are going to stay in country, and your passport number and your visa number, and more. And your signature--always your signature--of course. The form you fill out is in duplicate, the duplicate as elsewhere always made with the use of carbon paper of a sort you have not seen for a decade or more.
It is late and you are hungry and you are about to leave when the young boy at the desk who carefully slipped the very old and very wrinkled carbon between the registration forms shoves six more copies of the same form at you and says, Please sign your name at the bottom of all of them. You think unkind thoughts. You think this government is mad. And then you laugh when you hear that you have to hurry with your signatures because the boy will fill out the rest of the forms and he only has twenty-five minutes to get the six forms to the government agencies that are concerned about you. And your movements and intentions. After all, don't tell anyone but you are from the rebellious forces to the north, and within the hour will be putting explosives in place that will rock this nation's sense of self and its willingness to ever again let people like you who work for the CIA into the country.
Several people tell you that you are not supposed to take photos of big houses and military installations and the men in uniform, and bridges. With your 300 m.m. zoom lens you take photos of men in uniform anytime they catch your fancy. Then one day, east of Mandalay in a train heading to Mandalay, and out in the middle of nowhere, a man in a blue uniform who is working in your car and previously had been sleeping on the floor amid a pile of rubble comes up to you and motions for you to put your camera away. You have no idea what's on his mind since you have been taking scores of pictures since you got on the train several hours earlier. But you do as he says. He has a mean look on his face, one you decide you do not want to decipher.
Ten, fifteen, maybe twenty minutes later you come to a bridge over a large gorge and the train slows to a crawl, as if afraid that to go much faster would result in a disaster. The bridge strikes you as old and insubstantial, and hardly worth photographing even if you were hanging in empty space at a distance of two or three klicks from the bridge. All that's worth photographing, and only marginally so, is a rock wall in the distance, one you'd probably not print unless desperate. You think of the restriction on photographing bridges and you think of the CIA and the tens of thousands of dollars they would pay you for photographing hunks of gray steel and barely visible cement supports that disappear into the greenery below, and you try as hard as you can to think of a single reason why your government would want to bomb this bridge in a country that does not figure into the foreign policy of your country. The harder you think about this the more you have a burning desire to have dinner with the general who said that foreigners like yourself could not take a picture of a bridge. You would not laugh in his face, but you would spend a whole night seriously trying to get a peek inside his mangled mind.
You're in a small village in the north and it's early in the morning and you're sitting on the hardened dirt in front of a woman selling onions and other greens. You've been sitting here for over an hour. You are amazed beyond words at her command of English, and you cannot figure out how this command is possible. She is twenty-eight years old and has a gorgeous and generous smile and big white teeth and two children, ages two and three, and whether or not she has a husband you cannot be sure because no matter how you frame your question she always says yes--the eternal problem for those asking Asians questions.
She works in this market every day from six in the morning until six in the evening, and you learn she has been doing so for years. How, under the best of circumstances, could she have learned and then remembered the names of all these body parts in English that you throw at her? You cannot even pick up two decent phrases in Burmese without forgetting them by the next morning. Is your memory that bad?
You look for this woman the following morning to learn more about her simple but hard life making a dollar or less a day selling onions and greens, but you cannot find her. The thought of not finding her will sit heavy on your mind all day, and you will not know why. The sadness of all travel; you meet a person, have a satisfying time, and then you will never see that person again in this life. Regret in an ever-changing key.
You've found a hustler in Yangon who speaks English well enough for you to ask questions and make sense of his answers. You've got scores of questions on your mind, and you don't at all mind buying him beers and food and cigarettes.
Why, for openers, are there no ATM machines in this country? Is this not an obvious source of money, a way of keeping the few tourists who come here in country longer? Everyone will take almost nothing but dollars, and you need dollars to get kyats--euros here and there, if you're lucky--and once out of dollars you have to get out of the country. So what, you have already asked half a dozen people, can possibly be the logic of not allowing ATM machines in Myanmar ?
The only answer you ever get, if you get one at all, is that because the U.S. has imposed economic sanctions on Myanmar , and because Visa and MasterCard are U.S. based, ATM machines are not allowed. But then why, you have asked repeatedly, is it official policy that the only currency that the government and others will accept is dollars?
Dollars--as you often tell your students even when they don't want to know--are the most valuable commodity on the world market.
Why, you ask yourself, leaving this question, must you insist that others behave according to your Western sense of rationality?
He is eating a tuna sandwich and on his second Myanmar beer when not far from the booth you are sitting in is a table that has just been taken over by seven young girls. Some are pretty, some are not, you think. While your talky informant goes on about the government and its involvement in the heroin trade, a topic never far from your mind in this part of the world, you watch these girls. They are edgy and they keep turning and looking in the direction of a booth where there are people you cannot see. Something is going on, and you have not got a clue what it is.
What is going on? You must know, the vague information on the trade in heroin now not
very important.
He tells you that the girls are factory workers who make shirts and dresses that are sold in First World countries, and they make very little money at their repetitive jobs. Some of the young girls have children. They have come to this cafe, he explains, because a man in a booth we cannot see is here to pick out one of them to sleep with for the night. He will interview one and then another and then decide, and the others will go home. They will have spent two or three or four hours in travel and sitting and waiting after working all day and will have come up empty handed. Time lost hoping that they would be the chosen one for the night. A week or two in wages for spreading your legs and closing your eyes.
It's part-time hooking in a form you'd never heard of before. But then what did you know about Myanmar before coming? What you knew wasn't a whole lot more than what you'd learned reading George Orwell on his Burmese days.
You're in a Chinese restaurant in Mandalay and it is like few restaurants you have ever been in. You arrived to a parking lot full of new cars and SUVs; you arrived in a trike and felt naked in your dirty blue jeans and baseball cap.
You take a table for ten across from a table of nine Chinese men, several with four thousand dollar cell phones. That is the price you pay for one in this country unless you work for the government. Maybe you pay less than four thousand U.S. if you are part of the Chinese mafia running heroin around the world for the benefit of addicts everywhere, even those in Myanmar and Thai prisons.
At your back is an enormous and very fat Chinese man and you see that he has a Fu-Manchu mustache that looks a lot like the one you sported as a graduate student. But it is very different because his face looks like an over-inflated soccer ball that has turned lumpy, and ugly to a fault. He is chain-smoking and his ear is chained to a cell phone, and your not-always-in-control imagination imagines that he is doing another drug deal. One that allows him to drive one of the new cars out front, and have a cell phone, and one of those sprawling homes you saw on the way here.
You try to pay your bill in kyats, but they will not accept the currency. So you hand them a fifty dollar bill, more than a little wrinkled because it has spent nearly two months inside your left shoe wrapped in a plastic sandwich bag. It's also got a black marker line in the upper right hand corner that means nothing at all.
They won't accept the bill because it has this black mark about an inch long, and because it is a little too wrinkled. So you play with them, tell them you have no more dollars. You want to see how far you can push a dinner bill that has only come to about six dollars U.S. You want to see what they will do. You're curious because like other low-end countries the local currency is so tattered and old and dirty it can barely be identified at times as to denomination.
The tension builds, and the only three women in the restaurant, those who work at the cashier's counter, are now talking with a Chinese man at one of the men-only tables. You decide you've pushed it all far enough, so you come up with a clean hundred-dollar bill that earlier you said you did not have. They will take this one because it will be easy to launder. But they will take it at a rate that is about fifteen percent below the going black market street rate.
No deal, you say, not quite sure why you said this. Daring in a way that can easily turn stupid.
Now you think you have a small insight into why the Chinese are so successful, why in your first encounter with the Chinese in Tahiti many years ago you heard them referred to as the Jews of the Orient. A small moment, but enough to help you understand how the rich get richer in this part of the world. Why the Chinese will soon take over the world.
You have a small trump card. You pull out six one-dollar bills that you said you didn't have and pay the bill and say thank you very much. You leave, unsure of your inferences, but knowing more than you knew an hour earlier. Or do you? Such is the opaqueness of everything around you, even those people and things you have lived with for half your life.
Greg is going to go up into the mountains, and he will do some trekking among hill tribes. Just for the adventure, you originally understood. So you told him, Hey, you don't mind, I'll come along. He has some doubts about you, wonders whether you can keep up with him. You assure him you're in pretty good condition. You told him, Don't be fooled by time measured by a clock that has no sense of real ageing.
More time goes by and he's sending you a hint that he doesn't want you to accompany him. Okay, no big deal. But why not? you wonder. What's the secret mission?
He sort of lets slip that he's going out to "map" hill peoples whose names he does not know and whose locations he does not know. He's a geographer with a missionary's mission. Unofficial, of course, not part of the formal agenda of the Convention of Southern Baptists. Just something he's doing for himself. Find out and map the location of possible converts to Jesus Christ without a map in hand.
Yeah, sure, you now think. Thinking of honest Christians, who are always in love and always concerned about sin and never out of love with their lovely wives and too many children and always concerned about converting the native.
But not just any native. They want the native that is way out there, beyond the reach of easy contact. For there is something more fulfilling about converting the true heathen, the one who doesn't bathe and dress and eat like others. The one that doesn't yet have the shotgun and the ax but soon will have them after missionaries arrive.
But then you think, and you ask him, Why not concentrate on all those that are so easily accessible in the cities, in Mandalay or places smaller but easy to get to?
Good question, he says, one he and others have not thought about.
Not thought about? you say. Are you not concerned with numbers of souls, with being efficient?
We part, the missionary geographer going into the hills without a map and without names of peoples to visit and later convert and only two days to find them and then report back to this or that group of fundamentalists who will go forth with the Bible and the words that bring everlasting salvation. And hell for heathens like you.
You part without having read this critical passage in Romans that would have made you understand a question you jabbed him with more than you should have--perhaps. The all-too-familiar question of why if God is so full of love--why has he created so much hatred and cruelty and suffering in the world, and please Greg do not appeal to a small sin by Adam and Eve that came about because they ate a forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge.
You're in the Golden Triangle driving through mountains that have been denuded and allegedly are among the most abused lands in the world, the most thoroughly raped. This is what you've read. But how are you to know, knowing so little of what you might find elsewhere?
It is something else that catches your eye here as it has elsewhere in the last ten to twelve days, and it is the gangs of young men working alongside the road. Digging ditches where it seems to make no sense doing so, or where it does make sense and you see large blue lines that you imagine to be communication lines, being put in to shrink the effective size of the territory yet further. Generals thinking as anyone with a controlling mind might think.
And then, not once but two or three times, you see scenes where these men, invariably men are doing what makes no sense at all. Like leaning into a red embankment of dirt picking out weeds the size of your thumb. You stare, and you crane your neck in disbelief. Who, but people with demented minds, could possibly order others to do this kind of work?
Stickman's thoughts:
Great stuff, an enjoyable read. I must check out Myanmar one day.
The author can be reached at Korski1@cox.net.
The author of this website, NOT this article, can be contacted at: stickmanbangkok@gmail.com.
