A Fortune-Teller Told Me (59 page)

It was time. I felt that with him I could put an end to these encounters.

I
s it right that headhunters should abandon their rituals, however macabre, in favor of the more innocuous but equally inhuman practice of sitting for hours and hours in front of a box of illusions called television? Is it right that the warm, intimate light of oil lamps should be replaced by the flat, bluish glare of fluorescent tubes? That the sweet tinkling of bells on the eaves of a pagoda, stirred by the sunset breeze, should be drowned by the screech of a discotheque next to a lake on which plastic bags and empty imported beer cans float obscenely amid the shining expanse of lotus flowers?

“Progress” has spread to every corner of the earth—even where there are no roads or airports yet, a simple antenna on a pole will pick up the seductive messages and poisonous dreams of modernity. There are few places left where one can still ask questions like those above, even rhetorically. One of them was a remote corner of eastern Burma, between the town of Kengtung and the Chinese border. For more than half a century, because of Burma’s internal events and the xenophobia of its rulers, the region had remained cut off from the rest of the world, and thus locked in the magic beauty of timeless things.

The spell is now broken. Twelve months after opening the road to Kengtung, built by the forced labor of chained prisoners, the Burmese, under pressure from Bangkok and Peking, have extended it from Kengtung to the province of Yunnan. This has transformed the whole region into a corridor between Thailand and China, and a free market for everything from heroin to virgins. One of the last sanctuaries of untamed nature has been sacrificed to the logic of profit. I was one of those who took part in that rape. At the beginning of December I rode in one of the forty-six cars of the convoy which inaugurated the link
between Chiang Rai in northern Thailand and Kunming in southern China.

China and Thailand want to strengthen their economic ties, and they need a direct overland communication route. My “Friendship Rally,” advertised as a ten-day “adventure tour,” was meant to demonstrate that the Burmese mountains are no longer an obstacle to mutual development, and that the opening of the road is in everyone’s interest. For the organizers, the trip was a great success. To me it was a continual cause for despair.

The crude, tortuous road from Mae Sai to Kengtung which I had traveled at the beginning of the year had already been doubled in width, and was about to be tarmacked. The prisoners had been sent off to work in stone quarries, so as not to spoil the view for the tourists. In their place were bulldozers, cranes and lorries from Thailand. In the villages I saw new brick houses which had been built with the money earned by girls in the brothels across the border. And Kengtung itself, after just a few months, already showed all the signs of the ineluctable victory of modernity over tradition, of the garish over the natural. Psychedelic haloes—concentric rings of multicolored flashing bulbs—had begun to appear behind the heads of Buddhas in the pagodas; fluorescent lights could already be seen in many houses; and a deafening discotheque had been built on the shore of Lake Neung Ting.

The morning market was still a great adventure, with its fantastic collection of humanity—Meo hunters, Padaung women, the Lisu, the Karen, the Paò mountain people—each with something to sell or exchange. An Akka woman with a wooden packsaddle held by a strap over her forehead showed some Thai tourists a beautiful blanket covered with embroidery in the old style. One of them offered her a 500-baht note. The woman signaled no. Another held up two 100-baht notes. She took them and gave him her blanket. Everyone laughed, even the poor woman who went away happy, confident that two notes must be worth more than one.

At the Italian mission, the only change in ten months was that there was one nun less. She had died in November, and they had buried her in the church.

The most truly “adventurous” part of the trip began after Kengtung. The forest grew dense, and the road, barely opened by the bulldozers, ran up a steep slope. The villages we passed through were clusters of wooden huts grouped around pure white pagodas. The English writer Maurice Collis, who in 1938 was the last Westerner to travel in the region, described how the peasants would fall on their knees when they heard a motor car: it must be carrying a prince!

After a couple of hours we came to an old iron bridge over a little river. The convoy stopped.

“Is this the border?” I asked a Burmese official who seemed to be in charge of the place.

“No, that’s thirty miles further on, but the border controls are here.”

“Why?”

The official did not answer, but simply handed back my passport as if from there onward I and all the others were out of his hands. And indeed we were.

As soon as we crossed the bridge we were stopped again, and the cars were inspected once more, this time by some strange, small soldiers with lean, high-cheekboned faces, Chinese-style uniforms like those of the Khmer Rouge, and AK-47 guns. The striped flag that flew over their blockhouse, fenced with pointed bamboo stakes, was different from that of Rangoon. On maps the region is still part of Burma, but in reality we had just entered “Wa Land,” the territory of the headhunters. We were ordered not to get out of the cars and to keep our windows tightly closed. It was absolutely forbidden to take photographs. Nobody smiled at us or made a gesture of greeting. “Adventure tourism” did not seem to interest the Wa, only a $15 tax per car which the organizers paid, after which we were allowed to pass.

The Wa are a mountain people. For years they fought alongside the Burmese Communist guerrillas against Rangoon; then the Communists lost the support of Peking, made peace with the government and started growing opium, and the Wa had no choice but to do the same. They obtained an autonomy of sorts for their land, and there, obviously with the consent of Burma on one side and China on the other, they have become full-time heroin producers. This has also turned them into competitors of Khun Sa, the great drug king who operates farther south.

I am always curious at how the Western judicial system, which by now is formally the law of the world, has not taken root in Asia. Here the typically Western concepts of “right,” of “state” and “frontier,” are adapted to local traditions and interests. The Chinese, for example, have always considered the fringe regions of the Middle Kingdom as “subject areas” that owe tribute to the Son of Heaven, even though they are not officially part of China. Although the “Wa Land” is technically in Burmese territory, its chief is the very Chinese Li Minxiang, an ex-Red Guard and former adviser to the Burmese Communist guerrillas. Now he too has been converted to the production of heroin. His headquarters are in the town of Monglà, the “capital” of “Wa Land,” only a hundred yards from the frontier with China. We were absolutely forbidden to stop in Monglà, but it was not hard to recognize the house of Li Minxiang high on a hill, with a large satellite dish on the roof. In a sort of café by the roadside I saw about fifty young people sitting on wooden benches, glued to a television screen. The swift, dusty passage of our convoy distracted them for only a few seconds.

The Chinese are great actors, and several rehearsals must have been held for the arrival of the “Friendship Rally.” A barrier, freshly painted red and white, was raised at the sight of the first vehicle, and policemen in brand-new uniforms recited: “Welcome to China. You are pioneers. We hope that many others will follow you.” Since the end of the Second World War no Westerner had passed through there, and television reporters from Yunnan had been brought in to film the event. In the center of the town of Daluò the authorities had laid on one of their standard receptions to celebrate “friendship between peoples.” For me it was a good chance to take a walk around the place. Most of the houses were new or still under construction. A bank was prominent. From the telephone booths it was possible to call anywhere in the world. Everyone knew Li Minxiang, and they said he often came to Daluò. If I asked about opium and heroin they just smiled. A policeman said we had passed the refinery just before the border.

The setup was perfectly suited to the interests of all the protagonists. By leaving part of its territory in the hands of the Wa, the Rangoon government could claim that it was in no way involved in the drug traffic carried out by those “rebels,” even if it undoubtedly took a percentage of the profits. The Chinese, for their part, could say they had neither
plantations nor refineries within their borders, even if they undoubtedly profited from the fact that most of Li Minxiang’s heroin passed through China en route to the rest of the world.

After Daluò the “adventure tour” was entirely run by the Chinese authorities. Half a dozen police cars preceded and followed our convoy; in the villages and cities we drove through the whole population had been rounded up to stand by the road and manifest their “spontaneous” enthusiasm for the “Friendship Rally.”

The Chinese count on this road to export the products of their consumer industry through Burma to Southeast Asia and India. The Thais are equally interested in the direct link with China for developing their depressed northern regions and extending their influence to those parts of Burma with populations related to the Thais, such as the Shan.

The city of Kunming was already famous in Marco Polo’s time. He spent a few days there, and later described the local women’s surprising custom of giving themselves to visitors with no opposition from their husbands. Now as our convoy approached the city it felt like arriving in Hong Kong, with brand-new steel and glass buildings silhouetted against the sky. But on the roads, pushed to the side by policemen dressed like generals of a Latin American dictatorship, swarmed the usual enormous crowd of poor Chinese. Many still wore the blue outfits of Mao’s time.

Mao. In Kunming he was far from forgotten. Every car I saw had a big medal hung on the rearview mirror: on one side was the classic photo of the young Mao in Yenan wearing his green cap with the red star, and on the other the photo of Mao in old age, with the mole on his chin. “It brings good luck. It gives protection against accidents,” I was told by one of the hotel drivers. From being the god of the revolution, Mao had become the god of traffic. Perhaps for the Chinese that was a wise and practical way of exorcising the
phii
, the ghost, of a man who during his lifetime had weighed so heavily on their lives, and who after his death they certainly did not want returning to disturb their dreams. By honoring him as a divinity, they hoped to keep him quiet.

A strange fate, that of Mao. He began by trying to revitalize China by giving its civilization a new foundation and new values, and ended by
wrecking what little still remained of the old. He tried to destroy the Chinese view that they were different because of their civilization, and to replace it with the idea that they were different because they were revolutionaries. When it became clear that the revolution was a failure, the Chinese were cast adrift to be swept away by the current of the times, to become just like all the others. Poor Chinese!

The fate of this extraordinary civilization saddened me. For literally thousands of years it had followed another path, had confronted life, death, nature and the gods in a way unlike any other. The Chinese had invented their own way of writing, of eating, of making love, of doing their hair; for centuries they had cared for the sick in a different way, looked in a different way at the sky, the mountains, the rivers; they had a different idea of how to build houses and temples, a different view of anatomy, different concepts of the soul, of strength, of wind and water. Today that civilization aspires only to be modern, like the West; it wants to become like that little air-conditioned island that is Singapore; its young people dream only of dressing like “businessmen,” of queuing up at McDonald’s, of owning a quartz watch, a color television and a mobile phone.

Sad, is it not? And not just for the Chinese, but for humanity in general, which loses so much when it loses its differences and becomes all the same. Mao understood that in order to save China it had be closed to Western influence, it had to seek a Chinese solution to the problems of modernity and development. In posing the problem Mao was truly great. And he was great in being wrong about how to solve it. But always great, Mao: a great poet, great strategist, great intellectual, great murderer. Great like China, great like the tragedy it is now enduring.