For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question (2 page)

I nodded.

“I am kuh-REN. Everybody here, we are all kuh-REN.”

Oh, man. It was starting to come together now.

When I’d landed in Bangkok, a BA employee had picked me up at the airport to make sure that I found the bus station and the right eight-hour bus north. She was tiny and Thai and heavily accented, and repeatedly told me during our cab ride that everyone I was about to be working with was Korean. It seemed sort of weird that a bunch of Koreans would move to Thailand together to work for peace in Burma, but I thought that was nice, I guessed, and even wrote in my journal, relievedly, inexplicably, “Koreans tend to have
excellent
English skills.”

When I’d arrived at the Mae Sot bus station, the clearly Southeast Asian The Guy had asked if I was his new volunteer.

“Yes,” I’d said. “
You’re
not
Korean
.”

I’d done my homework before I left the States. I had read about the Karen. Unrelatedly, I even had a brilliant National Geographic-
style coffee-table book with pictures of women adorned with stacks of gold rings, members of the few remaining long-neck Karen tribes of not-so-distant relation. But I’d only seen the word written down, and had assumed, incorrectly, that it sounded like the name of my parents’ blond divorced friend. I didn’t know how it was pronounced any more than most Westerners would’ve been certain how to say “Darfur” ten years ago.

 

IMAGINE, FOR
a moment, that Texas had managed to secede from the union, and that you live there, in the sovereign Republic of Texas. Imagine that shortly after independence, a cadre of old, paranoid, greedy men who believed in a superior military caste took over your newly autonomous nation in a coup. Your beloved president, who had big dreams of prosperity and Texan unity, whom you believed in, was shot several times in the chest, and now the army runs your country. It has direct or indirect control over all the businesses. It spends .3 percent of GDP on health care, using your oil and natural gas money to buy more weapons, which Russia, Pakistan, and North Korea have been happy to provide, and the agricultural sector has nearly collapsed. Free press is illegal. So are gatherings of more than five people. A trial, much less legal representation, in the case of your arrest is not guaranteed. In the event of your interrogation, be prepared to endure tactics of the awful and the totally queer: crouch like you’re riding a motorbike, for hours, be hung from the ceiling and spun around, and around, and around, burned with cigarettes, beaten with a rubber rod, put in a ditch with a dead body for six days, locked in a room with wild, sharp-beaked birds, made to stand to your neck in a cesspool full of maggots that climb into your nose and ears and mouth. But if you do manage to stay out of prison, where most of your activists and dissidents have been rotting for decades, you are broke and starving, and you’re trying to personally teach your children to read, assuming they’ve survived to be children, since there’s a 30 percent chance that they’ll be devastatingly malnourished under the
age of five and a 10 percent chance they’ll die before they reach that birthday. What’s more, you and your fifty million countrymen are trapped inside your 268,000-square-mile Orwellian nightmare with some 350,000 soldiers who are on active duty, not reservists, not just enlisted and awaiting a tour, but actually armed and deployed all the time. They can snatch people—maybe your kid—off the street and make them join the army. They can walk into your neighborhood and grab you as you’re going out to buy eggs and make you work construction on a new government building or road, long, hard hours under the grueling sun for days or weeks without pay, during which you’ll have to scavenge for food, since you don’t have any money, lest you work yourself to death. You’ll do all this at gunpoint, and any break will be rewarded with pistol whipping; it’s possible, and entirely permissible, that you’ll be killed for malingering, or getting smart, whether you’re an old lady or a priest or what, at forced work, walking down the street, wherever. Your life in the Republic of Texas sounds like a dystopia a screenwriter made up. Your life is roughly equivalent to a modern-day Burmese person’s.

Now imagine that you belong to a distinct group, Dallasites, or something, that never wanted to be part of the Republic in the first place, that wanted to either remain part of the United States, which had treated you well, or, failing that, become your own free state within the Republic, since you already had your own infrastructure, and social structure, and community leaders and culture all in place. Some Dallasites have, wisely or unwisely, taken up their rifles to battle the government, and in retaliation for this armed rebellion, whole squads of the huge army have, for decades, been dedicated to terrorizing your city. You and your fellow Dallasites are regularly conscripted into slavery, walking in front of the army to set off land mines that they and your own insurgents have planted, carrying hundred-pound loads of weaponry and supplies under severe beatings until you’ve lost your use, which is to say you’ve become permanently injured or died. If you’re so enslaved, you might accompany the soldiers as
they march into your friends’ neighborhoods and set them on fire, watch them shoot at fleeing inhabitants as they run, capturing any stragglers. If you’re one of those stragglers, and you’re a woman, or a girl older than five, prepare to be raped, most likely gang-raped, and there’s easily a one-in-four chance you’ll then be killed, possibly by being shot, possibly through your vagina, possibly after having your breasts hacked off. If you’re a man, maybe you’ll be hung by your wrists and a fire will be built under you and burn you alive. Maybe a soldier will drown you by filling a plastic bag up with water and tying it over your head, or stretch you between two trees and use you as a hammock, or cut off your nose, pull out your eyes, and then stab you in both ears before killing you, or string you up by your shoulders and club you now and again for two weeks, or heat up slivers of bamboo and push them into your urethra, or tie a tight rope between your dick and your neck for a while before setting your genitals on fire, or whatever else hateful, armed men and underage boys might imagine when they have orders to torment, and nothing else to do. You can’t call the police, which are also run by the armed forces. And though you’ve been sure for decades that the United States can’t possibly let this continue, it’s invested in your country’s oil and will not under any circumstances cross China, which is your country’s staunch UN and economic ally, so you really need to accept that America is decidedly not coming to save you. Nobody is. Now your life is pretty equivalent to a modern-day Burmese Karen’s.

 

THOUGH THEY’D
been speculating about the new volunteer all the way into this early evening, no one created any fuss when I turned the corner from the kitchen into the large living room. Four pairs of dark eyes looked from a small TV screen up to me. I smiled, but no one said anything. The Guy, leaning against the wall with his arms folded, didn’t make any introductions, so I approached the only other girl in the room, who was standing in the back, and asked her name.

She looked nervous, but after sucking in a breath she uttered
three syllables, completely unfamiliar Sino-Tibetan sounds fast in a row, and I didn’t understand. I towered over her tiny frame. When I leaned in closer and asked her to repeat her name, she backed away while she did. I still didn’t get it well enough to say it back to her, but told her my name in return. She just nodded.

I sat on the marble floor among the legs of the white plastic chairs the guys were sitting in, quiet in the surrounding rise and fall of their soft tonal syllables, deep, bubbling, like slow oil over stones. The TV blared Thai. As it grew dark, mosquitoes sauntered in through the screenless open windows. In season on the mosquito-transmitting menu at the Thai-Burma border: malaria, dengue fever, Japanese encephalitis. My breeding and upbringing left me with no natural resistance to the two latter, and I’d opted against taking the sickening drugs for the former. Not wanting to further alienate myself by being the white girl who ran upstairs to hide under a mosquito net at dusk, I watched the guys laughing and talking, like a partygoer who didn’t know anyone where everyone was having too good a time to care. They were fit, bare calves and feet splayed in front of their chairs, their smooth faces smiling easily. I pulled my air mattress out of my bag and started blowing it up. I incurred some mosquito bites. I shifted my sit bones on the shiny tile. I stood up.

“I’m going to bed,” I told The Guy.

He nodded, and looked at me for a second. It was seven-thirty. “Are you okay?” he asked. I’d just taken twenty-seven hours of planes and automobiles and felt exhausted and alone. He wasn’t sure if I was going to lose it, but clearly I looked like I might.

I said that I was fine. He knew I was lying, but what could he do? I’m like a baby I get so incapacitated and pessimistic when I’m sleepy. I wasn’t sure if I was going to lose it, either. But I’d glanced the phrases “Forced marriage” and “Human trafficking” on a piece of copy paper taped to the scuffed flat paint covering the wall behind the computers in the adjacent room, so even though I didn’t know
what that was about, I suspected that in this crowd, the circumstances didn’t warrant a breakdown.

The wooden steps that wound from the living room ended upstairs at the front of the house. To my right was a big open room, its floorboards littered with straw sleeping mats. Straight from the steps, across a short landing, was a bedroom, my room, wide but shallow, more wood floors and walls, containing the door to the balcony. I dropped my air mattress in the back right corner, under the big blue mosquito net, and lay down.

Maybe I’d thought it was going to become clearer upon my arrival, but I realized I had no idea who these people were, or what they did here, or even what I was going to do here. I appeared to have my work, whatever it was, cut out for me, since The Guy seemed to be among the few who spoke English. My digestive system had its work cut out for it, too, since these guys apparently ate sticks.

A 1911 census reported that the Karen lived in Burma “peacefully, quietly, unobtrusively . . . avoiding all contact with the tribes they passed . . . preferring the hardship and obstacles of hills, jungles and uninhabited regions to the dangers of conflict with fellow beings.” Every missionary, explorer, and ambassador who ever encountered the ethnic minority that had for centuries farmed the mountains along the Thai border commented on their docility. And, lying there, feeling left out because I couldn’t participate in a language I didn’t understand, listening to my housemates laugh and holler downstairs, the Karen seemed nice to me, too. I couldn’t have guessed then, drifting to sleep to the sound of their amiable chatter, that every last one of them was a terrorist.

 

HTAN DAH
dropped a pile of thinly sliced onions and whole garlic cloves into a wok of hot soybean oil shortly after dawn. He’d been up in the middle of the night, waiting alone in the living room for one of the World Cup matches, most of which aired at seriously inconvenient hours in Thailand. I’d been up, too, and had seen him in the chair
he’d placed a few inches in front of the little TV when I’d gotten up to go to the bathroom. “Don’t you ever sleep?” I’d asked him, but he didn’t respond, or if he did, I didn’t hear it over the broadcast.

His coworkers had inadvertently slept through the match. Most of them were still sleeping now. I climbed out from under my mosquito net and walked softly out of my room and past a few of them sprawled on the floor of the big open one. When my feet hit the cool tiles at the bottom of the steps, I turned toward the sound and smell of searing allium.

Htan Dah stood at the gas range, which spat oil at his baggy longsleeved shirt. It was the same thing he’d been wearing the day before, when he had strode into the living room as I tried to figure out how to blow up my air mattress, sitting on the floor with the limp plastic splayed over my knees, surrounded by guys not speaking to me. When I’d looked up into his wide, round face framed with chin-length black hair, he’d given me an amused smile and asked, “Can I help you?”

I sat down at the picnic table in the dining room/garage, a couple of feet from where he was cooking, and we exchanged hellos. He was a little chubby, I thought, watching him in his loose clothes. He picked up and tilted the wok, concentrating harder than he needed to on the swirling herbs. Htan Dah was worried about me. As the office manager of Burma Action for the past two years, he’d heard the nighttime weeping of plenty of self-pitying philanthropists, who tended to arrive tired and instantly homesick. The last girl, a Canadian with a lot of luggage, had started sobbing almost as soon as he’d picked her up from the bus station, and couldn’t be calmed even by the hours she spent taking calls from her boyfriend back home. She’d cried for days.

Indeed, I’d had a very sad moment last night when, after my air mattress deflated shortly after I lay down on it and my angles pressed hard into the wood floor, and I realized that the ants patrolling the grounds were trekking right through my hair, I’d actually hoped for the worst, hoped that I had contracted malaria or Japanese encephalitis
from the mosquito bites raging hot and itchy on my legs so I had a legitimate excuse to bail back to the States. That way, I wouldn’t have to be mad at myself for being too chickenshit to hack it through loneliness and less-than-ideal bathing arrangements. I’d even considered taking the bus back to Bangkok and calling my airline, betting myself that there was room on a flight out. If there wasn’t, I reasoned, I could just hang out on Khao San Road and read books. I hated Khao San Road, with its hennaed European backpackers and incessant techno and beer specials, but at least it was familiar. I’d realized then that I might start crying. But I was determined not to. Instead, I saved the tearing up for when Htan Dah put another bowl of stick soup in front of me now and asked, “How long are you staying?”