For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question (28 page)

“We are okay now,” he said, laughing still. “I called her and said that I am sorry to her. I am also very sorry that I can’t buy presents for her. She said that”—and here he raised his pitch a little—“it’s okay; it doesn’t matter.” He dismissed the whole event with a wave of his hand. “Love takes care of everything.”

I crumpled my eyebrows. “It really doesn’t.”

“Okay, not the rent. But indirectly.”

I scoffed. Htoo Moo, who’d been listening quietly, shook his head and rubbed his eyes.

By the time I got back from class, the two of them were back at the table and way back under the influence of cheap Thai beer. The bottles were gone, but the boys’ faces were as pink as the tablecloth affixed to the wood. Htoo Moo’s eyes were glassy, and my roommate’s were nearly shut.

“Jesus, Eh Soe,” I said. “How drunk are you?”

“Not drunk. Darling, I have not had any beer.”

“Really? Because it smells like beer even from where I’m standing.” I started walking toward him, and he jumped up from his spot at the picnic table and bolted into the house. I gave chase, skirting the table and following him through the door as he ran into the living room, yelling, “I’m not drunk!” We ran a couple of circles around before he turned back out into the dining room/garage and I stopped, laughing, near Gaw Say.

Gaw Say was sweet and slim and not in possession of a huge English vocabulary. I wasn’t sure what he did, and he didn’t take my class, and he’d arrived at the house from inside or camp or wherever he’d been quite a while after I had, but I liked him, and we chatted, limitedly, from time to time. He had been standing idly in the middle of the living room when we’d come running in. He still was.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

He thought for a second. “Nothing to do!” he said. He fingered the Ping-Pong table against the wall as he passed it, on his way into the computer room to go back to work.

 

WEDNESDAY MORNING,
Htan Dah’s kid joined us in the dining room/ garage. He stood on the bench where I sat, teetering next to me, his eyes and mouth wide open as he took in my forearms. However I moved them, to pick up a knife, or cut through some long green
beans—on a slant, because Htan Dah thought they looked fancier that way—his stare followed. Finally, he reached out and grabbed the fine blond hairs with his plump little fingers.

“I saw you guys curled up and passed out on the floor yesterday,” I told Htan Dah. “You guys are so cute.” He smiled shyly. His kid pointed in his general direction and said,
da
,
da
,
da
. “Where does he go all day while you’re working?”

“With his mom. They go to visit with friends in Mae Sot, or some family. Just, hanging around.”

Abby joined us from next door, freshly cold-showered, her hair damp. “Good morning,” she said, sitting down at the table. “How’s it going?”

“Fabulous,” I said, while Htan Dah said, “Great! Living!”

She turned her attention to the baby. “And how are
you
?” she asked in a high pitch, in the way that people do. The kid didn’t start crying. “Wow, Htan Dah!” Abby said. “Your baby is hanging out with white people!”

“And he’s sober,” I said.

“Yes,” Htan Dah said. “He is becoming adjusted to you.” He smiled proudly.

“Hey,” Abby said, eyeing the Free Burma Rangers logo on my chest. “That’s a nice shirt. Where did you get that?”

After class, I took advantage of an open spot in the computer room to email home the progress I was making on depleting my savings and reiterate that everyone should send me money. Or at least I tried to. Three-quarters of the way through the composition, the power went out.

“God . . . dammit,” I said.

Htoo Moo, working near me, turned his head. “Why did that happen?” he asked.

I sighed, and because I was frustrated, and because that wasn’t the first time I’d lost work that way there, and because one of my students hadn’t shown up to class earlier—because, we thought, he’d
been arrested, so we sat there waiting and worrying for thirty minutes even though it turned out he’d just broken the chain on his bike—I said, “Because Thailand sucks.”

Htoo Moo laughed. Htan Dah, who was also working in the room, did, too, but chimed in, “Yes, but you cannot compare with Burma.”
⁵⁵

“Yes, I know, Burma is much worse!” I said. “Can’t you guys quit with your cool perspective for five fucking minutes?” Neither of them understood what I’d said then, I was sure, but my getting frustrated and swearing was always funny, so they chuckled, which was further frustrating. “It doesn’t change the fact that this is a pain in my ass.”

“Compare with IDP,” Htan Dah said.

“You can’t compare anything with that!” I shouted. I pushed my chair away from my desk, getting up to leave the room full of useless electronics.

Upstairs, I plopped down next to Eh Soe on the reading bench in our room. “What are you doing?” I asked him.

“Nothing, at this moment.”

I opened a notebook and pen. “Let me ask you a thousand questions.”

“Why?”

“Because, I ask everybody lots of questions.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Because I’m curious. Because you’re
sooo
fascinating.”

“Okay.”

“How long have you been in Thailand?”

LIKE TA
Mla and Wah Doh, Eh Soe came to Thailand to go to school. His primary-school attendance was difficult, though not because his village wasn’t big enough to provide that level of education, and not because he had to bribe his teachers excessively, but for a different kind of trouble: forced labor.

In 1955, the government of the Union of Burma ratified the Forced Labour Convention of the International Labour Organization, the UN agency charged with promoting labor rights. And since 1964, the ILO has been sending requests to Burma that it please quit using its citizens for unpaid internationally illegal forced labor. In February 2009, the ILO and the Burmese government extended their supplementary understanding, “which provides a mechanism for Myanmar Citizens to lodge complaints of forced labour through the ILO Liaison Officer in Yangon [Rangoon]” and “ensures freedom from harassment and retribution for complainants and other persons who support the operation of the complaints mechanism.” A month later, an internal ILO paper reported that the agency was very concerned about the harassment of complainants, and that one of the persons who supported the operation of the complaints mechanism had only just been released from prison. Overall, it pointed out, though the government had signed an agreement with the ILO years ago to eliminate forced labor, government-forced labor was still rampant in the country.

The Burmese government, naturally, says that it does no such thing, that people in Burma work on infrastructural projects for no money because they
want
to, they
love
to and they love their country, and it’s a selfless Burmese tradition that we self-interested Westerners just can’t understand. But Htoo Moo has documented it, of course, risking his life running around Burma like a crazy person interviewing escaped, very unwilling, prisoner-porters. In 1999, two people were arrested for having taped forced labor. They’re still in prison. In 2002, the Karen Human Rights Group published a volume of SPDC written orders for forced labor, which KHRG had collected
over the course of about a year; the book was 187 pages long. The aforementioned PBS
Frontline
video shows footage of hundreds of people working under Burmese soldiers’ watch. “Grandmother, how much are you paid for each load of stones?” the cameraman asks an old woman. She fixes him with a long, cold look, then says, “I don’t know anything about that.”

I hadn’t realized that Eh Soe had been subjected to servitude. The only person at BA who’d said anything to me had been Eh Na, my student who didn’t work but lived at Office Two and was covered in scars. He’d told me about it between teaching sessions one day, while we sat on the cool blue tiles of the room we used for class, his brown eyes framed by the chin-length pieces of hair perpetually escaping his short ponytail. He’d come to Thailand pretty recently from a big Karen village, Aung Soe Moe, where his family farm had rice, nuts, and vegetables. He went to school and worked his field, and in the cool rainy-season nights everyone warmed up around rice wine and other villagers’ company. And every day, Burma army soldiers came and took two, or five, or twenty villagers as short-term slaves.

When Eh Na was eighteen, for example, he encountered some troops on his way to his family’s farmland. “Come with us,” they said, and at gunpoint gave him a load of ammunition to carry, an unbearably heavy basket to strap to his shoulders. For four hours, he trudged through the jungle with them in his flip-flops, his skin slick with sweat, his back and neck searing, his steps heavy and stiff with the weight. He concentrated on avoiding land mines and fantasized about having a glass of water. He knew better than to think he’d be paid for his contribution, but he had been holding out hope for some food or something to drink before the soldiers turned him around for his four-hour trek back. Not so much.

In the last three years before he fled to Thailand, Eh Na estimated he had to do “only” ten forced labor stints. When he was twenty, he passed some Burmese soldiers on his way to visit a relative in a nearby village. “Carry this sick person,” they said, raising their weapons,
and he walked holding up one end of a stretcher for five long hours, which would have been bad enough even if the invalid hadn’t been fat. Once, he and nine other villagers were forced to haul rice, beans, and wine for an entire day, which meant they had to walk back home in the middle of the night. Once, he was part of a crew that cleaned and built a fence around an army compound. Once, he was part of a crew that cleaned and built a fence around an army compound that was infested with flesh-eating jungle ants. On both occasions, the villagers had to find their own water and food, and on one, had to contribute their own tools and construction materials to the project they were being forced to work on. Once, Eh Na helped build a road by hand, crouching, sweltering, crushing rocks with tiny tools and laying them in the ground. The demands for forced labor were so consistent that some of the three hundred households in Eh Na’s village had designated family members to do it, ones who were sturdy enough to survive it (unlike diabetic grandfathers) and whose work someone else could cover in their absence (unlike breast-feeding mothers). But it wasn’t until six people in his village were killed by passing soldiers as they walked back from a betel nut field that Eh Na decided he’d had enough and moved to Thailand.

Eh Soe said, when I asked him for an estimate, that he couldn’t possibly count the number of days he’d spent as a child doing grueling labor for the Burma army. His community of a hundred didn’t have enough slaves to share the work very liberally, and his parents were so poor that they had no choice but to accept the 5¢ from wealthier families who could pay others’ children to do their drudgery for them.

“Weren’t you mad?” I asked Eh Soe.

“No.” He waved his hand and shook his head briskly. “I didn’t think anything about it. It’s the culture. They had guns. Whoever has power can order people to do whatever they want. I couldn’t hate, because I didn’t have any idea about anything different.”

“I guess that’s a good thing about living in camp; most of the guys here didn’t have to do forced labor.”

“Yes, but they suffered the war. Their parents were in war. They had to flee. They had to live in the jungle. That is much worse. Me, I just have to work for a day, go home at night.”

So that’s what he did, until he finished primary school and his aunt paid for him to go away to high school in Moulmein, Burma’s third-largest city, in the southeast of the country. After that, he earned his certificate at a Rangoon computer school, and spent two months in leadership-management classes in Pegu, another big city, nearby. But there aren’t a lot of jobs in Burma, and Eh Soe was out of money, and
he
certainly wasn’t interested in joining the armed resistance, so he moved to a refugee camp, re-enrolling in high school at the age of eighteen so he could work on his English, joining Htan Dah at Huay Kaloke. And then you know what happened there.

After two years of English in two different camps, Eh Soe taught fifth-grade science and sixth-grade math and Burmese to other refugees. He had a brother and sister working legally in Bangkok, but Eh Soe had registered as a refugee with the UN, which made him ineligible for a work permit. Not that he could afford one anyway; they cost more than $100 and require at least five trips to Thai government offices. So now he worked at BA, as a community organizer, attempting to fight apathy one villager at a time. It was difficult for him that most of the people he worked so hard to get to—those border mountains were no joke—just wanted to farm, to be left alone by both soldiers and uppity educated refugees come to tell them that their health and empowerment could affect a war they were tired of talking about.

“Some Karen people don’t care about education,” he told me.

“That’s not just Karen people,” I said. “My best friend is a teacher in a remote part of Ohio, and she has the same problem with some of her students.”

“Real?”

“Sure. Their parents are farmers, and the students want to be farmers, so they don’t see why they should take the time away from farming to get an education.”

“That’s right, that’s right. Some Karen people say to me, ‘You have an education, and I don’t, but we eat the same rice.’ But it is very important for Karen people. If they have low education, they have intolerance. That is why Buddhists say to Christians, ‘You’re not Karen! You have Western religion!’ That is why DKBA has split from KNU. If they do not have knowledge, they cannot solve problems. If you’re educated, you can live in a house with different beliefs.”