For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question (4 page)

Since Htan Dah grew up in a refugee camp, he’d never lived on that land, but it was what he struggled to regain as an employee of BA. If he inhabited a peaceful Kaw Thoo Lei, currently labeled on a Burmese map as the misleadingly autonomous-sounding Karen State, his life would look much like that of the area’s original settlers. He would live in a hut he’d built, with the help of his neighbors, out of bamboo and thatch. He’d fetch water for drinking and cooking and cleaning from a stream or river running near the village, in which he could also catch fish. He’d collect eggs from his chickens and maybe there’d be pigs living under his elevated house, and after a rice-based breakfast he’d spend some of the day cultivating more rice and vegetables in a nearby field before returning to his home, which would rest in the shade of coconut palms and papaya, in a village of twenty or a hundred households. At the end of the day, fires would be lit all around to prepare rice with produce and meat, probably caught, possibly turtle, snake, fish, lizard, monkey, boar. Once in a great while, and even less often these
days, given their dwindling numbers, someone might kill a tiger. And as daylight and the smell of cook smoke dissolved, frangipani would perfume the crisp, tree-filtered air while Htan Dah visited with other villagers over rice wine, gossiping over the sounds of settling livestock and screeching creatures coming out to take over the night. A general outline of his year could be sketched by the Karen names for the thirteen months of the lunar calendar:
tha lay
, searching;
tay ku
, cutting;
thwee kaw
, drying and burning;
lah kli
, seed;
de nya
, lilies;
lah kü
, month of the farm;
lah nwee
, seventh month;
lah ho
, eighth month;
lah köo
, many lizards;
si muh
, little sun;
si sah
, little starlight;
lah naw
, oilseed;
lah plu
, spirits of the dead. To ensure the feeding of his family, he would work hard and often, together with other men and women of his village, independent, irenic, all set about with acacia trees.

Or as British Major John James Snodgrass would put it in the early nineteenth century:

These tribes’ lifestyle had long been disparaged by the Burmans, too. “Karen” was, to them, a classification for illiterate, swiddenfarming, animist (read: non-Buddhist) lowlifes—not a particularly respected culture, not when some of the other cultures were building a magnificent civilization.

Even back in the time of the Pyu, Burma was an important trade route, nestled, as it is, between south-central China and easternmost India, on the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea, the western edge of the Southeast Asian peninsula. By the sixteenth century, it was a center of world commerce, with towns modern, rich, and populous, where you could get anything: painted cloth from Masulipatam, Bornean camphor, Sumatran pepper, Chinese porcelain and cotton and sandalwood, wools and velvets and scarlets from Europe. Rich in trade, metals, and gems—and with flatlands of Mesopotamian fecundity—Burma was valuable indeed. Westerners passing through, whether Italian, Portuguese, or English, were uniformly impressed. “The accounts [of] all these travelers,” commented a writer later reviewing their reports, “even when every deduction has been made for glamour and its consequent exaggeration, prove that this empire, established on the delta of the Irawadi, was in the sixteenth century possessed of a might, a wealth, a splendour and an importance which have never since been approached in these regions.”

But what Burma also boasted in abundance was war. In 1057, one Burman king had kicked off a fight for dominance of the whole country, from which point on the Burmans and Mon and Shan engaged in constant and mighty battle. And though the fights were largely for property and plenty, they certainly weren’t free from ethnic issues. One eighteenth-century Burman king, Alaungpaya, recruited forces to take the country back from the Mon with a partly us-versus-Mon platform, then sent his opponents the gift of a thousand bodiless Mon heads. And where there was war and ethnic chauvinism, there was brutal Karen oppression. Being backward and backwoods and considered little better than dogs, they were subject to slave raids and
the heavy taxation of whoever was winning—usually the Burmans. And, Karen lore has it, Alaungpaya’s troops destroyed their villages when passing through en route to eastern military campaigns, just for fun.

So when the British came into Burma swinging in 1824, the Karen had little trouble picking sides. Alaungpaya’s son was waging a policy of wild expansionism that his conquer-happy father had instituted, and he’d finally extended his territory right up to the edge of British India. Britain had some military might and hostility to spare now that it had dispensed with Napoleon. The civilizations had failed to achieve adequate diplomatic ties; the time had come for them to clash. When Burmese armies encroached into a British protectorate, the soldiers of the English East India Company went to war. And not everyone they encountered in what was technically enemy territory was hostile. Major Snodgrass, whatever his feelings about the Karen standard of living, was quite a bit more gracious in describing their character, writing again in his awesomely titled
Narrative of the Burmese War, Detailing the Operations of Major-General Sir Archibald Campbell’s Army, from Its Landing at Rangoon in May 1824, to the Conclusion of a Treaty of Peace at Yandaboo, in February 1826
:

But however well things were going with the Karen, not so much for the war with the rest of Burma, which was, by one historian’s estimate, the longest and most expensive in British India, costing it 15,000 soldiers. The Burmese fought like hell. Even after Burma’s king realized his forces were far outmatched by Western firepower, even after the destruction of his entire navy and army and officer corps, he threw an army of conscripted, barely armed peasants at the British, the only men Burma had left, before finally giving up—after two years—some territory and a lot of reparations. The Burmese were hardly itching for another go-around less than thirty years later, when the British, looking for a fight and more territory, invaded again in 1852. Again, the British engaged the resisting Burmese and won, much more easily this time, and annexed the southern province of Pegu, dividing the country into sovereign Upper Burma and Lower Burma of the British Empire.

In addition to the battle, that Second Anglo-Burmese War sparked two other ugly fights. Party to the European victory were the Karen, who had once more acted as guides for the invaders. The British stormed Shwedagon Pagoda, the ancient 300-foot-tall golden stupa that enshrines eight of the Lord Gautama Buddha’s hairs, the most sacred site in a devoutly Buddhist country; the Burmans destroyed the crops of nearby lowland Karen, murdered children in rice mortars, and burned villages for miles around.

The other nasty scene was unfolding in the ruling palace of what was left of Burma, where a war between loyalists and revolutionaries ended when Mindon Min overthrew his half-brother king and
assumed the crown. That coup begat more violence: After Mindon Min’s death one of his sons ascended the throne by executing many of the other heirs. So it was that the Royal Thibaw Min, King of the Umbrella-Bearing Chiefs, the Arbiter of Existence, the Great Lord of Righteousness, was consecrated Burma’s final monarch amid the (depending on whom you ask) strangling or clubbing or elephant-trampling to death of princesses and princes in big pretty red velvet sacks, dozens of royal family members slaughtered. It was just a regular old reign-securing measure, but it made a mean splash in newspapers in England,
⁴
which was looking for an excuse to depose the sovereign leader and take over the rest of the lucrative Southeast Asian kingdom it already largely controlled.

Such an excuse, the story goes, finally presented itself in the form of that aforementioned young woman of European descent: Mattie Calogreedy, a half-Greek, half-Burmese palace maid who was having an affair with a French engineer of the Burmese king’s. When Pierre (seriously) went home to Paris and returned with a French wife in tow, a scorned Calogreedy slept with a Burmese administrator in exchange for an incriminating secret document, which she handed over to the British, which contained proof of their worst nightmare: an alliance between the Burmese and the French(!). The
Times
of London called for war. The French, who’d tried to take India and were well on their way to establishing French Indochina, neither confirmed that they had Burma’s back nor denied that they were up to something. The Burmese, conveniently, fined a Scottish trading company for failure to pay royalties. The British demanded, among other things, that Burma submit the matter to an arbiter and, oh, relinquish its sovereignty in the manner of Afghanistan before it. Thibaw, the last king of Burma, the Arbiter of Existence, prepared for combat. He couldn’t win, and he knew it, but the Burmese were
going to die fighting before they’d live without trying to maintain rule over what was rightfully theirs.

Having prevailed in the Third Anglo-Burmese War in just a few weeks, the British deposed Thibaw and shipped him and his wife off to exile. It was 1885. The Western victors didn’t realize it at the time, of course, but their battles on that field were just beginning—as were those between the Burmans and the Karen.

“SO,” THE
Blay said, smiling at me in a way that was more cocky than friendly, the way I soon realized was just the way he smiled. It was my second morning at BA. He’d asked me to a meeting after breakfast, and he, Htan Dah, and a couple of other guys sat across from me in the living room, in the white plastic chairs. Htan Dah was holding a notebook and ready pen, which for some reason made me nervous. “You are English teacher.”

“Yes. ...” It was true that I taught college composition, and that in America such courses are generally classified as “English.” I suspected, though, that this was a cultural nuance that didn’t translate. I hadn’t explained it in my introductory email to BA that said, “Hello there. I’ve been interested in volunteering on the Thai-Burma border for some time. I am an English instructor at the University of New Orleans. Do you need volunteers?” because I’d assumed that if they did need volunteers, a longer dialogue about my possible contributions would ensue. Instead, all that followed was a message saying

And then one more asking what time someone should meet me at the airport. And apparently even that limited job description, written by someone in Bangkok, hadn’t made it to Mae Sot before my arrival.

“I’m sorry,” The Blay was apologizing. “I thought before you were strategic planner.”

“I don’t even know what that is,” I said, though it did explain why The Blay had, over stick soup my first night, told me he had some objectives or something for me to look over, to which I’d responded, though I’d had no idea what he was talking about, “Okay.” Ta Mla must have cleared up the confusion, relaying what he’d learned at breakfast yesterday about my profession. His vocabulary seemed so limited that I hadn’t tried clarifying the difference between an English teacher and an
English
teacher to him, either.

So here was The Blay asking me if I could organize and teach two classes, one in basics to beginning students, like Ta Mla, who barely spoke English, and one in article/essay/memo/letter writing to advanced students, like The Blay, who spoke it pretty well. The advanced class would run from ten in the morning to noon, and the beginners’ from one to three, every day. The Blay was either not daunted by or not comprehending my explanation that I had approximately no qualifications for teaching English as a second language, particularly to students whose language I didn’t speak. I had two days to prepare.