For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question (52 page)

I was, according to the above Burmese laws, exhibiting
two
of the kinds of blemishes of a woman: “taking intoxicating drinks” and “finding fault or quarrelling” with a man. (The other four are “failure to take an interest in household affairs and in her duties towards her husband, and idleness”; “frequenting the houses of others”; “intimacy with another man”; and “habitually sitting in the doorway of the house and looking at other men.”)

“The eight kinds of husbands whom the wife has the right to abuse are—

one who is excessively lascivious;

one who is ill for a length of time;

one who is very poor;

one who is very stupid;

one who is infirm;

one who is very old and sluggish;

one who is very lazy;

one who is physically incapable.

If the wife loses patience and abuses or reviles any of the said kinds of husbands, let her have the right of doing so.”

When Yale researchers released a sexual-behavior study of 190 societies in 1951, it reported that 4 percent didn’t kiss. The Balinese, for example, instead brought their faces close enough to breathe in each other’s warmth and smell. Some South African Thongans who caught sight of Europeans kissing a few decades earlier had exclaimed, “Look at these people! They suck each other! They eat each other’s saliva and dirt!” So though tonguing is older than Vatsyayana, it’s not universal, and my acting like everybody had always been doing it all the time wasn’t exactly justified. Even Kinsey, in his 1953
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
, found that as few as 80 percent of American women who’d had premarital sex had Frenched—which is to say that as many as 20 percent of them had had premarital sex without ever Frenching.

The Yale researchers had observed a similar foreplay among the Filipino Tinguian. FYI.

Tongue kissing, say behavioral scientists, is a modification of “a ritualized feeding gesture handed down to us by our primate ancestors.” Which doesn’t sound that erotic, either.

Ta Mla was an animist, not a Christian. But in his own religion, if, say, an ancestor spirit or nature spirit is angered, even by accident, the defendant has to figure out what he did, which may require chicken bones and/or a shaman, and then fix it, which may require sacrificing an animal, and/or a shaman’s calling Ta Mla’s soul back to his body and quickly securing it there with bracelets made of string. That sort of spirituality required a lot more work, and resources he didn’t really have anymore. So sometimes, Ta Mla went to church.

“Supporters” and even victims of plenty of other terrorist groups are still liable for contributing to them, voluntarily or otherwise. As of late 2009, the Sri Lankan fisherman who gave the Tamil Tigers money for his own ransom had yet to be granted asylum.

Here both families were exhibiting one of the classic symptoms of culture shock laid out in the Comic Sans text of the English-translation cultural orientation book: “Withdrawal and avoidance of contact with people from the new culture.”

That’s another symptom: “Glorifying the native culture and emphasizing the negative in the new culture.”

Burma’s response, per usual, was to trash-talk: Other countries, the government said, “should refrain from interfering in internal affairs that will affect peace and security of the region” or else “possibly affect mutual understanding and friendly relations.”

Adopting that constitution through a national referendum was step four of the junta’s “Seven-Step Roadmap” to democracy, which it unveiled in 2003 to calm people down after its thugs seemingly tried to assassinate Aung San Suu Kyi. The fifth step is the upcoming election. The final destination, of course, is the bliss of “a modern, developed and democratic nation.”

Ditto
The Washington Post
, which I have additional affection for because they clearly make an effort to cover Burma. And
The Irrawaddy
, the Burmese exile paper, does work that, in addition to filling a critical reporting void, is incredibly reliable.

FYI, those were fact-checked against only my own notes. As for interviews with the BA guys, though there was no reason to disbelieve anything they said, when possible we still checked the details of their stories against other survivors’ interviews or published accounts. They always matched up.