Under the Dragon (23 page)

‘Small world,’ he sighed, uninterested. He had two more calls to make before his afternoon flight back to Mandalay, followed by another half dozen in Rangoon. He already knew that this was a wasted visit. The two old women did not fit into his company’s profile.

The salesman was a representative of a large advertising firm coordinating trademark protection for its clients in South-East Asia. The agency, he explained, wished to establish itself as the market leader by centralising marketing strategy for branded products. His assignment was to contact established small traders and to offer them the chance to buy a local distribution franchise. Out of habit, he gave the sisters a glossy brochure. He told them that his firm’s T-shirts and plastic bags, which were printed in Thailand, were of superior quality to their Chinese imports.

May was confused by the offer. She did not understand why she should have to pay for the franchise. She and Kwan had built up their business themselves. It was the agency that should pay them for it, not the other way round. ‘Thank you for your compliment,’ she said. It pleased her that he had called on them. ‘You may have heard that we are outsiders here.’ She assumed that the salesman knew of her intention to emigrate. ‘And it is true that we plan to leave Lashio.’

‘My sister wishes to join her son,’ explained Kwan, pouring out three small cups of Namhsan tea. It was first quality, grown in the Shan State and served to their rare guests.

May added with pride, ‘In less than one more year we will have earned sufficient money to make it possible.’

‘Great,’ said the salesman, and yawned. As the twins tried to decipher the brochure, he looked at his watch. ‘My car is waiting,’ he apologised, closing his briefcase and rising to his feet. He hadn’t touched his tea.

‘You must not think us ungrateful,’ said May, standing too.

‘Look,’ he said, with as much sensitivity as he could muster, ‘this isn’t my concern, but I don’t think that this really suits you.’

May hardly heard him. She calculated only that the visitor might help them to leave Lashio sooner. ‘It is this matter of our purchasing something that we already own that disturbs me. Please understand that we have no aversion to
selling
our business to you.’

The salesman laughed, and enquired if the sisters were aware of the laws concerning copyright infringement. They were not. He said, ‘There are other traders in town who are interested in the proposal.’

‘The fragrance of our good name is known by all in Lashio,’ said Kwan. His comment had upset her, and she reminded her sister that their father had advised them to depend on the family alone.

‘We have worked hard and are proud of our achievement,’ said May, a sudden sense of loss emptying her heart.

The salesman took back his business card. Anxious that he might reclaim the boarding pass too, May asked if she could keep it. He laughed again and said that she could. ‘No charge,’ he added.

In the windowless recess of her bare white room, May sat on the stool and watched the activity of arrival. The ground crew directed the Tristar towards the bright terminal, their orange torches glinting in the evening light. Landing strobes flashed off metal fuselages and flightdeck windscreens. A yellow Follow Me van sped along the tarmac. Her aircraft taxied across the concrete apron then swung wide into its bay. The engines wound down, the throaty whine of a shrunken world dying away. Catering crews and baggage handlers snapped hatches and holds open. In minutes they offloaded suitcases and restocked the galley with tin-foil chicken for the return flight to Asia. The passenger walkway craned out to meet the opening forward door, and May tried to catch sight of her unseen son’s face, cloning in her mind the features of a child onto a man’s body. But the observation deck was too crowded. She saw only other families, other lives, not her own flesh and blood.

Kwan stood before her sister, miming the action of collecting her belongings, anxious to please. ‘Welcome to Los Angeles, where the correct time is eight o’clock. I hope you have enjoyed your flight, madam.’

‘Yes, thank you,’ May answered, straining to spot his forgotten face.

‘Can you see your son?’

‘Isn’t that him there? In the blue jacket? No, he was never that tall.’ She turned to Kwan, seeking reassurance, the tenuous hold of her hope shaken by the finality of their imprisonment. ‘But he will be waiting for me. I know that he is waiting.’

‘I am sure of it, madam.’

The new plastic bags had appeared in the shops a few months after the salesman’s visit, and, as the twins had been assured, their quality was superior to the Chinese imports. Storekeepers had sold off the twins’ carriers and replaced them with Thai-made stock. Anyone with two spare kyat had become able to buy a Chinese bag, but as soon as they had them, as soon as their bamboo baskets had been consigned to the bin, they wanted the finer Thai versions. The deficiencies of Kwan and May’s imports became obvious. Their bags had a tendency to tear and stain their contents with cheap dye. They had also often been printed with misspellings of Toshibi, Gorgon’s Gin and Yum Yum Noodles. The town’s merchants had understood the value of the new, superior product. Once again, they only gave them away with purchases of Alpine car stereos and bottles of Chivas Regal. The certainties of Marxism had been swept away, as had the confidence in the Confucian Utopia before it, by the vagaries of the market.

The twins’ business had been lost. Their savings had been squandered on a fruitless attempt to improve the standard of their imports. There wasn’t enough money left to buy air tickets, even if they had been granted an American visa. The letters too no longer arrived from California. They never knew if May’s son had stopped writing or if the postman had simply taken to withholding his correspondence. The harsh economic reality had changed attitudes in Lashio. The sisters couldn’t afford to pay the bribes, so there was no reason to deliver their letters.

In the end they had opened a small market stall to sell herbs and spices under the tamarind tree. There hadn’t been the money to undertake anything more ambitious. Kwan had retrieved their father’s texts from the godown and rediscovered lost satisfaction in grinding cloves, preparing pepper balms and weighing out doses of
mu li
oyster shell. The week’s first day was set aside for sorting medicinal herbs, the second and third days were reserved for pounding cardamom and distilling volatile oils. The fine remedies won the devotion of the old families and new customers alike. No one suspected that Kwan’s sense of smell had not returned. Neither the familiar herbs nor the old routines had restored her memory. All she could smell was the stink of plastic.

Kwan and May cut an unusual image in Lashio, squatting beside jars of ginseng infusion, lighting incense in honour of their parents, arguing on their slow walk home from the temple. They were a part of the town and they would never leave it. Their lives had become contained again, as in truth they had always been, with only May’s fantasies reaching out beyond the lime groves, travelling along the Burma Road towards her ever-distant somewhere else.

‘THIS IS PURE PALAUNG, SIR,’ confirmed the old Chinese herbalist. ‘The Pa-O people make a similar basket, but it has no lid.’ She tapped the photograph. ‘This one has a lid.’ She turned the picture over in her hand. ‘The style used to be common here.’

‘It’s very similar to your basket,’ I said, gesturing at her delicate bamboo shopper.

‘Ten US dollars,’ interrupted her sister, her voice snapping out from the back of the stall. Then she added, ‘So when were you last in California?’

‘Your basket isn’t quite the same,’ pointed out Katrin, as much for my benefit as for that of the herbalist.

‘It is not for sale,’ she said, and bowed her head as if to brace herself against a series of blows. Her sister hissed at her in Chinese.

We had followed the twins down from the Quan Yin San temple and through the market to their stall beneath the tamarind tree. They had opened the shutters, pulled the covers from the jars and filled the market with the smell of cinnamon. Its pungent aroma had masked the stink of pig meat, putrefying in the sun at the adjacent stall. We had bought a few handfuls of spices, and when Katrin admitted to knowing San Francisco, had been invited to sit with them. A spot was cleared on their mat and the younger-looking twin had poured out their story, along with Namhsan tea from a flask. Her sister, whose hands were rough and callused, had stayed silent, except to confirm the odd detail or date. She only spoke when I asked her about the basket. I had hoped that she would send us across the road to a vast antique emporium and so conclude our search. Instead she told us that the basket had belonged to her mother, and its Palaung makers had long since deserted Lashio. She directed us back down the Burma Road.

‘Many Palaung now live around Hsipaw,’ said her sister, with a tight smile. She would rather have told us about airport transfer times or the rickshaw drivers of Soochow. ‘Would you like to go there?’ I sighed and nodded. I would have preferred to go to bed. ‘Then you will need a taxi.’ I guessed that she had a neighbour who would give her a finder’s commission. ‘I find very cheap one. For you five thousand kyat.’

The price was steep, more than double the usual rate. ‘But it’s only a forty-five-mile drive,’ said Katrin.

‘We’ll take the bus,’ I said. Our slow, snail-slide journey to Lashio had put me off Burmese trains for good. Its memory was also more recent than our last bus bruising.

‘The line-bus is bad for sophisticated travellers like you. I always travel first class myself. I recommend it for foreigners also.’

But it was not possible to travel to Hsipaw by bus, in any class. The agent would not sell us a ticket without a permit from the Immigration Department, and the office was shut for
thingyan
. The local military commander was willing to issue the appropriate pass, but only if his superior in Mandalay had approved our preceding journey. Without it we were not officially in Lashio, even though we were standing in front of his desk. I explained that we didn’t have a pass because travel to Lashio by train required no special permission. He in turn apologised that authorisation could not be applied for by telephone. The local exchange only took incoming calls. He then advised us – off the record – to go back to Mandalay, obtain his superior’s approval and return to Lashio. He assured us that our permit would then be issued promptly, or certainly within three working days. I considered offering him a bottle of whisky but, noticing his new gold Rolex, decided that my bribe might be more effective at the Myanmar Tourist Office. I was right. The supervisor there was grateful for the gift. He tried to help us by booking two seats on the afternoon flight to Rangoon, even though we had no intention of going there. ‘You are lucky to get any reservation at such short notice,’ he assured us. Our mounting frustration reminded me of a comment made by Stalin. When vetoing a plan to extend Russia’s telephone network he said, ‘I can think of no better instrument of counter-revolution.’ The free flow of people and information breaks the grip of tyrants. Few countries have been more successful than Burma in hindering communication.

It was a paradox that, had we wished it, we would have been free to travel in the opposite direction, north from Lashio. In the fly-infested tea shop by the bus gate Yunnanese girls in white plastic stilettos slurped cool cans of 7-Up. Three smug Chinese traders, returning home after offloading cheap nylons and brassieres, unscrewed brimming jars of bitter green tea, to be topped up with boiling water through the long journey. Nearby money-changers sucked on chicken feet and rooster heads while waiting to meet the Kunming bus. Between Lashio and China there was no frontier. No Burmese customs post stood on the bridge over the Shweli River. People and goods passed between the two countries without documentation, as if between English counties or American states. We were 112 miles south of the border, yet beyond Lashio one was to all intents and purposes inside China.

There had never been any attempt to disguise Han ambitions in Burma. In the 1960s Beijing had sponsored the outlawed Burmese Communist Party, supplying it with recoilless rifles, anti-aircraft guns and political commissars. At the height of the military campaign, twenty thousand square kilometres of the Shan State fell under Communist control. Then the
Tatmadaw
mounted a counter-offensive to halt the invader’s advance. As the expense in lives and ammunition swelled, it became apparent that conquest could be achieved by more economic means. China turned its back on the insurgents and began to arm the Burmese government. Beijing recognised that Rangoon’s greed could be exploited. The leaders of the regime were so insecure, and so obsessed with lining their own pockets, that they alone failed to see the triumph of their long-feared neighbour.

By the time I finally accepted that we had no option but to catch the train to Hsipaw, the booking office was shut. We rushed back to the market, only to find that the twins had vanished, and so we were also unable to follow up on their overpriced taxi. All the stallholders had closed early to prepare for the New Year celebration, gathering at a temporary
pandal
stage equipped with buckets and high-pressure hoses to soak passers-by. Katrin and I avoided the main square, dragging ourselves back through the crippling heat to our hotel. A bold Burmese child dogged us, a rusty tin of stagnant water in his hand. He wanted to douse Katrin but accepted me instead, pouring the murky liquid down my neck.

The exceptional ugliness of the hotel had gone unappreciated the evening before. It glowered at the head of a sweeping drive, an uncompromising concrete box that celebrated the triumph of rigid authority over sympathetic design.

‘Important visitors stay tonight,’ said the manager, with a proud smile. At his feet a cleaner squatted on her hands and knees scrubbing the grouting between the slabs of marble. It had taken all day for her to work her way across the vast expanse of floor. ‘They come from nearby.’