burmahunkalove

July 31, 2011: There's Something Wrong with my Toast


Every once in a blue moon, I make a pointed attempt at social grace.  This tendency is a liability that I must work hard to overcome.

Shiera and I are finishing our time in Iloilo.  The choice to give birth here came from a variety of factors. Myanmar--ranked just ahead of Somalia in a recent survey of health care quality--was right out.  As our health insurance does not extend to the United States, the tens of thousands of dollars that a hospital birth (Shiera's strong preference) would cost eliminated my native land from the running.  Only after the fact did we consider Thailand.  Counter-intuitive as Bangkok might seem (neither of us live there or are Thai citizens or have any particular connections to the country), it is a place with a functional health care system and user-friendly bureaucracy and had we made this choice, we would have avoided some of the more maddening obstacles we've encountered in getting Persephone back to Burma.

Iloilo is Shiera's ancestral home.  As she is the eldest of nine, Iloilo offered her abundant family support.  Additionally, we anticipated--and received--very good quality medical care.  The Philippines, despite its mind-boggling systematic incongruities, is a modern country.  We had met with our obstetrician in December and she was a knowledgeable professional and the pediatrician with whom we've worked has been similarly excellent.  Given my mostly negative experiences with health care in the United States, I suspect that we ultimately got better and more attentive care here than we would have in America, and at likely 10% of the cost.

A couple of nights before we planned to leave Iloilo, I extended a dinner invitation to the whole family.  Two siblings have relocated elsewhere in the Philippines for work and school purposes and another essentially lives at his evangelical church, so he was unable to attend.  But the taxi transporting Shiera, Persephone, and me arrived at the riverfront seafood restaurant just as the remaining seven Eñanos were walking into the parking lot.

(Never missing an opportunity to relay my perceptions of my own divine cleverness, I'll divert from the story of my bad toast to share a particularly witty clip.  The Eñano Family is, like most Filipinos, Catholic to varying degrees.  The father was discovered by the Church and brought from his village to study at a university and worked for the Church for four decades before his recent retirement.  He doesn't wear it on his sleeves, but I'd describe him as quietly pious.  The Church is a big part  of his life, though it's not of his nature to impose his beliefs, and neither my lack of religion nor Persephone's birth outside of the realm of approval of the Catholic Church has been any sort of an issue.  The rest of the family mostly seems to follow his lead--they are believers to differing extents and accept Catholicism as part of their cultural heritage, but Jesus really doesn't seem to come up in casual conversation.

As mentioned, one of the brothers has become involved with a seemingly rabid evangelical church that is much at odds with the spiritual nature of the family, and he spends most of his days at evenings at his church.  The family's attitude, as it generally is, is one of acceptance, though there is a little real and implicit eye-rolling and gentle comments along the lines of, "Yep, he's hanging out with Jesus again...".

Evangelical Brother did not attend the farewell dinner.  Repeated phone calls and text messages didn't elicit a response and it was understood that he couldn't be torn away from a night of worship.  And here comes--finally--my witty ad-lib:

As one sibling was leaving a message on his voice mail, I called out, "Come on, man. Ya gotta eat.  You can't eat Jesus, you know--at least you can't now that you're no longer Catholic!"

See, I think that's pretty funny. I said it quickly enough that the English challenged Catholics around me hadn't a clue what I was saying, so if there were grounds for offense, none could be taken.  I am funny.  Funny am I.  Just ask me...)

Almost immediately, any vague fantasies I had of the event solidifying the bi-family bond between Ziegers and Eñanos were revealed as an ineffectual pipe dream.  Without question, all members of the family have been open and accepting of me.  Particularly with the parents, there is a massive language gap, so conversation is limited to confusing and confused statements, questions, and responses of unknown content dominate the interactions, but it's apparent that we all love her daughter and grand daughter, so the (best unspoken) bond is there.

Ilongas, from my limited experience, truly love two things--eating and cell phones.  Never was this more in evidence than during our celebratory meal.  No sooner were we seated, than I looked up and each of the eight Eñanos in attendance were busily consulting their mobile phones.  Copious amounts of food were ordered and the drinks arrived.

At this point, my worst and most decorous social instincts kicked it.  This was, after all, a monumental punctuation of the most significant occurrence in my life.  Two families from  polar opposite geographical and cultural backgrounds had been pulled together by the forces of love and happenstance and would now see their destinies interlocked.  As the whole family had been gathered (minus those working, schooling, or worshiping), it seemed apropos to mark the occasion with a few words of heartfelt eloquence.

I moved toward the center of the table, television set blaring invasively over my head.  Speaking slowly, making pains to enunciate clearly, I brought my voice beyond the level of the broadcast of "Filipinas Got Talent!" with which I had to compete.

"EVERY-ONE--BECAUSE...THIS IS OUR...FINAL NIGHT TOGETHER...I WANTED TO SAY...A FEW WORDS...AS YOU KNOW..."

At this point, I looked down and noted that no one--least of all Shiera--was paying me any mind at all. I glanced over at Shiera and caught her attention.  Realizing that I was about to do something deeply embarrassing (and knowing that it was not in her power to stop me), Shiera came to the rescue and called loudly for her family to focus upon me.

Each of my audience of eight cast a single eye in my general direction.

"UM...WELL...UH...SINCE THIS IS...OUR LAST NIGHT TOGETHER...I WANTED TO THANK YOU....ALL....FOR WEL-COME-ING...ME..."

At this point, I saw that the father had picked up his cell phone and inserted an audio plug into his right ear.  There was a brief exchange between him and Shiera in their native Hiligaynon, which Shiera later translated as follows--"Dad, Robert is speaking to us.  Put away your phone."  "Why?  I don't understand anything that he's saying."

Reaching the point of abject defeat, I continued...less quietly, less clearly, and with less purpose...

"Um...so, since this is our last night...you know....um, I just wanted to thank everyone....um, I feel very lucky to, um...have a new family....um..."

A cursory glance at my audience revealed varying degrees of incomprehension, confusion, and--mostly from Shiera and her sister Kim--heartfelt pity.  I continued.

"Er...so, since this is our last night, I..uh..just thought I should mark the occasion...with...you know, I think it's obvious that the one thing we share in common is that we all love Shiera and Persephone very much and..."

The limited attention I was being afforded lagged even further.  A closer look revealed that Papa had reinserted the ear plug he had grudgingly removed and by now a couple of the lost siblings were calling out updates of text messages they just received.

I croaked out a couple more words and slunk back to my chair.  Shiera--perhaps more out of malice that affection--wouldn't just let it die.  In English:  "Hey, when someone gives a speech, we should applaud!" and she began to do so, the rest of the crowd joining in, (or least moving their hands semi-rapidly).

Later she explained what I already knew--that I wasn't being overtly rejected or ignored.  But rather, it's "just not how we do things in this family".  Having abandoned all sense of pride somewhere during Reagan's second term, I didn't let it get to me.  But I was silently amazed at just how poorly I sometimes read the social cues.

Persephone will have a mountain to climb.

July 30, 2011: What's Not to Like about the Guy?--Well, Pretty Much Everything...

"Hey, it that another mestizo baby?"

Man, my spleen--among other internal organs--clenched immediately upon hearing those words.  I looked up and a lanky, mid-20's, purposefully disheveled and bearded yank stood over me.

"Yeah, man--my wife's about to pop one out as well."

And I calmed down, immediately.  It would be odd, suspect even, for an impartial party to begin an interaction by commenting on the mixed-race of my child.  But as he proved to be a fellow countryman, also in an Iloilo mall, sharing a similar experience, there was nothing untoward about his greeting.

We spoke for a few minutes--he's Daniel, from California, operating a call center here in Iloilo, and his Ilonga wife is seven months pregnant.  But within those few minutes, my spleen's initial reaction proved to be prescient.  Good old spleen...I can always rely upon that mysterious organ.

My bile count quickly and steadily began to recuperate.  Partly--and this is unfair, I fully acknowledge--his appearance and mannerisms were to blame.  Though his greeting under these circumstances weren't inherently offensive, it did possess an air of invasiveness, a quality that Daniel showed to have in abundant supply.  The conversation continued.  As an act of pleasantness, I asked if they had a doctor in Iloilo, as the two we were working with had been excellent.

"No way, man.  We're not going to a hospital. Those places are dirty.  We're giving birth at home."

No problem as of yet...I largely agree with Daniel.  All things equal and if the choice were even remotely up to me (and it wasn't and it shouldn't have been), I would have opted for a home delivery.  I've known many people who have used trained midwives and in most cases birthing is a simple procedure.  Should complications arise, the trained midwife knows when to cede to modern medicine.  And it is true that hospitals can be breeding grounds for infectious agents.  Shiera, however, wanted very much to give birth in a hospital and I was entirely supportive of this.  Throughout the pre-natal period, the obstetrician had demonstrated ample capabilities and was extremely responsive to concerns or uncertainties that we presented.  Additionally, she had recommended the Iloilo Doctors' Hospital, as the maternity ward stands alone on the third floor, minimizing the risk of infection from outside.  

"Oh, that's good.  But, you know, if anything comes up or there are any problems, we'd be happy to give your the doctor's phone number...."

"No way, man.  I wouldn't go to a hospital.  If someone shoots me, I'm not going to any hospital!"

Daniel had officially crossed the Rubicon into the land of Simplistic Stupid Person, and I commenced my mental machinations aimed at terminating what was projecting as a truly dreadful encounter.  Daniel was exhibiting acute symptoms of "Everyone Is Stupid Except For Me Syndrome", one of the more noxious psycho-social pathogens to afflict humanity.  Daniel has an opinion.  Good for him!  I tend to agree with his baseline opinion. Bravo, Daniel!  Daniel holds strongly to his opinion.  I admire your sense of commitment to your ideals, Daniel!  Daniel makes it clear that his opinion represents the one and only valid way of looking at the situation and hints that anyone not in lockstep concurrence is a dupe, a dunce, a dunderhead.  Fuck you, Daniel!

Every year, millions give birth in a hospital.  The vast majority leave with a healthy child.  There are some risks involved with a hospital birth, just as there are some risks involved with a home birth.  Both are valid options.  Perhaps in the heavenly offices of the Department of Universal Truths, the records will show that one method is genuinely preferable.  But not only stupid people would disagree with Daniel; the two options were not home birth vs. immersing the child in a vat of ebola-tinged battery acid.

Daniel loomed over me, emitting a vague hint of what I interpreted to be a carefully cultivated unwashed stench, and continued his questioning.

"So, you live here, or what?"

I explained that Shiera and I were teachers in Myanmar, but that we were in Iloilo--Shiera's hometown--to give birth and that we'd be returning to Myanmar as soon as we could sort out Persephone's passport situation.

"Man, I don't even bother with a passport.  My passport expired a couple of years ago, and I couldn't care less."

I didn't feel like I owed him this, but did decide to take the time to explain to Daniel that since his life and work were in the Philippines and ours in Burma, we might, just possibly, have different needs.

"Well, you can just forget about the passport. You can't get anything done with the American government.  I couldn't even get a gun license in California!"

The case against Daniel was mounting.  First of all, I explained a little impatiently, the problem was not with the American officials, and I mentioned having recently obtained a replacement passport in just over 24 hours in San Francisco. (http://burmahunkalove.livejournal.com/8812.html)  But I was also unimpressed by his desire to own a gun.  Okay, I don't like guns.  I'm of the mind that the unchecked proliferation of hand guns in the United States is a problem.  Still--kill me for being reasonable--I do know many responsible gun owners.  While statistics may indicate that gun ownership is generally correlated with violence toward oneself, there are certainly many environments and individual circumstances in which gun ownership does provide genuine safety.  In the end, I am a gun control advocate, though aware that issues such as these aren't simple.  But more to the point, I am opposed to the desire of invasive, seemingly close-minded dumbasses for gun ownership. 

And somewhere in the mix, he added that any thoughts of teaching the kid any language aside from English was "pointless" and that he, himself, hadn't learned a word of any Filipino language since he arrived here.

"So, you said you're a math teacher?"

I repeated that Shiera was the math teacher in Burma, but that I taught history.

"History?  How do you teach history?"

This question confused me.  Was he looking for a statement of my personal philosophy concerning my pedagogical approach to the social sciences?  I could (and desired to) do no better than,

"I don't know.  History.  I'm a history teacher."

"How can you be a history teacher?  I mean, like, "local" history?  What sort of history?"

Aware that most people are unaware of the existence of thousands of English language international schools across the globe, I gave him a very brief intro to the concept.  I"m pretty sure that if I had a cat and I had explained the notion to my cat, the cat would have sufficiently understood. But not Daniel...

"Yeah, but why history?  I don't see how you can teach history.  You mean, like 'local' history or what?  Why would they have you teach history?"  He seemed truly incredulous and even somewhat agitated.

"Daniel, I'm a high school history teacher.  The school happens to be in Myanmar, but it's just a history class that I teach.  You went to high school and I'm sure you took a history class or two. That's all it is."

"But I don't remember anything from my history class!"

I had little doubt that he was being completely honest with this statement. At the same time, I failed to see how it was relevant.

"I'm sure you don't remember any of it, Daniel. But my point is that in most high schools, students take history classes.  The school we teach at is just like an ordinary high school, except that it happens to be located in Myanmar."

"Myanmar? Where's that?  I've never heard of it."

I explained roughly where Myanmar was located and that it is often referred to as Burma.  Lest he have the illusion that its of the St. Kitts and Nevis variety of states, I mentioned that it is the size of Texas and has a population of roughly 60,000,000 people.  Daniel repeated, proudly and contemptuously, that he had never heard of Myanmar or Burma.  Daniel was proving to be invasive, close-minded, gun-loving, and ignorant.  Yet, I sensed that there was more to the guy.  There was.

"So, man...is that a girl or a boy?"

Fair question, as neonates are indistinguishable blobs.  I responded and stupidly asked if he knew the sex of his (most unfortunate) offspring to be.

"Oh, it's a boy, man.  I don't want a girl.  Not a girl from these  parts! The girls here are all so hot--especially the dark skinned ones--that having a girl would be nothing but trouble."

Wow.  There is so much offensive and appalling in this last statement--and I made very certain that there would be no more to come, as I quickly gathered my laptop and made "let's get the fuck out of here" eyes at the equally disgusted Shiera--that I hardly know where to begin.  Implicit in this statement is a nasty lump of sexism with hints of racism and pedophilia added to spice it up.  Why does Daniel not want a girl?  Because she might be hot! And if a female is attractive, it is to be assumed that she has no other discernible qualities and for a father, this attractiveness would be nothing but a burden.  When he walks around on a daily basis in Iloilo, what does he see?  Implied is that he sees a lot of things--buildings, trees, people, and "hot, dark-skinned woman", which are entirely distinct from the people he encounters.  And perhaps I was just so poisoned against this awful creature that I couldn't help but extrapolate into unfair realms, but I swear I picked up a tone of voice suggesting that her inherent dark-skinned hotness that would fully define his hypothetical daughter just might make her something of a temptation to him.

You know, for all of my endless bitching about everyone and everything--just you wait for my next post!--I actually like most people just fine.  True, I get impatient, I'm quick to find fault, and I have a special level of vitriol reserved for authority figures who are lazy, and/or incompetent, and/or self-aggrandizing.  I'm not the easiest guy to live with.  But as quick as I am to judge, I'm usually as quick to forgive and I've never shied away from revealing and even lampooning my own thousands of imperfections and inconsistencies.  I just don't hate people. I sorta like 'em.

But I did hate Daniel.

So, so many months have rolled by without so much as a peep on these pages.  Burma Hunka Love simply never got the attention that it's predecessor, Pakagun in Your Karachi, did.  pakagunkarachi.livejournal.com  Partly, I think, it's that the novelty of living and working in a strange land wore off a little.  Both Pakistan and Myanmar have their shares of wandering livestock, strange clothing, uniformed criminals, and situations rife with potential for grievous cultural misunderstandings, and encounters with these sorts of phenomena can only be recounted in so many ways.  Also, my life in Burma has been strangely, pleasantly stable.  Yeah, I met my dream girl and am on the cusp of fatherhood, and all of that is remarkable.  But it's also too close to universal to be of much interest to others.  (Lord knows, the world is already choking on paeans to finding true love and the joys of becoming a parent.)  And, of course, the blog-related nature of my hasty departure from Pakistan tends to keep the dampers on discussing anything of a political nature.  (To wit, my first-hand account with history--watching a peace prize winner leave her place of incarceration--did not make here in this public forum, and was only emailed to friends.)

But after spending a night in a $164 hotel room and now being three hours into a five hour nervous wait by the San Francisco Passport Agency offices leaves me with both the time and the incentive to pound out and post of few words.  Those of you who have long considered me to be something akin to an infallible god-in-human-form will be rather disconcerted by what you are to read.  Those who have viewed me as a colossal fuck-up to the nth degree will find it to be mere repetitious history.  Those of you in the middle, however, might wish to read on, as I suspect that your assessment will swing strongly toward one particular end of the spectrum.

As background, this year's summer holiday necessitated a briefer than usual visit to the States, as Shiera the De-Facto Wife has been in the Philippines since mid-May, as she prepares to give birth to Persephone Enano Zieger.  There was a temptation toward skipping the US trip and being with her in Iloilo for the entire summer.  But as the only child of two parents in their seventies, that was a choice that I didn't feel I should nor did I want to make.  Thus, I arrived in Austin on June 1 and spent three weeks with my Fake Family (Mechelle and the Jurks) and with Bob and Gay Zieger, who graciously came to Austin for most of that time.  Premature delivery was a concern, as Shiera is due somewhere around the 15th of July.  But we agreed to play the odds and assume that if I were to make it to Iloilo by the 24th of June, we'd likely be there together for the big moment.

On the night of June 20th, I stayed awake watching Dick van Dyke Show episodes on the internet and was driven at 4 AM to Austin-Bergstrom International.  My plane to Los Angeles was experiencing mechanic issues, so they re-routed me to San Francisco, where I would meet another flight to Tokyo and then catch up with my original itinerary en route to Bangkok and beyond.  The flight from Austin was uneventful; I dozed a little, almost finished the too-easy United Airlines mag crossword, and studied (to likely no effect) with both my Burmese and Filipino flashcards.  (After three years and over a thousand hours of effort, my ability to speak Burmese still amounts to little more than a party trick.  As Persephone will be raised with Filipino as her co-language, I am now transitioning into focusing a little more on that tongue.  Given it's lack of tones and it's Spanish cognates, I hope to become slightly better than just awful in this language.)

I arrived on time in San Francisco.  I peed a couple of times, ate the two bagels I'd stowed away for the trip, and dinked around on the free wi-fi for a couple of hours.  Flight 837 prepped to leave on time, and I pulled my ticket out of my pouch and boarded the plane.  As I reached my seat, I performed an instinctive open-handed pat down search of my pouch, as that's where my passport was to be.  Not there.  Interesting...

The natural response would be abject panic.  But first of all, I've managed to beat my amygdala into submission and very rarely feel any tinge of fear or panic.  This is possibly a mature and constructive development, as perhaps I've transcended the specter of existential fear that afflicts most of our species.  Or possibly, I am living in such a world of denial-soaked illusion that I have repressed the fundamental angst at the core of my existence, and this act of evasion will some day destroy me.  I hope it's the former, but can live with the latter. Frankly, it's pretty cool not to get horribly distraught over the obstacles and facts of life, particularly those about which I can't do much or anything to change.

Thus, my initial response was calm.  I silently castigated myself for my carelessness, as I always do in these such common occurrences.  I went through all of my pockets, and then moved on to the larger of the two carry-on bags.  After a couple of minutes of this, I began to wonder if I could have dropped the passport. Hearing the overhead announcement that the doors would close in "just a few minutes", I alerted a flight attendant of the situation.  She sent a fellow employee back to the gate to see if it had been accidentally discarded on the floor.  I continued my search of the bags with a line of sweat forming on my forehead.  A second and third perusal of each and every zippered compartment, paired with the news that nothing had been found outside the plane, led me to think for the first time that I might really have done the unthinkable.  I left the plane and was joined by a couple of frantic flight crew members as we tore through both bags and took turns scouring the floor in the waiting area.  The passport was gone.  The crew shrugged sympathetically and retreated onto the plane, the doors sealing shut behind them.

Pooch expertly and thoroughly screwed, it was time to transition into survival mode.  So, how does one get from a city in which he knows no one, with the reserved flight now departed, with no passport, and with no corroborating evidence of identity, save the Texas driver's license that I thankfully (and uncharacteristically) did not allow to expire?  The folks on the ground at United were kind and placed me on the same plane leaving the next day, though I didn't see much likelihood that I'd be able to board that flight, barring a sudden reappearance of my wayward passport.  I plopped myself on the floor of the waiting area, pulled out each of the two new laptops I am carrying (one is mine, one is being brought to Shiera) and began a miserably confused process of googling terms such as "emergency passport replacement lost san francisco" and took it from there.

The first break came in finding an online passport service that had a live chat function.  Some anonymous person responded very quickly and efficiently and knew exactly what I needed to do to get a replacement passport post-haste.  The bottom line was that the passport would cost $195 and the service another $200.  As I have no birth certificate or expired passport with me, I would also need to pay the feds an additional $150 to do a file search to confirm my identity.  The personbot assured me that s/he/it could guarantee that I'd receive the passport by 4PM the next day.

While chatting with her/him/it, I used Shiera's laptop to track down a phone number for the US Passport Authority.  Fortune smiled and I was connected to "Sharon" an appointment specialist.  With immaculate detail, she provided me with a list of six requirements that I'd need to meet (valid driver's license, photo copy of said license, proof of flight itinerary, passport photo, completed D-11 and D-64 forms--which could be downloaded--and checks or money orders for $195 and $150, respectively).  She then contacted the SF office to see if there was an appointment opened by cancellation. There was not, but she informed me that I could arrive at 9AM the next morning and "hope for the best".  She spoke carefully, as she had no way of knowing what the result would be or of my actual circumstances, but in coded language I believe she let me know that this was very doable, as long as I pushed the right buttons.  My comment, "Ya know, if there is an afterlife at the end of all this, and we are allowed one question each, mine will be 'What the hell happened to that passport'", seemed to win her over.

Up to this point, I had managed to avoid hating on myself any more than I deserved (which, granted, was quite a bit, so the words "you dumb motherfucker" were something of a mantra throughout...), and obtained a strange sort of pleasure engaged in the problem solving process. But at this point, I knew what my options were, and none seemed particularly clear cut or ideal.  I spent the next hour wandering around the airport, pondering various options, deciding emphatically upon one, and then just as emphatically rejecting it for another.  I stopped periodically to survey hotel possibilities in the airport region (all of which were over a hundred bucks).  I placed internet calls to various airlines, (including United, who informed me that a further change to my itinerary would cost an additional--and I swear I'm not making this up--TWO THOUSAND FOUR HUNDRED DOLLARS (fuck you very much), and considered more bizarre and unsavory options that I would dare to admit here.  But as the clock continued to tick, the passport still did not appear, and the time to exercise the passport service's "tomorrow-by-four-pm" option had passed, I decided that it was time to head to some hotel, any hotel, get my paperwork in order, and try my luck at the passport agency the next morning.

The airport Travelodge ran me $164, (but it did include a complimentary continental breakfast, complete with tepid coffee and a styrofoam cinnamon roll).  I checked in and made my way into beautiful downtown Milbrae, California.  I found a bank and a Kinko's to take care of my documents needs.  (I also got an insight into the limits to my misery as the Kinko's manager, Omar, was a Gambian who told of sending his three children to Gambia to visit for the summer, whereupon all three lost their passports.  It was then up to the Gambian immigrant and his ex-wife, who now lived on the East Coast, to get them back.)  I returned to the hotel and found that any night I could, theoretically, take a Philippine Airline flight directly from San Fran to Iloilo for around a thousand dollars.  Ultimately, given the horrific nature of my carelessness, if I were to arrive in the Philippines at the total cost of fifteen hundred dollars out of pocket, I considered myself lucky.

I stopped at a poorly stocked Safeway, bought a mountain of bread, cheese, and beer, and ambled back to the hotel.  I called Shiera who was distressed but (as always) supportive and drifted off to sleep.  This morning I awakened to an email from Shiera announcing that she was experiencing contractions, but hoped that they were only of the typical early warning Braxton-Hicks variety. And with that, I headed to the San Francisco Passport Agency.

Allow me to digress here for an attack upon the right wing fallacy that "all guvmint is bad".  That argument always seemed suspect to me, and appeared all the more so in the wake of 9-11, when arch conservatives called in unison for government control of airport security. (Let's see...public schools should be privatized; all public utilities should be privatized; all health care should be privatized. But gosh, not airport security?  Oh, right...the wealthy conservatives actually use the airports, as opposed to the public schools and the other services for which they can easily afford safe, private options.  Got it.)  That government can be inefficient, that the private sector is often the way to go--I don't argue these points.  But I look at the American Post Office system--which provides coast-to-coast delivery for far less than is charged in any developed nation, and which has never lost a single piece of mail that I've sent or received--and I think I've found a situation in which government actually works better than, say, World Com, or Enron, or Lehman Brothers, or any fucking phone company I've EVER dealt with.

And with this dynamic in mind, I headed to the Hawthorne Street Passport Agency.  A line already stretched a couple hundred feet down the street and I began to fear the worst.  (All devout promises to awaken at 5 and be in line by 6:30 amounted to the usual hot air; I didn't arrive until 8:15.)

Americans have the reputation and being overly confident to the extent of being insufferably arrogant.  Perhaps this is often true.  But this was not the case in the middle of the early morning long line to the US Passport Agency in San Francisco.  Given that by virtue of our presence we had all fucked up and fucked up bad, this gathering was the the living embodiment of contrition, humility, and shame.  As we sheepishly exchanged stories, ("I didn't know I needed a passport for Mexico...", "Man, I never thought to check the expiration date...", "I think maybe my ex-girlfriend kept it...", "I lost in while making the fifty foot walk from the gate to the plane..." [that's me]), the entire street was bathed in a crimson glow, and there was little chest-thumping posturing about "getting bin-Laden" or the others forms of braggadocio in which we famously engage.

Once again, I encountered evidence that government works.  The entire operation was the model of how any bureaucracy should work.  The doors opened promptly at 9AM and stern but not unpleasant armed officers led us to the elevators in manageable small groups.  Equally stern but not unpleasant officers directed us through the metal detector and we assumed an orderly line.  After the "emergency" window opened at 9:30, the line made steady progress and by 10 I had my paperwork verified and a number assigned.  Twenty minutes later, my application was accepted, and I was told that I'd have a new passport by 4PM that afternoon, (assuming I wasn't flagged for some crime or misdemeanor).  And all the while, the federal employees were smiling, capable, and decidedly sympathetic.  Horror stories of cold, inept government bureaucracies abound.  But I can also recall lying flat on my back with a broken neck in the summer of 2005 and sobbing with fear and rage while the good folks at Sprint continued to erroneously sever my phone service and then putting me through hour long waits before I could talk to someone who would prove to be of no help at all.

Passport in hand--with an appropriately red-faced, bloated, bearded photo that I will have to carry with me for the  next decade--I booked the thousand dollar Philippine Airlines flight and prepared to be in Iloilo only twenty minutes after my initial planned arrival.  Shiera is beautifully fat and healthy was was thrilled to have her guy back to rub her feet.

And thus we stand as June comes to an end.  Shiera is due sometime in the second week of July, and then comes the hassle of getting Persephone her birth certificate and passport in time for Shiera's return to Burma.

This is exciting.  I feel strangely ready.

 

July 27, 2008: “Cho-Cho Shi.-Hse.-Hni’.  Cho-Cho Shi.-Hse.-Hni’!!!”

 

Loosely (very loosely, indeed) translated, this means “Sweet, Sweet ‘82; Sweet, Sweet ‘82!” in Burmese.  During high school pep rallies those in my graduating class too uncool to resist (surely, not I…) chanted this upon demand.  In Burmese, this inane call possesses an intoxicating rhythm.  By the time I left Austin, not only was it running tape loop style through my little brain, but it was also appropriated by my two nieces and nephew, ages five to nine.  I am among the least funky people alive.  (In fact, during a recent George Clinton Parliament/Funkadelic show this cardinal trait of mine was on full display. Oh, I was all about—all about—the “shit” and the “goddamn” parts, but as even the most impassive and sympathetic onlooker could attest, my attempts to “Get off [my] ass and jam!” were feeble and perfunctory.) So, I would be the last one likely to create fodder for the dance floor.  However, there has been a bass-heavy techno composition coursing through my head, which features the chant above, and which I swear could be a big, big hit.

 

And so, as befits my nature, this account begins with a digression...

 

 

 

It was an auspicious beginning.  On the Tapei to Bangkok leg of the thirty-six hour ordeal, I pulled out my “Burmese for Beginners” book to practice a bit of the delightful round and bubbly Burmese alphabet.  The woman across the aisle inquired and then reported that she was Burmese, living in Texas, but en route to a return home to Yangon.

 

My ever-perceptive eyes couldn’t help but notice her stunning beauty, but that is not the sound of wedding bells tolling, rather just my heart rattling around in the gutter to which it momentarily fell, as she talked about her husband and children.  I quickly discarded my disappointment to learn more about her.  It seems that she is a singer of some repute, returning to her native land to record an album and to appear on a television special.  D-Lun is her stage name and I think I was able to find a CD of hers online, if that is, in fact, her on the cover in a cowboy hat.  Her graciousness matched her beauty and she quite insistently invited me to phone her this coming week and to visit her home and family.  As I hope to become a true resident of Yangon—unlike what circumstances allowed me in Karachi—I am overjoyed at the invite.

 

Speaking of Karachi, these reports will be substantially different in tone than that of what I produced in Pakistan, both for reasons related to the Karachi experience and to the prevailing political climate here.  To understate the matter, this account will lack the “edge” of its older sibling and will focus more on the occasional cute kid and fluffy animal than it will on grandiose ruminations on the big questions I’ll be asking internally.  I hope the controversy-loving among you will understand and even approve.

 

I arrived in Yangon around 7PM on Friday and was immediately shamed to be informed that I had brought more baggage than the family of three that had arrived earlier in the afternoon.  Impotent protestations that as a social studies teacher I needed to bring a bevy of rare resources fell on the deaf but non-judgmental ears of the two school representatives who met me.  The luxury hotel that is to be my home for the next two years is thankfully short of developed-world standards of luxury.  The dingy, worn outer façade that is a Yangon luxury hotel would have been a Soviet-era bloc of flats in Romania;  in the States, perhaps, a pork fat rendering plant.  The inside has some lobby area trappings of opulence, but the room’s amenities are fairly pedestrian, allowing me to maintain what little remains of my street cred.  Within an hour of checking into my temporary room, I was fast asleep, but before collapsing, I caught a feint glimpse of Yangon’s radiant Shwedagon Pagoda glimmering distant in the night’s air.  Yangon is now my home.

 

 

I wish that I’d kept up a correspondence with Emily, a Canadian mountaineer with whom I ascended a Korakoram Mountain peak in Northern Pakistan two years ago.  But she was soon to be married and has since popped out a kid, so longevity was not the hallmark of our relationship.  But she did leave me with one golden observation: that “travel is one extended series of problem-solving exercises”.  An early proud moment came yesterday afternoon, when I tired during my walk home.  Using my six words of pidgin Burmese, I managed to learn that the 43 bus would take me to my destination, but to take advantage of this information, I had to decipher the Burmese characters for “43”.  A hint of genuine knowledge combined with a giant leap of faith put me on a bus, and it proved to be the correct one. I am now a regular on the 43.

 

 

One of the first games played by any quasi-experienced traveler in a new locale is “Where did Lonely Planet get it wrong?”.  At its most serious, this encompasses finding the highly-recommended restaurant that leaves you with botulism.  More commonly, the error is more innocuous and involves broad, sweeping statements about cultural mores.  In Bangkok, for example, LP makes it clear that shorts are never an acceptable form of dress, which must come as a shock to the vast multitudes of Thai who strut around proudly displaying their sexy gams.  Thus far, I take exception with the LP assertion that Yangon begins bustling in the early, early morning, as I have found recommended breakfast joints that only open—grudgingly, I might add—at ten.  Lonely Planet also writes at great length about the Burmese senses of modesty and decorum and makes it clear that public displays of affection are frowned upon.  Fearing a social environment even more stultifying than Karachi’s, I was pleased today to see literally hundreds of happy cuddlers walking hand-in-hand, snuggling body-to-body, and even making out (closed-mouthed, though, it seemed) passionately underneath a barely concealing umbrella.  The Myanmar couples were quite lovely.  I’d love someday to be part of one, though I would appear to lack the ethnic constitution to do it up right.

 

In the past three years, I’ve survived being crushed by an SUV and stumbling around the Pakistani-Afghani border with a wide-open mouth.  But none of this has prepared me for the Yangon sidewalks.  My sixty dollar Tevas are useless in the face of the invisible film that appears to line every square inch of pavement during monsoon season in this town, and loose bricks and gaping manholes abound.  Suffice to say, that if Yangon were magically transported to the United States, everyone here would be soooo sued.  (Given the assumption of neo-colonist aggression that is assumed of me on the basis of my citizenship, I must hasten to add that the concept of transporting Yangon to the United States is a purely rhetorical one, and that I have no desire—and even less ability—to actually make this happen.  And I can honestly say, to the best of my knowledge, that doing so is not a part of the platform for either Mr. Obama or Mr. McCain—though that could easily change.)  For you, a sidewalk is a useful aid in the necessary act of perambulation.  For me, the sidewalk is rectal cancer, a knife to the jugular, and the ravages of old age, wrapped in one neat, little concrete package.  Kristi Yamaguchi would spend most of her time here flat on her ass.  Two days into this experiment, I’ve yet to be subjected to the humiliation of either a face- or coccyx plant, but I’ve come close enough so to know that the Yangon sidewalks are a bad moon rising.  And it’s a full moon. (A moon full of potholes...)

 

Aside from the affectionate couples and the savage walkways, another prevailing observation is that Yangon seems to be entirely devoid of large animals.  In India, the cows stumble about as if they own the place (which they essentially do), and one can rarely go more than a few blocks in Karachi without seeing a donkey cart, a small herd of goats, or some other creature generally confined to grandpa’s farm in the U.S.  In Yangon, they are nowhere to be seen, undoubtedly by government decree.  Motorcycles, in fact, are banned from Yangon’s streets, I’m told, and even bicycles appear to be less omnipresent than one would expect.  In a “veritable orgasm of bad planning”—to appropriate the words of award-winning telejournalist Kent Brockman—citizens awakened some years back to a pronouncement that vehicles would now be traveling on the right side of the road, effective immediately.  After all this time, the drivers have become used to this, but most of the vehicles still feature steering wheels on the British right side of the car.  It is more than a tad alarming to glance toward a pickup truck barreling along the road with what should be the driver reclining in his seat, his nose buried in a newspaper.

 

I’ve been a bit timid, thus far.  Over the years, I’ve shown up alone in many, many dozens of cities and should be used to the drill of hopping off the bus or plane and plunging headfirst undaunted.  In reality, it can be a bit intimidating each new time.  Upon awakening before dawn on Saturday, I dawdled about the room to no great effect, essentially kind of afraid to dip my toe in the water.  Eventually, I worked my way down to the front desk, awkwardly asked the kind woman at the reception how to get downtown, and ended up in a cab, headed toward Sule Pagoda—an allegedly two thousand year old holy site that functions as a massive traffic circle in the city’s very heart.  I’ve seen and done relatively little beyond the pale, sticking closely to the prescribed routes dictated by the Lonely Planet clutched in hand or under arm at all times.  I’ve stuck to the tourist-friendly restaurants—ones with English words and prices and often photographs of what I’m destined to receive.  Eventually, I’m sure that I’ll be far more adventuresome, but at this point I’d rather not discover that the Burmese term for “lovely and flavorful tofu and vegetable delight” is distressingly similar in phoneme, tone, and cadence to the Burmese term for “lard-fried yak vagina”.

 

Finally, I’ve developed an alter-ego for my life in Yangon.  As I steadfastly practiced my Burmese writing this morning, I discovered with giddy delight that the word for “mushroom” looks undeniably like a fat (I’m working on it), bald (I’m really working on it) man with two spindly legs and pigeon-toed feet.  Sadly, I noted, he wears no expression on his face, but I fixed that in a hurry and I inserted eyes and a smiley mouth onto his erstwhile face.  That figure is now me, and I will now go by the name Mr. Happy Mushroom.  And I vow—with no one as my witness—that every time I am in a position to write the word mushroom in Burmese, I will add the superfluous facial features every time, whatever the social repercussions may be.  Mr. Happy Mushroom has spoken.

 

 

July 28, 2008: A Lifetime of Developing World Travel in One Hour

 

Sometimes a grand, sprawling experience can be wrapped up in one neat, little packet.

 

The day began with breakfast; nay, make that two breakfasts.  A mud floor, rusted corrugated iron roofed tea shop across the street from the entrance to the hotel provided my first foray into the Burmese “national breakfast” of mohinga, a sort of thick fish-noodle soup.  The tea, itself, has been a bit tricky, as the Myanmar prefer their brews syrupy sugary dense, almost to the point of being able to induce diabetes in a copper ingot.  My best attempt at “tea—a little, little, little, little, little sweet” finally worked (the key was adding the fifth little this time)—paid off and two happy cups later, I was off...

 

...to the Indian version of the same tea shop next door.  Two plates of various curries and paratha later (along with two more delicious cups of tea, which I eventually realized came from the same shop next door) and I waddled down the street, all of a dollar fifty poorer than when I began the day.

 

Oh, the ecstasy of traveling in the Developing World.

 

And then within ten minutes, I plunged my left sandal into the deepest, clingiest, most odiferous pile of light brown dog crap yet to be produced on the Eurasian continent.  And as I shuffled along the sidewalk attempting to scrape at least some of the stubborn residue from the sole, the same foot plunged into a two-inch deep morass of a devilishly black but otherwise unrecognizable viscous substance.

 

Oh, the agony of traveling in the Developing World.

 

I can go home now.  My work here is complete.

 

 

July 29, 2008: East Meets West

 

The common tendency, of course, is toward ethnocentricity; to doing linear comparison and find the other lacking. The backlash—stemming from both internal and external forces—is a flaccid, disingenuous form of cultural relativism; all that we encounter in the other is not better or worse, just different.

 

My learned mind and open heart tend to err toward the latter, though my temperament is lodged firmly in the earth of the former.  And both are wrong, of course.

 

A few months ago, I spoke with a Burmese-American acquaintance and we were talking about the psychology class I’ll be teaching here.  Psychology, of course, as a professional discipline is firmly rooted in Western thought and behavior and the next book I’ll be using reflects that.  I mentioned to my friend that I’ll need to find ways to familiarize myself with Asian concepts of the psyche.  As he responded, I stupidly somewhat tuned out, as I figured I could fill in the blanks once I heard the words “Western” and “individual” and “Asian” and “collective” paired.  An erudite fellow such as myself is certainly well aware of the primacy that the group holds in the East, quite in contrast to the go-it-alone spirit of the West, and I simply nodded carelessly at this poorly kept secret that we both knew.

 

The next day, however, I drifted back to the conversation and certain phrases that I had retained didn’t quite jibe with the message that I had anticipated (rather than heard).  Intrigued, I phoned him back and confessed that I hadn’t been very attentive in upholding my side of the dialogue.  I asked him to repeat his point.

 

In fact, he had had a lot more to say, had cut deeply into the surface-level stereotype.  It was true, he began, that Eastern societies are comparatively more inclined toward considerations of the well-being of the group. However, his point had been not to reaffirm the difference, but rather to point out that he believes it often to be overstated.  As evidence, he told me, he had pointed to the nature of the various post-colonial Asian independence movements and their leaders.  Gandhi, Sun Yat Sen, Ho Chi Minh, and Burma's own Aung San, he’d argued, had all put the importance of the rights and livelihood of the individual at the very forefront of their visions for a new society.  To be sure, all of these men simultaneously placed an imperative upon communal necessities as well, but this, he’d opined, was only half of the story.  Further, he claimed—only increasing my embarrassment at my laziness the day before—the one-sided, mindless picture of Asian culture was dangerous, as it played into the hands of the inhumane despots who have ruled much of modern Asia, as it allowed them to downplay the significance of human rights.

 

This, of course, is academic and abstract, but the same blending of the dual realties of universal standards and cultural exception has marked my morning today.  Yesterday, I had my first meeting with Ko Win, whom I had contracted over the internet to teach me some Burmese.  Knowing that when school begins the time and energy I have for language studies will be limited, I had asked to be booked for a week of four hour long lessons.  Between what I had gleaned from Burmese for Beginners while in the States and what I could learn from Ko Win in a week, I hoped I would enter my professional life with at least the very basics of the local tongue.  And, in fact, I have become moderately familiar with the sixty to seventy character alphabet and have at least theoretical command of a few hundred words and phrases.  Still, no one here seems to much understand a word I say. And dangers abound. Upon presenting a plate of sweet, fresh pineapple, I had not requested that Ko Win “please eat”, but rather called him a “twat”.  This one glaring faux pas aside, the lesson went well and I was looking forward to this morning’s 9:30 following.  And rather than pay him for each class, I handed him the full one hundred dollars that had been pre-agreed upon as his payment for the twenty hours.

 

At 9:41 the phone rang.  Through his limited English, Ko Win was able to convey his regrets that he wouldn’t be able to get to me until 12:30, as it seems that he had just been contacted by a woman who had wanted to book a quick lesson with him this very morning.  I informed him that I was not available this afternoon—I could have been, I suppose, but I’m not comfortable with the precedent that would have set—and we rebooked for tomorrow.

 

I think my gut-level response should be apparent to anyone who’s ever known me:  “Listen, fuckwit—I don’t give a good goddamn if it was the Queen of Belgium who phoned this morning requesting your services.  My schedule has been centered around our appointment—one for which you’ve already been paid, incidentally—and I expect you to be here!”

 

As this mini-devil stomped his little feet upon my right shoulder, his better natured sibling fluttered peacefully over my left, murmuring, “Granted, this development is a bit vexing, but do recall that you are a guest in this good man’s home and the Asian conceptions of time and commitment are doubtless not the same as those upon which you have been raised, ye of bilious temperament.  More importantly, 'saving face' is a need as great as food and oxygen in this part of the world, so your displeasure must be quelled.”  (Even later, this creature came back to remind me that Ko Win lived in abject poverty, so perhaps the opportunity to pick up a few more dollars more than outweighed concern over the comparatively minor inconvenience it might cause me.)

 

In the end, I’m not sure that I care for either of the buttinskies who were so quick to provide unsolicited counsel, and while I’m in Burma I’ll be in search of a wisdom that transcends them both and that meshes well with the environment and the circumstances of the moment.  No one is always right—no single culture and certainly not me.

 

 

September 20, 2008: The Curse of the Human Capacity for Language

 

Flat out, I suck when it comes to foreign languages.  Some of you who have witnessed my Spanish capabilities, might object—if you are not a native Spanish speaker yourself—that my prowess exceeds your own.  But hell, I’ve been working at its mastery for over two decades, have spent four to five months of my life in Mexico and Guatemala and taught in schools where I’d rarely go a day without speaking Espanol.  Given the time and whole-hearted effort that I’ve extended toward being truly fluent, it is borderline pathetic that still have trouble comprehending what a Spanish speakers says to me in casual conversation and that I almost literally cannot understand a word said on Spanish television or radio.

 

But one needn’t enjoy an activity to be good at it.  (Barry Sanders is said to have not much enjoyed playing football and Michelangelo was resentful whenever he was forced to put down his sculptor’s chisel to paint; yet both were pretty good in their respective hated professions.)  And one needn’t be particularly good at something one enjoys doing.  And I really do enjoy trying to learn other languages and all the more so would positively love to be proficient in a variety of other tongues.  To wit, upon accepting the position in Yangon, I mail ordered a bevy of Burmese books and CDs and surprised myself with the dedication I displayed in working with the materials, hopeful of arriving in Yangon with at least a solid basis.  And to be sure, I was convinced that I had done so.  By the time July 25^th rolled around, I had developed a theoretical vocabulary of three to four hundred words, had at least more than a passing familiarity with Burmese pronunciation and grammar, and had even learned to slowly decipher the Burmese script.  Is there no obstacle that commitment and hard work cannot overcome?

 

Yes, there is; my ineptitude at language learning.  This became clear enough within hours.  Having studied and rehearsed the (admittedly complicated) Burmese word for “tea”, I entered a Yangon tea shop.  At the tea shop, I attempted to order tea.  As all around me—ALL around me—sat in the tea shop, happily drinking tea, I politely asked for tea.  In return, I received a blank stare.  I tried again.  And again—this time adding a sipping pantomime.  “Coffee mix?” (low-grade Folgers pre-mixed with sugar and cream powder), asked the waiter.  I finally resorted to walking up to another table and pointing.  “Oh, ‘le hpe’ ye’!” responded the waiter, mimicking (I swear) letter-for-letter, tone-for-tone, syllable-for-syllable exactly what I’d said to him four times.  And this misadventure produced happier results, I’m sad to report, than another attempt at the same a few days later, when my desperate pleas for tea yielded—and I couldn’t make this up if I tried—a small plate of watermelon.

 

And the problem runs both ways.  When they do not understand my Burmese, I look like an ass.  And when their imprecisely enunciated English is incomprehensible to me…I look like an ass.

 

I got lost on my bicycle a few weeks ago and asked a passerby for directions to the main street off of which my hotel is located.  Its name is Kaba Aye Paya Lan (Kaba Aye Pagoda Street).  Needless to say, the pronunciation could take a variety of forms.  Is it KAba?  KabA? Kayba?  Is, as in some languages with Sanskrit vestiges, the final “a” silent?  Is the second word like the English letter “a”; or a Fonzified “ayyyyyy”; or like the English affirmation that sounds like “eye”?  After a few weeks here, I knew the answer—Kaba A PayA.  I didn’t suspect that I had mastered all of the subtle nuances, but had developed more than a rough approximation by the time I foolishly asked for directions.

 

“Kaba Aye Paya Lan be hma le?,” I asked.  In my new friend’s eyes, I detected the familiar question:  “Is the white guy trying to communicate something, or is he having a Tourrette’s-induced seizure?”  I tried again.  And again.  And a half-dozen more helpful men—there seems always to be an abundance of helpful men who materialize out of thin air in this place—joined him.  Finally, one hesitantly asked, “You…you want to buy a papaya?”  No, I did not want to buy a papaya.  But I also did not wish to continue this hopeless endeavor.  Thus, I surrendered to my impotence and affirmed that I did, indeed, wish to purchase a papaya.  Relieved and delighted, the men erupted in a cacophony of Burmese instructions, augmented by seemingly contradictory pointings of the hands.  Feigning gratitude with a conviction that would have left Olivier in the dust, I rode off in the general direction of the recommended fruit stand, even going so far, I fear, as to mimic the response I would doubtless have when finally completing my quest for the gustatory tropical treat.  I was such an ass.

 

On August 23^rd, one of the genuinely sweet young women who works at the hotel bounded up to me with enthusiasm and curiously announced, “Tomorrow is your buddy!!!”  My instinctive response to such banal and unfettered optimism is to explain my contention that tomorrow—far from being any sort of “buddy” of mine—is more likely than not to be a crushing disappointment and the source of the ignominious demise that I have somehow managed to stave off, lo, these many torturous years.  But I really do need to start getting along with people just a little, and no doubt the innocent youth—knowing nothing of the harsh realities of life—was merely trying to add a little hope and goodwill to my life. And that she even knew the word “buddy” was pretty cute in and of itself.  So swallowing the throatful of bitter cynicism that will no doubt choke me to death some fine day, I responded appreciatively,

 

“Yes, it is.  Thank you. And it is yours, too!”

 

And confusion set in on her face and she stared blankly.  And confusion set in upon mine, soon joined by the dreaded certainty that I was somehow in the wrong.  And she stared.  And I slumped.  And she fought the urge to giggle.  And I accepted my inadequacy and turned my attention to what might have gone awry.

 

“Birthday”.  Tomorrow was my “birthday”.  (It was; she must have discovered this in the computer’s records.)  Informing a casual acquaintance that tomorrow is his “buddy” is not some quaint Buddhist salutation.  To do so would be as awkward and foolish as it is would being English.  And somehow, I was again an ass.

 

Most other manifestations of Burmese culture also bring out my inner ass.  Of particular distress to me is that the  majority of men wear long, wrap-around skirts, known as “longyis”.  This cultural trait has led to numerous trains of thought along the lines of:

 

“Wow!  What a hot ass!!!...(on that 47 year old man with a five-inch sprout of hair growing from a small patch just to the left of center of his chin.  The closet creeps open a tiny step further…)

 

 

Voice Over: LIVE FROM GLORIOUS YANGON, THE SPORTING CAPITAL OF MYANMAR, IT’S THE FINALS OF THE 2008 “WATCH THE AMERICAN EAT” COMPETITION!!!  (Triumphant symphonic music roars in approval.) 

 

VO: Here with the play-by-play is Wink Buston and Martone Gatch!

 

Wink Buston: Hello and welcome to this exciting day that has long sparkled with anticipation on the calendars of Burmese sport fans for months.  Even those with a passing interest in Watching the American Eat has to be almost giddy at the level of competition and the almost mind-boggling enthusiasm that this tournament has brought to the sport.

 

Martone Gatch: Right you are, Wink.  The sport, which has been exploding in popularity over the past several years, now seems poised to become the national obsession of Myanmar, and the level of play we’ve witnessed over these past few weeks has done nothing to quell that enthusiasm.

 

WB:  Traditionalists in this country have long assumed that nothing would ever supplant Brutalizing the Ethnic Minority Peasant as the national sport of this proud country and it’s certainly too early to proclaim that Watching the American Eat has done so.  But it is in the midst of a meteoric rise, in particular among the young of the country, who show an almost insatiable appetite for the sport.

 

MG:  And, yes, it is that younger generation that is coming to dominate the sport.

 

WB: So, Martone, what do you know about the squads that will be participating in this year’s finals?

 

MG: It’s a strong, strong field this year, Wink.  We start with a Super Win No. 1 Restaurant squad that is coming into this year’s finals with a major chip on its shoulder after last year’s devastating loss in the finals.  (Camera pans to an austere-looking group of young Burmese men in a restaurant, staring with determination at the camera.)  You’ll recall that Super Win—one of the sport’s earliest professionals—was everyone’s favorite to finally take home the gold a year ago and seemed well on the way to doing so, until an inexplicable failure to refill the customer’s water glass when it was only three quarters full led to a disappointing drop to second.  I’ve spoken with the Super Win boys and they’ve made it clear:  this is their year!

 

WB: And there is, of course, this year’s, um…surprise entry in the finals, right Martone?

 

MG: That there is, Wink.  In years past, the final round has been a two squad competition.  However the National Watch the American Eat Federation announced just last week that a third team has earned a spot in these finals.  (Camera pans across a group of unmissably smug and privileged teens in a restaurant.  A few are fiddling with ipods or cell phones.  In the background, one can be seen kicking and older man.)  The team from General Shan Thwe’s House of Chicken  #6 is this deserving bunch.  The word in the press is that these, um, restaurant employees have shown themselves to be so adept at Watching the American Eat that the Burmese sporting public absolutely insisted that they be entered into these finals, despite the fact that they have never competed publicly in the sport before.

 

WB:  Am I right that these athletes come from a noteworthy lineage, Martone?

 

MG: They certainly do, Wink.  This extraordinarily well-reviewed restaurant is one of a chain owned by Supreme Military Commander Shan Thwe’s.  And with the regime’s emphasis on family values, it is no surprise that the athletes are all members of his direct family!

 

WB: How about that?!  Well, this certainly is a feel good story!

 

MG:  It is that, Wink.  And rounding out the field is the upstart squad from Lai Myo Than Food Place.  (Pan to a boisterous and energetic group of Burmese waiters.  “Number 1” fingers are flying in the air and the staff is wearing noxious day-glow yellow shirts.) Virtual unknowns at the time that this competition begun, they have captured the attention of the nation’s sport aficionados with some of the most daring and innovative routines this game has ever seen. 

 

WB: There is no doubt that these athletes have captured the nation’s fancy, Martone.  But the same irreverent flash that has brought new fans to the team and to the sport as a whole, have also rankled some.

 

MG: No question, Wink, no question.  While half of the Watch the American Eat world is praising this group’s innovation, the other half seems to have labeled them as mere gimmick-mongers.  Ultimately, this will be the test of what Lai Myo is made of.  There’s no doubt that they will bring excitement and dazzle to the afternoon’s proceedings.  But will they show the technical mastery that we know we will witness from Super Win?

 

WB: Well, the time for speculation has come to an end, Martone, as we are ready to begin.  We are told that the staff at General Shan Thwe’s House of Chicken #6 has “something else to do today,” so the customary coin toss has been waved and they will be allowed to go first.

 

(Pan to the smug socialites, as they continue their involvement with their electronic devices.)

 

WB: And here comes the American now.

 

 (A forty-something middle-American looking guy in casual attire enters the restaurant.  The “waiters” ignore him entirely.  Somewhat perplexed, he moves to a seat a few feet away from the waiters.  Eventually, one of the waiters grunts and points toward a dish of food that is sitting on a counter.  The American retrieves it and sits down to eat.  There is little response from the waiters, though two of them do light up cigarettes.) 

 

WB: The American has his food now and is eating slowly.  He’s giving every indication of wishing to be left in peace as he eats, which has got to be seen as a green light for the staff to focus all of their attention upon him.

 

MG: Thus far, they don’t seem to be gnawing at the bait.  At this point, it’s hard to be certain if they’ve even noticed his presence.

 

WB: Yes, this is definitely a low-key approached that the House of Chicken is taking.  To this point, they have not—wait a minute, wait just a minute!  One of the employees just shot the American a glance out of the corner of his eye!  Nicely done!

 

MG: Um, actually Wink, the employee was simply looking up at his coworker over there, who has recommenced the kicking of the older gentleman in the corner.  See, you can tell by the delighted smile on his face.

 

WB: Ah, good call, Martone, good call.  Still, it was a fine effort by the employee.

 

(A buzzer sounds.)

WB: And time has run out. What do you think, Martone?

 

MG:  Think?  About what?

 

WB: About the House of Chicken’s routine?

 

MG: I don’t think you can even call that a routine, Wink.  They just sat there screwing with their cell phones.  As far as I could see, they didn’t…

 

WB: I agree, Martone.  A wonderful performance.  I don’t think there can be any question as to why the rules were tweaked just a little to get them into this final round!

 

MG: A wonderful per…?! Wh…?!  B-but they, they, they didn’t…

 

WB: Yes, truly remarkable!  I’m certain you aren’t the only one to be left speechless by that display.  But now it’s Super Win’s turn at the table.

 

MG: Wait a minute, Wink.  That was absolutely the wor…

 

WB: Yes, wonderful! Absolutely wonderful!  But we need to turn our attention back to the pitch, as the boys from Super Win are getting ready to watch the American eat!

 

MG: Jesus!

 

(Pan to the focused and efficient lads from Super Win, as their behavior mirrors the call of the play-by-play announcers.)

 

WB: Well, Martone, the Super Win boys are on this American like flies on shit!  His rear end hadn’t even reached the seat by the time the head waiter had his pen in hand and was asking for his order.  These guys are true professionals.

 

MG: Yes, Wink, this is exactly the sort of play I expected to see here today.  Super Win knows the sport and executes to a tee.

 

WB: The American is clearly feeling the pressure and it’s clear that he’s now ordered before he’s ready.  The eight Super Win waiters are most certainly taking note of this and will all-but-certainly be glued to the ensuing spectacle. And by the worried look on his face, he is none-too-confident that the meal he receives will be even remotely like what he’s tried to order.

 

MG: And he’s right to be worried, Wink!  No team stocked with athletes of Super Win’s caliber would fail to misinterpret the order!  However, the weather gods are not smiling on Super Win.  Just as the food is arriving…

 

WB: And I’ll chip in, Martone, that the American most certainly did not order the deep fried pig’s intestine plate that is now being placed before him…

 

MG: No question about it, Wink.  But just as the food is arriving, a torrential monsoon rain has descended.  As the streams begin to pour through the poorly patched roof, it is going to be increasingly difficult for the staff to ignore the flooding and keep their focus on the eating American.

 

WB: A bad stroke of luck, indeed.  But they have still managed to have five of their employees circling the eating American within a six feet diameter.  It’s hard to tell if the desperate look on the American’s face is more a result of the extreme discomfort induced by the staring and smiling employees, or by the realization that he’s just bitten into something that is unrecognizable, and possibly even inedible.

 

MG: Wink, this steady and confident display can’t help but remind me of the “88 finals, when a severely undermanned Mingalaba Tea Shop squad—two-thirds of the staff had been detained earlier that week—still managed to so unnerve the American with its remaining three sets of eyes, that they were able to bring home the gold.  That Mingalaba team had the makings of a true dynasty.  Such a shame that the other three were detained during the awards ceremony later that day.

 

WB: Well, it had to be done, Martone, it had to be done.  But returning to today’s action, Super Win is pulling out all of the stops.  Just as the American was frantically putting his water glass to his lips—no doubt a desperate attempt to dilute the taste of fresh fried pig’s intestine—Super Win’s all-Myanmar water pourer, Myin Tin Win, has snatched the glass from the American’s hands in order to refill it.  Oooh, this is such professionalism.

 

MG: Fantastic, Wink.  And as the American is distracted by his impotent attempts to retrieve his water glass, two other employees have emerged from the kitchen with a fresh vat of fried pig’s intestine, and have slopped it onto his plate…

 

WB: …despite the fact that he’s barely touched what he already has.

 

MG: …barely touched what he already has.  It’s hard to see how anyone is going to top this today.  They continue to be completely undistracted by the rivulets of murky water rolling through the middle of the restaurant and pooling around the American’s laptop case, which is lying on the dirt floor.

 

WB: Sorry to cut in, Martone, but are you seeing what I’m seeing?

 

MG: BOO-YAH!!!  Super Win is in the process of writing a new chapter in the history of the sport!  Incredible, Wink.

 

WB: For the first time in the sport’s history, Super Win has bridged the gender gap!  From out of nowhere, two thoroughly confused young women have joined the gawkers…

 

MG: …making the American all the more self-conscious, as he searches in vain for a napkin to wipe the pool of fried pig’s intestine grease from his chin.

 

WB: And the Super Win boys don’t miss a beat, Martone! From the left corner, an attentive busboy has taken it on himself to apply a wad of toilet paper to the American’s face, as the two young women quietly smirk in a combination of embarrassment and derision.

 

MG: As we entered this final day of the competition, Wink, Myanmars waited in breathless anticipation, wondering what ground-breaking strategy might be employed by the upstarts at Lai Myo Than.  But the Super Win boys have just cried out, “Wait just a minute, folks!”  They knew that if there was a knock against them, it was that they come to be seen as being overly traditional in their approach to this rapidly changing sport.  But that criticism is now mute.  Quite honestly, I don’t know that the finals have seen such a bold move since Fukyan Kitchen’s daring move to grab a knife and cut the American’s food for him while he ate back in “01.

 

WB: And there’s the buzzer!  What a wonderful performance, and Super Win knows it.  The calm demeanor they brought into this day has dissolved into tearful hugs and triumphant cries.  They know what they’ve just accomplished.

 

MG: No question, Wink.  It remains to be seen what Lai Myo Than can pull out of its hat, but Super Win has truly outdone itself and the boys can virtually taste that gold that has eluded them for so long.

 

WB: We certainly are neck and neck between Super Win and General Shan Thwe’s House of Chicken #6, as we await Lai Myo Than’s turn!

 

MG: What are you talking about, Wink?! Are you seriously comparing a performance for the ages with a bunch of privileged arrogant brats dicking around with their ipods?

 

WB: You bet I am, Martone! And now, Lai Myo Than comes to the fore…

 

(Camera follows the action described by the announcers.)

 

WB: Martone, those day-glo yellow shirts that have become the Lai Myo Than trademark are already working their magic upon the poor American.

 

MG: They are, Wink.  Their unnerving luminescence can give the illusion of horrific invasiveness from ten to twelve feet away.  In other words, even if they aren’t all actively Watching the American Eat, they sure give the impression of doing so.  And the American is most certainly feeling watched.

 

WB: As she should be, Martone, as he should be.  This is no parlor trick.  The eight Lai Myo employees are truly and genuinely focused on the American as he orders.  What are you noting here, Martone?

 

MG: It’s bold and it’s dynamic, Wink, just as we expected.  Note the position of team captain No No Nei Ni—he’s to the American’s immediately left, positively hovering over him.

 

WB: You’re right—in fact his head and torso have breached the imaginary cylinder extending over the American.

 

MG: And not only that, Wink, but No No Nei Ni is so uncomfortably close that the American is actually tapping him in the crotch every time he turns the page of the menu!

 

WB: Outstanding!  In fact, let’s take a closer look with our Hovercam™. [Camera zooms in on the four square foot space encompassing the American’s face and the waiter’s crotch.]  Here you see the American’s left knuckles moving toward the waiter’s crotch and…

 

MG:  Wow! Look at the glint of horror in the American’s eyes when he feels the unmistakable squish of the waiter’s left testicle.

 

WB: And his jaw muscles are clenched to the utmost.  Why, there’s got to be at least ten to fifteen millimeter jawbone protrusion and any time the attentive service can actually produce physical change in the diner, you know that you’re witnessing greatness.

 

MG: This is the sort of thing that has made this squad such a hot commodity.  No doubt this is cutting edge and daring.  But it’s also technically flawless.  No No Nei Ni isn’t just flashing into the zone and then prancing off merrily on his way; he’s made it clear that he’ll be there for the meal’s duration.  This is superlative technique.

 

WB: Here comes the American’s food. Any chance it will resemble what he ordered?

 

MG: Not on your life, Wink.  These young whelps are too disciplined for that.  And notice that they are already bringing the American his second beer, despite the fact that he most certainly didn’t order it and that he hasn’t even touched his first one.

 

WB:  Good call, Martone.  Lai Myo Than isn’t intimidated by the standard that’s been set earlier this evening.  But…what’s happening now down on the pitch?

 

MG: Would you believe it, Wink?!  This is a play straight out of the sport’s earliest days.  One of the waiters is now practicing his English!

 

WB: This is absolutely fantastic, pure artistry!  It’s so clear that the American just wants to eat in peace!  Let’s see if we can pick up what he’s saying…

 

LMT Waiter:  Eh…eh…wain oo fun?

 

WB:  “Wain oo fun?”  Well, that’s absolutely incoherent!  What a performance!

 

MG:  This is one for the ages, Wink.  And note that when the American turns away from the English practice in frustration, he finds himself staring No No Nei Ni right in the crotch!  Pure brilliance!

 

WB: And there’s the buzzer!  History has been made here today in Yangon, Martone!

 

MG: No question about it, Wink.  No question.  We have seen a level of play that would have been unthinkable even a few years back.  I would hate to be one of the judges who has to choose between the sparkling performances of Super Win and Lai Myo Than.

 

WB: And let’s not forget about the earlier work of General Shan Thwe’s House of Chicken #6, Martone.

 

MG: Come on, Wink.  You can’t be serious!  This is clearly a two horse race. Those indifferent little punks didn’t belong in the same competition.

 

WB: Yes, we have seen three absolutely magical performances tonight.  But the judges have made their decision.  Let’s go down to the pitch for the call…

 

(Pan to the restaurant.  The teams from Super Win and Lai Myo Than look nervous and exhausted as they await the verdict.  The House of Chicken team is mysteriously absent.  An announcer in a tuxedo stands center stage.)

 

Announcer: Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a decision.  The winner…of the 2008…Watch the American Eat Competition…………..

 

(The remaining teams embrace their comrades, close their eyes, hold their breaths, offer up visible prayers.)

 

A: GENERAL SHAN THWE’S HOUSE OF CHICKEN NUMBER SIX!!!!

 

(The remaining teams look shocked, crestfallen, some even infuriated.  They collectively slump, some burst into tears.)

 

WB: General Shan Thwe’s House of Chicken #6 has done it!

 

MG: This is a travesty.

 

WB: In what has unquestionably been the greatest final round this event has ever known, the outsiders, the new kids, House of Chicken #6 has pulled off the upset.  Unfortunately, the squad couldn’t be here for their moment of glory, as you’ll recall that they had “something to do”, but I’m sure that when their driver picks up the award and lets them know that they’ve won, they will be ecstatic.

 

MG: This is unconscionable, Wink.  The fix has got to be in.  We have witnessed two of the greatest performances in the sport’s history, yet the guys who barely showed up have been named the winner.  This cannot be allowed to happen!  The people of this country will not st…

 

WB: Right you are, Martone, this is a night that sports fans will long remember!  As outstanding as the competition was, the judges clearly made the right call. 

 

(Pan to the pitch, where armed soldiers are leading the other teams away.)

 

WB:  I think it’s safe to say that General Shan Thwe’s House of Chicken #6 is on the verge of creating a dynasty and will dominate this sport for a long time to come.

(Triumphant symphonic music swells again.)

WB: Well, that’s all from Yangon for the 2008 Watch the American Eat finals.  It’s been a great night here, one that none of us will soon forget.  For Martone Gatch—who was just escorted by security forces to a meeting in our studio’s basement—this is Wink Butler wishing you a good evening.  See you next year!

(Music continues to swell and fades out…)

 

October 7, 2008: I Don’t Know Why I Bother

 

Yes, I know…you didn’t know that I did, right?  Well, that’s a nice cutting response to a lad in distress.  So, up yours, pal.  And that horse you road in on?  Up his, too…

 

This is well-traveled, perhaps even “trodden upon” ground, but every single, last, solitary, effin’ attempt I make to speak the local language leaves me looking like a colossal asshole.  Tonight I went to a barebones Indian place, where I had previously managed to order, eat, and get away with emasculating incident.  I smiled, barked out my usual “Te’ Ta’ Lo’ shi la?” (“Yo, homeslice…does this fine establishment happen to have comestibles fit for one who eschews the consumption of flesh?”  Or something like that…), and this time it actually worked.  I even managed to convey my desire for naan.  Sadly, they do not carry Tiger Beer, but the local Myanmar (which gives me a headache) was in abundance, so I went with that.

 

At this point I decided to expand my language skills.  It would have been better if I’d tried to write my name in urine in the communal pot of curry.  Not that this would have been appreciated, but I’m fairly certain that it would have turned out better than it did when I spoke Myanmar.  The Burmese language has a peculiarity in that every item has a “counting suffix” attached to it.  This practice isn’t completely foreign to English; as an example, we speak of ten head of cattle or three bunches of grapes, but in Burmese it is something of an obsession.  I know that bottles, fruits, and round things are referred to as “lone”.  Cups are “hkwe”.  Animals utilize the Burmese word for “head”.  But when I croaked my way toward ordering “two naan”, I decided I wanted to do it right, which would involve saying “naan nha _____________” (“naan two ‘whateverthecountingwordis’”), and I asked the waiter for assistance.

 

The usual chaos ensued.  After about three minutes of mutually unintelligible banter, I was fully resigned to my perpetual ignorance and with disingenuously satisfied smile and nod of the head, I accepted the final response that my would-be instructor offered.  I had suffered loss of face—anathema to Asians, but something of a religious rite for Ziegers—but at least the interaction was over…

 

…until the waiter showed up with a duplicate order of my meal, complete with two naan, in a plastic bag.  Ah, fuck me.  Fine, I’ll eat it for breakfast.  But then he showed up with another bottle of Myanmar Beer in a bottle—with a straw, of course.  At this point, I drew the line, and responded with a poorly intoned “I don’t need this.”  (I stress the poor intonation, because the words for “need” and “fuck” are nearly identical, and I may well have announced to the restaurant that “I don’t fuck”.  Which is, of course, too often quite the case, but I’m not sure than a tenth of the denizens of Yangon necessarily needed to have their suspicions confirmed...)  Anyhow, he removed the offending to-go beer…and returned with a similarly-packaged Tiger Beer.  You know…the one that they reported not to have at the outset.  I returned this one, as well.  At least the two meals only cost me about three dollars.  Still, I feel so deflated.

Last night, I dreamt about my three childhood pets.  Winston—the collie—appears on rare occasion, but he was there last night with his velvety ear lobes.  Blackie—easily the most regularly present in these periodic dreams—was recently dead.  In the dream, he had passed on two weeks earlier, (though it has now been over two decades) and I was marveling at how he had managed to last almost forty years.  And Little—who was by all accounts my cat—Little was curled up next to my head, her tail and nose burrowed into my cheek. When I awakened, I had my right arm clutched around the pillow beneath my head, and though I did not have a mirror handy to prove this, I’m almost certain I had an contented smile on my face.

 

October 15, 2008: Glad to Be Alive

 

There are those moments—not enough of them, some might argue, but some to be sure—where it all seems right, and by extension it all seems all right.  A couple of nights ago, I was cruising along at 45 MPH on what is possibly the only well-paved highway in all of Myanmar, Venus rising behind my right shoulder, a full moon doing the same before my left, and the mighty Irrawaddy River flowing beneath the bridge a couple hundred feet below, and I was stricken with an all-consuming happiness that I had been born and had made it this far.  I never know when these moments will come again, and part of me regularly fears that the final one may have come and gone. But when one makes an appearance, all doubts about whether this is all worthwhile are dismissed as ignorant and laughable.

 

A number of human rights organizations have called for a full-scale tourist boycott of Burma and the reasons for this are not hard to understand.  However, some one-time sponsors of this action have since changed their position, arguing that the good produced by the contact with the outside world and the trickle of money coming into the hands of working Myanmar outweighs the evil of the money that will inevitably end up in the hands of the bad guys.  I would not have taken this job had I not been at least reasonably sold that my presence here would be a positive, but after a few days in Mandalay, I think I feel more strongly that the tourist boycott, while perhaps morally “right”, is practically wrong-headed.  The first hotel I stayed in—Budget choice #4 in Lonely Planet—was depressed and depressing, as I was the only customer.  Bicycle rickshaw drivers are desperate, often lucky to plead their ways to a fifty cent ride or two throughout the course of the day.  A visit to a highly recommended vegetarian restaurant yielded word that they had put the venture on hold, due to a dearth of customers.  The monk protests of a year ago could pose no conceivable risk to any visitor and the typhoon didn’t come within a hundred miles of Mandalay.  But these two prominently-reported events have created a blanket impression of Myanmar as equaling death and chaos, and what minimal tourism there was a year ago, has now dried up to next to nothing.  And it’s just killing ordinary people.  There is no perfect answer to this dilemma.  Every visa fee certainly does end up in some hands that few of us would willingly shake, so my thoughts could change on the matter.  But I’m inclined now to label the boycott misguided.

 

Mandalay is, of course, a city whose name drips with colonial romance and mystique.  If I were as smart as I sometimes like to pretend I am, I would have thoroughly digested Kipling, but typically I know no more of the guy than he was an Age of Imperialism Brit, who wrote The Jungle Book, coined the term “white man’s burden”, and had something of other to say about “the Road to Mandalay”.  Dad, a recovering Anglophile, knows the reference far better than I and is also, apparently, unfortunately aware of a ancient popular song about that very road, and has spent much of the time since he learned of my trip marching about the house singing it in his own unique key.  (Mother now has the local TV divorce lawyer on her cell phone’s speed dial.)

 

The five days in Mandalay were most notable for my having met the new wife at the second guest house and for three trips to a bridge. 

 

The new wife probably won’t be the new wife. But she’s 25 (really old for an unmarried woman here) and lovely as can be.  Her name is something really funny—Ju Ju Thin sounds about right—but I almost immediately dubbed her Katarina, as she oddly projects the appearance of Spanish royalty.  She speaks no English, lives nowhere near me, and has given no evidence of being anything more than indulgent of my awkward stabs at flirting, (“So, what’s a nice girl like you doing in a savage dictatorship like this?” sounded solid as it coalesced in my mind, but ended up flopping desperately about on the table  like a beached flounder gasping for air once it actually left my lips), but I’ve distracted myself before with imaginary loves less promising.

 

The bridge is two hundred years old, made of solid teak, and spans a kilometer wide lake from the village of Amarapura to the island village of Thaungthaman.  At some point, the bridge, itself, was just a bunch of weather-worn wood, but the motorcycle trip out there was worth the effort, as the vehicles are actually banned in Yangon. 

 

My Swiss travel partner for the day and I hadn’t taken two full steps onto the antique teak when they appeared; Chitwe and Su Zin, Olympic quality ten year old purveyors of charming banter and cheap trinkets.  I knew I was beaten and would be forking over at least a few dollars for things I really and truly did not need.  Knowing this, I made the best of it, and enjoyed walking along with them, as they alternated slick pidgin sales pitches (“You very handsome man, so I give you very good price…”) and running around like totally goofy little ten year olds enjoying the attention of adults.  Chitwe was clearly the good one, Su Zin clearly the devil incarnate.  (Needless to say, I gravitated toward the latter; the Swiss woman regularly pantomimed throwing her into the lake.)  I took a few dozen pictures, parted with about six US dollars and headed back to Mandalay with promises of returning with copies of the photos the next day.

     

  

My return—my Swiss compatriot had had enough the first time—was a cause for celebration.  Su Zin was in her village across the bridge, but Chitwe’s older sister recognized me and hailed me as I rode by.  I stopped the bike and the usual assortment of half-dressed children and amused adults surrounded me.  I gave Chitwe her photos and it seemed only natural to capture the rest of them, even if this did mean a third trip to the bridge.  There were a few faces that defied explanation.

 
      

A mean case of the dawdles made for a late afternoon departure for the bridge the next day.  Less than halfway there, the skies opened up and I sought refuge in an outdoor beer stand that apparently does not see too many Westerners.  I gleaned this from the collective response of the employees.  I know that I’ve already commented on this phenomenon to the point of witless repetition, but this particular manifestation of the Asian Hover really was in a class of its own.  Amidst the endless ordering process—in which they acknowledged that they did have lots of vegetarian food but couldn’t understand if I wanted it with pork or chicken—I counted seven beaming and enthusiastic Burmese teenage males standing with eyes of rapt attention within three feet of me.  Once the seven took my order, one left for the kitchen, while the others continued to…well, just kind of stand there.  One seemed to be charged with the all-important task of repositioning my water glass each time I placed it on the table after a sip.  The seconds passed like years.  I made eye contact with a trio at a table behind this adolescent wall of obtrusive service and caught fleeting images of sympathy from these folks.  They were a male and two lovely women in their thirties and how, oh how, I yearned parlay this chance encounter into an invitation to join them, a night of memorable conversation, and a marriage to whichever of the two lovelies was the third wheel.  Instead, I found myself staring point blank at adolescent male crotch, which was fatefully positioned at the same level as the preferred eyes in the background.  I think I’ve already made this joke in past updates, but as I was led to the bathroom by one of my attendants, I was generally terrified at the possibility that he would take it upon himself to shake my winkle for me when I was finished.

 

Night had fallen by the time I made my escape and I rode through a barrage of fireworks.  The full moon had risen and the Thadingyut celebration (a big time Buddhist do) had begun.  Upon arriving at the lake, I was treated to the dozens of small pagodas all illuminated by tiny candles on my right and the moon reflecting on the lake to my left.  Chitwe and the other children were off for fun and frolic at a pagoda, but I did manage to find the sister and give the second batch of copies to her.  Mission accomplished, (no really—mine actually was accomplished; I don’t say it unless it’s true…), I walked aimlessly through the village

 

At the foot of the bridge, I heard the most desperate and disturbing wailing noise I’d ever encountered.  From the pitch and intensity, I knew it had to be a cat, and one in terrible distress.  Under the shelter of a hollowed out tree, I found not a cat, but a very young, very undersized, and very traumatized puppy.  He was clearly alone, and clearly too young to be alone, and clearly beyond hysteria—likely a reaction to the fireworks all around him—and was emitting a torrent of piercing cries that I would have thought couldn’t come from an animal of that size or species.  My mothering instincts kicked and I sat down in the dirt and tried to extend a comforting hand to him, but this only seemed to increase his terror and he upped the volume and vehemence of his cries all the further.  I moved my hand closer and he tried to burrow his way into the dirt to escape my assault.  But when I finally made contact with him, his crying diminished a bit, and then a bit more, until he was finally consoled to some degree.  He was a sad, little pup, as my hand now told me of his afflicted skin and his bloated belly.  But at very least, he was now quiet.  And after a few minutes, he began to playfully nibble at my finger and even wag his tail.  I tried to flag down a few passersby to ask them to take a thousand kyat and bring back some food for the doggie, but I’m not sure if I possess the English skills to make such a request—coming as it was from a guy sprawled out in the dirt, under a tree, in total darkness—seem reasonable, and my attempts to communicate it in Burmese were more pathetic than useful.  So I left the doggie, hoping that the worst of his night had passed, and tried to find some food from one of the nearby stands.   I was able, after some difficulty, to convey “dog is hungry—give me food!” and I came back with some dried fish and rice, but the little guy had scampered off somewhere, I hope to a better place.

 

Climbing on to the bridge, I found it packed—not with regular people, but with teenage monks with their shaven heads and saffron robes.  Some were walking, some standing or sitting, some playing the guitar, some smoking or chewing betel, some talking loudly and punctuating their conversation with raucous laughter. Really, it could have been a scene of teen hang out anywhere in the world, except there were no cars and no girls.  About a quarter of the way across the lake, I was stopped by three seated young monklets, who offered up the usual questions as to where I was from and where I was going.  In Burmo-English, I conveyed that I was American and heading across the lake.  One countered with “We go too!”, to which I responded “okay”, and he closed the deal with “Let’s go!”, and he and his cohorts leapt up with gleeful laughter and began to follow me.  Within a hundred feet, I became the focal point of eleven bald ten to seventeen year olds, as we trudged toward Thaungthaman.

 

This story holds promise, but, really, this was about it.  I am conversational in Burmese to the point of being able to adequately answer four or five questions, but my limitations became painfully obvious over the course of the hour-long trek.  But I think the simple curiosity of becoming a Pied Piper for underage monks across an ancient bridge on the most solemn of Buddhist holidays counts for something.  And it did occur to me on the way back—as we walked past hundreds of clean shaven heads and eyes reflecting full of moonlight, with a backdrop of glimmering pagodas in all directions—that it was well that I hadn’t ingested any hallucinogens that night, or I would surely have become one of those weird late night radio guys telling of his experiences with the aliens.

 

The next day, I hopped on the rented motorcycle to spend a couple of days in a small mountain village that sees a few travelers.  The drive was pretty, but my ancient ass began to ache something fierce through being assaulted by the rough roads and hairpin turns.  By the time the first evening was descending, I’d decided I’d seen enough of the city and made plans to head further east the next morning.  But after a half hour of searching for a hidden and recommended Indian restaurant, I found my reason for being there.

 

Arthur Robbins—not his real name—was the owner, a somewhat shy but remarkably elegant fifty year old.  As we were alone in the restaurant, he struck up a conversation, as his family members prepared the best meal I’ve had in Myanmar.  Arthur’s family had been in this country for close to a century, and as the trust grew a little, he talked of some of the sadness he feels as to how the country has fallen apart during his lifetime, and of his life experiences.

 

Further proof that I only pretend to be smart and knowledgeable lies in my admission that I’ve never read a word that Paul Theroux has written.  Yes, I know him to be the god of travel writers and can even make knowing reference to his The Great Railway Bazaar.  But why go through the trouble of actually knowing about something, when you are gifted with a mind that can unleash appropriate (though vaguely understood) comments at the drop of a hat, impressing all around with your erudition?  Arthur, though, knows Theroux.  As it turns out, it was his grandfather who prepared Theroux’s meal during his 1972 visit to this city and, as Arthur was essentially apprenticing to his grandfather, much of the actual preparation fell upon him.  With his wonderful and stately English, Arthur described in lovely detail the meal that he had prepared for “Mr. Paul Theroux”.

 

Of course, a cynical bastard like me has to wonder how and why he could possibly have known that it was Paul Theroux who was fed by his family that night, especially since the author was virtually unknown at the time.  Arthur explained that any time a foreigner was sighted in 1972, it stuck well in the memory, as the Ne Win regime essentially closed the country off from outsiders from 1962 to 1988.  A number of years later, Arthur’s family received a copy of the book in the mail from someone who suspected that it was they who had prepared the meal that was described in some detail.  Arthur’s grandfather uncovered the hotel’s record books and confirmed that Mr. Paul Theroux had indeed dined at their place on the night in question.

 

The next day’s journey to parts unknown was enjoyable in its way, though my aching ass transformed itself into a throbbing lower back, and I hauled back to my starting point as quickly as possible.  But there is no question that Mr. Arthur Robbins more than compensated for the trouble.

October 18, 2008: The Zieger Version of Life on the Seedy Side

 

Sure, we’ve all read and heard about the illicit goings on in the exotic playpens of Southeast Asia.  So how about a little tell-all from yours truly?

 

I had just stepped out of the shower, when I heard a faint tapping at the door.  Quickly draping a towel around my dripping form, I turned the knob and looked out.  Peering back at me was a sultry, long-haired beauty who spoke very deliberate Burmese with conspiratorial purpose and seductively arched eyebrows.  Quickly, she gestured with her head to indicate that she wanted in the room, and before I knew it, she was standing a foot from my barely-concealed self, and made it clear that, for a price, she was willing to…

 

…do my laundry.  And the price?  About a dollar and a quarter, though I rounded it up to close to a buck-seventy-five.  She was Ji Ji Than, one of the housekeepers at the hotel, and through a combination of impressively understandable basic Burmese and body language, she told me a tale of someone—whom I wasn’t quite clear—with a damaged leg and, hence, the need for such drastic measures.  The hotel also provides laundry service, so this all had to be on the down low, and she made this clear—via the index finger to the lips—that no one could know of this arrangement, lest she lose her job.

 

The next day, I saw her again huddled over a candle on the hotel’s dark second floor, (citywide power cuts mean that most do without electricity in the afternoon), looking over an x-ray of a shattered left leg.  As it turns out, it belonged to her mother.  I commiserated with a great deal of guilt and returned to my room, where I tried to add up her dollar a day salary to see how it might someday reach the level of paying for the medical costs.  Needless to say, this wasn’t going to happen.  Not that it will help a whole lot, but I returned to her floor and gave her a whopping 10,000 kyat (about eight dollars), figuring that an additional week’s salary was something she needed to get a lot more than I needed to keep.

 

Meanwhile, I took a mad stab at genuine romance with Ju Ju Thin (AKA, Katarina).  She somehow got prettier during my couple of days away and I decided to see if I could induce her into a dinner out before I left.  Both because I lacked the words and because I assumed it possible that even the most innocent dalliance with a guest could have repercussions for her, it was difficult to pose the question.  But she had smiled at me just long enough and often enough and had stood just a little closer than necessary on a few occasions to convince me to try.  My awkward query on Friday was met first with incomprehension, and then with a quick “tomorrow” as she bolted out the door.  Today I managed to find her outside of others’ earshots and in Burmese asked, “Do you want to have dinner with me?”  She grabbed a pen, wrote “yes” on her hand, and ran to her purse for a piece of paper.  With a day-glow orange pen I’d given her the other day, she had pre-prepared an acceptance note in which she said, “Ko Kyaw Swa, (this is the Burmese name, chosen with reference to the date of the week of my birth, that was bestowed upon me by the staff at this hotel.  If it proves to mean something like “tiny-donged-fart-breath”, there will be blood in the hallways upon my next return to this establishment…), Today I’ll come to dinner with you, but prefer to meet at restaurant by my house…” and she closed with an injunction to tell no one else of this meeting.

 

I wasn’t expecting a whole lot of anything from this date, mostly just glad that I’d get to spend a few hours with someone soft and pretty who was evidently willing to share a harmless fantasy with me.  Despite neither of us being remotely capable in the other’s language, I thought there might be just enough hopeful banter, good-natured ribbing, drawing of the odd picture, and incidental touching to make it a very sweet, if essentially meaningless, evening.

 

And I think the two of us could have spent three or four hours hovering over a notepad and an English-Burmese dictionary and the time would have flowed freely enough, as mindless flirtation really does not involve an awful lot of verbal communication.  But being a proper Burmese woman—and doubtless more than a little intimidated by this unusual proposition—she arrived with two of her friends (average age, 23; average height, 4' 10") and we were now a foursome for the evening.

 

This, of course, was understandable and, as I had no nefarious plans for the night, I wasn’t taken aback at all.  If anything, I found it sort of cute that this was evidently a fairly big event for her; she and her friends were decked out in their most stylish and elaborate duds and there was most definitely an air of goodwill to the evening.  Two problems, however, arose.  The first was that I was now the lone English speaker in a group of four, so the dinner mostly consisted of me being unable to comprehend some basic questions in Burmese and them giggling sympathetically at my confusion.  But this was okay; I’d have imploded long ago if I was genuinely bothered by appearing to be a complete ass.

 

The money issue, however, caused a little tension.  The largest denomination in circulation is the 1,000 kyat note, which is roughly 80 cents.  Wallets, of course, don’t really have much function, so my usual pattern is to throw a pile or two or three into my pants pockets or backpack and, since nothing here really costs all that much, I usually have what I need and then some.  A last minute change of trousers, however, left me with a comparatively small pile of cash.  I certainly had more than enough for the two of us, but there were more than two of us there.  As the various dishes piled up on the table, I did a constant mental inventory of roughly how much it might cost and how much I think I might have with me, and constantly fingered the lining of my right pocket in an attempt at an estimate.  The total bill came to 33,000 kyat—something of a king’s ransom in these parts, but fully reasonable for a special night out for four people.  I had a little over 31,000 kyat on me.  Following this revelation came the awkward maneuver of trying to explain the situation to the typically attentive team of waiters without making the issue overly apparent to the women.  (Mind you, I did not wish these negotiations to be furtive for any reason of pride or for fear that they would judge me lacking in any way.  I abandoned most of my pride during the Reagan years and what miniscule shreds I might have incidentally carried over the years were no doubt too feeble to put up much of a fight.  But I didn’t want the women to feel guilty or as if they had bankrupted this poor guy.)  Somehow—I’m convinced that the look of abject defeat in my eyes did the trick—the head waiter seemed to comprehend the situation, and he announced that he would apply a discount.  Evening over?  Not quite.

 

Ju Ju Thin wanted to go to a pagoda.  The three of them crowded onto one motorbike, while I followed solo behind them.  Normally, a first date that involves prostrations  before religious icons can leave sort of a bad taste, but Buddhism—with its openness toward skepticism and flexibility—has always struck me as the least offensive of the major faiths, and it was a cool breezy evening as we strolled amidst the many families circulating around the open-air pagodas.  On the occasions that Ju Ju Thin and I were separated from her friends by more than a few feet, her arm or hip seemed to casually bump against mine and it was clear that this was more than coincidental.  After dispensing with our religious duties, it was time to call an end to the evening.  Under the guise of helping me to find my way back to the hotel, Ju Ju Thin rode with me this time, as we followed her friends to the main road.  She leaned into me just a little and even draped her arm around my abdomen for a few precious seconds, disengaging with a purposeful squeeze.

 

As we (four) parted, she left me with a truly hideous styrofoam and glitter diorama that she had bought me.  It fetured a teddy-bear, a couple of hearts, and a few unrecognizable forms, and is as good a reason as I’ve seen for nuking the Chinese.  She also passed me a note, written with the same orange day-glow pen as the first had been.  In competent and undoubtedly-coached English, she wrote that she would “remember [me] always” and hopes “there is a chance we meet again”, followed by an injunction to remember her.

 

Well, she’s pretty and sincere; never mind our complete inability to communicate.  I suspect I’ll be back in Mandalay a time or two again and I’ll certainly propose another “date” with four participants or two.  It doesn’t take the place of a real relationship, which, despite my solitary spirit, is something that I want.  (The Susannah years were the best of my life and though Sakina proved to be nothing more than an infuriating let down after I left Pakistan, I was genuinely happy when we were together.)  But I do find these fleeting and pointless encounters sustaining in a real way.  At some level, I’m not convinced that I belong or would prosper in a tight long-term relationship, and I think my capacity for such an arrangement has decreased as the years have gone by.  But I remain, just as I was during my adolescent years, in love with the concept of being in love, and the more mysterious and improbable the temporary object of desire, the greater the appeal.  Meeting the eyes of a Burmese-Rakhine princess (not literally), who is earning fifteen cents an hour (this is literally true) in a small guesthouse in far off Mandalay is the sort of scenario that I’m almost constitutionally inclined to revel in.  Maybe one of these will pan out some day and I won’t look like the total fool for distracting myself with these fantasies.

 

But at very least, even if this approach does lead to a lonely dead end, I will have "cruised along at 45 MPH on what is possibly the only well-paved highway in all of Myanmar, Venus rising behind my right shoulder, a full moon doing the same in front of my left, and the mighty Irrawaddy River flowing beneath the bridge a couple hundred feet below”.  And I’m not sure that this isn’t a fair trade off.

I’m about a quarter century behind on my Springsteen, but at one point in his career, I believe that all but four of his songs were about a group of ordinary guys wallowing in middle age reflecting on the wild days of their halcyon youths. 

 

My guess is that the same sort of dynamic exists here.  Life is difficult in Myanmar and the reasons for middle-aged discouragement are many.  But the memories of impetuous youth—do they not provide sustenance; do they not give the aging and bedraggled a reason to still believe?

 

And of what is it that these memories are made?  In Springsteen’s native world, they are “under the hood[s] of [an] old, parked car[s]”, or Mary’s dress waving as “like a vision, she dance[d] across the front porch”, or the “glory days” of adolescent sporting triumph.  In Myanmar, the fodder of such sustaining memories surely must be different.  Below, I’ve detailed my take on five young Burmese males waxing ecstatic about one of these moments that will doubtless remain with them for the rest of their lives, providing some meaning, long after the meaning has come and gone.  Their actually names would be Aung Kyi, Than Phyu Phyu, Kyaw Swa, Maung Maung Cho Myint, and Naing Wai Chan Ko.  But those of you reading this aren’t sharp enough to keep those characters straight—face it, you aren’t—so I will redub them, using the unmistakably Springsteenian names Joey, Nick, Jake, Stevie, and Spider.  Joey, Nick, Jake, Stevie, and Spider are drinking beer late one Friday night in the Burmese equivalent of Nick’s basement—Nick’s old man split years ago, and his old lady works the night shift, so they got the place to themselves.  Raucous tunes are blastin’…

 

Jake: Yo, man.  You guys hear about the crazy shit Gino pulled the other night?

 

Nick: Man, I don’t even want to hear what that whacked mofo is up to!

 

Jake: Naw, man, this one is too much. Check this out…

 

Stevie [entering]: Dude, I just puked on your mom’s bed…

 

Nick: Fucker!  Go clean it up.  She might come home tonight.

 

Jake: No, so check this out, man. Me and Gino and Joey and Psycho Roy are just hangin’ out on the street the other night, and…

 

Joey:  Yeah, and Gino sees this foreigner guy walking up to us and…

 

Jake: Bitch, I’m telling the story!

 

Joey: Man, you always get to tell the story.

 

Jake: That’s cuz you always fuck it up, man. So, right, Gino sees this foreigner and…

 

Joey: I wanna tell it.

 

Jake: Joey, will you shut your fuckin’ mouth?  You get to tell Stoney when we see him, okay?

 

Joey: You promise?

 

Jake: Yeah, now shut it and let me tell it.  So, Gino sees this foreign dude and the guy walks right up to us.

 

Spider: So, what’s this foreigner doing?

 

Jake: Well, he’s…I mean, I don’t know.  He’s just like walking down the street.  Anyhow, he gets about ten feet away from us, right, he gets like ten feet away from us [Jake starts to slowly convulse in knowing laughter]…and Gino…man, Gino walks right up, right up to the dude and…says…he says…”Hello.”

 

[The room erupts with laughter.  Nick bids Jake a slap of five.  Joey holds out his hand toward Nick, but Nick just leaves him hanging.  Spider falls off his footstool and Stevie spews a stream of beer and sudsy vomit across the room.]

 

Nick: No fuckin’ way, man!

 

Jake: Swear to god, man.  “Hello.”  Just like that.  “Hello.” [Laughter erupts anew.]

 

Spider: That Gino is one crazy motherfucker, I’m telling you.

 

Joey:  I was there!

 

Nick: So, what’s Gino say next?

 

Jake: Nothin’, man.  What else could he say?  He just walked back to us.  We were fuckin’ dyin’, man, dyin’!  I swear I almost pissed myself. Gino walkin’ back to us with that shit-eating grin of his!

 

Joey: I almost pissed myself, too. [In the background, at that very moment, Stevie is, quite literally, pissing himself.]

 

Spider: So, what does the foreigner do?

 

Jake: Alright, man, here’s the best part.  [Jake begins again to convulse in anticipatory hysterics.]  So, this foreigner, like Gino’s totally blown his mind, right?  He doesn’t know what to do.  So, like….like, the foreigner…he like looks right at us—at all of us, swear to god—and he…[his uncontrolled laughter makes his words almost unintelligible]…he….he…he says….”Hi!”

 

[The room erupts into absolute chaos.  Spider is writhing on the ground. Tears are pouring from Jake’s eyes.  Joey is trying yet again to get a high five from Nick.  Stevie vomits on the cat.]

 

Nick: Dude, are you fucking shitting me?

 

Jake: Swear to god, man, swear to god!

 

Joey: It’s true, I was there!

 

Spider: So, what do you guys do then?

 

Jake: We ran off laughing!

 

[The laughter hits apocalyptic levels.  I mean, they all fall about the place.]

 

Nick: No fuckin’ way!  You didn’t?!  You just fuckin’ ran off?!

 

Jake: Laughing!

 

[All erupt again. Tears, beers, and Stevie’s contributions seem to flood the room, just as the Burmese equivalent of a Thin Lizzy CD fades into the Burmese equivalent of a mellow, soulful Dire Straits tune.  Slowly, slowly, the boys compose themselves and come back to this world. Without knowing it, each senses that he has received a glimpse of the future, a future that bodes well for none of them, a future filled with frustration, loss, pain, and eventually the cold, cold ground that will be the eternal resting place of each.  Each intuitively knows that he will never pass this way again and the mood becomes somber in an implicit appreciation of feckless joy of these wild days of insouciant youth and a dread of what is awaiting them.  The Burmese Mark Knopfler noodles away in the background, as the boys fall into contemplative silence.  Fade.]

November 1, 2008:  Dis-gusting

 

Yes, life can be disgusting.  Wherever one lives, pure disgust can’t be too far off.  The West, of course, possesses its share of truly disgusting qualities, particularly in the realms of morality, priorities, and displays of conspicuous consumption.  But for raw, visceral, good-ole-fashioned visual-auditory-olfactory-gustatory-tactile disgust, the Developing World still can’t be beat.

 

I will spare you the account of my recent street stall lunch that I attempted to eat a mere few feet away from two canines, who, it would appear, were “married and very much in love with one another”.  But suffice to say that my dreams have been haunted by the images presented to me that day.  I will only state resolutely that reproduction is an absolutely sick and repulsive process and I want no part of it.  Do you hear me?  Absolutely no part of it, whatsoever…

 

A more socially acceptable tale, however, (and do keep in mind just how low the bar of social acceptability was hinted to have been set in the previous paragraph), is that of the “cold butt”.  I should warm the squeamish among you that this has nothing to do with a chilly derriere.  It is, in fact, a story about food.

 

The durian is a much-loved, much-reviled fruit in this part of the world.  The durian is similar to a porcupine in shape, size, and contour—oval-shaped, weighing three to four pounds, and covered with spikes.  Those who love it are almost uncomfortably passionate about its flavor and texture.  Its detractors are no less adamant, particularly citing its odor.  There are said to be hotels in Thailand that specifically bar the fruit from their premises.  The word “sewage” is generally used to describe the smell.  Honestly, I never quite understood the fuss on either side.  I ate it a few times in Thailand and was neither impressed nor horrified by the taste.  In my experience, the durian is a bit stinky, but not too stinky, and certainly not something that I would ban from my guesthouse.

 

Last week I decided to treat myself to an ice cream cone.  As I surveyed the options offered by the street vender, I pointed to a yellow-green concoction and asked, “Da ba le?” (“What is this?”)  It was durian.  I gave it a try. And it really did taste like butt.  But this is not the disturbing part of the story.

 

The distressing part is that, while it did most definitely taste like butt, it wasn’t really “butt-y” in a bad way.  I have neither ordered durian ice cream since, nor am I terribly likely to do so, but I did eat the entire scoop, despite feeling sort of uncomfortable about doing so.

 

Look, I’m not saying that “butt” is a particularly good flavor, for a dessert or for anything else.  But as I found myself lapping away, I tried to rationalize why—although the ice cream did have a most decidedly butt taste to it—it wasn’t particular offensive butt.  I was finally able to realize that it boiled down to it being “fresh, cool, crisp” butt.  On the surface, that shouldn’t make a whole lot of difference—butt taste is butt taste, no?  But to whatever degree you are comfortable picturing this, would you prefer to eat warm, steamy, stale butt or “fresh, cool, crisp” butt?  The answer is obvious.

 

So, I finished my butt ice cream cone.  And it wasn’t all that bad.

 

 

November 23, 2008: Problem Solved

 

To begin, the nature of restaurant service in this part of the world never ceases to amuse and befuddle.  I’ll spare you the type of detail I have previously supplied ad nauseum, (“[In Burmese] One more coffee, please.”  “Yes, sir.”  Long delay.  Waiter returns.  “One more, sir?”  “Yes.”  Longer delay.  Manager returns.  “Sir, one coffee?”  “Yes.”  Long delay.  Uncertain looking employee hesitantly places a coffee on the table.)  Today, it is the sheer numbers that astound me.

It is the usual state of affairs in the developing world that six do the job of one.  I’m sure there are many valid reasons for this—the need for employment, the low cost of labor, lesser labor-saving technology, maybe even the communal nature of the non-Western world.  (Hell, what an empty experience it would be to bring someone a fork without a half dozen compatriots with whom to share the experience…)  So, it was none-too-surprising to enter this ultra-modern boutique coffee shop and find seven employees awaiting me behind the counter, (even though I represented only the second table at the time).  As I nursed my iced espresso, the other customers left, but a young Western couple entered.  As did two new employees…Moments later, I glanced up, and the tally was up to ten.  When another haphazard survey of the landscape revealed identically-uniformed employee number eleven—one woman even shorter than the norm had evidently been hiding behind the coffee grinder—I burst into laughter, and walked across the room to explain the source of my amusement to my Westerner compatriots, who had been jarred by the severity of my guffaw.  As I explained—and they were clearly as amused as I—I turned back toward the cashier and saw that the total had increased to thirteen—THIRTEEN!  And with the Venerable Lord Buddha as my witness, I swear that as this very moment, a fourteenth sauntered through the back door.

 

Yes, three Westerners, each down to the dregs of an iced coffee beverage ordered at least forty-five minutes previously, were being attended to by fourteen smiling, courteous, enthusiastic youthful Burmese, efficiently decked out in their black and red uniforms.  (It is impossible not to juxtapose this with the Green Muse in Austin, where a single employee usually handles all preparation and sales duties, and if he happens to be—slowly, slowly—making a sandwich in the back, your hopes of requesting a coffee refill at any point in the near future are likely to lead to disappointment.)  Lurking just beneath the veneer of amusement lay a vague air of menace, as one’s subconscious couldn’t help but fear that they were multiplying—Body Snatcher or Dawn of the Dead-style— and might soon subsume us all.  After all, isn’t this how communism got started?

 

 

Yesterday was devoted to problem solving, that activity which I enjoy best about living in the Developing World.   After a typical night of intermittent sleep—I rarely stay down the whole night here, either something about the life I lead here, or perhaps Dad’s regular insomnia making its genetically-induced appearance in my mid-40’s—I awakened for good around seven.  I do like Yangon, though its low-key and undeveloped nature mean a dearth of overtly fascinating diversions, and I often find myself just a little too lethargic to do much beyond the day-to-day.  By the time I was up for good, I decided that I needed to do something, anything beyond my norm that day.  Opening my copy of Lonely Planet Myanmar, I came immediately to the page about Twante, a Delta city perhaps twenty miles to the South of Yangon, across the Yangon River.  There didn’t appear to be much in Twante—the guide book touts its local pottery, but we all know how desperately uninteresting displays of “local pottery” in jerkwater burgs usually are.  But, as must be the case for survival in Burma, the decision to give it a shot was more with the journey than the destination in mind.

I wasn’t altogether certain that I would be allowed to cross the river.  Since last May’s Cyclone Nargis, the government had severely limited access to all parts of the Delta, even those just across the river.  Ostensibly, the areas are considered “unsafe”, but it is widely understood that no dangers await any would-be visitors, but rather the government fears that visitors might attempt to provide some sort of aid to the people whose lives were wrecked by that awful storm.  And we wouldn’t want that, would we?

 

I marched beneath the baking sun toward the ferry station across from the colonial era Strand Hotel.  My attempt to purchase a ticket, however, was parried by a nervous bureaucrat, who explained that I’d need “police permission” to cross the river, and he pointed in vague direction toward a police office that either does or doesn’t exist somewhere in that general vicinity.

 

I was now in problem-solving mode; and glad that I’d made the decision to try something new.

 

Figuring that the subversive scam was far more likely to succeed than following official protocol, I moved hopefully along the pier, hoping to find a smaller boat to whisk me furtively across the big river.  The Man, however, really does exercise completely control in this parts, and no one would dare.  It was a little sad to detect glimmers of hungry possibility in the eyes of a couple of small boat owners, as they mentally weighed the couple of dollars they could earn with the repercussions of being caught, but none were willing to take that risk.

 

I returned, then, to the ferry dock and tried simply acquiring a ticket at a different window.  While this did not succeed—official permission is a must—a very helpful employee was much clearer about where this permission might be obtained.  I walked back out to the street and engaged a trishaw—a three wheeled bicycle taxi—to take me to the Sule Pagoda, the landmark near which the Office of Hotels and Tourism was said to lie.

 

There must be 20,000 of these trishaw operators in this city and with so many of them, so very few tourists, and the preponderance of the population of Yangon living in dire poverty, I imagine that many must go long stretches without so much as a fifty cent fare.  My driver was an older gent, who had clearly put some strain on his mind and body over the years.  I suspect the usual fare for the ten minute trip was a few hundred kyat (about a quarter), but I made his eyes light up by handing him a thousand.  It’s a cheap thrill and a too easy way to try to justify my existence, but I do love being able to play benefactor to people I randomly encounter.

 

Much to my shock, the visit to the Office of Hotels and Tourism was stress-free, efficient, and pleasant. And, even more surprisingly, it was successful.  The women behind the counter must have ignored every regulation in the book, as I was treated warmly and within twenty minutes was sent—after I’d composed a letter promising not to engage in any revolutionary behavior—merrily on my way back to the ferry, permission slip in hand.

 

Upon arriving at the ferry stop town of Dalah, I had to find a share truck for the hour long trip to Twante.  Both the guide book and previous Developing World experience warned me that the truck would be crowded, but I nearly met my match on this one.  As the last to climb aboard, I was relegated to a corner at the back of the truck, my left foot planted on the rear bumper, my right foot dangling free, and my hands desperately grasping for the thin iron rods planted on the roof that were there to contain the random bits of luggage and to serve as holds for the dozen or so of us who could not fit within the interior of the truck.  My right hand was wrapped around an index-fingered width strip of iron rod, which possessed a sharp edged section that felt as if it would cut into my skin.  The left reached toward another section and only met its goal by way of enveloping the back of a poor woman’s head in my armpit, while pressing my forearm against the bridge of her nose.  After about ten minutes—on horrifically bad road—and two near tumbles, I’d pretty much decided to abandon ship and try to flag down a cab.  But at that very moment, the conductor began to hoist people to the top of the roof, and I was able to ride the rest of the way in relative comfort, crouching next to a darling seven year old boy, who rode the whole way with an arm draped over mine in a seeming joint display of wonder and instinctive kid-like affection.

 

Twante was mostly dusty and deserted, someone yielding even less than expected.  (And inquiry later revealed that what little had been there was largely wiped out by Nargis.)  I stopped at a riverside beer station and passed an hour with four tepid mugs of beer and the “English language learners’ abridged version” of a biography of Thomas Paine.  (One reads what one can find in Yangon.)  A young, very dark-skinned man in a straw hat stopped by my table to make conversation.  He was a trishaw driver, desperately searching for business, which has doubtless ground to a complete standstill since the cyclone.  He stayed politely within my sightlines for a hopeful twenty minutes, but retreated to his spot in the shade under one of the few remaining trees when it became clear that I wasn’t looking for a tour guide.  There was something that I liked about him—today’s beer, perhaps, made me people-loving and not people-hating—so I decided to approach him and ask for a “forty minute tour” of the city.  Admittedly, there was little to see and even less than I actually wanted to see, but the guide needed a little business and I needed to feel like I had contributed at least something to the rebuilding economy.

 

I was taken to a local pottery “factory”, which was essentially just a spacious wooden structure in which three people—two of them children—sat on the floor mixing and molding clay.  In the building next door resided the furnaces, which were somewhat impressive for their size and for the rudimentary nature of the technology used to construct them.  (OSHA would not be happy if such get up were to be introduced in Cleveland.)  Aung Ko then pedaled down a dirt lane and pointed to where he said his house lay.  He asked tentatively if I wanted to visit.  And, of course, I did.

 

It’s old news by now, but “Always Carry Balloons”.  Eleven family members live in his two-roomed thatch hut, seven of whom seem to be young children.  Seated on a straw mat hastily thrown on the floor—Aung Ko’s lovely young wife had been awakened from a midday nap to greet this curious visitor—I smiled at the slightly intimidated children who had gathered.  And with a knowing smile on my lips, I opened the zipper to my backpack and brought forth the balloons.  And the kids went apeshit.  And the neighboring children were beckoned.  And the neighboring children went apeshit.  And I went into full on performance mode altering straight forward deliverance of balloon, with mock huffing and puffing, and occasionally—when my internal goofball timer told me the moment warranted—allowing the balloon to slip my fingers and lips and go darting about the room.  And by now, even the adults were going apeshit.

 

I thanked Aung Ko and his family profusely and then had him bring me back to the taxi stand to begin the voyage back to Yangon.  I had negotiated a fee of 2,500 kyat, but was clear that the proceedings had called for a more generous pay out, and I left him with 5,000.  I’m not sure how long $4.20 will feed eleven people, but it should be for at least twice as long as $2.10 would have.  And the kids had fun and will get copies of the photos whenever I manage to make it back.  And I left with a smile on my face.

 

And this is the reason that I’m not in Kansas anymore.
 

     

 

     

October 31, 2008: Springsteen in Burma

 

I’m about a quarter century behind on my Springsteen, but at one point in his career, I believe that all but four of his songs were about a group of ordinary guys wallowing in middle age reflecting on the wild days of their halcyon youths. 

 

My guess is that the same sort of dynamic exists here.  Life is difficult in Myanmar and the reasons for middle-aged discouragement are many.  But the memories of impetuous youth—do they not provide sustenance; do they not give the aging and bedraggled a reason to believe?

                   

And of what is it that these memories are made?  In Springsteen’s native world, they are “under the hood[s] of [an] old, parked car[s]”, or Mary’s dress waving as “like a vision, she dance[d] across the front porch”, or the “glory days” of adolescent sporting triumph.  In Myanmar, the fodder of such sustaining memories surely must be different.  Below, I’ve detailed my take on five young Burmese males waxing ecstatic about one of these moments that will doubtless remain with them for the rest of their lives, providing some meaning, long after the meaning has come and gone.  Their actually names would be Aung Kyi, Than Phyu Phyu, Kyaw Swa, Maung Maung Cho Myint, and Naing Wai Chan Ko.  But those of you reading this aren’t sharp enough to keep those characters straight—face it, you aren’t—so I will redub them, using the unmistakably Springsteenian names Joey, Nick, Jake, Stevie, and Spider.  Joey, Nick, Jake, Stevie, and Spider are drinking beer late one Friday night in the Burmese equivalent of Nick’s basement—Nick’s old man split years ago, and his old lady works the night shift, so they got the place to themselves.  Raucous tunes are blastin’…

 

Jake: Yo, man.  You guys hear about the crazy shit Gino pulled the other night?

 

Nick: Man, I don’t even want to hear what that whacked mofo is up to!

 

Jake: Naw, man, this one is too much. Check this out…

 

Stevie: Dude, I just puked on your mom’s bed…

 

Nick: Fucker!  Go clean it up.  She might come home tonight.

 

Jake: No, so check this out.  Me and Gino and Joey and Psycho Roy are just hangin’ out on the street the other night, and…

 

Joey:  Yeah, and Gino sees this foreigner guy walking up to us and…

 

Jake: Bitch, I’m telling the story!

 

Joey: Man, you always get to tell the story.

 

Jake: That’s cuz you always fuck it up, man. So, right, Gino sees this foreigner and…

 

Joey: I wanna tell it.

 

Jake: Joey, will you shut your fuckin’ mouth?  You get to tell Stoney when we see him, okay?

 

Joey: You promise?

 

Jake: Yeah, now shut it and let me tell it.  So, Gino sees this foreign dude and the guy walks right up to us.

 

Spider: So, what’s this foreigner doing?

 

Jake: Well, he’s…I mean, I don’t know.  He’s just like walking down the street.  Anyhow, he gets about ten feet away from us, right, he gets like ten feet away from us [Jake starts to slowly convulse in knowing laughter]…and Gino…man, Gino walks right up, right up to the dude and…says…he says…”Hello.”

 

[The room erupts with laughter.  Nick bids Jake a slap of five.  Joey holds out his hand toward Nick, but Nick just leaves him hanging.  Spider falls off his footstool and Stevie spews a stream of beer and sudsy vomit across the room.]

 

Nick: No fuckin’ way, man!

 

Jake: Swear to god, man.  “Hello.”  Just like that.  “Hello.” [Laughter erupts anew.]

 

Spider: That Gino is one crazy motherfucker, I’m telling you.

 

Joey:  I was there!

 

Nick: So, what’s Gino say next?

 

Jake: Nothin’, man.  What else could he say?  He just walked back to us.  We were fuckin’ dyin’, man, dyin’!  I swear I almost pissed myself. Gino walkin’ back to us with that shit-eating grin of his!

 

Joey: I almost pissed myself, too. [In the background, at that very moment, Stevie is, quite literally, pissing himself.]

 

Spider: So, what does the foreigner do?

 

Jake: Alright, man, here’s the best part.  [Jake begins again to convulse in anticipatory hysterics.]  So, this foreigner, like Gino’s totally blown his mind, right?  He doesn’t know what to do.  So, like….like, the foreigner…he like looks right at us—at all of us, swear to god—and he…[his uncontrolled laughter makes his words almost unintelligible]…he….he…he says….”Hi!”

 

[The room erupts into absolute chaos.  Spider is writhing on the ground. Tears are pouring from Jake’s eyes.  Joey is trying yet again to get a high five from Nick.  Stevie vomits on the cat.]

 

Nick: Dude, are you fucking shitting me?

 

Jake: Swear to god, man, swear to god!

 

Joey: It’s true, I was there!

 

Spider: So, what do you guys do then?

 

Jake: We ran off laughing!

 

[The laughter hits apocalyptic levels.  I mean, they all fall about the place.]

 

Nick: No fuckin’ way!  You didn’t?!  You just fuckin’ ran off?!

 

Jake: Laughing!

 

[All erupt again. Tears, beers, and Stevie’s contributions seem to flood the room, just as the Thin Lizzy CD fades into a mellow, soulful Dire Straits tune.  Slowly, slowly, the boys compose themselves and come back to this world. Without knowing it, each senses that he has received a glimpse of the future, a future that bodes well for none of them, a future filled with frustration, loss, pain, and eventually the cold, cold ground that will be the eternal resting place of each.  Each intuitively knows that he will never pass this way again and the mood becomes somber in an implicit appreciation of feckless joy of these wild days of insouciant youth and a dread of what is awaiting them.  Mark Knopfler noodles away in the background, as the boys fall into contemplative silence.  Fade.]

 

April 17, 2009: From the Shan Hills

"Love at first sight" might be stretching it a bit.  But the racing heart, the barely supressed smile, and the mildly tingling adrenal glands were in play as the moto-taxi took me from the Kyaingtong Airport to the Noi Yee Hotel.

(Photographs are at http://picasaweb.google.com/robotboy15/Kyaingtong42009#)

Kyaingtong is as close as the Eastern Shan Hills comes to a city, though it can't legitimately rate as more than a village under any fair appraisal.  It is roughly three to four hours from both the Thai border at Mae Sai and the Chinese border at Dulao.  The Shan are ethnically and linguistically closer to the Thais than the Burmese and more than half of Myanmar's roughly 130 distinct ethnic groups reside in the general area.

It was a combination, I'm sure, of Kyaingtong's genuine appeal, my arrival coinciding with an off-season cloudburst, and the truly ghastly nature of many other Myanmar cities that made such a strong initial impression.  Riding in the back of an open-aired vehicle, I was bombarded by a cool, vigorous rain, a sensation that I enjoy as much as any.  In contrast to the cluttered filth of Yangon (or, to be fair, of any developing world metropolis), and the dry-season bleakness of much of the Irrawaddy Valley, Kyaingtong is awash in greenery, small lakes, rolling hills, and the requisite slew of gilded pagodas that dominate the high ground throughout the country.  These temples no longer greatly enchant me, as I apply to pagodas the same general maxim as I do to churches, mosques, and ancient ruins, ("Seen one, seen 'em all...").  But the modest water-borne golden structure centered in the midst of a thick, green bed of lilypads as I reached the town, and the massive standing Buddha pointing at me from a surrounding hill did take my breath away.

The guesthouse would disappoint Robin Leach a tad.  But for a five spot, I get a wooden floor, a flashlight, and a toilet that flushes and that--theoretically--can be induced to cease running from time to time.  

The usual routine for travelers is to head out to some of the many ethnic villages in the area.  To that end, I've pre-booked a few motorcycle jaunts with a guide named Sai Win, whom I will meet tomorrow, and who comes recommended by multiple sources.  There is also a Chinese version of Vegas--complete with gambling, mafiosos, drug lords, and transvestite hookers just on the Myanmar side of the border.  The kyat gives way to the yuan in Mongla and from what I understand, the Myanmar government long ago ceded control of the town to a one time ethic foe who now runs it.  Sounds like the cost of getting there is prohibitive, but I suspect it would be fascinating in a repulsive sort of way.

Mostly, though, I'm looking forward to sitting and walking about with little to do.  As of a couple of years ago there was no internet, and I'm sort of hoping this is still the case.  In my distant and isolated world, the medium has become an addiction and I tend to think it would be good for me to squirm with the discomfort of a week's total cut-off.  (And with the laptop back in Yangon, this is possibly the first collection of more than a couple hundred of connected words that I've handwritten in a long, long time.)


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Of course, the charm may have its limits.  Now that night has come, the question of what one could possibly do with oneself here rears its hideous face.  A few blocks down from the hotel sits a beer station (the closest Western equivalent might be a beer garden.  But trust me, this is no garden.  And do recall that I never promised you a beer garden...), which sported generator-driven florescence and four middle-aged guys staring blankly at their beers.  I walked aimlessly for an our, but found nothing other than a couple of street stalls and an all-but-literal hole-in-the-wall that sells electrical plugs of astonishing variety.

A last ditch effort to find diversion landed me at one of the worst places I've been in a good, long while.  It wasn't so much the aggressively awful Thai pop that was blaring, nor the warm beer; I care for neither, but have grown accustomed to both.  No, this night's displeasure came courtesy of one of my fellow customers.

It's never a good sign when the only other patrons are six dissheveled Burmese men with a Westerner--who can only be described as a "big, fat party dude"--holding court.  That I could hear their voices from fifty yards away--yes, even above the ovary-rattling Thai pop--indicated that I was about to have a bad time.  As I attempted to slip unnoticed into the most isolated table on the patio, I tried with great commitment to ignore the incessant barks of "Hey!  You!" coming from the drunken Burmese men (and possibly the big, fat party dude as well, though I was too terrified to look up).

Things came to a head when one of the drunks staggered over to me and dropped into the chair to my left.  I smiled politely and disengaged quickly.  He leaned closer.  I leaned in the opposite direction.  He positioned his head over my notepad.  I turned it over and moved a seat to my right.  He claimed my abandoned chair and recommenced his looming.  A youngster of fifteen or so knew a good thing when he saw it, and began to ape the behavior of his apparent hero and main mentor.  

It took a fairly brusque and determined stand on my part to attract the attention of a seemingly sympathetic employee who lead my assailants away. But as I hurried to finish my beer, I could feel the ill-focused eyes upon me and my blood was continuously curdled by the resucitated refrains of "Hey!  You!"

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One would think that I'd be used to it by now, but there is something enduringly astonishing about the realization that of the five thousand people milling about the open-aired market, I may very well be the tallest.

After about an hour of making my way through the twisted maze of shops, stalls, and blankets on the ground, this became apparent.  The entire time, I was hunched over as to avoid the low hung awnings, as an endless torrent of Shans, Burmese, Akha, Lisus, and others skipped merrily past me on their pogo sticks.  I decided to formalize my quest:  to spot someone who was over 5'10".  I failed.  I never even came particularly close.

On a couple of occasions, I'd see a potential candidate a few dozen feet before me at the top of a modest incline.  Delighted that my eyes were directed in a slight upward trajectory as they met his, I'd move toward him, hopeful that I'd perhaps tracked down my Goliath.  The most gargantuan of these creatures proved to barely exceed 5'6".

This brings to mind my big night out at the disco a week ago.  Nightlife in Yangon is desperation incarnate.  The beer stations serve up passable beer, but the clientelle is usually limited to a dozen or so middle-aged men wearing wife-beaters.

The other option is the half-dozen or so discoteques about town, which cater mostly to wealthy Burmese and ex-pats.  At some, the working women are in full aggressive force, while in others, they linger less obtrusively to the back, hoping to lure their customers with eye contact.  The music is uniformly deafening and appalling, or at least by my standards, and I can't imagine ever--EVER--patronizing such places in the States.

But I am in Yangon.  And in a war, you make arrows out of any kind of wood.  And on those nights in which reading, working, studying Burmese, or hanging out with the sparse company available to me just won't cut it--when I feel the need to be in a public place where I can witness exhibitions of human life after 11PM--I go to war.

Last Saturday, I headed out to the IQ Club for the first time.  It attracts a decidedly younger crowd than many of the others, and has the reputation for being a bastion of crotch-grabbing.  (And, in fact, I myself was the unsuspecting recipient of a scrotal tweak as I returned to my seat from the bathroom.  It was not at all clear who the culprit might have been, nor even the assailant's gender.)

In a sort of "ten-cents-a-dance" arrangement, I spent an hour in a halting and bass-drowned conversation with a young woman.  Often, this can be the opening salvo in a business proposition, but it also simply be a harmless means of her procuring a free beer and him pleasantly killing some time.  Generally, I politely (and awkwardly) decline whatever is being proposed, but on that night I was just bored enough to see no reason not to chat with her for the price of a beer.

After her small repertoire of English phrases and mine of Burmese had been exhausted, she suggested that we dance.  As mentioned earlier in these pages, the skill with which I shake my money maker leaves me desperately impoverished, indeed.  However, the Burmese disco aficianados  give no indication of ever closely studying old tapes of "Denny Terrio's Dance Fever", and it's really fairly acceptable to stand in a confined area and vaguely shuffle one's feet a little.  (And anyhow, "Your friends aren't around, and there's no one gonna tell, and there's no film in that camera, so no one's gonna know...")  A few minutes of erratic spasming segued nicely into an exaggerated glance at the watch, a few friendly parting words, and a quick movement back home.

The six minutes on the dance floor, though, revealed what an absolutely minuscule human being she was.  My 155 pounds positively dwarfed her, and my scrawny shoulders were nearly twice the circumference of hers.  Indicating that Burmese parents possess either fine senses of irony or humor, she was named Aye Myint Myint Aung.  "Myint", you see, means "tall" and when repeated the adjective means "very tall".  And she wasn't tall at all.  In fact, she was rather small.

Adding to the curious nature of her name is that her nickname is Mone.  My mastery of the Burmese language's tones is rivaled only by sense of rhythm in terms of leading causes of my undending humiliation--requests for a little extra rice regularly result in the waiter binding and gagging me with an assortment of his auntie's brassieres--but I was almost sure that this name means "hate" in the Burmese tongue.  I inquired and tested for understanding, ("not love, right?"), and confirmed that her common name was Hate.  To be fair, many English nicknames are dubious affairs.  What could be less appealing than Bubba?  And does Spanky indicate a person who spanks others, or to one who particularly enjoys being spanked?  And this confusion aside, is this the sort of detail that a hypothetical Spanky would be well-served by sharing with another on an initial encounter?  But I digress...

After exiting the dance floor, I asked how much she weighed.  "forty-five kg," she responded, and doing the quick mental math for which I am oft admired, understood that she weighed just under 100 pounds.  "No," she corrected, "forty-point-five kg".  That's a tad short of ninety pounds.  And while it might seem unnecessary to quibble over that half a kilogram, when you've only got forty of them to begin with, you fight mightily for whatever you could rightly claim as your own.  Again, in a war, you make arrows out of any kind of wood.  And Mone was at war.


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I was just like to interject that if you've never been awakened by loudspeakers blaring a Burmese language cover of "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go", you have not lived life.

Let me also repeat my oft-stated assertion that life is not worth living.

Get it?  Got it?  Good.

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See, some moments are just bloody righteously funny in the most simple, innocent, and goofy ways.

Walking the streets of Kyaington a few minutes ago amidst the Thingyan madness--more on this will follow--I was stopped by a young guy and his baby boy with the usual, "Where you from?" bit.  I'm not always in the mood for the redundant questioning, but today it's fine and there seemed to be something particularly good-natured about this guy.

Once his curiosity had been sated, another chap--ethnically distinct with a darker complexion and a shorter, stockier build--took his place.  His name was Dramratch (or something to that effect) and he was from Nepal.  In more than coherent English, he asked my name.

"Robert," I replied with the Burmese glottal stop, (not unlike the Cockney take on my name).

Dramratch looked genuinely befuddled.  I repeated my name.  Further confusion.  Hesitantly, he raised his hands above his head, giving them sort of a moose antler effect, and proceeded to wiggle the pointer finger on his right hand and the middle finger on his left, as his puzzled face beseeched me for clarification.

Having never been in a small Myanmar town while a perplexed Nepali performed a moose imitation before me, I wasn't quite certain as to how I was to respond.  (No guidance from Lonely Planet on this one...)  Our eyebrows furrowed at one another in mutual confusion...until the word "rabbit" popped into mind.  Ah, he found it odd that I was named "Rabbit".  And rightly so, really...

This crisis of cultural and linguistic chaos dispensed with, I headed out into the madness of Thingyan.

Thingyan is the Buddhist New Year and chief among its many assorted rituals is the process of pouring cups of water over venerated Buddha images--said to bestow luck by washing away the old.  Human beings being what they are, however, this ritual has "evolved" over the centuries into a free-for-all drenching all whom one passes during this five day Water Festival.

Yangon is said to be utter anarchy during the Water Festival, as the squirt guns and buckets of water have morphed into powerful hoses positioned atop huge wooden platforms erected just for the occasion.  Testosterone-laced young men climb these platforms and  vie with one another to see who has rented the water cannon that would leave Bull Connor with a serious case of penis envy.  Some love the madcap (and sometimes dangerous) revelry, and I considered staying in Yangon for this holiday, on the basis that it would be "an experience unlike any other".  But I also reflected that being administered a proctological exam by a drunken baboon would also qualify as "an experience unlike any other", and I have no intention of engaging in one of these.  As Yangon's Thingyan sounded only a degree or two more agreeable, I fled.

The Kyaingtong experience is far more mellow and far more innocent, though not much less wet.  By roughly noon on each of the past five days, the roads have been filled with mostly children brandishing water pistols and containers of water of varying size.  The more delightfully mischievous attack with small measuring cups, which they either personally pour down the necks of passing pedestrians, or hurl harmlessly at oncoming motorcycles and trucks.  The truly devilish are armed with huge buckets and the goal--if not necessarily to inflict real damage--is at least to thoroughly drench all who dare to pass.  The weather is warm and an all-but-universally adhered to gentleman's agreement brings all dowsing to a halt at sunset.

Mostly, it's good fun.  As the mammoth foreigner on the back of a guide's motorbike, my allures proves too irresistible for any red-blooded Myanmar youth to eschew, and I end up with more than my share of soggy clothes and blasts of water of questionable source rushing into my eyes, nose, and ears.  True, by about Day Three, the novelty had worn off and I plan to devote today to limited and cautious forays into town.  But the spirit is notably benign, the descent into assholishness that would accompany a similar event in the States is delightfully absent, and the euphoric giggles of the eight year olds who have just given the giant foreigner (who is, on cue, raising his voice and fists in faux-outrage) what he so richly deserves is enchanting.  I can envision future Thingyan holidays in Burma resulting in pointed visits to surrounding Muslim countries, but I'm glad to have done this once.

This reminds me of why I've never turned my back on Christmas.  For all its crass commercialism and connotations of religiosity, it affords most in America to dust off their displays of joy and affection.  And this is very good.

The rest of my time here--aside from the long, sleepless nights on a mattress the mere existence of which would have induced Torquemada to become a sustaining donor to Amnesty International--has been devoted to reading, writing, assiduously making my way through my recorded Burmese lessons, and embarking on day treks into the many tribal villages of the Shan Hills with guides Sai Win and Ami.

Sai Win is all that was advertised, a remarkably sharp and engaging tour guide and English teacher, who speaks six or seven languages fluently and know the land and peoples of the area intimately.  Teri, a fellow teacher from Yangon, happened to be on the same flight as me and ended up in the second floor hotel room next to mine, so we asked Sai Win to secure a second guide and motorbike.  When Sai Win responded, "Yes, my student, she will come...", Teri's eyebrows arched and on the way back to our rooms, she gently needled me about the likelihood that I could spend the next four days on the back of a motor bike with my hands clutching tightly to the waist--for safety purposes, of course--of a stunning Shan princess.

And as Sai Win pulled into the guesthouse lot the next morning, Teri and I looked down from the balcony and spotted a bright-faced, pig-tailed young woman trailing behind him.  I gasped and Teri muttered "uh-oh", just as the lass smiled up at us both.  The intrigue ends here.  Ami is indeed lovely and displayed ample charm and quickness, and I most definitely enjoyed a few days of playful friendliness with her.  But she is all of twenty years old and any sort of beyond-friendly interaction would have held little appeal or benefit for either of us.  But Teri seemed pleased at having been as right as possible about the scenario.

And so we spent the next four days--Teri clutching Jackson, her diminutive terrier; Sai Win wowing us with his mastery of half-a-dozen diverse tongues and the depth of his connection with each of the tribes we visited; Ami contending with the savage Shan Hill roads and with being an incidental target of the torrents of water hurled at the behemoth foreigner behind her; and Robert with his balloons and his camera, and relishing the chance to exhibit what he's come to recognize as a genuine talent of his--hamming it up--with goofy expressions and amusing sounds--for gaggles half-perplexed, half-delighted children.  There's little to report that the photo page won't better describe, except, perhaps, for the scene of Sai Win bewitching a whole village of Eng animists--man and woman, ages eight to sixty alike--with a series of hardcore pornographic videos on his i-phone.  (While this may sound distasteful, it struck me as somewhat endearing and almost wholesome in that all ages and both sexes felt comfortable watching, pointing, shouting and laughing at the images together.  I wouldn't see this happening at a Kansas farmhouse with Gramps, fundamentalist Aunt Nellie, and John-boy Jr. in attendance.)

At some point, the villages and scenery and peoples blend together and I'm aware that the past few years have left me (through repeat exposure) somewhat immune to the wonders of the foreign exotic.  But the cackling water tossers, the new fleeting friendships with Sai Win and Ami, the flashbulb moments in which a ten year old flashes a smile that would kick Satan's ass, and the moments of rolling solitude in which all feels pretty much as it should be still bring a lot to my life.  Dinner at Sai Win's tonight, the flight to Yangon tomorrow, and the final few weeks' homestretch are all that remains of Year One of this Hunka, Hunka Burma Love.