Hello, Darkness, My Old Friend

It's amazing how Thailand is never still.  You think I'd be used to it, having lived in cities since I was 18, but this is a different kind of noise.  It isn't a steady, low-level buzz that you eventually stop hearing.  The baseline is actually much quieter than it would be in a major city, but that only makes the individual noises stand out more.

It's almost 4.30 am, and from my back balcony I can hear:

- Music, possibly from a temple
- Hammering and sawing
- Motorbikes
- Dogs
- Roosters
- The occasional truck pulling up in the gravel drive behind the apartment complex
- The loud thrum of the water heating system, indicating that someone in the complex is taking a shower
- My next-door neighbour either going out or coming home (probably the latter)

The only constant (and kind of soothing) sound is the night insects.

Noise in Thailand is treated very differently, socially, from noise in Western countries.  There's no cultural rule that you're supposed to refrain from disturbing others; noise is just a thing that happens.  One of my friends here told me that the most hostile response she ever got from a Thai person was when she went downstairs at three in the morning to ask two women who were blaring music beneath her window to keep it down.  The women were very friendly until they understood what she wanted, at which point they got pretty pissed off.  "No, this is Thailand," one of them told her.  "You shut your window."

Our Band From Japan

One of the things about Chiang Mai that’s both frustrating and fun, compared to London, is its size.  On the one hand, there’s not much going on most weeks; on the other hand, the need for entertainment (and the fact that everything is so much closer together) means that it’s easy to be lured out to things I might not have thought of attending otherwise.  In London, you could tell me that Jeremy Irons, Maggie Smith, and David Tennant were appearing onstage together in a play based on scenes from George R.R. Martin’s as-yet unpublished next novel, and that there was going to be free wine and a flaming-sword-swallowing act during the interval, and I’d still probably ask what Tube station it was near and google night buses before deciding to go.  Here:  traditional dance and a chance to purchase Japanese noodle dishes that are slightly different from Thai noodles?  I’m on it like white on rice!  Or noodles!

Which is how I ended up at the Lanna (Northern Thai)-Japan Festival.

It was a fun night, actually; it’s a kind of annual cultural exchange festival, with a stage in front of the Folklife Museum to showcase arts from both cultures, and about a dozen food stalls, as well as a few hawking cheap package tours to Japan.  Thai food stalls outnumbered Japanese, of course, even with the Sunday night market and its wealth of Thai food a few steps away, because Thai people are, to an outsider’s eye, immensely picky about their food.  Just ask someone from Bangkok about “weird” northern Thai food, or ask someone from Chiang Mai about how Bangkok residents do noodles “wrong” – and that’s without even getting into food from other Asian countries!  I, of course, ate all of it, because, as has been previously established, I am a goat.  The Hiroshima-style yaki (cabbage inside an omelet) and the teriyaki skewers were the best, but there were also noodle and rice dishes, fried vegetable croquettes, sweet rolls, and sushi (which I stayed the hell away from, Japanese festival or not – raw fish that’s been sitting on a market stall for hours is the Russian roulette of food).  There was also the Mystery Food, although I never got to taste that.  Okay, this requires a little explanation:  After a while, I started seeing several people with this… food, dripping oil and wrapped up in tissues.  It looked a lot like cheese fried in batter, so naturally I became a cheese-seeking missile.  I managed to track down the epicentre of the cheesequake, only to find a stall that was just cleaning up from something.  They definitely had trays with the remnants of flour and breadcrumbs, but no cheese in sight.  I scoured the rest of the festival without luck, so that must have been the right stall, making me wonder whether it had actually just been gloopy flour dumplings I’d been seeing.  After all, cheese isn’t really a major ingredient in Japanese cooking… right?

Then, no sooner did I sit down to watch the performances than a young guy took the seat next to me and tucked into his bowl of Mystery Food.  I sprang up and ran back to the stall – only to find that any hint of food was long gone, and it had now become a medical tent!

O MYSTERY FOOD WHERE ART THOU?

I could really go for some fried cheese right now.

The performances themselves were a mix of Lanna and Japanese, introduced by two women; it actually took me a minute to realise that the Japanese host was in a traditional Northern Thai longyi, sleeveless top, and scarf, with orchids in her hair (and rocking the look), while the Thai host was the one sporting a red kimono.  The Japanese delegation was miles ahead in terms of the variety of acts.  There was an aikido demonstration by a Chiang-Mai-based dojo (which I loved, mostly because the opening bout involved a tiny Thai girl of no more than nine taking on an entire queue of older students and flipping kids twice her size, followed by some self-defence demonstrations in which a woman repeatedly disarmed a hilariously skeezy-looking guy with a yellow plastic gun); a traditional fan dance by rows of small girls in kimonos; a more modern dance/aerobics regimen to music by a bunch of grimacing teenagers in matching silk jackets, which ended up looking more like an ROTC drill than anything; and a quintet of female musicians in stunning red gowns, playing Western classical selections on traditional instruments (and, in one case, accompanying a woman singing Gershwin hits, because that’s really what you think of when you think of Japan).  On the Thai side, it was basically the same group of young male drummers, with their wall-sized drum kit and gongs, accompanying the same group of dancing girls in a succession of different outfits.  However, I’ve got to give the Thais points for using actual traditional music.  Not one of the Japanese acts did the same; even the formal dance number was set to vintage 80s J-pop.  Maybe they thought that would appeal more to foreign audiences?

There was also a rice-pounding demonstration, which is a lot more hardcore than I ever realised.  Essentially, it takes two people:  the first one wails away at the rice with a hammer the size of Mjölnir, but it’s the second job that really takes guts.  That person has to pat the rice back into place between hammer strikes.  The two men demonstrating had a lightning-fast rhythm going, but I hate to think what would happen if one of them fell out of step…

One of the best parts of the festival was the crowd-watching, though.  Quite a few people turned up in Japanese dress, but exactly what that meant differed widely.  Among the many variations on kimonos and other forms of traditional dress, you also had modern-looking silk jackets, a few teenage girls rolling out the head-to-toe Gothic Lolita look, and one old Japanese man wearing animatronic bunny ears.  I thought at first that he was selling them, but no – just wandering around, beaming at people and waggling his animatronic bunny ears.

I love this town sometimes.

Two-Year Anniversary Post

As of 23 October, I have been in Thailand for two years.

I've been wrestling with how to sum up my time here, and then I got the idea of revisiting my first few posts from Thailand and seeing how my life and opinions have changed (and how they haven't).  So I holed up in a Nepali cafe above a handicrafts shop, just down a narrow street from the hilltribe market (how awesome is it that a place like that exists in my town?), and got in the TARDIB (Time and Relative Dimension in Blogging).  Plain text is from the original blog post on that date - comments in italics below are added commentary from two years on.

Enjoy!

Sunday, 23 October 2011

So, I’m in Bangkok.  On an adventure!  Roughing it in my authentic Thai guesthouse with – um – air conditioning and high-speed wifi, within walking distance of one of the poshest malls I have ever seen.  Ahem.

The food here is GORGEOUS.  Oh, man, you were all so right about that.

Everyone I’ve spoken to at VSO Thailand so far has been incredibly nice.  Either this is going to be a very pleasant two years, or they’re all secretly plotting to kill and possibly eat me.  I’m gambling on the first one.
- I was correct.  Although they may still be biding their time before striking.

I must be the only Western traveller to Thailand who spends her time figuring out how to turn the hot water off.
- My tolerance for cold has dropped insanely since I’ve been here.  Apparently, your blood literally thins when you live in a hot climate.  At this point, I’m pretty grateful for hot water, and for the refugee-camp-woven blanket my colleagues got me for Christmas last year.

None of the vendors seemed very pushy, possibly because I was with a Thai person, or maybe because their locations guarantee them a decent trade in any case.  There are also many, many beggars sitting in the darker corners, or in one case, lying prone on the sidewalk with a begging bowl in front of him.  They, too, seem very reserved despite their numbers.
- This turns out to be more about Thai culture than economics.  I’ve still met very few pushy vendors, although food vendors I know will greet me with, “What can I get you?” in Thai, which can be awkward if I’m trying to slip past their stalls without indulging!

[My host] went for a really good tom yam soup with seaweed, some fried chicken with cashews, and a lemongrass-and-coconut-milk seafood soup dosed up with chillies.  The first two were basically high-quality versions of what you’ll find in a Thai restaurant in the UK, but the last dish was amazing – the flavours were familiar, but it was like they were suddenly three-dimensional, fresh and subtle in a way that the English approximations can’t quite capture.
- I’d forgotten that was my first time trying that dish!  It’s called tom kha, and I still love it.

He pointed out that the instant-noodle shelf had been stripped bare by people stocking up for the floods.
- Two years in this country have given me an instinctive understanding of the importance of ramen.  :P

 It’s possible that I caved and spent 40 baht (a little under a pound) on a pack of Ferraro Rocher, but I figure that a small taste of home to take the edge of the culture shock is okay. :)
- I long ago stopped apologising for splurging on Western food from time to time.  Son, I have eaten fried duck bill, battered chicken heads, live shrimp, crickets, bamboo worms, and jungle cat.  I have nothing to prove in the culinary adventure stakes.

But I hope this is a good beginning.
- It was. :)

Tuesday, 25 October 2011:  Things not permitted in my hotel:

·                     Drugs

·                     Weapons

·                     Pets

·                     Jackfruit

“Jackfruit” gets its own sign.  With an illustration.  They are SERIOUS about the jackfruit.
- It wasn’t jackfruit on the sign; it was durian.  And having experienced the lingering aroma of durian, I think it was fully justified.

Today, I … joined a volunteer from New Zealand for lunch… she introduced me to spicy papaya salad, for which I am VERY grateful!
- I, in turn, have all but force-fed it to every guest I’ve had here, and Margaret has taken the recipe back and made it for her guests in London.  And so the cycle of life continues.

I attempted a little bit of sightseeing in downtown Bangkok, and snapped a few pictures of one of the smaller palaces, before deciding that it was late, I was tired, fuck this noise, I was going to treat myself to a Westernised drink in one of the cafes and read. :)  (Hey, there's no harm in that occasionally.  Oreo shake FTW!)
- This is still how every day I spend it Bangkok ends.  I actually like Bangkok, but it’s weirdly exhausting.

Saturday, 29 October 2011:  HOLY CRAP, I CAN RIDE A MOTORCYCLE.
- You’re damn skippy I can!

I had a few hours' training today with a fellow VSO volunteer, the wonderfully snarky Pam (also my "buddy" whose job is helping me get settled in to Chiang Mai - so far, she's shown me where to buy utensils, imported cheese, and chocolate cake, so orientation WIN, as far as I'm concerned :)).
- Pam and I spent the first year and a half of my time here having dinner at least once a week, swapping downloaded copies of weird pulp movies, mock-insulting each other, and even travelling to Burma together.  She turned out to be one of the best things about my placement, and I miss her.  (She left last March, but I still bug her on Facebook with questions like, “Hey, where did you used to buy tea leaf salad when you were living here?” and “Do they let you use your driver’s licence for ID to fly to Bangkok?” and occasionally even, "I AM LOST IN A RICE PADDY, HELP ME.")

Monday, 31 October 2011:  I'm right off the highway, so my street is pretty quiet
- Ahahahaha and then they built a giant mall.

You can actually return a stranger's greeting on the street in Chiang Mai - yes, even at night - and that will be that.  At most, they might ask if you want to come into their restaurant, or want a taxi.
- This is still 99% true.  There is that 1% - a couple of drunken Thai teenagers tried to grope my friend one night, for example – but this is still pretty much the safest place I’ve ever lived.  And that includes Princeton, New Jersey.

No cooking apparatus whatsoever (a lot of Thais buy all their meals hot on the street, or eat pots of ramen)

- At this point in my life, I have acquired:  1) a toaster oven, 2) a kettle, 3) an electric wok, and 4) a blender.  It’s astonishing, the variety of food you can produce with that combination of appliances, if you’ve got the patience.  I’m on a baked-goods-and-pumpkin-soup kick at the moment because the weather’s turning cool.

Tonight I had what one of my fellow volunteers calls a Yellow Song Tao Adventure! … I took a wander around the eastern part of the old city, snapping pictures of the various wats, locating two brilliant English-language bookshops, eavesdropping on a tourist cooking class that was taking a tour of one of the markets (which was a lot more expensive than my local market, </smug>), embarrassing the local dogs by cooing over them, and resisting the temptation to eat EVERYTHING (seriously, this living on street food would be brilliant if my self-control were better :)). 
- Spoiler alert:  My self-control never got better. :)  I did eventually tour most of the major wats (including the mountain temple, the forest temple with its frescoed tunnels painted for a mad monk, the temple that once housed the famous Emerald Buddha, the temple with the prayer jukeboxes, the Shan temple, and the temple with the statue of Donald Duck – don’t ask); make friends with the old Irish dude who runs one of the bookshops and supplies me with my George R.R. Martin fix; learn how to cook a lot of the ingredients at the market, though I still haven’t taken a course myself; befriend the dogs in my neighbourhood; and try almost every kind of street food.

Then I met up with a couple of other VSO volunteers for dinner at a gorgeous little vegetarian restaurant and bookshop, where I fell in love with the Burmese-influenced dish khao soi (egg noodles and spring onions with meat or tofu in a delicious coconut curry sauce, served - at least in this case - with crunchy noodles on top).
- The crunchy noodles turn out to be mandatory.  The first time I went back to London, I made this dish for Margaret, who looked at the pot, said, “Two kinds of noodles?  TWO KINDS OF NOODLES!” and threw her arms around me. :)

I totally failed to find the right song tao route on the way back, so eventually I flagged down an empty one headed in my direction, and we negotiated that he'd take me as far as the superhighway (where he was going anyway) for the normal fare.  Little things like that leave me ridiculously pleased with myself when I'm in a foreign country. :)

- I can actually give directions and bargain in Thai, now, which tends to get me a lower fare.  Especially because I know how to say, “Puud len, na kha?” – “You’re kidding, right?” – and walk away if they try to quote me the tourist rate.

Wednesday, 2 November 2011:  Today is my third day in my office… My desk is in the coolest corner, in a room I share with a couple of other people (including a guy who sings little snatches of tunes to himself while he works, which... well, at least he has a nice voice, but occasionally I feel like yelling NO, FINISH THAT SONG BEFORE YOU MOVE ON TO A DIFFERENT ONE.  I'm a little compulsive like that :)).
- Now I just make passive-aggressive jokes on Facebook about how I’m going to punch him in the junk if he doesn’t stop.  I am a terrible person.  In my defence, though, two years of this.

Also, one of my colleagues compared me to a goat today. :)  It was cute.  We all eat lunch together… and apparently, the fact that I will happily taste anything, without ascertaining what the hell it is first, is causing great amusement. :)
- I don’t know whether I ever posted about this, but at least part of the “goat” reputation came from the day I brought a ground-pork-and-tomato curry to work to share.  No one else seemed terribly interested in it, for some reason.  Shrugging, I heated it up and ate it with a spoon.  It was over a year before I found out that that “curry”?  Was a dip.  It’s supposed to be served cold, with vegetables.  I was basically making a meal out of a heated bowl of salsa. J  None of my colleagues ever told me, by the way.

Sunday, 6 November 2011:  Today was Red Song Tao Adventure Day!  By the time I leave Chiang Mai, I will have ridden song taos of ALL COLOURS!  Actually, that’s a stupid goal.  Forget I said that.
- Pretty sure I’ve racked up yellow, red, green, and blue, which only leaves white.  NOW what are you calling a stupid goal, me of two years ago? :P

Wednesday, 9 November 2011:  Meet with colleagues about my project.  Ask loads of questions.  Feel slightly overwhelmed – less by the work, more by the sheer holy-hell-I-have-no-idea-if-I’m-doing-this-right-ness of the new job.
- I eventually learned that it takes people in Burma organisations at least six months to trust you, so the off-balance, what-am-I-even-doing feeling is completely natural.  Eventually, they start letting you in on bigger strategies and telling you what they really think (for good or ill – one of my colleagues waited until after my first project, an 80-page paper, was printed and released to let us know that she always thought it should have been more of a one-page pamphlet :)).

Yup, I have my own motorcycle.  (I mean, it’s on loan from VSO, but still.)  It is red.  I am in love.  I’m going to name it.
- She’s been with me through floods and thunderstorms and shittastic Thai drivers, dog attacks, drives up mountains, navigating past elephants, and road trips with passengers, including the time I did the last twelve miles running on fumes and blew into town without a drop of petrol to spare.  She’s had her steering column fixed, her tires changed, her brakes replaced, her gasket repaired; she’s been clamped twice (though I maintain that one of those wasn’t my fault), and one time I had to sneak into a gated parking lot and carry her up a flight of stairs to rescue her, by which I mean that Moray mostly carried her and I steered.  Her suspension is shot, and she’s not as young as she was, but I still love her.  Her name is Arcee.

One of the foods we share is… odd.  It’s like a ground-mushroom knockoff of a ground pork dish, but it has this kind of, well, frosting on it.  The frosting is creamy and white and a little salty, but otherwise has no particular taste.  (If you’re thinking of making a disgusting joke right about now, don’t bother, because I have made all of them in my head already.)  It’s not coconut cream, it doesn’t seem to be cream cream, and I don’t think soy cream looks like that.  The hell did I just eat, man?
- I still have no idea what that was.  And it disturbs me.

 Have a wonderful time chatting with my colleagues over a traditional mookata dinner… I’ve had some great meals here, but this is the first place where I’ve thought, “Oh, I am SO taking people here when they visit me.”
- That was before I discovered the MASSIVE AIRCRAFT HANGER of a mookata restaurant, which is supposedly the biggest restaurant in Thailand, seating something like 1,500 people.  THAT’s where I take visitors. :)

It shouldn’t be raining, not this hard – the wet and dry seasons are all messed up – and it’s making me kind of melancholy.   And I miss you all.
- They still are.  It still does.  I still do.

Conversations in Burma

I do have the blog post recording the end of my last visit to Rangoon mostly drafted, and I’ll post that eventually.  Right now, though, I wanted to share this.

 

I am in Rangoon again.  For work, this time.  That’s not what it says on my visa, but that’s what I’m doing, pretty openly – instead of furtively meeting with partners in cafes, I’m attending conferences in hotels, with agendas available at the door listing the speeches we’ll hear on land confiscation issues, on investment-related problems, on protesting against unsustainable development.

I am chatting with cab drivers about how cool it was when Obama met Aung San Suu Kyi.

I am standing, right now, at my hotel room window, and the sky just opened with a goddamned roar.  The rain is so hard that the air is white with mist, and since I’m overlooking an alley packed with corrugated-iron-roofed houses, the sound of it is like a jet engine.  Beyond the alley are skyscrapers of cream-coloured stone, warm lights spilling from the windows; off to my left are the dark outlines of palm trees and, beyond that, the massive golden stupa of Shwe Dagon Pagoda.  I’ve got the window open, my face half-tilted into the rain; it’s wonderful, as long as you don’t have to be out in it.

I really, really like Rangoon.  I like that it’s a big, grey, sprawling urban mess, but it’s got a unique character to it.  There’s no fashionable posturing, as in Bangkok, nor is there the feeling of anxiety that seems to attend it.  Everyone is in short-sleeved shirts and knotted cotton lungis, the women with flowers in their hair and yellow powder smeared over their cheeks, everyone’s strolling to and from work swinging their steel tiffin tins or leaning out of car doors to spit betel on the ground like they don’t give a damn, and everything is on Burma time.  In some ways, it feels like an archetypal Asian city – a maze of fruit and DVD stalls in front of each of the new Western shopping centres; bicycle rickshaws fighting it out with taxis; stray dogs everywhere – but to me, the clothes, the food, and the language all feel familiar now, after eighteen months working with Burma groups.  (And the food, oh, God – spicy, oily Arakan curries; sticky Shan noodles with spring onions and chili; parathas and chapatis courtesy of the Muslim vendors on every corner.  I love Thai food, but I love Burmese food even more.)  The differences is that in Chiang Mai, it’s all subdued, as my friends from Burma try to maintain their traditions while flying under the radar of the Thai folks around them, fitting in enough not to ruffle feathers.  Here, it’s out in the open and unapologetic.  I especially love seeing people I know from the border who’ve moved to Yangon.  I ran into one former colleague who’s switched out her pantsuits for a lungi, and started wearing powder, and jade amulets in place of Thai gold – but none of those changes compare to how happy she looks, how much more at ease in her skin.

And Rangoon is one of the few places I’ve been where, as a rare Westerner, I can walk the streets without being hassled.  Stared at, yes, but not hassled.  It’s such a relief.

Although on rare occasions, the staring is almost worse.

And on that note, I have to tell you this story because it’s really weird.

After dinner tonight (Shan noodles and a pile of light-as-air crispy wontons, aw yesss), I found a little shopping complex that was still open, and that had a supermarket.  This was lucky, because I wanted to get some rice mixes to take back, as well as something for the folks at the office.

Now, I want to make a couple of things totally clear.  First, there were other customers around when I went into the supermarket.  And second, I was in there maybe ten minutes – and I’d seen other people shopping about five minutes ago – when I started realizing that the employees were staring at me.

This isn’t exactly new in Rangoon, as I mentioned.  I figured they weren’t expecting a – I actually don’t even know what the Burmese equivalent of farang is, so let’s go with honky – in their store.  Or not expecting a honky to be buying dry noodle mixes and homemade palm sugar candy.  Or something.  So I ignored it.

An aisle later, I realised they weren’t just staring:  they were following me.

This was getting weirder and weirder, and I have to admit, I was curious about what would happen.  So I crossed the store.  They followed me, silently.  I went down a different aisle.  They all congregated at one end of it, in formation, like the Jets trying to corner a Shark in an alleyway.

I turned and looked at them.

They looked at me.

This went on for a bit.

Finally – finally! – one of them stepped forward.  “Miss, we close.”

Fair enough.  She gently took the few things I was buying out of my hands, and brought them smartly to the front of the store.

And then I saw it.  The entire staircase up to the next level of the shopping centre, as well as the whole balcony above it, were clogged with rank upon rank of young Burmese workers in matching uniforms.  At a conservative estimate, there were easily a hundred people.  All of them staring at me in dead silence.

They had all been waiting for me.

I won’t lie to you, it was eerie.  I tried to defuse the moment – “Oh, you were all waiting for me, I am so sorry!” – but, in true ahnah fashion*, they wouldn’t acknowledge the apology because it would mean, in essence, admitting I’d done something wrong, which is impolite.  So they kept staring.  I was blushing so hard you could probably detect it from space by now.  The cashier, who was the only one who, by contrast, wouldn’t meet my eyes at all, rang me up, and then – I am not kidding – I led a procession of over a hundred Burmese workers into the streets of Rangoon.

Just never tell the Burmese authorities that happened, okay? ;) 

*Ahnah doesn’t have a direct English translation, but I’ve talked about the Thai version – kray jai – on my blog before.  It’s being so polite, and going so out of your way to avoid posing any difficulty for someone, that you sometimes end up making everything really uncomfortable.  It’s also part of what stands in the way of speaking up if you disagree or don’t understand something.  Ahnah is letting someone stand on your foot for an hour, even though you’re sure it’s not deliberate, because you, well, don’t like to mention it.

(Incidentally, they told me they close at 9, and I was feeling really guilty about holding them up – until I got back to my hotel, a ten minute walk away, and checked my phone.  9:08.  Wow.  Quick off the mark, much?)

One more story from my time here… and I was debating how to tell this, as I sometimes do when I’m relating conversations in writing.  To me, a lot of the charm of these stories isn’t just what someone says, but how they say it – and I don’t mean “charm” in a condescending way, like it’s “quaint”, but just that the pattern of someone’s speech, the phrases they use – and, yes, even the mistakes – are all part of the fabric of the story.  So I tend to render conversations word-for-word, as best I can, rather than correct people’s grammar.  But I’m afraid that comes across as mocking people for whom English isn’t their first language.  I’m not – God knows, anyone who’s heard me attempt to speak Thai has some idea how much awe I have for people who are fluent in more than one language, and I can still say exactly four things in Burmese, except that I can’t say two of them in polite company, and I’m not supposed to say the third one for security reasons, so I can say one thing in Burmese.  So a Burmese person who can carry on a conversation with me in English, however much we have to stumble through together?  Has my admiration and my gratitude.

With that in mind, I’m going to tell this story with the quotes I remember intact, so you get the actual flavour of the exchange.

I had the greatest conversation with my young cab driver coming from the convention back to my hotel today (in his really odd-smelling cab – sir, please choose either a metric tonne of jasmine garlands, or a Glade lemon airfreshener.  Pick your theme and run with it!  This is not a good opportunity for cultural fusion!).  He started out asking whether I was American, and on finding out I was, pronounced this “very good”; I asked him whether he was from Yangon, which he was, and he then added triumphantly, “I am taxi driver!”  Which I took to be kind of like when I was first learning Arabic, and kept informing people in a loud voice that I was a student and my house was in East London, even the ones I met through school or at my house. :)

Then we started talking about the traffic (the perennial topic of conversation for anyone stuck in a cab in Rangoon, which is about half the population at any given time), the sights, and all the new developments around Rangoon.  He told me there were two huge new shopping malls downtown:  “In Myanmar, verrrry big shopping mall!  You American, small shopping mall!” he grinned.  And then he described some of the luxury hotels, adding, “One night stay, three hundred dollar!”  He sucked in a pained breath, and laughed.  “In Myanmar, very good hotel!  You American, small hotel!”

And then, out of the blue, he turned to me (we were stuck in traffic, don’t worry) and said, “Obama!  Obama come to Myanmar, very good!  Clinton come, very good!  Meet Lady Aung San Suu Kyi, shake hands like this –“  He demonstrated on himself, pretzling his arms together.  “Ah, my friend!”  (Obama also ill-advisedly kissed Daw Aung San Suu Kyi on the cheek, but I was too embarrassed to bring that up. :))

“Obama speak English very good!” my driver chirped happily.  I was a little weirded out by this – did he think Obama wasn’t American-born?  Had the Republican habit of describing the president with careful disdain as “articulate” travelled this far?  But then he went on, and I realised what he was getting at.  “Clinton speak English very good!  Number Two, Lady Aung San Suu Kyi, also, English very good!”  He waved a hand contemptuously.  “Number One – Number One is soldier, is government, is Thein Sein – English no good.  No good!”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the change that has happened in Burma:  a man openly praising Aung San Suu Kyi and talking scornfully about the military government to the stranger in the back of his cab.  And he brought it up, which means that he probably has this conversation with most of the foreigners he drives.  Wow.  It’s not enough, yet, not by a long shot.  But it’s pretty striking, nonetheless.

Aung San Suu Kyi is popular, he told me:  “Yangon, Lady Aung San Suu Kyi!  Mandalay, Lady Aung San Suu Kyi!  Inle, Lady Aung San Suu Kyi!”  He also credited her with doing more to help the people in practical ways than the government is willing to do.  The soldiers gave $150 to improve the roads, he told me; Lady Aung San Suu Kyi gave $300.  “Very good!”

I almost wish we hadn’t reached my hotel so quickly; I wanted to listen to more of this.  Hell, I was getting as much out of one conversation as out of weeks reading the Burma papers.  This wasn’t the first startlingly open political conversation I’d had in Burma – you might remember me talking about my guide on my last trip, and how he’d tell me in a low voice about people’s opposition to the mega-development projects – but he was a friend of a friend, and he didn’t really start talking until we were safely out of Rangoon.  This guy didn’t know me from Adam.

Things really are changing:  some for the better, some for the worse (I just got news of another anti-Muslim riot, this time in Lashio).  It’s a remarkable time.

Very good.

Burma, Islam, and Setting the Stage for Ethnic Cleansing

As I’ve said before, I don’t post about Burma issues often.  This is going to be one of those times.

You may know about the violence against Muslims going on in Burma right now.  Long story short, this really kicked off about a year ago, when a Buddhist woman was raped and murdered by three Muslim men in Arakan (or Rakine) State, one of Burma’s ethnic states.  (Lemme pour you a quick shot of context if you don’t know what I mean by “ethnic states”:  about a third of Burma’s population is made up of indigenous tribes; many of these groups live primarily in specific areas, like the Arakanese in Arakan State.  The ethnic states are officially under the rule of the central government; each state has its own administrative structure, but state officials are appointed by the central government and are ethnically Burman, the country’s majority.  However, armed groups in many of the ethnic states have been at war with the central government for decades.  Currently, ceasefires exist between government troops and ethnic armed groups in all the states that were at war, except for Kachin State, though clashes continue even in ceasefire areas.)  Anyway – days later, even though the perpetrators had been arrested, a Buddhist mob attacked a bus and lynched ten Muslim passengers who’d had nothing to do with the crime.  The situation escalated, leading to a state of emergency being declared in Arakan State, with curfews and areas being locked down by government troops.

Since then, the violence has risen and fallen.  It spiked in November, but quieted down in the new year – until the current wave of attacks, which really got going in March.  The violence has now spread beyond Arakan State and into central Burma, with Muslims being targeted in Mandalay and even in Burma’s first city and former capital, Rangoon (Yangon).  According to a recent article in the independent Burma paper Mizzima, the 2012 violence left 140 dead in Arakan State alone, and displaced at least 100,000 people (other sources say as many as 140,000).  Another 43 people have been killed in central Burma since March, where attacks have also destroyed over 1,200 homes, 77 shops, and a staggering 37 mosques.

Where is all this coming from?  Well, tensions between Muslims and Buddhists in Burma have existed for a long time.  The article I linked to above gives a fuller picture, but there have been Muslim communities in Burma for centuries now.  As was the case in many countries, the British colonial administration favoured a particular minority – here, it was Muslims, specifically Indian Muslims – and this generated resentment among the Buddhist majority.  Anti-Muslim riots in the 1930s were a way of expressing anger at the British regime, as well as at Muslim communities.  Since the military takeover of Burma in 1962, discrimination against Muslims has only become more entrenched.

In Arakan State specifically, there’s a large Rohingya population – Muslims of Bangladeshi descent, who have been established in Arakan State for generations.  The Rohingyas consider themselves to be one of Burma’s ethnic groups.  The Buddhist Arakanese, on the other hand, still see them as interlopers – to the point where I’ve seen Arakanese activists go apeshit at the mere mention of the R-word, because they equate using the term “Rohingya” with “siding with the enemy” by admitting that “Rohingya” is a real thing.  (A lot of Arakanese just refer to them as “Muslims” or “Bangladeshis”.)  Rohingyas have been excluded from citizenship, employment, housing – you name it.  It’s not about religion, every Arakanese person I’ve met hastens to reassure me.  It’s about nationality, culture.  They simply don’t belong.

It seems, ironically enough, that the loosening of government control over the past few years was one factor that helped take the lid off roiling tensions between Arakanese Buddhists and Rohingyas – and the lifting of some censorship laws may have fed into it.  During the riots in November and December of last year, rumours both true and false about the attacks were flying on now freely available social networking sites.  Instant communication can be a powerful tool… but the same technology that allowed protestors in Egypt to organise and to get word of their struggles out to the world can also allow an unverified story about Muslims burning Buddhists’ homes to reach thousands of already pissed-off Buddhists in seconds.

But the current wave of attacks, according to reports, seems to be more organized.  It’s heavily linked to the 969 movement, a (terrifyingly) widespread and grassroots movement led by radical Buddhist monks.  (Yes, I’m going to pause for a second to let the idea of “radical Buddhist monks” sink in.  Trust me, I had the same mental image of a Buddhist monk before I started working out here – we in the West tend to picture lotus blossoms and the Dalai Lama and movies about flaky white people discovering inner peace – but Buddhism is no more immune than any other essentially peace-loving religion from developing radicalised clergy.)

Now, I’m going to tell you a little bit about why this movement scares me so much.  I realised when I was reading some of the 969 propaganda out there (some of which is collected here by Burma Campaign UK) that it sounded awfully familiar.  In fact, it was eerily reminiscent of researching my Master’s dissertation.

You know, the one on genocide.

You might think I’m exaggerating, but regardless of the scale of the violence – and in this case, it’s increasing – the same techniques used to dehumanise a minority group in areas where ethnic cleansing later took place are being used here.  

• We’ve got fostering suspicion that the minority community is actually the group plotting (I’ve edited out an offensive term for Muslims here):
  
  “According to the above situation, Muslims in Marhtila are wearing their mosque clothes and going around in the town more than before. In that group, there are some stranger [Muslims] who we haven’t seen before. Although it is not [Muslims’] Eid period, they have been attending meetings at mosque. Using money Saudi allocated to mosques, they have been buying land, farm and houses both in and out of the town with incredible amount of money under the Burmese names. Two Burmese women from North Pyi Tharyar were married off to two [Muslims] under the responsibility of a mosque. Moreover, [Muslims] are urging each other that only Halal branded kids’ products such as snacks, fizzy drinks and tea are edible for [Muslims]…”
  
  (The scary thing here being that this was released by the “Township Monks’ Chairman in Meiktila, where the current wave of anti-Muslim violence began.)
  
• We’ve got severe policing of the majority group to weed out “sympathisers”, and especially to smack down women from the majority group who might contemplate sleeping with men from the minority group:
  
  4 rules from Alliance to Protect Buddhism Group (Thar Tha Nar in Burmese):
  
  1.Traditionally Buddhist owned houses, compounds and farms are not to be sold, rented or pawned to Muslims. 
  2.Buddhist women are not to marry Muslim men.
  3.Buddhists are to buy goods only from Buddhists’ shops.
  4.Buddhists are not to use their Burmese names to buy property, build or rent property for Muslims.
  
  If one of the above rules has been broken, serious effective penalty would be given.
  
• We’ve got appeals to history or to events in other places where the minority group were the aggressors, in an attempt to make it seem like they’re the aggressors in this instance:
  
  To wipe out our religion and nationality, bad Muslims are using several strategies such as using business and humanitarian sectors as leverage. Using such strategies, they have won over Indonesia, Malaysia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh where Buddhism was once well practiced. In India in AD 11 (Buddhist year 1700), they brutally burned and destroyed recordings of Buddha teaching, killed over a hundred thousand of monks and put out rewards to kill monks who escaped.
  
• We’ve even got Protocols of the Elders of Zion-style fake documents (in this case, with bonus THEY’RE STEALIN’ OUR WIMMIN! hysteria) – this is the supposed text of a “secret” Muslim document, as printed in a 969 pamphlet:
  
  Oh dear Islamists, for all of us Myanmar have become a poison. That is why we need to be united and take any possible ground we can. Even if we have to get out of this country, we will have to leave our blood behind in this country. Buddhist Burmese and ethnic Myanmar women are like prostitutes and we are able to get them anytime with money. For us, it is the best time to be active so we have to manipulate and get those Buddhist Burmese and ethnic Myanmar women by winning their hearts, using our money or businesses. The most important thing is to leave our blood and genes with them. For your hard work, we will be awarding 500 kyats if you can implant your blood inside Buddhist Burmese women. If you can implant into 4 Buddhist Burmese women, mosque will support 1,000 kyats every month. 2,000 kyats will be awarded, if they are graduated Buddhist Burmese women, and 50,000 will be awarded, if they are daughters of brigadiers… You can only distribute this letter to Muslims who promise not to share or talk about this with other religions.

Help doesn’t seem to be coming, from any direction.  Many reports claim that Burma’s security forces are either standing by and letting the violence happen, or actively collaborating, so that things will get bad enough to justify a military crackdown – helping to re-establish the army’s control and providing an excuse for the government to backslide on democratic reforms.  The opposition isn’t exactly leaping to Burma Muslims’ aid, either:  Aung San Suu Kyi can barely bring herself to discuss the “Rohingya problem” in public.  Ethnic Arakanese activism groups certainly aren’t helping.  Bangladesh has long refused to acknowledge any obligation or connection to Rohingya communities, and is now refusing to take in displaced Rohingyas (who are largely stuck in refugee and IDP camps in Burma and other neighbouring countries).  And while there’s been some hand-wringing among the governments of the world, none seem to be ready to hold Burma to account for finding a better solution.

Meanwhile, the violence has touched off understandable anger among Muslims elsewhere; right now, there are protests going on outside the Burmese embassy in Jakarta.  More worryingly, there have also been calls from radical Muslim leaders to violently oppose the Burmese regime on behalf of the Rohingya.  Recently, there was anattempt to bomb the embassy in Jakarta, which is likely to further fuel radical Buddhists’ belief that the Muslims in Burma are somehow “in league” with Muslims around the world.

You want to know what the icing on the cake of civil meltdown is?  A cyclone is projected to hit Arakan State this week – and over a hundred thousand displaced people, holed up in flimsy tents, are sitting in its path.  Unless the government is able to get its act together and prioritise the safety of its Muslim citizens, the toll could be devastating.