Burmese Lessons by Karen Connelly Read Free Book Online Page A

with the baby? A pre-verbal wail is the human siren.
Do something, help me, do something, help me, do something
.
    I put down my notebook and pick up the editor’s card again. He has become a political prisoner. Why am I surprised? I know what happens here. I tear up the card and mix it in with the other paper in the garbage in the communal toilet.
    Perhaps Pagan was too beautiful; it made me forget where I am.
    •    •    •
    T here are two realities for the new foreigner. Two worlds, both legitimate, both real: the seen and, kaleidoscoping deeply, endlessly, the unseen. Unspoken, unexplained. The unseen world does not yield easily. Facts swirl and shift rather than settle. Repeatedly, a new layer of knowledge displaces the older, simple pattern.
    I need years to learn. What I’ve had is two weeks in the Golden Land, as Burma is sometimes called, and many conversations about the country in Bangkok, sometimes with Burmese exiles but more often with other foreigners—Free Burma activists, NGO workers, journalists. Until recently, I’ve been living with a couple of journalists. Their house was an open center for international members of the Fourth Estate—American, Canadian, English, Irish, Australian, Kiwi. All these nationalities passed through, to do work in the studio, voice-overs and film editing for the BBC, CNN, NBC, CBC, ABN (Asia Business News, out of Singapore).
    The journalists were the ones who most strongly suggested that I visit Burma. They supplied me with names and addresses here, people to visit. They also told me to be careful of my list of contacts; if it seemed potentially dangerous to anyone to keep the names, it was better to get rid of them. Scribble them out. Throw them away. I am grateful to the journos.
    But now I’m thinking traitorous thoughts about their dinner parties. I’ve always had these thoughts. Now that I’m in another country, I can write them down. The dinner parties involved crates of red wine, loads of Carlsberg beer, joints so powerful I literally toppled over after smoking them, fried chicken and cashews, Italian pasta, and—always as the true main course—energetic, loud, smoky political conversations.
    So. What is there to complain about?
    During every intense, hand-waving, half-drunken rant or dissertation about Cambodia, Vietnam, Burma, and Thailand, I remained on the far edge of the dialogue. When I did speak, attention invariably strayed, or the topic changed. I was always reaching for the detail or the individual or the subjective truth contained in the particular moment. That’s how poets talk, and women; among hard-nosed journalists of either sex, my approachwas embarrassing. They knew everything. They spoke in broad strokes, with assurance and conviction. Even when they didn’t really know what they were talking about, it sounded as if they did.
    And I was younger than any of them. Why does everyone think youth is so wonderful? Most people won’t take a woman seriously if she’s under thirty. If she’s under thirty
and
beautiful, too many men want to fuck her and too many women are jealous of her. And still none of them take her seriously. I look forward to being over forty, wrinkled and tough. At least, I hope that toughness will come with the other two.
    At the dinner parties, the talkers dazzled me with their encyclopedic knowledge of Burma and “the region,” their many stories, their wealth of experience. I gratefully accepted their advice; they are experts. But something disturbed me more and more as the months went on: though the talk was often about those with brown faces, and though we were eating and drinking and living in a land of brown faces, there was rarely a brown face among us. I started to wander into the kitchen to chat with the maid, who was my link, in that house, to the Thailand I lived in years ago, as a teenager.
    During the day, she sometimes took me to the nearest street market, or to the temple hidden on the other side of