Burmese Lessons by Karen Connelly Read Free Book Online Page B

it. She spoke Thai with me all the time, until the language reasserted itself in my mind and my mouth. I felt uncomfortable that she was the maid and washed my clothes and brought me fruit in the morning and cleaned up after me. Of course there are maids here, servants, people to wash our dirty clothes, by hand, brown people to send to the market, who shop and cook for us, the white people. Social hierarchy is the way of things in Asia, and many Thais and Burmese have servants of various orders. But it gets stickier when you mix color into that hierarchy, especially when the only brown person in the house for days on end is the one who cleans the toilets.
    Oh, hierarchies! I noticed, too, that most Western experts think of and treat the Thais differently than they do the Burmese dissidents, who are the subjects of white concern and deference and genuine admiration. TheBurmese political struggle is inspiring and exciting. The dissidents are heroic. Not like the Thai maids (who need to be told everything twice or three times and still don’t understand—why don’t they learn better English?). Not like the Thais in general (who are considered unintellectual and shallow and spoiled).
    I should know that the Westerner is allowed to make such distinctions between one Asian race and another. The Westerner knows. We are entitled to knowledge, among other things. That is what makes us experts. Everything becomes territory to us, everything becomes ours. Is the tendency to colonize genetic? Even the political struggle of a small country can become our colony.
    Thus, I become suspicious of myself. What am I doing here? Really? Why do I
need
to know more about Burma?
    I get off the bed and stand at the window. The street below is empty and dark. The baby stopped crying awhile ago.
    Sleep, then, if you can. Make use of the silence. I lie down, my mind whirling through countries and words and conflicting allegiances.
    Just before I drop off—two in the morning? three?—I hear the breath-stilling clarity of trishaw bells. The ring seems to come from below my window. Who is out there so late at night? Is he leaving home or arriving?

CHAPTER 6
“EXACTLY WHAT WE WANT TO TELL YOU”

    Today San Aung will introduce me to some Burmese artists, so that I can see their work for myself and ask them about living and working under the SLORC regime. In the car, he asks how I slept. I remember the trishaw bell, so late at night, ringing in the dark street. “That was the last thing I heard.”
    “In Burmese, there is no trishaw,” he says. “We call it
si-caa
. From ‘sidecar.’ Like the sidecar on an English motorcycle. Another word for your vocabulary.” San Aung is pleased with my word obsession; he thinks it’s a reasonable objective to try to learn his language in a few weeks’ time. I scribble “si-car” in my notebook.
    In the beginning, all language is innocent—
tree, cup, flower, love
—but San Aung wants me to learn serious words. He has taught me
death
and
freedom. Democracy, cruel, trust, don’t trust
. I learn quickly, but as I fill my notebook with phonetic spellings I lament the loss of my innocence. Why can’t I just have sweet chats with the tea-shop boys? Or repeat the number of siblings I have? Or ask, “Can I take your photograph?”
    No. I am infected with the desire to grasp meanings, which makes itdifficult to keep things simple. And any language makes a home for those who speak it. Even a few shreds, a few building-block phrases, provide shelter. San Aung is at home in English. Unlike his parents’ generation, he didn’t have the opportunity to take language classes in school; General Ne Win had forbidden the teaching of English as too colonialist. Years later, after Ne Win’s daughter was denied entrance to a British university because of her poor language skills, the general put English back in the curriculum. But that was too late for San Aung. He learned the language from his mother and various