Burma!

This'll be quick- here at the transit lounge in Seoul-Incheon. Very nice space, free showers and internet (uh, in separate rooms...)

Burma was really interesting. Everyone falls in love with the country, I read somewhere. I don't know where to begin... it's the crossroads of South and Southeast Asia. People sell glutinous rice and fry up samosas on the street; packets of betel nuts wrapped in their leaves- and oolong tea; there are Indians (women in saris and with a dot on their forehead) to Burmese (look like Aung San Suu Kyi), to Nepali, Chinese-looking folk, Malay, people who seem something in between; women, girls, and some young boys wear the traditional thanaka paste on their face as sun screen- an offwhite paste made from a common tree bark- and there are ads for European cosmetics. Men still wear the longyi, the skirt-like garment that is gathered into a knot in the front, and I even saw a couple teenagers with blondish hair still wearing their national dress.

It's a totalitarian dictatorship, and from what I've read, they make China in the early 80s perfectly avuncular: at least there was arguably a pragmatic aim of China's authoritarianism. In the case of Burma, it seems to be no less than Orwellian. Indeed, a book I just finished, Finding George Orwell in Burma, likely banned in the country, talks exactly about three books that Orwell wrote that many view as a trilogy of recent Burmese history: his Burmese Days, a novel based on his shortlived career as a colonial policeman in Burma in the early 1920s, an experience that left him deeply anti-colonialist; Animal Farm, the parable about a socialist revolution gone awry that reflects Burma's own disasterous experiment with socialism under Gen Ne Win from 1962 to the late 1980s, and Nineteen Eighty-four, which is essentially the world that Burmese today live. The British ruled Burma from the 19th c. through 1948 as a province of India. From 1948 to about 1962 it was a parliamentary democracy. One of the country's independence heroes, the highly popular Gen. Aung San, father to opposition leader and Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, was murdered right after independence in 1948. Our guide pointed out the Secretariat, where Gen. Aung San was assassinated, the large colonial complex that was once the seat of power in Burma during colonial times and independence. It was now behind a fence, empty and unused, he said, as the military junta recently moved the capital some place north.

In fact, earlier today at the museum among a list of famous Burmese writers, there was one that was blacked out. Our guide didn't know who it was- someone born between 1907 and 1911. The list was engraved on a wooden tablet, and instead of creating a completely new tablet, they merely blacked out the name and life years of this particular writer. The other thing about the museum, besides being completely vacant of visitors, is that there is no reference to "Burma" or the Burmese. Burma is one of several nations that make up the Union of Myanmar, as it's known today, thanks to the military dictators. In 1948, when it won independence from the British, it was known as the Union of Burma. The Burmese make up about 65% of the population; the others include the Shan, the Mon, the Karen, etc. Some of these peoples are tribal, and have resisted Burmese rule. More recently however, many rebellious states have signed cease-fires with the central government, which is predominantly Burmese. And there is a Burmification campaign going on. So it's interesting b/c there is the notion of Myanmar, which is meant to be inclusive of a multinational state. But in the museum, this term was clearly used to describe what is more accurately known as Burmese (musical instruments, the language, clothing, etc). So there's this confusion between the multinational concept and the ethnic group in power which draws attention away from Burmification. What is Myanmar? All the peoples in the country? Or those in power?

What's amazing about Burma is how important Buddhism is. The monasteries are full, and active. They provide education for poor boys and girls, but also for poor lay children as well, who don't board there or enter the renunciate's life. As a result, in contrast to Lao, Burmese are very well educated- I never saw a pair of glasses in Lao; they were everywhere in Burma. You'd be walking along and suddenly an older man would speak very good English. Reminded me of older Chinese in Shanghai who'd been raised in missionary schools there. I saw in one small town what seemed to be a walking meditation session- for villagers- not necessarily people in robes. It feels it's practiced there by more people, than simply reserved for the clergy.

I kinda wish I had been able to do a project in Burma. Living in a totalitarian society would've been hard. You can't freely ask questions of course, and you don't want to get people in trouble for committing thoughtcrime. Merely the belief that there are informants everywhere is enough to make you act differently. We were constantly trying to make sure we weren't spending any money on the govt businesses, but in some cases it wasn't possible. The food was okay- we did better in Lao, we think- but maybe more time in a large city like Yangon would've turned up better food than we had.

We spent little time in Yangon. It reminds me exactly of a large tropical city with colonial stone and brick architecture that's falling apart, covered in streaks of mold, losing the battle against the jungle. People walk on the streets, which are full of vendors and little restaurants, and bookstores (again, high literacy rate). Maybe Indian cities are similar. We visited the great Shwedagon Pagoda- the largest in the country, and it reminds me of the Vatican: all these poor Burmese literally throw what little money they have to upkeep the gold leaf on this huge stupa, said to house 4 hairs of the Buddha.

While at Shwedagon, we saw a large alcove about S.N. Goenka, a teacher whose 10 day silent course in Vipassana Meditation I took many years ago. Turns out, not surprisingly, he's famous in Burma. Our guide had lots of praise for him for being so successful at teaching Buddhism in practice to so many people around the world. The alcove had photos of his latest project, to build a giant pagoda modeled after the Shwedagon in India with a meditation center, and food and books for sale. All in Burmese- not for the international audience. It showed a map of all the Vipassana centers around the world, including the 3 in CA, and elsewhere in N. America.

We also spent a little time in the central market there, not enough, by far. The streets wound around, and in one area, people in a tea house spilled out in onto a street corner. It was full of people sitting on low stools at small, low tables. There we saw South Indian women wearing saris frying up samosas in the middle of the street, and men of all different shades from Indian to Malay, to Nepali, to E. Asian wearing their longyis trading gems, loupes in their eyes peering at rubies and emeralds, smoking, chewing betel, sipping tea.

There's so much to think about and process. I think of all the SE Asian countries, Burma and Cambodia seem the most fascinating: they're the oldest, they're the sources of culture and religion for the others. Their recent histories are the most tragic.

On a bookseller's recommendation, last year I read Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace, an historical novel that tracks the fall of the last Burmese king at the hands of the British to the democracy movement. I never imagined at the time I'd be able to visit.