Remembering the Present by J. L. Cassaniti

Author:J. L. Cassaniti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2018-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

Part II

Myanmar (Burma) and Sri Lanka

4

BURMA: A FINE MIST, OR A CAVE IN THE WOODS

“But the Burmese are scary,” my Thai friend Jieb said when I told her I was going to Burma to learn about mindfulness. The two of us were sitting at the back of her porch in Mae Sot, a border town to Myanmar (formerly Burma), a few months after my meeting with Sayadaw Ñeyya in Chiang Mai. I had met Jieb in Mae Jaeng years earlier, and we had stayed in touch after she moved to the border. She now worked for an international NGO helping Burmese refugees settle in Thailand. “They won’t be friendly, I bet.” In all her time at the border town she had never been across into Burma. Like a lot of people I knew in Thailand, Jieb had an image of the Burmese that reflected a long history of neighborly animosity. Cartoons in Thailand often pictured Burmese people, with dark skin and red eyes, sitting on the backs of the most ferocious-looking elephants, as if the two nations were still in the throes of historical wars. “But I’ll go with you,” Jieb continued. “I’m curious what it’s like, and even without knowing Burmese or English, I can help you out as you start the research there. We can find a place to stay, and meet people, so you don’t have to go alone.”

I agreed to the plan, and the next morning the two of us walked across the border into Burma and rented the border guard’s motorbike on the other side. We made it only ten kilometers, though, before a police checkpoint turned us back. Since that visit the restrictions on entering further into the country via land routes have eased, and I have heard that buses take people all the way from Mae Sot to Yangon a few hundred kilometers away; but at the time we wouldn’t be able to get in overland, the man at the checkpoint informed us. So we headed back to Mae Sot and took a bus the few hours south to Bangkok, then flew in to Mandalay the next morning.

As the plane descended we saw the landscape turn a dusty green, stretching out in all directions, with a river to one side of the city and the streets carved into a long series of tan grids. The two of us checked in to a ram-shackle guesthouse in the old part of the city, and after renting a dubiously legal motorcycle from a family that lived around the corner we set out to explore the town. The streets were more crowded than the previous time I had visited, fifteen years earlier, but compared with the packed roads of Chiang Mai they were relatively peaceful, and felt full of adventure. A few cars, motorcycles, rickshaws, bicycles, and ox-drawn carts rambled by. Kids played chinlon, a Southeast Asian form of hacky sack, on the street corners, spread out between mobile food stands selling all kinds of fresh, diverse, delicious foods that would put LA’s food-truck reputation to shame.

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