Travels in the East by Richie Donald; Mansfield Stephen;

Author:Richie, Donald; Mansfield, Stephen; [Richie, Donald; Mansfield, Stephen;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stone Bridge Press
Published: 2012-07-03T07:00:00+00:00

Burma

Country at the Crossroads

Rangoon (or Yangon as it is now called) seen from the air seems subdued, at least after brilliant nighttime Bangkok. Just a light here and there, otherwise a carpet of darkness. This extends even down into the new and otherwise imposing airport where the light is so dim that officials squint to read my visa.

After the ordinary airport glare of just about everywhere else this obscurity seems attractively somber, and I remark upon and am told that the effect is not deliberate, that it was due to frequent electric power grid breakdowns and the fear that more will occur if the light level is turned up.

This was my introduction to one of the many structural breakdowns occurring in unhappy Burma, caught in the grip of a restrictive regime for decades now, the bureaucracy of the military junta having held the country since 1962.

But the illusion that dimness is more natural than brightness continued, and I found the city so shadowy, so full of groves, stands of trees, and clutches of bushes, that I was reminded of a much less scrubbed Singapore or of a more decaying Savanna. This illusion I ascribed to the pull of the past, an old-fashioned quality, a kind of temporal poverty toward which I am drawn.

There is a palpable past of Asia itself, the beauty of things that lives on long after their usefulness has evaporated. In Rangoon, this is embellished with the more recent colonial past. We pass the Strand Hotel, now refurbished, repainted, restored, though not yet gentrified in the manner of Singapore’s Raffles. It speaks not of English power but of English gentility, smiling away on the dark street and suggesting that by comparison we weren’t so bad after all, were we?

But I’m not going to stay there. A bed there, despite the country’s poverty, costs almost as much as one in Tokyo’s Ritz-Carlton or at the Hong Kong Peninsula. Nor am I going to stay at any of the government-owned hotels. (Though in a sense the government already owns everything; it gets about a third of your bill no matter where you stay.) You can tell the government hotels at a glance: they are often named after the city or the local sight, and they have the national flag flying in front, something private hotels only occasionally do; also, the best guides (i.e., Lonely Planet) refuse to list them.

Why do I have this aversion? Because I am prejudiced. What I have heard about the government here almost convinced me not to come at all, and once here it finds me unwilling to call the place Myanmar, a name the government began insisting upon in 1989. I have never been to any country under such circumstances—distrusting the governance of the place. In the rain, aware of a pervading melancholy, I proceed to my modest hotel.

*

In the morning the sky clears, the sun appears, and what I see resembles what the English must have seen a cen­tury ago. There are few

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