Burma’s Spring: Real lives in turbulent times (5 page)

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When I first met Mu Mu she was nineteen, but she told me she was twenty-three. I’m fairly sure that was the only untruth she told me when I interviewed her for a job as a nanny for our daughter. It was January 2006 and we were sitting in an air-conditioned, serviced apartment on the twenty-second floor of a block in the middle of Bangkok’s shopping district. I was a new mother of a six-month-old baby girl, and our small family had just arrived from London for my husband to take up a new job with an international aid agency. There was no way I could have afforded childcare in London, but in Bangkok, as I had discovered from my brief experience of the city’s expatriate mother–toddler groups, everyone had ‘help’. The nannies – usually unglamorous girls from rural Thailand or across the border in Burma – wore fake Hello Kitty T-shirts, stonewashed jeans and flip-flops, or their employers’ cast-offs. They would accompany the family on shopping expeditions or to playgroups, and made an art of knowing when their ‘madam’ required them to entertain the children or melt into the background. They would push trolleys around supermarkets as their employers
chucked in the groceries and would sit at restaurant tables spooning food into children’s mouths while the mothers gossiped or whined about their domestic staff right there in front of them. They knew their employers liked them to be as invisible as possible, which was confirmed to me at a pay-at-the-door children’s swimming party at Bangkok’s British Club. At the entrance two expat women sat behind a table selling tickets. ‘Do we pay for our maids?’ asked one mother, as her nanny, beads of sweat springing on her forehead, dragged a child’s buggy up the steps. ‘No need, we don’t count them as actual people,’ smirked the organising lady. So often, the girls who cleaned our apartments and loved our children were treated with suspicion and contempt, a response perhaps to the devotion our children felt for their gentle carers. Mothers felt threatened. One expatriate housewife boasted to me about how she had torn up her Burmese nanny’s work permit – the only identity and security she would have had – because she suspected the girl of stealing money. Another had installed a secret camera and found her maid ‘lying on my bed, reading my magazines!’ when she ought to have been mopping the floor.

Mu Mu may have lied about her age (she told me months later that she didn’t think I would have employed her had I known how young she was, and she was probably right), but she was truthful about already having been a domestic worker in the Thai capital for nearly five years. She was barely fifteen when she walked out of Burma and across jungled mountains to elude Thai border guards. A broker bundled her into a pickup truck, where she had to lie on her side, packed in with around thirty others, two layers of tarpaulin thrown over them, for the suffocating journey to Bangkok. Her first job, with a middle-class Thai family in the Bangkok suburbs, came with a salary of twenty-five dollars a month. She spent her days sweeping floors, cleaning toilets, scrubbing and wringing out piles of laundry by hand. She massaged
the feet of her mistresses, ironed ‘sir’s’ underpants and groomed the dogs. By the time she came to work for us, she had already looked after nine children, often sleeping at night in their bedrooms so their parents wouldn’t be disturbed if the infants woke. When not needed in the children’s room she had slept in the servants’ quarters – a windowless, airless cupboard which was a standard feature of every middle-class Bangkok apartment.

A position as an undocumented domestic worker in Thailand is no dream job, yet every year thousands of Burmese girls made exactly the same trip across the border as Mu Mu. Some found themselves in much worse situations. Tricked by brokers to expect work as waitresses or nannies, they would end up in the brothels of Bangkok and Pattaya, trapped in bonded labour, often for years, until they had paid back ‘debts’ to agents. Without passports or visas, they were illegal migrants and at the mercy of Thai police. If caught, they would have to pay bribes, endure verbal abuse and even sexual attacks. Yet every month, it seemed, another of Mu Mu’s friends arrived, then two cousins, then her younger sister. It never really made sense to me. What on earth could life be like in Burma to make the prospects in Bangkok – domestic servitude at best, sexual slavery at worst – enticing? It was something I asked Mu Mu many times. From her story, and those of others I would meet, I learned far more about life in Burma than I did covering the big news events that made headlines at home.

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Mu Mu was born in 1986 and grew up in Hpa’an, a vibrant market town in eastern Burma set amidst the limestone escarpments and emerald paddy fields of Karen state. The Karen, a hill tribe that traces its origins to Mongolia, is one of Burma’s largest ethnic groups, with its own language, calendar and traditional dress – brightly
coloured embroidered tunics and matching scarves tied at the side of the head. The Karen consider themselves different, separate from the majority Burmans, and took up arms practically from the moment Burma won independence from Britain in 1948. The Karen National Union (KNU) rebel group took control of much of the eastern part of Karen state, along the border with Thailand. When she was growing up, Mu Mu’s family suffered harassment from soldiers on both sides. As a small girl she would hide behind her mother’s legs when rebel fighters turned up at the family’s smallholding on Hpa’an’s rural fringe, demanding rice, whisky and a place to sleep. Her mother would lay down extra bamboo sleeping mats for them. After dinner, the yellow flame of the oil lamp would be doused, and the soldiers would lie down to sleep with the family in their single-roomed shack. Mu Mu woke at sunrise and watched the men snoring, open-mouthed, glistening with boozy sweat, their guns at their sides. ‘There were always problems. The next day the government soldiers would come and say, “Why are you keeping Karen soldiers here?” Both sides were trouble for us.’ By the time she had started school, Mu Mu’s family had moved to a wooden house on a main street in town, where government troops were firmly in charge.

Mu Mu, a pretty, playful child, was the second of four daughters. Her father worked for the state-owned firm that controlled all sales of liquor in the town. Although his salary was low, less than thirty dollars per month, the position gave him the opportunity to supplement his income with ‘tea money’ – backhanders from alcohol producers and shopkeepers who needed to keep the middleman on side. Her mother had a small shop in the front room of their house, selling eggs, little snacks and packets of instant noodles. They were poor, but Mu Mu didn’t feel it. ‘My friends were the same like us. No TV, no nothing. But my grandfather still had a farm, so we didn’t need to buy rice or vegetables. We always had enough to eat.’ Dressed in a
white shirt and green sarong-style skirt, she went to the local government school. She wasn’t a particularly talented student, unlike her studious elder sister, but her academic achievements were thwarted by external forces. Mu Mu thinks she may be ill-starred; she has certainly had her share of bad luck.

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On a cool, clear February morning, just weeks after the turn of the millennium, Mu Mu was cycling her big-wheeled, one-gear bike, on her way to sit her first high school matriculation examination. Her uniform was washed and pressed, her shiny black hair was neatly tied back in a ponytail. On each of her cheeks was a finger sweep of
thanaka
, the yellowish tree bark paste that serves as both make-up and sunscreen. Her steel tiffin tin containing a simple lunch of rice, fish paste and fried greens hung from the handlebar. The road ran quietly through neatly tended rice fields, a ridge of steep chalk hills studded with golden stupas rising up to the right. Mu Mu was contemplating the history exam that awaited her when a buffalo reared up out of the paddy and into the road. She swerved, lost balance and ended up in a ditch with a broken arm. She missed the examinations and was not permitted to re-sit.

In Burma, the matriculation or ‘Tenth Standard’ exams determine a student’s future at the age of just fifteen or sixteen. The Burmese education system has little interest in a student’s vocation or passion; it is all about grades. Those with the highest marks are expected to go on to study medicine at university, regardless of their desire to care for the sick. Slightly lower grades will steer the student towards the engineering or law faculties, after that come languages and computer science. Zoology and history departments are traditionally populated by students who have not excelled in their high school exams. Passing ‘Tenth Standard’ is regarded as a minimum educational requirement in Burmese society; without it, it is difficult to secure any
employment beyond menial work. More than a decade on, Mu Mu still felt the sting of failure. ‘I am ashamed that I didn’t pass Tenth Standard,’ she said. ‘Even now, I don’t like to talk about it. I feel that I am not educated, I am not clever.’

The accident couldn’t have been more badly timed. The atmosphere at home was becoming more and more fraught. A year earlier, Mu Mu’s father had lost his government job. The family had tried to survive by renting out their prized asset, their telephone line, which allowed locals to call their relatives who had left for Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore in search of work. It kept their head above water for a few months, until the State Peace and Development Council changed the rules. In those days before the Internet, when mobile phones were restricted to a small elite, the junta still had control of its citizens’ ability to communicate with the wider world. They wanted to keep it that way. New regulations were abruptly introduced so international calls could only be made on sanctioned phones and the family’s fledgling business died. ‘At home everything was bad. My father and mother were fighting the whole time, and he was always saying bad things to me. “What can you do now you have failed Tenth Standard?” I felt like I was a problem.’ Mu Mu could only think of one solution. Her cousin had recently come back from Bangkok for a visit, and was about to return to Thailand. Mu Mu begged to go with her.

Mu Mu had only made one trip out of Hpa’an before, a one-day school visit to Rangoon. She packed her few belongings in a small rucksack, her clothes, some soap and a toothbrush. There were no photographs at home she could take, no mementos or books. She had no passport and no money – the trip would cost 8,000 Thai baht, about $250, to be funded by a broker who smuggled migrants across the Thai border and on to Bangkok. This would be paid back through her wages as a domestic worker, ‘a maid’, as her cousin called it. Mu Mu couldn’t imagine her future life, she had no idea
what to expect. She couldn’t envisage the Bangkok apartments that her cousin had described, ten, fifteen, even twenty floors up. She had never lived anywhere with running water or an inside toilet, she had never seen a skyscraper, she had never been in a lift.

There were no special goodbyes. Her parents were fractious, preoccupied. Her sisters had their own concerns. ‘I left the house as if I was going to the market.’ With her cousin, Mu Mu caught a bus to the border town of Myawaddy, where they met their broker, a skinny woman with gold jewellery and heavy make-up. Getting across the border to the Thai town of Mae Sot was easy: the guards had been paid off. But after that it would become tricky. Thai police were on patrol to stem the flow of illegal migrants heading for the lights of Bangkok. ‘We set off at night through the mountains. We had to go by foot for a long way so that we would join the road again further down, past all the gates, the checkpoints.’ For five nights they were on the move, a column of around forty or fifty people, like an army brigade. They hid by day and trekked in darkness, herded by a group of armed men. Mu Mu doesn’t know who they were. ‘The people who took us were very strict, very rough. If they say you move, you move.’ They were still in Karen territory, now on the Thai side of the border. In daylight they hid in farmers’ cattle sheds, each day receiving a polythene bag of cooked rice, dripping with condensation. At night they were on the move, plagued by mosquitoes and leeches, drinking water from streams. On the fifth night the group came to a deserted house. It was boarded up and looked empty. They were ushered inside. In the gloom they could make out the shapes of dozens more people, squatting on the floor in silence, waiting. There Mu Mu put on the jeans her cousin had brought for her, the first pair she had ever worn. It was time for the human cargo to be packed into pickups, for the drive to the city.

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Mu Mu was beautiful. She looked like a Sioux princess. She had a strong mouth and perfect, straight, white teeth, the product of cheap Darlie toothpaste rather than fancy orthodontic treatment. She had a regal, straight nose and cheekbones so high they were all you could see from most angles of her profile. Her cat’s eyes slanted upwards to her temples, and on special occasions she would accentuate their startling shape with a modest stroke of black eyeliner. She was slender, with the sort of waist you could reach around with two hands. But she was oddly proportioned, her legs much too short for her torso. This, I discovered (not from her), was a sign of stunting. Although she was rarely hungry, Mu Mu grew up in deep poverty. Her staple meals of rice and vegetables from her grandfather’s plot were often devoid of protein. She just didn’t get the nutrition she needed to reach the full height that nature had intended for her.

Mu Mu had a boyfriend called Saw Myo, something she proudly told me at our first meeting. Saw Myo was a Karen boy from her hometown who had also come to Thailand in search of a brighter future. Their families knew each other a little, but she had only really got to know him in Bangkok. Living away from home had allowed young Burmese to circumvent the cultural norms of their society, in which a public courtship must culminate quickly in marriage to safeguard the reputation of the girl and her family. Mu Mu met Saw Myo when she was seventeen, through mutual friends on Sunday, her ‘off’, when the Hpa’an community would gather at the Karen Baptist church in Bangkok, the social highlight of the week. Nineteenth-century missionaries had scored some of their greatest successes among the Karen people of Burma’s eastern hills; the provision of education and healthcare had been rewarded with high rates of conversion. Consequently, Karen state has a much higher concentration of Christians than much of mainly Buddhist, lowland Burma. When Mu
Mu took a job which did not require her to ‘live in’, she and Saw Myo moved in together in a hot, airless Bangkok bedsit, something her parents back in Hpa’an fiercely disapproved of, but given Mu Mu’s status as the family breadwinner they could do nothing about. ‘They could say a lot of words, but they had no power,’ Mu Mu said.