Burma’s Spring: Real lives in turbulent times (6 page)

I never met him, but Mu Mu showed me pictures of Saw Myo on her phone. He was not what I expected, he wore thick spectacles, his cap of black hair was neatly parted. He looked a bit geeky. She told me he was thirteen years older than her and he loved books and computers. She clearly felt awed and outclassed by his supposed intellect. I asked her if she would like to get married to him. ‘Now we are working to stay alive,’ she said. ‘We can’t think about that right now.’ But deep down Mu Mu must have believed that she would marry him one day. By the time she came to work for us, Saw Myo had left Bangkok. Mu Mu was cagey about it at first, but as her trust in me grew, she told me he was at the refugee camp on Thailand’s border with Burma. Most of the Burmese domestic workers had friends and relatives in the camps, sprawling bamboo shanties dotted along the hillsides of Thailand’s western border. Thai authorities banned the building of any permanent structures in the camps, so everything was constructed from wood, bamboo and tarpaulin. They were cities in themselves; helped by generous aid funding they had their own schools, clinics, shops and orphanages. Most of the refugees were from Burma’s hill tribes – Karen, Mon and Shan. Many inhabitants had lived in the camps since 1984, when government forces launched a full-scale offensive against ethnic Karen insurgents, pushing ten thousand Karen refugees across the border. Some were dissidents from Rangoon and Mandalay who had escaped to Thailand following the failed uprisings of 1988, 1996 and 2007.

As the camps swelled, the United Nations established major resettlement programmes for the refugees, sending thousands each year to new homes in the United States, Canada, Norway and Australia. The lure of a new life in the West had attracted a new breed to the camp, migrants like Saw Myo, who had not fled directly from the barrel of a gun but instead from the poverty of opportunity that life in Burma offered its young people.

While not undeserving, Saw Myo and those like him did not meet the criteria set by the UN’s refugee agency, the UNHCR, to join its resettlement programme. So in the interviews with UN officials they would lie. They knew they had to prove they had fled persecution, and although in some way each of them had, they knew they had to package their stories to tick the UN boxes. So they would each have their own tale of their village razed, of being chased through the jungle by Burmese soldiers, and swimming across the Moei River to safety in Thailand. (Most of them had used this route, but like Mu Mu, in a more calculated way, using brokers to bribe officials on both sides to smooth the way.) They memorised dates, times and detail so as not to be caught out during several rounds of screening. As a mostly Christian group, with an easily digestible story of oppression by an evil regime, the Karen were Washington’s refugees of choice in the mid-2000s. Tens of thousands were extracted from the camps to start new lives in states such as Indiana, California and Texas.

After four years of poorly paid work in Bangkok, Saw Myo decided to head for Mae Ra Moe camp in the hills of northwest Thailand. He hoped to join the UN waiting list and follow his old schoolfriend who had just completed a week’s training in ‘Western ways’ (how to use an upright, flushing toilet, eat with a knife and fork, apply for a driving licence and behave on a plane) before flying out to Vancouver. But Saw Myo found himself at the bottom of the list with a three-year wait ahead of him. By
then, there would be no guarantee that the United States or Canada would still be as favourably disposed to the Karen refugees and willing to take them in such great numbers. In the rainy season the camp turned to mud. Living conditions were harsh, mosquitoes were a menace, there was no electricity and food was scarce. Saw Myo survived on UN rations of vegetables, beans, oil, salt and rice. There was no reliable mobile phone signal up in the hills and communication with Mu Mu became sporadic.

*

I answered my phone in the baking sun of the car park of Villa supermarket on Thong Lor in Bangkok and tried to take in what he was telling me. ‘Hello, ma’am, this is Saw Myo, I am the friend of Mu Mu.’ His English was perfect, his tone courteous. I thought he was going to ask me a favour – for some money, a letter of reference. But no. ‘Ma’am I need you to tell Mu Mu that I’m going to get married’

‘What?’ I didn’t understand. Who to? ‘But weren’t you planning to marry
her
?’

‘Marry Mu Mu? No, no, no,’ he laughed as if to say marriage to a poor, uneducated, albeit beautiful, housemaid was never a possibility.

Saw Myo was going to marry a girl at the top of the waiting list. She would be his ticket to the West. I felt panicked, trying to take in what it all meant. Mu Mu would be devastated. I didn’t want to be the one to tell her, and anyway, given I was her employer and Saw Myo and I had never met, it was an odd request. ‘You have to tell her yourself,’ I said.

It was a weekend, Mu Mu was in her shared, one–roomed apartment on the banks of a smelly
klong
, one of Bangkok’s water arteries. When I got home my phone rang again. It was Mu Mu. Saw Myo had called her already.

‘He will marry?’ The last syllable was a squeak as she started to sob. ‘I thought he would marry me!’

She came to our house. For once, the total suppression of her own needs and feelings, a manner she had perfected during years of domestic service, was cast aside. Normally when she spoke to me she would be obsessively tidying, bouncing the baby on her knee, or vigorously polishing a tap. Despite my repeatedly imploring her to eat with us at the table, she would always take her lunch to the back door, where she would sit cross-legged on the floor to eat. Now she was wailing, unguarded, ripping tissues from the box and flinging them used to the floor. She went over it and over it. She fell asleep that night on our sofa, heartbroken and exhausted.

By the next morning Mu Mu had a plan. She asked for time off and an advance on her salary. She was going to the camp to find him. ‘My head was full of blood. I had to understand it. If I couldn’t make sense of it, I felt that I couldn’t stay in this world,’ Mu Mu told me, years later. She now faced another dangerous journey across a country where she was an illegal immigrant. She hitched a lift to the border in a minibus with other Burmese workers, hiding on the floor as they passed through scrappy Thai market towns. It was a long, hot, bumpy ride, but Mu Mu felt no discomfort. ‘At that time I didn’t care if I lived or died.’ She was deposited in the town of Mae Sot and made the last part of the journey on the back of a motorbike, up the winding road that led through the forested hills to Mae Ra Moe. Blinking the grit from her eyes, she saw the fence that ran round the camp, a bamboo and thatch city cut out of the hillside. It was late afternoon, ribbons of grey smoke from hundreds of charcoal braziers rose into the pale blue sky. Her head down, she followed her elongated shadow into the camp. Her sandals kicked up dust from the dirt path. She walked past the rows of wood and bamboo houses looking for faces she recognised. Shyly, she
started to ask people for Saw Myo. In a camp of more than fifteen thousand refugees, Mu Mu was met with countless blank faces until, finally, someone told her where she might find him.

Saw Myo was sitting cross-legged inside the hut, chatting with a group of men. Mu Mu blocked the light in the doorway, and he looked up, through his thick glasses. Backlit, he could only make out her profile at first; he wasn’t sure it was her. He stood up and came towards her. ‘He was very angry,’ Mu Mu said. ‘He said, “What are you doing here?”’ Mu Mu instantly dissolved into tears. ‘I loved him because I was young. I only had him,’ she told me. Saw Myo was obliged to explain to Mu Mu why he had ended their relationship. After the initial shock, he grew kinder. ‘He said he had loved me, but our lives were going in different directions. He said we couldn’t be together.’ Later that evening, Mu Mu met Saw Myo’s new fiancée, who had no knowledge of his past relationship. The girls sat and spoke quietly together. They had both known hardship and they recognised it in each other. It seemed a bond of solidarity grew. The next day, the girl called off the marriage, saying she needed time to think. Mu Mu spent three weeks in the camp, sleeping in the bamboo hut of her rival. It was December, freezing at night so high up in the hills. Mu Mu had never experienced a cold like it. Her body and mind were numb.

*

Mu Mu came back to Bangkok and back to work. It was around the time our second daughter was born, and Mu Mu was an instinctive, gifted child carer. She would bathe or change the baby with an expert touch; she would gently pat her back until she fell asleep. She would play for hours with our toddler, sitting on the floor, joining her world. She may have failed her Tenth Standard, but Mu Mu taught me a lot.

She rarely referred to Saw Myo again, but I was reminded of her heartbreak each time her phone rang, programmed with the mournful ringtone that she had downloaded. ‘I’m a big, big girl in a big, big world, it’s not a big, big thing if you leave me,’ it sang, before Mu Mu answered the call. One day, a few weeks after she had returned from the camp, I thought he had called her. Mu Mu had shut herself in the laundry room, speaking in a voice I had never heard before, agitated, a little aggressive. Then I heard her weeping.

She emerged, looking punched and red eyed.

‘Was it Saw Myo?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘My daddy.’

Mu Mu had been sending money back to her family since the day she paid off her debt to the broker. She was the family breadwinner. During her first few years in Bangkok, she barely bought anything for herself: no shampoo, no snacks, no little treats. She used the bar of cracked soap by the kitchen sink to wash her hair; she ate only the meals supplied by her employers. Her family seemed to have a lot of outgoings. First, there was her younger sister Phyu Phyu’s education. A year behind Mu Mu at school, Phyu Phyu had done well in her Tenth Standard exams and became the first member of the family to go to university. When she moved to the city to study economics at Rangoon University, Mu Mu paid for everything. Then there was her older sister’s wedding. Mu Mu footed the entire bill. ‘I paid for the dress, the flowers, for the video, the food, everything,’ she said. She couldn’t attend herself, and no one sent her photographs. Mu Mu didn’t mind saving for these important family expenditures, but as the years went by, the demands kept coming. ‘My mother kept asking for money and I never asked what it was for. Whatever I gave them, it wasn’t enough.’ At times Mu Mu felt worn down by work – the ceaseless sweeping, mopping
and scrubbing – and she would suggest to her parents it was time for her to come home, even for a short while. ‘Sometimes I wanted to go back,’ she said. ‘But if I called them and suggested it they would shout at me and say, “What are you going to do here? You don’t even have an education.”’

Back in Hpa’an, Mu Mu’s family was unravelling, but Mu Mu knew none of it. The demise of their fortunes had begun with the loss of her father’s liquor job, followed by the new telephone regulations and a failed attempt to start a fish farm. The family was in debt. Nearly a year after Mu Mu’s departure (when she had cleared her debts to her trafficker), the money started to arrive from Bangkok, sent through a complicated arrangement, known as
hundi
, that smoothed the flow of remittances to Burma’s cash economy. Rather than paying off their creditors, Mu Mu’s mother, with more money in her hands than she had held in a long time, took a gamble on the lottery. She lost and bet again, borrowing money from a friend in an attempt to recoup Mu Mu’s hard-earned wages. She kept losing, but she kept betting. Each month Mu Mu’s money was gambled away – some modest wins only served to fire her mother’s hope that the big prize, which would solve all their problems, was just around the corner.

As the years went by, Mu Mu was able to send back more and more money. With good spoken English and her likeable manner, she had graduated from working for Thai employers to foreign expatriate families and now commanded a good salary. She was able to send hundreds of dollars home each month, way above the earning potential of any of her relatives, even her graduate sister Phyu Phyu. News from home was restricted to a monthly phone call, usually with her father, which generally focused on money – the details of how much she would send and when it would arrive. Mu Mu didn’t find out about the gambling until it was already way out of hand.
As the debts mushroomed, Mu Mu’s parents had sold off their meagre assets: the phone line, their motorbike, a small portable stereo. It hadn’t been enough. They had to get a loan from the government, a mortgage at an eye-watering interest rate. It still wasn’t enough. Every day the creditors came knocking. But her desperate mother kept on betting. ‘My mother was gambling four times a day. She stopped cooking at home, cleaning the house. She stopped washing herself. She got crazy. She kept losing and she wanted to win it back. She was going mad, going around all her friends and relatives asking for more loans.’

No one would lend her any more. Each day more and more people came to the house, angry, aggressive, demanding their money back. She had run out of options. One night, Mu Mu’s mother skipped town. That’s when her father called her, told her everything. Mu Mu was in shock. All the years of toiling, scrimping, saving and sending her wages home had come to this. She had left a poor family with a simple house, a phone line and a motorbike. She thought she could make their lives better, build the family’s future. Now they owned nothing. ‘We had gone backwards. I thought now I have no boyfriend, and I have no family. I felt like I was in prison.’

*

In the 1950s, if you wanted to travel from London to the exotic yet impoverished kingdom of Thailand, you would fly first to the busy regional hub Rangoon, the city that in the early twentieth century was South-east Asia’s most developed and cosmopolitan metropolis. From there you would transfer to a small propeller aircraft to fly on to Bangkok’s small Don Muang airfield. How times had changed. In 2006, Thailand, by now a thriving middle-income country with an economy more than four times the size of Burma’s (despite the two countries’ comparable size, population and resources), opened the state-of-the-art Suvarnabhumi airport, a giant glass-and-steel
edifice with one hundred and twenty departure gates, from where you could fly directly to all corners of the earth. In the same year, Burma upgraded its main airport in Rangoon, shifting passengers from a tatty old terminal which resembled a bus station in northern England, to a new, clean international terminal, with five departure gates and two baggage carousels. Burma, its isolated economy ruined by the military’s disastrous experiment in socialism, had completely missed out on the meteoric growth that had flung its neighbour into a new economic age. If history had taken a different course, the migration could have been the other way round: hundreds of thousands of Thais could have been trying to sneak across the mountains to seek their fortunes in Burma. But in the early twenty-first century, that was how the arbitrage worked.