Though my travels to the various towns Orwell had lived in sometimes attracted the interest of government spies curious as to what a lone female was doing so far off the usual tourist routes, I was never caught or questioned and have remained mostly below the radar. During the time I was there, I went to considerable lengths not to draw attention to myself; I conducted my research slowly and carefully, I was openly interested in the country’s history, took Burmese language lessons, and spent time hanging out in tea shops with Burmese friends. If there ever was a file kept on my activities at the time, I like to think it was filled with non-incriminating observations by bored spies (“the foreign woman has just ordered her
third
cup of tea this afternoon”). I also disguised people’s identities in my previous book, as I have done in this one. As a result, I have been able to travel there over the intervening years to visit friends, conduct further research, and write the occasional article.
Now, in the aftermath of Nargis, I wanted to return again to see what I could do to help and to try and catalog events from inside the country. Though I was doubtful that I would get in at a time when so many applications were being turned down, I applied for a visa through a travel agency in Thailand, where I live. Three days later I received a call telling me that I could pick up my passport, which was now stamped with a four-week tourist visa for the Union of Myanmar (as the regime renamed the country in 1989). My travel agent told me I could choose the day and time of my travel as, perhaps not surprisingly, commercial flights to Burma were mostly empty.
By then I was in fairly regular contact with friends in Rangoon and had received various requests and recommendations on what I should pack. The most important thing to bring was water purification tablets, wrote one friend in an e-mail, as the city was going to run dry in a matter of days. Another person advised me to fill my suitcase with dry noodles in case the shops started to shut down. Yet another told me to bring candles and matches, as there were none left in the city.
Many Burmese people I knew in Rangoon were organizing aid convoys. They were loading food, medicine, blankets, and drinking water into private cars and hired trucks and driving to the outskirts of Rangoon and down into the delta. Mass e-mails were sent out requesting critical supplies to be carried in by anyone who was able to get a visa. There were endless lists of medicines that were either unavailable or sold out in Rangoon, but the most insistent requests were for cash. There are no international banks in Burma, and aside from those at a few of the bigger hotels, there are no credit card or ATM facilities, so money must be carried in by hand. Nervous and bewildered by all the demands, I ended up packing my suitcase with a mixture of my own survival kit (peanut butter, dried fruit, water purifying tablets, and a headlamp), over-the-counter medical items for friends who were administering aid (electrolytes, Imodium, gauze), and hard cash (hundred-dollar bills stashed between the pages of a novel and hidden in boxes of pills).
On the day my plane landed at Rangoon airport, the runway was empty. After a major disaster, a working airport situated in the disaster zone would normally be crowded with fraught officials trying to organize the off-loading and onward transport of aid and equipment being flown in. But the airport was spookily quiet. It was a gray overcast day, and the compound had a dejected feeling that seemed to imply nothing much could ever happen there. As the plane taxied down the runway, I saw only two unused passenger planes and a lone soldier clad in the standard olive-green uniform. The soldier’s crumpled shirt was open at the neck, and he leaned against a tree, smoking a cheroot and gazing at the plane through lazy, half-closed eyes.
The atmosphere inside the airport terminal was no different from how it had been on previous trips I’d made. The Burmese people getting off the plane were laden down with the usual array of duty-free goods: boxes of chocolates, makeup, and whiskey. The handful of foreigners, most of whom were probably undercover journalists or aid workers slipping into the country on tourist visas, waited silently in the immigration queue, perhaps all sharing the same worry:
I hope they don’t know what I really do; I hope they don’t kick me out before I even get in
. Beyond the high glass walls that separated the immigration checkpoints from the greeting area, there was the familiar tight throng of people waiting eagerly for returning family and friends.
The immigration officer stamped my passport without even glancing up at me, and within minutes I had collected my suitcase and was sinking into the mildewed backseat of a battered Rangoon taxicab. The drive into the city used to be one of my favorite journeys. It was about a thirty-minute ride along tree-lined boulevards that skirted one of the city’s picturesque lakes, circled roundabouts with sculpted floral centerpieces, and passed the gardens that surround the majestic golden presence of the Shwedagon Pagoda. Alongside the newer Chinese-style buildings, which had increased in number over recent years, there was still the architecture of bygone times. There were dark wooden houses half hidden behind forests of trees, ornate monastery buildings with strips of paint peeling off the domed roofs, and brick-walled colonial homes set at the end of overgrown driveways. The thick covering of greenery along the drive had always given the city a hushed and secretive atmosphere.
After the skyscrapers of Bangkok, driving down the low-rise leafy streets of Rangoon felt to me like slipping back in time, which, in some senses, it was; my trips to Burma always meant relinquishing the modern-day technological gadgets I rely on at home. There is no international roaming service in Burma, and my cell phone was useless there. Internet providers are heavily monitored by the regime to prevent antigovernment material from getting into or out of the country, and access through the city’s cramped and crowded Internet cafés was often irregular and infuriatingly slow. Unable to distract myself with sending SMS texts or calling people during the cab journey into the city, there was nothing to do but sit back and watch the streets. And, always, there was the particular smell of Rangoon rushing in through the taxi’s open windows—a familiar dank and musty odor, like a room that has been shut up for a long time and is in need of a good airing.
But this time, even during the short taxi ride, I could see that the cyclone had totally transformed the city. Enormous hundred-year-old trees had been uprooted and tossed onto their sides. Telephone and electricity poles lay across the pavement, tangled up with wires and broken branches. Parts of the roofs of old houses had blown away, leaving behind gaping holes. Advertising billboards had been wrenched out of their moorings, though some shreds of the posters remained—among one set of twisted iron poles, a well-manicured hand held a steaming cup of coffee and a white-toothed smile fluttered in the breeze.
Before my arrival I had tried to book a hotel room, but with communication systems down after the cyclone, I had been unable to get through or even to ascertain if any hotels were still operating. Foreigners visiting Burma are not allowed to stay in Burmese homes, where all guests and overnight visitors must be registered with the neighborhood authorities, so a friend of mine had arranged for me to stay at a house temporarily vacated by an expatriate tenant. The house was a solid cement bungalow located in a well-to-do residential neighborhood and, apart from some minor damage to the overhanging roof, it had withstood the storm.
I spent my first few days in Rangoon checking on friends and delivering the supplies of cash and medicine I had brought. Though I knew the city well, I became lost a number of times, as so many landmarks had been altered; towering trees were no longer standing and buildings once obscured by greenery now stood out in the open. Having gone to the trouble of getting myself to Rangoon, I felt disoriented and useless once I was there. When I had finished dropping off the items I had brought with me, there didn’t seem much for me to do. Being a foreigner I was conspicuous, so I wasn’t able to go down to the delta easily and report on events. I had few other skills applicable to a disaster zone, so, for the time being, I had to content myself with following events as best I could from within the city.
The house I was staying in was almost unbearably quiet in the evenings. Without power and phone lines, there were none of the reassuring sounds of a home—no television, no music, no ringing telephone. The house was located some distance from the main street, so even the sound of passing traffic was absent. At nighttime, the darkness was absolute. Each evening I would put on my headlamp and wander from room to room in its feeble tunnel of light.
FINDING RELIABLE SOURCES
of information in Burma has always been difficult. The regime exerts control over the country in part by attempting to control the very reality in which people live. Everything that is published in Burma must first pass through a government censorship board. Each day censors are hunched over their desks sifting out sensitive news articles and searching for criticism of the regime that might be disguised in an allegorical short story or hidden within the rhyming couplets of a poem. To fill the gap left behind by the removal of independent news and views, the regime produces its own version of events, energetically rewriting the news in its favor and eliminating any contrary views.
The
New Light of Myanmar
, a newspaper published in both English and Burmese language editions, is the regime’s de facto mouthpiece. Printed on coarse paper in cheap black ink that rubs off onto your fingers, the daily specializes in good news. Few people I know consider it to be anything other than pure propaganda, but I read it every day whenever I am in Burma, not so much as a source of news but as a window into the point of view of the ruling generals. News as it is portrayed in the
New Light of Myanmar
does not represent how things actually are; it represents how the generals want things to be. And, in the case of Cyclone Nargis, the
New Light of Myanmar
portrayed a singularly unique take on events.
According to the official chronology of what happened after the storm, Burma’s prime minister, General Thein Sein, who was announced as the chairman of the National Disaster Preparedness Central Committee, convened a meeting in the new capital city of Naypyidaw at 8.30 A.M. on May 3, while the storm was still raging in Rangoon. State media reported that Thein Sein traveled south immediately afterward to begin overseeing the national relief operation. Almost every day the general was featured on the front cover of the
New Light of Myanmar
. When he was not pictured tirelessly briefing other soldiers in a never-ending schedule of meetings, he was shown inspecting government-run camps that had been set up for storm victims. According to the
New Light of Myanmar
, the relief effort was already a laudable accomplishment. Private citizens and the military had banded together in the country’s hour of need and, with the help of global goodwill, this disaster would soon be overcome. In the pages of the
New Light of Myanmar
, at least, everything was under control.
My Burmese friend Ko Ye, a publisher working in Rangoon, once taught me that if I wanted to know what was really going on in Burma, I should look for the absences; as the truth of events cannot be read in the pages of newspapers or seen on the nightly news, it is more likely to be found in what is
not
published or broadcast—the stories, or bits of stories, that are excised.
There were, for example, no disaster pictures in the
New Light of Myanmar
or in any of the many private weekly publications. The images of bereft families and broken homes usually seen in the news after a major disaster were absent. Though many Burmese publications had been able to use the disorder that ensued after the cyclone to defy the censorship board, and had run stories and photographs of the destruction, by the time I arrived in Rangoon the censors had regained control of the news.
The editor of a weekly news journal showed me a recent issue in which the censors had scrawled hasty lines across all photographs considered to be “negative” (images of collapsed buildings, sunken boats, unhappy people, etc.). Out of some one hundred photographs, the censors had only approved four images. Less than two weeks after the cyclone, Burmese journalists and editors were summoned to the central censorship office, the Press Scrutiny and Registration Division, and were told that the emergency period was over. From then on, all Nargis-related stories published in Burma had to focus on rehabilitation and convey only positive messages.
It was impossible to see how the local media would be able to squeeze any positive stories out of the ongoing events. The conversations I had with friends and aid workers during my first few days revealed a reality that couldn’t be more different from that described in the
New Light of Myanmar
.
Aung Thein Kyaw, a middle-aged man who runs a tour company, had temporarily shut down his business and was making repeated trips to the delta to hand out rice and medicine. The conditions he encountered were horrifying. In a tight and carefully measured voice he talked about how the boat he traveled in kept bumping against dead bodies. He described survivors with ghastly injuries. During the cyclone, flying sheets of corrugated iron had severed limbs and torn flesh from bone. While trying to stay afloat in the choppy waters of the storm surge, people had been battered by loose logs, boats, and planks of wood. Without medical attention their gaping wounds were turning gangrenous. Survivors who had held on to trees for the ten-to-twelve-hour duration of the storm had clung on so tightly and for so long that the skin on their arms, chests, and legs had been rubbed away.
Wa Wa Myint, a doctor working in Rangoon who had been down to a delta town to treat patients, described some areas where the roads were lined with thousands of desperate and homeless people begging for food. “There are so many, many people,” she said. “And they have nowhere to go. They have nothing left. Some of them were naked after the storm. They have no home left and no family—they have absolutely nothing, not even their clothes.”