The lead editorial in the April 15 Bangkok Post started out like this: "Despite efforts to make it a national occasion to observe family togetherness and respect for the elders, the Songkran festival has descended into just a long annual break marked by water attacks, heavy drinking, road accidents and untimely deaths. What a way for a country to start a new year!"
The editorial went on at some length in this vein---decrying Buddhist New Year alcoholic excess, viewing with alarm the chaos on Bangkok's streets, noting with dismay the transformation of a holy ancient rite into a commercialized pedestrian-drenching bacchanalia. The Post came down especially hard on the Bangkok municipal government, which sponsored a water gun battle meant to secure a place in The Guinness Book of World Records for the event's duration and number of participants. Thailand did in fact edge out Spain in this under-appreciated area of endeavor.
I used to be in the editorial writing racket myself, so I know that these cautionary lectures are an obligatory feature of major holidays. And just as essential to the ritual is the habit of everybody in the known universe to merrily ignore all the stern admonitions.
By way of historical background, the Post editorial pointed out that "the ancient links [to harvest festivals] are still evident in many Songkran traditions. For example, the use of water to bathe the Buddha images, to pour on the elders' hands, or to splash one another, were all linked to the use of water in ancient rituals to cleanse the house, wash the ancestors' relics, and bathe the elders."
Bathe the elders! Plainly, that's what a gang of twelve-year-old girls had in mind when I went out to pick up the International Herald Tribune Wednesday morning and they came at me with a garden hose, a pail, and a couple of water guns that were the watery equivalents of rocket-propelled grenade launchers. I was prepared---I had a waterproof camper's sack with me and the paper money in my pocket was carefully wrapped in a 7-Eleven bag. As one does, I chortled and walked on. Later in the day, Joe actually went looking for trouble. Appropriately clad, he walked over to Silom Road, where the mayhem was in full splash. The gay bars on Soi 2 were providing the disco thumpa-thumpa and the ten-thousand-plus mob of young and young-at-heart Thais and farangs were whooping and hooting with glee. I took the subway over and peered down on the Silom scene through my lorgnette from the sky walk up above, and then, clutching my IHT in its wrapper, beat it.
We had planned on going to Hua Hin, down on the gulf, for Songkran. But our friends there, Simon and Poe, were away---visiting a sick friend in the U.S.---and anyway we have some loose ends to tie up before leaving for home on the 20th. So we stayed in Bangkok and were glad we did. Songkran was poignant this year. It was the first April in three years when the city hasn't been wracked by political turmoil. This time last year the Red Shirts were occupying the central business district and rampaging around town in their pick-ups and noisy motorbike convoys. There had already been some deadly violence and more was to follow. Sad to say, many of the protesters' legitimate political and economic grievances remain. Discontent continues at a low rumble. Elections set for June might or might not help.
Speaking of which. One thing we are not eager to come home to is the toxic political environment in the U.S. Will somebody please fix that before we arrive in Boston Friday morning?
Our stay in Southeast Asia this year---our fifth---has been less adventurous than before, but satisfying in its own ways. We've loved having our own home in Bangkok and hope we can do it again next year. We've even been productive. I finished a book (RED WHITE BLACK AND BLUE will be out in September), and Joe has made good progress on the Bangkok street food guide he and Poe have been working on. And he's got thousands of great pictures he's trying to figure out what to do with.
We'll miss Thailand, especially (but not exclusively) the food. While you're at it, could some of you please do something about the impoverished American diet before we get home? What we are eager to return to, of course, are the family and friends we love. Don't go anywhere; we're practically on our way. We depart Bangkok late Wednesday, fly for seven hours, spend ten hours in lovely Seoul, fly for 14 hours, spend a night in lovely Detroit (since Delta merged with Northwest, Detroit beckons), and then it's on to Boston early Friday.
Has it stopped snowing there yet?
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Burma pictures
Sayadow U Tay Zaw Ba Ta in Mawlamyine
Before he smoked a cheroot, ate a piece of fruit or anything else, he spoke silently a prayer that lasted for several minutes
My lunch at the monastery. I ate after the monks by myself but before the pilgrims.
All quite tasty.
A rice cracker seller at Indein market at Inle Lake
Rice fields near Hpa-an
The notorious spider at Pindaya. Pa O are the people with turbans and indigo garb
A novice looks on with envy at this hand propelled merry-go-round
Dinner with Miss Ann in her ancestral home in Inle Lake. We were ferried to and from dinner in her private launch that whizzed through the dark waters of the lake to this formidable teak stilted house. Dinner was lovely. She has a wonderful collection of artifacts from the Shan empire that once ruled this region. The government has tried to get its hands on it.
The ice cream parlor in the market
The hand-powered ferris wheel. You can see the extra people at the top that were the weights that set the thing in motion. They jumped off at the bottom without being crushed by the swinging baskets full of people.
The pilgrims' stairway up to the Pindaya caves.
This was a dismal scene. This motorcycle had bundles of live chickens tied together by the legs and hung over the various parts of the bike.
A meat seller at the Indein market
A fresh boatload of tourists make their way across a bamboo bridge.
Boules, bacci?
Tea-leaf salad. A customary snack in Burma. Pickled tea leaves with various crunchy accompaniments. Fried garlic. roasted sesame seeds, peanuts, tiny fried prawns, and other goodies
In Bagan the parched land does not keep the farmers from growing a variety of crops. Cotton, squash, peanuts, onions, potatoes, corn and maise. a grass like corn grown and chopped for the cows.
In Bagan we had dinner at the house of our guide Kyaw (second from left). Our Yangon guide, Spring (far left), joined us with Kyaw's family. One of his sisters uses the table as a desk for teaching students.
Two Chin women on the porch of the family house
On the way to Chin state we stopped for tea and gas. The driver Tanzo sits by a poster advertising a theater group. These groups perform all over the country and we passed several open trucks on narrow mountain roads transporting the large groups of performers, sometimes as many as 30. What interested me about the poster was the variety of acts from traditional to hip urban. They often perform for 24 hrs. Everything from traditional folk tales to comedy and pop music.
Off th main street in Mindat some kids were having a tea-party, I thought. Apparently it was not that but a noodle shop.
This man we ran into in a remote village on a very steep hill. He was out for a walk.
This man was making a basket to sell in the market. He said he would get about $1.80. The young woman was shelling castor beans, which the government made everyone plant a few years ago with the hope of making bio-diesel. The effort seems to have petered out.
Orphans from the Christian orphanage in Kampelet
I told the kids who were being kept very orderly in my presence that when I counted to three they should all jump. We did this about six times until they were all absolutely hysterical. I don't think the elders approved.
In Bagan I spent an afternoon in the marketplace stocking up on things to bring to Chin state. From previous visits we knew what the most needed items were. We brought various medicines for worms, food poisoning, indigestion, pain of various kinds, bar soap and clothes washing detergent, powdered milk for breastfeeding mothers, toothbrushes and toothpaste, tiger-balm which the old people especially love, lined paper booklets, pencils, pens erasers and so on. We tried to give things out to those most in need and hoped that it would not be sold. One local guide took almost half the inventory when we asked him if he needed anything for his family. We told him he could take one of everything. Opportunity runs like water.
Chin is said to be the poorest in Burma. Things have been compounded by a rat infestation the last two years that has decimated all the crops. It also has meant that there were no seeds for planting. I met a Burmese man working for a French NGO that was trying to provide seeds to the farmers. He was there for three days trying to clear all the government obstacles. The National League for Democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi's organization, has been chastised for supplying rice to the Chin. There were two orphanages in the town of Kampelet. One, which was Christian, had fifty-six children; another Buddhist one had 200-plus. It was unclear why there were so many in this little town. Apparently they were mostly from Chin state. The Christian one was having a difficult time meeting their food needs for the children.
Chin villages around the town of Mindat
The market at Taukkyan, outside Yangon
This woman had just bought a chart from an astrologer. I bet I could tell her fortune too.
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Corrections and addenda
Corrections: Joe returned to Bangkok, read the blog, and pointed out a few errors. There are 8,000 golden Buddha statues in the Pindaya caves, not 80,000. The legendary princesses rescued from the caves by an archer were held captive not by a large spider but by a malevolent nat (spirit being) disguised as a large spider.
Abby Pratt, fellow Burma lover, wrote to tell us that she and her husband Larry once met U Winaya, the renowned sayadow whose body was stolen. She points out that he was the number one monastic advisor to Aung San Suu Kyi.
Abby also mentioned an insane feature of Burma I have not reported on. Passers-by may not assist victims of road accidents until the police arrive and take measurements, conduct interviews, etc. Joe says he also heard that the police sometimes shake down accident victims.
Joe had a good trek in Chin state, but he said the region is even poorer and grimmer than in past years. An infestation of rats has depleted food supplies and seed corn. French and other NGOs are trying to get seeds to people, but the government keeps throwing up bureaucratic obstacles. One Burmese told Joe that this is calculated; hungry people are less likely to be rebellious. True? In Burma, it's far from implausible.
He'll get some pictures up soon.
Abby Pratt, fellow Burma lover, wrote to tell us that she and her husband Larry once met U Winaya, the renowned sayadow whose body was stolen. She points out that he was the number one monastic advisor to Aung San Suu Kyi.
Abby also mentioned an insane feature of Burma I have not reported on. Passers-by may not assist victims of road accidents until the police arrive and take measurements, conduct interviews, etc. Joe says he also heard that the police sometimes shake down accident victims.
Joe had a good trek in Chin state, but he said the region is even poorer and grimmer than in past years. An infestation of rats has depleted food supplies and seed corn. French and other NGOs are trying to get seeds to people, but the government keeps throwing up bureaucratic obstacles. One Burmese told Joe that this is calculated; hungry people are less likely to be rebellious. True? In Burma, it's far from implausible.
He'll get some pictures up soon.
Saturday, April 2, 2011
Burma--Part Two
In The New York Times obituary of mystery novelist H.R.F. Keating, bookstore owner Otto Penzler describes Keating as a kind, sweet man who "carried himself like a Buddhist monk almost." The popular image of monks as serene, contemplative fellows floating through the rough world as on a cloud isn't inaccurate, it just doesn't cover all Buddhist monks. Take U Tay Zaw Ba Ta. That's the real name of the sayadow (abbot) at the Seindon Monastery in Mawlamyine (formerly Moulmein), in moist, green southern Burma. It's hard to distinguish U Tay Zaw Ba Ta from Abe Seckler of Canarsie. The fierce-eyed little seventy-nine-year-old charges around his crumbling teak monastery trailing cheroot ashes, ranting against the government, and yelling imprecations against the police, who help thieves steal architectural details from the nineteenth century building and fence them with antique dealers in Bangkok. The sayadow, ethnically Burmese, is also bitter about the ethnic-Mon building supply dealers who he says cheat him when he purchases wood and concrete to repair the wing of the monastery damaged by Cyclone Nargis in 2009. (The Burmese King Anawrahta of Bagan crushed a centuries-old Mon dynasty in the year 1057, and hard feelings continue.)
The sayadow is not too worked up, however, not to order up tea and fruit for visitors, and to sit down with us---he on a low seat, we on the floor---and to accept a cash offering to help save the monastery. Monks may not touch money, so we presented the donation in an envelope from our room at the Ngwe Moe Hotel. We all grasped the envelope in midair while a lengthy prayer was recited in Pali. My arm was getting tired, and the prayer ended just in time. After the ritual of the offering, the sayadow went on to complain some more about the junta. Monks were instrumental in the 2008 uprising that was brutally put down by the government, and now, the sayadow told us, "fake monks" have been placed in monasteries to spy on the real monks. (Was there a government agent in this monastery? The sayadow didn't say.) Joe spent the afternoon taking pictures in the monastery. (Which was built by Queen Seindon of Mandalay after King Mindon Min died and Burma's next and final king, Thibaw, ascended the throne. Taking no chances, Thibaw's wife saw to it that rivals to the crown and their families were murdered, so Seindon fled south. When Britain completed its conquest of Burma in 1885, Thibaw was shipped off to India to live out his life there with his homicidal consort.)
On our third day in Mawlamyine, we returned to the monastery to say goodbye for another year---this was our fifth visit---and the sayadow pounded us on the back while he prayed in Pali that we enjoyed good fortune and long lives. On the way out, the sayadow pointed out some rebar and cement that an earlier donation of Joe's had helped pay for.
A milder-mannered sayadow is U Thone, at the Badda Myar monastery in Thar Ma Nya, on the way back to Yangon. We had also met this man before---in fact we had twice slept over at the monastery---and were happy to see that his health had improved since we last saw him two years earlier. Though only in his forties, this slender man with an easy way about him and a ready smile, had suffered a number of maladies, possibly made worse by Myanmar's wretched-to-nonexistent health care facilities. (A well-known anti-junta statistic is that then-President Than Shwe's daughter's wedding gifts totaled $35 million, more than the country's health-care budget.)
U Thone, whose politics are about what you'd expect them to be, lives in the shadow of his predecessor, a famous anti-regime figure named U Winaya. This man was so revered when he died several years ago that a shrine was constructed near the monastery and his corpse put on permanent display in a tastefully lighted gold-colored glass box. Not long after we last visited the shrine, however, the body of U Winaya was stolen. Heavily armed men in military gear arrived in two SUVs, tied up the guards, smashed the glass case, and made off with the dead sayadow. The corpse was never recovered. There are a number of theories as to what happened. One is, the government regarded U Winaya as too potent a symbol of resistance and decided to have him get lost. Another is, an anti-regime group, possibly the Keren Liberation Army, took the body, hoping some of its magic could be put to use by them for political purposes. Additionally, some people believe the corpse's magical properties might be good for the thieves' health and stamina, sexual and otherwise. The keepers of the shrine have left it as it was after the theft. Now, through the broken glass of the case, a photographic portrait of U Winaya is visible. Joe took a picture of it. (I used the U Winaya theft as a minor plot point in The 38 Million Dollar Smile.)
On Thursday, the Myanmar military government officially ceased to exist. A parliament chosen in last October's phony election took over. (We met one man who said officials came to his house before the election to make sure he was registered and would vote. At the polling site, officials checked his ballot to make sure he had voted correctly.) President Than Shwe retired on Thursday, and parliament elected Thein Sein, a former general, president. Opinion is divided over what any of this means. Many say that it's just the same crew in mostly civilian garb (25% of seats are still reserved for military officers), with a token minority of reformers who will be unable to accomplish anything. Optimists think a semblance of democracy might somehow lead eventually to actual democracy.
The Aung San Suu Kyi-led opposition has fractured, with some progressives favoring the lifting of Western sanctions and others opposed. Daw Suu Kyi seems to be moving toward ending the country's partial economic isolation (which China and Myanmar's other neighbors ignore), but she hasn't said anything definitive. (A superb book on old and modern Burma is Thant Myint-U's The River of Lost Footsteps: a Personal History of Burma. The author is the grandson of former UN Secretary General U Thant. He makes a good case for ending the sanctions that he sees as pointless. Myint-U is also very good at showing the historical roots of the present nationalistic dictatorship. Among those roots are the military and ideological training of a generation of anti-colonial patriots---including General Aung San, Aung San Suu Kwi's beloved father---in the early 1940s in Imperial Japan. Myint-U says that in some ways, World War II never ended in Burma.)
Several reasons why things need to change in Burma:
Item: a woman we know attended a government conference on why the level of Inle Lake has dropped three feet, threatening the commercial lives of the ethnic Intha lake dwellers. She pointed out that water was just running off the surrounding mountains whenever it rained and wasn't being saved. Officials told her, "Those people must take care of their trees!" She had to explain that there WERE no trees; they had been cut down by cronies of government officials. (Recent deadly mudslides in flooded southern Thailand were also caused by illegal logging.)
Item: A writer in Yangon has had dozens of stories accepted for publication in magazines and newspapers, but none has appeared in print. The government censors intervened and rejected them all. One droll true story told of how 30 poor people from his neighborhood often show up at the writer's house to watch television, leaving behind fleas and other insects he's had to get rid of. The censors said, no, showing 30 people who lacked their own TVs reflected poorly on the nation. They said the story was both implausible and unpatriotic.
Item: Burma has over 2,000 political prisoners. We heard of one who was made to sleep in cold water. Many people believe that the political detainees at Insein prison, outside Yangon, are made to drink water laced with lead to destroy their brains.
Item: A young man went out to buy medicine for his sister, who was ill. He was grabbed by soldiers and forced into the military. When he ran away, he was caught and tortured.
Item: After Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest after the election, some people we know went to her house where thousands had gathered to hear "the lady" speak. When she said she hoped for change but counseled patience, a man shouted back, "I've been patient for twenty years!"
Sometimes people have asked Joe and me if we could think of anything to give them hope. For a while, I gave a little speech about how surprising history could be, and how situations that seemed hopeless suddenly got better. I mentioned South Africa, with Mandela in prison for decades, and Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union, and more recently Egypt, a corrupt police state suddenly becoming a messy but far freer emerging democracy. People listened to this, but apparently it seemed awfully remote to them, and not at all relevant to what they see when they get up in the morning. So I stopped saying this stuff. It felt cheap and easy, and it didn't help.
What does help a little is showing up. Show the Burmese they are not forgotten. Spend a little money, donate to a monastery, over-tip. Even Aung San Suu Kyi is now against the tourism boycott. If anybody wants to go, we can put you in touch with the right people there. If you can't go---a trip to Burma is not practical for most people we know---lobby to end the U.S. sanctions, which, thanks mainly to China, have no effect. Engagement can only help, and it's what most Burmese want.
By the time I post this, Joe will be back in Bangkok. He'll have ten thousand more pictures from the saddest, most beautiful place on earth, so keep an eye out.
The sayadow is not too worked up, however, not to order up tea and fruit for visitors, and to sit down with us---he on a low seat, we on the floor---and to accept a cash offering to help save the monastery. Monks may not touch money, so we presented the donation in an envelope from our room at the Ngwe Moe Hotel. We all grasped the envelope in midair while a lengthy prayer was recited in Pali. My arm was getting tired, and the prayer ended just in time. After the ritual of the offering, the sayadow went on to complain some more about the junta. Monks were instrumental in the 2008 uprising that was brutally put down by the government, and now, the sayadow told us, "fake monks" have been placed in monasteries to spy on the real monks. (Was there a government agent in this monastery? The sayadow didn't say.) Joe spent the afternoon taking pictures in the monastery. (Which was built by Queen Seindon of Mandalay after King Mindon Min died and Burma's next and final king, Thibaw, ascended the throne. Taking no chances, Thibaw's wife saw to it that rivals to the crown and their families were murdered, so Seindon fled south. When Britain completed its conquest of Burma in 1885, Thibaw was shipped off to India to live out his life there with his homicidal consort.)
On our third day in Mawlamyine, we returned to the monastery to say goodbye for another year---this was our fifth visit---and the sayadow pounded us on the back while he prayed in Pali that we enjoyed good fortune and long lives. On the way out, the sayadow pointed out some rebar and cement that an earlier donation of Joe's had helped pay for.
A milder-mannered sayadow is U Thone, at the Badda Myar monastery in Thar Ma Nya, on the way back to Yangon. We had also met this man before---in fact we had twice slept over at the monastery---and were happy to see that his health had improved since we last saw him two years earlier. Though only in his forties, this slender man with an easy way about him and a ready smile, had suffered a number of maladies, possibly made worse by Myanmar's wretched-to-nonexistent health care facilities. (A well-known anti-junta statistic is that then-President Than Shwe's daughter's wedding gifts totaled $35 million, more than the country's health-care budget.)
U Thone, whose politics are about what you'd expect them to be, lives in the shadow of his predecessor, a famous anti-regime figure named U Winaya. This man was so revered when he died several years ago that a shrine was constructed near the monastery and his corpse put on permanent display in a tastefully lighted gold-colored glass box. Not long after we last visited the shrine, however, the body of U Winaya was stolen. Heavily armed men in military gear arrived in two SUVs, tied up the guards, smashed the glass case, and made off with the dead sayadow. The corpse was never recovered. There are a number of theories as to what happened. One is, the government regarded U Winaya as too potent a symbol of resistance and decided to have him get lost. Another is, an anti-regime group, possibly the Keren Liberation Army, took the body, hoping some of its magic could be put to use by them for political purposes. Additionally, some people believe the corpse's magical properties might be good for the thieves' health and stamina, sexual and otherwise. The keepers of the shrine have left it as it was after the theft. Now, through the broken glass of the case, a photographic portrait of U Winaya is visible. Joe took a picture of it. (I used the U Winaya theft as a minor plot point in The 38 Million Dollar Smile.)
On Thursday, the Myanmar military government officially ceased to exist. A parliament chosen in last October's phony election took over. (We met one man who said officials came to his house before the election to make sure he was registered and would vote. At the polling site, officials checked his ballot to make sure he had voted correctly.) President Than Shwe retired on Thursday, and parliament elected Thein Sein, a former general, president. Opinion is divided over what any of this means. Many say that it's just the same crew in mostly civilian garb (25% of seats are still reserved for military officers), with a token minority of reformers who will be unable to accomplish anything. Optimists think a semblance of democracy might somehow lead eventually to actual democracy.
The Aung San Suu Kyi-led opposition has fractured, with some progressives favoring the lifting of Western sanctions and others opposed. Daw Suu Kyi seems to be moving toward ending the country's partial economic isolation (which China and Myanmar's other neighbors ignore), but she hasn't said anything definitive. (A superb book on old and modern Burma is Thant Myint-U's The River of Lost Footsteps: a Personal History of Burma. The author is the grandson of former UN Secretary General U Thant. He makes a good case for ending the sanctions that he sees as pointless. Myint-U is also very good at showing the historical roots of the present nationalistic dictatorship. Among those roots are the military and ideological training of a generation of anti-colonial patriots---including General Aung San, Aung San Suu Kwi's beloved father---in the early 1940s in Imperial Japan. Myint-U says that in some ways, World War II never ended in Burma.)
Several reasons why things need to change in Burma:
Item: a woman we know attended a government conference on why the level of Inle Lake has dropped three feet, threatening the commercial lives of the ethnic Intha lake dwellers. She pointed out that water was just running off the surrounding mountains whenever it rained and wasn't being saved. Officials told her, "Those people must take care of their trees!" She had to explain that there WERE no trees; they had been cut down by cronies of government officials. (Recent deadly mudslides in flooded southern Thailand were also caused by illegal logging.)
Item: A writer in Yangon has had dozens of stories accepted for publication in magazines and newspapers, but none has appeared in print. The government censors intervened and rejected them all. One droll true story told of how 30 poor people from his neighborhood often show up at the writer's house to watch television, leaving behind fleas and other insects he's had to get rid of. The censors said, no, showing 30 people who lacked their own TVs reflected poorly on the nation. They said the story was both implausible and unpatriotic.
Item: Burma has over 2,000 political prisoners. We heard of one who was made to sleep in cold water. Many people believe that the political detainees at Insein prison, outside Yangon, are made to drink water laced with lead to destroy their brains.
Item: A young man went out to buy medicine for his sister, who was ill. He was grabbed by soldiers and forced into the military. When he ran away, he was caught and tortured.
Item: After Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest after the election, some people we know went to her house where thousands had gathered to hear "the lady" speak. When she said she hoped for change but counseled patience, a man shouted back, "I've been patient for twenty years!"
Sometimes people have asked Joe and me if we could think of anything to give them hope. For a while, I gave a little speech about how surprising history could be, and how situations that seemed hopeless suddenly got better. I mentioned South Africa, with Mandela in prison for decades, and Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union, and more recently Egypt, a corrupt police state suddenly becoming a messy but far freer emerging democracy. People listened to this, but apparently it seemed awfully remote to them, and not at all relevant to what they see when they get up in the morning. So I stopped saying this stuff. It felt cheap and easy, and it didn't help.
What does help a little is showing up. Show the Burmese they are not forgotten. Spend a little money, donate to a monastery, over-tip. Even Aung San Suu Kyi is now against the tourism boycott. If anybody wants to go, we can put you in touch with the right people there. If you can't go---a trip to Burma is not practical for most people we know---lobby to end the U.S. sanctions, which, thanks mainly to China, have no effect. Engagement can only help, and it's what most Burmese want.
By the time I post this, Joe will be back in Bangkok. He'll have ten thousand more pictures from the saddest, most beautiful place on earth, so keep an eye out.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)