Back from Burma

I got back to Bangkok from Burma on Monday, a relief. The place was hot, enervated and tragic. Joe is still there, trekking in the North and East. He is utterly taken by the country. It's Asia a hundred years ago, sometimes a thousand years ago, and he loves both the simplicity of life in rural Burma and the quiet dignity with which its Buddhist-to-the-core people make decent lives for themselves and one another even as their own government heaps the most grotesque indignities upon them. I like these things too, but the place gets me down.

I wrote an op-ed piece for the Berkshire Eagle on Burma under the pseudonym Gerald R. Scutler. It briefly updates the political situation, tells about some survivors of Cyclone Nargis we met or heard about, and describes the funeral we attended of a senior monk. The piece should run soon in the Eagle, and you can Google it at "Berkshire Eagle Burma Gerald R. Scutler." The pseudonym is a precaution. Western journalists aren't allowed into Myanmar. On my visa application I'm a "retired teacher." Though when I told a Burmese friend I was being careful not to say anything on the internet that might cause problems for me or anyone else later on, he said, "Don't worry. They can't read."

I am not in touch with Joe---AOL is blocked in Burma most places most of the time---but he managed to phone his mother before the entire country ran out of $20 phone cards. Barbara emailed me to say Joe was fine and he was happy off in the forest living among his people, the Shan, Karen, Kachin, Wild Wa, etc. He flies on to India April 3 to take more pictures in Varanasi, then returns to Bangkok April 15. We arrive home April 22 and will have to act like grown-ups for a while. But not for TOO long, we hope. (We go to Zurich May 11-18. A gay film festival there will show two Strachey films, and they are recklessly paying me to come over and say what I think of the films, ho ho.)

I love being back in Bangkok. It is stinking hot, but it's full of happy-go-lucky Thais. I've started taking Thai language lessons. The "natural" approach used at the American University Alumni Association language school is basically a "plunge in and sink or swim" method, and so far I am sinking.

It's partly guilt that led me to do this. I have a good time snickering to myself
at the way many Thais speak English. When I returned to Bangkok on Monday, the desk clerk at the Pinnacle Hotel said to me, "Bama lane?" She was asking if it had rained in Burma. But at least many Thais can speak English at all. So I plan to do the best I can, and if I provide the Thais with a few good laughs along the way, that's fine too.

I am haunted though with the memory of giving the United Nations day speech to the student assembly at Shimeles Habte School in Addis Ababa in the fall of 1963. Insanely, I decided to give the speech in Amharic. My Amharic was limited and clumsy and not much beyond the level of Where is the railway station? The Ethiopian teacher I asked to help me translate my remarks into Amharic was doubtful and kept suggesting that maybe I should just give the speech in English, which students in the upper grades could pretty much follow. But oh no, we're the Peace Corps, we ride with the people, thought I. It was nuts. I must have sounded to the students as if instead of invoking the spirit of enlightened internationalism, I was standing up there saying, "Bama lane, Bama lane." If they snickered, they had the good manners---which is very Ethiopian---not to do it to my face.

One of the many pleasures of life in Bangkok is reading the letters to the editor in The Bangkok Post, one of two English language dailies. Most of the letters consist of teeth gnashing over Thailand's chaotic politics, which I won't attempt to sort out here. (Today the "red shirts" are assembled in front of Goverment House to try to force the "yellow shirts" out of office by yelling at them.) A sizeable minority of the Post's letters, however, are from foreigners who have chosen to live in Thailand but spend an inordinate amount of time complaining about the place. There was a good one yesterday from a man objecting to Bangkok taxi drivers who endanger their passengers by taking their hands off the wheel to "wai" three times whenever they pass a Buddhist temple or shrine. Personally I have never witnessed this phenomenon, but hope to.

Hua Hin to Bangkok to Burma

Breaking news...medical update! Yesterday Joe placed his exit token in a Bangkok subway turnstile and the gate failed to open. Without giving it a thought, he vaulted over the gate using both arms, painlessly and without dislocating his shoulder. Thank you, Bangkok Nursing Home Hospital surgical team!

Otherwise, we don't have much to report. A few days ago Joe spoke to his sister Catherine on the phone from Hua Hin. She asked, "So, what have you guys been doing?" Joe said, "Doing?" He had to think about that. Mostly, in Hua Hin, we strolled on the beach and joined the Thais in complaining about the 99-degree heat. Joe did arm exercises, and I walked into the village of Khao Takian, about a mile from our hotel, and participated in the latest of a series of activities I think of as Bad Haircuts Across Asia. When I told the barber I wanted just "a little" trimmed off, she apparently understood only the word "little" and thought I wanted a lot of little hairs sticking out of my head. I ended up looking like an elderly eleven-year-old---somewhat Benjamin Button-like, though not of course very Brad Pitt-like. It was my worst Asian haircut since the one I got two years ago in Saigon, a haircut I came to think of as Uncle Ho's Revenge.

I thought of Vietnam a lot in Hua Hin, for I was reading Denis Johnson's great brilliant mess of a phantasmagoric novel about the Vietnam war called Tree of Smoke. I recommend it. It made me wonder why, when Joe and I traveled in Vietnam two years ago, we were not asked to leave, or maybe just murdered in our beds. Here is a brief excerpt fron Tree of Smoke, in which the Canadian nurse Kathy Jones is thinking about some GIs she has just encountered. "The American soldiers seemed far too much like the Canadians---pulling her heart out in an undertow of joy and sorrow, guilt and anger, and affection.... [The GIs] threw hand grenades through doorways and blew the arms and legs off ignorant farmers, they rescued puppies from starvation and smuggled them home to Mississippi in their shirts, they burned down whole villages and raped young girls, they stole medicines by the jeepload to save the lives of orphans." That sounds like a summation of U.S. foreign policy from Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush.

On a lighter note (am I sounding like CNN?), I also caught up with reading a couple of copies of Pattaya Today, which I had carried to Hua Hin from Jomtien Beach. This English language weekly is similar, I've heard, to the daily Thai-language edition of the Bangkok Post, full of gore and mayhem. (The English edition of the Post, which I read, reports on Thai politics, where the gore is largely verbal, and reprints Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman.) Here are some headlines from the February 16-28 Pattaya Today. YOUNG FOOD DELIVERER RUN OVER BY DELIVERY TRUCK. YOUNG MAN WITH NO HONEY COMMITS CRIME. JOHN DOE FOUND IN A MANGLED STATE IN BUSH. SADISTIC HOTHEADS USE BASEBALL IN VICIOUS ATTACK. MONKEY GIRL'S APPEARANCE WAS DUE TO BAD KARMA.

My favorite Pattaya Today story appeared under the headline FOOD POISONING TURNS INTO DOMESTIC VIOLENCE. Happily, I reproduce it here in full.
"Crime Suppression unit officers sallied forth in force after finding out that the apartment house behind the Toongrad temple had become the scene of horrendous doom. Miss Kanja and Mr. Pirot, a paired couple, were rushed to Banglamung hospital as both were in a very bloodied condition. They were followed there by investigators but they failed to find out much as both victims were asleep.
"Later, however, Miss Kanja said that she, her boyfriend and some friends had been having a drink in front of the apartment. One thing led to another and everyone became rather drunk which led to a heated argument about nothing in particular. There was also a dispute about some food which had been served and which might have been past its sell-by date.
"Eventually the party of joy did break up, but an hour later it seems that one disillusioned partygoer came back with a gun and shot both the host and hostess. The mystery man then hopped back on his motor bike and disappeared into the night long before the police could do anything about it. Inquiries are continuing and, in the name of peace and order, let's hope there's a good result."

Joe and I are hoping for a good result from March 9 to 23, when we'll be traveling in Burma. Like Miss Kanja and Mr. Pirot, the blog wil be asleep during this period because internet service in Myanmar/Burma is poor to nonexistent. Joe will remain in Burma for an additional week of trekking among the hill tribes and then fly on to Varanasi, India to take more pictures there. I'll be in Bangkok working on a book and---don't laugh yet---taking Thai language lessons. Joe returns to Bangkok April 15 and we fly home on the 22nd. Please try to get rid of the snow by then.