For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question (30 page)

“Htan Dah,” I said, staying my hands and looking at him, though he continued to look at the paper. “You’re not listening to me.”

“Yes!” he said. “I am listening! It is usual for you to hang out with white people. It is not usual to live with refugees. Usually the white people who come here do not live in the house with us.”

“Wait, what? Your volunteers don’t live here?”

“No! It is . . . optional. Usually they stay in hotel, or in another house, like Abby.”

“Really?”

“Yes!”

“I didn’t know that.”

I dropped another braid. It disintegrated.

“Htan Dah, I don’t want you to leave. I’m not ready to go home.”

Eh Soe bounded up the stairs. “Darling, where you have been, I have missed you very much,” he said, sitting cross-legged on the other side of Htan Dah.

“Aw, Eh Soe, I missed you too. Didn’t you hear me say I was going out to dinner?”

“No! I asked everyone where you were, but they didn’t have any idea about that.”

“We went to the Crocodile Tear, and Casa Mia.”

“Are you very drunk?”

“No. I was maybe a little bit drunk earlier, before dinner, but not now.”

“Oh! I thought you would be very drunk.”

“Really? Why?”

“Because, you are fighting with your girlfriend.”

We talked about girlfriends for a while before Eh Soe went to talk to his and I got up to go to bed. There was light coming from the door to the balcony, so I poked my head out. Htoo Moo had set up camp there, lying on top of a mat of green and yellow woven plastic, a wool blanket about him and mosquito net hanging from two of its corners, ready to be strung up by the opposite two when the time came, the mesh in a pile around his legs for now. Someone else was sleeping in the living room, so he’d moved. I said goodnight to him before closing the door, while he continued to read an English/Burmese dictionary of military terms.

 

FRIDAY MORNING,
the boys were all business again as they crowded into the living room for the weekly staff meeting. They took their places on the floor, Htan Dah Indian-style at the front of the room with a dry-erase board, facing them. Eh Soe sat among the crowd with a notebook and pen ready. The people around him murmured to one another, waiting patiently for the engagement to commence.

The
kaw la wah
—white people, that is, Abby and me—however, had worked ourselves up to total frenzy. One of my erstwhile advanced students had walked in the door with eyes red and sticky looking; he’d just come back from some assignment in camp, where
he’d contracted pinkeye. He stuck his finger in one infected eye while explaining this to me, eliciting my desperate plea that he keep his hands away from his face and go wash them immediately. He just laughed at me, and continued to rub his itchy eyeballs while walking around the house touching things, computers, doors. Htan Dah had looked up alarmed when I burst into the computer room before the meeting and shouted “Don’t touch your face!” at him. Abby went on a mad search of the house for disinfectant. Some of the guys laughed at us when we warned them of the impending ocular-disease epidemic. Some of them laughed at us while asking if we thought we would die from pinkeye. Abby didn’t give a shit. When Ta Mla’s slaughtering of two chickens in the kitchen before breakfast coincided unhappily with 1) our running out of dish detergent and 2) the
Bangkok Post
’s running a front-page article about a massive resurgence of bird-flu outbreak, she ran to 7-Eleven to buy cleaning products.

The hush and calm of the meeting could have spread to Abby and me, who were present, sitting on the edge of the room in chairs. Htan Dah had written the abbreviations of different departments or projects within the organization at the top of the board and was very orderly calling on their representatives for reports and then very meticulously summing up their lulling Karen speeches in one English sentence on the board. Eh Soe, who was acting as secretary, was keeping diligent notes, and saying, anytime he missed something, “Please repeat that.” Ta Mla and a guy everyone called The Mechanic, who didn’t speak a word of English and therefore never spoke to me, and who sometimes wore black fingerless gloves, had their hands on each other’s legs and feet, comfortable. They were both wearing T-shirts they’d gotten in school at camp bearing the enumerated tenets of the KNU revolution. So many of the guys had so many of these shirts that it wasn’t uncommon for two to be making the ubiquitous, heavy political statement on the same day.

1. For us surrender is out of the question.

2. Recognition of Karen State must be completed.

3. We shall retain our arms.

4. We shall decide our own political destiny.

Everyone was lounging. Everyone was quietly attentive. But Abby and I were already on edge, and then, soon enough, Htan Dah called on the guy the KNU soldiers had dropped off the night before.

Eh Kaw looked bad. His face seemed gaunter than even his slim frame suggested it should have been, and his dark skin was dull, ashen. He’d been on some type of surveying trip in Burma, checking on the progress of a school, it seemed, as well as carrying in some of BA’s rations from the Thailand Burma Border Consortium to distribute them. He looked tired as he said whatever it was that made Htan Dah write on the board, “Both of teachers are afraid of SPDC and DKBA.” Eh Kaw talked a little bit more, and all the guys started laughing. Htan Dah wrote, “One of the teachers got shock when she heard the firing.” He stopped, considering for a moment before adding, “She is timid.” Eh Kaw went on for a few more moments, and everyone nodded.

“He has malaria,” Htan Dah translated out loud for Abby and me, looking at us.

“Oh no,” I said, because I felt bad for him. The personal implications of his misfortune dawned on me surprisingly slowly: This guy and I slept and socialized an easy mosquito’s flight away from each other. Lots of my roommates had had malaria before, but Eh Kaw had it right now. As I wasn’t taking any prophylactic medication, this was pretty bad news for me.

Days ago, I’d been at the table when the mosquitoes started pouring in and attacking at dusk, and a visiting BA staffer from Bangkok had said, “You’re going to get malaria.” Technically, according to the research I’d done before I left, Thai cities had eradicated malaria.
But I knew by now that the disease was raging just over the border, which these guys regularly hopped—them and millions of other refugees and migrants, so that the disease was a risk in this border town where I sat.
⁵⁶
I’d told the visitor, a chubby Karen guy with glasses and impeccable English, that I could probably survive a bout of malaria. “Not necessarily,” he’d said. “If it goes to your brain, it will kill you.” It was true that cerebral malaria required immediate treatment. If I were infected and didn’t get medicine, I could wake up feeling fine and be dead by the next morning. And I wouldn’t be the first BA volunteer to die this way.
⁵⁷

Htan Dah was sounding similar alarms now. “There is a lot of malaria in that area,” he said. “You can die easily.” I wasn’t positive whether he was being dramatic for my benefit or if he was just being perfectly candid and the content made it seem dramatic. I suspected at least a hint of the former, though what he was saying was, of course, true.

He went on to announce that one of the BA trainers had been arrested on his way to camp and had to pay twenty thousand baht—some six hundred dollars—for his release. Abby and I balked at this
number. The staff seemed concerned, though not surprised. Htan Dah continued, in English, that they were all at increased security risk, as Thai work permits expired soon and there would be more cops and more eagerness to check IDs and arrest people. As a final announcement, he said he had been selected, along with eleven others, to attend the upcoming fall semester at the journalism school in Chiang Mai.

“Oh!” I said involuntarily, and clapped once, but no one else said anything, and Htan Dah never broke his impassive meeting face. Only Abby and I were stirring, I squirming in my seat, she asking me if I had known that. I hadn’t.

“When did you find out you got in(!)?” I asked, accosting Htan Dah in the computer room after the meeting.

“They sent me email . . . maybe . . . couple days ago.”

“A couple days(!)? I can’t believe you didn’t tell me! That’s so exciting! Why didn’t you tell me?”

Htan Dah shrugged. “I forgot.”

One of the other staff guys came up to me and handed me a mailing envelope. “For you?” he asked. He’d just picked it up from the office PO box downtown.

It was indeed addressed to me, from Columbus, Ohio, and had the size and heft of a hardcover Che Guevara biography. I started jumping up and down.

“Do you know what’s in here?” I asked, tearing it open.

“No,” Htan Dah said, watching me.

I pulled out the cream-colored tome. The jacket had been lost somewhere, or maybe I’d never had it, since I’d borrowed the book from a New Orleans library before Katrina. “What’s in it?” Htan Dah asked. “Money?”

That irritated me a little, though I knew it wasn’t an unreasonable question; these guys sent money, if any money was ever to be had to be sent, in books. The Blay’s brother had decided to leave Burma to study in India a couple of years ago, getting there, and back, the
only way he could afford—walking—and while he was gone, The Blay had sent him money in books. But “This is that Che biography I was telling you about!” I said. “What do you mean, ‘What’s in it?’ There’s nothing in it. There’s a book in it. It’s a book. It’s for you.” I handed it over.

“Wow,” Htan Dah said, taking it. “Thank you very much.” He stuck out his free hand.

I took it, and shook it, but while doing so said, “We’re not shaking hands!” and then grabbed him into his second hug ever. He put his arms up, like the Canadian had shown him, but though they were on my back, they didn’t give in to the gesture, and neither did his perfectly rigid body, because it hadn’t been taught to like mine had.

“Here, let me have this for one second,” I said, releasing him and taking the book back. In my mother’s house, it was a sin to gift anything with a cover without writing something on the inside of it. I gave it back to him a little while later, inscribed.

I went to class. When I got back, I sat down in the living room next to Htoo Moo and watched music videos with him. Before long, he stood up and started doing squats. He put his arms out in front of him and clasped his hands together, standing next to my chair, tilted his ass up and then dropped it nearly to the floor, bending at the knees, his eyes on Eminem on the screen. The sets came closer together and became interspersed with an occasional crack of the neck or shoulder roll as it got later. It was time to play football. Or soccer, as I was keen on calling it. No one seemed to know how it had started, but everyone knew that the hour-long game started at five on weekdays.

“I want to come watch today,” I told Htoo Moo. “Is that okay?”

“Yes,” he said, smiling. “Very yes.”

“Htan Dah, you should come,” I said when we walked past him in the kitchen, on our way out.

“I don’t think so(!),” he said. “Maybe some other time. Right now I am too fat.”

Htoo Moo nodded. I knew he thought Htan Dah was fat; he’d told me so several times.

“Why do you guys keep saying that? You’re not fat.”

“Yes!” Htan Dah said. He pulled up his shirt, exposing his belly. He pinched the skin and thin layer of fat covering his abs. “I never exercise in the rainy season because I get very lazy. Maybe in the summer I will play.”

Htoo Moo and Ta Mla usually took bicycles to the field because they didn’t have the money to waste on gas, and it was a short enough ride—and more exercise. But since there were only two bikes, Htoo Moo drove me on the back of a motorbike. Ta Mla pedaled along ahead of us as we went, slowly, out of the neighborhood, off a main street, onto a narrower one lined with rough Thai houses and shops. Before long, we turned onto a dirt road.

We made our way to the back of some sort of farm. The season had turned the path to a sloppy mire, the mud gummy and choppy where it emerged from streams and puddles of rain and farm runoff. Some of the standing water was thick with shit and unrecognizable surface growths. I kept my flip-flopped feet up and hoped not to get any parasites while Htoo Moo did some scary off-roading and maneuvering. The cattle trail wound far into grazing pastures, opening up near the end at one with metal goalposts on its edges, the grass between them trampled away. The field was empty when we arrived at twenty till, but within fifteen minutes, a dozen motorbikes rumbled up to the playing ground.

The guys divided up arbitrarily, an ethnic mix spanning across the field, Karen making up a slight majority among the Thais and Burmans. It was just shirts or skins here. Nearly everyone wore polyester shorts and canvas sneakers. A few had proper cleats. The overcast
sky was seven shades of gray, deep and rich against the screaming green grass and trees, as the game started out slowly.

The center midfielder kicked the ball to his teammate, who kicked it to another teammate, and the pack had just started moving when someone kicked it out of bounds. The athletes waited, chatting, looking at the ground, stretching their arms and legs while someone retrieved the ball. The game picked up pace as the shots became well aimed and the players better prepared. The boys broke out their moves. They splashed through the puddles and slipped on slick, bright soil, laughing when they went down, playing vigorously and fast but laughing always, when they kicked the ball, when they missed the ball, when they narrowly avoided stepping into the pair of enormous cow pies in the middle of the field. There was one stone-faced guy, one inevitable guy with a pectoral dragon tattoo, a fashion mullet, and an earring. He had managed to muster a soul patch in this sea of smooth Asian faces. When he fell, landing his white shorts in mud, he did not think it was funny.