For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question (34 page)

Htan Dah cooked for us, as usual, though he did it on his haunches, on the floor, over coals rather than standing at our gas range. Abby and I hovered in the doorway, chatting with him as he worked with the help of a couple of guys, the little kitchen filled to capacity with squatting men. They were making pork, but also stir-fried greens and omelets with onions, which Htan Dah often prepared for us in Mae Sot. Ta Eh Thaw, the only Karen girl in Office One, had been making similar meatless fare in Htan Dah’s absence, and we’d eventually realized that the detailed and extensive instructions he’d left her while he was gone included feeding us.

After breakfast, we all retired to the cool semidarkness of the main room, cloud-filtered daylight seeping in through the hole for the door in the back wall. Htan Dah changed into a
longyi
of green, white, and black plaid. We sat cross-legged with the small group of calmly eager new staff members. They looked like teenagers. Some of them were.

We went around in a circle. Abby and I introduced ourselves, and then the guys tried their best English to tell us their names and where they were from. Htan Dah drew a little map of Burma on a dry-erase board propped up on the floor, against the wall. He indicated with his marker where in the country the boys’ homes had been. Most of
them were from the lowlands, further inland than the eastern hills of Karen State.

Htan Dah had some training to do yet, so Abby and I sat quietly for a while as he sat on the floor and spoke, dry-erase marker in hand. I studied a large poster of cartoon depictions of the things you couldn’t do to a child per the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, then went to the other room to lie on the floor. Abby pulled out a book.

When Htan Dah was done, the three of us retired onto the little back porch, he sitting on one side, leaning against the house, I sitting on the other, she leaning against one of the poles that supported the awning protecting us from the rain falling all around.

“Are you done with your training?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“So you can come home with us?”

“Yes(!).”

“What were you guys talking about in there?”

“I was telling them why they have to fight. In training, we do history, Burmese history, Karen history, because many people don’t know about the war.” Htan Dah had told me about this before. When he traveled to camp to give lectures and screen videos, there were always audience members, young ones, who didn’t realize there was a war on; they were so used to living in camp that some didn’t even know they were refugees.

“Aren’t these guys Karen?”

“Yes(!). But even Karen people, many Karen people do not understand what is the political situation in their country because they have no way to get information. You know, these guys are from the city. They do not even speak Karen.”

“Really?” Abby and I asked.

“Yes! The government does not allow them to teach Karen in the school, so they speak only Burmese.”

“So how do you talk to them?”

“In Burmese.” He thought about this for a second and frowned. “I do not like to write on the board in Burmese. I fear that I will . . . spelling . . . incorrectly.”

We listened to the rain. The sound came in layers, the pitch lower and denser, a wall of precipitation falling in the distance, the drops that slapped the leaves of the nearby flora higher and more distinctive. The chickens clucked lightly below us. I realized what had been giving the camp an eerie sense of emptiness.

“It’s so quiet here,” I said. The silence was thoroughly penetrating. The most-reported number of people living in a Karen refugee camp household is six. Most Karen refugee camps in Thailand don’t meet the UNHCR’s minimum space standards. Fifty thousand refugees packed in here, and not a fucking sound.

Htan Dah shrugged. “Yes,” he said. “Nothing to do.” He was looking out past the porch. Beyond it, bright trees on the close succession of hills shocked the gray of the sky. He was right that there was nothing to do in Mae La. But keeping up Mae La, which was more populous than some small countries, took a lot of doing. It had twenty-four primary and secondary schools. Aide Medicale Internationale had 250 workers there, and in addition to the aforementioned vast feeding and education infrastructure, nine international NGOs handled health and sanitation in the camps. Everything from eye care to prosthesis supply was provided on a budget of $6 million a year, to take 2007’s expenditures. Running the whole camp show required no fewer than twenty NGOs and added up to an annual price tag of $66 million, with the United States providing the biggest piece of the funding pie, 27 percent. But no amount of money was going to give the inhabitants something to do in them.

“I prefer camp,” Htan Dah said quietly, apparently to no one. I looked at him, but he still looked off from the porch, into the distance.

“Really?” I asked. “But you just said when we were walking up here
that it sucks. Weren’t you so bored in camp that you just did drugs all the time?” This was a rhetorical question. He’d already told me that he’d freebased meth for years. He would sneak out of camp with a friend and go to a nearby Mon village and buy some pills. In Huay Kaloke, they cost more than a dollar each. In Umpiem, they were half as much, because they were actually made in the village that sold them, Htan Dah thought. He and his friend would wait in the front room of the dealer’s place while someone went to get the goods—in the back of the house, outside, at another house, they couldn’t see where. Htan Dah used the money his mom earned illegally doing labor, which she gave him to buy food, so he would have more variety than his rations afforded him in his diet. Twice a week he and his friends would close themselves in one of the communal bamboo bathroom stalls with a lighter and a crushed pill and a piece of foil. A lot of refugees liked it because it gave them energy against all the odds, Htan Dah said. Personally, he didn’t really like the way it made him feel, unable to sleep or eat, but oh, my god, was he bored,
⁶³
and he did like the ceremony, the way it made him seem to belong to something, part of a community, and the smell of it, and the fact that it was one interesting thing in his life. He also found it helpful for prolonging drinking binges. But then he “lost control” and sold his watch, the only valuable object he ever owned, an addiction cliché
that apparently knows no international borders. Eventually, he quit, cold turkey, because he was afraid he’d get arrested, or sick. Eh Soe had shown me a picture of Htan Dah from that time, and he was so gaunt I couldn’t recognize him. (“Who’s this?” “It’s Htan Dah!” “What’s the matter with his face?” “That’s when he was doing drugs.”)

Htan Dah shrugged. “Yes, but here we can play guitar, and laugh, without . . . police, and worrying.”

We watched a little girl, who looked like she was about five, walk down the path below the elevated porch. She navigated the steep, choppy mud in pink gum boots and a purple dress, miraculously retaining her balance with a giant bucket of water in her arms and no traction on her feet.

“Okay,” I said. “So why don’t you move back to camp?”

“Because. In camp, I cannot work. I cannot work for my people. Just, sitting, and talking, and eating, and sleeping—it accomplishes nothing.”

We debated staying for dinner, and staying the night, but Abby wasn’t wild about the prospect. “Also,” Htan Dah said, “we have this pork.” Someone had slaughtered a pig and cleaved off a giant hunk as a gift to Htan Dah. He’d finished the training he’d come for, and he was anxious to get the pork back to BA, where there was electricity and a refrigerator. Currently, it was sitting on the porch in a garbage bag, as it had been for some time.

So we three and the pork bag hopped a
songthaew
toward Mae Sot. Abby went down hard in the mud as we climbed aboard with a full load of passengers. The driver got into the front seat, then got out again, and came around to rescue Abby or me from the Asian riffraff packing the back. I took him up on the shotgun offer in the name of my nausea. Htan Dah stood on the back bumper and held on to the arch rail for the whole wretchedly winding road back.

At Office One, Htan Dah’s pork in the fridge and his email checked, in the still twilight, after work and before whiskey, I sat in my room writing things down. The house was as quiet as a refugee camp.

“What are you doing?” Htan Dah asked. He walked through my doorway slowly, long seconds between his steps, always so tentative in interrupting.

“Nothing,” I said. I put my pen down. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Okay,” I said, laughing. “Let’s go to a bar.”

“Okay.”

My eyes widened. “Really? Wait, seriously?”

Htan Dah nodded, one hard chin dip. “Sure. Why not?”

Debilitating fear of police? Irrational terror of stray dogs? Deportment for everyone? “No reason!” I said. “Can we walk?”

So it was that we walked out of the driveway and down the street and toward downtown. We cut through the temple grounds, with the Buddhas long- and slim-faced, strung white lights twinkling in the air around the stupa. Though I’d been in Mae Sot five weeks, I’d never walked all the way into town after dusk. In the darkness, the streets were still warm and wet. Tuk-tuks and cars and motorbikes crowded them as usual, and the storefronts were still cramped. “Have you never been to a bar before, ever?” I asked Htan Dah.

“No! Never! I—”

“Yes, I know, you’re a refugee. I was just asking.”

The Crocodile Tear sat in a row of guesthouses and restaurants for tourists. The bar itself evidently pandered to both NGO workers and wealthy Thai businessmen interested in simulating the experience of getting hammered in Middle America. Our menu boasted cocktails with names like Billabong, featuring ingredients that didn’t exist in Thailand at large, triple sec and curaçao of multiple colors. A band onstage was covering “Paint It Black” in very questionable English.

“I used to get drunk and dance around like a jackass to this song in college,” I said, watching the bloated, flushed Thai men singing along at the table next to us.

“I think they are very happy,” Htan Dah said. He took in our surroundings without turning his head much, as discreetly as possible.
Wood walls, wood tables. Bottles of booze lined up behind a short wood bar in the back corner, where the girls in tight T-shirts filled drink orders. Fat guys singing Rolling Stones. Oh, nope. Now they were moving on to “Brown-Eyed Girl.”

“What do you want to drink?” I asked Htan Dah.

“I don’t know!” In ascending notes. “I don’t know what to drink! I don’t know what I’m doing. What do you think?”

“Well, generally, I drink a lot of vodka. Have you ever had vodka?”

“No. But I would like to try.”

“Okay. We should celebrate. Have you ever done a shot?”

“No!” he exclaimed, enthusiastically even for him. He smiled broadly, like he was the luckiest son of a bitch living. “I have never been shot!”

I laughed hard, though that probably wasn’t funny. I ordered two shots of vodka and a pack of Marlboros and explained that we were going to throw back the little glasses the girl in the little shirt brought us. Htan Dah watched me grip my shot glass lightly, my thumb and two forefingers on either side of its middle. He did the same, and followed me as well when I picked it up and held it out toward him.

“Congratulations,” I said. “Here’s to getting into J-school.” Htan Dah nodded another hard nod.

I clinked the lip of my glass into his and looked at him square. “Down in one. Ready?”

We ordered a round of tequila shots, since he’d never had tequila before. He liked that better than vodka, so we had another round of those. He’d never ordered and been served food out before, despite his living so close to all these sit-down establishments for so long, so we got plates of hot red curry and steaming rice. We shot more booze and played Who Would You Rather? using the big table of tourist girls behind us. I picked the prettier one every time. Invariably, he chose as his theoretical lover whichever of the choices looked more “flexible”—as in adaptable or easygoing, not as in doing the splits.
We hollered at each other over the band, whose set Htan Dah knew as well as I did. We smoked cigarettes and sang along with a sweet mix of oldies and classic and soft rock. As Long as You Love Me. House of the Rising Sun. Take Me to Your Heart—product of Danish boy band Michael Learns to Rock, which, an escaped Chinese-immigrant porter swore to Htoo Moo, didn’t write it but just translated it into English after stealing it from Cantopop star Jacky “God of Songs” Cheung.
⁶⁴
Feel Like Makin’ Love. Love Will Keep Us Alive. People Are Strange. The Boxer. More Than Words. Lola. Horse With No Name. Sundown.

“Gordon Lightfoot!?” someone screamed.

Okay; it was me.

Hours later, a door or two or three down from the Crocodile Tear, the Thai proprietor of a very dark bar looked at me like I had lost my mind when I leaned into the counter and asked him for a room. Though I had no doubt that this craphole was patronized nearly exclusively by people of significantly lower character than myself, and he did ultimately consent, he hesitated long to sell me a vacancy. He seemed suspicious of my slurring, or of the Karen refugee standing behind me, hair long and thick with camp’s cook smoke. Possibly both.

Htan Dah and I walked down a narrow sidewalk out the back, following it to our room, where I slid the key into the door. An awful neon light flickered on when I flipped the switch. It was an airless, windowless cell with hardly the room for the queen-size bed. We left our flip-flops at the door and narrowly skirted the mattress, Htan Dah following me into the bathroom. “Here,” I said, pointing. I set the dial to max on the small, electric on-demand water heater attached to the showerhead. I turned the water on and held my hand in the stream. After a moment, it warmed up. “See?”

“Ah, okay,” he said, touching it. “I see I see I see.”