Burmese Daze

No one knows much about Burma, but everyone, it seems, has an opinion about it. My PC friends, the ones who thought it was fabulous, darling when I went to Cuba, thought that giving dollars to one of the world’s most oppressive dictatorships was decidedly unfabulous. One went so far as to scold me for referring to Burma as Myanmar, which is what the junta renamed the country in 1989. (What she didn’t know was that Myanmar was the historical name of the land; it was the British who dubbed it Burma because the majority of its tribes were ethnic Bamar.)

In truth, the most vexing dilemma about traveling to Burma is that since 1995, the country’s Nobel Peace Prize–winning dissident, Aung San Suu Kyi, has opposed visits by tourists, investors, and even aid organizations. “As long as new money comes in, the SLORC”—the military government—“is under less and less incentive to change,” she said. One of her main concerns has been that the locals, so long isolated and economically deprived, “hadn’t had a chance to develop self-confidence.” She has never changed her position, but debate has raged and many Burmese dissidents, exiles, and artists vehemently (though respectfully) disagree.

There were equally compelling reasons to go. Jonathan, my partner, had seen the temples at Bagan years earlier when he was living in Japan, and they made a lasting impression. Friends of ours had also recently been, and they, like most of the world, were convinced that Burma was on the verge of opening up. They urged us to rush before the sightseers invaded Bagan or the 800-year-old temples crumbled. Then there was the fact that we like traveling in difficult places—if we limited our journeys to countries with “good” governments, we’d never go anyplace but Iceland. We thought it was important to witness how 45 years of dictatorship had withered the minds and spirits of the Burmese people—more important than relaxing on a beach.

That was three years ago, and in retrospect it was a good time to go, a time of hedged optimism. Today there’s only dread. The junta has beaten down the monks who rose up last autumn, and sealed the borders. Burma is once again off-limits. “There’s an eerie calm,” says Pallavi Shah, the woman who arranged our trip. She talks to her sources on the ground in Asia almost every day. “You can never tell what those generals are going to do,” she says. “That’s how they keep their people on edge. Everyone is just waiting for the hammer to fall.

 

YOU SET YOUR watch back 30 minutes when you fly from Bangkok to Yangon, Burma’s capital. You might as well set it back 60 years. The only activity in the airport’s arrival hall was from the lethargic ceiling fans, which barely managed to move some fist-size dust balls around the corners. There were way too many way-too-young soldiers and a smattering of Chinese businessmen in shiny suits and plastic shoes scurrying to nowhere. As we waited for our luggage to be hand delivered (there were no electronic carousels), a mechanic came running toward me waving the New Yorker that I’d left behind on the plane.

“He not returning the magazine to be kind,” Than,* our guide, told us on our way into town. “He didn’t want to get caught with it.”

Compared with Bangkok, where policemen wear gas masks to stave off asphyxiation from car exhaust, Yangon was leafy, relaxed, and untouched by global capitalism. No billboards hawking Marlboro or Coca-Cola. No Starbucks. Instead of skyscrapers, the moundlike domes of gold-leaf stupas dot the horizon like giant cones of Carvel. Our car, a 1950 black Ambassador left over from the British Raj, toddled along beside rickshaws and rickety buses.

As it turned out, cars were among the few spy-free zones, and Than seized the opportunity to tell us his story. He was a history student in 1988, the last time riots broke out. The military trapped hundreds—maybe thousands—of unarmed student protesters on a bridge and massacred them. The generals shut the university for years, dividing it into satellite campuses to prevent future mass gatherings. For Than, the crackdown didn’t just interrupt his studies; it shut him out of his career. His field had been modern history, and after 1988 all history books that extended beyond 1960 were banned. Since then, he’s been tangled in an Orwellian knot. He knows the history exists, but he can’t get access to it.