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.

Downtown Yangon is a mix of decrepit colonial buildings and concrete tower blocks coated with a velvety mildew from the summer humidity (it hits 120 degrees in July). The air in this densely packed part of town smelled like sewers, gasoline, and incense. Swarms of soldiers wearing flak jackets and carrying North Korean machine guns guarded hotel lobbies, directed traffic, and sardined workers into military convoys, transporting them to and from work. There are roughly half a million soldiers and almost as many monks in this country of 50 million.

Along one potholed road we found booksellers, their stalls filled with sad, dog-eared paperbacks and Burmese comic books. One of the few English titles was Burmese Days, which Orwell wrote when he was a policeman here in the waning days of the British empire. Though people knew about Nineteen Eighty-Four (one Burmese guide referred to it as “the generals’ bible”), that book was nowhere to be found.

We ended our first day at the Shwedagon Pagoda, the extraordinary temple built on a mount in the city’s heart, a world away from the throngs of downtown. Shwedagon is where Theravada Buddhism meets Disney. Dozens of glittering gold-leaf domes reach into the sky, the most magnificent one crowned by 4,351 diamonds weighing 1,800 carats. At sunset, the entire platform shimmers in a hazy orange light.

There are all manner of astrological posts and Buddhas among the stupas—reclining Buddhas, alabaster Buddhas, Buddhas somehow smoking lit cigarettes between their plaster lips. Supposedly there’s also a relic of the original Buddha’s hair. Given the sounds of clanging gongs and constant praying, and the sight of so many Burmese laying flowers as offerings, it’s strangely serene. One thing about the Burmese—they embody the word grace. Men and women are gently spoken, and they glide as they move. Westerners are lumbering and bloated by comparison.

Through our travel agent, we were able to choose hotels that weren’t owned and operated by the government. Though it’s likely that foreign companies—mostly French and Japanese—paid hefty bribes to enable them to build in Burma, we took some solace in knowing that our money wasn’t going directly into government coffers. Tipping generously in cash also enabled a select few to benefit from our dollars. 

Most Burmese have never known a decent government. Before the generals, they were ruled by another thug, Ne Win, who hijacked the country from 1962 through 1988, when he was squeezed out. In less than a decade Ne Win’s experiments in socialism had left one of Asia’s strongest economies in tatters and his people close to starvation. He was also criminally insane. A devotee of numerology, he, like many Burmese, believed that the number nine was auspicious, so one day in 1987 he ordered all banknotes to be printed in 45- and 90-kyat denominations and declared all the old 50- and 100-kyat bills worthless. Overnight, the life savings of half the population were wiped out. When the students rose up in 1988 to protest their sinking standards of living, the generals staged a coup, then smashed the rebellion. Led by Than Shew, a bully who never finished high school, the 12 senior generals and their secret police proceeded to make themselves the wardens to a nation of prisoners.

Today, three years after our visit, life in the Burmese gulag has reportedly become even more dire. Though the country is rich in natural gas and oil, its cities are plagued by blackouts. The largest export crop is heroin. There are no hospitals, and an estimated 60 percent of the population is malnourished. Homeless children have been seen sleeping in mesh cages—dog crates, effectively—on the rutted streets of Yangon. Last September, when the generals raised the price of fuel 400 percent, the monks and 100,000 supporters took to the streets and once again made Burma front-page news.

Throughout our trip , the subtext hummed: Should we be here? The few other tourists we met asked themselves the same question, but there was so much magic interspersed with the deprivation that the answer was always evident. Burma is nowhere near as grim as East Berlin was under the Communists. Under that divided city’s brown, coal-stained winter skies, people shuffled along like sullen automatons. Crowded cafés were memorably silent, as no one spoke above a whisper because of Stasi spies. As tourists we were scorned, insulted, or ignored when requesting service. Burma had retained its joy and color. Our guides took immense pleasure in pointing out the spies who hovered like gnats around the perimeters of noodle shops. Deprivation was all around, but the people didn’t wear it on their faces. They have a rich history and a powerful connection to Buddhism that seemingly supports them through disasters, political and natural. Nowhere is this more evident than in Bagan, the jewel of Burmese culture.

The temples at Bagan rival Cambodia’s Angkor Wat in magnificence. The ancient city was built mostly between the 11th and 13th centuries, with more than 4,400 temples to enshrine it as the capital of Buddhist study and to ensure the kings’ own good fortunes. The good fortune didn’t last for long—by the 14th century, invaders overran the country and ransacked the shrines. They lay in ruin for centuries until a 1975 earthquake prompted Unesco to rebuild some of the 2,000 remaining stupas and attempt to make Bagan a World Heritage Site. But the government’s xenophobia forced the organization to quit the country.

As a result, the temples in this 16-square-mile zone have been restored haphazardly. Some have gold-leaf stupas and refinished interiors with their original murals illuminated and visible. Others are untouched. Climbing tight stairways in the dark, surrounded by the acrid smell of bat shit and dampness, the temples feel spooky and thrilling. We may have been the first to rediscover some paintings languishing in dim corners—who knows? Most information about Bagan is anecdotal. There are no official maps. That’s the bright side of underdevelopment. The bad side is the really stupid skyscraper-size museum that rises above the temples like a scar on the landscape. Saw Tun, our guide to Bagan, called it “the tower of bad taste.”

Saw Tun was fiercely intelligent and deeply ironic. He wore a camouflage cap and a traditional longyi, a fashion statement that I interpreted as his commentary on the struggle between the military and folk culture. He had traveled across Asia, and he viewed the decrepit splendor of Bagan as a metaphor for the wrecked state of Burma. “Burmese people demand nothing,” he said. “The generals have successors lined up for the next 30 years. Even when they go, the country is full of spies and informers. Whose side will they be on?”

I asked Saw Tun why he didn’t emigrate while abroad. He told us that before he left, he had to sign a bond stipulating that his son would forfeit his education should he not return. “My family would suffer too much,” he said.

Did he approve of our visit, even if some of our dollars ended up getting funneled to the generals? “You must come,” he said. “Everyone is hostage here. If you don’t come, we are locked out of the world.”

It began to drizzle when we left Bagan, and it was pouring by the time we hit Mandalay, Burma’s second-largest city. Except for the amazing Mandalay Palace, the city is a modern grid of concrete tower blocks, rutted roads, and mud. Even the palace’s immense beauty was sullied when our guide, Mi Mi, informed us that it was restored in the late 1990s by prisoners and forced labor—young citizens compelled to “volunteer” one day of free work each month.

We wanted out of there immediately, but Mi Mi wasn’t keen to jump through the bureaucratic hoops it would take to alter our program. Resigned to a rainy day in Mandalay, we headed up a winding mountain road to a monastery outside town. Until the army retaliated last fall, monasteries were open places where anyone, foreign or Burmese, could visit or stay. We saw young monks performing their ablutions in a communal bath area, lying on bedrolls reading, and slurping bowls of instant noodles. It didn’t feel like a forbidding holy place, more like a relaxed college dorm where everyone happened to have a shaved head.

Buddhism is a less aggressive religion than Hinduism or Christianity—it doesn’t seek converts. Critics blame the philosophy of nonaggression for encouraging passivity. (I’d say that starvation and isolation are the more likely culprits in Burma.) I came to love the alms parade that occurred each dawn, when young monks all over Burma go from house to house, bowls in hand, collecting food. In Buddhism, feeding monks brings good fortune, and I was taken with the idea of a society that is rewarded for literally nourishing its young.

But something shifted last September. Food shortages forced villagers to forgo giving alms, which caused them great distress for shirking their religious obligations. The poverty the monks witnessed encouraged them to take to the streets, where they crouched in front of guns, chanting metta (loving kindness) and singing the national anthem.

The military tear-gassed, defrocked, jailed, and tortured them. They raided monasteries, smashing statues and stealing donation boxes. Some who escaped to Thailand report that Burmese monasteries are now crawling with informers posing as monks. The entire clergy is depressed.

Other, more optimistic observers contend that the government’s response to peaceful protests may have further weakened its standing and that the monks have not yet been cowed. The more defiant among them are refusing governmental overtures of vegetables and rice, leaving the food outside their doors to rot.

I didn’t realize at the time how deeply the Burmese monks had etched themselves into my consciousness. I may be three years away from Myanmar, but every time I see a photo of those shorn men in saffron robes, the cobwebby smell of cooking and old teak and the throaty chanting come flooding back. The fact is, I’m more connected to their aspirations because of what I witnessed on the ground. And ultimately that’s why Aung Sang Suu Kyi and I will never see eye to eye on visiting. If I hadn’t been in Burma, the current struggle would just be more noise, another international story in the New York Times.

 

NEW YEAR'S DAY, 2005. There’s one thing Burma has in common with the rest of the world: The first day of the year was dead quiet. Even far-flung Yangon was in recovery from the night before.

Reunited with Than, we asked him to drive by the home of the Lady, as the Burmese call Aung San Suu Kyi. She has been under house arrest in a lakeside villa for 12 of the past 18 years. I wanted to pay homage, as she had been a silent presence on our journey, a mother figure forcing us to examine the ethical consequences of our visit at every turn.

Impossible, Than told us. The road to her house has been barricaded since 2003, when she defiantly drove out of her own driveway. The military was forced to stop her convoy, and the generals were furious and humiliated.

Aung San Suu Kyi isn’t your run-of-the-mill dissident—she’s more like a living saint. She’s the daughter of a national hero, Aung San, who negotiated Burma’s independence from Britain in 1947 and was assassinated shortly after. Today most Burmese carry a small photo of her in their wallets or tape one onto the back of their furniture. Deeply influenced by Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence, she was elected president in 1990 by an overwhelming majority, but the regime ignored the election and slapped her under house arrest. Since then, her husband has died, her children have grown up abroad without her, and many members of her political party have been jailed.

The Lady has never fulminated against the military rulers, perhaps because she’s too much of a realist. Over the years, she has spoken to journalists about South Africa’s peaceful transition to democracy, indicating that she’d be willing to work with the generals to free her people. Out of the blue, on November 9, 2007, Aung San Suu Kyi met with the junta and later pronounced that the doors to reconciliation were open. The regime, in turn, has stopped describing her as “irrelevant.” It’s impossible to know if the generals are serious or just posturing to curry favorable world opinion, but this may be a slim reason for optimism. Personally, I’m skeptical, as I’m sure most Burmese are. After 45 years of disappointment, optimism shouldn’t be indulged in too often.

Limited and measured: That’s the Burmese approach to hope. And never was that clearer than on our final day with Than. En route to the airport, he pointed out a socialist sign. “To a new and developed country,” it proclaimed. “Burmese like that sign,” he said. “Because to us the only way to a new and developed country is on a plane.”

*All names have been changed, as the Burmese military government employs people to scan the foreign press for “enemies of the state.”
"Where Everybody Knows Your Nombre" originally appeared in the January/February 2008 issue of Culture+Travel. For a complete list of articles from Culture+Travel available on ARTINFO, click here.