Asia House
Festival of Asian Literature 10-26 May 2011 The only Festival in the world dedicated to writing about Asia from the Persian Gulf to the Pacific, The Asia House Festival of Asian Literature celebrates the newest and best writing from over 38 countries. The 2011 programme will include: Colin Thubron on Tibet Hanif Kureishi and Kenan Malik on Culture, Free Speech and Power Patrick French on India Tahmima Anam – The Good Muslim Mirza Waheed, Roma Tearne and Diasy Hasan on the Literature of Conflicted Lands Wendy Law Yone, Rachel Cusk and others on Feminism and Changing Roles of Asian Women (with Granta) Tamara Chalabi and Ali Allawi on Iraq Angela Saini and Alok Jha on Indian Science and Technology Anada Devi, Tabish Khair and Abdulrazak Gurnah – Indian Ocean literary connections (with Wasifiri) Zaiba Malik, Nikesh Shukla and Sathnam Sanghera How to be Asian in Britain A Persian Poetry evening with Mimi Khalvati, Ziba Kardassi, Stephan Watts and others Family events focused on Iran and South Asia Cookery writing from Iran and China The full 2011 programme and tickets will be available in March. For more information: www.asiahouse.org
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ASIA LITERARY REVIEW No. 19, SPRING 2011
ASIA LITERARY REVIEW No. 19, SPRING 2011
P E--C D E M E P E A E C E P D S, C M D C I B C I
Ilyas Khan Stephen McCarty Charmaine Chan Duncan Jepson Martin Alexander John Batten Peter Koenig Chelsey Cadham, Shweta Moogimane, Michael Chau, Alan Sargent George Pang Anil Kumar Steve Ellul Jack Picone Border pastoral: a tranquil scene, at odds with the atrocities of life nearby, in a mountain river high above Chiang Rai. See Planet Pariah, page 107
Asia Literary Review is published by Print Work Limited 2401, Winsome House, 73 Wyndham Street, Central, Hong Kong www.asialiteraryreview.com To subscribe email subs@asialiteraryreview.com Editorial: 852.2167.8947 Email: stephen.mccarty@asialiteraryreview.com charmaine.chan@asialiteraryreview.com Advertising: 852.2167.8910 / 8980 Email: anil.kumar@asialiteraryreview.com Typeset in Adobe Garamond Printed in Hong Kong by Magnum Offset Printing ISBN: 978-988-18747-6-4 ISSN: 1999-8511 Individual contents © 2011 the contributors This compilation © 2011 Print Work Limited
Contents
Contents Stephen McCarty
From The Editor
5
Isabel Hilton
Non-Fiction Dreaming of 1911
11
Reportage Qi Lihe
21
Poetry Picking Pole Evening Walk
39 40
Fiction Blood Money
41
Meira Chand
Fiction The Return
55
Bertil Lintner
Politics The Generals’ Celestial Mandate
66
Anil Stephen
Interview Aung San Suu Kyi
70
Poetry The Door
84
Fiction Surveillance
89
Stephen J.B. Kelly Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
John C. Evans
Jimmy Devan Schwartz
Michelle Tooker
Jack Picone
Poetry Good Luck to You – She Who Trades Currency Illegally
104
Reportage Planet Pariah
107
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Ma Thida
Poetry Naked Value
130
Lucy Tan
Fiction The Money Shot
133
Fiction Circle of Life
149
Memoir Fables of a Fractured City
159
Fiction The Ghost House
169
Dipika Mukherjee Hsu-Ming Teo Mark Kitto Mark R. Frost
Endpiece My Kind of Town ... The Possibility of a City
181
Contributors
193
4
From The Editor
W
New York (population 8.4 million people) with Wigtown (987 at the last count)? Or Chalfont St Giles, in which John Milton was careless enough to lose paradise, then sufficiently fortuitous to find it again, with Scarborough, which doesn’t have a fair (and never really did, just a prototype trade show)? How about hardy Hexham and Hay-on-Wye, which, through some of its numerous cloned locations, has migrated to the tropics? Or Charlottesville, abutting the Blue Ridge Mountains, with several London postal districts of variable appeal? Hong Kong and Paraty? Berlin and Dublin? Galle and Krasnoyarsk? Karachi and Byron Bay? St Lucia and New Orleans? Missoula and Chengdu? I could go on. And on. If you are perusing the Asia Literary Review in Hong Kong, during a recess between star-spangled sessions, the answer will be plain to you, a member perhaps of the global literati in town for the 11th Hong Kong International Literary Festival. If such carnivals were trees, global warming wouldn’t be much of a problem, sprouting as they seem to do at any destination (or in the neighbourhood) to which an author can be anointed with a businessclass ticket. This issue of the Asia Literary Review has taken shape in response, partly, to the latest incarnation of Hong Kong’s hoolie for the literate: its contents feature three festival headline attractions in novelist and cultural historian Hsu-Ming Teo; poet, translator and literary critic Arvind Krishna Mehrotra; and Meira Chand, novelist and former chairperson of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the South Pacific and Southeast Asia. All are gracing what uncharitable observers might regard sneeringly as some sort of mutual lovein or mass ego massage, at which the great, the good, the gods of small paper things – and occasionally the journeyman, committed but leaden on the page and on the stage – appear before worshipping droves, expenses taken care of, comfort assured, to be exalted, lionised and ultimately deified. (There may be some truth in the assertion that any author taking to a stage to discuss his or her work expects a largely favourable cross-examination; but who would volunteer for assassination?)
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A big, multilingual bang has taken place in the literary-festival universe, observable without the aid of a telescope but merely by glancing at the number of such events taking place annually around the world. Some jamborees, such as Cheltenham and Buenos Aires, seem to have been on the cultural calendar since books discovered ink. Others, like Bhutan, are barely out of their amniotic sacs. Special cases, such as Jaipur, seem to have been fed on East German shot-putters’ steroids: from 16 authors and total audiences of roughly 100 people at its 2006 inauguration, the event, now the five-day, corporate-branded DSC Jaipur Literature Festival, attracted 225 writers and speakers this year – and a crowd of 60,000, albeit for an entirely free show. Author and co-founder William Dalrymple attributes its success partly to its egalitarianism and is proud of its absence of velvet ropes separating Earth-bound festival foot soldiers from luminaries such as Irvine Welsh, Kiran Desai and A.C. Grayling. At Jaipur, the faces and the faceless mingle, even eating and drinking together. But let’s not fool ourselves that commerce is far from the equation either. Dalrymple recognises that a blossoming Indian economy, which supports a prospering publishing scene and booming books market, acts as a festival turbocharger. Party time always trumps being po-faced and Jaipur, with its Mughal tent, ribbon-festooned pavilions, fireworks and nightly music and dancing, is in the business of being fun, as well as erudite. But the most important reason for the healthy glow of the lit-fest landscape is also alluded to by Dalrymple. Perhaps the notion of apprentice natives booting each other off South Sea islands, or celebrities back-stabbing their chums out of suburban houses, has become pallid; conceivably, increasing numbers of people are reading books … or it could be that they always were, but until they had a focus in the literary festival their presence among us was often unsuspected. Whatever the reason, if fast-flowering book markets in turn support burgeoning festivals and encourage literacy, this is surely good for the planet’s soul: at times of international tension, terrorism and mutual misunderstandings (that is, always), what could be more fruitful, at least potentially, than the frank exchange of ideas and a direct approach to the discussion of opposing philosophies? No matter how much that might sound like a limp hippy dream, talk is not cheap, it’s essential.
6
From The Editor
For festival virgins, what happens at these conclaves of the faithful and the book-curious? Almost from dawn to dusk, it seems, a barrage of readings, debates, workshops and performances (courtesy of the poets) takes place at venues around the host town, or at different locations (lawns, tents, marquees, ancestral halls, courtyards) on one large site: the Jaipur beano, presented around the grounds of Diggi Palace, with its music stage operating after the day’s conversing is done, resembles a pocket Glastonbury, although a Glastonbury on intellectual speed. This year’s guests included Nobel laureates Orhan Pamuk and J.M. Coetzee, and arguably the printed word’s most seasoned enfant terrible in Martin Amis, who announced that the world would be a better place if it were ruled by women. Extending the gathering’s egalitarian aspect, Candace Bushnell also materialised – and like almost every author attracted a colossal crowd. Some literary events, such as the Ubud Writers’ and Readers’ Festival, attract middle-aged groupies and retirees who turn their attendance into an annual holiday; and in a place like Bali, why not? Others are on their way, like gargantuan rock concerts, to being prohibitively expensive – a charge lobbed at certain of Hong Kong’s constituent events. Jaipur’s open-door policy, meanwhile, was not a business model that Jamaica’s lamented Calabash festival found sustainable when sponsorship dwindled. Controversy sometimes adds a little extra frisson, for example in January’s “racist” spat between Dalrymple and Hartosh Singh Bal, provoked by an assertion that Indian literary culture remains dependent on Western interest and approval. And while it is easy to be supercilious about the likes of I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! one must admit that a literary festival is an opportunity to goggle at celebrities and to press the flesh of readers’ learned heroes and heroines. (So much flesh pressing goes on, in fact, that one author I know covertly carries a bottle of alcohol rub for hand sterilisation during book signings.) But beyond the starry-eyed awe, the chance perhaps to socialise postdebate or -workshop with exotic creatures from an exalted world and, yes, the opportunity for authors to garner publicity and keep the cogs of the book trade turning by selling their wares, literary festivals serve a serious and worthy purpose. January’s Galle Literary Festival struck its annual blow for free speech in Sri Lanka, where government censure means momentous topics often 7
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go unexamined. But if Berlin’s Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka and Reporters Without Borders, based in Paris, had prevailed, the festival would have been a non-event: they campaigned for a boycott because of attacks on and intimidation of numerous writers in Sri Lanka by the administration of President Mahinda Rajapaksa. Rather than cement any government status quo, or tacitly approve state silencing of debate, however, the festival achieved precisely the opposite by giving writers from within and without Sri Lanka the chance to speak up. What will happen to the literary festival if and when all books come with a screen and keyboard remains to be seen; rather than flipping to page 42 festival-goers might in future turn on and download to follow a debate. Perhaps authors will be gods of small electronic things. Either way, such occasions are for everyone who values reading, writing and discussion, and long may they continue. And just suppose such unrestricted forums were to flourish one day in Kabul, Tehran and Rangoon. What milestones in the quest for freedom of expression those festivals would be. *** O star for this edition of the Asia Literary Review is an instantly recognisable and implacable foe of the barbarous and tyrannical. Aung San Suu Kyi, a candidate for Patron Saint of Democracy, was released by Burma’s ruling military junta in November after seven years’ house arrest. Her re-emergence was an occasion for national festivities, but the political climate in the country, in which more than 2,000 of her colleagues and other activists are still in detention, remains one of mutual hostility between an habitually discredited government and its opponents. Joining a feverish debate on the peculiar character of Burmese repression and the country’s possible future, we offer an interview with The Lady herself, supported by political analysis, poetry, fiction and photojournalism. One of our contributors was active in the violently suppressed 1988 prodemocracy protests. He has been behind bars for 15 of the last 18 years and is serving a 65-year sentence for campaigning against the junta. He has been tortured in prison and visits, even from family, are forbidden.
8
From The Editor
The disintegration of state control of every facet of Burmese life may still be a long way over the horizon, but the region provides a likeness of what can be achieved with the relaxation of restraints. Even repressive regimes like Naypyidaw’s need friends, and China has the most cordial bilateral relations with Burma of any country, notwithstanding the Kokang skirmishes of 2009, which prompted 30,000 ethnic-minority refugees to abandon Burma for the People’s Republic after confrontations with the armed forces. Military hardware and expertise, and industrial machinery and textiles, continue to flow one way; natural gas, agricultural products, gems and timber, much of it logged illegally, make the return journey to China. Burma’s strategic position also gives Beijing, which is expanding its deep-water navy, access to the Indian Ocean. While no one will make a case for speech in China being entirely free, despite the likes of Google fouling its lines in a sea of prohibitions a certain liberty is now discernible in Chinese society. As the People’s Republic becomes increasingly accessible in the name of global trade, so the country sails towards autonomy in expression and assembly. This edition’s evaluation of how China has mutated in the century since the evaporation of imperial rule proves that even the most monolithic institutions are sometimes capable of a rethink. What price Burma’s generals comprehending the errors of their condemned ways, discarding their congenital suspicion and taking their iron heel from the country’s throat? Stephen McCarty
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Office Quarantine (2009) by Kacey Wong. Plastic laminate, lock, glass, insulation and figurines, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist, Hong Kong.
10
Dreaming of 1911 Isabel Hilton
H
an unruly creature. The movies that run in our imaginations of such climactic events as the fall of the Qing Empire in 1911 tend to be clear-cut narratives: there are scenes of panic; fearful palace eunuchs scramble to escape with their lives and treasure; gorgeously costumed concubines are humiliated by the mob, their fine silks ripped and their hair ornaments trampled underfoot; faithful servants are turned weeping out of their quarters, and in the obligatory crowd scene the oppressed masses loot the palace, desecrating the private apartments of the fallen tyrants. That, we imagine, is how empires dissolve, neat tales with a beginning and an end, clear contests with victors and vanquished; 1911, after all, set off a political earthquake that ended nearly 2,000 years of Chinese imperial history. The movie version that will play in Beijing this year is the US$30 million epic 1911, partly shot by Jackie Chan and Li Bingbing, bizarrely, in a disused open-cast coal mine in Fuxin, Liaoning Province. In this, the Chinese blockbuster version, it is a reasonable bet that the last emperor will be played neither as hero nor victim. The hero will be the revolutionary and founder of the Nationalist Party (the Kuomintang) Sun Yat-sen, played by Winston Chao. Sun Yat-sen, of course, is claimed as a political ancestor in both Taiwan and the People’s Republic, and it seems safe to anticipate much swelling of the orchestra strings on both sides of the Strait as our lanternjawed insurgent overthrows feudal tyrants and leads the grateful masses to a bright, post-imperial future.
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That version satisfies many political needs, but historians may well cavil. And there are certainly inconveniences in the narrative. The denouement in October 1911, after decades of decaying power, internal rebellion, foreign encroachment and lost wars at home and abroad, came not in the imperial capital, Beijing, but far to the south in Wuchang, Hubei Province. It began by accident, with the discovery of a list of members of a subversive society that included dozens of army officers. Knowing they would be arrested and executed, they rebelled, took the city and appealed to others to join them. The moment might have passed, notable only briefly for another of the many small revolts that plagued the Qing in the early years of the century, but this one happened to trigger a landslide of disaffection across China. Eventually it forced the abdication, on February 12, 1912, of the 12th Manchu to sit on the throne, the child emperor Xuantong. The Manchu empire had collapsed. But our hero, Sun Yat-sen, was not there. When it all began he was in the United States, fundraising, as he often was, for his own rebel cause. After discovering from a newspaper in Colorado that the revolution for which he had worked so long had started without him, he hurried home and struggled, unsuccessfully, to gain command of a state of affairs he had not created. He was duly elected provisional president of the new republic, only to be forced to cede power almost immediately to the satisfyingly villainous military leader, Yuan Shikai. Sun died in 1925, before he could complete his life’s ambition: to establish a secure republic in China. The film-makers’ dilemma is that there is no simple narrative to 1911. The absolute monarchy was already changing when it was toppled: the Qing had been forced into the first stages of a slow transition to a constitutional monarchy, complete with a planned elected parliament, before the events of 1911 overtook them. Sun Yat-sen himself is an ambiguous figure and today many of his views seem unattractive: he was heavily influenced by social Darwinism and had no objection to taking money from the Japanese, which makes him a problematic hero in today’s nationalist climate. More complicated still is the idea of Sun as the political ancestor of today’s arrangements: whatever he thought he was fighting for in 1911 it was not perpetual rule by the Chinese Communist Party. The masses, that essential element in Communist myth making, were barely involved at all in the overthrow of the Qing; the diverse makers of 12
Dreaming of 1911
the 1911 revolution had few common objectives, but the most prominent revolutionary leaders, including Sun Yat-sen, planned a national republic with all the trimmings – democratically elected assemblies included. The story of the end of empire was drawn out and ambiguous, emotions were mixed and outcomes indeterminate. In the tragic decades that followed, many Chinese thought that much misfortune might have been avoided had the Manchu stayed as national figureheads and the transition to constitutional monarchy been completed. What China suffered instead was decades of internal strife and civil war. The narrative used to be so much simpler. In its more ideological days, Party historians simply labelled the Qing Dynasty the feudal past and 1911 a bourgeois revolution against a despotic Confucian state. But not even our revolutionary hero Sun Yat-sen saw it that way at the time: in his most important political statement, the Three People’s Principles, Sun complained, “The Chinese people never suffered directly any of the evils of despotism. The Chinese, because their liberty has been so complete, have never noticed it, just as because there is so much air in a room, we do not consider its importance.” If less liberty rather than more was the objective of the 1911 revolution, it could be counted as one of that event’s few successes. Other gains are less clear cut. Today, apart from compulsory retirement at 70 and a limit of two terms for the top leadership, the advantages of China’s current political arrangements as opposed to those of a century ago are not necessarily self evident. There is one clear difference between today’s leaders in Zhongnanhai and the Manchu emperors, but it poses a further narrative inconvenience. For the revolutionaries of 1911, one of the Qing Dynasty’s least popular attributes was that it was foreign. It is not something that today’s rulers of China find easy to accommodate in their latest treatment of the Chinese past. In that version of history, China is today as it always has been and all who live within its current borders are and always have been Chinese. If the Manchu were foreign, after all, how did their ancestral territory come to be an integral part of China? But to the revolutionaries of 1911, the Manchu were barbarian invaders who had swept down and conquered China in the 17th century, incorporating the country into their already extensive property holdings. 13
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Their empire had been known as Da Qing Guo (the Great Qing Empire) long before they entered China and continued to be long after they settled in Beijing. Zhongguo, the Middle Kingdom, was only one part of it, albeit a substantial part. The Qing emperors ruled China for 268 years and after some initial massacres, necessary no doubt to instil a proper sense of respect, adopted the Chinese way of governing. They did not adopt a Chinese identity. Manchu versions of court records were kept and the imperial household was controlled entirely by Manchu personnel; Han Chinese were not allowed to settle in the Manchurian homeland until 1907 and intermarriage remained illegal until some hasty reforms were enacted following the 1900 Boxer Rebellion. The inner areas of Beijing around the Forbidden City were reserved for Manchu families; Manchu women, unlike the Chinese, did not bind their feet and Han Chinese men had been obliged since the arrival of the Manchu to wear their hair in a pigtail. In the eyes of Sun Yat-sen and the southern radicals, the Manchu remained alien invaders who had led China to ruin. China, they argued, would be saved by their overthrow. The more loyalist north was not so sure. There was much undisguised regret in the north at the end of the dynasty and hopes of a restoration lingered there for several years, encouraged, no doubt, by the political chaos that followed the abdication and the fact that the child emperor, whatever the failings of his family, could hardly be blamed for the shortcomings of Manchu rule. Xuantong, known after his abdication by his personal name, Pu Yi, had been installed on the throne by the real storybook villain of the piece, Cixi, the Empress Dowager, shortly before her death in 1906. He played little part in the drama that swirled around him in 1912, but on his status hung the fate of many others. They all had reason to be grateful that none of the royal house was to suer the squalid end that overtook the Russian imperial family less than a decade later. The terms and conditions the Manchu court was to enjoy were laid out in the Treaty of Favourable Treatment, signed in 1912 between the regent, the emperor’s father Prince Chun, and the republic and regarded by its signatories as an international treaty, although an unusual one. It was generous in its provisions: the emperor kept his title and treasure, and enjoyed temporary residence in the Forbidden City, with the expectation
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Dreaming of 1911
that he move eventually to the Summer Palace, the courtesies due to a foreign dignitary and an annual subsidy of four million taels. No doubt thousands of retainers and officials had to adjust to newly uncertain prospects, with bureaucrats forced to realign their allegiances and work from a radically revised power map. A torrent of antiques, books and manuscripts arriving on the Beijing market, many hastily acquired by foreigners, testified to changing personal fortunes. The royal family tried to stem the tide of thefts of their treasures by palace retainers while simultaneously peddling valuables on their own behalf, provoking a debate among officials as to exactly who could be said to own the nation’s patrimony. Beijing had been the imperial capital since the Ming Dynasty. The Qing court, with its followers, armies, eunuchs, concubines and officials was the centre of power. It guaranteed status and a place in the world to its followers. All who stood to lose by its disappearance, those who feared what might follow, all who were stripped of the protection of their connections or had cause to fear retribution for past abuses – for them the end of the empire must have felt truly catastrophic. There were others who grieved, not for personal loss but out of loyalty to the empire and the Confucian virtues they believed it embodied. One group of intellectuals, dining together in Shanghai, received news of the abdication from a houseboy. “The whole company,” one of the dinner guests wrote in his memoirs, “simultaneously rose to their feet and turning their faces to the north, fell on their knees and with weeping and sobbing knocked their heads on the floor”. The increasingly chaotic and violent years that followed the relinquishing of the throne did little to relieve this sense of catastrophe. Secret codes emerged to signal loyalty to the emperor: a collector’s porcelain vase decorated with a black peony advertised its owner’s grief at the fall of the dynasty. In roadside inns across northern China, the way the teacups were arranged spoke to those who could read the code of whether the landlord favoured republic or restoration. Warlord Yuan Shikai tried to capitalise on imperial nostalgia to offer himself for the role, and prepared an elaborate enthronement, but even the most ardent fans of the empire found this a step too far. After Yuan’s death, another general, Zhang Xun, was to try to bring back the authentic royal house. 15
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Zhang Xun was the military governor of Anhui and made no secret of his monarchist beliefs: he had never cut his pigtail and insisted that his entire army follow his example. After extensive secret consultation with other warlords, Zhang entered Beijing in June 1916 with a small force and contrived the dissolution of parliament. Few mourned its passing. The restoration of the emperor’s powers was proclaimed shortly afterwards. Within hours, Beijing was festooned with dragon flags as its people celebrated the good news. It was not to last. Within a fortnight a rival warlord had defeated the pigtailed general, a bomb had been dropped onto the Forbidden City from an aircraft, the republic was restored and Beijing’s masses sadly took down their flags. When the child emperor stepped down in 1912, one option his retinue had considered was that of returning home. He was after all still the Manchu emperor, ruler of a domain that included Mongolia and perhaps Tibet (Tibetans argued that the relationship was one of priest – the Dalai Lama – and patrons and declared independence at the fall of the Qing). How might things have turned out had the Aisin Gioro clan decided to make a clean break in 1912 and turn their backs on their long Chinese adventure? The proposition was not without complications: by 1911 the Russians had already encroached on Manchuria and the Japanese, of course, were to encroach farther. But in 1912 a return to Manchuria might have been pulled off without the opprobrium that Pu Yi incurred in 1934 when, already expelled from the Forbidden City and stripped of his title and wealth, he struck a bad bargain with an expansionist Japan to be their Manchurian puppet. In 1912 enough sympathetic generals might have supported his return and perhaps, as with Outer Mongolia, Russian influence might have preserved Manchuria from Chinese territorial ambition long enough for it truly to recover its independence. In the event the Manchu decided to stay in Beijing, a decision that complicated life for them and China. If the Manchu faced an identity crisis after more than two and a half centuries of ruling the country, China faced the same in the absence of the Manchu emperors. The revolutionaries had toppled the imperial house, as had happened many times before. What was entirely new was the idea of a national republic. The unwieldy assortment of peoples, cultures, languages and identities that had owed its loyalty to the
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Dreaming of 1911
Qing emperors now had to grapple with two entirely unfamiliar propositions: those of a republic and a nation. Most nation states come into existence after a group of people define themselves – however spuriously – as a unique entity and succeed in mastering a territory they can demarcate as a homeland. But the Australian historian John Fitzgerald argues that the People’s Republic of China’s continuing efforts at nation building took root differently. China, he says, began as a state – a state that, since 1911, has been in search of a nation. When the last emperor handed back the keys to the country China was faced with existential questions. Who were the people in whose name the republic was created and, in the emperor’s stead, what would bind them? As the eminent statesman Liang Qichao complained, with some exasperation, there wasn’t even a word for China, despite the fact that people had occupied the territory for thousands of years. For as long as anyone could remember the Chinese had considered the imperial dynasty synonymous with the country. Without it, who were they? China was an easier entity to define at the end of the Ming Dynasty than at the end of the Qing. Ming China was half the size of the Qing empire and linguistically and ethnically more homogeneous. The diverse corners of the Qing empire had little in the way of shared history, culture, language or religion. The differences between a Tibetan Khampa and a native of Canton were too obvious to ignore. In the absence of a shared past or cultural identity, the will to a common future can serve as a nation’s pole of attraction. But no sooner did the news of the Qing collapse reach the empire’s fringes than they began to break away. Mongols and Tibetans expelled their few Han officials and pronounced themselves independent, a reversion, as far as they were concerned, to the status quo ante. Xinjiang moved in a similar direction, ambitious for a Uyghur homeland. It was not just the margins that felt the desire to strike out separately: the south, with its cosmopolitan sensibility and maritime vocation, strained against a north it viewed as reactionary and oppressive. The disintegration of the empire that followed the 1911 revolution lasted almost 40 years. When the Communist Party managed to impose order in 1949 they began to build their own state and nation. This time, the citizen was defined not by ethnicity, culture or history but by ideology and class, and the nation was defined by its socialist mission. 17
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That was the China I first knew, in which my fellow students were convinced that theirs was the true path of socialism and that foreigners like me came from a fog-bound caricature of Victorian capitalism. China was their world and socialism their religion. Now the Party itself has junked the true faith and the world has come to China. But still China grapples with its national identity, as it did a century ago. Last summer, people in Guangzhou protested when a local television station threatened to broadcast in Mandarin instead of Cantonese. In 2008, Tibetans rebelled against Han colonialism and continue to pay a heavy price. In 2009, on a smaller scale, Uyghurs in Xinjiang made their discontent violently manifest. Xinjiang was cut off from cyberspace for 10 months, an exile from the 21st century that involved an entire people. In the absence of ideology or a shared national story, the Communist Party has turned back to Confucius, a figure whom the revolutionaries of 1911 were clear they rejected. Our film-makers do not have an easy task. *** The persecution the imperial family avoided in 1911 was to catch up with them at the end of their lives. Pu Yi was captured by Soviet forces in 1945 and repatriated to China from the USSR after the Communists won the civil war in 1949. He spent 10 years in prison, writing and rewriting his confessions of past political crimes. After a decade of thought reform he was released and worked quietly in Beijing as a gardener until the Cultural Revolution. Then, already ill with cancer, he was attacked by Red Guards and died shortly afterwards, in 1967. His cousins, Pu Quan and Pu Xuezai, both accomplished painters and calligraphers, worked in their own studio, turning out portraits of Mao Zedong. In 1966, Red Guards ransacked 72-year-old Pu Xuezai’s house and he was ordered to report for self-criticism. He left home that night and was never seen again. Pu Quan was also persecuted by Red Guards and suffered a mental breakdown. He recovered after the Cultural Revolution and abandoned portraits of Mao in favour of traditional Chinese landscape painting. The last heir to the vanished throne, Pu Yi’s nephew Jin Yuzhang, survived the Cultural Revolution and worked until his retirement as a municipal functionary in the Zhongwen district of Beijing. 18
Dreaming of 1911
In the century since 1911, the Manchu homeland has vanished and its ancient language is now all but lost. Traces of memory though occasionally surface. On a walk in the Western Hills outside Beijing, in 1975, a ragged old man materialised from bushes skirting the path in front of me. He was as surprised to see me as I was to encounter him: in those closing years of the Cultural Revolution the appearance of a lone, unsupervised foreigner was as rare and almost as portentous as a comet. The old man stared, then invited me in. Home was a hovel assembled from scraps of wood and bits of tarpaulin. It was a clear autumn day and the sun was still warm in a luminous blue sky, but Beijing’s winters are bitter and my host must have suffered torments of cold as the year wore on. He offered me a cup of hot water poured from a battered Thermos flask and told me proudly he was the descendant of a Manchu bannerman, one of the Qing Dynasty’s elite imperial troops. In 1977, after Mao Zedong died, I met another self-proclaimed Manchu. He seemed as Chinese as the next man, but with a biography more interesting than many: his education had been ruined by the Cultural Revolution but he was one of that dazzling cohort who succeeded in the national examinations for higher education in 1977, the first to be held in 10 years. (As part of efforts to reinstitute a workable education system, five million people sat the tests.) He went directly from pig farm to postgraduate study. Many of his classmates left China as soon as they could. Not trusting the door to stay open or the Party to stay politically sober, they scattered across the globe. One of his contemporaries, a handsome and witty young man, became a professional gambler in Honolulu. My Manchu friend became an academic in Australia and took David as his Western name. His Manchurian identity has grown stronger with time. Manchuria’s great mistake, he argues, was to invade China. For those two and a half centuries at the helm of the biggest, richest and most remarkable empire of its day, they lost everything. Had they stayed at home, he believes, Manchuria today would be an independent, oil-rich north Asian mini-power, a kind of Kuwait, but still with bad winters. In the romantic version of this scenario, the Manchu would have saved their forests from industrial logging, their language, their script, their religion, perhaps even their cavalry skills. Most important, they would have saved their country and their nation. It is an attractive dream, though 19
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there are many other possible scenarios. Even had Manchuria survived the attentions of the Russians and the Japanese, it is quite likely the twin onslaughts of resource curse and modernity would have corroded this nostalgic construct. It is likely, even in an independent Manchuria, that the imperial system would have come to an end and there is no guarantee that anything agreeable would have replaced it. But self-inicted damage is always more acceptable than annihilation by a third party. My friend’s Manchurian dreaming continues.
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Qi Lihe
Stephen J.B. Kelly
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L sits awkwardly on the outskirts of Lanzhou. It is one of the most destitute areas in this heavily polluted industrial city in Gansu Province, northwest China. The Shanghai to Urumqi express train regularly rolls through, rattling the makeshift homes along the track and slicing a divide between the shanty towns and the sprawl of high-rise apartment blocks and shopping malls. These developments have begun to sprout as Lanzhou attempts to compete with China’s other booming provincial capitals. In recent years there has been a surge in the number of migrant families arriving in the city, mainly from remote rural villages in Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture, a homeland for the Hui and Dongxiang Muslim minorities four hours’ drive north of the capital. For centuries the Hui and Dongxiang have farmed the arid, bleak land surrounding their ancestral villages. In recent years a severe lack of water has rendered what was once, nevertheless, a workable landscape infertile, exacerbating desertification and forcing many farmers and their families to move to Lanzhou. Life for these migrant families in the provincial capital is difficult. Unable to enjoy the same privileges as the city’s majority Han population, they are marginalised economically and educationally. As poor rural farmers living on the edge of society, the majority struggle to gain official Lanzhou resident status from the local government. This means they cannot afford to visit hospitals for even basic medical care and have little hope of job security 21
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A shepherd tends his ock on the hills above Qi Lihe. Although thousands of families have moved to the city from their villages in the surrounding countryside, many still strive to hold on to their rural way of life.
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Muslim elders on their way to a funeral cross a site cleared for redevelopment.
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and, therefore, no regular income. Many of the children do not attend school simply because their parents don’t have the money to send them. I first travelled to Lanzhou after a colleague, who worked at an NGO in Hong Kong, told me about the problems faced by many of its migrants. I had seen no media coverage of their predicament but felt it was an important story to tell. To that end I spent a month in early 2009 teaching English in a small school for 30 migrant children. I visited the students’ homes after class and spent time with their families and neighbours, learning more about their dire circumstances. In December 2009 I returned to Lanzhou. I went back to see the same families, who always wanted to share with me what little food they had. I met the Tang family during my first trip to Qi Lihe. It was a bitterly cold morning when one of my students from the school and a friend of the Tang children led me down a treacherous, snow-covered path to their one-room home. It was almost as cold inside as out, and Mr Tang was so ill he could not move from his stool beside the stove. During the two hours I spent with them that morning Mrs Tang was in a constant flood of tears because of her family’s difficulties. With her husband unable to work, she was the only breadwinner and had just returned from a 12-hour shift washing dishes at a local restaurant. It was a job she performed every night of the week. Their two children, an eight-year-old girl and a 14-year-old boy, were unable to attend school because they had to stay at home to care for their father, whose stomach ailment remained undiagnosed and untreated because the family couldn’t pay for medical help. My time with the Tangs moved me to want to document the lives of other Muslim migrants in Lanzhou. As the Gansu countryside is increasingly lost to desertification, the desperate plight of these people will continue.
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The Tang family in their one-room home 27
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A man prays in the direction of Qi Lihe mosque.
The mosque, heart of the community
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Qi Lihe
Friday prayers 29
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A boy stands in the doorway of a pool hall.
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Qi Lihe
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Children play with ďŹ reworks on wasteland where a Catholic church once stood. 32
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The Ma family at home. Two years ago they moved to Qi Lihe because water had run out in their village in Dongxiang County and Ma could no longer farm his land.
A boy watches television as his sister sleeps.
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Mutton is prepared for sale in the courtyard of a complex where six families live.
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A coalyard boss at dinner in her home within the compound A coal worker takes a late-afternoon break. Family portrait Making tracks? Life along the Gong Lin railway
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Poetry Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
Picking Pole The honeysuckle, One flowery leg Over the parapet, waits To sneak into the house, And perched on the water-butt, Facing the mountains, The magpie robin Shoots its mouth off. Singly, in pairs, babblers Hop in the shingle patch, Eating their breakfast of insects. I’m outside, watching them From the mango trees Bordering the lawn, A picking pole in my hand, The weeds ankle high, Some of the fruit, bird eaten, Rotting on the ground, The seed, white,
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Showing through the pulp Like a piece of bone, On a late summer morning Of my sixtieth year.
Evening Walk After a rubbish dump and a country liquor bar, the Adventist Church, a piglet in black ditchwater trousers running across its yard. Further down the road, a municipal tap. Under it, wielding a washing bat, a woman beating the life out of her clothes. Then like a running sore An open drain, sitting beside it two boys, bare-arsed and swapping cricket stories while doing their business. And the trees, Let’s not forget the trees. Trapped in asphalt, their boles knobbly with age, yet the sap pushing through to gnarled branch, twig, and erect bud Year after year. 40
Blood Money John C. Evans
D
H woke up early, fell asleep, woke up and lay half asleep again, waiting. The door rattled open. There was a long pause while his uncle took off his shoes and changed into his slippers. Then the alarm kicks came. “Get up! You need to get up and run. You’ve grown lazy with your conditioning.” Dae Hoon kept his head under the blanket. His uncle went into his office and returned. A hissing sound traced the periphery of the room – above the desks, into the pile of broken computers, above the clothes rack, around the windows and below the refrigerator – as his uncle discharged mosquito spray. The office door closed. It was warm under the blanket. The shortest, most precious moments of the day elapsed in silence. Dae Hoon stood, stretched and dressed for his morning run. At 6.15 the air outside was cool, but humid. He walked through the grey morning light, past the garden and cinderblock shacks of two families, to a corroded metal building, the wrestling room of Seowon Boys’ High School, South Korea’s back-to-back national champions. Dae Hoon left his muddy shoes on as he walked beside the rusty weight bench and the bamboo pole his uncle used to enforce discipline, and across the wrestling mat to the bathroom. He squatted, hovering above the porcelain-adorned hole in the floor. Mosquitoes descended on his arms and legs and landed on the pile of shit. Dae Hoon grabbed his cigarettes and lighter from the window ledge and smoked to keep the insects away. He had to light the cigarette with his left hand 41
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because his right thumb was purple and broken. He’d had six days’ rest. Six days while his uncle was officiating at a tournament in Dubai. His uncle had returned with stories of how his hotel room cost US$10,000 a night and how the tournament was nicer than those anywhere else in the Middle East and much nicer than those in the US or Japan. His uncle reminded him that he would soon be the number one international referee from Korea, not just number two. Number two is failure. Number two is nothing. Dae Hoon had been the number-two university heavyweight wrestler in Korea two years in a row. His uncle was welcome to stay in Dubai. The run went well. He started slowly, felt better, then better still, then, perhaps, like the professional mixed-martial-arts fighter he was. The feeling of being cool and sweaty was good. He wore a tracksuit with his name on the back, just like Kim Duk Goo. The idea was that people would recognise him as he ran and that he would be ashamed to run slowly. In Seowon, people knew him. On these morning runs he would often overhear “Lim Dae Hoon” or “Spirit MC” or “Super Korean” as he passed bus stops crowded with uniformed students on their way to school. Sometimes he would put his head down and pretend not to hear and run harder; sometimes he would smile and be greeted with encouragement. He had even signed a few autographs. He could picture the face of everyone who had ever asked. Back on the school campus he shadow-boxed near the baseball diamonds when he thought there was no one around to see him. He didn’t feel like stretching his legs, so he did nothing with his kicks. Su Min was in the utility building heating breakfast when he returned. It was leftover soondae soup, noodle-stuffed pig intestines with pepper paste and liver: good, greasy-hot hangover food they had ordered while drunk a few nights before. It would be better than the dog stew his father made him eat at home. Always dog stew, for stamina, from his small, kind, almost effeminate divorced father. His friends had deep bows for his uncle, his friends always looked away respectfully while drinking soju around his uncle, but around his father those same friends relaxed and smiled and laughed. Su Min was quiet. Dae Hoon stared at Su Min’s stomach as they sat on the floor and ate. “What do you weigh?” “Mind your own business.” “Tell me.” 42
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“Ninety-two kilograms this morning.” “You do your business poorly, fat pig.” Su Min held up two fingers and went back to eating. On television there was a boy band dancing; a K-1 Hero’s re-run with Kim Min Soo being knocked out for the hundredth time; a drama set in a traditional Korean village where all the women had smooth, surgically raised eyelids. They ate. No channel was different from any other. “You coming with me today?” “Of course,” said Su Min. Neither was sure if his friend had enough money for the event. One of the beautiful village girls on television dropped a bag of rice and started yelling. Her husband yelled back. She started crying and hit him. “Why don’t you take that job with the gokdugi?” Su Min asked. “Because it’s fucked up.” “You’d have a percentage, always, and it would be no work. People would recognise you. You know that.” The idea of being an on-call insurance man, the type that shows up at accident scenes to ensure no paperwork is filed and to extort on-the-spot settlements, did not appeal to Dae Hoon. It was a bottom-rung job in which he would have to answer to a bunch of pretend tough guys who couldn’t fight. “Maybe you should ask my uncle for a raise.” Su Min had been national champion at 80kg; he was the assistant coach at the high school. Two weeks previously, Su Min had run up 600,000 won on the team’s credit card and then crashed his car, drunk. Dae Hoon’s uncle had retrieved him from the police station, beaten the hell out of him with the bamboo pole and forced him to sleep outside the wrestling room for two nights in shame. Now Su Min rode a scooter and Dae Hoon was being a jerk. Dae Hoon had a beautiful, but high-mileage, BMW with UFC in chrome letters on the dashboard and American death metal in the CD player. Girls loved the car, but neither guy wanted to waste money on gas just so they could sit in traffic. The subway to Seoul might suck as well, but they would be able to ride for less than the price of a beer. ***
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Dae Hoon and Su Min emerged from the subway into a broad and animated crowd. Jangchung Stadium rose before them, concrete grey and utilitarian, but brightly decorated at its lower elevations with banners proclaiming the day’s famous Japanese mixed-martial-arts promotion. Su Min went to the ticket window, then reported that the cheap tickets were 35,000 won apiece and that they were almost gone. Dae Hoon didn’t want to spend the money. He went to the will call window, but no tickets had been set aside for fighters from his organisation; or at least, none had been set aside for him. From there he pushed through the crowd to the fighters’ entrance but saw only unfamiliar Japanese faces. When the most famous Korean promoter passed Dae Hoon stopped him, but was told there were no extra tickets. Dae Hoon reminded the promoter that he had made a lot of money for his promotion as part of a popular reality show, and had fought some good fights in the process, but the promoter simply reminded Dae Hoon that he’d lost in the finals, and the show had ended months ago. Su Min said the cheap seats had sold out and that they could no longer afford entry. Dae Hoon harassed the announcers from the Korean sports television network, but they could not help him. He even approached a foreign friend, an American journalist, and joked in Konglish that he could act as an interpreter at the press conference; but he was in no position to help. Dae Hoon had no choice but to find free tickets now he had cost Su Min his seat. When two children stopped him for autographs, Dae Hoon was afraid they had seen him trying to scrounge them. He had no luck with the Korean fighters lounging near the ambulances either, until he approached Kwang Kyung Young, the current welterweight champion. “Dae Hoon, you retarded baby dog, of course I can help you. Take my pass; I don’t need it. No one is going to stop me.” He took the large yellow pass from round his neck and handed it to Dae Hoon. “Wear this inside,” he said. “In a minute I’ll come in and get it and bring it back out for Su Min. You can’t be begging like this. You’re a fighter!” He slugged Dae Hoon hard and smiled. Dae Hoon and Su Min had gone from spending the equivalent of a month’s groceries on tickets to waltzing through the entrance reserved for 44
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press and fighters without spending a cent. Inside, the stadium was filled to the rafters. Guys with Mercedes-Benzes parked on sidewalks were sauntering in with their girlfriends to occupy the gaps ringside. The banners were the same, the lighting towers and camera booms were the same; the ring girls were different – they were Japanese and a little hotter than usual – but the same in that they remained inaccessible. People were everywhere, five for every one who had ever paid to watch Dae Hoon fight there. And the place was nervous. Dae Hoon was nervous. Knees would soon flatten noses, high kicks would splatter blood, ju-jitsu submissions would leave ligaments torn. A former Ultimate Fighting Championships belt holder would enter the ring. A Brazilian, one of the best submission grapplers in the world, would make his MMA debut. A French-born, Canadian-raised, Florida-based fighter of mixed Korean ancestry would battle a Japanese judo champion who had recently renounced the Korean half of his dual citizenship. On live television, the fight was being touted as a Korea versus Korea match-up with fight-ofthe-year potential. The screens above the stage flashed with knockouts. The fighters were announced. The crowd roared with anticipation. Dae Hoon imagined the locker-room excitement, concentrated on it, then let it slide away, only to be left with the feeling he always had in the days before a fight: that he could not possibly have enough friends around and he could not possibly have them close enough. Not that they had to do anything, or say anything, and he didn’t really want them to distract him – he wanted to know that his training partners were there to tape his hands, hold the focus pads, keep water and a mouthpiece close; just be there. And the walk down the long ramp and catwalk, his team behind him, the air thick with music he never remembered hearing, “Kill him, destroy him,” echoing between his ears, video screens like billboards looming overhead, pulsing with highlights and knockouts, reassuring him, exciting the crowd. “Takedown, Lim Dae Hoon!” Flames erupting on either side, arms raised before thousands, his concentration now fragmented by a smile. And those seconds after the bell could elongate into the most beautiful in life – as long as he was hit first, and hit hard. Terror was his refuge; adrenalin, instinct and muscle memory his saviours. Because when it began gradually – with a jab just stiff enough to rattle, or a low kick that merely bruised, a weak splattering of pain that hinted there might still be an alternative to getting hit – that was the dizzy, slow-motion, bullshit feeling of being stuck in a ring 45
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with nowhere to go, not fighting to win, but fighting to make the fight stop as quickly as possible. Su Min smacked Dae Hoon on the side of the head. Dae Hoon turned. “We need beer. How much money do you have?” “Enough.” “How much is that?” “Enough.” “Give me 10,000 won.” Dae Hoon ran out of the main entrance, past the vendors selling hot squid and chestnuts, to the MiniStop convenience store across the street. Large cans of Hite beer were only 2,000 won each, so he chipped in 4,000 won of his own and bought seven, in case Kwang wanted one. On the way back, he walked between the ambulances and through the service entrance, navigated a crowd of media people speaking quickly in Japanese, then took the stairs and returned to his seat. The security guys didn’t even look at him: he had Kwang’s yellow pass hanging from his neck. Dae Hoon handed out the beers. In his absence, a Croatian had landed a high kick and opened a gaping hole in the eyelid of his Japanese opponent. The fight had lasted 36 seconds. Entrance music for the next bout blared. Dae Hoon’s hands began to shake. He smiled, surveyed the stadium to take it all in, and then – there he was. On the big screens Dae Hoon was suddenly absorbing jabs and straight rights in succession. Noise rose from the crowd with every punch as Dae Hoon’s face quickly fell into bloody disrepair. The clips lasted only a few seconds, but they were a reminder that the next fighter had pummelled Dae Hoon so badly he had not answered the bell for the second round. No one remembered that Dae Hoon had taken the fight at short notice and with a badly sprained ankle. No one cared that Dae Hoon had submitted this guy with an armbar two years earlier in an amateur fight. “Fuck,” Dae Hoon groaned in English. The others said nothing, but Kwang had trouble holding back his laughter. Dae Hoon took his beer from him and chugged it, eyes watering with the cold. “What are you going to do, welterweight?” Kwang and Su Min said nothing. They watched the fights and drank. Dae Hoon watched a little less and drank a little more than his friends. A couple of bouts were rough. The 46
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former UFC title holder showed up fat and out of shape and received the three-round beating he deserved. When they were out of beer Kwang gave Su Min money and Dae Hoon handed him the pass. Su Min came back with six bottles of soju, because Kwang was buying and the beer wasn’t getting them drunk fast enough. Kwang opened the first bottle, handed it to Dae Hoon and declared that Kim Min Soo was a retarded baby dog. “I mean, look at that tub of crap. I don’t care if he did win some kind of medal in judo, he still sucks. He only makes money because Korean people will pay to watch him, and Korean people will pay to watch him only because he’s Korean. All he ever does is get knocked out.” In the ring, Kim Min Soo was preparing to face off against Ikuhisa Minowa, a veteran Japanese fighter several inches shorter and 50 pounds lighter than him. The contest was fought standing and it was one-sided. Kim used his reach advantage to dominate every exchange, but still found it necessary to strike Minowa with an illegal knee when Minowa shot in on a takedown attempt. The referee intervened midway through the first round and the fight was ruled a technical knockout, though Minowa didn’t appear to be badly hurt. Kim Min Soo then taunted his defeated opponent by leading the crowd in Minowa’s traditional victory cheer. Even among Korean fans, the enthusiasm died out quickly. “Who are you?” Kwang stood and yelled into the silence that followed. A few people turned. “You are not Kim Min Soo! Kim Min Soo always leaves the ring on a stretcher!” One entire section of the stadium was now watching. It was a pretty good joke, but Dae Hoon was embarrassed to have so many people looking at him while he was drunk. So Dae Hoon drank more. He went to the MiniStop and returned. It reached the point where no one in security was going to stop a drunken man of Dae Hoon’s size wearing a fighter’s pass, no matter what kind of disruption he might cause, but Dae Hoon did nothing to cause trouble. While Su Min and Kwang yelled and laughed and wagered thousand-won notes with the people in the seats around them, Dae Hoon drank and pondered, in a dull way, why he was even there. By the time the main event came round the ring was a blurred halfmemory. Four minutes into the first round, the Japanese-Korean caught the 47
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Canadian-Korean with a right uppercut that dropped him, unconscious. All those months of training, dangling vulnerable, then lost: a world-class fighter rendered helpless, almost infantile, in less than a second. It made Dae Hoon’s morning run seem stupid; futile. The three left amid a dazed, murmuring crowd. It was decided that they would go to a club. Kwang wanted American whiskey and he yelled something at the taxi driver about Dae Hoon needing to meet a transgender. Dae Hoon had to concentrate to avoid throwing up. The line outside the Hole-in-One Club was nothing more than pink and light-blue neon and men in suits; the waitresses inside looked like nothing more than the plain, slightly overdressed staff who could be found in any club, but with bigger breasts. When the friends discovered the bottle of whiskey Kwang wanted cost the same as a month’s rent, they decided on beers and shots instead. “You like this place, Dae Hoon?” Kwang asked. “It was your idea to come here,” Su Min reminded him. “Come on, Dae Hoon, answer the question.” A waitress in a short black skirt and shiny gold blouse brought their drinks and a plate of fruit. “Come on, Dae Hoon, cheer up! It’s time for shots! Wehayo!” Kwang led the toast. “This place is great, right?” Onstage a drunk, middle-aged man in a suit was gyrating against an older transgender waitress with dyed red hair in barrettes. They were singing a song that had been popular two years earlier. “Kwang, I’m sorry, you know I can’t pay for this, and neither can Su Min. We’ll keep drinking, but you’ll have to keep buying.” “No problem. We’ll drink so much you’ll pray that I run out of money.” Kwang hit the buzzer on the table and ordered more shots and beer. The same waitress brought them, along with a plate of small, fried sausages. Dae Hoon focused on Su Min. “As soon as you pay back the 600,000 won to my uncle you’ll be okay, right?” “No.” “What do you mean, no?” “I mean I owe your uncle more than that.” Kwang smiled and Dae Hoon wondered what the hell Kwang could know that he didn’t. 48
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“Tell him,” Kwang said. “I owe for the lawyer, and the fine, and then for blood money as well.” “Why the fuck do you owe blood money?” “Because remember the other week when I went fishing? There was this old man fishing there too. When I cast my bait my line crossed his by accident. This old man yelled and yelled at me and I told him that I was sorry, that I was new to fishing and that it would not happen again. But then, a couple of minutes later, I did it again. This time the old man went crazy, so I had to apologise and bow and bow and say that I was sorry again. I said, ‘Why, why are you so angry? I suck at fishing and it was an accident,’ but he went completely crazy. After a while he calmed down, but when it happened a third time he spat on me and started hitting me. I said I was sorry, but then I got tired of saying I was sorry, so I hit him and knocked him down. When he got up and spat on me again, I knocked him out.” “Tell him what you did then!” Kwang was hysterical with laughter. “I didn’t know what to do, so I just kept fishing. After a while he woke up and called the police. I didn’t have any marks on me, but since I had knocked him out and fractured his eye socket, I had to pay blood money. But I didn’t have any money, so your uncle paid it for me.” “Tell him how much!” “It was the way it always is, the money was calculated from the difference between the injuries. I didn’t have a mark on me, so I was charged 1,500,000 won for the broken skull and another 500,000 won for knocking him out, because the old asshole said he was concussed.” “Hah, isn’t that funny! He could have run away, or thrown the old man’s cell phone in the lake, but he just kept fishing. Su Min, you are so stupid.” “I told Kwang because he wanted to know why I didn’t have any money for beer. I’d have told you, but your uncle wanted me to keep it a secret. He’s still afraid the school will fire me, now for two reasons.” Su Min finished the beer he was drinking and opened another. Since he’d become champion, Kwang was making US$9,000 a fight. He could pay off all their debts with no problem. If the scrawny welterweight was going to run his mouth he’d at least have to cover the tab. In his drunken state, the only feeling Dae Hoon could generate was sadness. Su Min was his best friend, but his luck was all bad.
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“I wish I could get another fight. If I could get another fight before my military service, I could give you the money to pay back my uncle. Then you’d be okay. I wish there was a way I could fight during my service.” “If you tried to fight, you’d go to jail for sure,” Kwang said. “There’s nothing fair about the country taking two years in his 20s away from a fighter. Park Young Chung has been talking about fighting. Fuck military service. He’s been talking about changing his name and wearing a mask in the ring like the wrestler Rey Mysterio.” “Young Chung is just joking, and Young Chung is different.” Kwang was growing excited, “You should never compare yourself to Park Young Chung. He loves to fight. He fought extra-round fights back to back in the Middleweight Grand Prix. He fought with his heart. He collapsed in the shower and spent two weeks in a coma, then came back fighting as soon as the doctors would let him. Do not ever compare yourself to Park Young Chung!” Dae Hoon was friends with Young Chung. They had trained together for years. He respected him and always wanted Young Chung in his corner when he went out to fight. “All I mean is that I wish I could get a fight. I did not compare myself to Park Young Chung and I think you are using your words lightly, Kwang. Maybe you should be careful.” “Careful! How’s this for careful? Dae Hoon, you have the chin of a champion but the heart of a coward. Look at your size! Look at your skill! Aren’t you ever ashamed of the way you fight? You win against girls, then quit when it counts. You’ve never been knocked out! You don’t know what it feels like, and do you know why? It’s because you quit. You are nothing like Park Young Chung and even with your name on your back you are nothing like Kim Duk Goo. If you don’t finish a fight in the first round you lose every time, because you give up and protect that stupid chin of yours that could take a hundred stupid punches.” Dae Hoon thought the time had come to make Kwang stop talking. He wished Su Min would say something to prevent it. “Do you know what this is like for your friends? Do you know what it’s like to watch you humiliating yourself every time we turn on the TV? What can we do when someone calls you a coward and we know they are right? It’s
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a good thing you are going into the army. You are no fighter! I have to tell you this! All of Korea is happy that you are going into the army!” Kwang was almost screaming and he looked as if he were about to attack Dae Hoon himself. One of the transgender waitresses politely asked Kwang to be quiet because he was scaring people. Something had switched inside him. “Shut up and leave us alone or I will fuck you in the middle of this club!” Kwang threw fruit at her and laughed. A minute later another waitress quietly dropped their bill on the table and moved quickly away. Kwang responded by walking to the cooler behind the bar and taking three more beers. There was nothing for anyone to say. Dae Hoon and Su Min stared at the remaining fruit while Kwang examined the bill. He hit the buzzer and the first waitress returned. “This is too much. You’ve charged us 10,000 won apiece for the beers. I’ll give you half of that. For the food I’ll give you nothing, because we didn’t order it, but the whiskey is what we came for, so I’ll give you full price for that.” Kwang took his time counting his money. “Here’s 120,000 won, now get the fuck out of here.” Dae Hoon and Su Min could see what was going to happen and hurried to finish the drinks still on the table. A great deal of womanly screaming followed, then some not so womanly. Two more waitresses came to the table. Kwang told them his offer was reasonable, but because they had refused it, now they would receive nothing. Open-handed punches descended from every direction. Long fingernails tore at their skin. It hurt, and Dae Hoon wanted it to stop, but all he could muster on the question of whether he should hit back was more indecision. They made it to the door and the screaming followed, but by then it was funny, as were the bloody scratches on Su Min’s face. Kwang laughed, and so did Dae Hoon and Su Min. They walked slowly down the brightly lit but empty street, occasionally turning to taunt the one waitress who followed. An old black Hyundai Grandeur with custom rims pulled up beside them and five men emerged. Four wore suits, the fifth a red tracksuit with “Beckham” on the back. Two were as big as Dae Hoon; the smallest was still bigger than Kwang. They approached quickly, as if the fight were to begin at once, but stopped short. The waitress was still yelling. 51
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“Give me the money, you owe us money!” The second largest suit shouted: “There are five of us and three of you! Give him the money you owe!” “We offered the transgenders what was fair and they refused, so now they get nothing. Why don’t you gokdugi get out of here before you get hurt? I might just knock you out and take your money for fun.” Kwang raised his hand backhand, as if about to slap the suit nearest. Dae Hoon had seen small-time gangsters like these before, watched them train at his gym, knew the way they worked: sandbagging through the fitness exercises, going crazy on the heavy bag with wild flurries and flying knees when one of the bosses came in to watch, then always faking an injury when it came time to spar. They all trained for show, then talked trash in the showers, comparing their tattoos and misshapen penises with glass beads sewn into the foreskins. They frightened only those who didn’t know any better. Dae Hoon moved towards Beckham and spoke to him in the honorific tense. “Get in your car. I’m tired and I’m drunk and I don’t want to fight. Please just get in your car and go.” “Fuck you! I’ll stab you!” Kwang hit the guy, fast and without warning, but it was just a flipping jab, intended to humiliate. Beckham stumbled backwards but began yelling again as soon as he was out of reach. “Give us the fucking money!” “Either show me a knife or go!” Kwang moved towards him as if to strike again. “Dae Hoon, you coward. You had better fucking fight! You had better help me kill these retarded baby dogs!” It was then that the waitress rushed Su Min and began hitting him in the chest. A few seconds elapsed before Su Min realised there was a ballpoint pen in her hand. He threw her to the ground and moved as if to kick her in the face, but stopped. When another gokdugi took a swing at him, Su Min stepped to the side and hit him with an overhand right that knocked him to the street and opened a cut over his eye. “Fuck you, gokdugi!” Kwang wanted the fight. He was laughing, scanning whom to rush first.
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“You’re the ones in trouble!” The first suit was dialling his cell phone. “You,” he pointed at Su Min, “are fucked! Look at that cut on his head! He needs stitches and you will have to pay blood money when the police come. It will make what you owe the transgenders look like nothing. You think we don’t know who you are?” He stopped, took a step away and spoke quietly to the police. He said he was afraid and that he and his friends had been attacked. He asked them to come quickly. Dae Hoon looked down at his swollen, purple thumb. It was just as he had said: he was tired, and he was drunk, but he was not going to let them take another cent from Su Min. They would be the ones to pay. “Hey!” There was a loud thud, like a car running into a side of beef, as Dae Hoon threw his fist into the brow above his right eye. “What are you going to do now?” Dae Hoon punched wildly at his eyes with both hands. Again and again he struck. He could feel his gloveless fists bruising and lacerating the skin and a cold, scratchy feeling to the outside of his right eye as blood entered the retina. These things made him smile. “What are you going to do now?” He continued the beating on his nose. Even with limited leverage it was easy to break, it had been broken many times before. He could feel it smashing as his eyes began to sting with tears and blood. He turned to look at Kwang, then hit him with a straight right that knocked him to the ground. No one moved, no one made a sound. Even Kwang was silent as he looked up from the pavement. “What are you going to do now?” Dae Hoon smiled, then opened his mouth as far as he could and threw a hard right cross into his own bottom front teeth. His jaw dropped like a door suspended from one rusty hinge. It ground in place as blood drooled onto his shirt. What are you going to do now?
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Red Cliff 2 (Chongqing) (2009) by Chen Jiagang. Chromogenic print, 110cm x 120cm. Courtesy of Contemporary by Angela Li, Hong Kong.
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sleep on the night of his return. At five in the morning Arun sat up in bed and stared out of the open window. In the predawn sky the stars were still bright and Mumbai slept, its peelings and sores mercifully hidden. At that hour everything was still buried in shadow and the city belonged to the awakening crows. They filled the air with early grumbles, rising noisily from roofs and trees, alerting everyone to the coming day. Soon the sun would strip the town layer by layer; the tattered bundles lining the pavements would stretch and show themselves to be human. Arun contemplated the city; little by little it had shaped him, moulding his life, forcing him to do all he had done. Everything was as he remembered it in the cramped room he called home. There was the same problem of accommodating his suitcases that there had been on his previous visit two years before. Lifting the edge of the metal bed he had forced the cases underneath and in the night felt the unrelenting plateau pushing through the springs and thin bedding into his spine. After three years in affluent Hong Kong his back was now used to a somewhat softer mattress and he had forgotten the years of upbringing on this very cot, beneath which the hard shapes of storage trunks or tins of grain had always been tightly wedged. His father slept behind the flimsy partition of a faded curtain, his translucent, yellowed skin already giving him the look of death. The old man’s harsh breathing and coughing had punctuated Arun’s first night at home; it had been a relief to let him sleep and not to have to see him. 55
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Instead, it was his mother he had to face. She was so filled by emotion at the sight of him she could not speak coherently, bursting into tears whenever she looked at him. Her red, swollen eyes filled him with guilt and anger. He was sure she must have sobbed out his story to anyone who would listen in their tenement building. All the old widows, dressed for perpetual mourning in white muslin saris and with their sparse grey hair knotted identically, would have embraced her, sworn secrecy and immediately gossiped, for that was the way of the tenement. The place lived and breathed through the whispers of its occupants. Everyone knew everyone, for all the families came originally from two neighbouring villages in the province of Sind. Like Arun’s father, they had all arrived in Mumbai as refugees, fleeing Sind after the partition of India, having witnessed murder, rape and the torching of their homes. Some had eventually reached this building and squeezed themselves inside it, families of 10 or even 15 sleeping in one or two small rooms. Those who had been rich in Sind arrived penniless in Mumbai, having escaped with no more than the clothes on their backs. Others, who before had lived in meagre circumstances, began, through luck and endeavour, to see money at last. It had all happened long before Arun was born in Mumbai. All he knew was that his father had never found a proper job there, although in Sind he had been the respected headmaster of a school. In Mumbai he supported his family by giving tutorials to the children of the wealthy, leaving home early each day and often returning late at night, trudging the streets to save bus fares. Arun knew too that he suffered the insolence of those spoiled children, who thought no better of him than to put chilli powder or live cockroaches into his open mouth if he dozed, and whose well-to-do parents refused to pay six months’ worth of tuition fees when a lazy child failed an exam. No one stood on formality in the building: everyone knew the secrets of everyone else’s lives. People entered each other’s homes uninvited, offered advice, shared food during shortages, congregated to rejoice at births or to comfort each other at bereavements, living as one great extended clan. Everyone’s life was the property of his neighbour, Arun thought in disgust. He hated the filthy, crumbling place, alive with rats, roaches and foul odours. At first, after he arrived home, his young sisters, Veena and Jyoti, had stared at him in silence, glancing nervously at each other. “What? Not liking a chor brother, a thief?” he shouted when he found 56
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them around his open suitcase, fingering his shirts of soft, foreign materials, looking for the gifts they hoped he might have brought them. “Nothing is there for you! You know very well how I left Hong Kong!” He shouted, and they backed away like frightened animals. He felt guilty then that he had no useless fancy objects for them to flaunt before their friends. If he had returned as he had on his last visit, with nonsensical novelties, cosmetics, nylon georgette saris or electrical appliances to add to the trousseaux his mother was collecting for her daughters, there would have been no need for the shame he felt now as he stared out of the window at the dark city. Those articles from foreign lands would have imbued him with some remnant of dignity, whatever he may have done. Through the window Arun watched the sky retreating before the day. He shifted position on the bed; there was no longer time to dream. This was no visit, this was return. On the other side of the threadbare curtain his father stirred. At the thought of seeing him Arun turned his head away and continued to stare. On the pavement opposite the building vagrants stirred. One by one they awoke and made their way to the nearby seafront to relieve themselves on the beach. An old man, unable to walk the distance, squatted over an open gutter. Arun turned from the window, repulsed by sights he had observed unemotionally before. From the beach the smell of drying sardines and excrement drifted up to fill the tenement. Below his bed, on the stone floor, Veena and Jyoti were curled up together on a thin mattress; his two youngest brothers slept nearby. Another brother, a year younger than Arun, was already married. He and his wife and baby occupied a tiny alcove to one side of the room, with a curtain to draw around their bed for privacy. Earlier, lying sleepless, Arun had listened to the muted but unmistakable sounds coming from behind the curtain and the swaying creak of the old bed. Once, the child stirred and within the continuing rhythm he heard it quietened with murmurs and pats. His blood pulsed restlessly in him long after the sounds had stilled. He remembered a girl in Hong Kong whom he would not see again. Now, in compliance with the strict social conventions of this land, he would be bound to the celibacy of a monk, unless he chose marriage. And with the stigma of being a thief now on him he stood little chance of a pretty girl with a good dowry. He would end up with the likes of his sister-in-law, buck-toothed and dark skinned. 57
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Dawn light filled the room, picking out textures polished with age: dirty walls, doors and woodwork nicked and scratched, a table covered by an oily plastic cloth. On it stood a jar of mango pickle and a radio whose metal antenna caught the first illumination of the day. His parents had struggled to feed and educate their children, to live with the decency and dignity they had known in Sind before they fled their land. Yet only he of all the brothers had broken free of poverty, had crossed seas to find wealth and a different life. Arun heard his mother wake behind the curtain rigged up about his parents’ bed; since his father’s illness she had vacated the narrow cot to sleep on the floor beside him. He listened to her roll up her mattress, store it, then hurry into the tiny kitchen; he heard the clang of pots and pans as she busied herself preparing breakfast. Gradually the family woke and the small room grew even smaller, filled with people and movement. Arun continued to sit on the bed, his back against the wall, watching. This was to be the manner of his awakening now, each morning of each day. Soon, his mother appeared before him with a cup of tea and stood observing him sadly. “Drink,” she ordered, offering him the thick, chipped cup. Immediately he wanted to say, I did not mean it to end like this. Instead he took the cup silently and sipped slowly, watching his brothers wait their turn for the bathroom, listening to the sound of them bathing as they ran water into a bucket, scooped it up in a plastic cup and spilled it over their bodies. After he dressed, Arun sat down to the breakfast his mother put before him. Behind the curtain he heard his father turn restlessly on the bed and call out. Arun’s mother put a fresh paratha before him and looked anxiously at the curtain shielding the invalid. Before turning towards it she put a warning hand on her son’s shoulder. “When you see your father, say only that you are returning home for a holiday. You cannot tell him the truth. You cannot tell him you have lost your job. That would kill him.” Her eyes filled with tears. As he ate Arun listened to the sound of his father sipping his tea, the slop of water in a bowl as his mother wrung out a cloth to wipe clean the old man’s face; the smell of medicated soap came strongly to him over his paratha, pickle and tea. Soon his mother would break the news of his return and he must at last greet his father; the thought filled him with new panic.
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Finishing the meal as quickly as he could, he stood up from the table and silently left the room. As he emerged from the door of the tenement and began to walk he believed he had no destination, but eventually he found himself on Warden Road before a well-appointed block of flats. He knew then he had come to find Mr Verma, who managed the Mumbai end of the Hong Kong business house Arun had worked for. It was Mr Verma who had originally interviewed him in Mumbai for the job. The first-floor flat in which Mr Verma lived included a large terrace over the ground-floor garages of the apartment building. A woman, whom Arun knew to be Mrs Verma, stood on the terrace, her cotton housecoat clinging in the pre-monsoon breeze to the shape of her ample belly and short, stout legs. Gardeners were re-potting plants at her instruction as she shouted orders. The terrace dropped away on one side to the street, with its rutted pavements littered with vagrants and piles of garbage. Looking up at it from where he stood, Arun could see the soft greenery of ferns, leafy palms and wrought-iron furniture with brightly striped cushions. He waited, hoping for a glimpse of Mr Verma on the terrace, and started as the man appeared at the entrance to the building. Bathed and breakfasted, soft and fresh as a manicured cuticle, Mr Verma, in white shirt and dark trousers, nodded up at his wife as she peered down at him over the terrace wall, unaware of Arun’s presence. A young servant boy hurried behind Mr Verma, carrying his employer’s briefcase and the jacket of his suit, folded over an arm. A large polished car slid forward and stopped. A white-uniformed chauffeur emerged and took charge of the jacket and briefcase before installing Mr Verma in the car and gently closing the door. As the vehicle prepared to drive off Arun stood, flooded suddenly by such a rage that as the car moved forward he ran after it, shouting. Bending, he picked up a stone and threw it at the car with as much force as he could. The stone fell short of the vehicle and Arun was left standing in the road, anger thumping through him, staring at the outline of Mr Verma’s head in the back window as the car disappeared from view. From the beginning he had not been like his brothers. All Arun wanted was to be free of the tenement room that was his home, while his brothers seemed content to take whatever came their way. When he was younger 59
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he had made it a point, in the magazines he read and the films he saw, to study the dress and mannerisms of people who circled in orbits beyond his own. He had applied himself so diligently to this study and the reading of self-help books on etiquette, general knowledge and the winning of friends that, by 20, he had acquired a fastidiousness that appeared incongruous in his home. He had answered an advertisement placed in a newspaper by an export firm that needed young recruits for their branches abroad, and to his amazement was chosen to be a trainee in Hong Kong. His mother had cried then in a different way, producing a celebratory plate of sweetmeats and forcing the sugary crumbs between his teeth, even though he turned his head away, laughing and teasing, full of pride. Soon, his father had returned from his tutoring rounds and was told the news. Thin and stooped, his large balding head out of proportion to his slight body, he had banged a pile of mathematics books down on the table and slapped Arun on the back. “Well done, my boy. Well done,” he had said. Then, immediately, the building knew, for his mother rushed out to tell the liftman, and the liftman told everyone who rode up and down in the ancient cage. The letters from home began to plague him almost as soon as he arrived in Hong Kong. Letters from his married brother and older married sisters, letters filled with reports of his father’s sickness and the daily hardship at home. Letters filled with all the things he thought he had left behind; everyone asked for money. And he, anxious to show how well he was doing and to establish his distance from home, wrote back richly embroidered letters about the excitement of his life. In reality, his day was filled with long hours in a cramped office, and his mean lodgings were in an unsavoury Chinese boarding house in Kowloon. Despite this, he sent much of his salary home to those of the family most in need, leaving himself little to live on. No one appeared grateful for his generosity, merely dissatisfied with the money he sent, immediately asking for more. His father’s illness took a turn for the worse and desperate appeals began to arrive from his younger sisters, their words filling his mind, destroying his sleep. The sophisticated gleam of Hong Kong’s waterfront hotels and the harbour, dotted with ships, yachts and junks, lost its lustre. His meagre salary could stretch to no further donations. At first it had been negligible amounts of money he took from the office, 60
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amounts almost too small to be noticed. These he collected slowly until the sum was ripe enough to send away. Then, his mother’s letter came, stained with tears, recalling his father’s sacrifices for them all, describing the disastrous turn in his illness and the expensive drugs now required to prolong his life. Arun was forced to risk taking larger sums of money and was soon discovered. His boss told him he was lucky no charges were pressed, that he was not put in jail but only sent back home with his Hong Kong visa cancelled. When Mr Verma’s car was out of sight Arun walked on. People teemed around him, traffic roared by, honking horns were constant, beggars were everywhere. It was as if he had never left the town, never tasted that other life. Each building and odorous gutter, each familiar balcony of washing, each curve of road were unwanted acquaintances. When he looked at the city, with its exploited masses, he felt he looked into a bottomless vat filled with layer upon layer of humanity. Perched on the narrow rim of this well, the hot sun shining upon them, were the affluent, people like Mr Verma, who never glanced into the abyss at their feet. Down in that darkness was a faceless multitude; Arun could visualise himself among them, eyes turned up to the light, struggling but always failing to climb to where the bright circle of sun beamed so benignly at the wealthy. The vision faded and he was aware of how fast his heart was pumping. Soon he lost all notion of time and the number of streets he followed or buses he rode. As he walked he felt the town pulling him deeper to its heart, as if to reclaim him. People pressed about him, traffic roared, the shouts of peddlers and the wheedling voices of beggars assailed him. His body roasted in the sun. A heavy feeling pressed on him, his eyes seemed to jerk in his head. At noon near Dhobi Talao, in a cubbyhole of a restaurant, he ate a cheap, satisfying meal. Through the open shopfront he watched the road, grateful to be removed from its frantic life. The restaurant was near a crossroads and faced the Zoroastrian Fire Temple. As Arun watched, the flow of traffic at the junction was brought to a standstill before a red light. Amid the impatient cars he noticed an antiquated horse-drawn carriage towering incongruously above the surrounding vehicles like a tall hunched insect, the driver sitting high above the traffic, as ancient as his conveyance. At last the light turned 61
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green and the cars revved their engines, preparing to rush forward, but the horse did not move and a cacophony of honking began. The carriage driver raised his whip, bringing it down repeatedly on the horse with vociferous curses. Pedestrians stopped to stare; drivers stuck their heads out of car windows to shout abuse or give advice. Another minute went by and still the horse refused to move, oblivious to the whip as it cut the air to come down on its back. Ropes straining, wood cracking, the animal suddenly collapsed between the shafts, tipping the carriage forward as it fell, pitching the driver head first into the road. The crowd swelled forward regardless of traffic, excited by the spectacle. Arun paid his bill and hurried out towards them. He felt a tugging on his sleeve and turned to find beside him a beggar woman, whining for money in the usual rehearsed words of desperation. When he ignored her she pulled at his sleeve again, pointing to a swaddled bundle over her shoulder from which protruded two bare feet. Breaking free of her grasp he struggled on, pushing his way to the front of the crowd surrounding the fallen horse. The animal lay unmoving in the road, unaware of the hooting cars and curious bystanders. In better days the creature might have pranced in a feathered headdress about a grandstand, rich children on its back; now it lay dying in the road outside the Fire Temple before the furious cars. Arun stared at the swell of its pale pink belly, smooth-skinned like a delicate egg, edged by velvety grey. It was as if this secret part of the horse, so different from its scarred, worn back, had remained inviolate, hidden from the cruel life it endured each day. A sudden shiver ran through the animal and Arun was filled with an indefinable shame as he stared at the fallen horse, its legs elegantly crossed below its silken belly. He stepped forward, feeling driven to help the suffering creature, and saw that its eyes were white with terror, its lips rolled back over long yellowed teeth, foam frothing from its mouth. He told himself it was just the long yellow teeth that reminded him of his father and then it was no longer his father but himself he saw, dying like this, surrounded by inane spectators at the end of a miserable life, every small effort at dignity thwarted. In fury the carriage driver brought the whip down again, leaving a red weal on the horse’s flank. As Arun stared at the scene in distress, the beggar woman emerged beside him again to begin her wheedling and whining, pointing to her baby. Her filthy fingers closed on the soft fabric of his shirt; a 62
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shirt warm on his arm in the sun, still bearing the laundry mark of another world. Arun turned on her in anger, panic overwhelming him, thrusting out as if to push away the town that now pressed so hard on him. The woman stumbled and the baby, tumbling out of her arms, plunged into the road before her. Arun looked down at it in new horror. The child lay in the road, its wrappings loosened, staring up at him with a frozen expression, its face hard as a wooden mask. He saw then it was already dead, from the morning or the night before, hired out for begging until it smelled too bad. The woman scrambled up, abusive now, shaking her fist at him. Arun began to run and did not stop until he was clear of the scene, jumping at last onto a moving bus. His mother made an effort to smile as she opened the door and was careful not to ask where he had been all day. Behind her he saw one of his elder married sisters and her two small children, and an old widow who lived on the floor above. They all looked at him in silent disapproval. His mother pulled him aside, whispering urgently to him. “Father is awake and wanting to see you; he is excited to know you are here. I told him you have taken leave from your work because he is ill.” She took his hand and led him towards the curtain that screened his father’s bed. As a child at night he had lain on his mattress on the floor, looking up at this same curtain drawn over a window, seeing in its bold pattern of leaves and birds a secret world in which to lose himself. Now it was a faded rag and hung about his dying father. His mother turned, smiling encouragement over her shoulder, pulling back the curtain. There was the faint shadow of a moustache above her upper lip; a small dimple appeared on her cheek as she smiled. He realised in surprise that although she had always seemed old and tired to him, she must once have been young and pretty; she was 15 years younger than his father, who had been her schoolteacher. Their marriage had been a love match and, when her first child was born, she had been only 16. Now, she placed her hand on Arun’s arm and led him forward. At the sound of her voice his father slowly turned his head on the pillow and opened his eyes. Immediately, seeing Arun, his face glowed. Lifting a thin, wasted hand he reached out to grasp his arm, mumbling as Arun bent low to catch his
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slurred words. Smiling feebly, his father gazed at him with such fondness that Arun felt his throat constrict. “Your mother says you are here on holiday, to see me. Are they pleased with you there in Hong Kong, my son? Work hard; when you are young is the time for hard work. You were always the most intelligent of all my children. I rely on you.” A wave of anger he tried hard to suppress swept through Arun at his father’s words. It was this feeble old man who was the cause not only of his present distress, but also every other shame he had known in life. It was he who had thrust on Arun the degradation of this room, and the dire need it brought on them all. He had given life to 10 children, unable to stop them coming and equally unable to support them. The anger pounded through Arun and then abruptly was gone, leaving him with a weight of sadness. Tears blurred his eyes and ran down his cheeks, for he realised suddenly that in the circumstances life had thrust on him, his father had done his best. Now he was dying and, just as Arun had looked at the beautiful belly of the stricken horse and felt something indefinable that must be protected, so, looking at his father’s exhausted face, he was filled with the same inexplicable feeling. He pulled up a chair and sat down beside the bed, reaching out for his father’s hand. “Look after your mother and sisters, son. I have prayed for your return; you are the only one …” His father closed his eyes, but the pressure of his fingertips on Arun’s hand remained insistent. He felt the throb of the old man’s weak pulse pressed against his own hand and knew the weight of responsibility his father carried had now been passed to him. He did not know what time he awoke. It was still dark and in the bare window frame above his bed the stars were bright. In the road below the beggars slept as they slept each night, under ragged coverings on filthy pavements bordering decaying buildings. He knew now he would never be free of the town or this room; its life force ran in his blood and was the essence of his survival. If there was to be no escape then, he saw suddenly, he must embrace all that surrounded him. Somehow, he would find the strength to carry the burden his father had placed on him; somehow, he would regain for the family the respect he had lost. In the morning he would go out and find a job. Something would turn up. 64
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He saw that although his young sisters were still curled up asleep together on their mattress, the other beds in the room were vacant. From behind the flowered curtain came whispers and movement and even before he heard his mother sob, he knew his father was dead. Looking again at the star-filled sky, he saw that at last the dawn was breaking. Slowly, he pushed himself off the bed and made his way across the room. Lifting the old curtain, he turned first to his mother, hardly able to look at her grief-stained face. As she embraced him he felt the wetness of her tears on his cheek and remembered the weak throb of his father’s pulse as he had gripped his hand hours before. Instinctively, his arms tightened about her. “It is all right. I am here,” he whispered, and heard her small groan of relief. He stepped towards the bed and saw the peace that had settled at last on his father’s face. A sob spilled from him. He knew he cried not only in sorrow and regret for the past, but also in resolve for the future. Arun reached out to touch his father’s face, the flesh still soft and warm, and bowed his head in silent promise. Outside, the sun had already pushed back the cover of night and pigeons cooed, nestling together on the windowsill.
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66
The Generals’ Celestial Mandate Bertil Lintner Photographs by Nic Dunlop
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V hill town of Maymyo, dotted with rose gardens and ivycovered red-brick mansions, was once the retreat of choice for British soldiers and other colonial administrators escaping the heat and dust of Burma’s lowlands. Today it is not the British who take advantage of the cool, almost alpine, climate of the settlement, renamed Pyin Oo Lwin in 1989 when many local place names were changed. The Burmese military has built a sanctuary nearby for its officers that surpasses anything their former colonial masters could have imagined. Instead of the Victorian houses that gave Maymyo its charm, there stand garish luxury villas in the new zone, which is also home to the Defence Services Academy, Burma’s equivalent of the United States’ West Point or Britain’s Sandhurst. When construction began in late 2004, The Irawaddy, a magazine published by Burmese exiles in Thailand, reported that “no expense has been spared to allow the generals to live in what basically is a resort”. Less than an hour’s flight from Burma’s new capital, Naypyidaw, the theme-park sanctuary gives new meaning to excess and ostentation, containing replicas of the Shwedagon Pagoda in the old capital, Rangoon, and the ancient royal palace in Mandalay, plus an artificial beach with a man-made stretch of water that licks its sandy shores. Comprehension of the Burmese junta’s brazen display of wealth in old Maymyo is essential to understanding the longevity of military rule in Burma, whose US$1,500 per capita gross domestic product last year was roughly on a par with Rwanda’s, according to the International Monetary 67
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Fund. From 1962 to 1974, when the first post-colonial government of Niger fell to a military insurrection, there were 64 military takeovers worldwide, most entailing the overthrow of civilian governments. However, only two of the regimes responsible have held on to power continuously since those tumultuous years in Asia, Africa and Latin America: the cabals of Libya, where Colonel Muammar Gaddafi seized power in 1969, and Burma, where the military ousted the elected government of prime minister U Nu in 1962, and has remained empowered in various guises since. (At the time of writing, Libya was experiencing violent anti-regime unrest that was being met with a bloody response.) Grasping why successive military regimes in Burma have flourished requires, among other things, an examination of the ways in which power has been cemented. Repression by the military of the population at large and surveillance of it by the intelligence service are factors, as is the willingness of Burmese generals to use force, even at the cost of lives, as seen in the regular cycle of uprisings and crackdowns. The military has also retained an unyielding grip by controlling all vital economic activity; instituting policies to divide and rule, suppressing, often violently, opposition movements; and creating a state within a state, in which untold privileges are accorded army personnel, such as those for whom the highland haven is intended. Such dispensation contrasts starkly with the plight of the 2,200 documented political prisoners held, according to David Mathieson, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, in more than 40 prisons and labour camps in Burma. Victims of repression, they symbolise a broad cross section of Burmese society, including, he says, “activists, poets, hip-hop artists, doctors, politicians, Buddhist monks – people who are in any way perceived to have challenged the state or the interests of the military”. Among the most prominent political leaders behind bars are Min Ko Naing, a leader of the extensive uprising in 1988, and the popular comedian Zargana, whose double entendres poking fun at the regime failed to amuse the generals. Both are being kept in remote prisons in the ethnic hinterlands, away from their families and support networks. “Prisoners are routinely mistreated in these facilities, deprived of health resources, food and contact,” says Mathieson, who has reported on Burma for 15 years. “Torture [involving beatings, electric shocks to the genitals, and worse] is routinely employed against some prisoners depending on 68
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circumstances: for information, for punishment and, in some cases, in what appears to be the ‘system’ trying to crush resistance by destroying the human spirit.” One former political prisoner remembers having to kneel on sharp stones while being beaten – and being subjected to “the motorcycle”, a method of inflicting physical and mental torture. “I had to half-crouch and pretend I was riding a motorcycle, making engine noises and all that,” he says. “The officer would rap me with his bamboo staff and shout comments such as: ‘You didn’t stop at the red lights! What’s the matter with you! You don’t obey the laws!’ It went on like that until I thought I was going mad.” Sit Naing*, a former medical student, was also imprisoned for taking part in the 1988 uprising, when millions of people across Burma demanded an end to military-dominated rule. Enraged by a regime that had not only turned Burma into a political and social basket case but also foisted financial ruin on what had been one of Southeast Asia’s most prosperous countries before the coup, the protesters poured onto the streets to vent their anger. Demonstrations were met with unprecedented brutality when the army moved in to shore up a regime threatened by popular dissent. According to foreign witnesses and local staff at Rangoon General Hospital, several thousand unarmed demonstrators were gunned down in the capital and elsewhere. Twenty-six years after General Ne Win wrenched power from U Nu, having forcibly suppressed several other uprisings in the interim, the junta knew how to hobble protests. According to numerous witnesses I interviewed after the unrest, whose testimonies are chronicled in my book, Outrage; Burma’s Struggle for Democracy, the streets of Rangoon reeked of blood and the city looked like a slaughterhouse. Troops had fired machine guns and rockets at unarmed civilians. Arrests followed; Sit Naing was apprehended in July 1989 and spent 10 years in solitary confinement. After the killings he had fled temporarily to the Thai-Burma border – an area then controlled by ethnic insurgents from the Karen and Mon communities. Sit Naing was accused and convicted of having links with rebels from those minorities, a “crime” to which he “confessed”.
* A pseudonym 69
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B
’ national elections for 20 years were held last November. The country’s military rulers claimed the polls were a step towards democratic civilian government, but the United Nations condemned them as neither free nor fair. The elections were won by military-backed contenders the Union Solidarity and Development Party. Six days later Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the National League for Democracy (which continues to operate illegally, in defiance of orders from the junta to disband), was released from house arrest. She had encouraged supporters to boycott the polls but has since confirmed she is willing to meet Senior General Than Shwe, leader of the junta, for talks focusing on national reconciliation. Suu Kyi, of course, is much more than simply an opposition politician. The winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize and an international symbol of peaceful resistance to oppression, she was greeted by thousands of followers who gathered near her home in Rangoon, hoping for a glimpse of their idol, as news of her latest emancipation spread. Her appearance brought deafening cheers and was compared in some reports to the moment of
“But I had no idea what the confession said,” declares Sit Naing, who now lives quietly in Rangoon. “After my arrest I was badly beaten but they did not ask me a single question. They just waved a piece of paper in front of me and wanted me to sign it. After a few days I couldn’t stand it any longer and just signed it.” The purpose of his arrest, torture and release is obvious to Mathieson and to Burmese dissidents who have served sentences in the country’s prisons: to show other political activists the consequences of opposing the regime. Sit Naing now leads a reasonably normal life, but other former political prisoners haven’t been as lucky. Mentally and physically impaired, these broken ex-convicts remind young people that it is safer to occupy themselves with football or music, anything but engage in political activity. The military government has been spreading that message since July 7, 1962, at the first demonstrations held against it, when soldiers surrounded
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Nelson Mandela’s release from a South African prison 20 years earlier. No modern political leader other than Mandela has suffered more time in detention than Suu Kyi. Others dismissed the parallel as false, Suu Kyi’s emergence, however emotive, never having been likely to trigger any urgent political overhaul. Although she has spent much of the last two decades in detention, Suu Kyi, 65, remains the face of Burma’s democracy movement and its symbol of hope. She was first placed under house arrest in 1989, when the junta declared martial law. She was not permitted visits from sons Alexander and Kim, or her husband, the scholar Dr Michael Aris. The government tried to persuade her to join her sons and ailing partner abroad, Suu Kyi not having seen Aris since 1995, but she knew that if she left the country she would not be allowed to return. Aris died of prostate cancer in Oxford in March 1999. Considered Burma’s disenfranchised leader by her supporters, Suu Kyi emphasised, during an interview arranged by human-rights organisation Christian Solidarity Worldwide Hong Kong, which campaigned relentlessly
Rangoon University’s campus and shot indiscriminately into a crowd, students always being at the forefront of protest movements in Burma. Ne Win had faced little resistance when he seized power four months earlier, primarily because few Burmese expected him to stay in control for long. The general had taken over government once before, in 1958, but two years later handed the leadership to an elected parliament. The military, many believed, simply wanted to clean up politics at a time of rampant corruption and a proliferation of political parties that seemed to do little but squabble. Their misjudgment played into the hands of the junta, which soon showed how serious it was about ruling the country. Sai Tzang, then a 23-year-old tutor at Rangoon University, remembers fleeing for his life when gunfire rang out that day in July. “Finally, I reached the safety of the hostel building,” he says. “But then the soldiers began firing into the buildings and we heard bullets thudding into the walls and
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for her release, that the position in Burma is one of political confusion, but also desire and ambition for the regime’s opponents. Suu Kyi’s charisma and fame – UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has described her as “a source of inspiration for millions of people around the world” – have always been an irritation for the junta and if anything they have been burnished by her years of incarceration. At the presentation of the Nobel award, accepted in Oslo by her sons, chairman of the committee Francis Sejested called her “an outstanding example of the power of the powerless”. Suu Kyi and her colleagues remain under zealous surveillance, the BBC reporting that they are followed on foot and motor scooter by security police. It is unthinkable that eavesdropping on all forms of their communication is not carried out. Nevertheless, Suu Kyi was characteristically forthright during our conversation. Anil Stephen: What does it mean for you now that you’re free? Aung San Suu Kyi: I’ve been telling people I’ve always felt free in my mind.
the tinkling of glass as windowpanes shattered. It was clear the soldiers were firing not merely to disperse the crowds, but were under orders to shoot to kill.” Officially, 15 people were killed and 27 wounded. But Sai Tzang, neutral observers and students present during the shooting say hundreds of potential leaders of society in many fields lay sprawled in death. A day later, Rangoon residents were awakened by an explosion that reverberated through the city. The army had reduced the Students’ Union building to rubble. That it was part of history – where Burma’s independence movement against the British was born in the 1930s – mattered little to the generals , who wanted everyone to know who was in charge.
Before 1988 there was a handful of generals. Now there are dozens, although the exact number is almost certainly unknown outside Burma. 72
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But now, of course, I’m free physically, and this means a lot more work. There hasn’t been much difference in my mindset, as it were, because I’ve always felt that if you follow your conscience then you’re free. AS: What did you think of the recent elections? ASSK: The elections, as the United Nations has made very clear, were deeply flawed, and this is why we need an inclusive political process rather than one that is limited. The results of the elections have been questioned by many people and organisations. AS: What is the situation in Burma now? What do you read into it? ASSK: At the moment I would say the situation is one of political uncertainty. And at the same time of great hope, because we have been very gratified by the number of young people who have come out to support what we are doing. Their participation in the movement has been an occasion of great hope for us.
Their readiness to quash dissent with bullets was again demonstrated, in the mid-1970s, after about a decade of relative peace. What had started in May 1974 as a strike by oil workers demanding higher wages ended in a bloodbath after railway workers and labourers at a spinning mill laid down their tools. Ne Win acted as he had previously done: he sent in armed troops who took aim at the workers and students who had joined them. Officially, 28 people were killed and 80 wounded. Independent sources put the death toll at quadruple that figure. Hundreds of people were arrested and universities and colleges were closed because students had linked arms with the striking workers. Student opposition proved futile then and later the same year, when antimilitary demonstrations were held following the death of one of Burma’s most respected citizens, U Thant, United Nations secretary general from 1961 to 1971 and an intellectual who opposed Ne Win. Scores of students and other
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AS: You have faced many obstacles in your struggles in Burma. How do you keep going? ASSK: Partly it’s conviction and partly it’s that I have good colleagues, who have given up a lot to stand by their convictions. AS: What can the people of Asia do now for Burma? ASSK: I think there is much to be done. First of all, of course, there are the other political prisoners, the 2,200, who need to be freed, then there is a need for an inclusive political process in Burma. We would be so grateful, so appreciative, if the world could realise how important it is for us to make sure that there is going to be an inclusive political process, rather than one limited to the framework laid down by the present military regime. AS: What is your hope for Burma as you look into 2011? ASSK: My hope for Burma is that the people of this country will realise they have the capacity to bring about the changes they want. I want our people to
activists fled to the Thai border after the predictable government response of gunfire. There, pre-coup leaders, among them former prime minister U Nu and independence hero Bo Let Ya, were organising armed resistance against the junta. But that too ended in failure. Among other reasons, they lacked foreign support and the funds to acquire enough weapons on the Thai black market. The military government’s competence in scuppering challenges to its rule, Mathieson says, is “a textbook example of the squalid efficiency of very basic authoritarianism”. But repression alone does not explain the durability of Burma’s junta. The 1962 coup differed from other rebellions in the region in that the armed forces not only took over the government, but also assumed control of Burma’s economic institutions, ushering in an entirely new political and economic system. Under “the Burmese Way to Socialism” almost all private property was confiscated and handed to military-run
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be confident of that, to be confident of their own power, to believe in their own capacity to change this country for the better. Anil Stephen
A rare photograph of the National League for Democracy Executive Committee meeting in Aung San Suu Kyi’s house, 1996. From her left are Lwin, Aung Shwe, Kyi Maung and Tin U.
state corporations. Isolationist and xenophobic, the new policy also banned international aid organisations from operating in the country. In addition, it curbed freedom of expression, prohibited foreign-language publications and outlawed privately owned newspapers. Major industries, among them rice milling, banking, mining and teak were nationalised and oil companies forced to cease operations, with oil extraction and production monopolised by the government-owned People’s Oil Industry. The old mercantile elite, largely of Indian and Chinese origin, left the country in legions, as did many of the country’s intellectuals. Before 1962, Burma had one of Southeast Asia’s highest living standards and a fairly welleducated population. After the coup, the military became the country’s new and only elite.
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The military establishment developed into a discrete entity within the state, according employees of the junta, their families, dependants and cronies privileges ranging from special schools and hospitals to subsidised housing, often in secluded areas. An army pass guaranteed its owner a seat on a train or aircraft – and an untarnished record should he drive. As everyone in Burma knows, no policeman would dare to book anyone with such credentials for violating traffic rules. After 1962 the military also wielded absolute power through its own political institution, the Burmese Socialist Programme Party (BSPP). Two years later, all other political parties were banned. The Burmese Way to Socialism – and even the one-party system – was abolished, however, after the 1988 uprising, following which the junta renamed itself the Orwellian-sounding State Law and Order Restoration Council, or SLORC. Perhaps in an attempt to appease the international community, which had condemned the carnage in Rangoon, new economic policies permitting private enterprise and foreign investment were also announced. A possible reason is that, having been affected by the economic decline brought on by its own rash programmes – including acute shortages of daily necessities and various consumer goods, although
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there was a flourishing black market – the military realised it could make more money in a free-market economy. So austere socialism gave way to capitalism, although Burma’s economy remains a military-dominated one. Its own company, the Union of Myanmar Economic Holdings (UMEH), controls or supervises vital economic activity (ranging from banking to tourism to gem mining to property) and the money goes directly into the generals’ pockets. According to a leaked 1995-96 UMEH annual report, this conglomerate was formed in 1990 as “a special public company, with shareholders limited to the Directorate of Defence Procurement, Ministry of Defence, Defence Regimental Institutes and other bodies of the Defence Services and War Veterans”. Philip Robertson, an American labour activist, wrote in The Irrawaddy in August 2003, “Between the UMEH and MEC [the Myanmar Economic Corporation, another military-controlled enterprise under the Ministry of Defence], the military has extended its reach into virtually all aspects of the formal economy of Burma. When combined with the economic enterprises operated directly by the Ministry of Industry 1 and Ministry of Industry 2, the regime’s domination of the economy is clear.” The government’s dogged pursuit of complete control has also been aided by its policy of divide and rule. After the 1988 uprising and abandonment of the one-party system, several opposition figures were allowed to establish their own political parties. The most powerful was the National League for Democracy (NLD), headed by Tin U, an army chief turned democrat, and Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of General Aung San, who had led the struggle for independence in the 1940s. However, when the opposition proved wildly popular both were placed under house arrest in July 1989, and scores of others detained in Rangoon’s Insein and other prisons. That some activists were imprisoned for years and others released before the completion of their sentences, or not incarcerated at all, sowed suspicion among the pro-democracy forces, whose loyalty to their cause was also challenged by the military’s willingness to bribe opposition figures with money or privileges and force compliance by spreading rumours about them or issuing threats against family members. Left: the generals of Burma’s military regime on Armed Forces Day, in Naypyidaw, the Burmese capital. In the centre is Lieutenant General Aung Htwe, commander of the Bureau of Special Operations in Karen and Shan states.
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Nevertheless, with almost all prominent pro-democracy leaders detained, the military probably thought it was safe to hold the elections it had promised after crushing the demonstrations the year before. The NLD won an overwhelming victory in 1990, capturing 392 of 485 seats in the National Assembly. Parliament was never convened, however. Instead, a so-called Constituent Assembly was set up, consisting of 700 hand-picked delegates, of whom only 100 were elected representatives. Nearly two decades passed before the constitution was drafted and finally “approved” in a referendum in May 2008, just after cyclone Nargis devastated the Irrawaddy delta, Burma’s rice bowl and home to millions of farmers. At least 130,000 people were killed and 2.4 million made homeless or affected in other ways. But, if official figures are to be believed, 92.4 per cent of voters approved the charter, with a 99 per cent turnout. If Burma’s population of about 50 million people seemed cowed by the statistics, it was probably because only nine months before the vote the people had witnessed yet another unsuccessful uprising. This time, the protests were sparked by a government decision on August 15 to increase the price of fuel. Petrol and diesel quickly doubled in price and the cost of compressed gas, on which buses run, increased five fold. Four days later hundreds of people, many of them housewives, marched through the old capital Rangoon. Although the women were left alone, the authorities embarked on a witchhunt for activists and arrested more than 1,000 people, including some who had not taken to the streets. But still the protests would not die down and on September 5, 2007, monks in the central town of Pakokku staged a protest against poor living conditions. When soldiers and police broke up their peaceful rally, beating several monks, the holy men abducted about 20 government officials who had been patrolling the streets. The monks released their captives a few days later but demanded an apology for the violence. With no words of contrition forthcoming, the demonstration grew until participation by laypeople raised the number of protesters to at least 100,000. Events took a political turn when, on September 22, marchers defied barricades blocking the road leading to Aung San Suu Kyi’s home, where she had been held under house arrest from 1989 to 1995, 2000 to Left: a former political prisoner demonstrates interrogation and torture positions imposed on Burmese prison inmates. Mae Sot, Thai-Burma border.
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2002, and from 2003. In tears at the sight of the monks, she emerged briefly to receive their blessings. Then the crackdown began. Troops were brought in from ethnic conflict zones in the border areas and, according to Human Rights Watch, monasteries were raided, monks assaulted and valuables, gold among them, stolen from private quarters. In the streets of Rangoon, troops supported by riot police charged the demonstrations, shooting into the air, then into the crowds. Scores of people were killed and hundreds arrested. State leaders and advocacy groups worldwide again condemned Burma’s hard-line generals, but nothing seemed to move them. Burma’s religious affairs minister, Brigadier General Thura Myint Maung, asserted that “political extremists” and “foreign broadcasting stations” had incited the monks and others to demonstrate. The situation, he said risibly, was being handled “softly” and “with care”. In the lead-up to the 2008 referendum, the government-controlled media offered only crude propaganda in favour of a “yes” vote, Human Rights Watch reported, and publicised criminal penalties for those who opposed the poll, creating a climate of fear. “There has been no critical public discussion of the constitution’s contents,” the organisation stated. “Most people have not even seen the document. The generals are sending a clear message that their hand-crafted constitution will continue the military rule that has persisted for more than four decades.” To ensure as much, the junta eventually held on November 7, 2010, an election that it had promised after the 2008 referendum. The poll, however, aroused more interest internationally than within Burma, where there was little enthusiasm among a people who time and again had been disappointed by their military masters. The NLD boycotted the election, although some of its members broke away to form the National Democratic Force (NDF), which tried to take advantage of any opening the voting might provide. But the outcome remained as predictable as that of all other military-orchestrated events in Burma. In constituencies where it seemed that the NDF was heading for victory, boxes of advanced votes were dumped, overturning the result in favour of the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), the military’s new political body. According to witnesses in Rangoon, in some constituencies in which the USDP looked set for a thrashing, the doors 80
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to voting rooms were closed before counting began. In the final tally, the NDF clinched only 16 of 608 seats in the upper and lower houses of the new National Assembly. The vote was a resounding success for the military not only because of the USDP’s victory: it had also diluted the power of the once-mighty NLD and its breakaway faction, the NDF, was rendered toothless. On November 13, the military released Suu Kyi from house arrest. But it was clear that the generals were not interested in dialogue with her, Tin U, who had been freed nine months earlier, or anybody else from the opposition. When Suu Kyi’s son Kim paid an emotional visit to Rangoon shortly after her release – his first in 10 years – local media were warned by the authorities not to cover the event, or report anything about her and her activities. Internationally, however, the release of Suu Kyi conveniently diverted attention from the fraudulent election and evinced the military’s skill at manipulating outside opinion. Many Western diplomats overseas, and even those based in Rangoon, had dismissed the Oxford University-educated widow as irrelevant, arguing that she had been away from Burma’s political scene for too long and pointing out that she was a stranger to young people. They believed that a viable “third force”, represented by the NDF and others, had emerged to bridge the gap between the military and prodemocracy movement. But foreigners in Rangoon were astounded by the size of the crowds that gathered to see her – and that many of them were young Burmese born after the 1988 uprising. The recent election and the jubilant scenes in Rangoon after Suu Kyi’s release showed that the so-called third force was just a figment of the imagination of outsiders eager to see an end to the political impasse in Burma. In a similar miscalculation by the international community, a group of intellectuals and social workers calling themselves Myanmar Egress had attracted the attention of diplomats and foreign donors with their optimistic forecast of democratic reform in Burma. Led by Nay Win Maung, a local media mogul who, among other things, is the editor of several magazines, and Khin Zaw Win, an erstwhile UN employee and former political prisoner, the group became a partner of organisations such as Germany’s Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, which is close to Germany’s Social Democrats. Last September, Khin Zaw Win toured Germany and Scandinavia in an 81
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attempt to convince people that the forthcoming election would provide “an opening for democracy”. Myanmar Egress regretted the promise. Mathieson of Human Rights Watch wrote on the Open Democracy website: “Nay Win Maung, a prominent ‘third force’ intellectual, magazine editor and leader of an influential NGO [Myanmar Egress], was a notable proponent of the elections. He campaigned openly for people to participate; lobbied scores of Western diplomats on how the elections promised change; and predicted a strong showing for the opposition.” According to Mathieson, three days after the election, under his pseudonym Aung Htut, Nay Win Maung wrote a contrite piece in his Burmese-language magazine The Voice: “We climbed a slippery pole, knowing it’s slippery. I don’t think we were wrong. I thought just by climbing it the first time, we would go rather far. That opinion was wrong.” It was clear there was no viable “third force” and no real middle ground between the ruling military and the people. The truth that many outsiders are unwilling to accept is that Burma remains bitterly divided and change is as elusive as ever. Burma’s generals are often described as inept and misguided leaders propelled by superstition rather than rational thinking. When the capital was shifted to Naypyidaw, 320 kilometres north of Rangoon, the official move apparently took place at 6.36am on November 6, 2005, a time that had been selected by stargazers. Five days later, at 11am on November 11, a second convoy of 1,100 military trucks carrying 11 military battalions and 11 government ministries left Rangoon for the new capital. The significance of those numbers is not entirely clear, but many ordinary people in Burma will tell you that the generals are not only kings isolated from their subjects, but also deeply delusional when it comes to the paranormal. To guarantee their continuing rule they are said to believe that the intervention of spirits is necessary – in case their strong-arm tactics fail – and to rely on astrologers, mediums and soothsayers to help make important decisions about the country’s future. But as Ko Lin, a young Burmese now living in exile in the West, explains: “Ordinary people joke about [the generals’] belief in astrology and numerology, and it upsets many too, because ordinary people become victims of such nonsense. Look at the demonetisation of the Burmese 82
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currency, creating banknotes whose denominations are divisible by nine. It makes people suffer.” On September 22, 1987, all old banknotes were rendered worthless and replaced by 45 and 90 kyat bills. The new currency proved a nightmare for consumers and vendors as well as Burma’s few foreign investors, who, after 1988 began to discover the country’s vast resources of gems and minerals. The government then issued 20, 50, 100 and 500 kyat banknotes, along with a 50 pya note (100 pyas equals one kyat), the equivalent of less than a 20th of a US cent. There was a reason for its introduction: 20+50+100+500+50=720 and 7+2+0=9, a number considered lucky in Burma. The 50 pya denomination may have all but disappeared but now there exists a 5,000 kyat banknote (50+0+0=50), which does the same trick. The Burmese are not the only people to label the junta incompetent. In a US government cable released by WikiLeaks in 2010, Lee Kuan Yew, Minister Mentor of Singapore, one of Burma’s biggest foreign investors along with China and France, reportedly told a US State Department official that ASEAN should not have admitted Burma to the organisation in 1997. Lee also “expressed his scorn for the regime’s leadership”, the cable noted. “He said he had given up on them a decade ago, called them ‘dense’ and ‘stupid’ and said they had ‘mismanaged’ the country’s great natural resources.” Although Burma would probably have been economically and politically better off had the military not taken control, it is far from the case that it has lacked acumen in ruling the country. The brutality of the generals is well known, but their guile and shrewdness in exercising power over the populace have often been underestimated. Almost half a century of resilience cannot simply be attributed to star alignments or providence of the number nine.
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Poetry Jimmy
From The Hellish Rope of Three Strands: The Door, The Key, The Wall The Door The door! The door! This door has been with me for nearly two decades. I’ve had no right to open it or close – and by itself it swings in and out to seal the fates of many lives. The door is heavy-set – it puts its iron jacket on to guard my every particle of breath. This is the door which forces bodies to crumble and minds to slump the door which lets me hold its grille and sing my song beyond but never lets my thoughts dance through. The door is never smartened up but tends attentively to those small bowls
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that come inside and then go out and have the name of food – the thin and fragile cups that get inside and then slip out and bear the name of water hot and cold – and to my feet but not my knees going in and going out. This is the only gateway to my damp and suffocating cage. When hot weather stifles this is the door that scalds the inmates; when cold weather overwhelms, the door which gnaws their limbs to marrow. As each day rises I can bid the sun “Hello” but as nights fall the door will never tell me of the sky’s good news. Though in days’ blossoming I touch the ground with my bare feet the dusk then shrouds the door which steals and locks the sky. Oh my God! This is the door that judges innocence a convict and considers convicts innocent the door which tightens every stiffness as a reason to protect its hinge the door which turns openers to evil and closers into good. This is the door that may acquire grace by opening in time the door which lets me roam around this ten-pace world. 85
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This is the door which separates two persons with different uniforms and opposing duties. When the door is closed the uniform inside can feel unhappy while the uniform outside’s secure. At the time of opening the uniform inside relaxes cautiously and that without begins to fear. At night the uniform within must lie down still even if it doesn’t want to sleep; while the uniform outside must walk for ever up and down and up and down through all the sleepless hours. This is the door that won’t permit them sympathy but multiplies their hatred time and time and time again – the door that makes the one outside feel as if arrested by both hope and fear and the one inside to sense a conscience free. Sometimes, when slanting sunlight sweetly enters in, the door’s bright lower half can bask in light – and sometimes, when cool moonlight runs gently to the ground this is the door through which I know a way to catch a glimpse of moon. This door denies its definition – recomposes it as “thug”. This is the door that sows my future with darkness to reap only sorrows and pain. 86
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No! No! No! This is the door that must surrender me! For I possess a gardener’s hands his sharpened eyes and ears attuned – his perfect sense of smell. My predicament must change for this is the door that teaches me to hear the breaking news the door that urges me to study seasons of society then lectures me about the fertiliser’s lexicon! This is the door that steeps in me philosophies of self-defence to make a way of life – the door that cheers me up and makes me chant, “Down with thorns and bitterness!” and gives me thirst for “flowers and water”. Is the jasmine blossoming? Does Mesua ferra smell as sweet? Do those gum kino trees glisten? Rainwater splashes on a tarred road, purified. This is the door that counsels me to practise basic loving-kindness the door that leads me to deny my fate, create myself anew. Though this door will never be forever open neither will it close eternally. This door may crush my body but it can’t destroy belief: my soul’s set free – a shining star. 87
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“Can annihilation be annihilated?” This is the door that must bow down to the greater truths of a beautiful mind that must break free from its cage. Look! Look closely! Like the radiance of a reckless slut the door now bears my forehead’s print. Too cold to feel, the door is showing off its iron bars beating and chastising those who enter in and plucking, piece by piece, their sanity apart. The door! The door! My blood runs hot with consciousness and opens up my soul and when Aurora spreads her wings that cold and solid door will disappear. 2004
88
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screen she looked like a two-dimensional angel. The headphones slung around my neck muffled her voice, which rose above the others. I wound the tape back to my camera as it panned the faces, the handmade flags sewn onto bamboo poles, the chanting orchestrated by those standing closest to the fence. Somewhere the wind howled like a pariah dog, though I couldn’t be sure if it was on the video or outside my building. The camera focused on her, leading a simple protest chant. “Give us the truth. Give us our lives.” The words sailed from her mouth like candle kites aflame against a tar-black sky. A silver earring swung in a half moon. It brushed a thin scar along her jaw. She wore it proudly, without the cover of sandalwood make-up. While other women wore wrap skirts and pastel T-shirts, she wore pressed khaki pants and dark leather shoes. The camera scanned up towards her shoulder-length hair and mid-sentence chanting. “ ... the truth. Give us our lives.” Nothing seemed to betray which village she was from; I knew she wasn’t from Rangoon. She had the erect posture of someone accustomed to sitting on the floor and carrying baskets long distances atop her head. I watched it again. The camera zoomed in on the fence of green plastic cladding and razor wire too high to see over. It was then the crowd started to hurl stones and old bronze coins. I adjusted the headphones and listened to the frenetic drumbeat. Protesters bent to the ground and picked up 89
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chipped pieces of cement. Some even threw their sandals. I remembered a coin striking my head as I turned to film the crowd. I paused on the final shot of her: mouth open, eyes like brown sapphires, her hand balled into a tight fist beneath a ridge of knuckles. The crowd grew nervous and started to disperse, men in white button-up shirts and green sarongs parting their ranks like sand flying in through an open door. The camera slipped from my hand and hit the ground. I remembered bending down to pick it up, broken, and hoping to see her with my own eyes. She had already gone. The door swung open and bright daylight’s glare made it impossible to see the screen. I shut it off, the red power light disappearing with the memory of her pupils. “What are you still doing in here? Have you even stepped outside today? You’ll turn into a spider if you aren’t careful.” Jo Tin walked swiftly towards my desk. “I had a lot of work to do,” I said. “I can’t help it if my work is indoors.” He looked around my apartment, starting to laugh when he approached the single-burner stove. “Instant noodles and rice. Always noodles and rice. It makes me sad, do you know that? I’ll bet you haven’t had a meal cooked by a woman since you last had dinner in my home.” He inspected the olive green of his military uniform, making sure I felt responsible for the cobweb he pulled from his lapel, and a fly he shooed back into flight. “I heard you broke a camera. Was it expensive, little brother?” He was not my brother, but he used that as my only name. “Not so expensive,” I said. “Old, barely working.” “Still, video cameras are not cheap. It makes me look very bad for sending you there. What happened?” I shrugged my shoulders. “Nothing. Just a mistake.” “Whose mistake? The person who knocked it from your hand?” “No, really. It was my fault.” “Your vocabulary is part of your problem,” said Jo Tin. “You told me you made a mistake, right?” “Yes,” I said, nodding. “No,” he said, taking my head and shaking it. “Do not assume it is possible for you to make a mistake. I know what happened – you got nervous, 90
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didn’t you? You didn’t want them to know you were government. Your hand started to sweat; you held the camera in your bad hand.” I nodded again, pulling this hand into my ribs, thumbing the memory of phantom fingers. “I’ll make it right.” He said, “We’ll say she did it.” I told him I didn’t know whom he meant. He laughed again, pulling out a photograph of the woman from the protest, the one I was there to film. He threw it onto my editing board, the glossy image reflecting my face in the military watermark. “Here’s an extra copy if you lost yours. You must have seen her there. Our intelligence was very good. Now let me see the videotape.” As he reached towards the monitor I met his hand with my own. “Videotapes take a long time to edit well,” I said. “I can do even better than the interrogation videos from before.” He drew back, an uncertain look that relaxed into a smile painting his face. “My little brother, always wanting to please me.” He took a handful of my hair and pulled back and forth on my scalp. “Bring the finished tape to dinner at my house tomorrow night. You can show it to my wife … and she will make your favourite curry.” He pulled the door closed, the wedge of daylight diminishing. I returned to the tape, still frozen on the face of the woman from the protest: her makeup, her scar, her earrings. Somehow I felt I knew her already. I rewound the video and played it again. One touch of my finger and she would be the star, another and she would disappear, her beauty kept for me alone.
2 The bus was crowded that night. An earlier vehicle had broken down on the same route and ours adopted the passengers. Some of the younger men stood on the back bumper, holding on with one hand and pushing goodnaturedly with the other, pretending to unwind each other’s sarongs. The bus meandered between downtown buildings with their washing lines and boiling pots of rice. We turned onto a quieter avenue lined with willow trees, the diesel exhaust overwhelmed by the heady scent of a nearby lake at sunset. I pushed my way to the back and stepped down onto the gravel 91
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road. A yellow orchid caught my eye, hanging from behind a fence. I pulled it to my face, inspecting the severe beauty, the star-like angles. Using a sheet of newspaper to protect the flower, I plucked it from the stem and placed it inside my shoulder bag. The buzzer at Jo Tin’s house sounded like a rotary telephone ring. Between each depression of the white button I waited a few seconds in silence. He emerged from the door and pulled open the gate, which rolled on two old wheels connected by a wooden axle. “Where did you have the limousine driver park?” he said, laughing and leading me inside. “Sometimes it is not safe here at night.” The house’s vaulted ceilings were held up by white colonial columns repainted 10 or 15 times. A national flag nailed to the wall served as the pillowcase behind the head of a shut-eyed Buddha, resting on a shrine of liquor, roses, coins, candles and spices. The clattering of meal preparation in the kitchen confused me when I saw Jo Tin’s wife sitting in the living room, her feet up and pointing towards the television. She didn’t greet me at first but then turned and feigned surprise, as if I were a boy who had grown since the last time his aunt saw him. “Good evening, Thin Ma,” I said. “Be a good soldier and bring me a glass of water,” she said, engrossed in her programme. “Just tell the girl, she will hand it to you.” I had never been comfortable around servants and luckily theirs stepped out just as I entered the kitchen. From a nearby jug I filled a glass. Thin Ma drank from it dramatically, as though she’d returned from a desert, wiping her dry forehead with her shirtsleeve. Her show appeared to be on a commercial break; the advertisement was for a festival celebrating the anniversary of the constitution. Jo Tin took me by the shoulder and led us into an adjoining room. There he decanted two glasses of liquor from a matching set on a lacquerware tray. He placed one glass in my hand and swished the liquor in his own, nearly drinking through his nose as he inhaled deeply. “Do you remember when I first met you?” he asked. “Of course I do,” I said. “I was a villager then.” “No, you were a child. A tiny child with no family and mismatched shoes.” He sipped his drink with a reflective smile. “I was just a young soldier then myself, barely tall enough for the motorbike I rode.” 92
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“You gave me my first job,” I said, the alcohol hitting me immediately, the bottom of the glass distorting my vision. I was very much a child then. I’d grown up in a village of rubber trees and flower plantations. The farmers would come out before the sun rose, washing their faces in the dew of the leaves and tapping the sap into old army helmets. The boys patiently brought along candles or flashlights – the first step towards becoming a man. My father was bedridden, partly crippled by an accident. He sold our land, so we had nothing left to sell. Nothing but what I brought. I used to run through the manicured lines of saplings, carrying my sandals so I’d be fast and quiet. I’d watch the other families taking the milk from their trees, careful not to let them see me in their distant rows of flowers. My fingers worked silently, efficiently, a small knife doing the job of pruning shears. Only a few flowers could go missing before that day’s market. One morning I heard troops crashing through the brush. It came back to me, as I stood there with the drink, like a scene in a film: an establishing shot of their cigarette smoke rising over the forested ridge. The camera moves overhead as they yell at the boy. Close-up on his face – he understands little of their language. The camera pans the soldiers as they point their rifles with practised nonchalance. Music starts to play, quiet as a morning bat. The boy guiltily shoves one of the flowers into his pocket, crushing the delicate petals. A soldier laughs and drops his backpack with a thump. They don’t care about the flowers like the boy thinks, only about their new porter. The boy runs and picks up the backpack for the soldier, forgetting his sandals, dropping the small knife. The camera zooms out, fog and cigarette smoke filtering the eastern horizon and its promise of sunrise. “I gave your life direction,” Jo Tin said, pulling on my shoulder to take me to the dinner table. Already Thin Ma was seated, a glass of wine in one hand, hair pulled back with a yellow ribbon matching a silk dress she pulled down with the other. She motioned for their servant to bring the food. “What is the hurry?” Jo Tin asked his wife. “Our guest brought us a video to watch – didn’t you little brother?” She looked displeased. “Maybe we can watch it after the meal.” “It’s okay,” I said. “We don’t have to watch it.” The couple shared a beat of wordless communication. “Our guest brought the tape all this way from his little cave,” Jo Tin continued. “Remember what your father said. He offered a promotion to 93
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anyone who finds the organiser. That is very rare.” He finished his drink and poured another. She relaxed in her chair. “It’s true,” she said, “my father doesn’t usually like to promote anyone but himself. Put it on then, and we’ll just eat our dinner cold.” I reluctantly took the tape out of my bag. Their television screen flickered at first, then came to life. The camera moved through the crowd as they assembled their flags and banners, some tying handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses as I drew close. The crowd chanted in unison but individuals were separated by disjointed cuts and freeze-frames with blownup shots of faces. “Where is she?” Jo Tin asked. His wife yawned theatrically and he repeated his question, suddenly less amused by his drink. The chanting continued, louder, the camera moving towards the fence. It scanned the crowd nearest to me. There. The intensity of her eyes: they shone even in a single shot. The camera zoomed in farther, towards a reflection of the light on her silver earring, then the picture faded to white. Thin Ma and Jo Tin politely clapped like an audience in a city cinema. “There,” he said. “A promotion for the taking.” “I hope it helps someone to find her,” I said. “Maybe I can make a video of the interrogation.” He grabbed me, pre-empting my first bite of chicken. “Not this time, little brother. I need you to go, actually. All you have to do is go and collect her. You already know what to do once she’s here.” I paused, anxious. “That’s nothing I would be good at. Besides, I have no way to travel into the country.” “Listen, I am your older brother and I want to help you. You can take my motorbike to her village.” I hadn’t ridden anywhere in more than two years. I thought of her scar and the earring brushing it. I closed my eyes and reopened them. Her profile glowed in my memory. “Do you know where she lives?” Thin Ma asked, respectful for the first time. A montage from my first days spent with the military. Shots of a scared boy walking in front of a column of soldiers, abreast of another young villager. An old friend of his. When the boys tire and try to rest, one of 94
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the soldiers speaks directly to the camera: “We must go single file and we need a volunteer to walk in front. Who will go first?” The boy does not raise his hand; he thrusts it into the flower petals lining his pocket, thinking of home. I looked at Thin Ma again, then at Jo Tin. “I think I know her village,” I said. “There is a silver mine not too far away. It must be where she got her earrings.” “Perfect,” said Jo Tin, snapping his fingers for the servant to pour more wine for the table. “I knew you learned something from me over the years. Bring her in and you’ll make us all proud. Make her pay for what she did to you, and to the government.” I tried returning to my food. My appetite had gone.
3 There was a joke in my old village. It went: how do you know a man is new to riding a motorbike? He’s the one who asks for help lifting it out of the ditch. Cruising away from the city as I met the museum-empty highway, somehow it came to mind. Gravel shot up from the slipping tyres while I lurched back and forth between the gears of the foot shifter. I dodged one particularly vengeful stone hurtling towards my head and realised the joke wasn’t from my village at all. It came from the soldiers. They knew lots of jokes and would take turns telling the same ones over and over again. Sometimes they would make us tell the jokes back to them, just to laugh at our accents and tell us that what we said wasn’t funny. So we became good at telling jokes. We’d do anything to make them laugh. The road cut through a U-shaped gorge with limestone spires crawling heavenwards from the forest below. It was a clear day but one that hid behind low, misty clouds, obscuring the bends in the road, and so I rode more slowly than I would have liked. I wanted to be back by sundown. I had rice and instant noodles to return to. The wooden stilt houses were built cautiously on a hillside, as if the villagers knew a storm could easily wash them away. I handed the photograph to a woman squatting over an ironing board and a pile of worn clothes. She inspected the image closely, though I suspected she looked mostly at the 95
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novelty of the object. I asked if she knew the woman but she said she didn’t and returned to her ironing. Her neighbours didn’t seem to be home so I moved from hut to small house until I found a man sitting on a metal folding chair with no backrest. He exhaled clouds of smoke through yellowed teeth. I greeted him and handed over the photograph. He started wheezing a deflating-tyre laugh and said, “Yes, I know her. You are not the first man to come and see her. Many want to know where she lives.” This didn’t surprise me, because she was beautiful, but this man mistook me, clearly seeking a coin for his cooperation. I ran my thumb along my belt until I felt the metal of the buckle and the butt of the pistol Jo Tin made me promise to carry. I thought of lifting my shirt and showing it off like a tattoo. Instead I decided to let the man enjoy his day and tossed him a coin; he used it to point to a ridge at the edge of the village. “Road ends,” he said. “Follow the stream up.” He didn’t mention how the stream formed the only trail. The water drained down in fingers of dirt and pebbles, pooling inside the stitching of my boots. As I climbed I felt the weight of endless hours spent editing in my apartment, the reluctance of my legs to perform a natural task. Finally the trail levelled off. I caught sight of a house among the trees. I heard string music playing and smelled the sharp spice of chillies cooking over a charcoal fire. There was no glass in the windows, just open space between bamboo shutters. Inside the single room I saw her, through the slits of a partition, cross-legged on a bedroll, plucking at the strings of a small guitar. The simple melody accompanied her soft hum and the high, breathy tone of her voice. At first the words were unfamiliar to me, of a dialect I didn’t understand. But as they were repeated I began to recall some of it. I learned many dialects as a child, out of necessity. Once I thought I even had a capacity for them. Don’t let this life be known Don’t let my heart be bound – Shall we whisper all our lives? And speak true voices in our dreams? She set the instrument down and moved towards the kitchen area, a shelf of spices and oils. While she stirred the curry I could feel the chilli beneath my nose and worked to suppress a sneeze, closing my eyes to watch 96
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her imprint of light, her after-image. I heard the clang of utensils as she drizzled sauce over the rice then walked towards the door. She placed the steaming bowl next to an altar on the porch, the offering intended for the capricious spirits whose curses many villagers still respected, if only to uphold tradition. She closed the door gently. My feet were wet and my body felt weak. I grabbed the plate, aware that rodents or birds would otherwise eat the food. Using my hands I worked the clumps of rice and curry into my mouth. As I finished I felt returned to myself, and again saw the world around me as a film. A man dressed in jeans and a military coat enters through the front door. The music starts to play – the whine of a violin and an organ’s timbre. Close-up of his face. A close-up of hers. “I saw you at the protest,” he says. “Yes,” she says. “I was there. But only to watch, to see what it was.” “I do not believe you. I have a videotape that shows you chanting words of protest against the government.” “I remember you also,” she says. “You had the camera, and you were scared. I thought you were a journalist.” “I saw your earrings, and I saw a scar on your cheek.” “You also have a scar. You are missing fingers, right there.” She takes his hand, what is left of it, in hers. Close-up of their hands. A flashback of the man, walking as a boy between the soldiers and his friend, whose feet search the forest for mines. They practise telling jokes to pass the hours. The camera cuts back to the woman, trying to reason with the man. “You are not meant to be military,” she says. “Help me cross the border instead. Let me leave this place. We could both leave.” The violin saw-strokes and a single tear falls in the foreground of the shot. The focus shifts to her profile, a shot the audience has seen before. He runs his thumb along his belt until he feels the metal belt buckle and the butt of the pistol. He lifts his shirt and shows the gun. She drops to her knees, crying, speaking in quick bursts. He is telling her to get dressed, to put on her only pair of shoes, to bring her papers. He is leading her down the trail, through the stream, back to where his motorbike waits. It rumbles and the engine comes to life. They ride back to the city through a U-shaped gorge with limestone spires crawling heavenwards from the forest below. Fade.
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4 The building was made entirely of concrete, except for the satellite dish overhanging the roof like a gargoyle. Fluorescent tubes spat seizing light down the long hall. A door ajar. I pushed her in and told her to sit down. Two men entered through another door behind a curtain. A voice crackled through a wall-mounted loudspeaker: “Tell the soldiers what you need and they will bring it to you.” It was Jo Tin. “Do you love this country?” My voice. As if from a stranger. “Yes, of course.” “Why then do you protest against its government?” “I don’t.” “This conversation is meant to prove your innocence. Believe me, I would like you to be innocent.” “I am innocent. You have the wrong person.” “Then why do I have this photograph of you?” I pulled out the photograph, showed it to her, showed it to the men I assumed stood behind the wall-sized mirror. “A government that can handle being questioned only grows stronger,” she said. “Answer the question.” I held up my hand – three fingers forming a sad fist – and struck her across the face. The motion nearly cost me my balance as I knocked her from the chair to the ground. I moved unsteadily towards her. “A government’s strength comes from the support of its people.” I told her to return to the chair. She did. Her cheek bloomed, red and swollen. “You were one of the organisers.” “No.” “You were. And I want you to say it.” “If I did it would be a lie.” “The words you say right now are lies.” I looked towards the mirror and saw my image, thin, taller than I remembered, shoulders squared by the stiff jacket. I thought I could see a red light through the glass; I had never seen myself on video before.
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“I’ll do anything, please, just let me go. I’ve seen others in my village planning disobedience. I can give you their names.” I asked one of the soldiers to bring paper and a pen. She wrote down four names, all men’s. “Why is your name not on here?” “Because you know everything I’ve done. I went to the protest. I chanted. That was it.” There was a beauty in her vulnerability. I could have let her go on the spot. I could have made her make love to me. She started to cry. “Say it.” “I am not an organiser. It isn’t true.” “Stand up. Hold out your arms like this. Squat down and make noises like the motorbike we rode here.” As she assumed the position I told the second soldier to bring me a car battery. The seconds passed slowly as she made the noises, her voice hoarsening, her arms quivering, legs unstable. The soldier brought out the battery with two connecting wires, placing the apparatus on a plastic table. “Stand up,” I said again. “Take off your shirt.” She began to unbutton it carefully. I pulled on a sleeve and ripped it from her body. Her skin felt good, the first woman’s skin I had touched in years. She stood in bra and sarong, the sweaty convex of her stomach unveiled. “Your bra.” “Please, either leave it on or take it off yourself. I won’t do it and my hands are shaking now.” A soldier moved towards her with a knife but I waved him away. I remembered the interrogators in the videos I edited, doing my best to copy their mannerisms, their confidence, their calm. My hands shook at least as badly as hers and I stood behind her, confused by the clasp of the bra. For a moment I fumbled with it, until I heard Jo Tin’s voice again over the loudspeaker: “Push the two ends together until the top end is free and pull it up and over.” I did as he said and the bra fell down her shoulder, over her stomach, and onto her feet. She kicked it away like a snake. “What are you guilty of?” I asked, stepping in front of her again. “Nothing. I told you.” Naked from the waist up, she looked perfect to me. Maternal. Sexual. Like the first girls I had seen without their clothes, bathing in a small lake in my village. How I’d longed for them to notice me. 99
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I took the connection points from the battery, interlocking metal teeth that clamped onto her nipples. They were light brown and round as the end of a lime. “What are you guilty of?” “Nothing.” The soldier holding the switch for the battery asked if he should turn it on. I hesitated. Images ran past my eyes like rushing water. I nodded. He turned it on. She screamed so loudly. The lights fell. Darkness cast over the room like a fishing net. Interrogation is the art of controlling perspective. This is what Jo Tin told the camera in one of the training videos we made. The door swung open. He walked inside, carrying a jacket. The lights returned, softer, almost like candlelight. The soldiers removed the battery and pulled the table aside. “What’s going on?” I asked. “You’ve earned your promotion,” he said. “You’ve shown your loyalty. I thought maybe you would break.” Through the mirror I saw the camera, still filming. “What do you mean?” The soldiers gathered clothes from the floor while she accepted her jacket from Jo Tin. Buttons snapped over her collarbone and she dabbed a cloth across her face. “It means you did a good job,” she said. “I didn’t make it easy for you, I know.” She held out her hand and introduced herself. We shook with an odd formality. “Perhaps you do have a future,” said Jo Tin, again tugging my hair roughly over my scalp. “My little brother will now star in his own films. How shall we celebrate?” I shook my head, dumbfounded. “Yes, how shall we celebrate?” she asked. “Answer the question.” She pretended to strike me, as I had her. I flinched, everyone laughing at her pantomime. We started to leave the room and I thought of the protest, the camera falling from my hand. I looked once more at the side of her face, remembering her from the video rather than her live image. “I have to know,” I said. “How did you get that scar on your face?” She ran her finger down her jaw. “To be honest, I can’t remember.”
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The door slammed shut. We walked in a line down the concrete hall. She asked me what happened to my hand. I reviewed the videotape of my memory: I could see my friend, walking through the forest in front of me. A flash of bright light, then an empty space. Heat against my forehead. I caught the scent of the yellow orchid I still carried in my shoulder bag, protected by the sheet of newspaper. “To be honest,” I told her, “I can’t remember either.” It was evening as we stepped outside. The glow of the stars painted the earth.
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Poetry Michelle Tooker
Good Luck to You – She Who Trades Currency Illegally Like a cruel child who hides the dividers behind him, he puts his hand with spurious affection on Spicer’s arm. “Good luck to you,” he said in a high broken adolescent voice and patted him again. Graham Greene, Brighton Rock Dollars – thinned by wrinkles – exchange egg-white fingers for sun-brown hands. The man counts. She stares at the betel that kneels in his teeth, stains nothing can erase. He spits at her feet. Shades of ruby fill rifts in the street, bleed into the detritus of daily life. ***
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Kyats exchange sun-brown for egg-white. Caged watercolours depict chinthe arched, karaweik on still lake. She traces Burmese lettering. Hooks and curves. Ink on paper does not translate into texture, feel of jade to foreign hands. She looks at the crickets – fat torpedoes – overflowing from baskets, ready to submerge till segmented bellies explode. *** Sule Pagoda shakes hands with the sky. Gilded spires darken under a blitz of clouds. *** Bare feet strike pavement like bullets. Group of children arrives, surveys her pockets, hands dirtied by currency. “Good luck to you,” says one in a broken adolescent voice. They point to the soldiers staring with guns.
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Four Palms, Burma (2004) by Monica Denevan. Silver gelatin print, 38cm x 38cm. Courtesy of TÃ o Gallery, Hong Kong.
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Planet Pariah
Photographs and report by Jack Picone
W
I Panyuk he was sitting outside his hut on a seat made of fat bamboo tubes. Panyuk, a member of the Karen ethnic community of Burma, lost both arms and was blinded in both eyes in a landmine explosion five years ago. Since then he has lived in the Mae La camp on the Thai-Burmese border, exiled from his home, people and what might be left of his family. He spends his days singing songs and telling traditional Karen stories to other fugitives, which is how he makes a living. “I like telling stories,” he says simply. “I’m very good at it.” Ten years ago, when he was 19, Burmese government soldiers attacked Panyuk’s village in Burma’s Karen State as part of a continuing vicious campaign against the nation’s ethnic minorities, of which the Karen, numbering about three and a half million, form the largest. The Karen speak their own language and have consistently opposed the country’s military dictatorship. The Burmese soldiers, young men hardly older than Panyuk, killed his father and uncle and raped his mother. They destroyed their rice crops and burned his village. Panyuk escaped into the jungle and joined the rebel Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA). “After what I had seen, I knew I had to take action to protect my people. I had to strike back,” he told me. He fought with the KNLA until, on patrol, he stepped on the mine, planted by the Burmese Army, which almost killed him. KNLA medics treated him and took him to Mae La. For his portrait, Panyuk struck a proud pose with an umbrella, his weapon against tropical downpours, hooked over the stump of his left 107
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arm. With 45,000 other refugees in Mae La, mainly Karens, who have fled decades of persecution, and up to two million other displaced people of various ethnicities along the Thai-Burmese border, he is a casualty of the world’s most durable military dictatorship, and arguably the most brutal. Burma’s mountains rear invitingly on the horizon behind him, but Panyuk’s homeland is as remote to him as another planet. He is in a permanent state of displacement, so close to home and impossibly far away.
Panyuk
Fleeing attack, rape and torture by government troops and other abuses, such as forced labour and conscription of child soldiers – the Karen, noted for their strength, agility and jungle skills are used as porters by the Burmese Army; they walk at the head of patrols and bear the brunt of the blasts from any landmines they step on – those who reach Thailand, to Burma’s southeast, must endure weeks or months of arduous trekking. The 2,100-kilometre border terrain is jungle, with intimidating mountains and snaking rivers. For most of its length and breadth there are no houses, roads, visible pathways or signs of human life. Mines, malaria and food shortages kill many refugees long before they reach a crossing point. If the harrowing circumstances of people inside Burma are too often ignored by the world at large, even less attention is paid to their fate once 108
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they escape. By nature, borders in troubled regions are a surreal combination of official tension and lawless chaos, and I became fascinated by how exiles live, work and survive in such alien places. Thailand, with its stance towards its neighbour continually hostile, thanks to a history of discord, offers official refugee status to less than one per cent of asylum seekers from Burma. The illegal status of the rest condemns them to live life on the margins in more than just a geographical sense: they fall between the cracks of political responsibility, disappear from the radar of international relief and make easy pickings for exploitative Thai employers, human traffickers and corrupt police who demand bribes to allow them to stay at the edge of the map. Some end up in the region’s ramshackle camps, comprising mostly thatched bamboo huts, with no freedom of movement. The constant peril of the Burmese Army and their position outside the law mean inmates are in effect incarcerated: they are not allowed to leave to farm or gather food in the jungle. Some take their chances as migrant workers, scraping an underground living in factories, sweatshops, rice paddies and brothels. Others, in muddy riverside encampments, pick through garbage to support their existence. Once they arrive they are trapped. Their only route back
Mae La camp, home to more than 45,000 refugees, standing at the foot of an imposing escarpment on the Thai side of the border. It is policed by the Thai Army and residents are not allowed beyond its boundaries.
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home is the fate they dread most: being rounded up and deported in cattle trucks by the Thai authorities to face certain imprisonment or execution. In the border town of Mae Sot, through a grimy doorway guarded by Thai thugs, I found a young sex worker named Su who was confined in an airless wooden room. I entered the building by walking in when the guards weren’t looking, but Su was too terrified to attempt to leave by the same means. A mother of two young children, Su is one of about 10,000 Burmese women and girls who are lured into Thai brothels every year and forced to work in conditions of medieval slavery. Su went to Thailand after a Burmese military attack drove her from Karen State destitute and in fear of her life. She receives only US$3 of the US$5 she earns from each client; the rest is pocketed by the brothel’s pimps and most of what Su makes is sent home. At 18, she has the depleted body of a much older woman and the quiet stoicism of a veteran of misfortune. She was eager to be photographed despite the risk of being caught by her minders. “I am not ashamed of myself. I want the world to see the way I have to live, that I have to sell my body because I have no choice,” she said. She added nervously: “Please don’t show my face.”
Burmese sex worker Su prepares to meet a client. She sends most of her earnings to her mother and child inside Burma.
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Many of the people I met and photographed on the border revealed a similar ambivalence towards the camera. They were torn between the recognition that the images were a record of their existence and an acknowledgement of their hardship, and the fear that they could be arrested or deported if they lost their invisibility. I often found myself treading an uncertain line. One week I went to the banks of the Moei River underneath the cruelly misnamed Friendship Bridge that connects Mae Sot with Burma. On the first day I shot pictures of a family sheltering under the bridge. The husband was selling crack for 30 baht (US$1) a hit and using the cash to buy food for his three scrawny children. I was touched when his wife offered to share a meagre plate of rice with me. The next day I went back to see the same family; another crack dealer pulled a knife and threatened to use it if I didn’t leave. The unpredictable rhythms of life on the border infuse the atmosphere with an ever-present sense of menace. The illegal immigrants jump when children let off fireworks, betraying a reflexive fear of mortar fire, and they fade into the shadows when police trucks rumble through the streets. No one is safe, but the Thai authorities tolerate a degree of clandestine activity because trade such as illegal logging and gem smuggling, and the copious supply of cheap labour, bring obvious economic benefits. At 7am each day, not far from Friendship Bridge, small wooden motorboats packed with hundreds of illegal workers cross the river from Burma. On the other side, they are loaded with tax-free Thai goods for the return journey. It is a bald exchange of commodities. Farther north, high in the hills skirting the infamous Golden Triangle, I met a Thai Buddhist abbot named Khru Ba who is battling another iniquitous border trade. At the Golden Horse monastery he provides refuge for about 50 orphaned boys from Burma’s Shan State, many of whose parents died in violence associated with the area’s extensive drug-trafficking activity, from which the Burmese government profits. A muscular man draped in an elaborate tapestry of tattoos, Khru Ba, who survives on donations from other Buddhists, accepts the boys as novice monks and trains them in kickboxing and horsemanship. Then he rides with them back into the jungle to wage a non-violent war against the drug trade. The prime traffickers in the area are members of the ethnic Burmese Wa tribe. Once in rebellion against central Burmese rule, the United Wa 111
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State Army remodelled itself into one of the world’s largest drug-producing organisations. Khru Ba and his novices bravely attempt to confront armed Wa caravans laden with heroin and methamphetamine to prevent smuggling. “I use my powers of faith and persuasion rather than weaponry,” Khru Ba told me. “I pray to the Lord Buddha and I ask the traffickers to consider how they’d feel if their own children died from drug addiction.” Because monks still hold sway in Buddhist communities some consider what he has to say, although the abbot admits his efforts are often in vain. His is a spiritual quest, an attempt to counter the savagery of border life and restore some peace. His monastery, with its incense-scented air, softly chiming temple bells and roaming wild horses, is one of the rare havens of tranquillity in the region. But Khru Ba is quick to dispel any romantic notions. The orphaned boys must adhere to strict Buddhist doctrine and accept the gruelling ascetic regime he imposes. “It is very tough here. My mission is to teach the novices to accept fate and not to fear suffering,” he says.
Charismatic abbot Khru Ba instructs apprentice monks in the discipline of Muay Thai.
Faith is one of the few forms of solace for many Burmese exiles on the border. Cut off from their culture and communities, the disparate ethnic and religious groups try wherever possible to observe sacred festivals, wedding 112
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customs and funeral rituals. Such occasions, several people told me, help to maintain their sense of balance and identity. In Um Phang, an isolated village south of Mae Sot, I watched two elderly Karenni tribeswomen peer through the slats of a wooden hut to witness the consummation of a Karenni marriage. The groom traditionally wears bells on his toes to inform the wedding guests of his exertions, but the two old women wanted visual confirmation. As well as Buddhists, the refugees comprise Muslims and representatives of numerous Christian denominations, most also worshipping “nats” or animist spirits. Burmese tribes believe nats inhabit the trees, wind, water and earth of their villages and will protect the people from disaster if they are given offerings of prayers and fruit. In many villages the Burmese regime has already ensured that the nats are no match for military force, but shrines to the spirits are dotted all over the border area – tiny symbols of hope that one day the nats will help the refugees return home. Everywhere I went in this shadow zone, with all its complex layers of misery, subterfuge, exploitation, brute authority and everyday survival, I wondered how people could live without going mad or simply giving up. The chances of improvement in their stateless plight or of regime change in Burma are almost nil. Yet I rarely saw self-pity or outbursts of strong feeling of any kind. Part of it, I guessed, was owing to the concept of “face”, of not showing weakness or excessive emotion. But it was more than that. In a run-down border clinic I saw a 14-yearold boy, given only local anaesthetic, having a leg amputated with a blunt saw. The boy had stepped on a landmine during his flight from Burma. He didn’t utter a sound during the operation, but his eyes had the glazed expression of someone who is in such agony he is incapable of feeling more pain. I realised then I had seen the same expression many times before.
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A young woman and child in desperate circumstances. The mother had built her dwelling against an enormous pillar of the Friendship Bridge. Her defencelessness was palpable.
No-man’s-land in the Moei River, which separates Burma from Thailand. Burmese refugees live in miserable shacks on the spit of earth, which shrinks and expands during the rainy and dry seasons.
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Mae La camp. Schools are crowded and the education is rudimentary. This little girl had been bathing her dead mouse – her only toy – in an open sewage drain. She stroked it affectionately.
Children in Mae Sot ferret through domestic rubbish from dawn to dusk to find plastic bottles and cardboard they can take to Thai recycling plants, earning about US$2 a day. Children like these are vulnerable to human traffickers, who may abduct and sell them to unscrupulous Thai families as slave labourers or to brothels, even if they are under age.
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Kayah girls sporting traditional neck coils of brass so heavy that a horizontal pole is required to bolster heads and assist in eating.
A Kayah woman wearing brass coils weighing eight kilograms. The metal burns her skin when heated by the sun, but she believes the customary adornments make her beautiful.
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Taking a tube to Burma. This man returned carrying goods bought after a day’s work in Mae Sai, on the Thai side of the border. Burmese often commute illegally to work for a day. They must return to Burma by nightfall or risk being arrested, fined and deported by Thai police.
Making a splash in the Moei River. This might look like an idyllic respite from the appalling realities of life on the border – but children such as these are reputed to smuggle “yaba” pills, containing a mixture of methamphetamine and caffeine known as the “crazy drug”, across the river in their swimming trunks.
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Fires caused by basic cooking appliances are common in the border shanty towns where exiles and hill tribes live. This girl shrieked in agony as her burns were treated in a Mae Sot clinic.
A man waits anxiously with his daughter as his wife wades across the Moei River. In the rainy season, from June to October, the water ows in furious torrents. Burmese refugees are often poor swimmers; many are swept away and drown.
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With a sad half-smile that lasted only a second this homeless man beckoned me to take his picture. He was heading for the Friendship Bridge and the streets of Tachilek in Burma. Two elderly women in a Karen village near remote Um Pang town provide an unsuspected audience for the consummation of a marriage. The groom had small bells tied to his toes; the longer and louder they rang, the greater the testimony to his prowess.
Goats were the sole companions of this teenaged girl living in the compound of an orphanage in Mae Sot. They followed her everywhere around her ramshackle cottage.
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Neophyte Shan monks from Wat Jong Kham in Mae Hong Son during celebrations recognising their entry to the monastery.
Buddhism, the predominant faith along the Thai-Burmese border, espouses balance and serenity, making it an ironic counterpoint to the region’s human-rights abuses.
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The border, given crude form by concrete, razor wire, tree stumps and a primitive fence. This side, Thailand, that side, Burma.
Razing the forest: illegal logging by Thais on the Burmese side of the border outside Mae Sot.
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Thai soldiers peer into Burma. Tension is manifest at the border crossing between Mae Sai and Tachilek. In 2001, artillery ďŹ red by the Burmese military into a Mae Sai market reignited chronic Thai-Burmese distrust.
Mai Sai, Thailand: after the attack, a Buddhist monk recites prayers for peace at the sealed gates of the Friendship Bridge connecting Thailand and Burma.
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Guerrilla warfare manoeuvres with the Karen National Liberation Army. Arduous treks through unforgiving jungle are required to ambush the enemy, or simply avoid them.
Khru Ba leads his novices in meditation in the forest.
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Riding into battle with the United Wa State Army
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Bloody conict’s alluring backdrop: Karen National Union soldiers move upriver on their way to the front line with the Burmese Army.
The circle of life: sign language at a Buddhist monastery on the border
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Ma Boko, the matriarch of a persecuted family who had trekked across Burma to Thailand, is bathed by her family in preparation for her Buddhist funeral. When I asked her daughter how she had died, she replied: “The journey here was too much. It killed her.”
The corpse of a young Burmese man wrapped in plastic and bound with string awaits transport to a cremation site. The body was thrown onto a pyre. The Thai worker burning the dead man told me he had no information about who he was or how he died. He said: “He arrived with no paperwork and no relatives have come forward.”
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Under local anaesthetic a 14-year-old landmine victim has his gangrene-infected leg amputated with a blunt saw. He winces during the operation but does not scream.
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The putrefied flesh is fetid. Flies buzz in 49 Celsius heat in an operating theatre three metres by two. The sweat-soaked staff work mostly in silence to end the procedure as quickly as possible.
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Poetry Ma Thida
Naked Value Skins: Professor, Lawyer, Author, Economist, Politician, Doctor, Programmer. Blood: Honesty, Loyalty, Leadership, Wisdom, Cooperation, Altruism. Blood is inside. Outside is skin. Some people have thick blood, some people have many skins. Some have bright blood, some have transparent skins. Some people have thin blood, some have few skins. Some have dark blood, some have opaque skins. Skin encloses blood. Blood has a value beyond time and space. Skin has a value changed by time and space. Blood is inviolable. Skin is vulnerable. Some people depend on their skins. They live for their skins.
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They compete for their skins. They hide behind skins. They paint their skins with gold. As time shifts and space is changed skins are peeled or taken o and lose their worth. Without them those people are helpless, lifeless, useless. Others rely only on blood. They live for their blood. They struggle for blood. They value their blood and dip diamonds in blood. Though time and space are transient, their blood will never change. Blood is strong, condensed, brilliant, glistening, pure. People of blood fear nothing: they are immortal in daring to live. Blood is the back-face of fame. Skin is the front-face of fame. Blood is nameless. Skin has many names. But if there were no blood under the skin this skin would be a sepulchre, a shell without a name. And if there were no skin, then blood would form the core itself, and have no use for fame. Some people value skin. They want people to love, respect and honour their skin. They love only those who love, respect and honour their skin. They are only pleased by the words and applause of those who worship their skin. They lovingly polish their surface of skin and their blood becomes faint. Polishing skin diminishes blood. But when blood is all gone, the skin is a coďŹƒn-shell without a name. Others value blood. They want people to love, respect and honour their blood. 131
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They love only those who love, respect and honour their blood. They are pleased to the core by those who honour them – but they only care for their blood. Their blood becomes radiant; their skin becomes strong. Caring for blood makes for glorious skin. When blood is tenacious then skin is made glorious – the core has no use for mere fame. My dear friend, Please see a person by removing the skin. Translated by the author, Ma Thandar Aung and David Martinez.
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The Money Shot Lucy Tan
E
the morning, walking the streets of Shanghai was like wading through a pool of sweat. The trees along the roads dragged their limbs under the weight of sunshine, colourless haze and lines of laundry strung between windows and branches that never really dried. Although he had been in Shanghai only three days, Davis thought how welcome it would be to speak English again. To speak real English, not the tethered syllables of the doorman or the breathless colloquialisms of street vendors. “We can solve that,” his businessman father told Davis when he called him from Hong Kong. “Ring the Shao daughter. She’s here on school break too – UCLA, I think? Berkeley? One of those hippy schools. In any case, you need to pay old Shao a visit.” Shao was a friend and colleague of Davis’ father, a slumped, gregarious man who loved to smack people on the back and order more than he could eat. For a while, when Shao had been going through his divorce, he had become a family regular – keeping the couch warm, eating leftovers from the fridge, having his back scratched and ridden by Davis’ younger sister Amy. After he had moved to Shanghai, a year before Davis senior, Davis hadn’t heard much of him. Shao lived in an apartment in the heart of fashionable Puxi, where English was almost as widely spoken as Mandarin. The day Davis set out for Shao’s place was the first he had emerged free of jet lag. That morning, he had wandered around the streets, fanning himself with a metro map and squinting through the construction dust ubiquitous in that part of town. He stopped at fruit stands and open gardens, benches 133
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and air-conditioned shopfronts. Shanghai was swarming. When it grew dark, even more people filled the streets, moving past Davis in groups of four or five, children pushing against him, adults walking quickly with eyes distant, fixed. At a bus stop people were playing cards. A mother breast fed her child while a bystander watched. Davis saw him suck on a tooth and fish around in his pocket for a cigarette. Davis couldn’t be bothered to find his way home and change his shirt before going to Shao’s. Instead, he hailed a taxi and showed the driver the slip of paper on which he had printed Shao’s address. Davis thought he caught the smell of a perfume he recognised and found it comforting; but the car’s air conditioner sounded like a secondary engine and someone on the radio was screaming words he could not understand. Davis did not like not knowing what to expect. As for that night, he didn’t like going out with girls he had never met. Davis hoped Shao’s daughter would take after Mrs Shao, all deft hands and appeasing eyes. *** Although Davis had thought he could at least count on the familiarity of the old man, when he arrived at the apartment he found even Shao had changed. Once his uniform was pastel-coloured V-necks and deck shoes; now he wore oriental slippers and a silk-patterned robe tied tightly around his bulk, as if resolving to keep his heritage wrapped around him. “Hey, Davis, good to see you, boy!” Shao announced as he opened the door. He grabbed him by a sleeve and pulled him inside. “Hey Corinne, get out here, come meet your date! How’s Cornell treating you, eh, Davis? How’s your dad, hey?” From where he stood, Davis could see traditional Chinese day beds in the living room, festooned with showy bright red and gold cushions. “I’m fine, Mr Shao, we’re all fine. And you?” “Fine, boy, fine. So you know where you’re taking my daughter tonight? Corinne, get on out here! I saw you dressed half an hour ago!” Shao strode down the hall and stopped beside a door that was ajar. He knocked commandingly but didn’t push it open. An iridescence flashed in and out of view. “Can you believe what great timing, Davis? Corinne’s just on a break too. Been here for about a week now, see, and she’s wilting – aren’t you, 134
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darling? Poor girl’s gone from parties every night to an early bedtime in a strange new city. I know she wanted to go out but I had to put my foot down. Not alone, oh no, not in Shanghai – her mother would fly in from L.A. and strike me dead. It’s not like Los Angeles, you know. It’s easy for us ex-pats to forget we’re not in America anymore and then you read stories that just make you …” A pause, for a smoker’s cough. “But you just got in a few days ago, didn’t you Davis? It’s too bad your dad had to go away on business just as your break started or he’d have introduced you to the city himself. But now at least you have someone your own age …” The door opened and Shao’s daughter stepped out. She looked from the clutch she was holding to Davis’ shoes, to his hands, to his eyes and back down again. She gave a perfunctory smile. “Corinne, meet Davis. Davis –” “Dad, I need money.” Corinne slipped between them on her way to the hall and Davis’ forearm brushed against the sequins on her dress. They were cold, like the scales of a mermaid. “Money, honey! Sure, sure.” Shao patted his chest and back pockets in search of his wallet, but his daughter was already drawing a wad of notes from where it lay on the hall table. She turned and cocked her head at her father, who had stopped talking and was merely watching her. A smile formed on his broad face and he strode over to kiss her forehead. “Off you go, kids. Have fun, hey?” Giving her father’s belly a double pat, Corinne left the apartment without looking back to see if Davis was following. In the hall they waited for the lift together in silence. Davis was more surprised than offended; he had never been treated this way by a woman. It wasn’t that Shao’s daughter had been rude – Davis knew all women liked to be rude from time to time – but that she did not seem conscious of her rudeness, or conscious of Davis at all. When most women were rude, they planned it. To act impudently towards men was to clear a certain path for them to walk down – a path that Davis was aware of, but followed all the same. He tried to dismiss the thought that Corinne’s unawareness of her attitude simply meant she found him inconsequential. The hall was extensively mirrored so that Davis was free to observe Corinne from all sides without appearing obvious. He had to admit she was pretty, but not extremely so, and less when her features were in repose. Set 135
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closely together on an egg-shaped face were her father’s hooded eyes, giving her the majestic air of a tropical bird. The bridge of her nose was unusually high and her cheekbones began just under her eyelashes. Davis could tell she was one of those women who was often looked at, regardless of whether she was admired. Corinne’s hair was pinned up to show off a circle of diamonds that sat still around her neck, like stones at the bottom of a pond. Yes, she must have been looked at often. When the lift arrived they squeezed in at the same time. Davis excused himself and Corinne smiled faintly with a corner of her mouth. Unsure of this reaction, Davis began to talk to disrupt any judgments of him she might be making. “I, uh, looked up some places we might go. Some of them around this area are quite international. You know, if we take a cab –” “We won’t need a cab,” she said, with the echo of a smirk still in her voice. “We’ve got a driver.” “Oh.” Davis found the silence amplified and tried to regain his composure by looking at the ceiling. The tiny security camera he found staring back at him made him clear his throat and lower his head again. He suddenly became aware of his posture. When they reached the ground floor Davis waited for Corinne to walk out first. Her heels hit like little mallets and he followed them across the marble floor, through the spinning door and into the damp night, where a car was waiting. “Get in the front,” Corinne told Davis and seated herself in the back, where a door had been opened for her. “Evening, Chip!” Corinne greeted the driver. Her voice was suddenly so bright and metallic that Davis turned round in his seat to make sure it was coming from her. “Evening, miss,” Chip said, in surprisingly fluent English. He smiled at her in the rear-view mirror. “Where we going tonight?” “Same place as last night. Same girls too.” “You got it.” Chip released the brake and Davis could hear the leather squeak as Corinne eased into her seat. “Early start tonight,” Chip said. “Got Dad’s permission?” “Yep,” she said. “I have an escort.” 136
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Chip gave Davis a friendly nod, but Davis was not in the mood to return salutations. He wondered whether he should start a conversation with Corinne, but then decided too much time had passed for anything to come about naturally. To his surprise, Corinne spoke first. “You like Chinese girls, Davis?” Her voice from the back seat sounded a mile away. “What?” He had heard her, but was buying time to think of an appropriate answer. When he turned his head his ear grazed her lips. “I said, do you –” “Yes.” Shit, Davis thought. What a weird question. He didn’t know what the proper response was but he knew he hadn’t given it. He should have said, “It depends”, or “It’s irrelevant”, answers that would have been closer to the truth. Better yet, he should have thought of something witty. If only she hadn’t sneaked up on him like that. “Good,” Corinne said, from the back of the seat again. “You’ll like my friends.” So she hadn’t been talking about herself. Of course she hadn’t been talking about herself. “If you’ve got friends here,” Davis asked peevishly, “why am I taking you out?” “They’re locals,” she answered him matter-of-factly. “Dad would not approve.” When they pulled to a stop outside another apartment complex, two girls came fluttering out similarly attired in glittering dresses and tiny spiked heels. Immediately after piling into the car they began chattering excitedly to Corinne in Mandarin while Davis watched in the car’s door mirror. One girl gestured questioningly towards him and what Davis imagined to be Corinne’s explanation turned out to be lengthier than he would have expected. At the word “America”, the only one Davis could make out, there was a unified sigh of appreciation and the girls crowded Corinne’s side of the seat for a better look. The club wasn’t far but to Davis the drive was a long one. He was lost in their gossip, which sounded to him like a cross between the languages of snakes and birds. Briefly he considered trying to chat with the driver, but was ashamed at having slighted his greeting and could only remain silent. At last they approached a large building, with a verandah outlined in neon lights, outside which taxis were pulling up. Hanging from the verandah 137
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was a billboard almost as wide as the club’s entrance. Pale flashes of colour moved clockwise around the familiar portrait of a man, also neon lit. “Is that Mao Zedong?” Davis asked no one in particular. “Is he holding a bottle of … Belvedere?” “It’s a party theme, not propaganda,” Corinne answered from behind him. “It’s supposed to be ironic.” She did not wait until the car stopped moving before opening the door and jumping out; the others followed. One of the girls ran to her and they linked arms as they made their way to the entrance. To Davis’ surprise the other grabbed him. “Hello,” she said with a smile. “Well, hello.” Keeping track of Corinne was difficult and all the women standing outside looked the same from the back: narrowly framed figures with jet-black hair and matchstick elbows. When they turned their eyelashes protruded farther than their brows. Just managing to keep sight of the single white feather in Corinne’s hair, Davis led the girl on his arm through the crowd to the velvet ropes as Corinne was slipping through them. The music grew steadily louder as they entered. The beat was techno and Davis felt as if his heart was adjusting to the vibrations of the floor. Corinne led them past the DJ’s booth, past the small square tables and the bar, all the way to the back of the club, where Davis could make out a few couches on which white men dressed in dark suits were lounging. He wondered how Corinne knew such men, who seemed about 10 years older than her. But to his surprise Corinne made a sharp right turn before the lounge area, stopping at the counter running along the wall. It was a strange place to sit, Davis thought, but at least the back was a little quieter than the rest of the club. Davis was no stranger to the party scene, it was just that his natural social habitat was somewhere behind a beer pong table. Here he didn’t know what to do with his arms. “Should we start the first round of drinks?” he suggested, signalling a waiter. Corinne exhaled a laugh, then leaned in to explain: “You go ahead. I don’t pay for my drinks.” But Davis was not even given the chance to offer before Corinne shouted, “Let’s dance!” and one of the girls promptly jumped off her stool in agreement. The other, the one who had taken Davis’ arm, tugged at Corinne, mumbling something. 138
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“She’ll stay and have a drink with you,” Corinne translated. Relieved, Davis drew his stool closer to the girl’s and called over a waiter, who took two orders in two languages. After that it became more difficult. “Hello,” the girl offered again and Davis laughed pleasantly. He didn’t want her to think he was laughing at her and this he tried to explain, but she only smiled and nodded blankly. Having nothing to say – and no means to say it – the two looked out into the crowd, where Corinne and her friend were dancing. Davis had never seen anyone dance quite like Corinne. She moved in a way that allowed the music to pass through her body in waves. Every so often a beam of light would slide over her sequins, making her limbs seem even more lithe than they already were. The waiter arrived with their drinks and Davis pulled out his wallet to pay. “Keep them coming,” he said. When he looked back, the song had changed and with it Corinne’s movements. The gears in her had shifted; now she acted unpredictably, stopping and reversing and throwing her body into all sorts of convulsions in time with the music. Before, Davis had admired how, unlike everyone else’s body, Corinne’s seemed unsegmented – her torso completely at one with her hips. Now he was in awe of how her body parts seemed to have nothing to do with each other. With her hips and torso in two places her head was now entering a third. Davis’ next few drinks arrived. He threw each back in a matter of seconds, all the time watching Corinne. Her pelvis popped forward and the movement made its way down her leg. Her chest and waist mimicked it a moment later. As the song reached its climax her arms hovered about her head in suspense, until at just the right moment she undid the clasp that held up her hair, throwing her neck back in a deluge of ink. The white feather came loose and swayed serenely to the floor, oddly independent of the music. Davis was not the only man who watched its descent. When the song changed again she was spinning with her hair down around her shoulders, her dress glittering at all the right angles. That did it. Two of the dark-suited men stood up at once, neither noticing the other. The man who reached her first caught her by the arm and steadied her as she performed a charming fake totter. He spoke into Corinne’s ear 139
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and the runner-up settled for her friend. The four made their way to the white couches and Davis had to lean forward on his stool to keep sight of them. He flinched when he was touched on the hand. “Hello,” said the girl with Davis. She pointed to the counter, where more drinks were waiting. “Oh.” Davis pulled out his wallet again. “Thank you.” He paid the waiter with a few red notes. “That’s enough for now.” On the couches one of the men was pouring drinks for Corinne and her friend; they seemed to be talking as if they had known each other for years. Davis stood suddenly, a puzzling vigour working its way up his legs. He was annoyed – and it must have shown on his face, because Hello looked at him curiously. “Let’s go over there for a while,” he said, pulling her after him. Corinne caught his eye as soon as they began to make their way across and to Davis’ strange satisfaction a glance of panic registered. But by the time they reached the seats she had recovered her poise. She manufactured a wide smile. “Everyone, this is Davis,” she explained. “Davis is –” “Her date,” he finished for her. Stepping over a tangle of shins and knees, Davis made his way to where she sat in a semi-circle of men, deliberately meeting Corinne’s glare. The men grudgingly shifted to make room for him next to her and Hello was left to perch at the end of the couch. “Let’s ask Davis what he thinks,” a man named Stan said, leaning forward with a bemused smile. “We were discussing the most endearing quality a man can possess,” explained the man with his arm round Corinne. “Stan here thinks it’s smarts and Trevor said it’s charm ...” “Of the two, charm obviously wins,” interrupted Corinne. “Smart men are too predictable.” The group chuckled appreciatively and the man with his arm round Corinne buried his fingers in her hair. He was the first man Davis had ever seen wear gems on his fingers. “But I would have to disagree with both,” Corinne continued. “Well, honey, what would you say is the most endearing?” asked Charlie. She set her glass down on the table dramatically. “Valour.”
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The men at the table started to laugh. “Well,” said Charlie, “I guess it’s the lady’s opinion that counts, isn’t it? But I’m curious to know, what would you say is the most endearing quality a woman can possess?” “That’s easy, Charlie,” she replied. “Beauty.” “Oh? Not smarts or charm?” “No!” said Corinne, affecting surprise. “A smart woman has too much power to be endearing. And a charming one? Well, she’s just dangerous.” The men were clearly delighted with her answers and Charlie petted Corinne lovingly, like something newly purchased. He whispered in her ear, which made her smile coquettishly and grasp his arm as they stood up to leave. Davis stood up too. “Corinne!” he said, louder than he needed to. “Don’t go with him. I …” Her eyes retreated beneath her lids. “I promised your dad …” he drifted off lamely. To Davis’ relief, Corinne’s face softened at the mention of her father and she released Charlie’s arm. After whispering something to him she took Davis’ arm and pulled him away from the group. “Aren’t you having fun?” she asked. “I think we’d better order you a drink.” “No,” said Davis, drawing back from her and cradling his empty whisky glass. “No drink. I’ve had enough already.” “Ooh, this sounds interesting.” Corinne inched closer to him and pointed to the laminated menu she had picked up from a nearby table. Davis tried to focus on the place indicated by her metallic fingernail. “It’s called the Money Shot,” she giggled. “Doesn’t that sound interesting?” “It says it’s equivalent to eight shots.” His voice wavered on the last word so that it came out like a question. “Oh, come on Davis! Don’t be a baby. Let’s have a little fun.” Corinne’s face hovered closer in his vision; Davis was unsure whether this was her doing or his. To be safe, he leaned backwards and bumped into one of the dark suits that had wandered after the two of them. Before either man could respond Corinne was pulling Davis after her again, towards the bar at the front of the club. “Come on. Let’s get me a drink then.” Davis stumbled behind her, his mood lifting as he felt the coloured lights sweeping over him. Suddenly, he thought he owed Corinne some sort 141
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of explanation: about the things he had said, the reason he was there, how they had ended up there together. But she was moving too fast for him and it was all Davis could do to keep hold of her hand as she darted through the crowd. Finally they found themselves at the bar. “Listen, Corinne. I’m sorry for before, if I … I just wanted you to be safe, you know?” She turned towards him with a look that was suddenly kind and remorseful. “I know,” she said, moving closer and placing her hand on his hot cheek. “You were just trying to protect me. I appreciate … the valour.” As blood rushed through his body the word rose in his chest and Davis felt grateful to this delicate creature for putting it there. She was a warm person after all. She may have been unapproachable at first but that was because she needed to be. Her beauty and vulnerability required it. Davis regretted not having been as understanding about her guardedness as she had been about his need to protect her from the men in the dark. And in protecting her he had to be extra-cautious. She had been here a week and must have already been consumed by the vulgarity of Shanghai: the undisguised staring, the spitting on the streets. Corinne’s body was humming against his. She slid her hand from his cheek to the nape of his neck and paused – so that when they kissed he could have sworn it was she who had kissed him. He pulled her towards him and felt her back, cool and slick from sweat. Carefully sliding his fingers down her spine he expected them to hit the waist of her dress, but they dipped into something wet instead. Corinne’s hand met his and closed his fingers around what she had been holding behind her: a large shot glass. Reeling from the combination of the alcohol and the kiss, Davis was having trouble forming words and found it easier to take the drink. He realised as he drew it nearer that the glass was only shaped like a shot glass, but was as wide as a beer mug. He could barely taste the spirit as it slipped down his throat and it wasn’t until afterwards, as Corinne led him back to the couches, that he felt its contents erupt in his stomach. Davis could barely see anyone’s face and concentrated solely on the pressure of Corinne’s hand on his and the sound of her voice as he collapsed next to her. “Davis here just braved the Money Shot,” she bragged for him. “Any takers?”
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*** He woke up alone on a couch. Sitting upright quickly made him keel forward and for a moment he swayed like a sand-filled punch bag. Corinne! he remembered, panicking, but his stomach remained anchored to the floor. He concentrated his gaze upwards in degrees until he was staring at the lounge table before him, which was now littered with empty money-shot glasses looking defeated in the dark. When Davis finally went in search of Corinne and her friends it didn’t take long to discover they were all gone. Unsure of what to do he paced the bar, thoughts in a frenzy, then settling, then swarming again. She was beautiful. Beautiful. Skinny-breasted winter beautiful, and she had kissed him. She did not belong in this cave, but could not find her way out without his help. She had accepted his help, standing in the same place he stood now. Where had she gone? Suddenly Davis heard the echo of a laugh, a little-bird laugh. He was sure it was her. Two forms – one light, one dark – were staggering towards the exit and he could not tell which was holding the other up. Davis’ back clenched; someone else was leading her out of the cave. It was easy to follow them by the sound of her voice. When he was outside and could no longer hear her laughter Davis’ other senses reawakened. He blinked rapidly, surprised to find himself in the open air again. Shanghai, not quite deserted: tea-egg vendors with steamed faces over portable stoves, dignified vagrants swilling the change in their cups like liquor, everything shining against a numbing backdrop of cobalt. His eyes focused on a bench beside the club entrance, where a man in a dark suit was lying beneath the wooden eaves. Pinned under one arm was the immobile body of something that before had seemed so agile and free. Taking a step closer, Davis squinted at Corinne and Charlie in horror but still could not make out what was happening. Neither seemed to be moving and their combined clothing covered the bench like a layer of dirty snow. It occurred to Davis that the man might have knocked her out. He might be slowly working his other hand up her dress right now, climbing the length of her tree-branch body. Davis took another step, screaming Stop! in his head, but his mouth wouldn’t open, growing warm and rigid instead.
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What had immediately registered as anger had now turned into quiet wonder. He imagined the man throwing her onto the bench, her protests suddenly turning to screams. She would have writhed and kicked, maybe and he would have smacked her soft face again and again. Suddenly, a hand emerged from the mass and Davis saw it was Corinne’s. It opened like a flower, searching for something in the half light. Moments later, more of her body glided from the bench, breaking free and leaving a rumpled lump in her wake. She was fine; spotless. Having tucked Charlie’s money into her dress she darted back onto the pavement, where the street light received her again, hitting her sequined body so sharply that Davis had to look away. When he looked up again she was walking towards the main road, trying to hail a taxi. “Corinne!” She walked on wordlessly, butt cheeks alternately catching light like a tacky disco ball. She disgusted him, he wanted to shake her, he wanted to break her body to see if it would re-form. He wanted to tear through her dress to touch her skin. “Why did you steal – why do you need the money?” he finally asked when he caught up with her. Of all the things he wanted to say, of all his questions, he asked that which fell impossibly short of reaching her. She shrugged; there was an uncharacteristic limpness in her shoulders. “What else is there to take? I mean …” She began to laugh, the metallic sound emerging from the back of her throat. “What else are men made of?” For a second she looked at him flatly. Then her pupils returned almost to the corners of her eyes and he grabbed her arm to make her face him. “He might have hurt you.” “Ohhh,” she crooned. “Were you just about to save me?” Each word fell from her mouth like a loosened bolt. “Here you go, superhero.” She shoved RMB50 into his palm coldly. “Take a cab home.” When she turned to walk off again Davis could not catch her arm. A taxi came hurtling into view and stopped just short of the kerb. Davis let Corinne take it alone. He did not look at her until he heard the car door slam and its engine rev. The last glimpse of her face through an open window told him she was leaving the way she had come – poised, faceted, alone. Her eyes carried the glint of spider silk, weaving invisible control. When she had 144
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long been out of view Davis could still see her in the car, staring out of the window at nothing but passing lights, throwing an occasional absent glance at the sky. *** It was approaching 5.30am when Davis arrived at Shao’s apartment building. The security guard sitting at reception looked at him warily, but dialled a number and murmured. Moments later Davis was riding the same lift he had taken a few hours before when he had left with Corinne, the one that had made him aware of being watched. Now he felt nothing; even the mirrors seemed to leave him alone. As Davis stepped onto marble the unfamiliar squeaking of his shoes startled him. It took him a moment to remember how to navigate the hallways that led to Shao’s apartment. He couldn’t wait to go back to his father’s place and meet the kind of sleep that turned everything into a dense pool of images through which reality could not be seen. Pak pak pak. Davis knocked lightly, not wanting to hear the happy chiming of the doorbell that had announced his earlier arrival. Shao opened the door, again in his bathrobe, his hair ruffled, although he was wide awake. “Sorry to bother you, Mr Shao.” “Oh, it’s no bother Davis, come in.” The mood in the apartment had changed. Only the hall light was on; it grew darker as they walked into the living room and Davis felt an acute sense of unease. Maybe she hasn’t come home. Davis took a seat on the edge of the couch and liked the hardness he felt beneath him, the encouragement to continue it offered him. “Mr Shao … is – is Corinne at home?” Shao gave him a look of surprise. “Well of course she is, Davis, didn’t you see her to the lobby? She came home maybe half an hour ago. Said you shared a cab.” Davis raked a hand through his hair as if to grab hold of the relief that came over him. But how was he to explain the rest? Shao was looking at him expectantly, with that expression on his face that always seemed to be begging for permission to laugh. Davis smiled at him.
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“Right,” he said at last. “Sorry to bother you so late, Mr Shao. I should get going now.” “Not a problem, Davis, no problem at all.” Shao rose and tightened his robe, asking for no further explanation. As he did, Davis glimpsed a certain pained look on his face that he had forgotten from the days of Shao’s divorce. They were standing now and Davis felt the urge to cup his hand to Shao’s face, as he had seen his sister sometimes do when Shao had stayed with them. A soft noise came from the kitchen and Davis’ heart leaped. He had not noticed anyone in there before, but now his eyes had adjusted to the darkness he could see a thin figure moving, pouring a drink into a glass. Shao had walked to the foyer to show Davis out, but Davis did not move. She was coming towards the light – bare legs, sharp bones, thin hour-glass figure. And that heavy, dark hair. He stared at her face until its features took shape; now she was standing directly between him and Shao. “Davis?” Shao asked urgently. “Corinne?” He realised it wasn’t her before he said it, but he called her name nonetheless. The girl before him tilted her head to one side quizzically. In a few quick steps she made her way to the door of what must have been Shao’s bedroom. There, she turned and stood, putting her weight on one hip and folding the other leg so that the foot was resting on her inner thigh. The robe parted from the waist down. “Davis!” Shao’s voice had an edge to it. Without looking at him, Davis turned away from the woman and made his way towards the hallway. Outside the apartment he broke into a run, sliding his fingers along the walls as if they could admit him if touched at some secret place. He reached the lift and stabbed the down arrow furiously as he waited for the doors to open. Nothing seemed real to him on the way home: the gritty streets, pastel moon, the bicycles with plastic baskets, shadows tied to solitary trees like balloons. What Davis saw passing outside the taxi window was a running reel he watched half-interestedly. At last, the driver pulled to a stop outside his father’s apartment; when Davis handed over the notes Corinne had given him he received change in coins as light as tin. There were no street lights in front of the house, only bruised patches of sky to see by. Suddenly it occurred to Davis what was missing. In the three days he’d been there he 146
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had never seen a sign of life overhead. If there were planes above Shanghai they were obscured by fog. If there was wind, it never prodded the clouds. If there were birds, they were the kind that never left the ground.
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Untitled (FL.4s-35) (2009) by Yuichi Higashionna. Spray paint on canvas, 33.3cm x 33.3cm. Courtesy of Gallery EXIT, Hong Kong.
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Circle of Life Dipika Mukherjee
Sunday cottage today for the month-long writer’s residency! The flight was way too long and the shuttle-bus driver from the airport talked until I fell asleep. I can’t believe I finally have unlimited time to write. My cottage is in the middle of a national park in Washington state. There’s no television, no telephone, no internet. Foreign cell phones don’t work here, so no one can reach me. A whole month of not having to wake up for the school bus, no kids fighting when I want to write, no husband to bother me … in case I forget how important the writing is, there’s also the foundation’s Möbius strip logo above my doorway with the Latin phrase for “Life ends, art lives on”. It’s freezing and so silent here that I feel I should write something more serious than my usual chick-lit fluff. Something a little more gloomy perhaps? No wonder so many movies have been shot here, especially The Ring – yes, that creepy movie about a mother who throws her child into a well. There are incredibly atmospheric scenes in that film, especially framed against the lighthouse. I walked there early this morning. The full moon was on one side and the sun rising on the other. I had the whole beach to myself. It felt like I was in The Ring, as the opening credits were rolling. It was a weird feeling, to be inside such a dark movie, but that’s really how beautiful this place is. With the air wavering because of the wind, I raised my arm a little to make sure there wasn’t a movie screen there.
R
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Anyway, despite being cut off from all signs of civilisation, here’s my uninterrupted Write on Mamma blog for all you wonderful people who like to read the stuff I churn out. As soon as I’m home, in a month, this whole saga will be posted online, as promised. Woo hoo – it should be like watching the entire boxed set of your favourite TV show all at once. *** Wednesday It’s just us writers, dancers, poets and musicians here, in our cottages from the 1800s, creating stuff. We can’t light candles in the rooms in case the old wood catches fire (the kitchens have electric stoves), but we all have great views and I can see the water and cliff edges from mine. The morning sun is filtered through a huge tree in front of the house and the light changes gradually every day from lavender to orange-pink. Remember The Ring, with the scary girl, Samara, who crawls out of television sets? And how there were these huge flies buzzing everywhere? I swear the same flies are in my room, humming around my lights all night. This morning I thought one had entered my computer screen but of course that was an illusion. I almost smashed the screen trying to remove the damned thing. I had a pile of clothes lying at the bottom of the closet and when I moved it, some flies buzzed out. Another fly was playing dead inside the kitchen drawer; just when I thought I was removing a carcass it came to life and buzzed away. The Ring, the English version, was the one shot here, with these flies. Not sure whether the original Japanese Ringu had flies, but it’s said to be even spookier than the English remake. Here’s my dirty secret – I love not having to bathe every day. I wake up when I want, write for a while, then have a nap. When I wake up again, I write again. Tried to edit old work, but in this absolute silence the flies are getting to me. An Irish artist created an outdoor installation in the military fort of thousands of miniature prayer flags all tied together – to symbolise peace – but some jerk spray-painted obscenities on them at night. My Irish friend is pretty pissed off and snarly – and so’s the foundation staff. Not a happy camp today. 150
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Thursday I think that big tree in The Ring is the same one outside my window. It reaches out its really long branches in the night, and today it rained like crazy and I thought I saw somebody with really long hair standing under it – TOTALLY FREAKED ME OUT. When the rain stopped I had a look outside. Found only a little shrub with tall grass stuff growing out of the centre (I have no idea what flora anywhere is called), so it was not Samara. The Ring is my favourite horror movie. There is something disturbing about an evil child, but more unsettling is the thought of a mother throwing her daughter into a well to die slowly. It gives me the creeps, in the good way horror movies should. Movies such as Paranormal Activity just don’t do it for me, but something like The Others, with the mind games, is totally cool. It’s not so wonderful to have that tree by my window and the flies in my room though. It spooks me out at night and I see things that aren’t there. But there are no wells in this place, I’m pretty sure. I must have explored everywhere by now. *** Friday The flies are keeping me awake. They never go away. With the temperature below zero outside you’d think they would be frozen by now. I am so sleep deprived. Today we walked up the hill to the old fort to see the Irish artist’s installation (he cleaned it after the graffiti incident). There were three of us, including the artist. I had to stop a couple of times to catch my breath, but the whole landscape spread out as we climbed higher and it was pretty amazing, with the cliffs bordering the water and the birds everywhere. The old fort still has the ramparts that you can climb on and look out for enemy soldiers. At the end of it all is a memorial vault, like a large slab of stone covering a tall coffin. It has the names of dead soldiers carved on the sides. The light was fading when we moved that slab of stone, and I swear I saw Samara in there, under the stone, drowning in the water. I slammed the stone back so hard that I pulled off a part of my nail and my finger is bleeding now. 151
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I screamed and ran all the way down the hill. My friends thought I was fooling around and ran back with me, laughing and screaming too, so I tried to join in the fun. They had both seen The Ring and were describing the girl in the well, with the ring of sunlight above her (the girl in the movie, I mean; no one else saw Samara in the vault). I know I saw Samara. She was bleeding into the water as if globs of her flesh had been cut off. *** Saturday The flies are inside my head. I had the lights on the whole night and was reading on the couch. I can’t write. All I think about is that damned movie, and my finger is swelling painfully. It smells of old seaweed. I think I dozed off last night, maybe for a few minutes, but I woke up gasping, as if I were drowning. But it was only because a kitchen tap was dripping. Got up, turned off the water and read again. The tree outside can stretch its branches and reach my window. I have drawn the curtains. The branches kept scratching at the cottage all night. Tried to write about not being able to write and this is what I came up with: I’m trying very hard to quell the sense of burial in a well chilly water, moss, and the smell ... Quell? I never write rhyming poetry. Ever. This is not my work. I stayed on the couch until 7.30am, until the people who work in the office next door started to arrive and I could hear greetings and smell coffee. Then I climbed into bed, with the sun warming my face. *** Next day Some young Samaritans renovated these cottages, so a lot of the work is 152
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really amateur. My headboard, for example, was stencilled in by a wannabeartist, in blotchy blue and green, with curly seaweed on an ocean floor. It matches the green cupboards and blue walls, and even the bedspread and pillows, so when I’m in bed it’s like being inside an aquarium. Today, the seaweed from my headboard tickled me awake as the evening fell. That’s how I knew Samara was here, in my room, even before I saw her. When I spotted her flitting long black hair, in the mirror, the tresses so much like my own, I ran to the second bedroom, the one I never use, and pulled off all the sheets from the twin beds. Then I ran around the house – the entrance hall, the bathroom and, finally, my bedroom – to cover all the mirrors. I could hear her trailing behind, her breath a susurration. I didn’t want to see her. I didn’t want her to see herself. All that blood. It smeared the floor, leaving a trail everywhere. I called my husband from a payphone today. He had a meeting starting in three minutes so he told me to write down whatever was in my overactive imagination. He thought I sounded like an actress immersing herself in a scene. He wants me to email him this story. I didn’t have time to tell him that when I saw Samara, she was holding out her bleeding flesh, like chunks of butcher’s meat. She was offering me her flesh. I knew she was the child I aborted eight years ago. *** Another day Of course, it was illegal. While it was happening I drifted in and out of consciousness and I remember nothing except a nurse in green wiping tears from my cheek. Nothing else. The decision to abort was instantaneous, it was nothing I had to think about or remember. Some couplings are so forbidden that they are about endings. Then life goes on, other children are conceived and born and you know your womb is not cursed. There are no repercussions, you are caught up in incessant child rearing, the minutiae of a daily existence that involves a man
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as well as two children and growing ambitions. You forget the nurse in green because nothing happens to make you remember. You remember only once, in a temple for unborn children in Japan. The jizo temple, full of small concrete statues of baby-like monks in bright bibs. You see the lost soul of the unborn child and want to transform her into a happy jizo with fluffy mittens to keep her warm in the afterlife. But your husband grows impatient and wants to leave. He doesn’t understand because you’ve never told him. So you leave, doing nothing. Once you played God; instead of giving life, you chose to take it. It’s not how you thought of it at the time, or even later, but that’s how it was. And this decision, made almost a decade ago, and a movie watched before that, come back now. You can do nothing else but remember. Even when the child is not here, you remember. *** Same day The child came again today. I was chopping tomatoes and I cut myself and the blood became one with the tomatoes and kept dripping. I kept cutting at myself, slashing with the knife, until something made me open the door and go to the ranger’s office in my pyjamas. There I was, sobbing, holding out my bleeding arms. He called 911. The child was offering me her bloody parts again. She wanted to know why her, and not my other two? *** Wednesday Sylvie from the foundation office visits with the Crisis Control Manual. This manual looks the same as all the others lining her bookcase (Fiddle Tunes, Writing Workshops, Artists’ Grants). She asks me whether I want to go home and I say no. She thinks she should send me home, for my own good, but I tell her that would be a mistake and, besides, I am too immersed in a story, like actors often are. I 154
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also let her know it will cost the foundation a lot of money to change my international-flight ticket. Then I show her my poem, which is now five pages long and very graphic. I tell her the poem is finished, that I won’t be going to those depths again, and I laugh lightly. I know Sylvie likes rhyming poetry. “You’re saying that it’s like … um … method acting?” Sylvie asks. “Mmmm, yes.” This has never happened with a resident before, she says, making some notes and adding that she’ll have to keep a close eye on me. My cut turns out to be a surface wound, not at all serious, and she believes me when I say I cut myself without thinking and then panicked at all that blood mixed up with the tomatoes. Sylvie has read all my chick-lit novels and she loves them. She tells me she has had to deal with some real eccentric people in this artists’ colony. She pleads, “Please, no Van Gogh wannabes here, no matter how brilliant. Write something else next, okay, like your romances?” She lightly touches my bandage, gives me a hug, then I am free to go. This is a love story I’m writing, but I don’t tell her that. I want to tell Sylvie about the flies but they buzz too loudly when I try. *** Not a Nice Day The Korean printmaker who makes detailed pictures of birds in distress (with real feathers on his canvas) is someone I’m usually glad to see. Today, when he wishes me good morning, I just ignore him. I don’t think it’s a nice day. I went for a walk to the lighthouse today and a man out walking his dog asked, “Who are you?” I stopped, surprised by his existential question. Then, even the dog cocked his head as the man rephrased it as, “How’re you doing?” I had only misheard him, but it felt like something more. It was as though I were inside the child, the way she was once inside me. Everything was opaque and filtered through a film of water and I felt suffocated by the knowledge that there would be no escape into a new birth.
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I cut my hair into spikes with the kitchen scissors. I can’t bear to see my long hair reflected in the windows, or on the kettle. My finger still smells of seaweed. I can’t bathe; if there’s water surrounding me, over my head, I know I’ll drown. I tried to pray today. Buzz, Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. The child comes every day now. She stains the carpet so I can see her trail, even after she’s gone. *** Next day Sylvie was here this morning to tell me that the foundation has decided to send me home. I hear the other residents starting their cars to go for dinner. I’m not invited. Everyone avoids looking at me. I woke up to bloody sheets today, but it’s only menstrual blood. I have forgotten what day it is, what part of the month we’re in. *** Saturday I am surrounded by water. When a curtain unhooks itself from a metal bar and falls onto an electric heater, it starts to burn. I can see the white flame turn orange, then the dirty grey carpet start smoking and the big whoosh of fire. I stay cool inside the chilly waters. There’s a noise like a foghorn but I’m not on a boat so I just let it blare. It becomes louder and then I hear sirens. When a fireman comes in I have my computer open and am still trying to write so he has to drag me out. The police come and Sylvie talks to them. They call my husband. I tell them it’s an act of God. I was trying to pray, and the fire happened. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.
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My cottage is a ball of light against the other cottages, which remain a muted grey. The sun starts to come up behind the little stone castle but my cottage burns much brighter. Then the tree is on fire, and so is the shrub, writhing in the flames. I see the child appear in a meteoric burst and then she is gone. I see her long hair drifting out over the sea. She knows I still have so much to say but she doesn’t turn back. I am surrounded by a wall of people who put blankets on me and connect me to a beeping machine. When I try to sit up I feel dizzy. I can only lift my head. In the distance I see the child drift like a seagull, a speck on the horizon. Her hair floats like seaweed before she drowns. She is gone before I can explain.
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Human Nature 3 (2010) by Jang Seung-Hyo. Original photo collage, 100cm x 140cm x 18cm. Courtesy of CAIS Gallery, Hong Kong.
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Fables of a Fractured City
Hsu-Ming Teo
T
’ walk from my apartment, the Parramatta River muscles its way downstream towards Sydney Harbour. An ancient, tidal waterway cut into the layers of Sydney’s shale and sandstone basin from west to east, it shoves its weight against silting bays, sucking detritus into its ebb and swell. A moody river, this; sulking under the glower of heavy pewter clouds or dazzled by the brightness of a hard blue sky. In the morning it brims over outcrops of tilting rock, some crusted with oyster shells. Grey mangroves tremble gently in the water, their ghostly limbs and thick, glossy leaves kissing rippling reflections. By late afternoon they stand stranded in a littoral of black-stained sand as fishermen perch on rocks to cast silvery lines into the receding tide. Not that they can eat their catch: the river is too polluted still. During my childhood the river was an open drain for Sydney’s chemical industry and abattoirs, now extinct, in the west. Elderly inhabitants tell stories of the days when the bloated carcasses of cattle drifted and banked among the salt marsh and mangrove swamps downstream from the State Abattoir at Homebush Bay, where the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games were held. The slap of athletes’ shoes on synthetic rubber track and the rhythmic roar of the cheering crowd are distant memories now, dismal reminders of Sydney’s moment of glory, when its aspiration to be “world class” was realised … only for it to sag into a malaise of a decade or more that continues to affect us. Long before the Olympics, the Union Carbide factory leaked dioxins and DDT into the river, where those chemicals mingled with resin 159
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and phthalate from the ICI paint factory. Farther upstream a ship-breaking yard fronted the river, along with the clay pits of the State Brickworks; and the Petroleum and Chemical Corporation of Australia slid tar sludge into the foul brown depths. Only the poor lived along the river’s edge. When the Australian economy was deregulated in the 1980s, these industries foundered and the ageing abattoir shut its gates for the last time in 1988. A few years later the land was redeveloped for sporting facilities, then the Olympics. The river was cleaned, the contaminated soil on its banks remediated. New houses with acres of blinding glass and “resortstyle” apartments sprang up, clustering along Sydney’s fluvial spine. Always infected by an aqueous fever, Sydneysiders – including me – confirmed David Williamson’s adage in his play The Emerald City: “No one in Sydney ever wastes time debating the meaning of life – it’s getting yourself a water frontage.” On New Year’s Day I walked along the windy shoreline to the ferry wharf at Cabarita. Past the fat palm trees with curve-beaked ibises perched on top; past the joggers, cyclists and people walking dogs. Past the pitching white boats with their halyards ringing hard against the spars. Past the rowers and kayakers dipping and pulling against the water’s drag. Past the bikiniclad mother ignoring warning signs of contaminated water to splash in the shallows with her shouting children. Past the teenaged Asian girls sharing magazines and secrets on a bench, and the Muslim families somnolent around the smoking barbecue pits under peeling gums and Moreton Bay fig trees. Past the beaming boy who persuaded his grandmother to clamber out onto the rocks to cast a line, the tail of her hijab flicking stiffly like a pennant in the wind. The Parramatta ferry sputters eastwards down the river, slipping under the soaring parabola of the Gladesville Bridge into the broad waters of the inner harbour. The houses are growing grander. It’s a half-hour ride from Cabarita to Circular Quay. When I disembark at the ferry wharves sheltering under the cantilevered slash of the Cahill Expressway, I stand in front of the sandstone porticoes of Customs House. A century ago, I would not have been allowed to proceed any farther without having to take the infamous Dictation Test that enforced the White Australia Policy. I turn my back on Customs House and stand here at the heart of Sydney. To my left, the riveted steel arc of the Harbour Bridge joins the two halves of this 160
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fractured, fractious city. To my right, the concourse curves towards the Opera House, Royal Botanic Gardens and beyond, marking the start of the eastern suburbs. Behind me, George Street begins – the asphalt overlay of old convict tracks leading south and angling west. North, south, east, west: this is now the most Asian of Australian cities. North. The Harbour Bridge is a social and psychological barrier of sorts, demarcating where the affluent North Shore begins. The suburbs tumbling down the hills to the north-eastern edge of the harbour constitute the lower North Shore: home to well-heeled professionals and small clusters of Japanese around Crows Nest and Neutral Bay. Follow the train line farther north as its cuts through sandstone gorges and bush near the Pacific Highway and you eventually arrive at Chatswood: the heart of Hong Kong Chinese society in Sydney. Here are the old yum cha restaurants, gleaming roast duck and roast pork dangling in shop windows, Chinese grocery stores jostling with newer Korean eating houses, sushi restaurants and bubble-tea cafés on Victoria Street. In the 1980s my mother would drive us to Lindfield on the upper North Shore for Saturday-afternoon piano lessons. Miss Cheung was a Hong Kong migrant who lived with her parents in a split-level, brick and timber project home nestled in bushland near the Lane Cove National Park. She had trained as a concert pianist but patiently taught piano to uninterested children instead. I was a lazy and uninspired student. But I still remember the sense of anticipation when her glossy black Yamaha was opened: the lifting of the heavy maple lid and the ceremonial scrolling of the red felt strip that covered the keyboard. She straightened my posture and placed 50-cent coins on the backs of my small hands to keep them parallel to the ivories. My fingers crawled carefully up and down in monotonous scales. Occasionally, I sneaked glances out of the open window where eucalypts shed rinds of pale bark and long, slender leaves onto the pulpy ground. In winter drizzles, the damp smell of humus and the mournful cry of a wet magpie accompanied my stumbles through Clementi sonatinas. In the haze of summer, the air was redolent with eucalyptus oil and the faint, acrid smell of distant smoke. Sydney is a city hacked into the ancient bushland around the drowned valley of the harbour. The bush constantly pushes back into the suburbs north and south of the Parramatta River. It is preserved in the parks that rim 161
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the sandstone cliffs opening onto the Pacific Ocean, the enormous Kuringai Chase National Park and smaller reserves that sprawl intermittently throughout the north, and the Royal National Park in the south. In 1993, shortly after Christmas, the eastern seaboard of Australia was aflame. The sky over Sydney massed with smoke and snowed ash on the city. More than 80 fires raged. By January, arsonists had set fire to Lane Cove National Park. The summer heat and thrusting nor’westers fanned gusts of flame until they crowned the trees, boiled through the tops of exploding eucalypts and, fuelled by gum tree oil, leaped over firebreaks, sucking dry brush into the inferno and eventually devouring houses, including the Cheungs’. Motoring down the winding cliff road of Lady Game Drive in early February 1994, all I could see around me were the blackened skeletons of burned-out trees and thick, felty ash on the ground. It was an apocalyptic landscape. Yet seeds would soon be dropping from the fire-burst trunks of hakeas and in a few weeks, tendrils of green would shoot forth from the sooty limbs of trees. The piano room in the Cheungs’ house, however, was destroyed, as were the lower decks. But the piano was long gone. Miss Cheung had taken it with her when she married and moved to Chatswood. South. Beverly Hills, with its squat, red-brick or weatherboard houses secured with rolling steel shutters, is nothing like its Los Angeles counterpart. Developed after World War II, its main thoroughfare is now lined with kebab and pizza joints and Chinese seafood restaurants – a spillover from the densely populated, Asiatic suburb of Hurstville nearby. Driving south along King Georges Road, just past the colourful wedding-cake façade of the Vietnamese Cao Dai Temple in Wiley Park, the boundary of Beverly Hills is crossed. The frontier is marked by the enormous 1960s BoianNight Chemist sign: a reminder of the first generation of Cold War eastern European migrants who settled among the Anglo-Australians. In mid-December 2005 I was having dinner in Beverly Hills when hotted-up cars pumping out boom-box music roared down King Georges Road. The reverberations from howling mufflers and bass-enhanced gangsta rap shook the restaurant windows. We went outside to see what was going on. A long convoy of cars thundered past, ignoring traffic lights and posted speed limits. Two police officers watched from a marked car parked at a kerb. The previous day, 5,000 mostly white Sydneysiders had gathered at North 162
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Cronulla Beach to protest against the assault on a volunteer surf lifesaver by a young Lebanese-Australian man on December 4. Cronulla was mainly a “white” enclave, while Lebanese and other ethnic Australians usually gravitated to Brighton-Le-Sands – a beach in a more culturally diverse area. Tensions on Cronulla Beach had been building up between Lebanese and Anglo-Australians since October. Throughout the afternoon of December 11, 2005, they came to a head, fuelled by sun, beer and racial rage against any dark-skinned people unfortunate enough to be on the beach that day. Chanting racial epithets, the mob attacked several Lebanese men and two Bangladeshis and rioted in the streets of Cronulla, hurling beer bottles and shattering the windows of shops. Police intervened and the riot was quelled by mid-afternoon. Retaliatory attacks started that evening and continued for the next few days. Young Lebanese and other “men of Middle Eastern appearance”, as newspapers called them, gathered in Lakemba and Arncliffe in the city’s southwest and drove in convoys to the beachside suburbs of Cronulla in the south and Maroubra in the southeast, starting their own spree of violence and vandalism. The Shire – a local-government area including Cronulla – had always been a distinct part of Sydney. Like the upper North Shore, The Shire was white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant territory, but comprising more tradespeople than professionals. There were also the newly rich, who built mansions and moored yachts within the estuarine beauty of the Georges River district; they attracted notoriety of a sort thanks to the airing of the reality-TV series Sylvania Waters, which focused on one such family. During my schooldays, however, the girls from Sylvania, Jannali and Sutherland were intent on recreating scenes from the 1981 Australian film Puberty Blues. They dressed in skimpy bikinis, hung out on Cronulla Beach and tried to pick up bronzed surfers at weekends. We attended an all-girls’ private school so we listened to and licked up every tale from their sexual adventures, mythical or real. To migrants like me, The Shire seemed true-blue Aussie and the site of impossible liberty. After 2005 Cronulla became synonymous with the riots, Australia was again labelled racist and The Shire became, among other things, the stamping ground of a white supremacist group that has, nonetheless, been unable to stop Asians moving south into “God’s own country”. “But that’s the media’s south, not our south,” says Viphada. She means 163
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Asians such as us: Chinese-Malaysian-Singaporean like me, Laotian like her. She takes me to the city’s southwest and shows me the Laotian temple Wat Prayortkeo Dhammayanaram, the Thai Buddhist temple, the Amtra Monastery, the Russian Orthodox Church of the Protection of the Theotokos in Cabramatta, the Jehovah’s Witnesses compound and various Catholic and Protestant churches – all within a few streets of each other – and the Bonnyrigg Mosque next door to the Chinese Presbyterian Church, both facing the Vietnamese Buddhist temple. After our tour of temple-land we go to Cabramatta for pho and chao tom. Once the drugs capital of Sydney, home of the 5T gang and derogatorily called Vietnamatta after its refugee population, John Street, “Cabra”, is now an avenue of prosperous Vietnamese restaurants, grocery shops, karaoke clubs, fabric shops and dessert stalls. “This is my Sydney, my south,” Viphada tells me. “But nobody pays any attention to us unless there are riots over the building of a new Muslim school. Once, the media was afraid of Indochinese boat people and drug gangs; now they’ve got their knickers in a knot over ‘home-grown’ Muslim terrorists.” East. One of my mother’s Malaysian friends lives in Vaucluse at the eastern tip of Sydney harbour, near the old Macquarie Lighthouse with its dazzling, windswept prospect of the Pacific. Several times a year I drive to Double Bay or Rose Bay to have lunch with her in an overpriced waterfront café, from which the view of the harbour is impeded by giant yachts anchored at the marina. This area of Sydney is not part of my comfort zone. Once, when I was at a party in Point Piper – home to the city’s lawyers, judges and billionaires – someone asked me where I lived. When he learned I was from the west, he said, “I don’t drive further west than Ocean Street,” the leafy, high-walled road that connects exclusive Double Bay to Oxford Street and then Bondi Road. Most Sydneysiders associate the eastern suburbs with privilege: either the extravagant wealth of the quiet neighbourhoods hugging the harbour, or the sand-and-surf leisure of the beaches. Bondi – landing place of New Zealanders, haunt of British backpackers and countless other tourists from around the world – is the most famous, of course, but perhaps least visited by locals. They prefer the smaller beaches to the north or south. One thing I love to do at Bondi, however, is the coastal walk that begins at the southern end of the beach, where the Icebergs swimming club perches over the ocean. The path climbs up and around the cliffs, winding through 164
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parks, Waverley Cemetery and the tussocks of wild grass gripping the continent’s edge, all the way to Maroubra Beach in the south. Few people ever hike the full 12 kilometres; most tackle just the half-hour walk to Bronte Beach for a meal. The Bondi-to-Bronte stretch is the most thrilling and picturesque, with striated sandstone sculpted by wind and sea spray and wildflowers sprouting in the crevices. The light refracts brilliantly off the ocean, turning the knuckled cliffs into shelves of thick shadow and blinding rock in the midday sun. By late afternoon the crags are flushed with rosy warmth, the sky dissolves into sea at the darkening horizon and white gulls mewl and circle overhead. At this moment, the whole world seems suffused with such beauty that it could cut you to your heart. In my 20s I thought I could live and work in another city, but I could not shed my homesickness for the peculiar quality of light, wind, water and rock right here. Away from the beaches, the eastern suburbs is home to the University of New South Wales, which hosts one of the largest populations of international Asian students in the country. All around the campus cheap eateries have sprung up accordingly. My cousins from Malaysia studied at the university. When I visited them, we ate at dingy Thai restaurants and devoured midnight snacks of kebabs and souvlaki. Dhani is my guide and regular eating companion these days, introducing me to Indonesian restaurants and nasi padang eateries around Kingsford. We look for parked taxis and follow the drivers inside ramshackle buildings, where the walls are plastered with Indonesian advertisements and the bains-marie are loaded with pungent curries, ayam goreng, fried peanuts, crispy fish, trays of vegetables and plastic bags of emping and krupuk. I collect my plate of rice and three dishes, pick up my mismatched cutlery, pull out a plastic stool and join the Indonesian students and drivers at the cracked, laminated tables. West. Sydney’s west is divided into two demographics in this city’s consciousness. The inner west is home to artists, writers, academics, intellectuals, gays and the creeping gentrification of previously workingclass suburbs. The rest is the wild west: a broad arc sweeping north to south over the Cumberland Plain from the Blue Mountains to the southernmost edge of Sydney. It is known to outsiders mainly through the sensationalist screams of tabloid headlines relating the 1986 abduction, rape and murder of Blacktown nurse Anita Cobby; the 1991 mass shooting at Strathfield Plaza Shopping Centre; the 1997 abduction and murder of the toddler Jaidyn 165
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Leskie; the mass rapes of several Anglo-Australian women in 2000 by a Lebanese gang led by Bilal Skaf; and any number of muggings, drive-by shootings, armed robberies of petrol stations and convenience stores and vandalism, and the throwing of rocks from bridges onto cars travelling the M4 motorway connecting Sydney to the Blue Mountains, or the M5, which leads south into further areas of socio-economic disadvantage. In Sydney lore the west has been characterised as crass, kitsch, uncool, tasteless, home to single mothers raising multiple children on welfare payments, rev-heads who burn rubber along the broad highways at night and rednecks who spout racist vitriol, beat up Indian students and rage against multiculturalism, migrants and especially asylum seekers. But the west is also where many migrants land when they arrive. Here, migrants find homes, work, an easy, tolerant friendship and some semblance of community. When these migrants’ children become successful they move out of the west and disperse into the more affluent areas of Sydney. But the west remains home to the first generations of Pacific Islanders, Indians, Sri Lankans, Filipinos, Chinese and Vietnamese. I have lived most of my life in the borderland between the two wests. This is the Sydney I know best, but perhaps because of this it is almost too overwhelming for me to describe. Memories, stories, tumble out thick and fast, so where would I begin? The summer I climbed up the pink magnolia tree in my father’s backyard and sat on the boughs every day, reading for hours. The 15-year-old student from my school who went missing and was found hanging in Burwood Park. Cycling to Rookwood Cemetery with my Scottish-Australian neighbour Lorna, walking barefoot through the grass for a dare and picking painful bindies from the soles of my feet. My friend Melissa’s father who, according to his Malaysian wife, fell under the spell of their Filipina helper, divorced his wife, married the maid, went bankrupt and committed suicide in the Georges River. He tried to make it look like murder so his family could collect his life insurance. At university, when I shared a flat with an Indian student, we came home one night to find our Vietnamese neighbour had swallowed sleeping pills and we had to call an ambulance to take her to hospital. Later, our clothes disappeared from the washing line outside. They were taken by the neighbour, who used them as samples to sew new garments to thank us. She returned our missing clothes, together with a bag of mandarins and a huge 166
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slab of pork belly that we could not fit into our old freezer. Then there was the Estonian woman who asked me to carry her shopping bags home in the midday heat one summer, poured me a glass of something alcoholic and made me sit on her lace-covered sofa while she played two Chopin études and showed me her family album. My South Korean neighbours who taught me to make bibimbap and, concerned that I was too tanned and developing sun spots, gave me skin-whitening lotions. The mentally ill man who regularly sat next to me on the bus, warning the world against hyperglycaemia and ranting that sugar was from the devil. And so this city of mine is split along its seams. Boastful, insecure, rude, angry, continually outraged, haunted by a pervasive sense of victimhood, impulsively generous, easy-going, ready to laugh at itself, finally accepting and even celebrating all that is different within itself – this is my Sydney. How is it possible to love a city so fiercely, so absolutely?
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What Light Dreams when Sun is in Love (2009) by Koh Sang Woo. Chromogenic print on aluminium, 44in x 64in. Courtesy of The Cat Street Gallery, Hong Kong and Hong Kong ArtWalk.
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The Ghost House (based on a true story) Mark Kitto
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M didn’t like the foreigner. He stared at him, curled up and comfortable on the dusty floor, fast asleep. Lao Ma was sitting on a stack of bricks and wide awake. He didn’t like that either. The glow from the small fire at his feet was barely strong enough to cast his shadow on the pockmarked wall behind him. Above his head a roof beam seemed to hang in mid-air where the feeble yellow light licked its middle. The ends were invisible in the darkness. Lao Ma rocked his body to relieve the pressure on his buttocks and thumped his knee with the heel of his hand. Why had he agreed to spend a night with the foreigner in the Ghost House? He took a stick and poked the fire. His walnut face glowed orange in the brief flare-up and the stubble on his head shone like sand dunes in a moonlit desert. His shadow danced to life on the wall and the foreigner fidgeted in his dreams. Lao Ma hoped the crack and pop of the flames made them nightmares. He hit himself again, a little harder. Lao Ma avoided the Ghost House for obvious reasons. Everyone in the village did, especially at night. Lao Ma had been inside it twice, both times in daylight and long ago. He squeezed his eyelids almost shut and pictured himself in the far corner. It was dim enough during the day but now it was as black as a vault of dark secrets. Lao Ma imagined himself in a shortsleeved white shirt soaked with sweat. He was 14 years old and between him and the wall was Mei Feng, his second cousin from the next valley. She was two years older than him. She had not spoken to him since. 169
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The second time he had been in the Ghost House was soon after, with his friend Xiao Pang. Lao Ma had wanted to boast about his conquest but lost his nerve and ended up in thrall to Xiao Pang’s own stories of sexual discovery. Lao Ma raised his eyes to the wall above the sleeping foreigner, to where the graffiti had been. It would be more than 50 years ago. “Xiao Hong has breasts like lanterns,” Xiao Pang had inscribed with a bamboo splinter in the mud beneath the soft whitewash. “Her dad’s going to beat your arse black and blue!” Lao Ma teased Xiao Pang as they ran. “Only once he’s shoved your head in his shit pit!” Pang shouted back over his shoulder. Lao Ma heard the words sharp and clear as if Pang were sitting beside him. He shivered, then smiled, despite himself. His childhood friend had done well. He had become the boss of a sock factory in Wuqing. They’d lost touch when Pang’s parents died and he stopped visiting the village. Must be living out his retirement in luxury by now. Lao Ma tried to conjure an image of Xiao Hong’s breasts, and Mei Feng’s mouth, but all he could come up with were broken pictures, like those from a television set with a coat hanger for an aerial. He sighed and stared at the fire. “Fuck it,” he muttered. He looked at the sleeping foreigner again. The face seemed so innocent, almost childlike, even with the blond beard. There was a smile on his lips too. He really was having sweet dreams. About money, perhaps? No, not unless he was counting it. Women then? It was common knowledge that foreigners had sex all the time. By the way this one was smiling, as if he had just licked his lips, Lao Ma guessed he was dreaming about food, his own weird stuff. Lao Ma was sure foreigners didn’t like Chinese food. He for one would never eat foreign food. How could anyone ever want to eat food that wasn’t their own? Lao Ma’s stomach was as much a part of his identity as his soul. Imagine polluting it with stuff from outside. Yet foreigners ate Chinese food and pretended they found it enjoyable. Maybe that was proof of their inferiority, and Chinese superiority. Lao Ma reeled in his chain of thought. How had he jumped to Chinese superiority from Xiao Hong’s breasts? That wasn’t like him, to think about 170
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big issues. He didn’t care about those unless they affected the village and, more important, himself. Lao Ma was 70. In all his life he had never travelled outside the county, except for a few trips with the trucks that delivered part of the bamboo harvest to the remote milling stations. He was born 10 years before the “liberation” in ’49, and his life had run a remarkably smooth course through the political upheavals of the 1950s and 60s, the confusion of the 70s and 80s, and the recent “liberalisation” of the 90s. Peasant ignorance and preoccupation with his own affairs had served him well. By default more than merit Lao Ma had become a respected senior citizen. That his front porch happened to dominate the daily lives of his neighbours gave this unwarranted authority a significant boost. There were 20 houses in the village, all with whitewashed packed-earth walls on the ground floor, wooden slats and windows above and shallow roofs stacked with stubby tiles, like so many thousands of fallen dominoes, on top. If you looked in through the wide doorways you would see timber pillars holding up the ceiling in precisely the same position in every house and the same faded characters on them just above head height – “big north west”, “small north west”, “main south” and so on. The design hadn’t changed for centuries. The almost identical buildings – an outhouse on the left for one, on the right for another – were spread out along the road that ran up the valley to a dead end at the foot of a stone path. Thirteen of the houses were below Lao Ma’s. The other six were above, and above them, on the lower slopes of the mountain, were vegetable patches and tea fields. Lao Ma’s house was in the narrowest part of the village, where the valley was more like a gorge. It sat against the foot of a low cliff about three times its height and opposite its front door, on the far side of the road and a stream, a bamboo-covered slope rose almost vertically, too steep for anything to move across it except snakes and the feral cats that lived on the ridge and at night came down to scavenge, hunt and fight. To descend from the upper village to the valley mouth and the bus stop, or to climb to the fields above, everyone had to walk past Lao Ma’s house, which was closer than spitting distance to the single-track concrete lane. More like tap-on-the-shoulder distance. And tap them he would. 171
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From seven in the morning until supper at five, with a one-hour break for a nap, Lao Ma sat on his concrete porch in his patched blue jacket and black trousers. He would inspect everyone who passed and ask questions disguised as greetings. “Your boy still at the factory?” “Planting root vegetables already?” “That’s a big bag of rice …” Thus Lao Ma collected his knowledge and his knowledge increased his status. That evening in the Ghost House, Lao Ma pulled his coat around his shoulders and leaned forwards. He tilted his head the way a cat would over a crippled bird and studied the foreigner again. He still couldn’t quite remember his name. It was something like Tuo Ni, but everyone called him Lao Tuo, which had become Luo Tuo, as in “camel”. It suited him because of his blond hair and beard. First behind his back and now to his face, the villagers all called him by the nickname they had chosen for him. He seemed to like it. Camel had arrived a month before, unannounced and as if from nowhere, like the buttoned-up cadres in the 50s who ordered everyone to melt their pots and pans, or the wide-eyed students a decade later, or that nervous official in a suit and a smart car 10 years ago who told everyone it was okay to be rich. There was always someone turning up in the village and telling people what to do, then disappearing again. The difference this time was the someone was a foreigner, a true outsider, and he seemed to want to stay and – unbelievably – spend his money. And as Lao Ma was painfully aware, this outsider was fast asleep on the floor of the Ghost House while he was sitting on a pair of bricks suffering sore buttocks. He raised his hand above his knee again but this time held it there. He’d win. He was sure of that. Along with his status, Lao Ma had acquired a stubborn streak. He was proud that he had never lost face, so far as he was concerned. He had a reputation to maintain. No way was he going to lose it to a foreigner. Lao Ma shook his head and wondered if he hadn’t been a little too stubborn. Maybe he could have joked his way out of this childish game. He blamed himself for not thinking fast enough.
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He and Camel had eaten late, at about 6.30pm, then started drinking. They were in Zhang’s house, two down from Lao Ma’s, which Camel had started renting a month ago as a base while he negotiated for other houses in the village. His assistant, a tiny girl from the big city, acted as interpreter. Camel knew basic Chinese only, such as the words for eating and drinking, but he conveyed his intentions well. Like Lao Chen, the village bully by the reservoir, he made toasts as though he were issuing challenges. Lao Ma didn’t drink much compared to his few contemporaries, but he could hold his own and knew the trick of leaving a little rice in the bottom of his bowl and tipping liquor into it when no one was looking. So he had remained more sober than Camel and observed him calmly, the way he would a car crash on a highway. Camel became louder as the alcohol took effect. He had a funny way of moving his head and shoulders as he spoke. They swayed from side to side while the rest of his body stayed still, rather like a camel. He used his arms a lot too. The more he drank the more he moved. He spoke in sharp bursts, mostly in his own language to the girl, and occasionally in clumsy Chinese directly to Lao Ma. He knew a few words to do with friendship and cooperation. Now and again he patted Lao Ma on the shoulder. Lao Ma didn’t like that. He had sat still throughout, moving only to drink, or pretend to, after emptying the liquor into his bowl. He assumed that Camel had invited him to dinner to give him face and in due course to ask about renting his house. So far Camel had talked his way into two places in the village, Zhang’s father’s and a property of another Ma, no relation. He said he was going to convert them into guest houses. Workmen with unfamiliar accents were tearing them apart and building materials, expensive ones, were piling up outside. Camel moved fast. Some people in the village liked what he was doing. But that was to be expected. Mrs Xu, for example, was earning a fat salary as his chief housekeeper. Lao Ma wasn’t so happy. Camel had come to him late in the day. If he had started with Lao Ma’s house, Lao Ma would have shown Zhang and the other Ma how to do things. But the fools had fallen over themselves for quick cash, renting their unused houses to Camel for a pittance. It was no secret how much he was paying. Lao Ma told them from his porch how 173
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stupid they were. Then he started messing with Camel, just to put him in the picture. First he cut the new water pipes, the ones to the house in which he was having dinner with Camel. Next, when he heard that the foreigner needed to move a load of bricks up the hill, he parked his tractor in the middle of the lane and disappeared for the day. He was pleased to see his tractor still there when he returned. That was satisfying. For the time being he was content to be causing Camel trouble and the foreigner was acknowledging it. The dinner was clear evidence that Lao Ma had the upper hand. Now he could negotiate from a position of strength. He waited patiently for the subject of his house to be broached. He and his wife would move in with their son and daughter-in-law a few years earlier than expected. Then Camel had thrown him by talking about the Ghost House. Want that one too, do you? Lao Ma thought. “No one will tell me who owns it,” Camel said. His face twisted to demonstrate his disappointment. His Chinese was improving with the alcohol. The girl helped with some of the words. “But let’s not talk about that. I just want to know, Mr Ma, why is it called the Ghost House?” Lao Ma smiled and said, “Because there are ghosts there.” “Yes, but whose ghosts? Who died there? Was someone murdered?” “No one knows.” “No one?” “That’s right, really,” Lao Ma repeated. “Well I don’t believe in ghosts,” Camel said. He raised his glass. “Mr Ma. To no ghosts. Cheers.” Lao Ma raised his glass and took a genuine sip. He was lowering his hand when Camel suddenly rocked forward on his stool. Ducking under Lao Ma’s elbow, he looked up into his eyes and said, “Mr Ma, let’s prove there are no ghosts.” His pale blue eyes shone with mischief. “You and me. Let’s go to the house now, tonight, and sleep there. How about that?” It was a good joke. Lao Ma grinned. His drinking hand was still beside Camel’s ear. He raised his glass to his lips again. “Nice idea,” he said, and drained it. He was forming a smile on his wet lips when Camel straightened and stood up, as ever with quick, decisive movements.
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“Right then. Let’s go,” he said. “We’ll take this.” He picked up the bottle. “And these.” He took the two glasses. Then he said something to the girl and she left the room. Lao Ma was flabbergasted. Camel meant it. He lit a cigarette to calm his rising panic. This was a challenge. Suddenly he understood the purpose of the dinner. Camel wasn’t giving him credit and making amends. He was raising the stakes, first with the drinking, now this. Lao Ma knew he had no choice. Camel shouted something, then the girl reappeared carrying two blankets and a torch. Lao Ma watched, glued to his chair. He took a drag on his cigarette. “Come along, Mr Ma,” Camel said, slapping him on the shoulder. Lao Ma flinched and glanced at the wall clock. It was almost 9pm. Then Camel waved him through the door. Lao Ma was wearing his everyday blue jacket, black trousers and a pair of green gym shoes. He could hardly claim he needed to change clothes. He followed Camel up the road and into a patch of darkness between two street lamps. Camel switched on his torch and shone it behind his feet for Lao Ma’s benefit. After the second lamp a stone path led off to the left. Lao Ma paused for a second, more in his mind than with his feet, and followed. He flicked his cigarette into the stream. He knew this gully well. A few metres up and on the left were his 32 tea bushes, and above the terrace where Zhang had his Phoenix trees Lao Ma owned the rights to two hectares of bamboo. He caught a whiff of night soil and knew that Wang had been working on his vegetable patch. He did not look up. The Ghost House was among the bamboo opposite Zhang’s tree plantation. It was a single-storey building with two large central rooms, each of which had a door to the outside. On the wall between the two doors faded red characters exhorted visitors to “have boundless faith in Chairman Mao”. Lao Ma remembered how students from the city had painted the slogan when they moved into the Ghost House in 1967. That was the only time he had known anyone to have lived there. Maybe one of those students was the
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ghost. Bad things happened to students in those days. They hadn’t stayed for long. He really didn’t know why it was called the Ghost House, but for the first time in his life he wished he did. Apart from accommodating the students, it had been used only as a temporary storehouse, occasional goat stable and somewhere to cook lunch for the workers who came to harvest bamboo shoots in alternate springs. Camel stepped through the right doorway, flashing his torch over the walls and ceiling. He must have been there before, Lao Ma thought, because the room on the right was the cleanest. “I’ll sleep here Lao Ma,” Camel said. “You there.” The yellow spot of light swung across the floor and stopped. A blanket landed on it. “Okay?” Lao Ma remained in the doorway. It was a warm night thanks to the thick, late-September clouds. After a short silence he spoke. “I’ll start a fire.” He bent to pick up some dusty shards of bamboo. “But it’s not cold Mr Ma.” Lao Ma ignored Camel. He fetched a tight bundle of brown-leafed camellia branches from the terrace. It didn’t matter whose they were. By touch he picked out the smallest twigs and snapped them off. He threw the pieces onto the floor. Camel sighed, made a hush and tut sound, and said in Chinese, “All right, let’s have a fire.” With his torch he found an old bamboo broom. He pulled it apart and put the straw under Lao Ma’s twigs. “I’ll do it, I’ll do it,” Lao Ma repeated, and pulled out his cigarette lighter. Camel stepped back. The pile of tinder cracked and flared. Lao Ma started breaking the bigger branches and throwing them onto the flames. “Not too much,” Camel said. “There’s no …” He stopped. He held his hands apart and slid them up and down in the air. “Chimney,” Lao Ma said. “No chimney,” Camel repeated the word. “No problem.” Lao Ma pointed at the open door. Camel mumbled in his own language. Then he spread out one of the blankets on the floor, lay on half of it and pulled the other half over his body. He meant to sleep straight away. He didn’t even take a last drink. Perhaps he was drunk enough already. He had left the bottle and glasses on the ground outside. 176
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Lao Ma made a stack of four bricks, two by two, and sat down on it, right beside the fire. He left his blanket in a heap on the floor. Camel closed his eyes. That’s how they spent the night: Camel asleep, turning when the floor grew uncomfortable, Lao Ma by the fire, pretending to warm his hands and smoking, trying not to think about ghosts, seething at letting himself be hoodwinked into this ridiculous challenge. He wanted to leave. He wanted to go home for a proper night’s sleep. He thought about leaving Camel there and telling him in the morning that he’d gone for more cigarettes and dozed off. But he was as frightened of losing face as he was of ghosts. To amuse himself and in case there really were ghosts, he made up prayers and whispered them half out loud, half in his head. “Dear sir or madam, or whatever you are, spirit, immortal, ghost … please don’t blame me for disturbing you. It is not my fault I’m here. It’s that guy, the big nose, who made me do it. If you are going to punish anyone, punish him please. I have enough problems and he has plenty of money. Imagine this fire is incense I am burning for you. How’s that?” Lao Ma paused. “Oh, and say ‘hello’ to my mum, will you?” Lao Ma felt a little better. He’d thought of his mother. She had always made him feel brave. It was she who had protected him from his father, a bully who had disappeared when Lao Ma was 13. When he grew up, married and had his own children his mother helped raise them, cooked for them, worked the tea bushes and collected bamboo with him. Sitting by the fire in the Ghost House, Lao Ma remembered something else he had all but forgotten about his mother: she had worked for foreigners when she was young, before the liberation. She had told him stories but he hadn’t paid much attention. Now he made an effort to remember them. His eyes were drawn again to the dark corner where he’d fumbled with Mei Feng, as if his mind could slip through it and back to his youth. What was it his mother had said? He could call up only an impression, no precise words, but she had said good things about foreigners. She had liked them. The ones who came to the village in those days were almost all priests. For a couple of months in the summers they had rented houses in the village, just like Camel wanted to. His mother had helped them with household chores.
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Lao Ma had never really thought about it, but it must have been the foreigners who converted her. He’d assumed his mother had always been a Christian. With his brother and sister he had ignored her beliefs as best he could. Religion had been deemed an evil superstition since he could remember and having a Christian mother had been highly embarrassing. Then again, it had given him something to say when the Red Guard students ordered everyone in the village to root out the Four Olds and denounce their elders. He could tell from his mother’s face that she hadn’t minded, even when they were screaming at her while she kneeled on the threshing floor. Religion seemed to be all right now. Old Mrs Xu had even stuck up a sign at the bottom of the steps to her house. It said “House Church this way” in pale green paint on the dark brown board. Lao Ma tried to remember what his mother used to mutter to herself. Lots of “fathers” and “mothers”, stuff about forgiveness and heaven, and that formula she used when the students started hitting her. She said it over and over. It started with “Jesus said”, then there was “forgive” and “they don’t know”. “Forgive them because they don’t know”? Because they’re stupid? Lao Ma distracted himself with his memory game. He hadn’t thought about his mother for such a long time. She had died at 62, just turned up her toes and gone to sleep forever after a day collecting bamboo. It had been a hot one. When he and his wife found her the next morning there was a smile on her face. Her eyes were still open a fraction and in her clenched fist there was a metal hairpin. Scratched onto the wall above her bed, just as Xiao Pang had etched his appreciation of Xiao Hong’s breasts on the wall in the Ghost House, were fragments of the Christian stuff she used to say out loud. “I am the light eternal”, read one of the sloping lines. “He that believes something …” shall receive something. That was another. Lao Ma could remember only the first few words now. “Do something to others …” Then what? They’ll do something to you? He couldn’t think. “It is easy for a camel …” Lao Ma sat up with a jolt and almost tipped over backwards. To keep his balance he poked his right foot out from under him, close to the dying fire. A camel. He shot a look at the foreigner as if to make sure he was still there. There was a groan, the blanket moved; stillness again. Lao Ma froze. 178
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What had his mother written about a camel? He tried to recapture the image of the wall in her bedroom. They had repainted it straight away, before the funeral. He clamped his teeth together and squeezed his right eye shut, as he did when he was concentrating. Something about a camel passing through a narrow passage, entering heaven, a rich man. “It is easy for a camel to …” What was easy for camels? Travelling long distances. That’s what. Carrying merchandise, stuff worth money. But where to? Somewhere through a small hole … a narrow passage? That was part of it. And on the other side? What was on the other side? Heaven! He remembered it now. Not the precise words, but that was the gist, he was certain. His hand went up to his chin and his face relaxed. He could take his time. The foreigner was called Camel. He had travelled from far away and he brought money. So if this camel could fit through a narrow passage, and that had to be the one by Lao Ma’s house, there was no question of that … In other words, if he could make his way past Lao Ma, then he was going to create a heaven in the upper valley, an earthly paradise, a land of riches … Lao Ma didn’t move for a long time. He sat still as a statue. He didn’t notice dawn creeping in and blackness turning grey. He lowered his hand and looked across the dead fire at the Camel again. A long, lingering look this time. You could almost have called it affectionate had it not been so possessive. At last he moved to one side and crouched beside his bricks. He pushed three of them away, spread the blanket, stretched out on it and laid his head on the brick he had chosen for a pillow. He stared at the roof. In the half light Lao Ma could see the roof beam from end to end. It was good timber. The struts supporting the clay tiles needed replacing, most of the tiles too, maybe all of them … but that wouldn’t cost much money … and there’d be plenty of that … and who believed in ghosts anyway? Probably just a story made up by his parents to stop him playing there as a boy. Lao Ma smiled up at the beam and closed his eyes. 179
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The Possibility of a City Mark R. Frost
What makes a happy city? speak only about what makes me happy in a city. That would have to be a city’s sense of drama. I like cities that create theatre, that make you feel you are watching a stage, where the people know they are at the centre of things and so develop their sense of style and spectacle accordingly. Better still, I like cities where there are several different stages, to which a range of people have access and so define in distinctive ways. I dislike cities that follow just one domineering script, whether it’s written by politicians, urban planners or international architects. Being someone who writes about the past, I’m happiest in cities that retain a sense of historical drama: cities in which I can eat, drink and watch the “show”; cities where people have been doing the same things for decades, even centuries. I don’t simply mean that happy cities ought to preserve all their ancient buildings. That would be an overwhelming constraint on their capacity to create new theatre. But when the externals have to change I appreciate some continuity of place. Politicians, planners and architects who aspire to build cities that look like other cities have a tendency to rip the distinctive soul out of those places. They kill the great performance.
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From: markfrost@ To: Colleague Subject: RE: PossibiCity There you go. Straight off the top of my head, so I hope that works. Please let me know what the final version you’ll be using in the expo will look like. These days I have to be careful about edits and what goes out in my name. However, you can drop the architects from my list of urban villains if you like and just leave the planners and politicians in there. Best, Mark *** From: Colleague To: markfrost@ Subject: your text Like it! Thanks, Mark. Is there any chance though that you could just add one line at the bottom that finishes on a positive note? The word “kill” is a bit of a tough ending. Thanks,
*** From: markfrost@ To: Colleague Subject: RE: your text Positive messaging for the PossibiCity? So Singaporean! But just for you, , I’ll try. I’ve adjusted the relevant sections below (and added shopping!) 182
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What makes a happy city? [Sections of revised text with changes/additions in italics] … Being someone who writes about the past, I’m most happy in cities that retain a sense of historical drama: where I can eat, drink, shop and watch the “show”; cities where people have been doing the same things for decades, even centuries. I think that politicians, planners and architects who aspire to build cities that look like other cities have a tendency to rip the distinctive soul out of those places. They kill the great performance. Fortunately, the signs are positive. In many places, more people are having a say in the way their cities are re-made. “Consultation” has become the buzzword, “community” the goal. Our urban drama might still end happily. *** From: Colleague To: markfrost@ Subject: Revisions Hey, thanks a lot Mark. You know how it is, that will be their first comment … must be positive, so why fight it? :) They’ll be in touch shortly. *** From: Possirep To: markfrost@ Cc: Colleague Subject: edits Dear Mark, Thank you for your text. However, we cannot insert political elements so we propose the following:
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AS A HISTORIAN, WHAT MAKES A HAPPY CITY? I can speak only about what makes me happy in a city. That would have to be a city’s sense of drama. I like cities that create theatre, that make you feel you are watching a stage, where people know they’re at the centre of things, and so develop their sense of style and spectacle accordingly. Better still, I like cities where there are several different stages to which all sorts of people have access and so define in distinctive ways. Being someone who writes about the past, I’m happiest in cities that retain a sense of historical drama: cities in which I can eat, drink and watch the “show”; cities where people have been doing the same things for decades, even centuries. I don’t simply mean that happy cities ought to preserve all their ancient buildings. That would be an overwhelming constraint on their capacity to create new theatre. But when the externals have to change I appreciate some continuity of place. Mark R. Frost, AGE?, Historian Would you agree with the above? Also, please provide your feedback on the new title and indicate your age. If you don’t want to state your age, no problem. Thanks,
*** From: markfrost@ To: Possirep Cc: Colleague Subject: RE: edits Well, I am afraid it IS a political question, so you’d better count me out. ***
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From: Possirep To: markfrost@ Subject: RE: RE: edits OK, will remove your text then. Thank you for your efforts. *** From: Colleague To: markfrost@ Subject: A compromise Hi Mark, Sorry it’s taken a while to get back to you. Thanks for all your efforts on the text and apologies on the rewriting, it’s just that the committee are under pressure to ensure that PossibiCity doesn’t put anyone’s nose out of joint this year. This is the first time that ANYTHING proper has been written for this event, so bear with them. I have tried to find a compromise as I know what you are trying to say. I have attempted to find a happy medium between what the committee left out and what you were saying. I turned it round to make it sound more positive while still saying the same thing. We are just trying to make a difference to how people see communication with the public. We are trying to show Singaporeans how to do it properly. If this is ok I will send it on to . Many thanks,
*** What makes a happy city? I can speak only about what makes me happy in a city. That would have to be a city’s sense of drama. I like cities that create theatre, that make you 185
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feel you are watching a stage, where people know they are at the centre of things and so develop their sense of style and spectacle accordingly. Better still, I like cities where there are several different stages, to which all sorts of people have access and so define in distinctive ways. I don’t like cities where there is just one domineering script, whether it’s written by politicians, urban planners or international architects. I don’t like cities where there is just one domineering script, devised by experts but with little consideration for the users. Being someone who writes about the past, I’m happiest in cities that retain a sense of historical drama: cities in which I can eat, drink and watch the “show”; cities where people have been doing the same things for decades, even centuries. I don’t simply mean that happy cities ought to retain all their ancient buildings. That would be an overwhelming constraint on their capacity to create new theatre. But when the externals have to change I appreciate some continuity of place. I think that politicians, planners and architects who aspire to build cities that look like other cities have a tendency to rip the distinctive soul out of these cities. They kill the great performance. Sometimes, politicians, planners and architects aspire to build cities that look like other cities, but these places tend to have no soul. There is no recipe for a successful city. It is ultimately the inhabitants who give cities their uniqueness and sense of performance. Such an evolution takes time. Fortunately, the signs are positive. In many places Fortunately, nowadays, more people are having a say in the way their cities are re-made. ‘Consultation’ has become the buzz word; ‘community’ the intended goal. Our urban drama might still end happily. Our urban dramas are being re-written with happier endings. ***
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From: markfrost@ To: Colleague Subject: RE: A compromise , Really, if you can find someone else to write your piece, I’d prefer it. and co. haven’t exactly made me think this is anything but a waste of more time. If it was just a kind of exhibition text re-edit, as you seem to suggest, then I wouldn’t be so bothered. But since I was asked for my views it’s a different matter (take it or leave it – this is not stuff I am happy attaching my name to if it’s watered down). Hope you can understand, Mark *** From: Colleague To: markfrost@ Subject: RE: RE: A compromise Hi Mark, No worries. We can make it anonymous. We will just put “by a historian” for you to feel better. Thanks,
***
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From: markfrost@ To: Colleague Subject: RE: RE: RE: A compromise Sorry, , that’s not the issue. I wrote my text and it was meant to be my opinion. I don’t really want to have anything used from it, or used as being by “Anon.” without my control over it. These things actually matter a lot to me. How about this: if I use the correspondence with PossibiCity (deleting your name) for a piece about intellectual constraints in Singapore, you can do whatever you like with my text. However, I will, of course, be able to use whatever you decide to do to it in another context. How does that sound? Mark *** From: Colleague To: markfrost@ Subject: Being unreasonable Mark, All right, I understand what you are saying. It’s a great piece you wrote. Except, WHY DID YOU HAVE TO ADD THE BIT ABOUT THE POLITICIANS, URBAN DEVELOPERS AND ARCHITECTS??? You have alienated all the people working on this project with one politically insensitive comment. With the greatest of respect, you know who you are writing for and why, and you already know that in Singapore these comments are touchy subjects, and that you are putting me and the team in a difficult situation. In your book you implied a lot of things but did not blatantly write about them, as you didn’t want any difficult or negative comeback. So why couldn’t
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you have done that for us? I didn’t think I asked a lot, but obviously it was too much. Yours,
*** From: markfrost@ To: Colleague Subject: RE: Being unreasonable With the greatest of respect, let’s not forget that you asked me for this text – as a favour! It turned out to be a waste of time and not what your committee was looking for. But that really isn’t my fault. And it wasn’t meant to cause trouble. I’d assumed PossibiCity was about the globe, not just Singapore, so I responded with that context in mind. But I have obviously been away a long time and have forgotten the extent of local sensitivities. I’m sure someone else can be found to write something more on message. Best, Mark P.S. I completely disagree with your interpretation of my book. It wasn’t intended to be read that way at all. *** From: Colleague To: markfrost@ Subject: RE: RE: Being unreasonable Yes, you have been away a long time. And, of course, now you are no longer here I suppose you can afford to have these high-minded principles. Well, I just wish you could have come down from your high horse for a moment and seen things from our perspective. All we are trying to do is 189
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something nice and supportive for Singaporeans. All we wanted from you was a little support – and a little RESTRAINT! What a shame you couldn’t bring yourself to give it and be part of the team,
*** From: markfrost@ To: Colleague Subject: One for the team What makes a happy city – Singapore style? I can’t really answer that one for myself. (Can? You really want? OK then, I’ll try). The way I see it, I pay the government my taxes so they can hire the best architects and developers in the world to make my city happy. These people like an empty page to work with – a blank slate – so they can try out new ideas that will be good for us. It makes their work much easier. It means they can make my city “iconic”, like other global cities – like Dubai, or Las Vegas. And this makes me happy. Because, like the government says, the more tourists who come to our city, the more shopping they will do in our shiny new malls. I know this means there will always be rice on my table. I know it means that one day I’ll be able to buy that new HD LCD TV. It will probably take up a whole wall in the cosy housing-board flat that the government has given me, but that’s not a problem. I also know that if we let these architects and developers get on with their work, their buildings will be noticed by people in other cities – and perhaps win prizes! This will make me and the government very happy. We’ll be able to tell all our friends that we live in a state-of-the-art city, a “world class” city, with the best facilities and the best public toilets. Maybe, famous writers will come to visit us. Maybe, after a few hours talking with our leaders, they’ll go away to write books that tell the rest of the world how happy we are.
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I think a happy city … (You sure I can say this or not? Sure? OK …) I believe a happy city is a city where I don’t have to think about the rest of the world’s problems, where the politicians are like my loved ones – they provide for me, keep me safe and make sure I have every convenience. I think a happy city is a city where we all know our place – all sing from the same songbook – and the government politely asks those who won’t to leave. And what do we all sing when we are happy? Why, One People, One Nation, One Singapore, of course! Happy, happy city.
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Contributors
© Sam Kalayanee
MEIRA CHAND, born in London of Indian-Swiss antecedents, has lived in Japan and India and now resides in Singapore. She is the author of eight novels, the latest, A Different Sky, having been published last year. She is an Associate of The Centre for the Arts, National University of Singapore and from 2000 to 2002 acted as Chairperson for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. NIC DUNLOP is a Bangkok-based photographer and author whose work has appeared in publications worldwide, including The Guardian, The New York Times and Le Monde. His book The Lost Executioner (2005) tells the story of his exposure of Pol Pot’s chief executioner, Comrade Duch. The HBO film Burma Soldier, which he co-directed, will be released in May.
JOHN C. EVANS is a recovering engineer and semi-itinerant instructor in English literature and composition. Having graduated from Columbia University with an MFA in Creative Writing, he moved to Cheongju, South Korea, where he is a doctoral student in Western Philosophy. His fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction have appeared in more than 20 literary journals, including The Truth About the Fact, The Yalobusha Review and Square One. MARK R. FROST was born in England and raised in Australia by his Indian mother and Londoner father. For the last decade he has lived in Singapore and Hong Kong, working as a writer, academic and occasional museum designer. In 2010 his first book, Singapore: A Biography, was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and awarded the Asia Pacific Publishers Association Gold Medal. He is still waiting for his Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. ISABEL HILTON is an author, broadcaster, documentary maker and founder of www.chinadialogue.net, a bilingual Chinese-English website devoted to climatic and environmental problems. She studied Chinese at Edinburgh University and in 1973 became one of the first British students to study in China. Hilton has worked as a journalist at The Sunday Times, The Independent, The Guardian and The New Yorker, and on BBC radio.
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JIMMY, born in 1969, is a Burmese writer, poet and political activist. He was arrested in 1989 for peacefully voicing his political views. Released in 2005 after almost 16 years, he married a fellow activist. When their daughter was four months old they were both detained for opposing the Burmese regime; they were sentenced to 65 years’ imprisonment each.
STEPHEN J.B. KELLY, born in 1983, grew up in Nigeria, Oman, Hong Kong and England. He has pursued several long-term projects in China and won numerous awards, including The Observer Hodge Photographic Award, the Reginald Salisbury Award and the Made in China Award at the Lodz Fotofestiwal, Poland. His work has featured in The Independent Magazine, The Observer Magazine, D La Repubblica delle Donne and IL Magazine, among other publications. MARK KITTO is the author of China Cuckoo, How I Lost a Fortune and Found a Life in China and a columnist with Britain’s Prospect magazine, for which his brief is to “illustrate the big picture of China with anecdotes from rural life”. He runs a coffee shop in a disused brothel in Moganshan, a mountain resort near Shanghai and is rarely short of material. He used to be a magazine publisher.
BERTIL LINTNER is a former correspondent with the Far Eastern Economic Review and is currently Asia correspondent for the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet, as well as a contributor to Asia Times Online, Hong Kong and Jane’s Information Group in Britain. He has written seven books on Burma, including Outrage: Burma’s Struggle for Democracy; Burma in Revolt: Opium and Insurgency Since 1948 and Land of Jade: A Journey Through Insurgent Burma. ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTRA is a prolific Indian poet, anthologist, literary critic and translator. Mehrotra’s The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (1992) is an exceptionally influential work. He has edited several books of translation and criticism, including A History of Indian Literature in English (2003). In 2009 he was nominated for the chair of Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.
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Contributors
DIPIKA MUKHERJEE saw her debut novel, Thunder Demons, longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2009. She has edited two anthologies of short stories: The Merlion and the Hibiscus (Penguin, 2002) and Silverfish New Writing 6 (Silverfish, 2006). Her first poetry collection, The Palimpsest of Exile, was published in 2009. She is Professor of Linguistics at Shanghai International Studies University. JACK PICONE is an Australian-born editorial and documentary photographer based in Bangkok. He has spent more than 20 years working in scores of countries, including some of the world’s most dangerous, such as Israel, Angola, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the former Yugoslavia. He has won several of photojournalism’s most prestigious awards and conducts The Jack Picone Photography Workshops. DEVAN SCHWARTZ is a graphic novelist and freelance journalist who has worked as a human-rights reporter in Southeast Asia. He is enrolled on the Portland State University MFA programme in the United States and is writing his first literary novel, The Disunion of Hope. His work has appeared in New Plains Review, Rio Grande Review and Street Roots.
© Jing Shao
ANIL STEPHEN, who has a master’s degree in journalism, is a former news producer for Star TV in Hong Kong. He is the CEO for Christian Solidarity Worldwide, a human-rights organisation that campaigns for religious freedom in more than 25 countries. He has travelled extensively and lived in India, the Seychelles, the Philippines and Hong Kong.
LUCY TAN is a fiction writer and New Jersey native who works and writes in Shanghai. She recently graduated from New York University, where she earned a B.A. in English and American Literature, East Asian Studies and Creative Writing. A reluctant child of the suburbs, she is drawn to established and burgeoning cities, which her stories often explore.
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HSUMING TEO is a Sydney-based novelist and historian. She won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for her first novel, Love and Vertigo (2000). Her second novel, Behind the Moon, was published in 2005. She co-edited Cultural History in Australia (2003) and has just completed an academic monograph, Loving the Orient: Orientalism and the Mass-Market Romance Novel. She is a judge of the 2010 Man Asian Literary Prize and is working on her third novel. MA THIDA is a Burmese writer and medical doctor who has won numerous human-rights awards. In 1993 she was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment but was released in 1999 with help from Amnesty International and PEN. Since then she has published widely and taught at Brown and Harvard universities in the United States. She recently returned to Rangoon, where she writes, edits and practises at a free clinic. MICHELLE TOOKER lives in Philadelphia, where she works in marketing by day and writes poetry by night. An avid traveller, she has visited 33 countries and plans to visit at least 100. Her favourite region is Southeast Asia, particularly Burma. Michelle’s work has appeared in Schuylkill Valley Journal, Ampersand, Foundling Review and Gutter Eloquence.
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Art and the Artists
CHEN JIAGANG, from the central Chinese metropolis of Chongqing, studied architecture and practised as an architect before becoming a full-time artist in 2001. MONICA DENEVAN lives in San Francisco and has been visiting and photographing Burma for a decade. YUICHI HIGASHIONNA lives and works in Tokyo. His recent work has made sculpture out of everyday objects such as uorescent-light tubes. South Korean artist JANG SEUNG-HYO constructs three-dimensional collages by building up multi-layered imagery from photographs. KOH SANG WOO from South Korea is a graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago. He paints the bodies of his models before photographing them and creating fantasy images using negative ďŹ lm. KACEY WONG of Hong Kong recently published Drift City, a volume of photographs documenting a continuing series of architecture-inspired appearances by the artist dressed in a cardboard suit depicting a skyscraper.
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January 21 - 25, 2012
See you again @ Jaipur in 2012 For more information: www.teamworkproductions.in