My flight to Rangoon on June 18 is canceled. Thai Airways announces that heavy rain has closed Yangon airport. In the restless gloom of the waiting area, rumors start to spread. The Burmese army has taken over the airport, people whisper. Aung San Suu Kyi’s birthday is a day away. Has some event occurred while they have been away? Young fathers sit staring into space, wondering whether they can ever return home.
We get bussed to the Amaranth Hotel, a fancy five-star hotel in the outskirts of Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok. Using my wireless thumb drive, I e-mail my friend in Washington, DC, and request her to check Twitter. Within a few minutes, I get my answer: a plane has skidded off the tracks at Yangon Airport. Flights supposed to land there are being rerouted to Singapore.
We fly to Rangoon the next morning. In the excited conversations I start up with my fellow travelers, I refer repeatedly to my visit to “Burma,” to which they politely remind me it is now “Myanmar.” At a crowded traffic junction, a young newspaper boy flashes me illicit news printed in The Nation, a Thai newspaper. The front flap is folded over to hide the headlines inside: “Kachin Rebels Resume Fighting at Border, Threats of Civil War.” only 3,000 kyats (US $4.70), he says. I get a Hollywood thrill seeing the news, hidden so discreetly and flashed briefly before my eyes.
In a nearby restaurant, the kindly owner starts to discuss the Kachin rebels with me. The people are protesting, she says, because the benefits of the new hydroelectricity dam currently being built will
all go to China. The Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) River will dry up and the Kachin will get nothing in return. She is surprised I do not know all this already. “I think you are journalist and you come to report about this,” she confides. I deny this, but she hardly believes me: how could I not be a journalist? Obviously I was not a tourist—clearly I had come for some specific purpose.
Four months earlier, in February, I had ridden a pickup truck to Lashio, in the northern Shan state. A government official had looked at me and asked, “Are you a writer?” Do I have “I am a writer” written on my forehead, I had wondered at the time. In hindsight, this was disingenuous: which tourist in her right mind would be riding a pickup truck to Lashio, sitting squashed alongside 30 laborers in the back with a giant pile of goods, and only a plastic mat as cushioning?
I had admitted I was a writer, of sorts, but I need not have worried—the official went on to tell me that Myanmar was now introducing democratic norms and would soon become like other democracies. He also told me that he never took the state-owned Myanma Airlines, and that
he felt that his country would slowly but surely adopt the political freedom of other countries. He admired writers, and wanted to learn to write in English.
Of course, he was a government official whose children studied at the best schools. His three rosy-cheeked children went to one of the best boarding schools in the country, in Pyin U Lwin (formerly Maymyo), where he was picking them up to take them for a short vacation. Ordinary people had told me that only government officials get to send their children to good schools, or to buy property or start businesses. We can’t do anything, they said. It might have been true in this case but the official was so pleasant, polite and charming, and so clearly on the side of a democratic system, that it was hard to fault him.
Despite all this, I was unsure how much I should reveal—would saying that I was writing a book about the Nepali/ Gorkhali community in Myanmar bring unwelcome attention? Did I want to invite the possibility of more government officials asking me more questions?
I was unsure, and in the confusing absence of information it seemed better not to say anything.
Back in the Rangoon restaurant on a steaming and oppressive June evening, I shook my head and said: “No, I’m not here to report on the Kachin rebellion.” The owner was surprised by this. Then she resumed telling me the story of what was happening in Myitkyina, almost as if it did not matter why I had come in the first place, as long as I got a chance to witness what was going on there. I was educated, it was clear. I could speak and write in English. And this was enough credentials to be a witness.
Reading the New Light of Myanmar, the government-run newspaper, I saw that indeed the Kachin rebels have resumed fighting in Myitkyina, where I was headed. As the restaurant owner had earlier indicated, the news also told me that the Kachin were protesting the building of a dam by China; they had already blown up 22 bridges.