An Australian journalist revels in the pleasures open to foreigners living in the “hardship posting” of Rangoon

Land of a Thousand Eyes: The subtle pleasures of everyday life in Myanmar, by Peter Olszewski, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2005. P253

I finally figured out what the Burmese military propaganda tag “internal destructive element” really is. It’s an Australian journalist. Peter Olszewski’s memoirs, Land of a Thousand Eyes, is an account of how a western expatriate wallowed for a year in the privileged lifestyle enjoyed by the elite who cling round an authoritarian political system.

Olszewski, a former editor of Australian Playboy, founder of the Australian Marijuana Party, and a self-styled Gonzo rock journalist, moves through the expatriate and local elites scene of Rangoon with the moral immunity enjoyed by many foreigners who frivolously retain their freedoms at the expense of a people largely deprived of  rights.

Olszewski worked in Burma during 2003-2004 as a media trainer for The Myanmar Times, the semi-official weekly newspaper run by fellow-Australian Ross Dunkley. The author casts Dunkley as a foul-mouthed publishing pioneer, and his newspaper as a significant factor in nudging the country towards a more open future. In a recent interview in Australia where he justified the role of The Myanmar Times, Olszewski stated that “it doesn’t get told what to say, it gets told what not to say.” This is even more cowardly than subservience to censorship: it is active collaboration with a system of censorship.

The author knew all this before he went to Burma, of course, and it didn’t bother him. But he didn’t go to help, he went to help himself, strapping on the nosebag of expatriate largesse and munching away on a fat Japanese-sourced salary.

Rangoon’s foreign circles come alive in the book as Olszewski states: “Expatriates who can survive the vagaries of life in Myanmar are those who can adopt a philosophical wait-and-see-what-happens attitude and react accordingly,” all in the air-conditioned luxury of privileged spaces for people who cynically regard Burma as a “hardship posting.”

For Olszewski, it was smoking dope in Rangoon, puffing on opium in Shan State, getting drunk and falling into holes in the sidewalk, and doing the rounds of what passes for a high society of parties and gallery openings.

Some of Olszewski’s revelations will enrage fellow expatriates, with references to cocaine snorting, dubious lady companions, the murky dealings of business people, and scenes of drunken debauchery that only those with money and diplomatic immunity are capable of.

The book’s narrative structure is like being cornered by a stoned, middle-aged hippie at a party who starts to mumble inanely: you are never too sure where the story is going or what, if any, point there is to it. One minute we are at a beach in Arakan, the next at a Thingyan water festival.

There are dozens of descriptions of shopping expeditions, Olszewski’s favorite cafes and feeling homesick. He complains about the food, the problems of finding hot water in Kengtung and Shan virgins.

He caps off this “tour de farce” with 50 pages of a love story as he finally meets a Burmese woman who can stand his obnoxious Australian sense of humor.

Amid the hackneyed attempts at political and cultural insight lurks some hilariously bad writing, especially when he realizes in late 2004 that the Burmese elite who protect him and The Myanmar Times have been purged and the good life is endangered. He compares Burma to a pretty but dangerous plant. “Kiss (Burma) softly at first because underneath the sensuous surface lurks needle-sharp danger…now I am bleeding with a mouthful of painful thorns.”

There are worse lines.

Collaborating with a repressive regime is the least of Olszewski’s indiscretions. He provides us with his odious views on female social subservience as equality and strength, on modest clothing as sexually alluring, and on the virtues of certain points of the female Burmese anatomy. It is in descriptions such as these that the book descends sharply to misogyny, and transforms from boring autobiography to Bangkok go-go bargirl literature.

The book’s most revealing passage is when the author refuses to help the sick street child he patronizingly pretends to care for. He has been giving her pocket change for months for helping him to carry his shopping and to bargain for him at the market. But when she falls painfully ill with stomach worms he refuses to help her get hospital treatment because —under what he terms “the unwritten law that forces people to ignore the suffering”— assistance could have jeopardized his own position.

Land of a Thousand Eyes is the story of a man who went through Burma with his eyes shut to anything but his own selfish pleasure.