Revisiting Myanmar - A photoessay

(Again this was written circa 2000, so recent events have obviously overtaken some of what I have written)

Myanmar, formerly Burma, is in the far east sharing borders with, going clockwise, Bangladesh, India, China, Laos and Thailand. It is known mainly for its’ political troubles with a bloody government crackdown in 1988 and the charasmatic leader of the opposing democratic party and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Aung San Su Kyi.

I however know it differently, having fond if vague memories of living in a tropical paradise as a young child and revisiting it when I was twelve. It was only in 1997 however that I went back as an adult. In a typically Burmese way, I found that much and at the same time little had changed.

There were signs of political unease shall I say, but they were easy to miss if you weren’t actively looking for them. It was usually only the odd soldier posted here and there that gave anything away.

I arrived to what I thought was the searing heat of the midday sun but quickly realised that it was still only early morning. The terminal building was new, built to accommodate the fledgling tourist industry. The only problem I saw was the lack of tourists. Nineteen ninety-six had apparently been “Visit Myanmar” year, but I think the only people who knew about it were either those working in the government tourist department or the small Burmese communities who had resettled in the West.

I was greeted by a flock of relatives who hadn’t seen me since I was a boy of twelve. They were all from my mum’s side of the family and included my uncle, aunts, grandma and grandpa, a cousin and her two children etc.(I forget) We all got into a small convoy of white cars, mainly oldish but pristine Toyota Corollas (apparently, white is more prestigious and their resale value is much higher than other colours) and drove home.

I can speak basic Burmese but not really well enough to hold a conversation. I often resorted to just nodding which seemed to work well enough. My aunt, who had looked after me as a child (children seem to be brought up by relatives as much as by parents in Myanmar - it reminded me of a scene in a favourite film of mine, Local Hero where there is a group of fisherman and a toddler in a pram and they’re asked whose child it was, to which they just looked at each other, frowning) had installed air-conditioning in her room just for me. It seemed that I was a delicate westerner, not used to the hardships that they endured there. I was ready to argue that life in the West was as difficult in it’s own way but thought the better of it, there really didn’t seem to be any point in a philosophical argument over the pros and cons of living in a western versus eastern society. I don’t think that they would have understood anyway if I complained how poor the Northern Line underground service was or how mundane a nine-to-five job could be. To their eyes, people in the west live just like the glamorous characters in Hollywood movies or like Aerosmith on MTV. It’s very easy to understand why. There is only one national television channel devoted to home made soaps and a ‘News’ service devoted solely to idolising the accomplishments of the present regime. Other channels are pan Asia including an Asian (read Indian) MTV channel called ZeeTV. It seems obvious to me that your knowledge base is only as good as your source material. Granted, you can get the BBC World Service on the radio but if you’re Burmese, I’m afraid that’s your lot. The idea that you may know more about what’s going on in a foreign country fourteen thousand miles away and other countries around the world than you do of the country that you live in may seem strange, but that’s Burma for you.

The first thing that we did after resting and unpacking was to head to the Shwedagon pagoda in the centre of Rangoon. This is probably the most important monument/shrine in Myanmar. It is a pyramidal structure that has been steadily covered in gold leaf from whenever it was first erected (probably about two thousand years ago). Around its base are additional small shrines devoted to nats (spirits) along with multiple statues of the Buddha in various poses. I don’t think that my factual description does the pagoda justice. You really have to be there to appreciate and understand it’s full glory. It isn’t for instance just golden looking, it is actually covered in real gold. There is nothing remotely like it in the west. It takes a good half hour or so to walk around it at a leisurely pace. During the day when the sun is at its harshest, walking around the pagoda can feel like walking on hot coals (I neglected to mention that you can only enter the pagoda after taking off your footwear, it is a sign of respect to the Buddha). I worked out that some of the tiles were cooler to walk on than others, but only after partially burning off much of the soles of my feet.

The pagoda is set on a rise and you have to climb up a path of steps to reach it. Situated along the path on either side are various venders selling scented flowers, paper umbrellas and other trinkets to be used as offerings at the shrines located around the pagoda. On offer are also various hand made goods. Environmentalists better close their eyes here; Burma has very valuable natural resources, one of which is wood. In short, you can pick up quite cheaply carvings etc. made from teak and other materials which are from so-called non-sustainable forests. You may have seen tv programmes mentioning the illegal log trade that exists between Burma and its neighbour Thailand. There seems to be a large demand for Burmese timber, no doubt in part due to it being so cheaply obtained.

I must mention that people don’t seem to realise just how wealthy Burma is in terms of natural resources. It is amazing to think that just forty years ago it was the richest country in South-East Asia. It is upsetting to know that in the space of a few decades it has been transformed into what the West views as a typical third world country. In 1988 Burma applied for the status of the world’s poorest nation. What went wrong? You can speculate as well as I but closing off the country from the outside world would seem to have done the trick. Whilst the west, Japan and other countries raced ahead to develop their own infrastructures, governments, economies, education systems etc. Burma just buried its head in the sand.

I managed to spend some of my time with my young nephews and niece, the last occasion I had seen them being twelve years previously, apart from the occasional photo that arrived. It struck me that I would have grown up just like them had I remained in Burma instead of coming to Britain. Dad said that the reason he decided emigrate was because he saw the local children being brainwashed with communist propaganda but I must admit that I didn’t observe any overt communist tendencies in my young nephews and nieces. On the contrary, their ambitions seemed healthily capitalist! (they all wanted to make lots of money whether by becoming doctors or rock stars - strangely enough a career in law wasn’t mentioned) The time I spent with them were some of the happiest moments I remember. As it so happened, my visit coincided with the Burmese New Year, which is a water festival. It’s basically an excuse for a countrywide water fight, the significance of which I’m not entirely sure, no-one I’ve asked really seemed to know. Convoys of pick-up trucks loaded with passengers would parade past roadside gangs equipped with hoses intent on getting the passengers soaked which they duly did. Anyway, being too scared to go with the adults on the pick-up trucks, knowing full well that some of the hoses were so powerful that it would have hurt, I decided like an invalid to remain with my young cousins. I confessed to myself that I was indeed a delicate westerner just managing to stop myself from saying “Ouch!” when one of the cheeky blighters (of which there were plenty) “whacked” me in the back with a can full of water. I soon found out that “playing” with the kids was almost as dangerous as with the adults. They used empty cans, the tops of which were ground down to remove the sharp edges, filled with water which they flicked at you in such a way as to make the water sting. Family as it turned out was no source of sanctuary. My little relations were as eager as the other children to drench me from head to toe. Admitting defeat, I retreated, head bowed and a little wiser.

In front of the flats that my mother’s relations lived in was a sort of local lending library which the children used and it seemed, ran. I only now on reflection realise just how peculiar this must seem. I can hear in my head cries of “child labour” from activists but this wasn’t so. There wasn’t any money to be made from their labour and no adult was telling them that they should do it. It seems that Burmese children are from an early age instilled with a deep respect for knowledge, and the vessel that carries it whether that be a book or an elder. Although I have become so called westernised I can still recall echoes from my childhood of being told to respect elders and books, to a state of reverence for them. It is comforting in our modern world to think that places still exist where the young are taught to respect and take care of elders and the experience and lifetime knowledge that they represent but my cynical half thinks that this is just a way of telling children to behave and not talk back. The truth as always probably lies somewhere in the middle.

My brother once commented that Burmese children behaved like adults and that the adults behaved like children. It seemed sad that children grow up so fast there, wearied by the pressures that they face

We decided to take a trip up country, along the famous Road to Mandalay. It was a sort of a mini-expedition. We hired a coach from the Ministry of Tourism and a driver to go with it. Neither seemed fit for the purpose. The coach’s glory days were clearly over and the driver seemed to have emerged from an alcoholic (or narcotic) slumber (you can never entirely tell in Burma). What the hell. It seems to be a truism that when on holiday you tend to take a devil-may-care attitude, even to the extent of taking leave of your senses. Having said goodbye to caution and common sense, we started on our happy journey. The road (to Mandalay) was so straight you’d swear the Romans had built it. Breakfast was at a makeshift roadside inn. I had a sort of pitta bread with mushy peas. It tasted delicious. The early morning sky was an azure blue as we headed out of Rangoon...