No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore.
—Charles Dickens, “A Tale of Two Cities”

My backpack is strung with talismans. There’s a Shiva bead in an orange thong hanging from one of the side straps, a small disco ball from a Tel Aviv bar in one of the pockets, and on one of the zippers a key chain that used to dangle a Taj Mahal snow globe, though now it looks like a half-finished game of Hangman—one more guess.

There’s a Bedouin braid hung off the middle that’s red, white, and black, the strong colors that herald Nazis, Coca-Cola, the White Stripes, and wine. I have another braid tied around my ankle with cool Rasta hues, for a balance of color, and wear Brahmin strings around one wrist, all the yellow faded so they are just white and red and frayed at the ends. Around the other wrist is a bracelet of wooden blocks, each with a sticker of a Hindu god—monkeys, elephants, blue people, and too many arms.

There’s a string of Turkish beads on my knapsack with the Evil Eye in the middle, and inside are some Greek worry beads that some girl gave me. Somewhere around there’s a Buddha coin, a pregnant woman, an Egyptian scarab, an old drachma, and a Shiva shell with a whorl on the back. This completes the catalog of my talismans.

Everything becomes something of value on the road—a red stuff sack, a Ziploc bag, a clothes pin. I’ve scoured the hotel room for a missing rubber band, and know how many I have, and I’ve ran half a mile back down the trail for a pair of drying socks that fell off my bag on a trek. Money changes value. It becomes the local price of a beer, the local cost of lodging. A hundred rupees, that’s a lot of money, even if it’s only two dollars. People become treasures. In these quick and passionate days, you appreciate with reverence the chance encounter, the friendly face, the restaurant where they know you.

And there are the people and places that you can never, never know, because there are too many and the world is too big, and they will always be faces in a crowd, names on a map, full of mystery and the romance of hearsay. It is better that way. If ye knew it all, ye’d be mortal no longer.

Ron and I sat on the balcony, smoking cheroots and feeling very colonial. Through the bars of the white banister all the brightly-colored longboats were moored for the night. The canal water was low, like a taught muscle, in anticipation of the rainy season. Across the canal stood more stilted shanties, deep earthen brown with porches and tin roofs, looking very Mississippi, and there were palm trees and pines and a rolled-out line of hills and clouds scorched autumnal and a single early star.

Two women walked past in the street below, balancing baskets on their heads. The men wore Kachin bags slung over their shoulders. One zipped by on a motorbike with loaded baskets burdening the back. Down to the left at the teal-painted ferry dock some coolies loaded boxes of green tomatoes from a sampan onto an old half-ton truck, with much clatter and shouting. To the right a girl chased a dog with a stick, and men in longyis smoked cigarettes under the eves of a grimy riverside tavern, stilted over the muddy banks. They had not yet switched on the generators, and the quiet air felt cool after a dense, hot day.

The streets of Nyaung Schwe had a frontier flavor—dirt streets and wooden buildings, opening onto boardwalks on the ground, with banistered balconies where you half expected to see lacy painted whores coo-cooing for customers. The Shan locals posted their bikes and motorcycles at the hitching posts out front and the presence of carts in the street and parked in the weeds, and the girls sitting side-saddle, and the lawless chaos of traffic, and the patched darkness of the unpowered night all added to the cowboy feel. All the light came from the drinking holes.

I wandered the streets, with Ron and a Swiss Kurd named Julian, in the warm lively night.

“I want to go into one of these whiskey bars,” Ron was saying, “and order a bottle of whiskey. I’ve never done that in a bar. Have you ever done that in a bar? It’s only two dollars here.”

“Yes,” I said, romanticized by the notion,—“yes, we have to do this, at that Western bar. Not the Western bar, the Wild West bar, with all the liquor bottles on the wall and the old men sitting around and the busted television. We go in, music stops, record scratches to a halt. Everyone looks up—who are these strangers? Push through the saloon doors. Piano player looks, and all the poker players look up from their hands. Then they all say, It’s just a couple of chumps, and go back to their cups and cards. And we take a seat and order a bottle.”

“Good luck with that, man,” said Ron.

The bar so mentioned was a caricature, though without the gramophone and gamblers. The sky blue paint peeled off the walls in strips, and posters for old Burmese movies covered up the patches. We had some beers and later went out to find some barbecue in the street, and to meet the American and his Chinese mother, mentioned in the previous chapter.

The next day I wandered around the town some more. Away from the main streets, the homes were stilted, and bridges led up from the road to the front door, across weedy marshes of front yards. I sat on a Shan fellow’s porch, overlooking the canal, and we were smoking cheroots and watching the gentle onset of dusk. His wife was fussing over his young daughter, just a few months old and turning her head all around to take in everything.

“She is like a fan,” said the Burman, rotating his head back and forth.

I told him about what I had heard in Kalaw, about the Burmese playing guitars in front of the girls’ windows, and he laughed and said, “That is how I met my wife. I would play my guitar just over there,” and he pointed across the canal. “She lived here, with her father,” who was also fussing over the infant.

In the morning of that same day, after breakfast, Ron and I went looking for the pickup taxi to Taunggyi. We waited a long time at a spot where it supposedly stopped, and only after some inquiry found the “bus station,” which was a dusty yard between some buildings. Ron became incensed when nobody seemed to know when the next taxi left, raging about and saying, “Speak English? Anyone speak English? You should fucking learn. All idiots.”

I was happy to sit there reading an Orwell novel, with my legs folded under me so the flies couldn’t get at my feet. When Ron asked, “What should we do?” I shrugged and said, “Get a beer?” Said the Israeli, “Alright, let’s get a beer,” and he stormed off to the adjacent bar, saying, “Let’s see how much it is.” As I made to follow him, I glanced up and saw all the Shan looking at me coolly, a look that grumbled, “Asshole.” Among the Shan, as with most people on this half of the continent, to lose the temper is to lose great face.

The pickup taxi started rumbling, and we skolled our beers and hopped on the back and sped off through the midday sun, through the oak-lined streets outside of Nyaung Shwe, and through a golf course where Shan locals in rice paddy hats played caddy to rich Burmans in polo shirts, and we jumped off at the fancy Aythaya Vineyard, a setting that would not look out of place in a 1980s gangster film—a classy place. We tasted the wines and toured the facility but could not afford anything else, and so headed back, encountering much of the same difficulties as on our way out there.

Unless you live in Burma, you can’t feel the hand of the regime, but it is always there, a tightening fist. In the morning in Shwe Nyaung, just north of Nyaung Shwe, the traffic police officer sits under a peepul tree on his motorcycle. When a car passes he blows his whistle and the car stops. A boy runs out, collects 500 kyut from the driver, and brings it to the officer.

Well, the next day Ron and I rented bikes and rode them out into the rural countryside, and up a steep hill to the Ruby Mountain Vineyard. There we could sample nine wines for two dollars. It was owned by a Burman, who visited twice a year, on his way to a summer home in Taunggyi, but the winemaker was French. The vines had been planted six years before, the first batch bottled in 2008.

I knew nothing about wine, I said, except I had seen Sideways once. Ron explained about the flavors of wine—how the palette tastes strawberries in white and earth in red, how the air and soil impart these flavors and the winemaker brings them out; how the “legs” dripping down the side of a sloshed glass tell the alcohol content, and how to sniff and check for clarity. I felt like I was in Sideways, and I felt fine, and it was a beautiful place, sitting on wooden chairs looking out over the hills and rice paddies to the lake, ten miles off.

A Canadian girl named Kaylin arrived after a while and moved over to our table, since the rest of the place was empty. We all rode back to town, to the restaurant near the docks where we had been having lunch. They had just opened five days before, and that day received their Myanmar Beer propaganda—ashtrays, napkin holders, and posters, so that their place looked just like all the others.

After lunch she was off to Mandalay and Hsipaw. Ron and I rode across the canal and smoked cheroots and fell asleep in the shade of a pagoda, a lone white pinnacle in the green fields. Then we returned to town and had dumplings and coffee, barbecue and Tiger beer, and I bought a bus ticket and arranged for a moped to the station, to leave the next day for Bagan. Ron left Burma a few days later for Thailand and Laos, and I felt like I had to see all the wonders I could with the time that I had.

The bus to Bagan was a long, jostling, crowded, hot, dusty affair, first down the mountain switchbacks from the Shan heights, and then across the dry plain of central Burma, to the ancient capital on the banks of the Ayeyarwady. The monsoon had not yet come to Bagan.

I stayed at the Golden Myanmar Inn, kept by the Chinese friend of the owner of the Gypsy Inn, and was the only guest. It was cheap and had air-conditioning to ward off the horrible heat, and so after a big thali sort of meal and a stroll around the town, smiling at the Burma girls, I came back and read and fell asleep early, so early that I woke up the next day at 6:30.

That day I did the obligatory bike ride around Bagan, with plenty of water, since I knew it would be horrible, sweaty, dusty work. What is there to see? A hundred Buddhist cathedrals, high brick pagodas and golden pinnacles, solitary structures, as all the thatch cities have rotted away, like the flesh of some ancient beast, leaving these fossils sticking up high over the arid plain, where only shrubs and scanty pines grow.

I rode out of the new town toward the Old. The road was crowded with cars, trucks, horse carts, and tourists on bikes just like mine (no local would ride in that heat), so I took off onto the sandy snake trails that led unto the most isolated and romantic of the pagodas—dark mysteries, Stygian wonders, constructs of an unknown age! Some of the shrines are still in sacred use, and I wandered the outer courtyards, and took the circuited hallway within, past gilded Buddhas facing the four points of the compass.

Monks wander around, and trinket stalls line the covered walkways up to the entrance of the pagodas. Even in the cloisters, local women sit with their infants or old women sit with huge cigars, and they say, “Picture? Picture? You want picture?” and will ask for money if you take one.

In an outer building of the Anando Pagoda, still a very holy place, I went into one old outer building full of painted scenes in pink, cobalt, and white. The son of a family of painters explained to me the Nat spirits, the Romances, and the Customs displayed there—here a Romeo and Juliet on their wedding night, their eager expressions unmistakable even on those alien-looking figures; and there they take offerings of food to the monastery on the following day. I took a nap in the shade of a tree, getting as much sleep as the flies would allow me, and then wandered off out of the Old Town, in search of more isolated and decrepit structures.

A young Burman on a bike rode up next to me, and he stuck by me even as I turned around and around, and as I tried to sneak into the Museum, and even as I rode down the long straight highway into the desert. He had slung over his shoulder a Kachin bag full of paintings that he wanted to show me. I refused in every possible way, without being impolite, and finally said:

“Alright, if you can show them to me while we ride—just go no hands and pull them out—I will look. But I will not buy.”

“No buy,” he said, for the hundredth time, “only look,” but my request was impossible.

I saw a massive red-brick structure off to the south and rode towards it down a sandy track. The painter followed. I got off along the way to walk out into a dead, dusty field and look at the colossus over the pale-green boughs of a line of golden mohurs. It was called Dammayangyi. I drank some water and gave some to the painter, who started muttering about his paintings.

“You know Conan the Barbarian?” I said, giving voice to the fancy stirred up by the sight of ancient temples,—“He goes around Hyborea, stabbing people, getting drunk, picking up girls. Anyway, the last Conan story ever written was called Red Nails. Conan finds this huge brick structure”—I wave at Dammayangyi—“out in the southern desert. He goes inside and there’s a whole society. There are two families fighting each other, and their fathers fought each other, and their grandfathers, and so on. Conan solves the problem by killing everyone. This reminds me of it somehow.”

I considered it some more and then rode on. The painter silently followed. Gradually he told me his life story, sitting in the shade like a parent as I climbed around on the walls—of his sister at school, his mother in need, his education in the family profession, and of what passed from first to last.

I entered Dammayangyi through the main gate, past a group of Burmans playing a rowdy card game in the shade, and told another vendor about Conan and the Red Nails as he stalked me through the high-arched halls and gothic vaults. The boy thought I was crazy and left without a word. I climbed up into the side passages and dodged a crippled bat that nearly fell on me and explored every corner. The painter was lurking around, and eventually he found me reading “Benito Cereno” in a windowsill. He sat still for a while, then said, “You see paintings?” “Not interested.” So he left.

On the bus to Mandalay there was this French girl, or rather two of them, traveling with two French boys—but this French girl, this image of Blaas’ water carrier, sat and chatted with me when we stopped at a teahouse for lunch. She had an altogether, almost obscenely enticing habit of dropping open her small mouth whenever I said something of interest, and because the French tend to enjoy boring detail, much of what I said was of invaluable, open-mouthed interest to her.

These four French also stayed at the Mandalay hotel where I found lodging, and the next day they took the same bus to Hsipaw. Let me describe this marvelous bus:

It is rather short, with boxes and all sorts of jetsam contained on the roof under a blue tarpaulin. All the seats have been raised roughly to the level of the window sills, so looking in you see lots of legs, and under the benches has been installed a raised floor of cardboard shipping boxes. The aisle is even higher, with first a stratum of rowed canisters of oil or battery acid, and on top of these some sacks of cheap plastic, full of who-knows-what, that the passengers duck walk across and fall from into their benched seats. More passengers sit in the aisle, crammed together, like hypothermia victims entangled for warmth, though it is warm enough.

Something on the bus stank like rotten fish (I think it was a durian fruit), and whenever the bus stopped so the conductors could throw water on the asthmatic engine and shout at each other, everyone would pile out to escape the sauna heat and the junkyard scents, starting with those lying in the aisle. It took six hours for the bus to cough up the serpentine road into the mountains, and then we arrived in Hsipaw.

Hsipaw: A small mountain town of fifteen thousand, popular among travelers for its charm, though most Burmans have never heard of it. The trees are lined with golden mohurs, and the marigolds and orchids and frangipani are in bloom. It is a town of lazy routines. Mr Book sells a rusty library, Mr Charles runs a fine guesthouse, and Mr Food has cheap beer and satellite television, though I preferred a small place nearer my lodging, with white picnic tables under the vast canopy of a banyan tree.

The premier and cheapest Shan dish is kao soi, or cut noodles. It is a soup of rice noodles, with tomato and pork broth, herbs and sesame seeds and chili powder, pea shoots and maybe some rice noodles, and the Shan eat it and serve it everywhere, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

In the morning the Shan peasants come in to trade by the riverside. In the evening they pan for gold in the shallows. In between they work in the shade, doing as little and napping as much as possible. It is very hot. I liked it and resolved to do nothing but look around.

On the second day it rained, then the sun returned. The kids in the school next to Mr. Charles’ Guesthouse were chanting and it sounded like African music, and there were noises of construction and motorcycles and chattering Shan and chattering insects. I chattered with a Seattleite named Sam, a recently graduated economist, about stateside politics and Thailand, and we went out to eat a few meals of Shan noodles, the portions being very small.

That French girl was there in Hsipaw, and this Mormon chemist, Dale of Texas, and a German couple, Mort and Carolina, working in Vietnam, this ambiguously gay San Franciscan, this Russian woman named Mascha, and this Swiss beauty named Colette. I ate rice and drank tea with one or more, or made jokes over beers at Mr. Food, or played pool on a huge snooker table in one of the pool halls.

Sam and I went off north of town one day, wandering through the alleys and looking for a place called “Little Bagan” with a bad map. Eventually we found it—a few overgrown temples, very picturesque. On the way back on muddy roads an old woman working in her garden called us over, and we talked for a long while. Her house was on the map as “Popcorn Factory,” and many tourists call her Ms Popcorn.

She used to make popcorn and sell it to the school nearby for 1000 kyut a bag, but the Chinese can do it for 500; so she grows vegetables in her dead husband’s garden in the summer and makes potato chips in the winter and tutors a few kids in English, since she used to be headmistress of a school. She told us about this and her family—her six daughters, living and working all over, and all their children, some of whom rushed about the yard where we sat, chasing a puppy or skirmishing in some war game.

Sam had got a job with a fellowship, researching the economics of health, hard questions—how many children will die if this country does not get a new vaccine? how much will it cost?—expressed in numbers, which he says are often flawed, though they are always taken as canon law by policy-makers and companies.

He asked one of the Burmans at Mr. Charles’ place about illness in the country. Dengue fever was common, especially further north, but Malaria was not so bad; many villagers had tuberculosis, from fueling smoky fires in their longhouses to keep away the mosquitoes. We asked about politics and the Shan candidates for the government, but the Burman had no idea and did not really care—what did it matter?

Well, Sam and the German couple came south with me when I left, almost a week after arriving in Hsipaw, for Mandalay, and I was there for a few hours before taking a night bus further south on the Ayeyarwady to Yangon.

I arrived in Yangon and it was raining. I took a bus in to Sule Square and went back to the Okinawa Guesthouse and got a bed in the air-conditioned dorms for one night, since my flight back to Bangkok left the next morning. I had breakfast there and watched it rain and met a Bavarian Buddhist named Tobias, who had studied physics and worked for Mercedes for a few years, but he was as unsatisfied with that as Prince Siddhartha. He took a vipasanna class a year ago and found a new calling. He had been in Burma for six months on a meditation visa, studying in monasteries in the south.

Tobias told me about the Buddhist teachings as we wandered around later, looking for Fuji Sushi and a place to watch the World Cup opener. South Africa tied Mexico, and I had a few beers, and all the while my brain was roiling with thoughts totally foreign: Should I continue on?

My plan was to go from northern Laos to the south, into Cambodia and then scaling back up Vietnam, when I feel sated with this Southeast Asia, and yearn for China. It would take six months if I wanted to see it all, all that these countries have—

Cambodia, where Angkor Wat covers miles with temples, and the schools became Khmer Rouge murder houses, and the killing fields have been dug up, and the prostitutes follow you down the street on motorcycles and cling to you like drowning victims; and the coast has islands like Thailand used to have, and there are dolphins in the Mekong, and they use US dollars because their currency is bunk.

Vietnam, where they eat anything with four legs, more-or-less, and they sell cans of beer in the temples, and they burn fake dollars and Euros for their ancestors, and the roads are clogged by fleets of scooters, and you see an accident every half-hour; and where the museums celebrate their victory over American “imperialist pigs,” with pictures of the girl who killed six GIs and dog tags for sale out front, and they celebrate victory over Chinese dynasties, Cambodian empire, and Mongol hordes, though the people will welcome everyone with a smile.

It is far better, I decided, to let these wonders remain spoken mysteries for now, reasons to return later amidst life’s travails, than to hasten through them with eyes unseeing, and miss the grandest gift that travel bestows—love for a place, a people, a family, a culture, a religion, a style—a love that only comes with patience and time.

He says, ‘I’m only stopping here to get some gasoline.
I guess I’m going thataway just as long as it’s paved,
I guess you’d say I’m on my way to
Burma shave.’
—Tom Waits

The morning sun shot off like a firework over the hills. Ron and I took our backpacks to Sam’s trekking office, where from a painted portrait, three feet across, the old gopher-toothed Burman explorer looked out from under his rice paddy hat to the narrow room and the street beyond. Naing Naing, Sam’s nephew and our guide on the trails to Inle, was there waiting. He tagged our bags and sent them to Nyaung Shwe, on the northern bank of the lake, where we would proceed, in a meandering way of hills and vales, over the next three days.

Naing Naing kissed his little daughter goodbye and shouldered his knapsack, and we followed suit, with only the bare necessities. We walked south out of the Kalaw valley, on winding ways cut into the hills, past groups of novices in burgundy tunics, with metal dishes for their monastic meal. None of the monks ate after noon. Naing Naing stopped us in the shady path to squat and smoke a cigarette—I think we walked too fast for him—and he told us about Buddhism: its six senses, eighteen elements, twelve causes, and four noble truths.

We continued on through hills and forests of spare dry pines, past the army camp, and came out onto a long unnamed valley east of the Tong-La that Robin showed us, opening south to the plains, and to the north hemmed in by the hills of Kalaw. The trail zigzagged along the tops of the eastern hills, turning from forest to glade, where smiling children in rice paddy hats and rubber boots with Shan knives in bamboo sheathes shepherded herds of stupid cattle, shooting them straight with slingshots. Bullocks carts went off the other way, making for the market day in Kalaw.

Across the valley we saw a train snake down the tracks, and the Knuckle Mountains, sloping above, and not a river in sight, but plenty of green fields and white stupas. The monsoon irrigates the highlands, fills the paddies tier by tier, but then it was still early in the season. The hillsmen, mostly Danu tribesmen where we were presently, grew tea and vegetables in gardens of rich earth and waited for the rain on which they were completely dependent. They prayed to the thirty-seven nat nature spirits, and they shot rockets into the air with messages for God.

At that time the farmers would sow their rice in a well-tilled field, and in August, when the rice paddies become full and smooth with gray water, they plow the ground there and transplant their crops. Households owned certain sections of the nearby paddies, and most of the rice they grew was for their own consumption. In the highlands, they also grew brown mountain rice, which is more nutritious and does not require standing water; and this, along with their vegetables, they sold at market.

In Lupyin, Naing Naing, Ron, and I stopped for tea in a dirty bamboo bungalow that housed ten Danu. Most everyone was a farmer, but we met a man who traveled through the villages selling lottery tickets for a living. They bet on the last three numbers for the Thai lotto. There was also a monastery in each village, with a few monks and the abbott, who was the de facto village headman. Some monasteries had televisions where the village could come to watch football. Boys ran around with water tanks hanging from bamboo staves, a wheel at the bottom end and the top across the shoulder.

Here, as my group came to the village of Lupyin, is a good time to present the map, the making of which occupied my voyage, secondary in importance only to an active marveling at my ancient surroundings. Behold! my journey, from beginning to end:

As the Reader can see, we three lunched in Shar Pin and passed through Lin Pan, a Paoh town where a half-dozen kids waved and screamed, “Bye-bye,” the only English phrase known to most of Burma’s peasants, and they screamed it after us until we were out of sight, calling across the hills. We walked on through wilderness, beneath pines and oaks, banyan trees and the Flame of the Forest with its red flowers, and passed phloxes, ninnias, marigolds, pale orchids, and frangipani: the temple flower, bells of white and gold with a sweet musk.

We arrived, around four in the afternoon, at the village of Kyaut Su, where there was a secondary school for 250 Paoh students. I saw a few primary schools on our trek, and only this one secondary school outside of Kalaw. The students must either lodge in the town or walk several hours every day, and it is prohibitively expensive for most families. So the children go and work in the fields, with no time for politics or revolution, and when their children grow up they will do the same. A few go to high school and college in government-sanctioned programs, and they graduate to government jobs. The government likes it this way.

Our road climbed up a hill, with two banyan trees guarding the top, and we began our descent when the rain started coming down. The trail turned to sticky mud and the rain blew at us in torrents and weighted us down like seas. I unfurled my umbrella and Naing Naing and Ron donned their jackets, and we marched on through wind and rain for some time, through wet hills and bamboo groves, until we came to another part of Kyaut Su where we would spend the night.

Leaving our muddy kit at the porch, we climbed up to the top floor of the thatch longhouse, by way of a bamboo ladder. It was constructed in the same way as the house of the medicine man, mentioned in the preceding chapter. There were two rooms: a kitchen and a hall; bare walls, bamboo mats, ratty blankets, and a smoking firepit set on a round stone, where the husband of the Paoh family made our dinner from things Naing Naing had bought in villages along the way.

I took a twilight stroll through town before dinner. Round brown faces peered out at me from the windows and balconies of their thatched longhouses. They stared shyly, with only an occasional “bye-bye,” as I walked between the dozen homes, the rain cisterns and latrines and bamboo stands, and looked out into the valleys beneath Kyaung Su.

Sam, when we met the old trekking guide, sold the untouched rural culture as a commodity—we would see so much more culture and so many fewer tourists on his trip than the others, he said, knowing by a decade of experience what all tourists want to hear. “Stop,” he had said,—“Look, at the people. Look, at the villages.” So that’s what I did.

I saw simple people, uneducated and modestly dressed and modestly content, going about the routines of homecoming and story-sharing and meal-taking. I saw boys playing checkers with bamboo tabs, white on one side and green on the other. They saw me as a stranger, white and round-eyed and big-nosed, and they were not aware of much outside Kyaut Su.

Eighty per cent of Burma lived in the countryside and worked on the farms, a pristinely pre-industrial way of life. They were not stupid: they could read and write and criticize politics, but the circumstances of life and labor meant they had no time for any of that, not when they had to fight every day for a living. So they keep their heads down, occupied with matters of surviving. This served those men in power very well.

Ten other villagers turned up in the kitchen of the house where we stayed to watch Ron and I eat our supper. They sat cross-legged around the firepit, observing over the flames and the cauldron as we ate plates of rice, meat, and vegetables, with soup and tea and chilies. We finished and sipped our tea while our audience waited, and we asked each other, “Should we do something?” but eventually they departed and we moved to the main hall to let the family eat their meal. We rolled out our bedrolls between the drying garlic and the Buddha shrine and went to bed at eight.

On the second day I rose early and washed my face with rainwater from a cistern and considered the misty morning over the vegetable fields. We had breakfast and coffee, filled our bottles with boiled water, and turned east. We hiked through rolling lowland of dry paddies and barren grazing land, Poah territory. Blocks and cliffs of limestone stood in the vales: huge rocks like Crusader fortresses, overgrown with shrubs and pockmarked with the nests of birds.

We came to and crossed a railway, a highway, and a power line from the hydroelectric plant that the Japanese built in Kirin state, siphoning power north to the rest of Myanmar. All Burmese attempts at damming tributaries of the Irrawaddy have met with disaster, and this Japanese dam is a primary source of electricity for the country, though the towns along the lines are not even wired to them. The town through which we presently passed, Bow Nin Gone, was all turned out, with all the men and women working outside the schoolhouse, building new furniture and planting new gardens, and the stores were filled with donated notebooks and pens—but Reader, they need more!

Beyond the straight lines of civilization, we came to low hills like a heath, with young crab apple trees between the planted fields, grown not for their sour fruit but for the firewood. Paoh girls in long, loose tunics and trousers of orange-trimmed black, with orange turbans on their heads, swung hoes at their bare feet, in furrowed fields of soy and ginger and potato. The women worked and the men watched the home and the children, because the wives could not trust them to stay away from other women if they get out of the house—or so I am told.

I’m not sure what the men do. What I saw was a lot of men gambling and smoking, and a lot of working wives with babies slung under their arms from shoulder holsters or playing around in the bushes next to the rice fields. Older children work alongside their mothers and sisters. However the men do cook the morning and evening meals. Once the wife returned home, the husband lost much of his depraved independence, as is true of every human society.

Under the gray sky, the earth was red as Mars with iron oxide, and the farmers have to sprinkle the fields with lime to balance the acidity. We walked single-file on a raised path between the deep ruts that cart wheels had carved out of the muddy clay, and we passed through only a few villages, built on higher hills, with bamboo thickets around the perimeters. It was quiet out there. Near the villages there was the whimpering protest of a bullocks-cart’s axle, the munching and breathing and ringing bells of cattle, the chattering of Paoh women in the field—but only rarely. Mostly there was only windswept silence and birdsong. It sprinkled a little, but the real rain missed us, and we were usually alone on the road.

Soon we came out from the heath and into a much hillier region, with the arid rocky land good only for soybeans and grazing. We crossed a line of hills and came out into another valley of this infertile stuff, with a few deep mud gorges along the southern end of the path. Twice we had to cross these, once by winding down and up, and again by crossing a creaking bamboo bridge. Ahead and growing closer there was a high limestone ridge, very picturesque, with hills steep as Roman columns in the south. Rice paddies ran up the slope to the base of the limestone, and they also grew mountain rice.

Eventually we came right up to the ridges on a steep, winding trail and passed through a niche in the stone, like a niche in the blade of an axe. There were shines carved into the walls on the side of the trail, which then opened onto a wide valley, hills in the distance, the cliffs spreading out to either side, and directly beneath us, surrounded by bamboo stands, the Paoh village of Pat Tu, where we would spend the night in the local monastery.

Naing Naing had us halt at a store on the main road, and Ron and I sat on bamboo benches, smoking cheroots and drinking rice wine. A Frenchwoman stopped there but would not sit with us, but an American traveling with his Chinese mother heeded our call to company and conversation. He had been working in Beijing, and his mother, a meditation instructor, had been abroad for twelve years, and was presently taking courses in Burma. I got in her good graces by saying I wanted to go to her home island of Taiwan, so she whispered to me of her son:

“You know he just broke up with his girlfriend. Eight years they are dating, six years living together, and then they break up, and he goes back and she already has another boyfriend. He says, ‘I’m going to win her back,’ but I think someone needs to tell him he needs to move on.” She kept on telling me her son’s problems, wishing on me the position of role model, as he kept glancing up nervously, as if at something that was about to explode.

There was also, drifting around this store, a cute moon-faced Paoh girl with earth-brown skin, and every time I caught her bright eyes looking over at me across the yard, she would smile. She lurked around the washing station, clicking her gum and rolling her eyebrows, and Ron would look back to see what the hell I was smiling at.

“You had better stop that,” he decreed.

“What?”

“You had better stop.”

“I like these peasant girls.”

“You’ll get in trouble.”

“Knifed by her brother.”

“Yeah, they’ll find you hanging in one of the houses, next to the garlic.”

“Good thing we leave early tomorrow.”

“They’ll be waiting for you in Inle. You touch her, you have to marry her. That’s how it works.”

“Machete wedding.”

“I’m serious.”

“Well,” I said, leaning back and puffing my cheroot,—“let’s see how she cooks first. Slowly slowly.”

I spoke only a little with the girl—“What is your name?” she asked, and I complimented her English and winked at Ron, who was just then coming around the store—whose name was approximately Zumeeing, and then our romance was interrupted, as Ron and I took an after-dinner stroll through the town. There were many more Paoh peasant women coming home with hoes or umbrellas over their shoulders, orange-turbaned and sun-wizened. They watched us with the guiltless, bold stare, and well-meaning, and humorous, of one who works hard for a living.

Naing Naing took us up to the monastery, a tall, sloped, stilted building in a wide gravel field between the trees and bamboo. Our guide procured bedrolls from the half-deaf master and laid them out in the wide wooden hall. Ron and I sat on the balcony, as a monk and a girl spoke quietly in a columned nest under the monastery, until it got too dark to do anything but sleep. We were asleep in the hall when the rain started coming down, loud on the tin roof. A monk sat against the wall, meditating matins. The only light came from his candle and through openings high on the wall that let in some silvery moonlight.

We broke our fast in Pat Tu at Zumeeing’s hut, then headed east along muddy roads. Our soles turned to platform shoes in the muck, and every ten minutes we had to scrape off an inch of it on rocks at the side of the road. Between the ridge and Lake Inle were many rows of hills, and most of the day we spent crossing them. We had tea at a motorcycle repair place in the hills past Nan Yoke, and past another line we climbed down onto the plain of rice fields, all reeds, canals, stilted houses, and green a vibrant jade.

The road followed straight along the canals, shallow at this time of the year, and all through the rest of the monsoon this place must be navigated by boats. Shan kids played in the water around the dams, and peasants in rice paddy hats worked among the fields. Past a monastery, stilted above the marsh, we stopped in a store in Taung Bo Gyi to take our lunch, and near there we met our boat driver, who took us on down the canals, through a forest of bamboo poles marking out danger spots or watery garages, under bamboo bridges, over little dams, and past the peasant women, bearing loaded baskets on their backs.

We came out onto the lake, which is tall and thin. Strands of green tomatoes float in the shallows, and there are stilted hotels and temples standing out over the water. One of these was named the Jumping Cat Monastery, as they had a dozen cats that the monks had trained to jump through hoops, but it was too hot that time of year and all the cats were too lazy to jump—is what I heard. One sunburned hour of this brought us to the northern shores of Inle, and up a canal to the docks of Nyaung Shwe.

This is how the world will be,
Everywhere I go it rains on me.
—Tom Waits

The monsoon works like this. During the wet season, which follows the hot, humid season and occurs at a different time of year depending on where you are, but generally in the summer, and in Burma between May and September—during that wet season, it is perpetually cloudy, and for about fifteen minutes every day there is a biblical deluge that floods the fields and roads, raises the rivers and sewers, and washes up everything in the world. Then the rains soften to a sprinkle, and then they cease entirely, and the world is a muddy wreck, though the air is much cooler.

In the heart of the monsoon, in August, it rains perpetually, but I was there during the time of the daily deluge, which caught me nearly every day in a place of some fascination. It is worth surveying the montage of them, with some necessary digressions, and so I will proceed.

I am in the home of Mysande when the rain starts coming down. She is a pretty Muslim girl, almost nineteen and studying Chinese at the Foreign Language Institute in Yangon, and she approached me in the road near the river in Bago and invited the three of us to her home, to practice her English. Ron, Gina and I sit around a table in a room in that oriental style, with packed earth just inside the entrance and a raised wooden platform beyond.

A grandfather slumbers soundlessly in a chair in the corner, halfway decomposed already, withered skin on a skeleton. Above him there is a shelf with some family photos, and on the back wall is a picture of the Kaaba and the name of Mohammed.

Myusande asks whatever questions she can think of—How old are you? Where are you from? What is your job? Where do you go in Myanmar?—and always her reply to our answer comes, “Ooh, hmm,” as the wheels of Babel turn in her head. We ask about her family, her school, Yangon and the friends she lives with there, speaking Chinese over dinner,—“but I miss my mother,” she says, looking towards the old mam with a sly whimper.

“Gina,” she says,—“you are very beautiful.” Gina says, “Oh, no, you are very beautiful.” ”Thank you,” says Myusande—that is, Theankh yeu. “You are very beautiful. I have gift for you.”

From the rooms behind the curtained portico, Myusande produces a section of branch from the thanakha tree. She brought out a round grindstone from near the door and spread some water round it, then ground down the branch until she had a circle of khaki-colored paste. “It is for absorb moisture,” Myusande explains when we ask,—“keeps your face clean and safe from sun.” The girl sat Gina down in front of her and painted her face with a standard Burmese design: Pikachu circles on the cheeks, and lines smeared around the bone lines and across the forehead. “There,” she says, “now you can go in the sun.”

The rain had stopped as suddenly as it began, and the sun is out again and low, so we bid farewell to Myusande and her family and accept the gifts generously bestowed, regretting that we had nothing to give her in return but a promise to visit when we returned to Bago some lucky day.

There is no time for dinner. We get our bags and speed off to the bus station on three scooters, and our bus to Mandalay leaves at six, a nice coach with leg room, and I sip out of a flask of Mandalay whiskey to while away the hours, as the Burmans turn out all the lights soon after departure and start exhibiting slapstick soap operas.

Around nine, Gina asks when we will make a rest stop, and the driver and the two ushers say, “Don’t worry, in a few minutes.” By half-past ten, my flask empty and my bladder a stretched balloon, I ask when do we stop, and the lords of the coach, as omnipotent as the captains of sailing ships at sea, say, “In a few miles.” At eleven, Gina is up there, and they are saying, “Just around the bend,” and I have a Hindenburg of urine and defy my better nature by demanding of the captain, “Stop now. Stop now. Stop the bus now.”

The bus stops at the side of the road. I would have felt bad about this, even with the tremendous rapture of my liquid relief, if half the bus had not gotten off with me to use the bushes and ditches at the side of the road. We arrived at the first rest stop a half-hour later, almost six hours after departing Bago.

I am in a beer and barbecue when the rain starts coming down. It had been a hot day in Mandalay until this started, and Ron and I are happy to sit there with our glasses full and watch the streets go to hell.

Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice, but I say water would also suffice. Weighed down like Atlas by the oceans that the clouds disgorge, the Burmans rush to and fro across the street, seeking shelter in storefronts or restaurants, covering their wares or their trishaws with tarps. Half a minute passes, and then the hurrying stops, though the cataract continues. Everything is already soaked, so why bother? A dripping Burmese girl with a miserable look pushed her bike slowly down pavement wet as the sea.

The gutter begins to flood, turning earth to mud, and carrying some horrible sludge into the beer hall. We retreat back as the whole front is filled with gray-green water, back to the inner depths of the place, and Ron and Gina and I sit at a table and watch it come down. After a while I put my head in my arms and fall asleep.

It had taken us all morning to find the Mandalay Beer brewery, and we found it closed. None of us knew it was a Sunday. (Later we learned that you need a government permit to enter the place—are they brewing secrets down there?) First we three tried to enter the Mandalay Palace complex, two miles square and ringed by a moat and wall, but foreigners can only enter by the eastern gate and must pay $10. We were at the western one, and anyway did not want to pay to see something that was rebuilt 15 years ago by forced labor, so we argued for a long and fruitless time with the palace guards.

“Why not?” we demanded on being barred. “You, different,” said a little Burman in a checkered longyi,—“You tall, me short. See skin?” He held his arm to mine. “You very white, me black. Different.”

Having failed to see both palace and brewery, while the clouds hung low and dark, we settled down in one of the open beer halls—a roof, three walls, and a stove—on the dirt road between the three. Gina went off to find a market, and Ron and I lowered ourselves into forty cent cups of fresh beer and big plates of noodles fried with sausage and quail eggs. The cook’s son brought out pannikins of green chili peppers, onion slices with sweet chili sauce, and chicken broth. “It’s good,” we said, and I sent the kid off to bring me more beer. A soap opera was running in the corner, and all the Burmese were watching it.

Gina arrived just before the deluge on the back of a bike pedaled by a slim girl with a black face. “I told her I wanted noodles, and she took me back here,” she said with a laugh. She ordered food as the sky cracked, and the bar boy ran over to get his pay before the rain began.

A few hours pass, cradled in the crook of arms, and then I wake up and rouse Ron from his own slumber. Gina is already gone. We hop out across the gray puddles and the wreck of the sideway, and the sky looks as dark as a death shroud and is as quiet as an executioner. We hail down a pickup truck heading south and stand on the tailgate, clinging to a rollbar and looking over the canopy roof, as all the benches beneath are full. On the sides of the road, vendors bail out their stores, drain their canvas roofs, and remove the plastic sheets from their displays of comic books, watches, sunglasses, and fruit. They retract their umbrellas and start their motorbikes and leave whatever temporary shelter they had found. Birds start to call out again, to fill in the startling silence, and the air is as cool and clean as the ground is wet and filthy.

When the truck stops a block from the hotel, the conductor tries to charge us a dollar a piece, and then to refuse us change, but the other Burmese yell at him and shame him into treating us fairly. We have a fine night of beer and barbecue, and Ron goes out to haggle rudely with the tuk-tuk drivers, to get one of the to take us to the ancient capitals that ring Mandalay. The next morning we leave north into a strange lowland country—scattered trees on the floodplain, spread out all the way to the creased mountains, and Reader, you never knew about these shades of green!

I am in a horse-drawn cart when the rain starts coming down. It is a jostling, two-wheeled affair on a road of rutted mud across the Utawei River, and that means “Small,” but the rains have bloated it wider than its name. Tonton, the driver, stops briefly under a tree next to an old palace tower. Two Burmese girls run up to us with baskets of rusted bells and elephant statues and a desperate slant to their squinting eyes, halfway to weeping, but we do not buy anything. We urge Tonton on, and with a small whip he urges on Lamomere the horse, as the rain comes down harder.

Tonton goes up the road a ways and then stops in the shade of a banyan tree, and Ron stays in the cart but I run out with Tonton and Gina, through a gate in a stone wall and into a small sloping white stupa. The interior is under renovation, with a central sanctum and four anterooms pointed out at the jungle and road. I sit on a mat in one of these as the rain fell and write about what we had seen so far, the snake monastery and the temple, and the river-crossing to old Inwa.

In the wake of the downpour, when it becomes a gentle shower, the jungle erupts with two-hundred sounds—chirps and clucks and whistles and squawks, singing and chanting carried across the plains from distant speakers, the slow rumble of single-cylinder engines, the giggling chatter of children. It was a land of willowy firs and solitary palms and sacred banyan trees. Corn grows in some places, low and densely planted, and elsewhere herons pace the low water of the rice paddies. We stare out in wonder as Tonton drove us and Lamomere pulled us down the muddy channel of the road, lined with trees. Wheels and hooves sink inches deep but do not stick, as Lamomere pulled us on to Bagaya Kyaung.

There in the heart of a bamboo grove, the monastery is a stilted old teakwood fortress, black-walled with many roofs of red-tiles and upturned eaves. The floorboards creak, and dogs lounge in the resurgent sunlight. Inside, a sleepy young monk teaches a class of eight novices, their heads newly shaved, lined up on benches under a window, through which the jungle announces itself. The song of bird and cicadas and crickets drowns out the noise of children playing in the brick courts. Black wood columns reach up into the cavernous heights of the main hall, where three golden Buddhas oversee their disciples—columns big as any Olympian marble and carved from a single tree, so they resemble a dark primeval forest, there in the creaking, dusty monastery.

As we leave the monastery, an old Burmese woman, shaped like a sunken ship, accosts us on the wooden steps, a peddler of souvenirs with a basket of trinkets: long-stemmed opium pipes, old temple bells, Victorian coins, black statues of elephants and lions the size of a fist, emblems of Buddha and his Bodhisattvas, knives rusted into inlaid sheathes, and rings and chains, all dark and gritty as the sea-drowned sky. Ron and I refuse, and by the time we find Gina and rouse Tonton and Lamomere, the peddler has already walked to our next stop: basket slung over her back as she walks down the road, her face hidden under the low brim of her rice paddy hat, a keen-eyed girl following close behind.

We come to a broken brick structure under an open sky, a few cracked stupas and their fallen walls. A pretty girl with a round brown face waves us in and points the way. She has on a denim skirt and a wicker hat, and she is deaf and dumb. Her mother, the peddler, has laid out all her wares on top of a broken column. Ron and Gina start looking around and rebuff the trinket seller’s hassling, and I look over at the girl and see her wave me back into an old hallway.

I follow her along a brickwork wall that retains some of its plaster. The girl waves through an open door, the Vanna White of Burma, and I look in on a strange jungle scene: all the floor growing up wild between four pillars, evenly spaced, and three Buddhas at the far end, the center one of a magnificent size, meditating in the lotus position with his eyes half-sealed, his ears stretched long, and beyond the statue the fields wet with rain and patches of palms and misty mountains and a shredded sky in gray and white.

Ah, I remunerate, so like an epic of the jungle; and the mute girl waves me out of my reverie and gestures at the nearest of the columns, which is broken in half. A shattered brick wall runs along between the columns, all the way to the Buddha statues, and she points at these emphatically. I start groping along the wall of the open doorway for a handhold, but that short peasant girl brushes me aside and leaps ably and barefooted in a skirt to the broken pillar. She turns back on me, grinning wryly. I wrap up my scarf and follow her agile bound, and follow her on down the wall—such a strange scene we made—all the way, twisting around the remaining columns, to the great Buddha. I look up at his great and tranquil face and down at the girl’s beaming round one, and I catch her dark eyes and her smile and I laugh. We turn and scrabble back along the wall and leap into the hallway and return to the others.

Tonton takes us back the way we came, and we cross the river and rendezvous with our tuk-tuk driver. After a stop at Sagaing, and a walk up a covered stair to the pagoda-encrusted top of the hill, from which vantage one can see 600 more pagodas in the hills around the Utawei, including one shaped like a woman’s breast, for when the king wondered at design, his wife pulled back her robe and showed him something worth his worship—after all that, we proceed in our tuk-tuk to Amapurana, “City of Immortality,” once a capital and now a little monastery town. It lies on a wide and shallow river, very low now, so that the Burmans grow corn and wheat and poppy on the exposed shoals, and U Bein’s Bridge sits high on its stilts, which in coming months will all sink under a rising tide, and they will plant rice and bamboo in the pools.

The teakwood bridge is more of a catwalk: a long wooden way, spanning nearly a mile between Amapurana and the island of Taughathaman. Maroon-wrapped monks stroll back and forth across the bridge in the day’s waning hours, between the monasteries on either bank. They stop on occasion to sit on benches in the covered rest stops, where women sell shrimp and peanuts and strange fruits, and the monks, Ron and I notice with delight, stop often to chat with girls also taking an elevated stroll. Most of them are only inmates of monasteries for a few weeks or months, wherein feminine contact is forbid. Why not have someone waiting for you on the day of your release? Some girls had come dressed up for the occasion, and some robed monks sit on the benches of the bridge, looking at forbidden videos on a girl’s cell phone.

Two monks approach we three as we start across the bridge, over the line of beached longboats, gaily painted and eyed. One speaks very good English and asks if he can join us and practice it. The other, much older monk speaks naught but a few memorized phrases, which he mispronounces so completely that we can not decipher them. Soon both are walking with Gina, who was talking with the clever young monk about education, and soon she has an entourage of six monks around her, though she does not think it strange.

Gina and I are just leaving the hotel when it starts raining a little, and it only rains a little this day. We walk to the little breakfast place near Royal Hotel while the rain prickles on our shirts and on the skin of our arms. Ron happens to be there and waves us over. The cooks are making something like French toast in their big wok, and we each have four of them, and I have fried rice and coffee, too. By the time we are smugly finished, the rain has stopped.

We take a bicycle rickshaw on the road around the palace walls to where twin lions, thirty feet tall, guard the entrance to Mandalay Hill, and we scale the covered stair to the top, stopping in temple halls along the way to see the Buddhas, statue tableau, and viewpoints, and to eat deep-fried crickets, which taste as empty as overcrisped French fries. When we have got back to the bottom, the sun has got its fingers through the cloud cover.

Gina and I wander around the temple district between Mandalay Hill and the moat and wall of the palace, walking through one containing the world’s largest book, inscribed on 729 stone pages like huge gravestones, each housed in a separate stupa of white stone, lined up in perfect rows around the Kuthodaw Pagoda. Gold bells crown the stupa of each regal page, tinkling merrily in the wind.

We are trying to find another teakwood monastery in the area and are going the wrong way until an old Burmese woman rides up to us on her bicycle to tell us so. “I thought you were going there,” she says, “but it’s this way!” Her English is perfect. She teaches it privately, having learned from her father, who was some combination of Scotch, German, and San Franciscan—“He met my mother during the war. He went to her village, and they took one look at each other, and that was it. They had eight children.”

Her name is Cherry, and she believes in love at first sight. Gina and I sit down with her on the squat stools of a teashop on the corner, and Cherry produces from her notebook an old sepia photo of a pretty young woman in an old-fashioned dress, wearing a sash and crown. “When men see this,” says Cherry in her husky voice, “they fall in love with me, so don’t you fall in love with me.” Cherry’s hair is tied back, and her face is shriveled and the color of raw pork, with a mole on her chin sprouting three hairs, half a foot long, but I can see some vestige in the square form of her features and in her dim eyes of the woman in the tired old photograph.

“My friend from Germany sent that picture,” Cherry is saying,—“We knew each other in the beauty contest. I got second place in the contest for all of Burma. I also did Thai boxing. In a big tournament for all of Burma, I got second place, again. Then we went to Thailand for a competition, but I broke my hand in the first match, so I had to stop.” She waves her hand as if to say, And that’s that.

Cherry had been in the army for eight years, had married and had some daughters, and now she had her English students and the money her children sent, and she seems very happy, with all that freedom and unconventional vitality that sometimes possesses the elderly, and none of the bitter malignancy that often takes hold of aging beauties. She is past all worldly concern and ready for the hereafter.

Though not a Buddhist, Cherrye asks Gina on which day of the week and hour was she born, and says Gina is a white elephant, an elephant without tusks. I guess Tuesday morning for myself, and Cherry says, “Yes, you are the lion. Very quiet with a big imagination.” Gina agrees with this, and I do not mind, but say, “Lion is very fierce.” “But he can also be very timid,” Cherry corrects,—“When the lion is timid he hides under the cot. When he is fierce he runs up the tree.”

She waves at a trio of children on a blanket on the curb: two toddlers and a swaddled infant, playing in a pile while their mother works in the teahouse. “Everyone loves that baby,” says Cherry. “She is the reincarnation of a man who lived in the neighborhood, who everyone liked. He was reborn in her. You can tell already. Watch. Everyone who comes up will say hello to her.”

“Hey, you hear that?” says Cherry, and we hear a shrill whistle,—“That means it’s going to rain. You have to know the birds here in Burma. You know the bird, hoo-hoo—yes, the owl! In Burmese, you say zee-gwat, because he makes a noise like zee-gwat, zee-gwat. There is another bird whose call in Burmese sounds like, ‘Get the cart, brother-in-law. Brother-in-law, get the cart.’”

We have to hurry back from that end of town, all the way round the palace, on the back of a guy’s scooter, and I do not have time to get dinner before our pickup to the station. I am mortified. Luckily the drivers are trying to fit all the luggage in the bottom and bodily push a parked truck from in front of the bus. I scurry across the muddy junction to a teahouse and get fried noodles, covered in egg, and broth and onion with chili sauce from a grinning Burmese girl. Then I have to stop the bus from leaving without Ron, who is off looking for potato chips.

The bus drops us off in Kalaw at 2:30 in the morning, and we sit there watching the local scooter gang and befriending stray dogs until 4, when we walk up the hill to the Golden Kalaw Guesthouse. It is late enough, or early enough, that we can get a room without paying for that first night.

We are in the lounge of the Golden Kalaw when it starts coming down. Ron and I wait it out in the wide common room, full on breakfast, seated on the couch to watch the news on TV. The old man sits in the back and his wife in a corner, and their granddaughter with her cropped-hair waits for it to end so she can shuffle off to school in rubber boots. The downpour sounds much more pleasant when you’re somewhere like home. From the balcony up above you can see it, running like a veil over the valley of the town.

The rain stops, and we walk out onto Kalaw’s straight streets, along their plank sidewalks and past the sundry businesses and workshops that open onto the road, through the market, which is lively even when it’s not market day, and we stop in teahouses and at the beer halls, with meat grilling out front and a karaoke video on the television.

The town is full of soldiers, grunts uneducated and unheralded, uniformed at sixteen and brainwashed into thinking highly of their Buddha-sanctioned state service, thirty years for which they are paid fifty dollars per month. They wear Nazi helmets with swastikas and eagles, out of deference to the strength and unity of the German people and their similarly fascist state. “They don’t know what it means,” says Ron as we inquire about it.

There are five camps around Kalaw and an officer’s academy on the hill, though that is shut down this year—all the colonels are busy working for the upcoming elections—and it’s impossible to get a map of the area. The military does not want any strategic details slipping out in the hands of trekkers. So foreigners have to get a guide, and the guides only have their walking knowledge of the country and their hand-drawn maps.

Tourists can only go to thirty per cent of Burma without a permit. These are the “white zones;” the “brown zones,” including the northern hills, require government permission, and the “black zones” are impassable places, ruled by state-sanctioned opium warlords. If a stranger wanders into one of these places, such as the vast stretch of Shan Army territory along the eastern border with Thailand, an observer will make a call to a nearby rifleman, who will shoot the stranger from ten kilometers away and ask questions later—or so I am told.

The Brits started the opium farms in Burma and Bengal to sell to the Chinese, and everyone was rich. Now in the Kalaw highlands they grow tea, vegetables, and rice. The families keep most of the rice they grow and sell most of the produce at the local markets, although they also make an interesting tea leaf salad in this part of Myanmar. The land is not so good for grazing. We passed a Nepali ranch where the Hindu family, following their traditional trade, maintained about fifty cattle, including thirty cows, though the milk they produced was hardly worth the expense and effort.

Most of the water buffaloes, stupid animals with their long horns curved back in a useless way, and the brahmin bulls, which bear a camel-like hump above their strong shoulders, were skinny things used mostly for carrying bullocks-carts down the rutted dirt pathways that thread the hills. Sometimes a Burman will take a herd of emaciated cattle out east, fattening them up with mountain grass along the way, and at the Thai border will fill their mouths with opium from the Shan warlords, and make a killing off meat and drug on the other side—at least that’s what I heard.

The next day we leave for a trek with Robin, a stooped Sikh with a graying beard and a green turban, son of a large and prosperous family of Sikhs running the Golden Lilly Inn, who had been in Burma for a century. We had met Robin in the street before the rains, as we sauntered around town, a brown and black-snouted dog guiding us in, running ahead to chase motorycycles and smile at pedestrians, and leading an altogether fine and sunny life, in spite of the floodtide of blackened clouds.

Anyway, the most appealing part of Robin’s offer, other than all the culture we would see, was the attendance of three girls from Spain. “Young or old?” queried the Jew, and the Sikh replied, “Young I think.” My eyes were wide and I said, “Three young Spanish girls? Yes, I think we should go.”

I am very excited as we go over to the Golden Lilly. Then I meet this fabled triad of Spanish girls, and it turns out that they are all around 30. One woman is Catalan, one is Mexican, and the third is just a Frenchman. The three of them are studying development in Beijing and wear trekking shoes they had bought in Kalaw. It is with inestimable disappointment that I set off behind them and our guide for our loop through the southern hills.

Kalaw is the Burmese word for wok, and the city is so named for its bowl-like appearance, surrounded by pine-clad hills with further valleys beyond. Our road takes us up switchbacks past homes and monasteries, vegetable gardens and mango trees, and a house where one of the Burmans hands Robin a big bunch of bananas.

As we come out of the hills and the pine woods, into a valley floored by rice paddies, now dry, we come across five veterans sitting scattershot and slipshod across the sunburnt hillside—ex-rangers, hired by a Bavarian hotel owner as keepers of the forest. They are all in their fifties, though they look much younger, and are lean and narrow from mountain campaigns. They wear their old uniforms but can no longer carry firearms. Instead they have long Shan knives, radios, and cameras slung from their belts.

Robin gives them the banana bunch as a gift, and the veterans survey us with grizzled curiosity and ask where we are from. They are impressed by Ron’s origins and compliment his country on the Uzi. In the army, they had used smuggled German G3s, Russian Kalishnakovs, Swedish artillery, and a few M16s abandoned in Vietnam, but those aren’t very reliable. We greet them politely and go our own way, leaving them to their business of checking on the water supply for the resort of their Bavarian lord.

Robin is honest and awkward, the kind of man who embarrasses easily and talks a lot anyway, and he forces a laugh every few syllables, as he points out all the plants he knows—some edible, some medicinal, some poisonous. Now he prides himself on knowing all the plants of the Shan hills, with as much pride as a man of his quiet nature can express, but once he had been a mechanic like his father and his father’s father, who came to Burma with the British Railway Company in the 1880s. Robin’s father worked privately for the British and then, during the Second World War, for the occupying Japanese.

Kalaw was sometimes bombed by B-52s returning from Japanese targets in the north. The bombers were required to return empty and would let loose their extra ordinance over the quiet hill station. Robin’s aunt was killed by one of these, and his uncle injured, when it swooped out from the formation they had been counting and bombed the empty field where they stood.

After the war, Robin’s family ran a transit company, moving material for the public works department with heavy Buick trucks. A financial crisis hiked up the oil prices in 1979, and Robin’s father sold the whole gas-guzzling fleet. Robin told his father to buy Japanese cars, but his father said, “I don’t trust them. Unreliable.” Rather they became mechanics, and later opened the Golden Lilly.

There are only a handful of Sikh families in Myanmar, the relics of the Raj, and they are slowly dying out to emigration and mixed marriage. To the distress of his parents, Robin refused an arranged marriage and married for love, to a Myanmar girl from Kalaw. They have been married for twelve years, and he is happy even though she did not like to make him Punjabi food. Ah, what we sacrifice under love’s humbling spell!

You would never guess the Sikh was so romantic, as he stoops up and down the rolling hills with their dead green color, past tiered rice paddies, thirsty for the endless rains that come in August, because there’s no irrigation here in the hills, no other source of water but the monsoon. The area outside the Ayeyarwady would look like Egypt outside of the Nile if it were not for the seasonal rains swept northeast from sweltering India.

Hillsmen squat around pots of tea in the shade of a wooden shack, halfway up the slope of one of the hills, and one girl works in the vegetable field in peasant clothes and a rice paddy hat. They kindly share their tea with us and ask, through Robin, where we are from. Robin tells us that these are people of the Danu tribe that lives in the hills near Kalaw, one of the four tribes in the area, who speak different dialects and keep their own villages.

The Palaung tribe also lives near Kalaw, and unlike the others, they must marry within the tribe. Everyone in a village is related, and there is a high level of inbred deformities, especially polio. They have a strange marital custom where, after the wedding, the teenage bride goes back to her own longhouse for a month, after which time she is called out by her husband. The newlyweds go off to a distant field and live for a month in a shack, working in the day and sleeping in the shanty at night, when it earns its name of “Honeymoon Shack.” After that month they go live in the husband’s family’s longhouse, sharing space with the extended family and the animals, and set in for a long life of marriage.

The Pao tribe lives further south of Kalaw, and we will come to them another day. Most of the villages we see—Hinkagore, Myinsanggone, and Myindaik, a few dozen houses shrouded in bamboo groves, in the hills on the western side of the Tong-La Valley, with the Knuckle Mountains to the east—are those of the Danu. Of the Taung U, with their long dark faces and natural houses, we see some, passing through a Taung U village of sixteen families called Bawninnkone, but a medicine man lives there who is one of the Pao.

The medicine man’s house looks like most of the tribal homes—a two-storied long house of woven bamboo, the bottom floor on a raised dirt foundation used for cattle, tools, and drying garlic, and the top floor, reached by a slanted bamboo ladder, for the family. The tin roof is slanted against the rain. Only the rich have tin roofs rather than the equally waterproof bamboo sheets, and despite the noise and the heat, they are a source of inestimable pride and prestige. We come down a steep hill over the stilted home and crossed a dirt yard where squares of turmeric dry in the sun. The brown roots look like ginger, and when broken open they are orange and smell like India. When properly mixed into a potion, they make good treatment for stomach ailments and Alzheimer’s. Passing them, we climb the bamboo ladder and enter the house.

There is an open room with a floor of bamboo mats that has the unstable feel of walking across an attic. A few posters of pop stars and Buddhas decorate the thatch walls, a few shelves with old pop bottles full of strange brown mixtures, and a shrine of gold and glass on a far wall, with offerings of flowers, candles, incense, and food arranged around the statues of Buddha and the local nat spirits, a sort of dryad. An open door leads into a kitchen area with a stone hearth, where a fire smokes under a kettle, and there is an open balcony off the far end where the family would wash dishes. It is a dark and smoky house, with only one window in the corner of the main hall, and seated under that window on a bedroll, the only item of furniture other than a round table—there in the streaming sunlight sits the medicine man.

He is eighty-four, as dried as the turmeric in the yard, as brown as a cigar, and he considers us with lugubrious eyes, lying there like an invalid. He wears loose Shan trousers and a baggy shirt, and on his head a green and yellow towel wrapped up in a Chinese turban, open in the center to reveal his bald pate. An ashtray next to him is full of reeking palm-leaf cheroots, and though he no longer smokes fourteen a day, he is still a considerable smoker. He has a whiskey flask full of mountain goat blood and wild honey, his own medicine, and Robin says, “It’s why he looks so young.” There is also a spittoon, a ledger, and three of his ten Pali spellbooks with runes and candle templates, potion recipes and tattoo designs. The medicine man is not just a shaman and alchemist, but also a tattooist, an acupuncturist, and a masseuse, and he has been in his life a farmer, hunter, and an instructor of a martial art called Bang.

We walk back along the train tracks, keeping our cameras hidden as we pass the fence of a military base. Burman peasants go the other way with loads balanced on their heads, and the hills turned green and gold in the slanted light.

Ron and I went out to the Chinese hangout for dinner. All these flying ants have hatched after the rain, and they fill the street thick as falling ash. They start coming into the restaurant through cracks around the window and suiciding into the food on the table, so the Chinese turn off the lights and bring out candles.

The topic of discussion is international support for Myanmar: China has a good deal with them, exchanging political legitimacy and UN support for dirt cheap commodities, especially metal, oil, and natural gas, and gas-starved India is looking for the same—but what about our mighty Western Powers with their moral agendas? The US and UN boycott Burma, spend a lot of time talking about it, while Western multi-nationals sweep in and get a great deal to extract resources and send them back to the eager markets of Myanmar’s enemies.

Ron remarks, with typical Israeli cynicism, “But it’s like that everywhere. One hand says no, and the other takes. That’s how it is.”

We stop at a street grills on the way back, to eat some grilled something from a goat and some pancake filled with mixed banana and egg. At Golden Kalaw we sit in the lounge with the last of the whiskey and looked for a movie. The Untouchables ends and there is only some Russian news and Al-Jazeera. After a while the owner gets out a DVD that reads “Sharon Stone Sexy Goddess” and says, “Very good movie.” We say, “Okay.” He turns on Basic Instinct, and several Burmans sit around watching it intently with their legs crossed.

Several sex scenes later, I hear some drunken wailing from out in the street, and I shoulder my bag and say, “I’m going to see what’s going on.” Some distance down the street there are four Burmans sitting on a concrete divider on the side of the road. One of them is playing guitar, and they all know the songs—Burmese recuts of Western and Japanese hits, with Burmese lyrics substituted in. I had met one of them before and say hello. Then I am seated next to the guitarist, with a cigarette and a glass of rum—they only had the one glass.

“In Myanmar,” says the Burman with long hair, “we mix the rum with water.”

I say, “Sounds good,” and soon there are five cigarettes burning in the dark, everyone drunk and howling at the moon.

They play the kind of ballads you play at the end of the night, loud and noisy and never in harmony. The long-haired Burman flails around in the street and sings in a high-pitched voice. The man with the guitar is some sort of contest winner, they try to tell me, and is very good. Presently he sets his instrument in his lap and wants some rum, but long hair has misplaced the glass. He waved his lighter around the grass to find it and laughed. The guitarist takes a swig of rum from the bottle, then some water.

“You’re a champion,” I say.

“Not Inter Milan,” says the Burman.

“Ha ha,” says long hair,—“You hear? He is not Inter Milan. He is very clever, with the joking.”

The four of them are tour guides, relatives of the owner of the Golden Kalaw, and so they speak good English. They ask me if I can play anything, and I wave my finger like, wait a second, and dig my harmonica out of my bag. “Oh, harmonica!” I tell them I am not very good, but I can play some melodies. The guitarist start tuning their guitar. It is ninety-years-old, passed down from a teacher who was a grandfather to one of them, and they love the instrument like a little sister. They have to tune it with a pair of pliers because it is missing the pegs.

“You can wait?” the guitarist asks,—“you wait one year, okay?”

It is related that eighty per cent of Kalaw can play the guitar (and that 100 per cent likes to drink). The town is famous for its schools, and students come from all over the countryside to study there. When the locals find a pretty girl in one of the dormitories, they go out in a small troupe and play guitar in front of the dormitory windows. When more than one group wants to play, they take turns and compete to see who could play the best. For the most talented wailers, the girls would open the door of the dormitory and invite the boys closer for tea or coffee.

I wave at the guitarist and say, “The girls always give him coffee?”

“I’m not as he says,” says the guitarist, offended. “I am not as he says.”

We talk about girls for a while, and I ask the guitarist if he has a girlfriend. He mumbles something. I ask, “She is a Thai?” but the Burman says, “No, she is die.” I am shocked, in the way that only an utterance of mortality can shock, as if it were an invocation of the hooded one himself. “Oh, she died?” I say,—“My God, that’s sad. What happened?” The guitarist answers, “Cancer. She die three years ago. Now I am alone since then.” He seems like the sentimental kind of guy who will love only once in his life, as he tunes his ancient guitar and looks sidelong into the past.

He starts playing again, howling loud down the empty streets. Other drunks show up. One lays down in the road, waving his arms in the air and singing along. Another invites me to his apartment—“Only joking!” he adds. I play my harmonica along with the Burmese songs, the stolen Rod Stewart ones, and then we sing Country Roads in English. They howl out a final barroom dirge, beautiful in its drunken candor, and then I say goodnight and refuse all demands that I must stay. It is already late, and we leave the next day for Inle Lake.

END SCENE.

Rise up and take the power back, it’s time the
Fat cats had a heart attack, you know that
Their time is coming to an end, we have to
Unify and watch our flag ascend.
—Muse

A trash fire burned outside Lumpini Park. It was a desolate scene, with a line of soldiers visible in the smoky and seething distance, and the boom of gunfire seemed to come from every direction. A man rode up on a motorcycle, his face masked like a highwayman, and in one hand he carried a huge Thai flag that nearly touched the ground. Expertly he steered his motorcycle around and around the trash fire, and the flag waved quietly in the smoke. Plumes of it—a fog of war—rose into the air all around Rajprasong, from piles of tires set afire to keep back the soldiers, on that first day of the siege.

Security forces moved to tighten their cordon. They built walls of sandbags and razor wire and pointed their rifles out from the rubble. Weighted in battle armor, they thudded across the highway overpass that runs along the southern end of Lumpini Park. Traffic still crawled behind them, and a local audience turned out to stand along the pedestrian overpasses near the battleground. They came in spite of the government’s warnings, in spite of the echo of gunfire and crash of explosions, and even though it was a Friday. They had to see it.

The Red Shirts hid behind their tires and spears, a space between soldier and rebel, a desolation of stones and broken glass, which closed suddenly, capriciously, violently, at several points along the circuitous front. Red Shirts mounted on motorcycles and scooters formed a rebel cavalry that rushed in squadrons at the army barricades, and then lurched back around into the encampment, with a Parthian shot of bottles or fireworks. In one place the mob overran some of the security forces and captured three army trucks. The mob pulled out the drivers and held them and beat them, and the mob set fire to one of the trucks, and the mob cheered in a lustful frenzy, a cheer that became a solid drone, as the soldiers watched from some cold distance through the transparent screen of their riot shields, through the leveled scopes of their rifles.

A squadron of mounted Red Shirts formed outside the protest area, and in the afternoon they made a desperate charge to enter it, carrying food and water and more makeshift weapons. They rode straight at the police barricades near the Victory Monument. People went out onto the balconies of their gentrified apartments to watch the smoky tumult, like the balconies of an opera house, running up a wall of the Coliseum. Gunshots! Five observers knocked down on the lower balcony, some screaming, some still. Lo, the soldiers shout, “Get off the balcony!” metallic over the loudspeakers.

A bomb exploded in the rally site just after six. It sounded like someone had dropped a dumpster out the window of one of the skyscrapers that surrounded Rajprasong—the Intercontinental or the Grand Hyatt or CentralWorld. The captains jumped down off the stage and were dog-piled by their bodyguards. Everyone was terrified, and justly, for sixteen people were injured in the blast. Another 21 were poisoned by some mysterious player handing out cups of free coffee. And another 141 people were wounded and sixteen were killed in the fighting. The security forces had their orders to start with rubber bullets and with shots over the heads of the rebels, but most of them were recent conscripts from the provinces, and the only order that mattered was the one authorizing soldiers to use their weapons in self-defense. Well, what do orders matter anyway?

Both comrades and medics feared the government’s snipers and left dead and wounded lying in the streets for hours untended, as the battle lines ebbed and flowed. The military prevented ambulances from entering the arena. Emergency medical technicians had to shuffle out in a duck-walk and carry the wounded on stretchers to the perimeter, from whence they could be driven to any of Bangkok’s fine modern hospitals. One EMT was shot off his motorbike by a soldier, and he later died.

Four journalists were also wounded in the first three days. Two were Thais and one was a Canadian, who was shot several times but survived. The Red Shirts told other journalists and photographers to come back—they would be safe within the rally site, and surely someone had to see this. Someone had to watch. Where would Jesus be, if not one Evangelist had attended the Crucifixion?

So ended the first day, though the war continued into the night. Spats of gunfire in the alleyways. Explosions in Lumpini Park. Cries from all quarters. A woman’s broadcasted voice, tinny and uncertain: “For your own safety, please stay indoors.” Thomas Fuller, the man who saw Seh Daeng die, lay flat as an eastern supplicant on the deck of his apartment. He wore body armor and a Kevlar helmet, relics from his coverage of the Iraq War, and watched as the city he thought he knew descended into madness. He wrote this as he lay there:

A city with floor-to-ceiling windows is a confident city. Sheets of glass, unlike the thick walls and tiny windows of centuries past, send a message: We are not worried about what lurks outside. But from my desk, it seems as if Bangkok’s architecture has outpaced its political maturity. Who in Bangkok today would feel confident behind a wall of glass when explosions rip through the night?

Bangkok today has many more high-rise condominiums and much more luxury than the city I knew 15 years ago, but is plagued by its dysfunctional politics. Is there any other city in the world today that has so many cloth-napkin restaurants, spas—and periodic grenade attacks? How many other world capitals have streets filled with fleets of luxury cars and armies of protesters apparently willing to die for their convictions?

By morning of the second day the protest area showed all the signs of medieval siege: confusion, bickering, and pestilence. Trash piled up, and flies descended on Rajprasong thick as doom. The government did not withdraw its portable toilets, for the noble cause of sanitation. As for the workers assigned with cleaning and maintaining them, they came back bruised after being assaulted by the Red Shirts, as servants of the tyrant, and could not be made to return. Imagine a frightened child in red, shielding his eyes with one hand and waving a stick with the other.

“We are afraid for the soldiers, too,” said a nurse at one of the Red Shirt first aid stations, a tearful old woman named Jenny Tan, expressing the saddest sentiment of a nation divided. “The soldiers are our sons. We are mother, father, sister, brother. So we don’t want any of them to die. Very, very sad. Very, very sad for Thailand.”

Women and those too young or too old to fight huddled in the guarded center of the intersection. They would not leave, though the Thai Red Cross and Unicef pleaded with them. The captain Nattawut moved the children and their families into the grounds of a nearby temple, but the women who wanted to fight remained before the Pratunam stage. One old woman said, “No matter what happens, I’ll never leave the rally. Our friends have died for us, so we’ll never leave others for the sake of personal safety.” In the temple another old mother named Sangwaan said, “Everybody is united. Nobody wants to back off. I don’t fear death.”

What do you say to that, Reader? What do you say to a mother when you tell her, Death is coming for you and your child, and she replies, I’m waiting—what can you possibly say?

I visited the area around Rajprasong, blockaded at every street by policemen, the streets empty. A family crept up to one of the security stations and reached over the barbed wire to hand the soldiers bags of food. It was a dead place. There was trash piled on every corner, oozing out into the gutter. All the long lines of stores were closed up with steel shutters, except for one curious stall which continued putting together altars of Buddha in crimson and gold as if nothing special were happening within a hundred miles.

The government continued to wail about harder stances. “We cannot turn back,” quoth Abhisit, slick as ice on Thai TV, “We cannot let the country remain in this condition, where people do not respect the law. Ending the rally is the only way to prevent calamity.” Hello, calamity? Calamity is upon you, Prime Minister! Your city burns! Your nation is disgraced! Even if you ordered all your soldiers back and sent the Red Shirts such an appeasing offer of peace that only a fool would refuse it, the soldiers would not move and the Red Shirts would refuse, because this is mightier than thee. The king is on his deathbed, and the nation crumbles!

The military was committed. On Saturday eight more people were killed and nearly 60 injured, but the soldiers had anticipated blood. There would be no retreat as there had been after the skirmishes of April. This was an all or nothing effort. Somewhere along the line they posted up a banner proclaiming a “Live Fire Zone;” and all along the line the security forces closed in on the barricades, and the Red Shirts fought back with their slings and arrows, and with pipe bombs and improvised flamethrowers. They kept their bags of fish sauce and chili paste in reserve, since food was running low. They began to loot the grocery stores and 7-11s in Rajprasong.

“You are being used as tools,” said Abhisit, but none in Rajprasong heard his words. They heard only the great harangue of Nattawut and Jatuporn and the rest, were too occupied by the desperate struggle to consider the metaphysics of their predicament.

The army called for reinforcements as the battlefield expanded, for more Red Shirt heroes rode to rescue their brothers and sisters. Residents woke up to find their neighborhood a war zone, as the Red Shirts assaulted the cordon along its perimeter, desperate to take supplies into the besieged captains, or to simply join them in their dying agony, for all rebels are born to be martyrs, and what a chance this was! The whole lot of wretches wanted a fight to the death, which was the only topic they could agree upon.

The divided captains held as hostage the commerce of Bangkok, but had issued no demands. Some still wanted to surrender, some to fight to the death. By Saturday they were all terrified. One captain, the man they call Rambo, was seen wearing a woman’s wig in the camp and avoiding photographers. They no longer appeared on the Pratunam sound stage to embolden the battalions with their rousing Mussolini manifestos. The cameras hung loose as abandoned artillery, and the plastic chairs stood empty. The crowds had thinned out and lost their passion to a famine and fear, timid and capable of anything. They fought on the barricades or huddled within and wondered when the snipers would take them.

Nattawut hosted a small council of journalists. He said that it was no longer possible to control some of the protesters, and the journalists duly wrote this down in their notepads, as if it were news to anyone.

Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and in a hospital bed across the city, Seh Daeng lay dying. Surgeons removed a blood clot from the cerebrum but said that the brain was inflamed—surely with rage!—where the bullet had passed through it, and Khattiya could die from his injuries. The papers call it “critical condition.” The doctors said things like “almost nil.”

Seh Daeng’s wife had passed away many years ago, but his young daughter Khattiyaa sat by his side, fearful and tearful. With her wide-set eyes wet with tears, she told reporters, “I’m now trying to be as strong as my father.” The major-general’s old classmates from Class 21 of the Armed Forces Academies Preparatory School arrived to see him, as did Bangkok officials. Seh Daeng awoke for none of them.

MONDAY. The words linger in the corner of the movie screen, filled by the horrible site of a smoking city after four days of war, and it could be your city, Reader, it looks so familiar, with its glass towers and shopping malls and fancy cars. The commercial heart of the city was a warzone of ash and noise. The five-star Dusit Thani Hotel belched smoke from its wounds of a midnight grenade attack. A hundred of its guests cowered in the basement. It was atop this very building that the sniper took aim at Seh Daeng, and it had been used as a base for hundreds of government forces for weeks.

Gunshots and explosions came more frequently. Schools and businesses were closed, the government was shut down, and embassy conferences were cancelled. All over the area, Thais were trapped in their homes. They rushed to the supermarkets and hoarded food. It was not safe anymore. The troops and snipers surrounding Rajprasong had begun to fire with live ammunition at anything moving within the haze of the camp, and the “terrorist element” fought back with lethal force. A soldier was shot and killed near the Dusit Thani, the first soldier to fall in the skirmishes. Thirty-five people had died and 266 had been wounded since the fighting began on Thursday, and on that Monday, the Red Commander, five days wounded, made it thirty-six. Seh Daeng was dead.

The major-general died before he could be stripped of his rank. His body was redressed in his camouflage and taken to a Buddhist temple, where it would lay out for three nights, as Red Shirts tumbled by, shouting, “Seh Daeng, our hero!”

Alas, what fear and panic must wreak, and alas, the careless murder of war, which strikes so random and so rarely pegs the culprits—Apollo’s arrows in the Achaean camp. The bullets take foolish men with wooden swords and greedy hearts, caught up in a conflict too real for them. If he could but speak one last time, if his wounds could ope their ruby lips, I’m sure the Red Commander would have channeled the words of Shakespeare’s noble Brutus, who also fought against tyranny in spite of his love. I know in my heart that Seh Daeng would have said straight from his:

___________________Countrymen,
My heart doth joy that yet in all my life
I found no man but he was true to me.
I shall have glory by this losing day,
More than Octavius and Mark Antony
By this vile conquest shall attain unto.
So fare you well at once, for Brutus’ tongue
Hath almost ended his life’s history.
Night hangs upon mine eyes; my bones would rest
That have labored to attain this hour.

Alas, that they did not listen, that the rebellion climaxed as tragically as it did! Not in any Rapture did it end, but in the worst sort of blood orgy imaginable. O God!

There had been so many suggestions of renewed negotiations, shot down each time by the dogs of war who said they would fight to the death. You cannot argue with a battle cry, nor with men incensed beyond reason. Things had gone too far. On Monday the government issued an ultimatum: Leave by three or else. Helicopters dropped pamphlets on the encampment with the news, and the protesters responded with bangfai rockets. Some of them left, escorted out by “men in black.” Of the 100,000 that once packed the intersection, perhaps 5000 Red Shirts remained when the clock struck three. They were mostly men of grim severity, wearing black shirts and red bandanas, the new uniform of the guardsmen.

And there we see one of the grandest tableaus of the campaign: While a few Red Shirts filled small bottles with gasoline and practiced the new tack of hitting them with a golf club, and while small cabals looked up at the department stores where the snipers hid, and while some handed out balls of sticky rice that was the last of the food, and as a monk in saffron led a congregation of guardsmen in prayer, and as trucks full of tires raced out to the perimeter to toss more rubber on the burning pyres while onlookers cheered, the great majority of Red Shirts gathered in the center of Rajprasong and they danced and sang as if it were the end of the world—for all of them knew that the end was nigh and that victory was impossible.

Then the crackdown fell. On Tuesday the army mustered its armored personnel carriers, great wheeled slugs of steel. They overran some of the outlying barricades, and the soldiers dismantled them. Two Red Shirts were shot dead as they tried to set fire to the kerosene-soaked walls. Others were successful, and the day ended with smoke.

A full assault came the following morning. The war engines pushed forward through more barricades, through volleys of grenades, rockets, flamethrowers, petrol bombs, and whatever else the rebels had conjured in their laboratories. They battled under the eaves of luxury hotels and shopping malls and conference centers. They advanced between the Royal Bangkok Sports Club and the Four Seasons. They shot at men under the Holiday Inn.

Four Red Shirts died on Wednesday, as did an Italian photographer, Fabio Pohlengi. The government said that a grenade slew him as he stood next to a policeman, which does not explain the bullet wound through his gut. Witnesses said that he was shot in the back while fleeing with a mob of rebels.

The Red Shirts gathered in Pratunam—what should we do? Jatuporn took the stage in answer. He wore his Gandhi shirt and bore a defeated look as he told the crowd that he would surrender himself—“We cannot resist these savages anymore,” said the captain, and they booed him, the coward. After all his proud words, all his words of blood, Jatuporn now pleaded over their cries, “Please listen to me! Brothers and sisters, I will use the word ‘beg.’ I beg you. We have to end this now,”—but they booed him: they booed him because they knew that to surrender meant to lose everything, meant that they would be dispersed back out to their northern farms, where their children were starving and their fields were dry and there were no prospects, where they would wait for the government to come to arrest them, and then they would vanish and none would ever hear from them again; the urban rich would win, and the haves would take more from the have-nots, and things would go on as they always had, but worse than before because they had failed. They booed, and they began setting fire to Rajprasong.

Just next to the Pratunam stage there was one of the largest department stores in Southeast Asia. Lonely Planet says, “Central World Plaza (cnr Th Ploenchit & Th Ratchadamri) Formerly known as World Trade Center, Central World is Bangkok’s glass-paneled embodiment of consumer excess, complete with eight floors of restaurants, beer gardens, cinemas—even an ice-skating rink. The plaza’s lifeblood is the Zen [World] department store, which is dotted with high-end fashion brands. Skytrain to Chit Lom.”

Zen World! What a wonder was this six-story lifestyle megastore! Level one was titled “The Beauty of Luxury.” Level three was “The Casual Woman’s Zone.” The fourth floor was the destination for metrosexual men, and the sixth floor had a doggie spa and hotel. The peasants of Thailand can barely feed their children with white rice, and they live in bamboo shacks, and somewhere there are Thais who care for nothing but “ultra-chic fitness and aerobic wear” and “non-chalantly stylish smart-casual fashion,” and who are not only unembarrassed by all this, but who cannot understand what these stupid northern rebels are doing in the middle of their metropolis! Aren’t you sick, Reader? Can’t you see why these men and women were mad enough to die?

It was unto this very Zen World, this highest jewel in the crown of capitalism, that the red mobs applied the torch. They stormed it, as the French stormed the Bastille, stormed through the trendy stores—Playground, Manga, MUJI, Flow Now, and Q Concept—and emerged with cell phones and jeans, even as the Parisians emerged with guns from the arsenal; and they set fires behind the gleaming glass facade, doused piles of “ultra-chic” clothes in kerosene and set them ablaze, so that even as the war engines closed in on them, rumbling like the wheels of doom, they could all look up, as the whole emblem of the shopping mall and all its wasteful chic horror was consumed in red flames! Libertas, Fraternitas, Equalitas!

All around the city, all around the nation, Red Shirts responded to the crackdown by lashing out in a similar manner. Thirty-five buildings were ignited, including the Thai stock exchange, two banks, a cinema, and a television station, which was forced to stop broadcasting. In the provinces, they set fire to two city halls, as fresh protests erupted and were summarily crushed. There was a curfew in 24 of Thailand’s 76 provinces. The government broadcasted a calming music video on television: Thai flags, rice paddies, and the beloved king, set to the pop lyrics, “We have to love each other. / We want to see Thais loving each other again, / just like we used to.”

And in Rajprasong, as the suave window displays of Zen World went up in flames, the Red Shirts scattered, frightened children shocked by what they had wrought. The army’s war machines had stopped the advance, but the Red Shirts fled as if routed by pursuing hordes. They left behind bedrolls and slippers and pots of food. They left the generators throbbing, the spotlights shining on the Pratunam stage, the speakers broadcasting noise. When the soldiers and journalists arrived, Rajprasong was abandoned. The uprising was over.

The captains surrendered one by one, or they were captured. Jatuporn turned himself in around noon, along with Nattawut and five other captains. Arisman, who had led the assault in the Battle of the Overpass, and who had previously eluded his captors by jumping out a hotel window, escaped from Rajprasong in a disguise. He was captured Wednesday night and taken to a military base outside Bangkok. Fifty-one people had died in the last stand. Total casualties since April stood at 85 dead and 1,378 injured. As with Black May in 1992, when 52 people died, many others will vanish without account. The government has their pictures and has their names and will visit them later at official convenience.

Abhisit expressed his sorrow over the deaths, though he never apologized for his methods. Those against the Red Shirts called the crackdown legitimate. The Red Shirts themselves were caught up in a fury of just revenge—cries of “Bring down the dictator,” echoes of the slogans that initiated the Bangkok rebellion. Young Khattiyaa Sawasdipol, only daughter of Seh Daeng, said she would take over leadership of the fallen hero’s Khattiyatham Party and make her dad’s dream come true. Once she had supported the Yellow Shirts, but now she was all Red.

Thai Financial Minister Korn Chatikavanij held a much more revealing conference where he discussed the impact of the protests. Politics, he said, had not risen along with the wealth, and this was the result—the rebellion that had clipped Thailand’s 10 per cent economic growth by 1.5 per cent. “A company is a country, a country is a company,” Thaksin once said, and all that spilt blood can be reduced by his successors to 1.5 per cent—to a fraction of a number, fifteen in a thousand, a mere factor of greater finance, a little spasm of a muscle, easily ignored; a blip on the radar and nothing to worry over, the ministers think, just as the early warning signs of cancer are nothing to worry about. Meanwhile the thing goes from benign to malignant, and the fatal danger grows.

Conflagration in the provinces. The curfew must go on for another week. The old firebrand words are revived—terrorist, criminal, Thaksim!—and Seh Daeng is worshiped in his tomb. No noble heart was he, just a poor wretch with a crooked chivalry, but by God, a modern folk hero is born before our eyes. Burn the joss sticks and raise the red flags! The rebellion lives on, because it is impossible to destroy a culminating feeling, especially one so powerful as the fear and rage of the oppressed. Now the class divide is a scar. There will always be poor men in Thailand, and they will always have a reason to fight.

To this conclusion, I am obliged to add another, for three weeks after the crackdown, I returned to Bangkok and revisited the site. Rajprasong was restored to commercial grandeur. Fresh flowers were planted on the median where the Red Shirts had laid out their bamboo mats for two months of residence. A sign on the skyway said, “Amazing Thailand, Grand Sale 2010, We Love Rajprasong!” What better excuse than class warfare accompanied by horrific massacre to hold a sale? Traffic flowed where the crowds had stood, as oblivious to irony as traffic always is, and Louis Vitton and Burberry and the bank and the cinema had restored their claim to the intersection.

But up on that skyway crossing the busy street, people stopped and stared—wealthy Thais in suits and visiting farang. They leaned on the banisters and stared longer than they had at any piece in a museum, though what they saw eluded meaning as much as a sculpture of pain. Art students sat around in circles doing creative things with their cameras, and all the others just stared out over the cleanup and construction crews. The wall before them was in ruins, the ochre remnants of a sign—“ZEN WO D” with the O hanging down—and the broken glass of a gutted building, full of ash and glory.

FINIS.

Sam asked me one day, as I told them all the story of the end, with wide eyes and a shaking voice, for I had become too invested in this struggle—she asked me, “Which side do you support?” And I got this horrified look and answered, “Neither. The whole thing is a tragedy.”

Four of us were in Bago then. The night before we left I had stayed up until five in the morning talking to Guillaume and Ron, and at eight I had to get up and go. Sam was leading a group of us—Gina of Minnesota, Ron, and myself—to a town just sixty miles northwest of Yangon on the road to Mandalay, a small and busy trade town called Bago. The San Franciscan had only a few days left before her flight out and wanted to spend them seeing something new. The only impediment was the difficulty in moving anywhere in Myanmar.

The trains were government-owned, sold tickets to foreigners only at an inflated price, and took forty hours, anyway. It took us until noon to get out to the Yangon bus station, and there we sat on the kid-sized stools that the Burmans prefer and eating cold noodles and liver while we waited for the next bus to Bago. This took another two hours through arid plains, but the roads aren’t that bad. Most every journey by bus compares well to my time in India.

We arrived in Bago and wrestled our bags out into the muddy station, with some difficulty. Now Gina had backpacked Asia before, but this trip she had these two big rollerbags, one of them heaving with school supplies. She had seen a rural school on a previous visit to Myanmar where the kids were writing their homework out in the dirt, and this time brought pencils and erasers and crayons and notebooks for them. She was herself a teacher, like her mother, who discouraged her from entering such a trying trade as education, but Gina liked teaching kids too much.

Before taking a position at an international school in Saigon, which was her job up until recently, leading field trips into the Cambodian jungle and joining the scooter flotillas of Vietnam—before that, Gina spent two years in the Peace Corps. They dispatched her to Kiribati, a country that nobody has heard of, and which only rarely features on maps of the world, somewhere out in the South Pacific, where the Micronesian islanders live quiet lives, fish the oceans, worship avidly their Jesuit Catholicism, and sometimes ferment toddy from the young coconuts. The men laugh with a swaying, big-bellied bombast, arms waving, mouth open so wide the wisdom teeth show; and the women wail at funerals with a sensational melodrama, fainting across the coffin, tearing their hair and rending their clothes in grief.

Gina worked in an elementary school on Arorae, an island where nothing ever happens, so people retell the old stories over and over again. Remember the time when that man got drunk and rang the village clock in the middle of the night and was kicked off the island? When the fisherman’s son got his wrist caught in the line and the shark pulled him under? When that Western woman sheltered the bloodied wife of a fisherman and shouted at the husband, though he had a knife and was in his right, and made him go away? This, of course, was Gina.

One day a Kiribati lad climbed up to the peak of the school roof and dropped his pants and defecated right there. The teachers were horrified, and they brought two suspects into a backroom for punishment. Corporal punishment was outlawed in Kiribati, but the teachers sometimes forget. When Gina arrived a teacher told her what was happening, and she rushed into the darkened teacher’s lounge. All the other teachers were sitting around the room in a guilty circle. The principal had the two boys suspected of the fecal crime at a desk in the center with their hands out, and he held the long spine of a palm frond, which he would have used as a whip if Gina had not raged into the room and commanded him to stop.

“No you do not!” she cried, all that Minnesota modesty forgotten, as the principal quivered in rage and the teachers looked on with hidden glee,—“You do not touch those kids. I don’t care what they did, you do not touch the kids. If they pooped on the roof, then you make them climb up there and clean it up. Do not lay a hand on them!”

So anyway Gina had this big rollerbag full of school supplies set there in the Bago bus station. A Burman named Aung with an oily, used-car salesman air about him approached me and gave me the card for the Mya Nanda Hotel, which turned out to be recommended in the Bible, so what the hell. Aung agreed to drive us down the road to the hotel free of charge. For that purpose he organized a gang of four scooters. Gina balanced her heavy rollerbag behind the driver of one and sat on the back end of the bike. The rest of us took spots on the backs of other scooters, and we all set off racing down the Yangon – Mandalay Road, weaving past grumbling semis and chugging one-cylinders and top-heavy Joad-wagons and all the flurries of Chinese scooters.

We haggled a long time at the hotel for a triple room with an extra bed. All of us knew what to do and did not say, “Oh come on, take it, it’s only a few dollars,” until the good deal was won. The room had air-conditioning, but the power grid only runs for six hours a day in most Burmese cities. The Burmese say that you cannot be shocked by touching an electrical wire, only by reading the newspaper. Everyone had a generator but gas was too expensive to run the air-conditioning off that. So most of the time we were stuck with a single rotary fan, shaking its head No on the dresser. The lowlands were a heat-drenched hell unless it rained, and then the air cooled off nicely.

Aung hung around the hotel like a job applicant, straight-backed and politely insistent, as we washed our faces and some of our clothes and kept on saying, “What are you going to do? I would like to know your plan. I can arrange a tour, if you like,” but we did not have a plan. On that first day we just wandered through the wonderfully Asian marketplace, all dirt roads, canvas awnings, and wicker baskets full of things you’ve never seen, and we were the only foreign faces in town. We found an open restaurant and ate some food and talked about schooling.

We had made it back to the hotel when the rain started coming down. It lasted only a few hours, and that night we wandered out into the drenched black town, crossing lakes and rivers in the dirty roads. The power was out, as usual, and the only light was the scooter headlights and the excess that spilled out from the teahouses. We stopped in one that was making something like Indian food and ate greasy chapatis and potato curry. There were a lot of men and families sitting there with cups of tea watching the movie on the television in the corner. We followed a trishaw driver with a flashlight down black alleys and along the highway to a beer hall and had a few 50 cent cups, talking about what blame we must sometimes endure, we Americans and Israelis abroad.

Oily Aung woke us up the next morning, knocking on the door and turning on the lights like a summer camp counselor. He sat there off to the side as we ate breakfast. We talked noisily and I slurped down coffee and then we slouched around getting ready for the day. Aung kept sidling in on our nerves and saying, “I’d like to know your plan for the day.”

“We’re backpackers,” said Sam, finally fed up with him,—“We don’t have a plan.”

“Well if you would like to do a tour, I can arrange. There are many sites around Bago. Reclining Buddha, Shwemadaw Pagoda, Hintha Gon Pagoda, Kyaik Pun Pagoda. All around Bago. If you want to see them all, you must have motorbike.”

Eventually, after a great burden of haggling, we got Aung to rent us two of his scooters for $15. Ron drove one and Sam sat on the back, laughing at me because I did not know how to drive a manual bike, and Gina had driven one through the flurry of Vietnam, and so I sat on the back of hers. We drove off east first, around the hundred meter gilded umbrella of the Shwemadaw Pagoda, which required a government ticket, to the Hintha Gon, and we took off our sandals and walked up the covered stairway to the temple, where there was a great statue of Buddha, still and erect as a Pharaoh of Egypt, and smaller ones of the Bodhisattvas, surrounded by mountainous offerings—plates of rice and sweets, flower garlands, bottles of whiskey, and cans of beer. Pictures from the story of Buddha ran all around the ceiling like a comic book.

There was a room off to the side and lower than the sanctum sanctorum, full of musical instruments and musicians warming up, men encircled by drums or cymbals or fiddling with long-stemmed horns. Four dancers in strange garb entered the room, though we could not tell if they were women or only dressed like them. The musicians began a wild cacophonous noise, and the dancers wove their way with waving arms across the room and past the statues. They danced all together and then one at a time, and then a man pinned thousand kyut notes to their dresses and they danced more.

We wandered out after a while back down the stairs and drove across town. We had tea and steamed dumplings full of meat and onions or bean curd at a teahouse by the side of the busy road, then turned off down a side road. After stopping at a quiet wooded monastery, where I smoked cheroots with some Burmans while Ron and Sam taught their kids the “rock on” hand sign, we drove down past the Four Figure Pagoda to a massive reclining Buddha, a hundred meters tall, with a toe as big as me, lying sideways in a field with his head set on his elbow. There was another more famous one, the Schwethalyaung Buddha, housed in a huge tin building, at the end of a long hall full of vendors, but it was all covered in bamboo sheets as it was repainted.

The last place we visited was the Shwegugale Paya, at the end of the road that curled past that lethargic giant and off into the bamboo. The pagoda curved up to a high golden peak, and a courtyard ran around the white limestone base, with bamboo stands and muddy fields further out, and the road going off into the countryside. The sky looked like an apocalypse. I knew it was going to rain, as we went over to inspect the building, so I found a dry place for my Calcutta loafers and kept my helmet with me.

Sure enough, even as we neared the door, even as we leapt within it, the rain swept down on us in increasing torrents, which became like cataracts of the Nile, billowed out over the plains. Sam and Gina went out to dance through it, and Ron and I sat sensibly in the cavernous interior, beneath the three meter high Buddha, gold and enlightened. Soon the women came back, and we all sat there on the bamboo mats listening to the monsoon. What else could we do?

I know I am a scout
And I should find a way out
So everyone can find a way out.
—Modest Mouse

The man they called Seh Daeng, “Red Commander,” known otherwise as renegade Major General Khattiya, sat down for a hasty last meal in Siam Square. Lower lip jutting, eyes tight as Lee Van Cleef’s, a cowlick plastered to his forehead where his hat had been, aggressively spooning fried rice into his mouth. The Defense Minister had recommended that Khattiya be dismissed from duty for his support of the Red Shirt rebels, had forwarded the papers to Prime Minister Abhisit, but Seh Daeng still wore his army fatigues on the field of Rajprasong.

He said that if the other rebel commanders, the “cowardly idiots,” gave in to government demands, that he and the “hardcore” members would take over and would never give up. “We will fight until we win,” he said, gleeful and animated before the journalists and admirers. “We will use the trucks as barriers and we will drop firebombs on the armored vehicles.” He had trained his guardsmen to use pipes and spears and bangfai rockets, and he would lead them to victory.

They asked him, Seh Daeng, will you not remove your uniform, which makes you stand out in a crowd? Will you not wear a bulletproof vest? A helmet instead of that cloth hat? Anything?

“Such dress would make me feel like one who fears death, and would prevent me from leading others who do not have protective clothing,” quoth Seh Daeng, pulling his special forces hat closer down. The brim was tied up on the side, and metal rings ran along the front. “I’m a commander-in-chief, I can’t fear anything.” He said, “All I have on me is a small pistol and a stick. If anyone comes to arrest me, I can assure you I’ll shoot and fight to the end. Soldiers are on to me. There are snipers out there. But they’ll never get me.”

Seh Daeng’s stick was a long wooden staff he always walked around with. He used it in his training exercises. Some Red Shirts would dress up as riot police, with helmets and wooden shields that looked more like something from the Battle of Hastings than anything in the panoply of a modern police officer. The mock riot police lined up on one side of the street, Seh Daeng’s guardsmen on the other, and the Red Commander ran up and beat at the shields with his staff, harmless and smiling, to show them how it was done, this business of resistance. He went with reporters to a rebel workshop and drew back the string on a longbow they had made out of a bent PVC pipe and some fishing line. Seh Daeng approved.

The day was Thursday, May 13, the day of the Royal Plowing Ceremony in Thailand. Early in the morning two sacred white oxen were tied up to a plow on the ceremonial grounds at Sanam Luang, in a custom seven centuries old. The Crown Prince and his Royal Consort were there, as was Prime Minister Abhisit. Soothsayers presented the oxen with seven bowls of food and drink, and the oxen chose grass, signifying a normal water supply and an abundant rice crop. Thousands of farmers cheered the answer.

Next the Lord of the Plow, otherwise Secretary of Agriculture Yukol Limlaemthong, wearing gold and white robes and a plumed golden crown, chose one of three pieces of folded cloth of different lengths, and chose the longest of the set, thus acting as harbinger of a season of limited water supplies, high rice yields in the lowland areas, and low yields in the highlands. He threw out handfuls of rice, and thousands of gathered Thais scrambled to pick up the auspicious grains.

Thus the plowing season began, and on that same day, at 6 p.m., the rebel camp at Rajprasong was cut off. The security cordon blockaded the supply lines, the truckloads of food and water, and checked the identity of anyone trying to enter the intersection. The initial plan of the Center for the Resolution of the Emergency Situation was to cut off water and phone and electricity at sunset, but the residents and businessmen of the area complained and that plan was canceled. Still the soldiers moved into position.

Convoys of army trucks and armored vehicles plowed into the capital, and soldiers in their full kit marched along the freeway shoulder. They set up checkpoints, with barricades and armored vehicles, along the four roads leading into Rajprasong to keep more protesters out. They put snipers on the rooftops to protect security forces from the “men in black,” the “terrorist elements” of hired mercenaries that fought amongst mobs of unarmed Red Shirts. The streets were closed to traffic, public transit halted, and the government discussed a curfew. Abhisit brought another fifteen provinces into the state of emergency to prevent fresh rebel uprisings in the countryside. It was the most ambitious effort to end the rebellion since the stalemated crackdown on April tenth that first brought the Red Shirt movement into the international spotlight of uninformed sympathy.

And the heart of the movement, which encompassed the country, was the square mile around Rajprasong intersection, the commercial heart of Bangkok, a shopping district with enough floorspace to paint the walls, floors, and ceiling of the Mall of America—there in Rajprasong, where thousands were gathered in spite of the high temperatures and monsoon rains that threatened their crops, and the impending violence and starvation that threatened their lives—men and women and children, poor and hopeful and ready and waiting to be dealt with, one way or another. Some Red Shirt leaders wanted to break camp; others announced on the Pratunam stage that they would fight to the end, to the wild cheers of the mobs. It no longer mattered what the leaders decided. The movement was more than that.

What were they fighting for, those thousands of wretches besieged amid the malls and plazas of Bangkok? For justice against the tyrant, for the restoration of the people’s constitution, for the defense of Thaksin. Some of them were fighting for money, for a share of Thailand’s growing wealth. All of them were fighting for fear. They saw the urban middle-class of Thailand moving ahead and leaving the poor rural farmers behind, as if all the third class carriages had been detached from the train and were left to roll to a stop in the middle of nowhere; they saw this, and they were so terrified that they were willing to sacrifice or destroy everything on the slimmest chance, because they were absolutely unwilling to accept it. The country’s poor had risen up against its wealthy, and there would be wrath and ruin before the end.

An hour after the blockade began, Seh Daeng went with a group of foreign reporters to survey his people’s barricades along Lumpini Park and outside Chulalangkorn Hospital. He was a man who reveled in attention, and here he behaved the bravo, pointing out the better parts of his barricades and boasting of how they would turn back the dictator’s forces. Then the other reporters went off on their own to compare notes, leaving Seh Daeng alone with a journalist from the International Herald Tribune, Thomas Fuller.

The commander talked easily about his uniform, the same uniform he had worn during a campaign against Maoists thirty-odd years back, and about working with civilian troopers, and about the coming crackdown; and as he strolled along the lines of bamboo spears and piled tires and petrol bombs in the early twilight and said gruffly, almost absently, to his companion, “The military cannot get in here,”—he was shot in the head.

Fuller, who was not two feet away, heard a staccato snap over his shoulder, a bang as loud as a firecracker, and saw Seh Daeng’s eyes go wide with awe, his tight countenance slacken, and then the renegade general fell to a heap on the ground. His hat tumbled away, and blood spilled out from his temple. The journalist whirled around, by instinct, and saw nothing but the shocked faces of Red Shirt guardsmen, no assassin; and in the southern distance, away from Rajprasong, an overpass and a nest of skyscrapers.

The bullet had come from a high-powered rifle. It entered near Seh Daeng’s right temple, passed through his brain, came straight out the nape of his neck, and vanished into the pavement. The snap that Fuller heard was not the report of that rifle, but the sound of the bullet passing within inches of his head, faster than the speed of sound.

Imagine the howling and chaos. Alarums, cries within, fly, fly, fly! The other reporters closed in quick as vultures with cameras for beaks, and several Red Shirts snatched up the fallen general, Achaeans clutching at a disemboweled captain on the fields of Ilium. His black blood covered their clothes and arms, as it had already covered his face, and they stared down at their cradled charge, and they could not open their mouths or their eyes wide enough. Others cried out, “Seh Daeng has been shot! Seh Daeng has been shot!” and they moaned his name, but those bearing the body were funereally silent as they struggled to carry him to a nearby hospital.

The commander was still alive—Seh Daeng was not so easy to kill—but comatose, and he could not breathe for himself. He was attached to a respirator and moved into surgery. Because of the general’s earlier assault, the hospitals near Rajprasong were almost completely abandoned, and later that night he was transferred to Vajira Hospital, away from his Red Shirts and his battle lines. Ah, the irony! His own ungovernable fear had seen that hospital shut, and it was that fearful act which sent him away to a distant infirmary, that fear which tore him away from his comrades. Alas! for Seh Daeng, the fight was at an end.

The Red Shirts around Lumpini Park became grim and quiet, breathing a grudge. Two guardsmen whispered, “Why did they shoot him? He was always in the open. They knew where he was. They could have arrested him at anytime. Why shoot him?” They looked out past their piled tires to the security forces sitting there beneath the underpass, riot shields leaned against the walls, shotguns loaded with rubber. The two guardsmen looked out, and a thousand Red Shirts looked out, and they saw in their mind’s eye everything that would occur.

Shortly following the assassin’s bullet there came the sounds of explosions and gunfire. Around 10, the Red Shirts packed around the barricades of Lumpini Park and threw rocks and fired slingshots at security forces outside and received a hailfire of rubber bullets in reply. They no longer wore red; they just looked like lost people. Comrades helped to carry away the wounded. One 25-year-old man was hit in the face and died. Five others were wounded that night, and four went to the hospital.

At the Red Shirt stage at Pratunam, the rebels in their thousands whispered fearful and confused and vaguely determined, cornered animals now, starving and wounded. Their remaining commanders huddled near the stage in a hasty council of war. Seh Daeng’s shooting rattled them, and it came in the wake of news that Veera Musikhapong, the movement’s chief, who had accepted Abhisit’s “road map”—he had quit the Red Shirts and was to flee the country. Now leaderless, the old division between those would talk and those who would fight exploded into argument. The remaining members of Veera’s factions, Adisorn, Visa, and Phaijit, wanted to disperse the mobs and talk to Abhisit, maybe revive some of the Prime Minister’s previous concessions, but without the chief’s support these commanders fell by the wayside.

A commander named Jatuporn took the stage, surrounded by guards, and said, “The protest will not end as long as justice is not delivered.” He was one of the “hardcore” Red Shirts, along with Arisman, Kwanchai, Payap, Suporn (better known as Rambo), and the fallen Seh Daeng. “If death can bring democracy and justice,” said Jatuporn, “we are ready to die. We are ready to face it. We are here to take the bullets!” The crowd roared up, completely consumed by some fire greater than speeches and speakers, and Jatuporn found himself wrapped up in the energy of the people he ostensibly controlled. There would be no surrender, no compromise, nor sober judgment, now that Seh Daeng had been martyred.

One of the “cowardly” commanders of Veera’s shattered faction, a certain Nattawut, told them all, “Those behind the attack wanted to tell us that even Seh Daeng could be shot, so other Red Shirt protesters can be harmed, too.” We are all in danger of death, he said. The crowds muttered. It was not what they wanted to hear. Nattawut added hastily, in the voice of dictators: “They are tightening a noose on us, but we will fight to the end! Brothers and sisters!” Ah how they cheered! Twas not the words that moved them, but they that moved the words! The drums of war beat in the hearts of every man and woman.

The Red Shirts prepared to fight, and I see it in a montage. They doused Seh Daeng’s barricades, all stone and tires and sharpened bamboo, in gasoline. They splashed oil in front and scattered pellets for the advancing soldiers to slip on. The rebel guardsmen armed themselves with bows and arrows, PVC crossbows, slingshots, bamboo spears, and with crowbars and hatchets and iron poles. They propped their bangfai bamboo rockets in traffic cones, a new trick that allowed them to aim better at soldiers and helicopters. The people filled plastic bags with fish sauce and chili paste to throw at the soldiers. Read that again, O Reader, and wonder.

This is no joke, Reader. The soldiers were conscripts with assault rifles and banana clips, a month of training and a license to kill, and the rebels had bags of fish sauce and a high tragedy in their glance, a readiness to die; and they had that feeling, that afterbirth of glory and honor, a feeling that only humans can show, and only in the rarest and least scientific circumstances of history—that feeling that says, Let’s take as many of them with us as we can. Is it high and noble, or is it the lowest vengeance?

Alas! the clouds had burst, and the fighting would not stop until all was ended.

INTERMISSION.

As my plane landed in Rangoon, I looked out the window on a brown patchwork landscape. The canals of the Irrawaddy zigzagged all over it, snaking lines of green trees and white houses and temples in gold and blue, but most of the land was a deep rich ocher brown, a carpet of scorched earth.

Of course it’s not called the Irrawaddy anymore, but the Ayeyarwady, and Rangoon is now Yangon, and this country is now Myanmar. The British called it Burma after its principle ethnicity, the Burmans, and the generals changed it back in 1988, because even though only the Burmese purebloods can be generals or ministers, there is still a wider country of seven major and 127 minor ethnicities, all living under Burman rule. Many minorities of southern China ended up here, pushed out by Han expansion, as we see modernly the Tibetans pushed into India. The Burmese inhabit the Ayeyarwady plains, and the other populations live mostly in the jungle highlands around the periphery, near Bangladesh, Assam, China, and Thailand.

A coupe brought the left-wing army of General Ne Win into power in 1962. Three thousand people died in the monk-led rebellion of 1988, the military government collapsed, and lo! from the ashes, the Slorc was born—the State Law and Order Restoration Council! The Slorc held elections and duly imprisoned all the winners, famously including Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of the general who united Myanmar against the British Empire; and a woman who, after several instances of liberty, remains under house arrest. The country operates under the martial law of the Slorc, without a constitution; a country of 52 million with an army of 15 million soldiers; embargoed by the UN and the USA, though close friends with India and China.

The Slorc dropped its local fuel subsidies in August of 2007, and heightened prices were the proverbial last straw. There was a second rebellion. Again monks went on the march, and again the military cracked down hard. Unknown hundreds, and perhaps thousands of protestors died by the bullets and clubs of their own army, including fifty monks, an irredeemable crime to the pious Burmans, but the Slorc remained in power. Under international pressure, the regime has planned elections for the tenth of October this year—10/10/10, an astrologically auspicious number which should ensure a Slorc victory—and the people say, “No election, only selection.”

Given these dire straits, I prologue my account of Myanmar with a defense of my going there:

I initially got the idea in a town in the Albanian hills, an old Turkish town called Berat, at a table in an inn where I ran to escape the rain. I found myself at dinner with a Canadian named Frederick. I told him I would go to Southeast Asia eventually, and he said that he enjoyed Thailand, Laos, Vietnam—but that his favorite place was Burma, “and hear me out on this.” A lot of people questioned his decision to go to a country that was the origin of such horrible news, where his presence and his tourist dollars would go to support a much (and justly) maligned government, but Frederick said that he went anyway.

“I spent my money at local places,” he said, “at hotels and restaurants and family stores. It went straight into the hands of the people. No charity can say that. Half their money disappears into the pockets of the government. And anyway, most people give more money to the Myanmar army when they fill up their tanks than I gave to them in my whole trip there,”—and it’s true, Reader, and you should be more aware of where your money goes. Tourism brought in $164 million in 2006, the majority of which went to the private sector; natural gas took in $2.16 billion, and then there’s oil, minerals, teak, timber, and heroin to consider. No wonder China and India are such close comrades of this rich little neighbor!

By going there, by talking to people, the Canadian learned what was really happening, and told people of the freedoms he enjoyed, which is exactly why the imprisoned Aung San Suu Kyi endorsed foreign tourism. Frederick said that Myanmar was a bewitching and rewarding country, with an untouched and unexplored character, and that its people were impossibly nice, generous, and welcoming.

I was sold. I heard much more praise for Myanmar as I neared its borders, and never a word of criticism, and that only cemented my resolve to see it. So I overcame the process of attaining a visa in Bangkok, and I filled my wallet with the familiar faces of dead presidents. There was no way to withdraw money within Myanmar, it being unsupported by international banks; and the government changed at an extortionate rate, and the black market moneychangers demanded dollars. Really, they were connoisseurs of the bills, demanding the most recent models, uncreased and unbent. Some serial codes were preferable, and some were unacceptable, although this was generally some bullshit they concocted to swindle the foreigners out of their money.

Contrary to the Bible’s sound advice, and without knowing the exchange rate, I changed money with the first trader I met outside of the airport. I was standing there in the shade of the new arrivals zone with a Chinese woman, and we were going to share a cab, and she seemed to think that this was a horrible idea as she thumbed through her own Lonely Planet, but she did not say anything. I gave over $50 to the moneychanger for an equivalent amount of kyut (that’s chut, as “k” in Burmese produces the sound of “ch”, and also “th” is “t-ha” and “ph” is “p-ha,” and if the Reader finds that confusing, wait for Pinyin). A good rate would be 1000 kyut for one dollar, but you will only get this from sneakthieves who have many tricks up their sleeves to part you with your money. I changed mine for 950, received my kyut, counted it, and said, “Thanks.”

Everything worked out, with the proper amount, and I was very grateful, given the horror stories I heard later. Sometimes it is good to trust people and sometimes it’s stupid and you just have to be lucky, and sometimes it is best not to question the difference.

Anyway, the Chinese woman and I took a taxi into downtown Yangon, past the towering golden bell of the Schwedagon Pagoda, surrounded by smaller pagodas like the ancillary towers of a citadel, to Sule Square and, just around the corner, the Okinawa Guesthouse. The city reminded me immediately of India, in its smell and its squalor. There was a greasy reek with a fragrant overlay, an unbathed scent masked by too much of some fascinatingly exotic perfume, a smell of cooking and frying. Geographically and culturally, Burma lies right between three tectonic cultures—India, China, and Siam—and its position combined with its isolation and backwardness has made it a fascinating blend.

The streets of Yangon differ from the streets of Calcutta or Benares: not quite so oppressively filthy or trafficked, more lively and cheerful, and with little noodle stalls and squat chairs and tables with teapots set up here and there on the sidewalk (in India the streets are for walking and nothing else, and there are no streetside cafes), and Yangon differs in the proliferation of great gilded bell-shaped stupas and monks and nuns.

Many monasteries had been moved outside of the capital after the monks went on the march during the protests a few years ago, but most religious communities remain in the cities, where the laity has more to give. Maroon-wrapped monks and pink-cloaked nuns can be commonly seen walking from storefront to storefront making noise and asking for alms. Women would come out and put a spoonful of rice in the black alms bowls of each of a string of novices, who proceeded smiling as if it was Halloween.

Myanmar is predominantly Theravada Buddhist and profoundly pious. Merit is the supreme consideration, won by rituals and good deeds—merit to improve the karma, thy fate in this life and the next. The rich build stupas and hope for Nirvana, or at least rebirth as a man, and not some lesser thing on the wheel of life, like a rat, a snake, or a woman. The common people engage in simpler rituals within the pagoda. Most families pay hundreds of dollars to have their sons don the maroon robes and move into a monastery for a few weeks, first as a teenage novice and sometime later as an ordained monk. This brings the family great merit.

The Burmans, mostly dark-skinned with East Asian features, dress in a sort of long skirt called the longyi, made of cotton with dark checkered patterns, which they wrap up in a bundle at the front of their waist, so that it looks like some samurai garb. Conical bamboo hats and paper umbrellas are also a common sight. If the Reader wishes to pretend to be in a Kurosawa film, apply for your visa today. An honest and trusting folk, the Burmans often stick their wallets in the back of their wrapped up longyi, so that half of the leather pouch sticks straight out from the small of the back. Most of the men go clean shaven, but the Muslims, making up one in twenty of the population, often wear beards on their chins.

Burmese women are very beautiful, oval-faced and long-eyed with straight black hair and the same cheeky cheer as the Thais, and almost tragically intelligent, given their common fate as housewives, day-laborers, and sore-footed farmers. On the Buddhist hierarchy of reincarnation, women occupy the same tier as rats—they cannot achieve enlightenment, and must instead aspire to being born a man in the next life. They sometimes wear the longyi and sometimes a simpler skirt, and always keep their shoulders covered. Rice paddy hats and smiles half simple, half sly complete the peasant attire. During the monsoon season, most of the Burma girls paint demon lines across their face with khaki dust from the thanakha tree, to absorb sweat and keep clear their dusky countenances.

After checking into the guesthouse I wandered out to a street corner for some cold rice noodles, hand-mixed with sauces and spices in a metal bowl and served with a cup of chicken broth, a common street meal in Myanmar. Then I crossed the busy roundabout of Sula Square into the pagoda, or paya, of the same name.

Cool stone walkways circled the golden umbrella at the center, winding under smaller shrines and spires and past rows of Burmese in everyday clothing, praying or meditating before statues of the Buddha and his saints. I circled the complex a few times in great wonderment, and then was approached by a young Burman learning to be a travel guide and out to practice his English. He told me a little about the pagoda and showed me which statue to douse in 24 cups of water (one for each year of life, with a hopeful extra, that I may see my next birthday, I suppose). The post depended on what day of the week I was born. This was the simplest and most common ritual to receive merit. A Buddhist monk told me a little more, as I sat in the shade to cool off from the heat and humidity, and then I walked back to the guesthouse.

Then it started to rain. Dark clouds had been sliding back and forth across the sky all day, and now they burst with bucket-fulls of rain. It came quick as an earthquake—a moment of sprinkling drips and then the high tide of the downpour—and lasted only a little longer. Twas the monsoon! It was the second rain of Burma’s wet season, which came late that year. All the farmers had been praying for it, shooting fireworks up into the hundred degree sky and offering gifts at their animist shrines. They had no other way but rainfall to water their tiered fields, and for the last ten years have had to deal with incessant drought. May that 2010 be a better year for it, however much it inconveniences the unwary traveler—for I was caught in the middle of it!

The Burmans and monks took cowering refuge in alcoves and alleyways along the main streets, which were reduced to rivulets by the diluvian rain; but I’m an Oregonian and used to this business. Of course this was much heavier than the rain of my home, and I was so wet when I got back to the guesthouse I might as well have swam the last block.

I went upstairs laughing, to change my clothes, and there met a San Franciscan girl named Samantha, who had been on the road about as long as me, which was true of many of the Myanmar travelers—they were long term, and despised the Anglo-drunks in Thailand. She was copper-skinned and almond-eyed, with bundled hair and a long-traveled look, not dirty but self-assured and self-contained, and with the energy of someone who could spend six hours at a nightclub.

Well we talked for a while, and after the rain ended we went out to find something to eat on the street. We had some greasy flat-rolled pancakes with vegetables and sauce, very like the Indian dhosas, and some rambutan, red and egg-shaped and covered in green hair like stalks of grass, and white and sweet on the inside; we asked at the trinket stores if they were government owned, and shouted hello back at the grinning children; and we looked all over for some man who made wafer sandwiches that Sam had found a few days before, and ended up instead at a hotel with a mummified gym and a swimming pool full of screaming, writhing Burmans.

I did not ask Sam where she was really from, which is a question without much relevance in this cosmopolitan world, a question that she said she had to answer far too often. She was born in California and very much a Californian, but her parents were from Vietnam and had fled to the States by way of Hong Kong. I also did not ask her if she was in Asia to discover her Chinese roots, which was another question far too often put, even in India. “I’m here for the same reason as everyone else,” she said, and I knew what she meant. Her parents did not understand it, she said, and would have preferred a stable job, a cultured life, and a permanent home, but they accepted that Sam was different, that she preferred teaching at an Ethiopian grade school and wandering India with a chain-smoking Swede and milking goats in Laos.

“Travel is difficult,” she said as we frowned at the prices in the menu of a sushi restaurant,—“that’s what they don’t understand. Finding a bus to somewhere, arriving in the middle of the night, lost in some town, haggling down a hotel, trying to find something edible.”

“Washing clothes in the sink,” I added. “Learning the language.”

“Right. Arguing forever over the price of a bike rental, trying to meet the locals—it’s a lot of work.”

“It’s a pain in the ass. But it’s worth it.”

Sam had been to a lot of the places where I was going, so I quizzed her experience as we went back to Okinawa Guesthouse, without having sushi, and sat around for a few hours. An Israeli named Ron arrived and joined us. He was short, but in a sort of coiled spring way that made him look average height. He had the Ashkenazi features of his ancestors: victims of the Polish Holocaust, survivors of Auschwitz, partisan fighters on the Eastern Front, who had fled by way of mistrust to the Promised Land—but those stories unremarkable in Israel. He was very typical of the Israelis in his cynicism and sturdiness and in the frank manner in which he dealt with people, a no bullshit approach. Ron was on his obligatory post-conscription year abroad, although it had been three years of school and work since he left the Israeli Defense Force; and three months in India, Nepal, and the Thai isles had brought him to Burma.

He sat with us in the air-conditioned dorm and counted some money he had traded. “Fuck,” he said after a while, “Fuck, I got ripped off!” He had traded $300 and lost $170 in the business. Here is what happened:

Ron haggled out a good rate of exchange for $200 then handed the moneychanger his two bills of exchange. The Burman said, “This one is good, but this one no good,” and pointed out some crease or bad serial number or other bullshit flaw that made one of the notes invalid. Alright, fair enough—Ron handed the moneychanger a different hundred dollar note, and in the heat of the black market exchange did not realize that he never had his flawed bill returned! The moneychanger now had $300, though Ron only meant to change $200.

Then came the second scam. The moneychanger counted out somewhere around 200,000 kyut, having offered an unreasonably good rate, but he did it in a card-trick way where he double-counted many of the notes, so in the end he put only but about 130,000 kyut in Ron’s hands. Ron went to count it himself, but the moneychanger stopped him saying, “No, not here, the government watches us! No, cannot count! Quick, quick, police!” I have heard that if you insist on counting out the bills at this point in the scam, the moneychanger will find some other flaw in one of your dollar bills and will call off the whole deal. But Ron listened to the thief and rushed away, having given the moneychanger $300 and received $130 in kyut in return—a most unreasonable rate, though still better than the one the government offered at the airport.

Well we talked and raged about it in the air-conditioned room of the guesthouse. Sam had also lost some money in an exchange and wanted to go take retribution on these moneychangers. I thought, “How did I not get ripped off?” but got worked up with the rest.

Ron went out to find his man, who was of course long gone. The Reader may not be able to appreciate how much $170 amounts to in Burma, but if we say that a beer costs fifty cents, a bottle of whiskey is less than two dollars, a filling plate of noodle is a buck fifty, and a brand new motorcycle costs $200—well, $170 is a lot of money here. However, Ron did find one moneychanger who was apparently offended at the crime committed, and who had a cousin or some relation in the police force—it’s all about family connections in these martial countries—and who vowed to help Ron find the culprit.

First we had sushi. We went to a small restaurant with a Nipponese woman with a shaved head who had been in Yangon for nine months on a meditation visa, learning from the monks to improve her own instruction back home, and in that time had found a very nice Japanese place. We stuffed ourselves on nigiri and maki, tempura and miso soup, and we marveled at the bill—$3 a head. The staff saw us out with a cute kowtow and an, “Arigato gozaimasu,” and we left with that good feeling that can only come after a meal of sushi.

The next day, Ron, Sam, and I went out looking for this noble knight of a moneychanger, with an air of high adventure. Sam was carrying this lacy yellow umbrella, which she planned to wield against the Burman who had stolen from her. Ron only had his fierce Israeli expression, a hundred times as deadly. I was along for the ride, “for the adventure of it,” as Tom Sawyer says. Well, we didn’t find anything and went home disappointed.

But I must add—before we left I had to change more money. Ron went with me, and we walked out to the corner of the square with all the noodle shops. After a while of standing there, a man approached us, and this is how these things work. He was a mustachioed Burman in a soiled longyi with the sallow features of a drug addict, and Ron said to me, “That’s the guy—that’s the guy who wanted to help me catch him,” then he turned to the moneychanger and said, “Hey man, I look all over for you yesterday.”

“Where are you yesterday?” said the man with some concern. “You find the guy?”

“No, I don’t find him.”

“Well I have the police. You tell him about the man who stole, he finds him, gets your money back.”

“Look,” said Ron, “we leave tomorrow, I don’t know. Just forget it. It’s only money.” Sometimes it’s not worth fighting criminals who wouldn’t think twice about killing a man over a few dollars, we had decided earlier.

We told the moneychanger that I had money to change, and he seemed agreeable. He led us into the backroom of a paint-peeled house near the corner and sat us down in plastic lawn chairs. We talked rates for a while and agreed on 950 kyut to the dollar. Anything more and I would have been suspicious. There were a lot of Burmans lounging about, and it was actually very suspicious, but I was too busy reveling in the scenario to notice—a backroom, black market deal!

Well the man with the money showed up, and he had $100 of kyut in a brick, like some mafia payoff. He disapproved of the serial code on one of my American bills but eventually found one that suited him, and he waited while I counted out the kyut to verify it. When we were all satisfied I shook hands with the two moneychangers, said a thankful, “Chezube,” and sauntered off with a secret smile. How I have such luck with these criminal transactions, I will never know.

Let us travel back in time, not on some Vonnegut highway, but only a little up the track—to the day I arrived in Burma.

That day I got very drunk. Sam led Ron and I down to a local place near the guesthouse, a place with tables and chairs in the street and cups of some local beer called Dagon for fifty cents. We sat at a table with some Burman whom Sam had met, and who was sitting with a woman from Minnesota named Gina, who had been a teacher in the Peace Corps and at an international school in Saigon—and we’ll get to that later.

Well Ron drank a reasonable amount, and Sam and I drank most unreasonably, and I was the least reasonable of the lot. We drank and began to discourse, Sam and I, about kung-fu movies, the philanthropy of Jackie Chan, and about who would win in a brawl, Bruce Lee or Tony Jaa. If the Reader is unfamiliar with this issue, an advised education would include Bruce Lee’s Return of the Dragon and Tony Jaa’s Ong Bak 2, though Sam would recommend the first Ong Bak, which is an overdrawn mess. Obviously this issue got us very fired up, I for Bruce Lee, Sam for Tony Jaa—and it perplexed everyone else at the table.

And I drank beer very fast, and every time my glass was empty I waved at the Burman waiter and said, “One more,” until I was very tight, and eventually there came one of those vast confusions that sometimes take us, and Sam was giving me the Heimlich Maneuver on the side of the road, though she doesn’t remember it, and shoving fingers down my throat, to save me of the ills of drunkenness, on the not-so-long road back to Okinawa Guesthouse—but we’ll skip all these unsavory details, because what can more mere words add to the imagination, anyway?

After some debate we went back to the same bar the next day. I had spent the day with Sam, Ron, Gina, and a tall Italian from Lombardy named Francisco, wandering around Chinatown and looking at all the strange things for sale between the warehouses. We stopped for a drink at one of the beer and barbecue places on a long street of them. These places were very common in Myanmar—a few picnic tables in the street, a keg of beer in the back, a case of raw meat on wooden skewers, and a hot grill, and sometimes a TV in the corner showing American movies from some hijacked Indian channel.

Myanmar only had eight stations, all state-owned and awful. At seven the government showed a South Korean soap opera that the South Korean tourists say is for old people, but all the Myanmar girls watched the trash in unison each evening and discussed the junkyard of it the next day. At eight came the national news, which closely resembled what you would expect an American public access channel to broadcast if Nazi Germany had won the war.

Anyway we had more sushi, then went back to the site of yesterday’s drunken escapades, along with a Frenchman of Strasbourg named Guillaume his girlfriend, Selene of Normandy. The Burman waiters only laughed when they saw us and showed us to another table. They came over whenever a glass was empty and asked, “One more?” with a great, grinning guffaw, too good-natured and good-humored to hold a grudge against something so innocent as drunkenly keeping a bar open until two in the morning.

The Burmese are the kind of people that, if you compliment them on something more than once, they will gift it to you with a smile. Good deeds matter for the merit of them. Buddhism teaches the Burmans to live not through an acquisition of material possessions, which leads only to yearning and loathing, as we Westerners well know—but by fostering a tranquil complacency, a satisfaction with aught that God has seen fit to bestow. Anything else is out of the mortal hands and surely nothing to worry about. Because they understand these basic truths of the world, the Buddhists are the happiest, most generous, and best-humored of folk.

Later that night I turned my consideration to a people much better off in some ways and far worse in others. Ron, Guillaume, and I stood around talking at the foot of the steep stairs to the dormitories for a few hours, and then we went out and sat on the stoop while Guillaume smoked cigarettes. We talked about dealing with cheaters in the Asian countries, about traveling with girls, about global finance, and always we came back to the topic of America.

Guillaume had been to America, first when he was sixteen, as part of a homestay. The company sent him to an engineer’s family in Sacramento that apparently signed up for the program only for the money it dispatched alongside the foreign ward. The Frenchman did not think much of them. The mother and father were always out of the house; the daughter had fallen in love with him long before he boarded the plane, though the romance lasted only until she emailed a picture of herself to France, for there was no concealing or repairing that kind of ugliness; and the son was about Guillaume’s age but would never leave the suburban house.

“He was such a lazy bastard,” said Guillaume. “I would ask him, ‘You want to go play tennis?’ and he would say, ‘No, it is too hot.’ So I would ask him, ‘You want to go swim in the pool?’—everyone had a pool there, you know—and he would say, ‘No, it is too cold.’ That lazy bastard!”

Once the engineer dad came to Guillaume and asked him, “Do you want to go to the mall?” “Yes!” said Guillaume in his retelling,—“anything to get out of this house!” So they drove off to the shopping mall, which the host father revealed with a sort of showman’s flourish. Guillaume had to explain, to the engineer’s great confusion, that they had malls in France. They had the small boutique stores and markets that sell wine and cheese and croissants, and they had malls, too.

The engineer then brought his ward to a bank to make a withdrawal from an ATM, and he showed to Guillaume with an eager glee and narrated all that was involved—the debit card, the card slot, the PIN number, and the security of the transaction. Guillaume then explained that the French also had ATMs, that a Frenchman had invented the credit card, and that France was not some medieval backwater, as his host seemed to think.

At a university in Fort Myers, Florida, a few years later, working towards his MBA, Guillaume saw more of America and was arrested several times, for crimes such as drinking beer in the park, throwing rocks at his roommates window to get him to open the door, and smoking a cigarette outside late at night, a few blocks from an apartment where a man had knocked on the door and ran away a half an hour before. Each time the officers rushed at him screaming nonsense from a cop movie and shining a Mag-light in his face. Once the arresting officer, seeing Guillaume’s French identification, wrote down his name as “Praenom Guillaume” and had his home address as the French consulate.

Guillaume began to reflect very carefully about what made America so different from Europe. Americans, he decided, were too restricted by rules to have real freedom. Everywhere there were stupid laws against trivial things, and there was no common sense or leeway in the law’s application. Guillaume decided that he was far freer in France to live his life than in the land of liberty. A French couple will not be arrested for drinking wine on the banks of the Seine, and teenagers can buy cigarettes for their parents, despite all that the law says, because the law is made to protect people and not confine or moralize them.

Americans are good at making speeches, said Guillaume. They are dangerous in commerce: the Americans always act like your buddy on the phone and made it impossible to tell if they plan to do business or if they are uninterested. The girls are bold and oversexed. Once an American girl sidled up to him at a bar with this obvious look and said, “I’m demanding.” And the Frenchman wondered about the simple nature and the lack of awareness he saw in most Americans. American knowledge of geography and international politics is a great global punchline. Why did so few of those people look beyond the borders of their town or borough, much less their state or nation?

Guillaume experienced a revelation later in his stay, while riding a Brooklyn subway with some other international students. He spotted across the aisle a black man reading a book of French poetry. The French love to speak their lingua franca, and Guillaume approached the man and asked him, “How do you know French?” The black poet turned up from his book with a taciturn, contemptuous expression and said that he was from an old French colony. Which one? He would not say. Guillaume kept up the conversation, even though the African kept muttering under his breath, “White people don’t know anything,” because the Frenchman was curious and pressed him, “Which colony are you from?” The African would not say. Instead, he drew a map of France in the air and marked out the ten largest cities. Then the African got off at his stop, leaving Guillaume with his questions unanswered.

“After he left,” said Guillaume, “I kept thinking, I wonder what colony he is from. Then I asked myself, Do I even know all of France’s colonies? We had a big empire. Forty-nine colonies, all over Africa, Southeast Asia, the Pacific. I thought about it, and I could only name ten of the forty-nine. Then I thought, Could I name the capital cities in them? The ten largest cities in any of them? The black guy, he knew all of France and all of its cities. I did not know the colonies of my own country.”

Now, France was the world’s fifth largest economy, and Guillaume realized he knew all about the four above it, knew their basic profile and their place on the map, and that he knew next to nothing about all the multitudes below—why should he? How could that help him in business? So it was no surprise that the Americans at number one knew nothing about these lesser economies. Even Britain, Russia, and China warranted little attention from the top dog, other than the sidelong glance that a winning runner casts fearfully back at those who might overtake him.

When he returned to France, when he heard his countrymen laugh about American stupidity, Guillaume would ask them how many countries were in the European Union, and what were their names, their capitals, their major cities; and what were all the colonies of the French Empire; and the French did not know. He asked his sister, who brought out a blank map of Europe, and Guillaume found that he himself could name all the countries but not all the capitals.

And so it was revealed that the Europeans were not so canny as they thought, and knew about as much of the world as any American could be expected to know—not nearly enough. On that note we return our attention to a country of rather small economy and to a conflict that was secretly great.