At the border

Standing on the low, sandy cliff--the powdery slope serving as the border of Thailand--I squinted out across the river at the gleaming bodies making their way through the quick-moving water. One, two, three...five...seven--I counted the young men edging their way towards the opposite river bank, towards Burma, plastic slippers dangling from their finger tips, smiling broadly and shouting to each other. One of them was beginning to lose his low-slung pants in the current, prompting eruptions of laughter from the others. I tented my hands over my eyes and focused on the approach of the first boy to the far bank. He had told me, just days before, that it had been seven years since he had seen his country. He began to move faster as he got closer, elbows rising high above the glassy river to propel him forward, invisible legs running beneath the surface, smile spreading further as he went. As his body appeared, bit by bit, out of the river, he planted his hands on the steep embankment and scrambled up the bank, all skinny-muscled limbs and hard-narrow back. And when he was finally standing on the other side, he rose, lifted his hands above his head and shouted in English, "I am going back to Burma!"

You're already there, I said to him, to myself, from my perch on the cliff in Thailand. You're already back. The late afternoon glow off the river weeds and the glint of the sand lent the scene an other-worldliness; I relaxed my fierce watch--and with it, my belief that by watching I could keep him, all of them, safe, let me eyes blur and for a moment, I couldn't see him at all.

escaping

it's no secret that i travel to the other side of the earth, pick a little town, and then never leave it--at least not until i'm ready to leave it forever. people think of me as a traveler but i know the truth: i travel huge distances to stay still. i stay until claustraphobia sets in, until i think i'm going crazy, until i'm literally itching to get out.

why do i do it? i love motion. bus window down, elbow crooked on the sill, dust and sun in my face, glimpses into lives i'm never going to live. i love to travel. today i followed my friend jess up the long slope of highway leading into the mountains, my little motorbike not quite a match for hers, driving straight on into the 1pm sun, the best kind of sun burn just waiting to happen. how do you accelerate up a mountain? hit it in fourth and hope it'll carry you through? start slow and try to build something? some mix of the two? we chugged and struggled and crested hills and coasted into valleys and smelled things growing and smelled diesel and moved and moved and moved.

i kept thinking about the california coast, route 1 to san francisco. last spring, just before i moved to thailand, kai and i rented a tiny, red car and stopped in every place that looked half-worth stopping. that exposed stretch of ocean, those awesome drops, such a wild breaking off point of the earth, the biggest edge i've seen and stuck to. in every little town i thought, i could live here. or maybe here. but the beauty was that i didn't.

there's nothing like driving in the mountains. the warm-cool patterns of sun spots and shadows--warmer and cooler because we're so high up--and the promise of a million things we don't know yet. i hate to be stuck but wonder if it's the escaping that makes this part so good.

An opening

I complain about the traffic, I say it has no heart, what town this small needs five 7-11s? It's always hot or raining or both, every street is a one-way, the advert trucks with their blaring loudspeakers (especially when they're under your window at 7am) are like a mean joke. But really, it's not that I dislike this town. It's that sometimes, I think it's flat-lining. or maybe I am. I look for and try to grab onto some kind of sprark, a beginning of something bigger, but i come up--again again again--empty. When people say they love it here, I feel my head cocking to the side, a tiny, involuntary, really?

But then, there are unexpected moments: a teenaged girl leading her blind grandfather by the arm, while he coaxes music out of a mandolin that's so pretty it makes my arm hair stand up, I literally get chills. Or four months ago when Aung San Suu Kyi came to town and I waited in the blaring heat on the side of the road until her massive car rounded the corner and the man standing next to me opened his mouth in wonder and joy, and threw, in a perfect arc, his bouquet of flowers through her open window and we saw them land neatly in her open hands.

The border of Tibet

In total, I've spent less than two months in Tibet. The first time, I was seventeen years old, sick and miserable and under the impression I was in China. The second time, I was twenty-one, awake (for the firs time?), powerful in my intensity, ready. It all came crashing down fairly quickly when I realized it was difficult--basically impossible--to be anything but a tourist in Tibet.

Following on that realization, I immersed myself in Tibetan refugee communities--in Himachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Kathmandu. People assumed I was a Tibet activist or a Tibetan Buddhist because if not, what was I doing? I wasn't an activist in the traditional sense and I wasn't a Buddhist. I was deeply, ceaselessly interested in what was happening around me. No, "interested" seems weak. What was it? I wanted to understand every word, every gesture, every moment in history, everything buried beneath it all. I wanted to to dig in the dirt on my hands and knees for every morsel of something useful, complicated, (un)knowable. Was I trying to possess things that weren't mine? Maybe. But I like to think I didn't do any harm.

For years, I circled--circumambulated?--the Tibetan border, entrenching myself in mountain-towns that were almost, but not quite, Tibet. The better I knew Tibetans, though--the more language I understood, the more cultural truths--the farther I got from Tibet. It became increasingly abstract. It was if the more I came to know the "border" (both tangible and in-) the less I believed in the center. People will say that I was so caught up in the fantasy of Tibet that I couldn't see the real thing. It might be true. But it's also true that I have a hard time believing that America is happening when I spend long periods of time away. Rather than an Orientalist, I may just be self centered.

I wonder if something similar is happening here, if I'm doing it again, less than 5 kilometers from Burma. My visa keeps me on this side of the river. I've walked along the Irrwaddy, my eye trained on Burma, trying to see the difference. I tell myself the buildings look shabbier, the trash piles seem higher. I strain my eyes to make out the faces of the people on the riverbank--it's really that close--and I tell myself they look more exhausted, less hopeful. But the truth is I've never looked at Mae Sot from that side, so I really can't compare.

At the same time, my life here is full of people from Burma. After six months, I'm learning how to interpret certain gestures, small hand movement, averted eyes. I know what that smile means, I know when my students are telling the truth and when they're re-packaging it for me, giving me something that only resembles it. All of the imperceptible things that make a culture are fitting together and I find that I'm less lost. The map that I'm following is only half-finished and frequently wrong but it's there.

Burma is also there. It's just on the other side of the river. But if I never cross the bridge, I might never meet Burmese people in their own country. I might stop believing (or never start believing in the first place?) that life is really happening there, that my students really come from there, that some of them left very recently, that many of them want desperately to go back and fear it just as much.

I almost married a man from Tibet. He often talked about how we could go back together to meet his family. I could picture them--his parents and grandmother, his sister. It took work, but I could. He would talk about how we could live there for half the year, or more, if we wanted. Here it was, then: I was going to be more than a tourist in Tibet. I closed my eyes and tried to be happy. But I couldn't marry the sensory-overload of his reality with those too-flat images and in the end, I couldn't marry him either. Geography, for all its definitiveness, is so far from tangible. I wonder who in the world has trouble believing that I exist, that this country exists, or if this problem is only mine.

When it was still raining

I wrote this at the end of June, a little over a month after arriving in Mae Sot.

A breeze so sudden cools the room that I think the electricity has come back on. But the ceiling fan is stationary in its wire cage and the new air in my living room is rain-fresh and bright. The sound of a passing motorcycle on the road at the end of the soi reminds me that the world is still happening out there; in town, people are eating at road-side stalls. Others stop for essentials—beer, soap, salted nuts, slurpees—at the fluorescent-lit 7-11. Teenaged girls riding side-saddle hold onto their boyfriends’ waists on the back of battered motorbikes. But here on the outskirts of Mae Sot, the electricity has been out for hours and hours and it’s easy to believe this candle-lit place is the entire world.

But it’s not. Up the road, only a mile or so, my students are going to sleep in their makeshift beds under well-used mosquito nets, pop songs cooing from their metallic mobile phones. The stragglers talk politics or eat post-dinner helpings of rice and fish paste in the damp kitchen. A young man speaks in his tribal language into a cell phone, spitting mouthfuls of discarded betel nut between sentences. Is it his mother or his girlfriend on the line? No one else here speaks his language so no one knows.

Today, one of the youngest students said, “I was born in Thailand and I’ve never been to Burma. If I go back, am I returning?” It’s World Refugee Day, it’s 2012, Angelina Jolie is on the television asking us to remember the plight of displaced people. After a reading of the 1951 Convention, my students wanted to know why victims of famine aren’t considered refugees. What else are they supposed to do, they wanted to know? I wish I could give them satisfying answers. And other things: identity documents, doctors appointments, safe passage between here and the refugee camps where their uncles and sisters live. The best I can give them is my word that if they’re arrested for living illegally on this side of the border, I’ll bail them out of the detention center in the middle of town, just down the street from a place where I like to eat breakfast. I'll do it, I tell them, I promise.

Translation

Today, I looked up the word "seizure" in a battered, pocket-sized, Burmese-English dictionary. When I found it, I marked it with my index finger and slid it across the grubby table to the young woman sitting next to me.

"Here," I said, softly. "Look. Tell me if this makes sense to you."

She leaned forward and examined the page carefully, my finger still in place in the margin. She took her time. I watched her profile, waiting for the moment of understanding, some eye twitch or mouth movement to give her away.

"To grab," she said, looking up at me, expression neutral. "To catch." She made a gesture in the air, as if ensnaring a mosquito.

I smiled, slow, exhausted. "That's all it says?" I asked. I already knew the answer.

"Yes," she said. "Like the police."

If I weren't so tired, if the day hadn't been so long, if the almost-gone sun funneling into the almost-empty classroom were somehow less sad,  I think I could have done better. I believe that. Instead, I tried to explain about brain signals, messages to the body, mis-firings. Did I get anywhere with all those words?

"Hey," I said finally, grabbing onto something tangible. "Did you tell your mother?"

"Yes," she said. "She scolded me for not telling her before."

I felt myself let go of a breath I didn't know I was holding. "That's really good," I said. "I'm glad."

"Yes," she said. We sat smiling at each other, half-smiles but without awkwardness. She's the rare kind of person you can sit and smile with and it's enough.

What I didn't say: to seize, to grab, like the police, to catch and hold you somewhere beyond your own control... it's a bad translation--completely incomplete--but also not so bad. Your mother might not know how to translate this either. But she has a rare daughter who is comfortable with silence and whatever she says, it will be enough.

drive home:

first the back-stretch of road from work to the traffic light
skinny burmese men pushing carts on foot
or by pedal bike
motorcycles with side cars full of freezer-burnt or half-melted ice cream
then the mansion on the corner
not done yet
marble tigers and exposed scaffolding
the traffic light is blinking on and off because it's past the time of day when we have to wait for the light to change, we can all just go when we think it's safe which means all of us just go
dodging each other over the blare of karaoke from the korean bbq joint
and then the winding bit of road where the trees and the dogs are denser
and  people burn their trash in piles in front of their tin and bamboo houses.
next is the T where i can go left or right to get home--haven't timed it
but i like the drive through town better, more human someone, to be with all those other people,
so it's left past the temple and the never-stocked tesco
and a straight shot through the traffic lights striping intarakiri road (or is that the one
running away from the border? i can never remember)
and as i sail past the left turn into the muslim part of town
the call to prayer makes me suddenly teary--(i must be exhausted)
and finally a right turn into a broad, undodge-able pothole, a hesitation at the 7-11: do i need anything?
another right at the traffic light, a quick merge, a sharp left turn at the gift shop
and i wind my way down the badly-lit road to the police station--past thick cops on bikes, wearing sunglasses even though it's already dusk--
curve slowly around the detention center where burmese migrant workers sit on the floor
of a big cage that i try not to look at and also try to look at and can't decide which is worse
while avoiding the ditch that's eating into the road, checking over my shoulder
shifting down to neutral
swinging one leg over and heaving open the blue iron gate
and then it's a single burst uphill and i'm home.