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.

Motorcycles.

The July my best friend came to India to meet me, we rode ram-shackle buses and jeeps from Delhi to Manali to Leh and to every tiny village we could find once we got there; we forgot to eat and got too-thin and too dark in the high altitude sun. We drank homebrewed chang when we felt like it, wore sleeveless tops without blinking, learned hilarious catch phrases in as many languages as we could get our hands on ("two mosquitos don't fuck, just like that" triumphing as the most bizarre and wonderful of them all). Inevitably, we befriended two wind-swept Ladakhi dudes over fried noodles and cigarettes, hotel staff with some English under their belts, and drove with them to a festival several hours north. I rode with Champa, a man of few words and awe-inducing cheek bones. Our bike kept breaking down. At one point, the sand beneath us got too deep and we tumbled, softly but not un-painfully, over. I loved every second. The smell of motor oil and dessert, Himalayan temple smoke and petrol, sweat and altitude. I hoped it would never end, that I could hunt for Ladakhi chaam dancing festivals from the back of a motorbike, hands tented over my eyes, forever.

Fast forward five years: my motorcycle is another bill I'm struggling to pay and I never get to be the passenger. In this little city on the border with Burma, I navigate crowded weekend streets, maneuver from my apartment to the 7-11 to Hong Long Grocery to the mechanic to the photocopy shop. My "new" bike is old and acts older--it's nearly impossible to kick start when the engine's cold, it hates third gear, it makes a waooow, waooow, waooow noise that's starting to get on my nerves. You could say that the romance went out of our relationship, except that it was never there.

But. Every now and then, I leave town--to drive my friend to the bus station, to search for a cheaper gas station, to wind pointlessly through corn fields and rice paddies and feel, temporarily, untethered--and I see the murky crest of mountains on the horizon, let up on the break, and entertain a stirring of something, a feeling like I'm about to laugh or cry.

Here's something I'd like to know: do motorcycles still breed equal parts black smoke and happiness in the mountains of Ladakh? I hope there's a girl without a sense of obligation, of genuine fear, straddling the back of an Enfield with her eyes closed, hands lifted in the air, fingers spread, sun so-hot on her neck, wondering where she's going but satisfied with any answer, satisfied just by asking.

Not morning.

Saturday at 12:57 pm in Mae Sot. Still in my pajamas. House cleaned, coffee drank, lots of quiet except for the street noise--too-big trucks and small dog fights. Almost casual in their violence towards each other.

This town isn't big enough to to be big and (of course) not small enough to be small. Going on six months here and I still wonder what this place is about. Last night, I drank watered down whiskey and coke with a woman I met in India and a table-full of her Burmese friends. There's a new string of bars lining the suburban-wide street that connects one side of the highway to the other. People are calling it Mae Sot, Sukhumvit, to pretend we live in more of a city than we actually do. But then again, the Thai women in high-waisted short-shorts, the neat mess of motorcycles against the sidewalk, the three-piece band in skinny, skinny jeans all do hint at a kind of urbanism I didn't know existed here. See? Six months and I'm still not sure what kind of town this is.

I'm here to teach twenty-four people from Burma about community development. We over-use the word 'community' in the classroom to the point where I don't know what it means anymore. My students come from community-based organizations along the Thai-Burma border. We are currently undergoing data collection for a community development project, to be implemented over the next few months in a local, migrant community. We prepare for our community visits, we meet with community leaders, we identify characteristics of communities.

Guess what? Some of the members of the communities we're working in don't speak to each other. They don't share a common language. Or an interest in speaking. Some of them say, this isn't a community at all. This isn't my land. The Thai government doesn't recognize us. I'm a day laborer. Look somewhere else. Some of the community members are the wrong religion, the wrong colors, came from the wrong place in Burma for the wrong reasons. They made too much money, they didn't make enough money. Trying to understand these people and the places they occupy verges on impossible--for me. Luckily, it's not my job. I just need to pass on what I know about getting to know people, about actually talking and actually listening and resisting the urge to oversimplify. On good days, it's not so hard. On better days, I love it.

From years of moving to new places I know nothing about, I've learned it's the little things that make you truly happy. Clean sheets, good take-out, evenings free. I try to cultivate familiarity so that I can better guide my students (and myself) through the unknown. Of course, the world is so small and there's familiarity even in strange, uncomfortable places. Sitting on a bamboo floor, talking (in translation) with an elderly Karen Buddhist man, I saw in his face--in its expressions more than its features--elements of Tibetan faces, of Tibetan people I've known and loved. Extended gazes, pronounced blinking at the end of a sentence--I've seen these before. Once, when I was twenty years old, I sat on a hard, flat cushion on the floor of an upstairs apartment at a Tibetan medical clinic in India, drinking tea and looking awkwardly at the woman in front of me. Nine years later, I still call that woman mother and I love her like it's true.

Sometimes I think: if I just kept sitting on that bamboo floor, maybe something would grow. Syllables would distinguish themselves into words and I'd piece them together and remember that learning a language is more ambiguous than any high school Spanish teacher will ever tell you. It's not as if one day you don't know and the next day you do. There is so much in-between space to live and work in. If I sat and sat and sat there on that bamboo floor, maybe one day I'd reach a point where I wouldn't understand the community-that-is-not-a-community of which the old man is (not) the leader, but I'd understand how much I don't understand, and all the complexities and un-nameables would open up before me, and I'd be able to finally ask the right questions.