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.