a shared taxi

A shattered mazda station wagon pulled up outside our hotel in Mandalay. Like so many cars in Myanmar, this vehicle looked like it was hold together with duct tape and luck. After hoisting our backpacks into the back, we climbed in into the back. Lana sitting in the middle with my at the window seat.

Seated next to us in the backseat was a young kid of about seventeen or eighteen, wearing a blue track suit. His eyes were a bleary red and his skin was stretched tight across his face. He smiled nervously at us and then looked at the women sitting in the front seat, a look of surprise and bemusement about sharing this taxi for the next four hours with a stark blond and a gigantic man. After a few minutes of sitting somewhat awkwardly, not knowing if either of them spoke a word of English, the lady turned in her seat and with a most pleasant smile asked, in halting English, if I’d like to switch places with her. I fumbled for a moment at the question. From the information given to us by the hotel clerk, the front seat passenger paid an extra 2,000 kyat for that privileged position and I wasn’t sure if it’d be polite of me to accept. But overcoming by initial hesitation, I quickly lunged at the chance not to spend the next five hours contorted in the back, my legs already threatening to rebel against me.

The women who so generously offered to take my place in our shared taxi was a short, round woman of about 45 or 50. Her hair was neatly trimmed above her shoulders and she wore a black and white sweater. But more than anything, what I noticed about her was her smile.

She told me that she was a garment factory manager who worked in Yangon, pronoucning it with the colonial “Rangoon.” This was to be her first trip back to Hsipaw, her hometown, in the past seven years. When hearing this, I audibly repeated, “seven years!” in amazement that someone could have been away from home for so long. Her homecoming, however, was not to be a joyous affair. The purpose of her trip, in fact, was to visit her mother who was suffering from a probable fatal heart condition.

I asked her if she preferred Yangon or Hsipaw more and she smiled (a seemingly automatic response to nearly all my questions) and replied that she of course would rather live in the countryside. But her job in Yangon was reasonably well-paying professional position in a country that was in desperately short supply of such careers, and she therefore had to make the move down south.

From the outset of my trip, I’d been curious about the reaction of Burmese people towards the American embarago. In 2003, President Bush enacted harsh sanctions on the country, forbidding any American company from doing business in Myanmar. She told me that the embargo had in fact hurt her company. For many years they’d had a contract to supply inexpensive plain white t-shirts to an American garment company. The division had been the most profitable for her factory but was forced to close after the sanctions were put in place. “My workers keep asking me when it reopen,” she told me with her customary smile, “but I have no answer for them.” When asked about how Burmese felt towards the embargo, she shrugged her shoulders and said “most people understand that it had to happen.”

As we pulled up to her family house in Hsipaw, a squat-one story with a traditional wood shingled roof, a group of what I guessed were family members came solemnly out from the courtyard. I wasn’t sure how they knew we were coming at that moment, but a young boy came up and silently took their luggage.

She turned around to say goodbye to us and I wished her mother good health. She responded in a quiet barely percetible voice with the words, “she will die.” And then she smiled warmly at us and entered the house to attend the vigil.

scratching the surface

Flipping through the photos I took of our trip to Myanmar, I realized I’d captured a skewed vision of the country. My images were dotted with serene monks holding umbrellas, smiling children with thankin painted faces, and vendors selling religious icons. That is not, however, the Myanmar I will remember. It glosses over in a very disturbing way some of the harsh realities, daily lived, by Burmese residents.

The Myanmar that will live in my memories is a small boy with postcards dangling from each hand, chasing a fat Western tourist outside a paya in Yangon. A guide in Hsipaw picking up a teak leaf and telling me how the Shan people once used them for wrapping sticky rice and other food. But now the teak trees are gone. Sold off by the Tatmadaw and the Shan People’s Army to finance their arms war, with the effect being a landscape littered with plastic bags. A school teacher in that same town, recounting his story of imprisonment and torture, degree denial and job loss, all for his role in the democratic movements which have periodically swept the country. A women and her son who shared a five hour taxi ride with us as we went sightseeing in the Shan Hills and she returned to her village for the first time in seven years to visit her mother who was dying of a heart condition. And a hyperkinetic monk in Sagaing with an ink-stained hand filled with daily notes and random numbers, smiling and screeching, “I dare not say” when asked about his life in the monastery and his future plans.

These are the stories that are not documented in my tourist photos. The people who smiled at the opportunity to share their tragic stories with an outsider.