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.
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