“I’ve been manywheres in Vietnam,” said my friend Lan, a Vietnamese music journalist, over dinner last night at a sushi bar.
“You’ve been everywhere in Vietnam?” I asked, unsure of what I’d heard.
“No, not everywhere,” she said. “But manywheres.”
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Shortly after the protests in Burma started, I emailed a couple of friends I made there, but I hadn’t heard anything back until now. I just got this message:
Hello Tom,
I am so glad to get ur mail. In Burma, gov don’t allow to use
Internet. If so i am very hard to communicate with all of my friends.
I remember you. Yes. Not good condition in Burma. REALLY BAD. I am so
appreciate to remember me and send an email to me. U have been really
kind to me. I have no words to express how am happy to get ur mail.
They killer and they killed even Monks. I think they are evils. I am
fine and safe. But I have lost my ambition to go to [another country].
I feel small. I like to die in these days. I try to encourage myself. I hope
i am getting recover now. Thanks for sending me and remembrance. I
hope we can get in touch by email. . .
Burma breaks my heart. More to say on everything. Today is the 12th anniversary of Aung San Suu Kyi’s detention, by the way. Rallies have been/are being held in cities around the world. Not in Vietnam, of course.
Vietnam, on its way to full membership in the global community.
Admitted to the World Trade Organization. A seat on the United Nations Security Council.
And now, most importantly, Vietnam has its very own celebrity sex tape scandal, featuring Huang Thuy Linh, 19, star of the teen soap opera Vang Anh’s Diaries.
When news of the sex clip infiltrated the gloomy corridors of state-run television–I picture their headquarters in a windowless, concrete citadel–the mandarins at the helm pulled their dusty, comically oversized plug on the show. Clearly, Vietnam is clamoring for nudity. How long can the will of the people be subverted?
Today is my traveling semi-anniversary! I’ve been on the road for exactly six months.
Also, I just broke the 2,000 mark in posted photos (as always, viewable on the Photos page here or on my Flickr account). Someday I will project the longest and most boring vacation slide show in history, a grueling, Warhol-esque art happening.
Does beer count as a performance-enhancing drug?
More to say, but I am off to see The Simpsons movie with my new friend.
I’m in the beautiful old city of Hoi An. The last week or so I’ve been making my way up the coast along the beaches of Vietnam.
Nha Trang: I exaggerated when I wrote that Vietnamese women go to the beach fully dressed, although not by much. I did see a few one-piece bathing suits and even a couple of Annette Funicello-style bikinis to go along with all the long-sleeve t-shirts and pajama pants, but compared to their Western counterparts–those hussies–Vietnamese beachgoers are about as provocative as, well, Annette Funicello.
This is not just a case of cultural modesty; many Vietnamese women have a vampirical aversion to the sun. As in most of Asia, white skin is highly prized here. Skin-bleaching creams fill the shelves, and it’s common to see women dressed like a cross between Michael Jackson and Rita Hayworth: floppy hat, sunglasses, surgical mask, and the kind of arm-length evening gloves last seen in Gilda. They even commit the ultimate fashion sin in their quest for beauty–socks underneath their sandals, all so as not to expose even an inch of skin to that pigment-arousing solar devil.
Lots to come about Cambodia, but I wanted to finish some thoughts about Myanmar first.
During a blackout a few nights ago in Siam Reap, I got into a conversation in a restaurant with a French-Canadian guy (who travels the world as a teacher with Cirque du Soleil!) I told him I had been traveling in Southeast Asia for the last four months. He asked if I had been to Myanmar. When I said yes, he said instantly that he loved it, that it was one of his two favorite countries, Brazil being the other, and asked what I’d thought of it.
I couldn’t, and still can’t, come up with a short answer. I loved it, yes, but I felt a lot of other things too: pity, despair, anger. My conversation in the restaurant was not the first time I’d heard or read someone say that Myanmar was one of his favorite places, and it’s not impossible to see why. Some of it is as beautiful as anywhere I’ve ever been, the people are awesome, and it is simply so different. Refreshing, as long as you don’t think of the brutality and suffering that make it that way.
I don’t know, I think to some extent you find what you’re looking for when you’re traveling, and I know I was partly drawn to Myanmar because it was a “bad” place. I wasn’t disappointed on that front, but then the whole experience turned out to be so much more than that: wonderful, eye-opening, heartbreaking, perspective-changing.
Anyway, notes from the last week or so I spent in Myanmar:
Monywa
After Hsipaw, I went back to Mandalay and then northwest to Monywa, a trading center on the Chindwin River. Not many tourists go there, which is exactly why I wanted to; it turned out, as these places generally do, to be a fun and unpredictable excursion. Highlights included seeing the movie I wrote about below; hanging out with a Catholic priest and some young seminarians; and drinking toasts with a group of drunken men in a Chinese restaurant.
A great site I visited near Monywa was Thanaboddhay Paya, one of my favorite temples so far. It didn’t look like anything I’d seen before: the outside is all Easter egg yellows, pinks, and blues; the inside has over half a million Buddha figures; and the top is a stupa surrounded by small spires that the guidebooks compare to Borobudur in Indonesia. Being among all the Buddhas was like standing between two mirrors reflecting each other into infinity. I remember thinking: if Michel Gondry designed a Buddhist temple it would look like this.
I stopped by the Moustache Brothers’ house one afternoon to drop off an article I had seen in the New York Times which mentions them. Lu Maw corralled me inside and I was served tea by his cousin, the former political prisoner Lu Zaw. Lu Maw quickly put me to work helping him out with some of the English-language expressions he wanted to use in his show (words/phrases he was working on: “groupies”; “bun in the oven”; “energy boost” (which he got off of a bottle of moisturizer); “cheapskate/miser/Scrooge/tightwad”; “straight shooter/shoot from the hip.”)
Here’s a joke Lu Maw tried out on me:
A Burmese man wakes up one morning with a toothache. He gets on a bus and travels all day and all night to the Thai border. He sneaks across, and goes to see a dentist there. The dentist asks him, “Why did you come all this way? Don’t you have dentists in Burma?” “Yes,” replies the man, “but in Burma no one’s allowed to open his mouth.”
In Myanmar, this kind of stuff gets you nearly six years in prison.
To anyone planning on visiting Mandalay: Lu Maw asks for English-language news magazines. He also wants to get his hands on an Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English (Dictionary)
The debate about whether tourists should come to Myanmar is resolved for at least one person. “Tourists keep us alive,” says Lu Maw, one-third of The Moustache Brothers, Myanmar’s most famous comedy/satire/folk opera troupe. He’s not being dramatic. In 1996, Lu Maw’s brother Par Par Lay and his cousin Lu Zaw were performing at a birthday party for Aung San Suu Kyi. Apparently, the regime didn’t find their political satire that night very amusing; when the two returned home to Mandalay they were promptly arrested. They were finally released in 2001, but the Moustache Brothers were blacklisted, banned from performing at any outside events. The brothers began putting on shows at their Mandalay home, and despite pressure and warnings from the government (or KGB, as Lu Maw calls them), they continue to do shows nightly for small crowds of travelers–the only audience for whom they can now perform.
Their show is a mixture of slapstick, cornball humor (including plenty of wife jokes), traditional dance, and political satire. The wiry Lu Maw crouches low over the microphone, delivering commentary loaded with rapid-fire idioms he picks up from dictionaries: his brother was “sent up the river,” he teases, “put in the clink,” “thrown in the Big House.”
It’s amazing to sit in a small room and see what amounts to as public a form of dissent against the government as you’re likely to see in this country, performed by people who were true political prisoners (Amnesty International campaigned for their release.) Lu Maw proudly points out that Aung San Suu Kyi herself sat in this very room as well; she came to see them perform upon their release from prison. As for fears of reprisals, or a return to prison, Lu Maw feels shielded by the attention he gets from tourists: “You are our eyes and ears.”
It still doesn’t sound like a real place to me. For a long time I think I vaguely conflated Mandalay with Xanadu–ancient, splendorous, in a famous poem. Mandalay is the name of the house in Rebecca, while Xanadu was of course Charles Foster Kane’s estate ( “cost: no man can say.”) Can you blame me for thinking them similar? It’s still such a sonorous name to me, with its echoes of mandala, the way the sound falls and then seems to float away on that last long vowel.
After two passes through Mandalay, I will be the first to admit that I was completely wrong. Is it possible to be more wrong about a place?
Splendorous? “Cleaner, greener land?” Couldn’t Kipling come up with a rhyme for “hot, dusty shithole”?
What’s funny is that Mandalay’s not ancient. It’s not even old; it was founded only 150 years ago by King Mindon, who was trying to fulfill a prophecy that a great Buddhist city would one day exist on that spot. There is a large statue of Buddha on Mandalay Hill pointing the way.
Mandalay spent a short time as the last royal capital of Burma and then, in 1885, the British annexed it after the Third (and last) Anglo-Burmese War and turned it into their headquarters for Upper Burma.
As far as sights go: In the middle of the city, there’s a Royal Palace surrounded by a moat; it was recently restored using forced labor, and part of it is a military base. Mandalay Hill is the only high point on an other completely flat plain. A walk to the top is interesting enough, as you pass through several temples, although it had a listless aura to it when I went: no tourists, a few pilgrims, many hawkers of souvenirs lying motionless in the heat of day.
A man approached me with the typical “Hello! Where you come from?” line, which in Mandalay is usually the opening come-on to an annoying sales plea of some sort, from trishaw or taxi rides to money changing. Warily, I told him “America.” He said he had a niece in New York. He asked if I was a student and I said no. He told me that he was a journalist. He still hadn’t let go of my hand from our initial handshake. I asked him who he wrote for, and he told me. I asked him what he wrote. “Not the truth,” he said. “I don’t write with freedom. If I tell the truth…” and he let go of my hand and extended his own two, wrists together, in the universal symbol for handcuffs. “You understand?” Then he walked off.
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