On the way into Mawlamyine the train passed an attractive village, the station post reading
Zingyalk in English. A few days later I arranged my local guy ‘Donel’ to take me, and he knew of a guesthouse where I could stay. It was a 90-minute motorcycle ride past enjoyable scenery of rural
Myanmar, and we arrived at the guesthouse supervised by a teenage boy. He didn’t speak a word of English, and so yet another acquaintance of body language began. The room had a bed and fan, and the shared bathroom in the back consisted of a keyhole toilet and a water trough for taking cold bucket showers. It was $1.50 per night, payable every morning.
My first stop was a family shop across the street where I had a freshly pressed cane juice to quench the heat. Next I walked down a dirt path leading to the train station to get my bearings. There was a group of four men repairing a diesel engine on the tracks, and surrounding the station was a small rock quarry, where maybe 30 girls about 12 years old shuttled crushed rock from a mechanical grinder to a nearby pile in buckets balanced on their heads. Everyone in view was stupefied at the sight of me, and work at the quarry all but came to a halt.
Suddenly I heard a
‘Hey you!’ and spun around to see a chubby, round-faced man with black, neatly parted hair lumbering towards me with his finger outstretched. He clenched my arm above the elbow and led me into the train station, where he offered me a seat and a glass of iced tea. It was difficult to gauge the situation given his conflicting behavior, but obvious that he was a government official. He disappeared into an office with my passport, returning five minutes later with his index finger aimed between my eyes like a laser: ‘
Hey you! USA? American?’‘Yes,
USA.’
‘You leave! Now! Back to Mawlamyine!’I played dumb, pointing up the hill to a pagoda, trying to reinforce my role as a tourist. He handed my passport back, and lifted me out of the chair by my arm. He was escorting me to the main road, where he sat me down again and stood, lighting a cigar, waiting to flag a shared taxi. I tried several times to stand up, but he restrained me by the shoulder. There were petrified faces everywhere I looked and it was now a fully unsettling situation that I had no control of. Why was I being expelled? Perhaps the child labor I had observed, but who’s to know. My priority now was to depart this village safely, and ideally with all my belongings. The man walked towards me, again pointing, and demanded money: ‘
Hey you! Dollar, for me.’‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’
‘You give me dollar!’ I handed him a one-dollar bill, and he returned an evil smirk, stuffing it into his
longyi. I was prepared to give him more, and was surprised at his contentment.
It was imperative that I get back to the guesthouse to retrieve my other bag before the shared taxi arrived; once it arrived, any feedback from me would be misinterpreted as resistance. I attempted to explain this to him to no avail, and finally produced a room key which he at once understood. He allowed me to gather my things and when the taxi arrived, grabbed my bag with one hand, my arm with the other, and shoved me onto the tailgate of the pickup truck, and I squished into the caged bed with a dozen others. As we pulled away, the kid from the guesthouse ran after the truck to return the money I had paid for the room.
In
Zingyalk my impression of life under an autocratic government crystallized.
Myanmar has courts,
per se, but no rule of law. During my visit, many conversations with Burmese have included complaints of their overbearing government, but now, for the first time, I began to appreciate the nature of their frustration. (The Burmese are subdued in this regard however: the illegal act of conversing in political topics with foreigners is punishable with imprisonment.)
