BURMA: ISOLATED

 

Traveling to upcountry Burma with people from the US Embassy. 1989 

In December of 1987, I found myself flying to Rangoon, Burma. 

Six months before, I couldn't have told you where Burma was on the map. I learned that it was a remote time-warped country wedged up between Thailand, China, Laos, Bangladesh, and India. To get there, I had to fly through Tokyo and spend the night in Bangkok, and then take a flight to Rangoon where the pilots operated with no radar to finally land on a rutted tarmac next to a crumbling terminal building amid swaying palm trees in the hot dust. Rangoon was a low sky-lined city with mildewed architecture from the British Raj dominated by the two-thousand-year-old Shwedagon Pagoda with a tall golden spired dome. I was eighteen years old, a senior in high school, and this was where my mother lived. 

I spent my last year of high school at a boarding school in Pennsylvania since there was no accredited high school for me in Rangoon. I hated it. I was cut off from my friends that went to my previous high school in Virginia, my mother, Chris, Tauna, and Todd, were on the other side of the world, and our only mode of communication with each other in those days was letters, and by landline phones. Plus the boarding school was very rigid with lots of rules to follow. I had no freedom. This ran counter to how my life had been up to that point, and to my natural rebellious tendencies. My escape was to Burma, and ironically, it was one of the most isolated and controlled countries in the world. 

Traveling to northern Burma with my Mom, Chris, and friends. The man in the marron sweater was our driver, Cyrus. 

When Burma gained independence from the British in 1948,  it was called the"rice basket" of Asia. It was one of the wealthiest countries in southeast Asia blessed with an abundance of natural resources and fertile land. But starting in 1964, Burma suffered under the brutal and xenophobic dictatorship of General Ne Win. He eliminated all private enterprise, expelled foreigners, and sealed up the nation's borders, and the country slipped deep into poverty. For years, foreigners were only allowed to visit Burma for no more than 24 hours, then later increased it to seven days. When I arrived, Burma was referred to as a "hermit nation" and going there was like traveling back in time. There were no high-rises, escalators, glass buildings, fast food restaurants, or bars. There was only a little rock-n-roll, a few posters from the movie "Rambo" and other bits and pieces of modern Western life that had slipped into the country. 

People worshipping at the Shwedagon Pagoda, 1987

Chris was the DCM, or Number Two, in the US embassy in Rangoon, and my mother was a political/economic officer. They lived in a 1930s British Colonial house on the American Ambassador's compound, which was a walled and gated verdant lakeside retreat, where, my mother said, they could escape the realities of the 1980s. It was a time capsule, like the rest of the country. The residence occupied thirteen acres and lapped the shores of Inya Lake, and was stocked with a variety of beautiful trees and shrubs, ornamental lawns, and vegetable gardens, and it had two tennis courts and a pool. There was also a large staff, which included a cook, bearers, and wash nannies, and gardeners called Mollies, who tended to the gardens and caught and killed snakes.

DCM's residence in Rangoon

Our house staff with Mom and I, and my friend Frankie (his parents also worked at the US Embassy)

My First Christmas in Burma in 1987 was magical, and I was delighted that I would visit this country twice a year for three years. It made up for going to boarding school. Even though tourists, at the time, could only stay in Burma for seven days, I was allowed to stay for long periods because my parents lived there. 

Burmese children at a pagoda

Rangoon, as a city, was the creation of the British and Indians more than the Burmese, the British had made it the capital in 1852. The Burmans were a minority in the city's populace until after independence. It was a charming city with lakes and parks and twisted old trees and musty old Elizabethian-style buildings, and, of course, the beautiful Shwedagon Pagoda that dominated the city's skyline.   

But traveling to northern Burma gave me a sense of freedom - even if we had to get permission from the government to leave the city (this had to do with insurgents who had been known to ambush cars and trains), and spies followed us, and the local people we talked to were sometimes interrogated by the authorities. We weren't allowed to fly because Burma Airways had had too many deadly crashes. But still, we'd set off on bumpy roads by van - our driver Cyrus at the wheel. We carried such provisions as coolers full of cokes and beer, sandwiches, bags of popped corn, insect repellent, a first-aid kit, Mallox, and Tums, jackets, and sweaters for the mountains, pillows, cameras, books, and a supply of liquor, cigarettes, golf balls, and other American-made items to use as gifts or bribes. On top of the van, we carried six containers of gasoline. Gas was very scarce and expensive in Burma, especially outside of Rangoon. 

In the open countryside, we'd see a landscape studded with pagodas and rice fields, farmers working the rice paddies in their conical straw hats and next to their water buffalos hearing the tinkling of temple bells as in Kipling's ballad "On the Road to Mandalay." We'd see people carrying bundles or ceramic pots on their heads, or long lines of monks wound through the streets, their heads shaved and wearing orange robes and carrying lacquered bowls. They ate by begging from the ordinary citizens, but could not ask for food after noon. 

If you've 'eard the East a' calling, you won't never'eed naught else. 

Many hours later our van would make a slow steady, but treacherous, climb up the mountains into cooler air to places like Kalaw, a former British hill station during the Raj, or Taunggyi, the capital of Shan State. 

Local man in Shan State

In a book by Maurice Collis called Trials of Burma, published in 1938, Collis wrote: "One enters as through a door into such a life. The door closes behind and after a while, one appears never to have been anywhere else." And that's how it felt. We were in a different world. 

It was a place of dreams if you were the adventurous type. 

But when I say a place of dreams, I mean for us travelers. The people of Burma were suffering terribly under a corrupt and oppressive military government. 

By the time I returned to Burma the following summer in 1988, there would be protests and violence.