Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

“You don’t think Aung San has. reformed?” Benny ventured.

Saw Lay gave him a sidelong, disbelieving look.

“You don’t think it’s possible that he actually wants something like democracy here?”

“Democracy,” Saw Lay said, his tone full of contempt. “Yes, this is the word that makes the British sit a bit easier with themselves now. One of the things they don’t seem to understand — that no one outside Burma seems to understand — is the duplicitousness of most Burmans, even those who are highly educated and who seem to have the ‘Frontier’ peoples’ interests in mind. How very Western to trust the word of a man who speaks fluently, intelligently, even brilliantly. How very Western to trust that he has the same code of honor. How naive to think that because he makes one sweeping gesture toward Western democracy he couldn’t possibly at that very same moment be plotting a systematized form of inequality — a state in which one ‘dominant’ race rules and is sanctioned to discriminate against others — against ‘minorities’—minorities that together make up half of the population, though no Burman would ever admit that!”

The alcohol and tobacco had done their work, relaxing Saw Lay’s agitation so that he openly seethed as he spoke. Benny wanted to say something to soothe him, but he sensed any speech would only further incense his friend.

“I’m so tired of their story that we’re only minorities!” Saw Lay cried, jumping up from his chair and going to the window. The sun had finally begun its descent, bringing with it a breath of cool air, which Saw Lay loudly inhaled as though gasping for life itself. “We Karens are a national group on a given territory that is our homeland ,” he said. “ They were the invaders. We were here centuries before—”

“Isn’t what you’re speaking of, Saw Lay,” Benny interrupted him gently, “a kind of tribalism?”

Now Saw Lay turned to him with outright reproach in his eyes.

“What I mean to ask is,” Benny carefully went on, “isn’t Aung San correct in a sense — that the best thing would be for us to form a perfect union, as the Americans put it? We could, after all, rise to the top in such a union, instead of always being the outsider, the other.”

If Benny had felt excluded by Saw Lay’s “we” before, the frostiness that came over his friend now left him entirely out in the cold. Saw Lay went to the table where he kept his tobacco and mechanically rolled himself another cigarette, which he lit and held to his lips. “You surprise me, Benny,” he said, after he had exhaled. “Aung San’s talk of unity. Surely you know ‘unity’ is just the word tyrants use before heads begin to roll. But very well. Let us take your American example. I’ll pass over the very obvious case of the American Indians, who have been incorporated into that perfect union with such stunning success—”

“Saw Lay—”

“Suppose—” the man persisted, but with a trace of his old politeness, “suppose that your Americans suddenly found themselves being overrun by Japs. Say Hiroshima never happened and so on. Say that we had lost the war, and suddenly America is overrun. Americans are no longer permitted to speak English in any governmental setting; their children must learn their lessons in Japanese, learn a ‘history’ that mocks their ‘minority’ perspective. Say that in theory their children can rise to the top rungs of the social and political ladder — but only by adopting Japanese values, a belief in the superiority of Japanese blood, and even a disdain for American primitivism. American religion — be it Christianity or anything else — is, if not formally stamped out, labeled crude, ‘aboriginal.’ Or say something more radical happened. ” He had begun to pace, and as Benny watched him, as he listened to him, he felt drawn into an old comfort: some slip of his old cautious friend had reappeared, had survived after all, in spite of the setbacks. “Say that these Japanese rulers institutionalized handicapping Americans by cutting off their hands if they were found with reading materials or writing implements, so that before long — without a written language, without a written history, without access to education — Americans were as ignorant as the Japs said they were. If, instead, these Americans refused to relinquish their writing and language and values and culture and history so easily, would that be ‘tribalism,’ as you call it?”

“But—” Benny started, and Saw Lay held up a hand to silence him.

“But,” Saw Lay went on with a fanatical gleam in his eyes, “in the better of these two scenarios, these Americans would have the right to speak their own language and practice their own religions in private, you argue! Why should they insist on educating their children in English, and on practicing a form of government that coheres with their American cultural tenets?”

“That wasn’t going to be my argument! You’ve conveniently chosen an example of a group not bound together by racial sameness! Not to mention the fact that the Burmans made slaves of the Karens hundreds of — if not a thousand — years ago.”

“And so what? It is time for the Karens to accept their lot — like the American Indians? Oh, yes, I know how this argument goes. It’s the history of the world, one group invading another’s territory, swallowing them up. But we’re still here! And you’re conveniently forgetting that our problems were largely resolved for a century under the British — resolved until a mere five years ago! This is a critical juncture! When, for all intents and purposes, we won the war for the British in Burma, and thereby aided the Allies’ overall effort in the Pacific — and therefore have a right to expect something in turn. And you’re absolutely incorrect that the Karens are racially homogeneous — there are more subgroups and dialects of Karens than I care to name. Black Karens, White Karens, Red Karens — Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, animist — all Karens with a shared vision of self-determination. You, for example, are Karen and racially different from me.”

This last point, delivered with a smile, had the effect of making Benny smile unexpectedly in turn, of disarming him at precisely the moment that Saw Lay proceeded to discharge his most explosive point.

“Mark my words, Benny, with or without Aung San, the Burmans will try to wipe us out. And Aung San’s insistence on a union will lead to Burma’s destruction. Which is why, with or without the British, we are forming our own union. The Karen National Union. If London truly wants to secure future peace, the only course is to divide Burma into autonomous nation-states.”

For a moment, Benny couldn’t respond. “And if that doesn’t happen?”

Saw Lay crossed to his chair, picked up his bottle of beer, and drank at length. When he set the bottle down, he put his bloodshot eyes on Benny again. “What you’ve done for the Karen people is no secret — what your business smarts, your money smarts, have done. If it should happen that the British concede everything to Aung San — you see, we need to prepare.”

“You’re talking about — about armament?”

“How much could you give us to help?”

All at once, Benny wanted to tell Saw Lay that everything had been forgiven, that he loved him as innocently as on the day they’d last sat together on the Khuli riverbank; but that would have been a lie: if it was too late for a peaceful union of Burma, it was also too late to recover the peace they had once shared. What had been done would go on finding its ways to wound them.

“I reinvest almost everything into the businesses,” Benny stammered, but already he felt himself weakening — waking to some ancient instinct to resist injustice, to come out swinging. “I don’t have much in the way of capital,” he stammered on. “Money’s always going in and out.”