Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

Their sputtering exchanges never failed to leave an aftertaste of disappointment in his mouth. Not that he was disappointed with her precisely. He was still surprised by her mysterious beauty, and his admiration for her as a manager of their new household increased with every passing week. With the salary that he turned over to her, she purchased a few handsome pieces to complete the flat, filled in their wardrobes, and even arranged for a neighbor’s servant to help her clean. She was an excellent cook and seamstress, and a truly gifted nurse (once, when he returned from the wharves wretched because of some bad fish he’d eaten, she spent the entire night by his side, washing his mouth, rinsing out the spattered porcelain, ignoring him when he waved her away in shame). In short, she was more capable and dignified than he could have anticipated. Yet gazing into her sweetly peering eyes, he often felt locked out of a place to which he’d never be permitted entry, because she was Karen, and he never could be.

He began to wonder about the secrets she might be keeping, such as what exactly had happened to her father at the hands of the Burman dacoits, what toll that had taken on her, and why her mother and sister had looked at her with such blame. And also: How sexually experienced had she been before their first encounter as man and wife? Her nightly abandon with him, so in contrast to her demure (enforced?) tranquillity by day, both fed and poisoned his peace of mind. While away from her at the wharves, he had vivid fantasies of her undressed and entertaining some old Karen flame. And at the same time, he became increasingly sensitive to the differences between his Burman and Karen underlings — how the former tended to fly into a rage when slighted, while the latter tended to smolder, even when treated to a generous dose of the former’s sense of supremacy.

He had hardly considered the matter of race when spontaneously determining to marry Khin, his only consideration being his embarrassing lack of awareness of how the Karen were distinct from any other people among the Burmese. Perhaps this had been his privilege as a “white”—though olive-complexioned — citizen of British India. If he was very honest with himself, he understood that he had distrusted the notion of race to begin with. His aunties’ clannishness reeked of false comfort, even of superiority, no less than Ducksworth’s claiming of his Anglo blood reeked of latent self-hatred. But now he felt cornered by questions pertaining to race. Was it a Karen trait, Khin’s preference for the quietness he sometimes found stifling? Had she been taught never to impose, to avoid eye contact, to fold her arms across her chest in conversation, to duck when passing others congregated on the street? He wasn’t at all sure that her habit of refusing his offers to purchase her some tidbit (a coffee, a trinket from a stand) wasn’t in fact a Karen form of modestly accepting . Nor was he certain that the concerned glances she cast him when he asked something of her directly (say, that she use a tad less chili in his lunchtime curry) weren’t in fact meant to be reproving. She very visibly forced herself not to comment when he offended her sense of propriety (as when he walked with a heavy step or shut the doors with a bang). And the few times he lost his patience with her (generally because he was fed up with having to read her mind), she seemed to be on the verge of packing up to leave.

“Leave them, please ,” she beseeched Benny one afternoon when they were walking along the Strand and a pack of runts began shouting crass words about her clothing (because of the unseasonable heat, she was wearing a native tunic rather than one of the fitted and buttoned Burman blouses that she’d come to favor since moving to the city). Benny ignored her pleas, charging over to the runts, taking one of them by the sleeve, and asking him in an English that was meant to put the kid in his place, “Do you know what you are doing?” But, of course, only Benny was stunned by what had just been done to his wife.

And as 1940 progressed and Khin became resplendently pregnant with his child, Benny’s sense of what he didn’t know about Khin and her people seemed to take on the dimension of Burma’s problem — what with a warrant issued for Aung San’s arrest for conspiring to overthrow the government, and the Burman elites and masses, helmed by this de facto leader, attempting to turn the pressure of the wars at large into a domestic opportunity by demonstrating, rioting, and striking. For that matter, Benny and Khin’s troubles seemed to be magnified by the scale of the world’s recent problems — Japan’s capturing of Nanning in China, the Soviet attack on Finland, the sinking of a British destroyer by a German submarine. True, Khin continued to appear mostly secure in their marital arrangement and her life as a member of a minority, just as the British continued confidently to frequent their Rangoon clubs in their ascots and evening gowns, insisting that their hold on Singapore—“the most important strategic point in the British Empire”—was safe, that the Japs were armed with no more than a fleet of sampans and rice-paper planes. But in more ways than Benny could count, he felt threatened. And, without ever admitting as much to himself, he started to ready himself for a fight.

There have been so many unfortunate, and disagreeable, and regretable things in connection with our annexation of Upper Burmah, that whatever pleasant features there are should have full prominence. And one of the most pleasant features has been the remarkable loyalty to the British Crown of the little nation of Karens. It is a nation almost unknown at home here, and is frequently misunderstood and misrepresented, even in India; but it is one with such marked idiosyncrasies and of such peculiar suggestiveness, that we have thought it would be of interest to our readers to set before them a few facts.

That was Charles Dickens Jr., in December 1888, in an essay Benny had very nearly neglected to read. He’d first heard mention of the piece several months before meeting Khin, when the inspector above him at the Rangoon wharf, a Briton and recent transplant to the country, had mentioned casually over tea that it was the son of the great author who had first introduced him to the Karens (or the “little people,” as he’d called them). “Wrote a marvelous little musing on the Karens,” he’d told Benny. “Can’t say I remember the title. In the All the Year Round series, it seems to me.”

Now Benny ransacked more than fifty mildewing volumes in the series, the bulk of which sat neglected on the shelves of the officers’ club library, before opening volume XLIII to the contents and, under the chilling listing “JEWS, SLAUGHTER OF, IN YORK,” finding what he was searching for: “KARENS, SOMETHING ABOUT THE.”

There are times when time is revealed as a mockery. It was as though Dickens were in the musty room alongside him, pulling him by the sleeve, leading him to the worn leather armchair in which the ghosts of Benny’s predecessors had pondered their papers; it was as though Dickens were pushing him down and prodding him to leaf through the volume, thrusting his finger at Benny, and crying with all the reproach of the unheeded: “See what my son saw! Over half a century later, and you people are still living in ignorance! My God, man, do something!”

The article was more comprehensive than its unobtrusive title suggested, covering everything from the term “Karen” (a broad one, if Dickens Jr. was right, and referring to several tribes sharing linguistic and ethnic traits) to the geographic (the Karens of Dickens’s time were spread out from the hills abutting Siam down to Tenasserim and as far to the west as the Irrawaddy Delta) to the topic of origins (drawing on the publications of several of his contemporaries, Dickens Jr. advanced the theory that the Karens had originally lived on the borders of Tibet, then crossed the Gobi Desert into China and journeyed south, although “why they migrated,” he stipulated, “and when they first came to Burmah, remains a mystery”). What was most immediately fascinating to Benny, however, was the article’s meditation on the Karens’ faith, whose traditions the author’s son described as having “a singularly Jewish tinge”(!) with “accounts of the Creation, the Fall, the Curse, and the dispersion of men. startling in their resemblance to the Mosaic records”: