Duality

I recently left a town where young men with too much time on their hands and who have been listening to messages of hate from a human in monk’s clothing went on a rampage against their Muslim neighbors, burning down their house of worship and an orphanage. That bears repeating: a mob of young Buddhists burned an orphanage to the ground because it’s orphans were Muslim.

On the following afternoon I stood in front of my hotel and watched at least 100 small motorcycles go screaming by, sounding like massively oversized gnats. Each and every  motorcycle had a driver and a passenger holding at least one weapon—a stick, an iron pipe or piece of rebar, or a large knife. Most passengers held extra weapons for their drivers.

Here’s an image forever burned in my memory: the riders on four or five motorcycles, and in a couple of cases both the drivers and riders, stood out because of the color of their clothes. In Myanmar, monks’ robes are often described as saffron, sometimes maroon. Monks can’t help but stand out wherever they go, but that is especially true in a sea of t-shirted and blue-jeaned motorcyclists, double-especially when they are carrying clubs, pipes, and knives just like their lay comrades, looking for Muslim businesses to attack or individual Muslims to exact revenge.

It’s important that I take a detour here to make sure that this image is interpreted as precisely as possible. Myanmar monasteries are filled with young monks who are there for one of two reasons: it is a traditional practice here for all young men to have their heads shaved and to wear robes for a week, occasionally longer. Think bar mitzvah or confirmation. The second reason is that their families cannot afford to educate them, or in extreme cases, educate and feed them. So they essentially give their sons to monasteries that have the resources to do both.

In other words, Myanmar is filled with young monks who are not in monasteries for the free dharma lessons. Many of them regularly sneak out to shoot pool, watch soccer on TV, hang out at betel nut stands with their home boys, and do what teens and early 20-somethings can be seen doing all over the world: wasting time. In their undeveloped brains, grabbing a weapon and using it to beat someone from another faith while wearing monk’s robes makes sense, the Buddha’s teachings on compassion be damned.

They are not by any means the majority of monks in the Sangha (the official name of the national organization of monks in Myanmar), but they are part of a growing Buddhist nationalist movement within the Sangha that is very worrisome.

The events in Lashio and the images and sounds I heard were powerful enough that three days later, back in Pyin Oo Lwin, I heard the sound of a large number of motorcycles approaching, and I reacted with fear—a new mind circuit being triggered. It turned out that those motorcyclists were part of a very large funeral procession for someone who must have been truly revered. Later that same day I was working on editing in my hotel room when I heard the voices of a large number of males in the distance, chanting in an organized way. Again, a fight-or-flight reaction automatically arose. This time it turned out to be a large group of soldiers—200-300 in orderly columns—out doing their jogging for the day. No guns, no helmets, just soldiers from the local military academy doing their daily running in my neighborhood.

I went back to my room, looked around, and realized how fat my situation was. My hotel had a large double bed, a TV with cable for watching anything I wanted, as long as it was in Chinese or Burmese (plus BBC), and a shower with hot water on demand (unusual in cheaper guest houses). Every morning I ate my free breakfast in a large manicured garden. All for $15/night. When I needed wi-fi, all I had to do was walk five minutes to a little restaurant run by two sisters-in-law, one of whom spoke fluent English and loved to laugh at the same things I do.

The following morning I decided to walk a bit farther—20 minutes or so—for my breakfast and wi-fi hit. I had a bowl of mohinga (fish stew) and a freshly brewed cup of coffee made from local beans on the porch of a restaurant next to a large nursery filled with flowering plants. Breakfast cost $1.50; I added a 33% tip. The restaurant is a modern, open-air building less than two years’ old. It serves lemon squares.

I giggled.

Lashio (where the riots were) and Pyin Oo Lwin (home of the $15 hotel) are at the two ends of the Myanmar spectrum. It takes almost no effort to do the country’s soft side and to keep one’s head in the sand. It took me longer than I want to admit to understand how I had fallen into the media trap of good-versus-evil in Myanmar. Myanmar has a middle class, one that did not drop out of the sky, fully formed, after the 2010 elections.

The Lashio experience was great in one respect because it confirmed some ideas I had in my head before I got on the plane in Seattle in late February. I told you that I had attended 10 weekly lectures on Myanmar sponsored by the Seattle Art Museum/Gardner Center for Asian Art last September through December. And being who I am, I also read a big bag ‘o  books on Myanmar before my departure, mostly recent histories and political stuff.

The last book I read was Nowhere to Be Home, a collection of stories of people who were persecuted in one form or another by the military regime, funded/published by Dave Eggers’ publishing company. Some of the storytellers were forced into prostitution. One was forced to walk in front of a line of Burmese soldiers looking for insurgents, acting as a human mine sweeper. Others did hard time in prison for political speech and organizing.

If I remember right, the book had 28 such stories, and at the end of each one I would say, “OK, that’s enough, no more, I got the idea, I don’t need the depression.” Then I’d start reading the next.

These are the reasons why I look at each and every person over the age of 30 or 40 and think, “What’s your story?” For elderly people I simply assume that their lives have been insanely difficult. That doesn’t have to mean suffering from political repression or violence at the hands of the tatmadaw (the name of the military regime that has controlled Myanmar for most of its post-World War II history). But every once in a while I’ll meet a cab driver who spent six months in prison for voicing support for the National League for Democracy (Aung San Suu Kyi’s party), or a local businessman who spent five years in the slammer for the same reason before becoming a successful money-maker.

Other times I’ve met elderly men who are more interested in boasting how they fathered 13 children than in describing any of the other hardships that they suffered (let alone what their wives suffered).  

I have had many more opportunities to interact with young men and adolescent boys like the ones who burned down the mosque and orphanage in Lashio. Similar to my own adolescent cluelessness about the suffering that my parents went through during the Great Depression and World War II, those kids either don’t know about the suffering of earlier generations, or know but don’t understand it with any depth, or are too busy with their normal teenage stuff to ponder it. I’ve wracked my brain trying to avoid this cliché, but what I see is great potential for a “lost generation” in Myanmar, a large chunk of adolescents without jobs, without schooling, and open to messages of hate against a group that I’m told constitutes 4% of the country’s population. 

Back to Pyin Oo Lwin. If you walk 15 minutes beyond the restaurant where I ate the $1.50 breakfast while I checked my email, you’ll enter the grounds of the National Botanical Garden, an exceptionally pleasant place. It has a walk-through aviary, an orchid garden, and a butterfly museum. If you walk back toward my $15 hotel you’ll go past the Feel Restaurant, which sits on a lake surrounded by houses owned by the Burmese 1% (maybe 10%).

Less than 10 minutes from my hotel is another restaurant called The Clubhouse that has a large porch overlooking a well-tended garden. The main part of that restaurant is in a house that was built by the Brits in the 1920s, when they owned Burma.

It is possible to stay and eat in these kinds of places and never have to confront the idea of anti-Muslim riots. For foreign visitors like myself, who may not be very high on the economic ladder in America but who are incredibly rich compared to the average Burmese, this is a magic time for visiting Myanmar. For no other reason than I am a white Euro-American visitor, I am given deference. I eat in really nice restaurants with beautiful interiors and spend $6 or $7, espresso included. People smile at me all the time. They are happy to know that I like their fish stew.

I’m experienced enough to know that it’s all an illusion, and I’m not talking Buddhist cosmology here, though it helps. I'm taking full advantage of the situation in-between my excursions into the gritty side of Myanmar, while keeping in mind the dual reasons for my visit: meditation and giving something back.