Burn This Book (3 of 11)

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COPYRIGHT
Burn This Book by Toni Morrison (Ed.). Compilation copyright 2009 by HarperCollins Publishers.
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

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The Man, the Men at the Station (Cont'd)

And, I began to suppose, people like me. I added to Maung-Maung’s collection of addresses and photographs, and after I returned to California, I often heard from him, just as I heard from other Maung-Maungs I had recently met in China, the Philippines, Nepal. Every few weeks, so it seemed, a worn blue envelope would arrive, with his looping script—”Maung-Maung, Trishaw Stand, Mandalay, Burma”—on the back, and stamps that must have cost a day’s wages or more to buy, even when the letters were smuggled out through foreigners traveling to Thailand.

He was still at his trishaw stand, my friend wrote, in carefully inscribed English (I thought of the dictionary, the almost lightless room from which they came); he still hoped to become a teacher of mathematics. “Sometimes I don’t even get one kyat for a day,” Maung-Maung wrote. “Anyhow, I will try to improve for my living and I will support to my old parents. I have to try for success, then happiness. But I don’t want to wish for what is impossible.”

He never asked me for money or presents or support for a visa; he asked only that I never mention politics in my letters, and that I remember how often letters got intercepted and devoured by the wrong eyes. I followed every precaution, but still, at some point, I realized that the letters had stopped. I shuddered to think what might happen to a curious and intellectually engaged man in Burma, where the government was fearful of everything and ruled on astrological whimsy, at one point outlawing all currency notes in denominations of 10 and 5—because 9 was a more auspicious number—and thus effectively robbing the people of all their savings.

I scheduled a trip to go back to the country, partly to see my friend again. But one day after they issued my visa, the consular officials at the Burmese embassy in Tokyo happened to see my photo in Time magazine, realized I was a journalist, and called me up to ask if I would mind if they canceled the visa (since the alternative was going to Burma and being arrested on the spot, I accepted). That same month, demonstrations broke out in the capital and three thousand people or more were killed.

This is a story that every traveler will recognize; I would come to know it by heart as I traveled to North Korea and Ethiopia and Laos and Haiti. Words cannot easily do justice to the lives that crowd in on one in most countries in the world, and ask why they shouldn’t receive an answer. Burma, after the demonstrations, became Myanmar, even farther from the notice of the world; occasionally it would slip into the news, as a factor in some geopolitical equation, but for most of us it disappeared entirely behind a curtain, just as its government hoped it would. Of the government, indeed, we heard now and then; of the people, cloudless, good-natured, and as sweet and kind as any I had met on my travels, we never heard at all.

“How can you go to a country where your very presence there counts as a vote of confidence in its oppressors?” friends sometimes asked me. “Every penny you spend goes towards the oppression.” It was never an easy question to answer, but when I thought of Maung-Maung, and all his neighbors, I imagined that if they were asked, they would nearly always vote for our presence. Without us, they were essentially condemned to solitary confinement for life.

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