From the Land of Green Ghosts:
A Burmese Odyssey
by Pascal Khoo Thwe

Imagined Journeys
When I was young I used to watch the rising sun with amazement. There is a long lake on the east side of my home town which cuts through the blue range of mountains that skirts the lake, and seems to disappear over the south-east horizon. I used to watch the sun emerging from the blue misty mountain, and saw it as a boy climbing out of bed. Then I would gaze at the lake below the mountain where fishing boats were crossing water golden in the first light. The bells of the pagoda could be heard from the top of the hill as the Buddhist monks chanted their sutras. Immediately afterwards the angelus bell rang from the belfry of the Christian side of town.

My mind kept wandering to places I imagined were beyond the blue mountains, on the south-west side of my view, where the frame of the lake disappeared. I asked my teacher at school what lay beyond the apparently borderless lake. He pointed on a map to a famous scenic waterfall, called Lawpita, which was also a hydro-electric installation supplying electricity for half of Burma, and , at the bottom of the waterfall, the legendary River Salween, which starts in China, meanders across Shan State, Kayah State and Karen State, and finally joins the sea at Moulmein.

He told me that the jungles towards Salween were full of bandits and rebels - what he called 'destructive elements' - whose aim was to undermine Burma and the government. Their speciality was kidnapping young girls and keeping them in some dark lair in the middle of the jungle. This gave me a vague sense of fear and foreboding, although I had as yet no idea who these bandits and rebels might be, what they were trying to do, or what the government was. I had fantasies of protecting, or rescuing, my schoolmates who were at risk from these malefactors. At the same time I found myself constantly drawn to imagine what it would be to cross the thick jungles towards unimaginable places and the great Salween.

I always woke up to the songs of Jim Reeves, Paul Anka, Elvis Presley and the Beatles, before I had learnt the names of any of them. My father used to listen to these songs on the government radio. The English programmes were broadcast only three times a day - 8:30 to 9 a.m., 1:30 to 2 p.m. and 9 to 10 p.m. - after the main Burmese programmes, and were introduced with a piece of Burmese music, hectic and unintelligible to me to this day. For reasons I could not understand, every adult in the room sighed with a sort of disappointment when they heard it. Then followed an announcement in English: ‘This is the Burma Broadcasting Service. The news, read by Marie Conway.’ It was not until I was about ten that I could understand those two English sentences.

Radio and our family life were inseparable. My grandmother used to get up early to go to Mass. She had been converted to Catholicism from Buddhism more than thirty years before, but had become devout only recently. By six o'clock she had finished cooking breakfast and strolled to the church which was about a hundred yards away. Either my mother or I cooked breakfast and lunch for the family. Sometimes we had to pound husked rice-grains in a big wooden mortar with a heavy wooden pestle to get white rice - a backbreaking job. For breakfast we normally ate boiled rice, meat, fish and vegetable curries, and fresh seasonal fruits with rice-wine. We offered the choicest bits of food to God and our ancestors at the family shrine.

My father usually switched on the radio to announce that he had woken up. This was also a signal for us to boil the water for his tea and rice-wine, for he rarely ate breakfast. He liked his tea very strong and his rice-wine very dry. My mother could predict his mood from the volume at which the radio was played. All my younger brothers and sisters would then wake up with their cries for breast milk and, later, rice-wine. Sometimes there were fights for possession of the rice-wine pot. Eventually this was solved when more pots were supplied.

It was many years before I began to understand the significance of the radio in my father's life. He was a believer in the Burmese regime - the Burma Socialist Programme Party of the ruler, General U Ne Win. He listened to the state radio with intense concentration as though he was looking for a revelation from above, something that would confirm his faith. When he finally lost that faith, then it was that he switched to the BBC.

My mother couldn't speak my father's language, Padaung, when she married him, only Karen. I myself ended up speaking Burmese, which is neither my father's nor my mother's tongue. Curiously enough, I started to speak Padaung about the same time as my mother. I felt special because I could speak one language more than my cousins. I used to see people in a different light depending on which language I spoke to them in.

As soon as the sun was up, the whole family basked in the sunlight to absorb heat and energy like a flock of swallows on a branch, and discussed the ensuing day's business.

Copyright © Pascal Khoo Thwe 2002.
Posted with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.