Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

I found out all this, and more, by traipsing around Mandalay with him, because he knew the sights, he knew where good food could be found, he was openhearted and candid. I wanted to find the fish soup I remembered from long ago, spiced and creamy, with noodles. It was called mohingas, he reminded me, and took me to a place that served it. He had some too. He took me to a Muslim trader named Soe Moe, to a trader who sold old opium weights, to a Burmese man who made long trips into Nagaland—not the Naga Christians who were numerous on the Indian side, but animists, monkey worshipers and fetishists, living traditional lives in jungle clearings. The Burmese man had piles of weird artifacts: necklaces of monkey skulls and bison teeth and hornbill casques, antlers, masks, bone armlets, knives, swords, spears, and textiles. In trade, the man gave medicines to the Naga people, because no government agencies ever went up the rivers and into the jungles that bordered India.

When I talked to Oo Nawng about the future, he laughed and said, "What future? I'm old!"

"You're my age."

Oo Nawng wrinkled his nose and said, "I don't want to live a long time."

"Because of your kidney problem?"

"No. Because I have no money. How long can I pedal a bike? Maybe two years more. If I get some money, I'd like to live a long time. But if not, I would prefer to die."

All his years of studying, homework, and teaching had allowed him to make this fatalistic statement in perfect English. That's what it came to: his intelligence and fluency gave him the ability to pronounce his own mournful epitaph.

He was one of the millions who didn't matter. He was old, he couldn't fight, couldn't work, wasn't important to the economy—a drain on available resources. The military men who ran Myanmar would have said that Oo Nawng was better off dead. Oo Nawng himself agreed. After a working life of educating children, he was a pauper.

At a fruit juice stand he said, "Eighty-five percent of people are against the government." He sipped his juice. He said, "The other fifteen percent are government relatives. And Chinese."

I had come across this hatred for the Chinese on my first trip. I heard much more of it this time, because the local Chinese were now able to make deals with the bureaucrats and traders in the People's Republic. They were in the gem trade, the drug trade, in food and wood export. The mansions of Mandalay, in walled compounds, were mainly owned by Chinese merchants. The Sinocentric Singapore government, the People's Republic, and India were supporters of the Myanmar military dictatorship, propping up the regime and its arrest and imprisonment of people for political crimes. A number of Burmese told me in whispers that the country was full of collaborators, informers, and spies. Defying all the twenty-first-century trends of liberalization, Myanmar was going sideways and backwards.

The government that had held on for forty years was determined to go on holding on. Quite a lot of money was at stake, because as a well-educated Burmese man told me in Mandalay, "The government is making a lot of money on drugs—on the opium trade. The generals here are all involved with the world drug cartels."

I heard lots of praise for the United States in distancing itself from the regime, and lots of blame for China and Russia and Singapore in supporting it—China especially. But China's prosperity, its need for oil and wood and food, had created a new dynamic. China had no interest in any country's developing democratic institutions; on the contrary, it was a natural ally of repressive regimes. When the World Bank withheld funds from an African country because it was corrupt and tyrannous, demanding that it hold an election before it could qualify for aid, China would appear with money—"rogue aid," with no strings attached, and got the teak, the food, and the drugs.

"We could have an internal coup, but it wouldn't change much," one man told me. "There are no liberals in this government."

This man too had been reduced. "My family had a Mercedes when you were here before. Now all I have is a Chinese motorbike."

"What will come?" Oo Nawng said. "More of the same."

He said there weren't enough tourists, and the ones who visited were not interested in taking a bicycle rickshaw. They wanted a taxi. They spent money at the hotels. He was glad that I had hired him three days in a row, but I would go, and what then?

"I meditate twice a day," he said, as though explaining how he made life bearable. He woke at four-thirty in the morning and sat for an hour. After dinner, he did the same. "My koan is 'Buddha meditates monk.' I pray and"—he shut his eyes and spoke with intensity—"Buddha sits on my head."

It was too complicated to explain, he said. Most of Oo Nawng's teeth were missing, and he was down to one good front tooth.