It is nice and refreshing to see a country so free of industrial structures scaring its surface, the annoying
sounds of machines reshaping everything imaginable, and noxious fumes coloring the sky, but it is sad to realize
that perhaps the people would not be so poor had they had some opportunities for industrial growth.
It was difficult to see anything other than food and beverages, books and brick and mortar houses manufactured
in Myanmar. Even bathrooms of the hotels I stayed at had fixtures from Thailand, not Myanmar.
After I had told a few souvenir vendors that I didn’t want anything, they began asking me if they could trade
for some of the things I had such as my inexpensive Thai umbrella or my cheap, $25 American watch. I asked one
vendor who was selling gems from a small case, why he wanted to trade for my umbrella. “Because I can not get
it here.”
Nowhere outside of Japan, I think, is the car market so dominated by Japanese vehicles. One Burmese man
estimated that ninety percent of the vehicles in Myanmar were from Japan. The army transport vehicles I saw
in Shan State were typically Chinese and I saw a used Korean tourist bus, but I think just about all the other
vehicles I saw were Japanese. What made the site of so many Japanese cars even more unusual was that many of the
cars and trucks had Japanese writing on them, Kanji, Katakana and/or Hiragana, suggesting that they had been used
commercial vehicles that were sold by the Japanese to Myanmar. The people of Myanmar, for their part, did what
they could to get every last mile out of the vehicles. More than once I saw someone apparently using superglue
to re-adhere molding around the window opening of a door.
The roads in Southern Shan State, even between relatively large cities, are narrow and frayed at the edges making
it necessary for slower cars to frequently give way to larger cars. Cars and trucks honk their horns when approaching
hidden corners as a precaution and to signal to a vehicle in front of them that they wish to pass. Vehicles that are
ready to be passed often turn their left turn signal on, not to signal that they are moving left, but to let the car
behind them know that it is safe for them to pass.
While driving through the country in a taxi, I noticed a train had stopped and there were people walking around the
front and rear of the train. Speaking in a simple, broken English, I told my driver, “Train broken.” He responded,
“In Myanmar, many broken trains, many broken planes.” I had a plane to catch in a couple of days so this just made
me worry. A broken train is one thing because it can just stop. Try stopping a plane in mid air.
broken boat, Nyaung Shwe
No matter where your international trip takes you, Europe, Asia or some place else, anytime you hire someone to
show you something there is always more to the experience than meets the eye, and this is not always a good thing.
Inle Lake is a popular tourist destination in Shan State if only because of the Intha fisherman. These fishermen
are famous because they often row their fishing boats standing up with their leg wrapped around the oar. Other
boats that ply the river are passenger boats, boats ferrying goods from one part of the lake to another, and tourist
boats all of which are outboard motor boats. The tourist boats are hired at certain areas where tourists are sure to
be found and they will drive right up to an Intha fisherman for a photo. My driver did this on more than one occasion
and since I have a large camera lense, which permits me to take photos of people without being right in front of their
face I would wave him off so as not to be too obtrusive. The fishermen seemed incredibly tolerant considering the
nuisance that our boat posed. This was only the beginning of my tour of Inle Lake which took me to a longyi weaving
factory, a boat making village, a blacksmiths’s village, a cheroot making factory, a silversmith’s factory and shop,
a floating garden village and a “floating market”. Every stop was a place for me to buy something, even the wives of
the boat builders shoved souvenir models of boats in my face to encourage me to buy one, and yet I wanted nothing.
Somehow, when it was all done, I felt I should have been paid for being run through the gauntlet of shops where I was
expected to purchase something.
Taxi drivers, which can be hired to take you from town to town or for an excursion have a network of
associates as well. The taxi driver I hired to take me from Nyaung Shwe to Pindaya and then to Kalaw,
took me to an umbrella shop, Afterwards, I was taken to the most expensive restaurant in the area where
I was the only customer for lunch. Again I chose not to buy anything, but the subtle pressure is pretty intense.
There seem to be more ethnic Chinese Burmese living in the San Francisco Bay area than Burmese. I met and
spoke with two of them. Chou, who was in his ninety’s when I visited him, and Alice, who told me about the
plight of her uncle’s family during World War II.
Chou was born in Amoy, Fujian Province in 1904. His father died before the boy was five years old and his
mother, accompanied by his elder brother and a sister-in-law, took the young Chou to British Burma. During
the four month long journey from the East coast of China through the Straits of Malacca, Chou’s mother began
having stomach pains and died in Penang, British Malaya. Chou’s brother then returned to China leaving the
sister-in-law to take him on to Burma where she joined her husband, Chou’s third eldest brother, and the two
raised the boy.
In 1931, Chou returned to China after nineteen years in Burma, to marry a woman his eldest sister, who still
lived in China, had arranged for him. Chou’s fiancée was an orphaned woman who had been raised by Methodist
Missionaries at a school where his sister worked. The new couple then moved to Bamo, a Burmese town just
across the border from Yunnan Province in China, where they had six children and Chou ran a small import-export
business.
During World War II, the British evacuated to India in anticipation of the Japanese invasion. When the Japanese
arrived in Bamo, they rounded up about forty residents and lined them up in front of a machine gun. They never
shot the forty, but were beginning their occupation the way they would maintain it, through intimidation and force.
Chou maintains that he stayed out of politics because he was a Chinese man living in a foreign country. Yet
he had been a member of the Burmese chapter of Jian Kaishek’s Kuomintang (KMT) since 1927 and had helped KMT
soldiers fleeing the Japanese to evacuate to Yunnan.
The Japanese military police, or kempeitai, visited his business where he also sold food, drinks and other
essentials. They were good customers, always paying for whatever they took and so they became friends,
like brothers to Chou who became an interpreter for the kempeitai. He maintained that those who were arrested
by the kempeitai were only slapped around because the Japanese were only intent on intimidating the residents
into submission. However, he also said that he was on a hit list they had compiled, but since he was known by
a common Burmese pseudonym, “Nice Man,” rather than his real name, they never caught him.
Meanwhile, another Chinese man, son of an Immigrant from Fujian, was taken by the Japanese occupiers from the
village where he lived near Rangoon to northern Burma. The man’s wife and children followed, but he was executed.
The man’s family then began the arduous trip back to their home suffering untold hardships. The mother and three of
the daughters died on the journey.
During my brief visit to Myanmar, there was a general dislike for the Chinese population that seemed second only to
the dislike for the military government. The resentment was based on the fact that Chinese were emigrating from
China and becoming prosperous in Myanmar while the indigenous populations remained poor. A man I spoke with in
Mandalay said that the reason the Chinese were doing so well economically in Myanmar while the country was so
impoverished was that China and overseas Chinese investors in places like Thailand were financing Chinese
businesses in Myanmar. By contrast, he noted, Burmese did not have this sort of relationships to assist them
and the government was doing nothing to help either. In a poorer area of Taunggyi, where most of the home were
huts made of natural materials found locally, the cement and mortar houses typically had decorative Chinese
papers around the doorway. Apart from this relatively benign site, my travels through Myanmar, perhaps by
their nature, did not bring me into contact with “wealthy” Chinese, only a couple of Chinese restaurant
owners, and numerous Chinese tourists from afar a field as Hong Kong and Shanghai. However, one particularly
bitter man I spoke with in Yangon went so far as to suggest, with a straight face, that the government should
institute a one-child policy for Chinese living in Myanmar. He told me he had worked at a factory owned by
Chinese people where the pay was scant and the demand for workers to work extremely hard was intense.
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