There’s a photograph that I can recall very vividly, although I haven’t seen it since I was a young boy. In it, my Uncle Nick Bianchi is standing in what looks like a small studio photographer’s set. He is dressed in his Army uniform (I can’t remember his rank) and he has a spear in his hand. I don’t remember exactly if he had one of his feet on the dead tiger in front of him. The tiger is big and looks real, although it might be taxidermized.
The photograph was taken in Burma, where my uncle served in WWII. That name, Burma, has since had an exotic meaning to me. Its contemporary military government changed its name to Myanmar, but it’s Burma to me. It’s also Burma to Emma Larkin, the pseudonymous author of Finding George Orwell in Burma, a splendid book that fuses my interest in Orwell (nee Eric Arthur Blair) with the place where my uncle once “killed” tigers.
I read my 1984, Animal Farm, and Down and Out in Paris and London during my college years. But I didn’t read Burmese Days, which Orwell wrote after a stint as a British colonial cop in Burma in the 1920s until I made my own visit there in 2001. Burma was a colonial station in the 20s, and no doubt had elements of oppression and surveillance that influenced some aspects of Orwell’s later writings on totalitarianism. But one has to read Larkin’s book to appreciate how the efficiently brutal military junta that rules Burma today seems almost to have gone to school on Orwell’s farm and “futuristic” city.
That’s only the beginning of ironies that Larkin, who is fluent in Burmese, exposes in her travels and “interviews” with a fascinating array of local and post-colonials in major cities like Rangoon and Mandalay, and small towns and villages. The tentacles of the tatmadaw, the Burmese Army, reach into all of them. They are virtually everywhere, and that makes Burma a dangerous place for snoopy reporters, [1] and even more dangerous for people who talk to them.
But some Burmese do talk, if often very obliquely. Larkin was introduced to a Mandalay book club where authors hoard forbidden books, struggling to protect them from not just the tatmadaw, but the steamy weather and paper eating parasites. Her experience reminded me of my experience with my guide, Myo. [2] I had discovered in a bookstore in Rangoon, a copy of Burmese Days. Since it is an anti-colonial story it is permitted, even encouraged, to be sold by the junta. I bought the copy as a gift for Myo, who had not read it and knew little of Orwell. I told him about Animal Farm and 1984 and said that I would send copies to him when I got back to Hong Kong. The joke among the Burmese, according to Larkin, is that “Orwell wrote three books about Burma”: Burmese Days, which is about the colonial period, Animal Farm, which—prophetically—describes the disastrous period of socialism started in 1962, and 1984, which mirrors the features of the present regime. But he said I should not bother since they would be intercepted by the mail inspectors and would never reach him. Not wanting to take a chance of getting him in trouble I never tried to send them.
Reading Larkin’s book it is easy to understand why. The internal spy network is like an almost inescapable web, tied together with the permits and paperwork required of travelers that informs the spies of where one is and whom one has spoken with. She might be talking to someone who suddenly gets up and leaves. People speak of the government only by way of metaphor, or through jokes laced with irony. Larkin does not have to strain in the slightest to draw parallels in the ubiquitous tatmadaw and the ever-present “Big Brother” of 1984. The Burmese, who are the ruling ethnic group of an ethnically diverse country containing many peoples and tribes, have long persecuted, enslaved, and murdered people like the Wa, Padaung and the Karen. [3]
One person that Larkin was not able to interview, however, is Aung San Suu Kyi, the duly-elected leader of Burma (and daughter of the assassinated previous leader of the country) who has been imprisoned under “house arrest” for many years, and whose name can only be spoken in coded language. I never thought that back in my school days when I read Animal Farm and1984, that the author was such a prescient travel guide to Burma.
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©2005, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 8.1.2005)
[1] There are nevertheless some courageous journalists, such as Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark, whose The Stone of Heaven: The Secret History of Imperial Green Jade (London: Phoenix Books, 2001) is not only an engrossing history of jade, but also of the fact that the world’s best jade comes from northern Burma. The mining of jade today is conducted in an area of restricted access by the Burmese Army, an almost surreal zone, which these authors penetrated, of slavery, genocide, drugs and the production of the semiprecious green stone.
[2] I had learned from reading signs that myo means “town”in Burmese. So I said to Myo, “Your name must be Town, in English,” but he said that his name, while “romanized” with the same spelling, had a different sound, and therefore a different meaning.
[3] See, for example, Andrew Marshall, The Trouser People; a story of Burma in the Shadow of Empire, (Washington: Counterpoint, 2002, and Pascal Khoo Thwe, From the Land of Green Ghosts (Flamingo, 2003). Marshall took considerable risks in traveling in areas of ethnic minorities, and Thwe, a Paudaung, tells an amazing story that takes him from the jungles of northern Burma to Cambridge University.