Oh, how happy

This is bliss.  These dirty pants and this dirty shirt, my dirty nails and clean smile, my happy happy feet willing to dance, my newly grown smile lines.  I look back retroactively retrospective, or maybe a little introspective, trying to get a little intimate with why I feel so freaking bright pink and I see that it’s been here inside of my blood for a while now.  I see that it has happened.  My happiness, my soul, that little blue light that grows inside of me right behind my heart is glowing and it meets up with other blue lights who make it glow even brighter and brighter, enough to blot out the sun if we wanted.  But the light, my soul, the blue butterfly in its new shiny armor is inside of ME and not inside of a place that I will constantly long to be in, not trapped inside of a memory that will always make my stomach turn, not stuck inside of anywhere except for me and wherever I go, there it is.  Bliss.  Happiness, no longer in pursuit I see it as here, not fully achieved but at least I caught it placed it inside of me and now all I have to do is take care of it.  Smile smile.  Smiling alone in a restaurant.  Laugh laugh.  Laughing at myself smiling alone in a restaurant.  Yes, I could go anywhere, this line doesn’t turn to form a circle that closes around a country and a memory and a face and a period in my life; this line, and the lines around my face, form more lines that lead to more lines and more people and happiness and different places and the same little blue light inside of me that contains all of it and has the capacity to either let it go if necessary or put infinitely more inside. 

Mae Sot will end, I will leave and go somewhere else and be happy.  I will be happy here.  I was happy in Chiang Mai.  Gasp, I was even happy for bits and pieces in the hell of Pattaya, when Jenna and I would find ourselves far enough away from the devil to laugh where he couldn’t hear us.  And, most importantly, I will be happy a year from now, doing whatever I decide to do, and I will be happy tomorrow and if I’m not, if I’m grumpy or something, then I will go for a bike ride and find the little blue light again inside of me.

We love you Mae Sot but it’s alright to close your eyes sometimes.

(Fluidity motivated by the situation I see, and already know)

Escaping from home, the place where it happened, where they made you black and blue on the inside, not to mention torn and dark on the outside, where your heart stopped beating and then, for that moment, you were happy.  Where depression sank you deeper and deeper, like into that mud puddle and you know you will be stuck and comfortably numb if in a few moments you just waited it out.  Where pulling yourself out or up or through by your bootstraps isn’t an option because they, he, them, took that away too when they came and took everything away.  When land confiscation and government-sanctioned kidnappings became places on the map of your soul where you can pinpoint that place in time, that nick on your body, that scar, the night when he came across the bed, the eyelids, that warmth, that comfort of recognition.  How can my own people, my own government, my own family do this to me?  That recognition, confusion, love washes away away away down the hill across the border that night when you pack everything out of horror and you cry because the landslide hit and your family doesn’t matter anymore because they are all the same, the same people that hurt you, that hit you, that took your land and your country and your vote and your virginity they are all the same.  The threshold, the border, the crossing, the backpacks, and schoolbooks, the looks and the phone calls, looking back will always to you be sign that you are going forward because nostalgia is not a disease anymore to you, but rather that disgusting third eye that grew on top of your head and can see everything. 

You move en masse, you go by yourself, across the world, across the border, a few kilometers away, plane ride after plane ride ripping your hair out hoping chunks of your brain come with it, chunks of your memory come flying out and splatter across the windshield to be sucked away by the pouring rain…floods (like that one time, in that one place, only the water ran red when no one was looking but me and I never said anything).  You rip and pull and bang your head against the window seat plate glass, against the pick-up truck window, against your friend, against your backpack, trying to have them leave you.  But they are stuck, like his, their, your hands were.  Stuck in places you will never forget but try to hide and keep dry for the rest of your life.  Stuck in places that only come out of your body in water form when you cry or when you swim and you think no one watches you, stuck in places that only become unfolded in your new job or at night in those places that you would think he, or them, would already know about because he, or them, put them there and he, or them, could hear you letting go of reality when it hit, when it hit like a monsoon.  But he and them never stop, even after you leave the land is still confiscated and they still hurt the things you love the most and your home, however tarnished and ruined it is because of those memories is still STILL the only ONLY place you want to go back to, to shed everything and be open to the plague, the mosquitoes and the flies that have now taken over, the soldiers and the earless families who now call it their home because after you left they saw that they couldn’t listen and their hearts took flight to somewhere only he, or them, knows about.  Your mouth opens wide to scream about it and you can’t seem to remember whose blood you have on your hands or what border you crossed or what is now happening in that place that everyone else calls your home and that you still, in that childish place in your heart, want to go back to.   And as you scream you hear someone else’s teeth fall out of their mouth and look behind you to see thousands upon thousands of people just like you, who look like you and have mouths and bodies and souls like you and are standing next to you looking at the fire pit that was also once their home.  They are screaming with you.  

The Bordertown

I am here and totally deserving.  I am bra-less in my room the windows open and wind from the rain and the fan gently brushing my loose skin.  I am here, my body finally becoming a regular stranger to me, my memories an old friend.  I am here, alone but with friends, in love with this girl I met recently named Rebecca, or Becca, depending on her mood.  I am here, noticing that when my skin peels off because of my expired mosquito repellent that it is *gasp* pink!  And not the dirty ugly pieces that used to fall off me.  I am (quick grab your map of Asia) the purple ink blot slowly spreading its wings, leaking effervescently like dye in champagne or pens in my dad’s old work shirts.  I am making my mark and totally deserving.  I am in Mae Sot.  I don’t know where it is, either.  But I am more comfortable here than I have been in ages, passing through Paleolithic Pattayan Periods where blood and tears were things that martyrs wore on holidays. I have finally decided to not be that, to be this.  To follow and lead, to make people laugh, to have people meet me, to want to meet me, to follow me, to come with me, to invite me, to eat with me, to be invited, to be meek and to ask questions, to be at the bottom of the charitable and never-ending intellectual depths of the volunteers who call Mae Sot their home.   

Everyone must start at the beginning, and, days or months from now I will recognize this beginning as one of my many.  Perhaps one of the most important.  Or perhaps, one of less importance as leaving in this case was the thing that carried the greater weight.  Gosh, I feel smarter now, as my internet tabs carry headings about Cambodian boys being sold to Thai fisheries for work, children dying for organ harvesting, various (shh) NGOs in Mae Sot, Aung San Suu Kyi, and how to pursue my masters in criminology.  Or Human Rights.  Or women’s studies.  Or how to stay here to look at precious powdered (or are they painted?) faces of Burmese migrant children (or are they orphans? Orphaned by their own country, orphaned by the country in which they now live, orphaned by systems that give them no rights but the right to linger, to constantly pursue but to never have) blowing me kisses on the front steps of the shelter that they live in.  I live, lived, will live, for that moment when their faces, and the faces of their caretaker, a woman much younger than me, plucked a baby out of its hammock in the ground floor of the shelter and looked at me with wide eyes… “will you work here?”.  “I hope so”.  I knelt down and made a little boy smile, which in turn made all the little ones smile, which in turn made the caretaker smile; their smiles bursting through what in any other situation would be a stone façade but here is a silent and hard fight carried in their eyes.  The fight across the border for the right to speak in the country they have always wanted to live in.  Burma…I have never thought about you.  I never knew.  Now, it seems to be seeping into my eyelids at night.  The abuse, the prisoners, the action, the uncanny strength in every single Burmese person I have met who has suffered greatly at the hands of the government and left to Mae Sot only to continue to fight in a dangerous way.  Museums highlighting the torture and violence that political prisoners endure are created behind laundromats and hand-drawn maps with the vows of silence that lead me there.  I am quiet, volunteers and NGOs speak out about the human rights violations but are quiet about specific other endeavors that could hinder the ability of their Burmese counterparts to live in peace in Thailand (where they are not officially recognized as refugees and so are mostly migrants, undocumented, floating).  I don’t feel danger or even tension here, simply a profound sense of injustice and the fight to get respect and a liberation that has not been seen in Burma in decades.  

Mae Sot is a border town about five kilometers away from Burma (the border crossing is now closed).  It is relatively small and comprised of factories, NGOs, Burmese migrants, Thai business owners, and foreign volunteers.  The refugee camps are close as well, although I am still not exactly sure where they are and am unable to see them without proper documentation.  The situation in Burma is more dire than I initially thought when I came here and since my arrival I have met numerous ex-political prisoners working for the rights of the current political prisoners (some doing so by going undercover into Burma to communicate with them), teenagers who have crossed the border with their spouses, children, or by themselves, some as few as four days ago and heard stories from my friends who work in the medical clinics of botched abortions , women crossing the border and risking their lives for a medical check-up, and babies with combinations of Dengue Fever and mental disability.  I have only been here for four or five days, long enough to celebrate Aung San Suu Kyi’s birthday at a bar and listen to ex-prisoners speak about their experiences with her, and hear one current prisoners’ recently written letter to the Burmese government regarding their recent claim that there are no political prisoners in Burma, and learn about the silence involved in living here (the Underground). 

I don’t know how I got here, but the thought of coming here has been swirling around my mind for some time now.  I remember hearing someone talk about Mae Sot about two months ago when I was in Malaysia but by then it had already seemed familiar to me.  I wanted to see the refugee camps and when I realized I couldn’t I was already on my way here and decided to come regardless.  Now that I’m here I want to stay.  There are two or three organizations here that I have contacted for volunteering; mostly dealing with women and children.  I don’t know how long I will stay, but I already have made some friends and find myself happy.  The town is beautiful; set in the mountains with a cooler climate and delicious food, trivia nights, plenty of interesting people to meet, hiking, waterfalls, and the amount of excitement that I find satisfying.

Bangkok and Chiang Mai

From the time I was able to escape, not as bandaged as I could have been and just as nervous about being alone as I was two months prior, I took the short drive to Bangkok with all my belongings, leaving more than half of my stuff for Jenna.  I realized that I had, despite my pain and the emotional beatings that Pattaya, Jomtien, Chonburi, had doled out, created a life there.  I was a little bit sad to leave, to leave Jenna behind, to leave the students behind, to venture alone again.  I remembered how absolutely excited I was to not be alone and to have a job again, to feel settled and here I was again in my life giving it all up for the unknown.  I cried when I left and didn’t mean to…it was the ultimate release of a good decision made.  I realized how much of a bubble Pattaya had been when shortly after I got on the bus I got off into Bangkok, into freedom, into the ability to start over and do what I wanted to do.

Bangkok – busy, comfortable, me myself and Jenna and old friends from Malaysia mixing with the rain and the rats from Khao San Road, unsure of myself walking tepidly along rainy streets and alleyways regarding my safety as an old habit long forgotten.  Bangkok – hilarity, finding my laugh again, drinking beer in the afternoon, small luxuries in riverboats that remind me of my grandfather dancing at my cousin’s wedding, smoothly and slowly and roundly, the way all memories should come, like couch cushions softly swaying against my cheek for an afternoon nap, like raindrops near me but not on me, like green grey memories, Bangkok.  Bangkok, freedom, liberation, tiredness, recovery, tea drinking, realizing I had packed too much, lamp-lighting (not fluorescent), friendly conversations with normalcy walking down the street, meeting people my age who were not interested in go-go bars or prostitution but rather…just…conversation and maybe a drink.  Bangkok – a shock of sorts as I realized that for a month I had been living accustomed to a place of high trauma, high cortisol brain involvement, like I did before, in those long-lost folds of my brain and that at times and regrettably it felt comfortable and I learned to silently hate, to see things through my squinted eyes, covered partially by my risen cheekbones because I was always wincing from the pain.  Bangkok…cured me, partially, from that, and brought me back down to normal breathing patterns, to approaching people with sweet and not bitter, with hands outstretched and not “are you here on a sex tour?”.  Bangkok, dirty, slums, brings me back to the reality of a third world country flanked by the beauty of sparkling temples in the night, and houses falling into the brown river on the riverboat ride. Bangkok, where children smile and wave at me because I look funny to them in their untouched-by-globalization-neighborhoods, where a tuk-tuk ride in the pouring rain makes me, alone, laugh out loud and remember what it’s like to have fun.  Where Jenna, who amazingly came to visit because I missed her, and I laughed without restraint and bought t-shirts and allowed ourselves to not be brought down but instead be uplifted.  Oooooh, Bangkok, through the squalor I saw all the colors that the grey of Pattaya nearly drowned me in.

Then, to Chiang Mai, where the elephants live.  The city of the north, in the mountains, where things cool off and broccoli reemerges and your mouth doesn’t fall off from the spice but rather enjoys a touch  of sweetness.  I took the overnight train and blasted into the past – I felt like I was on the first train ever to touch tracks…people smoked long cigarettes in the open-air dining car with temples glittering in the long grass, seats transformed into beds, food was ordered in advance and brought to us, and the toilet led straight to the tracks.  A 14 hour train ride, turned into a 16 hour train ride.  I met a friend, Sarah, who bunked in the bed above mine, and two more friends drinking in the dining car (which was  loud and hot  and had bugs pouring in with all the windows open, barreling through Thailand’s body at an incredible pace, slowing down to pick up people on the side of the tracks and people at train stations with four or five plastic chairs in the waiting room).  These few hours, in this space, were some of the most memorable for me – I felt there was little separation between myself and the tiniest parts of this country, like parts of my heart were flinging themselves out of the windows and landing in the grass, in the temple glitter, or on people’s laps as they waited in plastic chairs, only to be picked up and examined and placed gently in the long grass around them…I felt like part of Thailand, part of the noise and dirt and bugs and the shouting and the heat that brought it all.

In Chiang Mai I found the peace that needed to follow my recovery.  I met up with an old friend from Malaysia and stayed with the girl I met on the train.  We ate delicious food, rode elephants, went white water rafting, trekking, bamboo rafting,  saw women from the long-neck Karen hill tribe, rented motorbikes, saw mountain temples, went to the zoo, and watched Thai boxing.  Although the city of Chiang Mai, protected by an ancient wall and cloud of mist, is strikingly beautiful and calming, the tour that we did that included most of these activities (the rafting, elephants, and hill-tribe) was unsettling.  I felt like I had in Malaysia; like I was extracting a piece of someone else’s culture and selfishly keeping it for myself.   The elephants, abused by their “owners”, trained at rigorous elephant school, separated from their mothers at an early age, hit with a wooden stick when they didn’t obey…it made me a little nauseous, not from the bumpiness of the ride, but from how every time I lovingly patted my elephant’s back in an apology she would swing her nose up to me and sniff at me.  And the bamboo ride, near the pristine river was also near the logging trucks and tons of destruction to build more bamboo rafts and restaurants for the tourists…it was, to say the least, a tour I won’t do again.  Lastly, the Karen long-neck tribe visit -we waited in quiet excitement, hushed by the sadness we had experienced earlier and ready to experience real culture.  As we arrived, our hopes shattered as our guide explained that the women (“long-necks” because they put golden rings around their necks to elongate them, a sign of beauty.  They also place golden shackle-type bands around their legs, right below their knees when they are very young, so that when they are older they can barely walk) come  from Burma for three months to set up stores in a “tourist village” to try to sell scarves, jewelry, their livelihood, while the men stay behind and work.  For mysterious reasons that the guide would not explain, they go back to wherever they came from (here it became ambiguous whether they actually came from Burma, the camps, or the hill tribes that rest between the border of Burma, Laos, and Thailand), soon to return when the demand calls for it.  There were little girls running around with the rings around their necks looking terribly beautiful, women with golden shackles limping up the hill, and teenagers with neck jewelry talking on cell phones while we, 8 white people, walked and stared at them asking to take pictures.  We felt awful, confused, unsure about cultural norms, and unsure what we should do.  That night, we decided to let our anger out by watching some Thai boxing (and the drinking the cheap beer that comes with it).  I have to admit, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. This was the experience I wanted; the loud tinny music, the hot pavement outside the elevated ring, the Thai man taking money for bets, the outfits and celebratory dances performed by the boxers before the match began, the washing of the feet, the cheering in each corner, the loud Thai women who were just as knowledgeable and engaged as the men, and the coordinated efforts of the fighters.  I loved it!  Even when the kids entered the ring to fight and everyone gasped, I was totally intrigued.  They were about 8 or 9 years old and looked so nervous they could barely contain themselves.  The sociologist, or maybe anthropologist, in me calmed my friends down (who were visibly upset) and had them look around at the massive amount of respect they were getting from their families, how their feet and heads were being delicately touched and washed before the match began, how the families in the corner hugged and kissed them before they entered the ring.  I know they were excruciatingly young to fight but Thai boxing here is like putting your child in karate lessons back in the States, only with so much more cultural attachment.  The kids fought, after they each did their well-rehearsed dance to bless the ring, and after the match was over the kid who lost went over to the winning kid’s coach and took a sip from his water cup; a sign of mutual respect.  Then, the two children went to the middle of the ring and with huge smiles on their faces, forgot that they were in a boxing ring surrounded by adults, and gave each other the biggest hug.  Everyone cheered and my friend and I got a little emotional.  Maybe it was the beer, I don’t know.