THOUGHTS AS WE MARCH INTO MARCH

Here it is already March 1. Lots of birthdays around this time, including my lovely mother-in-law Ann (Feb 28) who died over twelve years ago, and my father Adrian (Feb 29) who died in 1969 at a too-young age. There are lots of still-alive people, close friends and some relatives too, to celebrate as well, but they should probably remain anonymous…a lovely collection.

The turn into March feels momentous every year, perhaps a little like the turn into September. It’s not yet the end of winter, but the promise is there, of springtime and renewal.

Of course I am writing all this with pictures of winter and spring in my mind’s eye that don’t at all match what I see out my window. For I’m in Chiang Mai, where it’s already hot, with a haze from stubble-burning greying the sky and thickening the air. On the other hand, this dry season blending into hot season is also, like winter, a kind of dead-plants time, that will end with the “spring” that early rains bring, greening the ground and the trees.

Meantime the first durians have appeared in the markets, a little stenchy in an inviting way, and mangoes and papayas are showing up too. Yum. Every season has its disadvantages and its compensations. I’m inclined to focus on the compensations, especially the seasonal foods, for they need to be appreciated while they’re available.

And I leave here on Tuesday, so my awareness of the glorious fruit that I’m about to miss is acute!

Toay I dropped by Akha Ama coffee for a cup of some of the best coffee anywhere (no, I know I’m not an expert, but I have to say it…) and there was Lee, the man who started it all. He’s Akha, young and loaded with creative imagination and energy, and some years ago he persuaded his family and his village to start growing coffee commercially. They’re doing very well. I can only imagine the strain and effort it took to persuade the village to embark on all this. After all, the Akha haven’t survived for centuries by being pushovers or flighty adopters of each new thing that comes along. Instead they have been tenacious survivors, brilliant and thoughtful agriculturalists with a rich material culture.

And now here they are growing world class coffee in Northern Thailand.

I wonder what this will all look like in five years…

I stopped in for coffee because I was in the area, having pedalled out to Niemenhamen soi 13 for a meeting at the best Friends Library. They are the sponsors and arrangers of my two BURMA book speaking events tomorrow. The afternoon session is small, at the Library (which has very little space). In the evening there will be more room – it’s at Documentary Arts Asia. Garrett of the Library and I met today to talk about room arrangements, food (he is doing most of the cooking, with help from friends), and the timing of the events.

It was hard for us to get focussed on those details, since we had so much else to talk about, mostly centred around the current crises in Burma – the war in Kachin State and the ongoing Rohingya situation in Rakhine (Arakan) – and the seeming failure of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi to be effective or even speak out with any clarity, about either. There seems to be a problem, and perhaps it’s to be expected, that the qualities that made her strong and dynamic as a persecuted opposition leader in a kind of internal exile are not ideal for dealing with the complex realities of ongoing politics. A leader needs people who argue and disagree with her/him, and needs wide-ranging discussion. She also needs a team to deal with the day to day practical details, handlers of various kinds. But Saw Suu apparently refuses to have handlers. And a leader needs to develop sophistication and strength in a team, so other people can carry part of the load and develop necessary skills. This also seems not to be happening.

It is heart-breaking to see how let down by and mistrustful of Daw Suu the non-Bamar peoples of Burma have become. It weakens the country.

Of course there is often let-down after the first euphoria of success or freedom or election. But this is deep distrust and dismay. It makes all of us who worry about Burma feel great concern.

So if you are interested, I suggest that you read news from the Irrawaddy and from Mizzima. Both are independent papers, published outside Burma.

I hadn’t intended to write about all this. It is a subject people talk about amongst

themselves, but not out loud in public much, not yet.

Instead I had intended to write about the people I saw today at the Haw market in Chiang Mai: the older Shan woman who works at the soup place I like, who walks awkwardly on legs a bowed from malnutrition in her childhood and yet works non-stop; the young women of various kinds in their platform shoes teetering through the market; the Muslim woman by the gate with a wooden leg and a baby, waiting for alms from passers-by without asking or even looking up; the mountain-grown vegetables green and bursting with life; the many languages, most opaque to my ear, though I recognise northern Thai, Yunnanese, other Chinese, Shan, Burmese…  It’s a rich brew, every Friday morning, this market opposite the mosque. There are stories and stories, I am sure.

And like most things in life, all I can do is look inquiringly, try to tune in, and know that all I am seeing is the surfaces of things. For each of us has our own story and perspective, and how much of anyone else’s can we hope to understand?

OUT & ABOUT IN RANGOON

It’s Saturday evening in Rangoon. People are out and about drinking and doing karaoke, eating hotpot out on the sidewalk, or just strolling in the warm air. What then am I doing sitting inside typing on this keyboard?

Well I think I’ll move to a small café nearby, so I can have a snack and a beer as I write this. But I do need to be writing, for life is about to get a whole lot busier in less than twelve hours. A good friend named Min is coming by for breakfast at 8 tomorrow morning, then I have some further research for an article to do mid-morning. And after that there’s the move to the Summit Parkviw Hotel, where I will meet the Burma immersethrough food group tomorrow afternoon and head out with them before sunset to Shwedagon and then to supper.

It’s strange to be here as a tourist and yet at the same time have a rather full work agenda. For over three  years I made regular trips to Burma to do work for the BURMA book. And during that time I was rather single-minded, with a sense of urgency, on every one of those trips. I avoided local ex-pats and also anyone who was “connected”, not wanting to lean on anyone, or be a parasite. I needed and wanted to find things out for myself (for better or for worse!).

Now that work is done. I have the tour work coming up of course, but I have also had almost a week of hanging around in Rangoon. And that has produced all kinds of interesting encounters with ex-pats, Burma specialists, and others. I have learned a lot of gossip, and heard about deeply interesting Burma-based research in linguistics, agriculture, and more. I’ve also seen an incubator kitchen in action and heard other food-related projects being explored in talk.

Some of this stuff is entirely new, a product of the changed political and social landscape here. Some of it has been going on in one form or another for while, but I have not known about it because of my wilful avoidance of ex-pats and connected Burmese. I have no regrets, I have to say. Hearing now about exciting ideas and projects in Burma is like watching the desert bloom after never dreaming it could rain a drop.

And at the same time of course, this energy and forward movement is happening in a fragile place and space. There’s still fighting in Kachin State, and huge perhaps never-resolvable tensions and hatreds in Rakhine State. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was at the photo exhibit I went to late this afternoon after the book launch party. She was there as its patron and as a judge in a photo competition. The press of people wanting to see her, photograph her, get a whiff of her fairy dust, was a little dismaying. It’s natural I suppose, this elevation of a remarkable person to icon status.

But it can’t really be doing her any good, can it? Like everyone else, she is only human, and the strengths that saw her through isolation, harsh choices, and house arrest, may not be ideal attributes for a leader who needs to build a strong political party. Do people dare to disagree and argue with her? Is she getting tough talk form anyone?

I sure hope so. For the isolation of a person who is idolised is a dangerous thing, and it must also be so lonely in some ways.

Here I am coming to the end of these thoughts. I never made it out to a café. Instead I am sitting in the charmless lobby of the Eastern Hotel, sipping beer between sentences, and listening to the casual chat of the guys on staff. I love the sound of human voices speaking a language that I don’t understand. There’s the comfort of voice without the intrusion of meaning. What more can a tired person ask for?

The sound of other humans reminds us that we are not alone. And the absence of comprehension leaves me free to think my own thoughts, shape my own sentences. What a pleasure.

HOME GROUND FEELS JUST GREAT

After the whirl and distraction of three weeks of book tour (if it’s Tuesday it must be Boston, is my version), I’ve come home to find a lovely groundedness with friends. This week will be busy, yes, as I do publicity things in Toronto and Montreal, but somehow I’m feeling less scattered.

Some of that may be just simply because I have literally done some gathering-up of pieces of paper. I’m talking of course about receipts. On tour, while hotels might be prepaid, everything else pretty much is paid for by me as I go. Then the challenge is to keep track of all the recipets and submit them to the publisher for reimbursement. I’m happy to be able to tell you that I’ve got them all sorted and stapled onto sheets, will photocopy them on Tuesday, so I can have a copy, and then off they go to New York for processing. Hurrah.

But the other reason I’m feeling great is a note that came in this morning as a comment on my facebook fan page: http://www.facebook.com/NaomiDuguid  A very nice man named Simon Khin commented under a photo of the BURMA book as follows:  “I got this book as a gift from Kyi Kyi (Aung San Suu Kyi) during her brief family visit to Pacific Northwest a couple of weeks ago. I’m still reading it and thoroughly enjoying it. A big thumbs up from Kyi Kyi, Alex and me.”

How amazing to hear this. What a gift! After all, Aung San Suu Kyi, this icon of Burmese democracy, is one of the symbols of all that we hope goes well in Burma. She’s working for conciliation between the central government and various important groups in the border states such as the Shan, the Karen, the Kachin, the Chin. And she’s the symbol of the Burmese people’s tenacity in the face of years of political oppression and mismanagement by their rulers.  So for me to hear that she has given a copy of my Burma book to friends and family, and that she and her son Alex and others give it “a big thumbs up”... well, it doesn’t get any better than that.

I meant to write more here tonight, about various wonderful encounters in New York and Boston and Charlotte and Seattle, but suddenly it’s late and I have a whole day of media tomorrow, followed by a real treat, a book launch party at a bar in kensington Market. Being on home ground is always a pleasure. But it takes being away to make me realise how much I value life here in downtown Toronto.

Please wish me luck and clarity with all the interviews and conversations and presentations that lie ahead...

NEWS FROM MYITKYINA OF PAIN, & CELEBRATION TOO

Nine days ago, on a Saturday night, I wandered around Shwedagon in more of a daze than usual because the intensities up there - golden statues, people praying, sounding gongs, chatting, walking, making offerings, pouring water on their day-of-the-week animal, and more - were multiplied tenfold, it seemed. As the sky slowly darkened after sunset, the temple festival lights came on. Usually at night the dome is floodlit, but these are different. They’ve been put up for the huge temple festival at Shwedagon at the end of the month. Imagine little fairy lights, the kind of Christmas outside lights that some people in the northern countries use to outline the edges of their windows at Christmas time, and then in your mind’s eye drape them around the outlines of temple roofs and chapel openings each strand a brilliant green or an intense blue or purple or yellow or red or... You get the idea. It was gaudy, kitschy, fantastical.

(On my second walk around the circle of the dome an older monk stopped to talk with me After I’d answered his question about where I was from I said, “And isn’t all this amazing?” and he answered, “I don’t like all these lights; too much!” )

Two days later I was in Myitkyina, in Burma’ s farthest north state, Kachin State. The crowds and the celebrations of Rangoon felt far away, for the army has been attacking villages up there for the last six months or so, and fighting with the KIA (the Kachin Independence Army) after a ceasefire of seventeen years, despite a call from Burma’s president Thain Sein to stop fighting. As several people put it: “The army is out of control”.

There are small camps for the IDP’s (Internally Displaced People) who have fled their villages; they now number over 65,000. It’s an ugly situation, with no resolution in sight. The churches in Myitkyina and area are working to get supplies of blankets and food to the IDP’s who are out in the countryside; other camps in and around town are being supported, with shelters, basic food supplies, and blankets, by UNHCR and the World Food Program, as well as local churches and temples.

I stayed at the YMCA where I’d stayed three years earlier on my first trip to Myitkyina. The same fabulous staff still work there, and it’s a good place to meet other foreigners who have a special interest in Burma, and to learn the latest news. This time there was immediate good news amidst all the bad details about the fighting and the IDP’s: Aung San Suu Kyi was coming to Myitkyina. Unbelievable.

The day she arrived the town was buzzing, and whenever she was driven somewhere the small cavalcade was led by guys on a motorcycle shouting out and waving a red NLD flag atop a long bamboo pole. She spent most of the day visiting other towns, then in the evening dined with the heads of the churches to discuss the IDP situation and the fighting. I waited outside her small hotel just behind the Y to see her when she returned after ten that night. After a long gruelling day, she still looked full of life, saying a few words and touching hands with each of the young people who crowded around as she walked up the hotel’s front steps.

The next day she gave a big speech at the Manau grounds, where the Kachin new year festivitites take place each January (except this year, when they were cancelled because of the fighting). I went out early on my rented bicycle to find myself a good spot. There was a decorated platform, some flags and bunting, and no visible security. People started to stream in before eight in the morning until suddenly there was a crowd. And it roared as she got out of a van and walked up onto the podium, dressed in traditional Kachin clothing, and began to talk.

At the time I could just pick out key words: democracy, Panglong, Bogyoke Aung San (her father)... Later I learned that she’d talked about national reconciliation, the need to negotiate a settlement with the army, the need for a “Panglong for the twenty-first century”, a reference to an accord with the major non-Bamar groups (except the Karen) that was reached before independence; her father Aung San was the man who achieved that. Every once in awhile there’d be a call out or comment from the crowd. And each time she’d respond to it, sometimes making people laugh with a quick retort, other times with a longer reply.

One call-out was a “it’s been so long since you were last here!” She answered with a “well I was under house arrest for a lot of that time” and then went on to say that they, the people of Myitkyina, know what house arrest feels like because their situation is similar, with the army and police checking on them, and no freedom to go where they want freely. ‘We are all citizens of this country and we should all have the same rights, the same respect,’ was her message, along with a reminder that democracy involves responsibility and hard work.

Afterward the van carrying her, standing up through the roof and easy to see, drove at a snail’s pace across the field toward the road, the crowd thick all around and reaching up to her. She reached back, bending to each side to touch people’s hands, and again and again..more and more...

And so there was celebration in Myitkyina.

AND ABOUT THE DAM: I went one day up to Myit Sone, the place where the two upper branches of the Irrawaddy meet to form the great river. It's the site of the proposed Chinese dam, or series of dams. Those have been suspended for now by President Thein Sein. The Chinese, not just the companies involved, but also the government, are incensed. Perhaps this is part of the explanation for the continued fighting in Kachin State? Maybe they want to destabilise this reasonable liberalising president? Hard to know.

In the meantime the confluence area is beautiful. I feel so lucky to have seen it, been out on the river there, seen the gold panning along the river banks, etc. There are signs of the dam prep: dormitory buildings all in a row on the far bank, and walls of concrete high up on the cliffs and banks to stabilise the future walls of the future reservoirs. This is set to be a huge project, with a giant lake, that could alter and destroy the water balance and the agriculture of central Burma. Let's hope Thein Sein survives as president and the dam project stays on the drawing boards only.

AN EVENING IN RANGOON, ON A DAY WHEN TWO WOMEN MET

Dusk and nighttime in Rangoon are enchanting, welcoming, and full of life, especially on a Friday evening. The sky glows a faded pink, the air cools slightly, men in white walk in pairs and groups, freshly washed and wending their way to a meal or homeward after Friday prayers at the mosques.

As I walked west this evening along Mahabandoola Street headed for Chinatown, the gleam of Sule Paya, the tall golden dome that sits at Rangoon’s major downtown intersection - a reminder of the central role Buddhism plays in the life of the country - pulled me forward. I passed vendors frying snacks, small hotpot stands steaming in the dusk, with a few small plastic stools around the pot, flower sellers, shops gleaming with watches or cameras or packaged snacks, as all the while buses streamed past, their tired engines roaring and groaning, the ticket collectors shouting out the bus destinations.

Once past the huge Sule Paya roundabout, I was in India town, where most shops are South Asian, the restaurants sell pulaos, little shops with Indian sweetmeats invite the esily tempted passer-by, paratha-makers stretch and flap their springy thin gelaming-with-oil sheets of dough, then fold them with several graceful twists of the wrist and toss them onto a hot griddle, and men sit in tea shops or in the doorways of small shops and sip tea and chat and laugh now that the weight of the day is almost done. There are scents of sandalwood and fresh orange, fennel and hot oil and hints of cardamom as I walk past the small vignetted shopfront scenes.

And then, after the piles of oranges and bananas and avocadoes and pineapples at the end of tk street, Mahabandoola becomes Chinese. Suddenly the shops are selling ginseng root and strings of dark red Chinese sausage and tall tins of English style biscuits (not quite Peke Freans, not quite Cadbury or Mackintosh, but close enough to be familiar-looking), and there are small eateries along the sidestreets with trays of meat and fish waiting to be grilled, and people sitting at low tables drinking beer and having a night out. Chinatown by night is the most lively scene in Rangoon. It doesn’t last long: the fruit vendors pack up by eight. But on the sidestreets the grilling and hotpots and noodle places, and the beer halls, stay lively until ten or so.

I meet a friend on the corner of Latha and Mahabandoola, by the large Chinese Temple, and we stroll, picking our way along the bumpy lumpy sidewalks and navigating the fruit stalls and small vendors. She wants me to try the grilled stuffed fish, so we pick one out (tilapia, now being farmed not far from Rangoon), and order hand-cut Myeik noodles and a lime juice each, as well as skewers of grilled garlics, then sit at a low table streetside. The noodles are spectacular, flat rice noodles tossed in a wok with a few small beans, small fresh shrimp, slices of Chinese sausage...delish. The fish is tender and perfectly grilled. The finely minced filling seems to have saw-tooth herb and minced shallot and some minced sour fruit. My friend says it’s called a quince in Burmese; you could use green mango, mashed to a paste, or perhaps a very tart apple or plum. We sucked the fish off the bones, using hands as well as chopsticks to navigate it all, greedily and happily.

We wandered some more, had another pause for another lime juice, and then it was time to part ways. I decided to walk back the way I’d come, about 30 blocks. But now it was quite dark and shadowy in many place. The only light came from some still-open shops and the headlights of cars, as well as the occasional streetisde paan vendor with a small cnadle lighting his stand. The streets near Sule were lively with people, but most vendors had packed up or were in the middle of closing down. The headlights lit the uneven paving stones of the sidewalks, casting shadows and setting them all in relief for a moment, before vanishing and leaving me in darkness again. I ploughed on eastward, past the Immanuel Baptsis Church with its blue neon sign, and wider patches in the sidewalk where people sat at low tabes eating noodles.

Walking on rough ground, where there’s the occasional hole, steep curbs, and generally rough unpredictable terrain, is a lot slower than moving swiftly along a sidewalk in Toronto or London and takes more concentration and more effort. I was sticky an sweaty by the time I got back, even with a small pause to shoot some video of the action near 37th to 40th street, with honking buses, shouting vendors and conductors, and people walking in both directions along a sidewalk busy with small evening vendors. I’m looking forward to showing it to people at home. I realise that my few words can’t paint the scnene nearly as effectively as a short bit of video can.

And yet I always feel the urge to try to put some of all this into words. I want to convery my wonder at the life and good humour in this place, and the current surge of optimism.

Earlier today, just after dawn, Hilary Clinton was due to come and talk with her at 9.30. went out in a taxi with some friends to Aung San Suu Kyi’s house to see the media scrum. It was amazing to have a pack of journos at the gate, all waiting to get in; the State Dept person had a list, and some got in and some did not. Just over a year ago this house was a prison in which Daw SU was confined, and now here she is the focus of the world’s press, and free to meet with the world leaders.

Meantime there was endless traffic on what is normally a quiet street, as now-confident Burmese drove slowly past, smiling and waving, and craining their necks to see what they might see. Old NLD guys (the oppostition party Daw Suu heads) arrived one by one, dignified after years of jail and struggle. And then came the press corps in buses and after them the Clinton motorcade, all SUV’s, swept through the gate.

Here’s hoping that the world keeps Burma in mind, and that Burma keeps on opening up, maintaining and strengthening its openness, regaining free speach and the rule of law, and frees political prisoners, in short becomes the powerhouse and remarkable place its people deserve.

Meantime, I feel very lucky to have been here in these early optimistic times.

I am heading north to Inle Lake (where I first was over thirty years ago, on my first trip to Burma; and then again with my kids in January 1999), and after that west to a town just on the edge of Chin State called Kalaymyo. I doubt I’ll have much reliable internet access while I’m away, and in any case I’m leaving my laptop in Rangoon. The next posting here won’t be until December 11 or so. Hope you have your Christmas shopping done by then....I haven’t even started.

ASSERTING OUR FREEDOMS, A SOLSTICE OBLIGATION

It’s been an eventful thirty-six hours, starting with stupid kitchen accidents and ending with serendipity. First the stupid accidents: I was trying to make myself useful to Dawn, who was preparing for a big catering job. She suggested I could shave fennel for her, for a salad, using a mandolin. Hers is a good one, and sharp. And believe it or not, but I had never used a mandolin before. You can guess the rest: I sliced my middle fingertip. Ouch! Yikes! Gauze and bandaid firmly on, I went back to my task, resolved to be careful. But I was still, in retrospect I now realise, using the wrong technique. You have to hold your hand flat, not grasp the vegetable you are slicing but instead just press it against the blade with your flattened palm. And so of course I managed to slice another fingertip, even more bloodily than the first (no, no blood on the food, don’t worry!!). More "ouch!" more "yikes!".

Since then, almost as if I had paid ahead for it, life has been wonderful in many ways. Dom and I drove to the airport and picked up Tashi and Duncan, hot off their charter flight from Rome, still bright-eyed, and very awake. Such a treat to see them and to hear them talk about their trip as we made and ate supper and hung around together.

And today, after a morning run and a long coffee with a friend, I did a market shop and then managed to get a recipe figured out on my first try, a yummy dish of chicken livers, cut into bite-size, and bathed in a thick rich “curry sauce”. I was trying to reproduce something I’d eaten in Hsipaw, in the Shan State, at a Burmese (rather than a Shan) restaurant. The chicken livers are tender and just cooked, the sauce has a depth of flavor that is surprising and inviting.

I hurried a little with the recipe because I’d promised to go help a chef here with a find-raising event tonight. When you’re feeding 300 people, you need a lot of hands just for plating/serving. And so, along with a crowd of others I carved beef and drizzled on sauce and put out slices of cheese etc, as the courses went out one after the other. The late afternoon and evening were clear and beautiful, the light sharp, so that everything glowed in a solstice celebratory kind of way. And the guests were happy and felt celebratory too, the food was so good, so beautiful.

My bicycle ride back, along paths in the forest, was peaceful, yes, but also a bit iffy, with only a flickering bike light in the dark. I was grateful that the moon, coming full, made small occasional patches of light through the forest canopy, so that I was able to pedal along tracks and finally up a steep path in the forest without incident and at last out into quiet residential streets.

But then the big city part of the trip was a huge contrast, Saturday night uptown, with lights and cars and revellers in summer frocks. From that scene in a few minutes I was in quiet again, as I pedalled through the University of Toronto, nearly home now. But then, and this is the serendipity, as I got to Queen’s Park, by the provincial legislature, at about ten o’clock, there was a big crowd, and live music. YES! Salif Keita and his band were playing in the warm summer night in the park. I propped my bike against a fence and started dancing, and they played and played...

So as I write, my feet are a little bruised from dancing barefoot for over an hour on rough ground, and I still have the music echoing in my ears, Salif Keita’s distinctive enticing voice and the drumming! How lovely.

Two sliced fingertips are nothing balanced against this fabulous twenty-four hours. And even without the serendipitous end to this day, the fact that I am free to ride my bicycle, to say yes to helping a friend, to poke around trying to figure out a recipe, to love my grown up kids and tell them so, these are the important things to celebrate. Today Aung San Suu Kyi turns sixty-five. There was a vigil in her honour, but also to remember all those who are not free, held a couple of evenings ago downtown. It was a sobering reminder of how precious daily freedoms are. We need to celebrate them and exercise them.

This coming week, as the men with guns descend even more intensely on this city (the G-20 are meeting here next weekend, so there are cement and metal security fences downtown and closures of institutions such as the university and galleries and banks etc, for four days to a week, and a general flight out of the city by all who can), is the time to assert our freedoms. For me that means NOT fleeing but staying, asserting normalcy in the face of the security hysteria and wild overspending that our conservative government is visiting upon us. I say NO to all that. I plan to bicycle around, to see friends, to refuse the powerful messages of fear.

Fear is the enemy of freedom, freedom of movement, of thought, of action, of creativity and imagination. In other words it’s the enemy of all that makes us human. So it’s a big NO to fear. That’s MY solstice resolution! Let the sun shine in!

As the buddhist monk who led us in a prayer at the vigil said, and we repeated after: “may we be free” - “may we be free”... “of enmity” - “of enmity”.