Stars

Five young Burmese activists sat on the elevated walkway that runs along the west shore of Inya Lake in Rangoon under a sky full of stars that shone remarkably bright for a city of 10 million people and despite the floodlights illuminating the path. They passed around a beaten up blue acoustic guitar, taking turns playing a song as the others sang along.

The five were among the thirteen organizers of a protest on the International Day of Peace in which hundreds of people marched through the streets of Rangoon, calling for peace in Burma, and especially in Kachin State. The protest culminated at the very same place they sat that night with demonstrators building a stone monument and holding several minutes of silent prayer for those who have died in conflicts in the country. This was the site of a massacre of so many student protesters in March 1988 that the walkway’s name was changed from “White Bridge” to “Red Bridge.”

The activists were facing court cases in all ten townships the protest passed through in September and were required to appear at court hearings nearly every day – and sometimes several in one day – a schedule that was admittedly cutting into their work. One of them was also having difficulties applying for a passport since.

A Letter

I wrote a letter tonight for the first time in years. Not just a note in a care package or a postcard from somewhere new – the mail equivalents of a tweet or status update – but a three-page letter about my life to someone I regrettably haven’t spoken or written to in far too long.

I was surprised at how it felt to actually write to someone, to be conscious of the characters my pen formed on the page so he would be able to read the words. I wished I had been able to find nicer stationary than pages carefully ripped out of a notebook that I use for Burmese lessons, but relished the old school Air Mail envelope I had found.

The letter felt so lasting and personal compared to the dozens of emails I send every day around the world in a familiar font that is installed on a million computers. I kept thinking of the saved correspondence between my grandparents when they were young and in love during World War II, or the letters I found in a folder from my mum and dad to each other when they lived apart for a summer. My letter could end up in a box in a basement, to be read by children and grandchildren, unlike the impermanent chats and text messages that no one ever keeps. It contained words that would continue to exist beyond their initial reading.

My letter’s recipient is of a generation that didn’t use computers. As I sealed the envelope, I sadly wondered if I would write a letter to anyone else once he is gone.

The Holstee Manifesto

Glimpses of my Neighbourhood

I heard the Burmese hip-hop before I saw them. Two Burmese boys around 12 years old on a tri-shaw (a bicycle with three wheels at a platform between the front two, used for carrying people and goods around town). The boy in front held the music player; the one pedalling wore hand-made sunglasses fashioned out of discarded plastic bottles, tied on with a plastic string. He was imitating the moves of a gangster, pedalling in time to the music. They came back a while later, having switched places. The second boy pedaled with less style than his friend, who now sits poised in the front with his plastic glasses, the string streaming in the wind behind him.

As I was sweeping up my yard one day, a skinny old woman with a machete opened my front gate. When I looked up, she inquisitively smiled and pointed at my back yard. It was overgrown when I moved in, but over the course of my first few months at the house, it had grown into an unruly jungle. Speaking Thai and gesturing with the machete, she seemed to want to cut it down for me. I thought she was offering her services. I could see her house through my back fence and know that she’s pretty poor, so in my broken Thai I asked her how much. She smiled and shook her hand, which I took to mean “nothing”, and immediately went to work. She threw all the cuttings over the fence into her yard and left me with a clean garden, space for a washing line, and a huge patch of mint. The cuttings disappeared after a couple of days, but I was never sure what she did with all of it – until the garden started to grow back and I recognized the morning glory. She had probably cooked it and the other edible plants for her family and burned the rest.

A man rode past on a tri-shaw loaded up with crappy aluminum pots piled 4 meters high. I had no idea how he can see where he was going.

The day I bought a fridge, I put the box beside the neighbourhood garbage bin. As soon as I returned to my house and closed the gate, the woman two houses down stealthily snuck out of her house and took the box back to her yard, where it now stands with a pile of other cardboard boxes on her front porch.

Two lizards used to live in the trees of my front yard. Tan in colour, one looks like his front half was dipped in blue and the other in terracotta. They bob their heads up and down to some inaudible music or sit warming themselves in the sun. After the storm knocked down the teak tree, I worried about the fate of my lizard friends. But once in a while, Blue makes an appearance, posing on my back fence or the front wall of my yard.

A dark man with an orange shirt, probably from Arakan State in western Burma, walked past my house singing a Hindi song. When he saw me through the fence watching and smiling, he stopped long enough to ask, “How are you?” I gave him a thumbs up and he continued on his way, picking up the song right where he left off.

One of my neighbours sounds like a Burmese version of Mr. T, his voice echoing all down the street. When I finally saw him after months of living at my house, I was surprised to see that he was a small skinny man wearing only a longyi riding around on a child’s bicycle.

A calm morning spent reading on my porch was shattered by a Thai army helicopter flying low overhead. I was instantly reminded that the Burmese border is less than 7 kilometres away. The nearby jungles shelter armed ethnic groups fighting for basic rights in their own homeland in what is the longest running civil war in the world.

Memories of Cyclone Nargis

The rainy season has just started here in Thailand. We’ve had a good storm or two, but last week’s was one of the biggest storms I have ever experienced—second only to Cyclone Heta in Samoa in January 2005. Unfortunately, my colleagues and many in this town have lived through far worse, memories of which were stirred up by this one.

I was at work when the wind picked up all of a sudden, slamming the front door of the office shut. I went to stand in the doorway with some of my colleagues, revelling in the refreshing change of temperature—a monumental difference from the extreme temperatures here recently. Our relief quickly turned to worry as the gusts of wind became so strong it was a struggle to hold the door open. Leaves and branches were whipped down the street. When a kid ran out to play in the street, one of my Burmese colleagues screamed at him to get into his house and then burst into tears. She had been in Rangoon two years ago during Cyclone Nargis—the worst storm to ever hit Burma in which an estimated 138,000 people were killed and 2.4 million were affected.

As we tried to console our colleague, we watched in awe as the roofing on the construction site across from us lifted slightly and then was blown off piece by piece. The construction workers—notably lacking the steel-toed boots and hard hats of their colleagues in the West—huddled together under what was left of the roof. We called for them to join us, but they resisted until the very last minute when all the roofing was blown off. One worker carried with him a bunch of power tools, bundled together in a plastic rice sack, too valuable to leave behind. Another was nearly hit with flying roofing as he dodged the fallen power lines and branches on the street. There was a young boy with them who arrived in our compound shivering in soaking wet boxer shorts. We dried him off and put him in a dry shirt from the recent 10^th anniversary of the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners that fit him like a dress. He sat shaking and looking terrified until it was over, answering our questions unsurely and munching slowly on a banana.

When we finally emerged from the office, power lines were down all along the street, gutters had overflowed submerging the neighborhood in nearly a foot of water. We all decided to go home as there was little work to be done without electricity and internet.

I took the office motorbike to drop a colleague off at her house. As we drove through the town, it became clear by the chaos just how big the storm had been. The electricity was out everywhere. Police were directing traffic, already slowed by trees, branches, pieces of roofs and other debris in the street. I dreaded going home. I had left all my windows open and was sure my entire house would be a mess.

I could see from a distance that the main road to my house was blocked off, right about where my street entered it, so I took a back way. Even before turning onto my street, I could tell something bad had happened. Motorbikes were lined up with their passengers taking photos of the street—and specifically, my house. The giant teak tree that had stood in my front yard had come down, bringing with it the wall of my compound, the iron gate, another tree and the power lines to the whole street.

I approached in awe of the gaping mess. My young Thai neighbour paused from her sweeping to smile at what must have been shock on my face. After phone calls to my landlord and my friend to get the story from my neighbour, there was little left to do. So I started taking photos. I wandered down to the main road where I could now see that the blockage was because 20 power poles had fallen across the street. There was no way anyone could pass.

Before the sun went down, I hauled 15 buckets of water from the reservoir in my backyard to fill the cement tank in the bathroom. I have always complained that the water tank in Thai bathrooms made no sense. In a malaria and dengue zone such as Thailand, the still water is a perfect breeding zone for mosquitoes. But now I wished I had used it.

The sun set, I lit candles and finally sat down to rest. It was then that I realized how lucky I was. I still had a solid house and roof over my head, I had food to eat and I hadn’t been injured. The head of the construction site across from my office lost 20,000 baht worth of building supplies, the office of one organization had its windows smashed by flying branches, and many of the small wooden huts on the rice fields surrounding the town had been completely levelled. Nine people were killed from falling trees and power lines. But within a couple days, the electricity was back on and life had pretty much gone back to normal. In Burma, its been two years since Cyclone Nargis, and people still haven’t fully recovered their livelihoods and homes. The junta continues to harass and imprison aid workers and restricts the assistance trying to make its way into the country.

With the daytime temperature well over 40 degrees Celsius, I missed the fan that has been my constant companion for months. But remembering that people here and in Burma are much worse off, I was resolved to live without it for a couple nights without complaining. I settled down in the relaxing candlelight, grateful that it hadn’t been worse. The entire neighbourhood was dark, quiet, and uncharacteristically calm.

Burmese Prayers for Yangkey

On April 2nd, one of my closest friends in Dharamsala, Yangkey, died of tuberculosis. She had been sick for a while and had sought treatment in Delhi. I spoke to her on the phone at the beginning of March for her birthday, just after she had returned to Dhasa. Yangkey said she was feeling much better and was glad to be home. We spoke about our friends and she asked the usual question, “When are you coming back?” Unfortunately, my answer was not soon enough. Friends told me that Yangkey took a quick turn for the worse and left us forever. I am so grateful for that last phone call—I think it was the first time we had spoken in a year.

I had a photo of Yangkey printed, bought flowers and placed them on the makeshift alter I put together in my house, beside the photo of the Dalai Lama and a postcard of a thangka of Avalokitesvara. I said the only prayer I knew and sat in front of the alter, crying while Tibetan incense swirled around me and sweat poured down my face from the candle burning in the oppressive heat of April in Thailand. I felt a million miles away from Yangkey and from all our friends who were mourning for her.

After I heard that friend of ours in New York had monks there pray for Yangkey, I wondered if I could do the same thing here as Burmese have a similar tradition.

I had seen the ceremony a few months earlier when my boss’ mother had passed away in Rangoon. She had been sick for quite some time and my boss had shared her regrets that she could not return home to see her mum one last time.

My boss was younger than me during the student uprising in 1988 in Burma. She was a beautiful chemistry student who was interested in fashion rather than politics. However, with her brother’s encouragement, she became more and more involved as the protests grew, eventually becoming one of the main leaders—ironically to the disapproval of her brother and family who were worried for their safety. When the military cracked down on the protests, my boss fled into the jungles of eastern Burma with those who made it out alive, never to return again. Even though she now holds a foreign passport, she would definitely be arrested on arrival, as her friend Nyi Nyi Aung was this past year.

When my boss’ mother died, all she could do from a distance was to give offerings for the monks in our town to pray for her mother. Her closest friends stayed up all night cooking a lavish meal for the monks. My boss seldom cooks, but for the occasion, she had made a delicious tomato curry just as her mother had made at home. Dozens of my boss’ friends and colleagues gathered for the prayer ceremony, after which we enjoyed the food left over from the monks who had eaten earlier that morning.

The day after Yangkey died, I called my Burmese friend to ask if it would be possible to do the same ceremony for her. My friend said of course, and picked me up to following day after work. We rode to her house, where we changed our shorts for longyis and our tank tops for more respectable longer sleeved shirts. The Burmese longyi is a rectangular piece of fabric sewn into a tube. Women pull the excess fabric to one side, fold it over across the front and tuck in the corner at the waist. I am amazed at how elegant Burmese women can look in them. I felt like I was wearing an unflattering sheet that could fall off at any moment.

As people stared and a couple of guys even pointed, we walked through the crowded market to buy the offering for the monks. My friend suggested that I offer a package of goods rather than food, as it was late in the day and Burmese monks don’t eat after noon. I giggled to myself at the thought of them eating my cooking, and how strange they would have found it—and was glad for another option.

At the recommendation of my friend, I bought a silver offering bowl with flowers, packed full of toilet paper, soap, toothpaste, toothbrush and other items that felt strange to give to a monk as an offering. So I also bought a large pack of incense that felt more appropriate.

When we got to the temple, all the buildings were closed up. Around back, we found a single monk watering plants. My Burmese friend told him that my friend in India had died and I wanted to say prayers for her. The short shirtless monk looked at us quizzically and asked how we would do it if I didn’t speak Burmese. My friend said that she would recite the prayers for me. He agreed, but then as he turned to enter the temple he turned around again with a worried look on his face and asked if I was Christian. My friend told him no, and that my friend who had passed away was Buddhist from Tibet. He nodded and gestured for us to follow him inside as he wrapped another piece of his robe around his torso.

The little room where we recited the prayers was off the main temple. A fan whirred above us as we sat on the rotting wooden floorboards amidst piles of offerings. The monk asked for Yangkey’s name and began chanting prayers, remarkably pronouncing it correctly every time. As he prayed, I thought of Yangkey and tried to recall the Tibetan offering prayer our friend had posted on Facebook. He occasionally stopped for my Burmese friend to explain to me the meaning of the ceremony. The monk told us that the karma from the offering I made would go to Yangkey if her spirit was still lost in this world and unable to leave it peacefully. If her spirit had already gone on, the karma would help others.

My friend then explained to me the next step: as she said the prayer on my behalf, I slowly poured a glass of water into a small bowl, which we later emptied onto the ground under a tree outside. Then I had to ring a bell three times as they prayed together. I was a bit uncertain about it, but the monk made gestures so that I had the correct timing. As my friend was reciting one of the final prayers, she forgot a word. Without hardly skipping a beat, the monk jumped in to offer the next word. The next few times she took a breath, the monk spoke the next words, thinking that my friend had forgotten the words again. She muffled giggles after she was done, and with tears in my eyes, I gave her a sheepish smile to show it was okay.

Afterwards, we sat in the courtyard together. I tearfully told my friend about Yangkey, and we laughed about the strange mingling of cultures in the ceremony. I’m sure it was the weirdest offering ceremony the monk had ever performed, but I was grateful for his and my friend’s help. Even though I had understood very little, I felt a sense of peace afterwards.

Yangkey la – You were an amazingly caring and generous friend. I love you and will always miss you.

Tsering Yangkey
March 3, 1977 to April 2, 2010

Turtle Feet

“In order to understand something clearly, one must first give it up.”

I said something similar to one of my best friends in Dharamsala the week before I left. While I knew I would miss India like crazy – and I was right – I experienced so much that I knew I needed to leave to let it all soak in.

I picked up Turtle Feet at a small bookstore in Majnu ka Tilla, the Tibetan colony in Delhi. It jumped out at me because I had been thinking a lot about my monk friend, his life, and the community’s expectations of monks. The front flap of Turtle Feet included a line about demystifying monks’ lives. Perfect food for thought.

Back in Montreal, when I finally sat down to read it, my first impression was that the author, Nikolai Grozni, was a stupid injie (Westerner) who took his vows to become a monk without fully understanding what it meant. His friends were the epitome of the Western tourists I hated in Dharamsala, oblivious to the culture and community around them and disrespectful without even being aware of it.

But as I read, I discovered that the author was slowly learning lessons that gave him a deeper understanding of the community – many lessons I myself had to learn. In one chapter, Grozni writes about meeting Tsar, a Western monk who smoked and was always hanging out with girls. At first he seemed interested in Tsar because he was a fellow Western monk who wasn’t afraid to still act however he wanted. But by the end of the chapter, Grozni realized that he was being judged by the community for hanging out with someone who had such a bad reputation.

Reading about the difficulties Grozni encountered on his spiritual quest for the truth made me think more about my own struggle to understand the Buddhist ideas of emptiness and impermanence. The more I have read about Buddhism, the more I have felt like a stupid Westerner who has been taught to hang on to people and experiences, be miserable missing them when they were gone, and to deeply fear death. In comparison, my Tibetan friends seem to be able to cope much better with life’s changes. I keep trying to override the worldview that is deeply engrained in me, but the process is making me realize how difficult it is to change my fundamental beliefs when they are the basis of my actions and reactions on a daily basis. I have also realized that until now, I have not chosen those fundamental beliefs, I have merely soaked them in from my surroundings. I took some comfort in knowing that I am not alone in my struggle; even as a monk who was studying Buddhist texts with learned teachers, Grozni also seemed to be grappling to understand Buddhism through the worldview from his childhood.

Grozni’s descriptions of Dharamsala are so vivid. He describes the bustle of the town, the packs of dogs and beggars, and being surrounded by the Himalayas so precisely that I felt again what it was like to be there. It made me miss the fresh air and the night sky and the million sounds I could hear from my bed in the morning, and even the damn monkeys.

At a time when I was painfully missing India, Turtle Feet helped me realize that Dharamsala will never be the same as it was during the year I was there. Many of my friends have left, our lives have changed, and our experiences have changed us. At the same time, I know that Dharamsala will always be there and will probably always evoke a sense of awe in those who visit it.

The Case of the Missing Toothbrush

For Sun Chee

Roommates. Most of us have lived with them at some point in our lives. They are strangers with whom we must coexist, whose bizarre habits and foibles we must cope with and who must cope with ours in return. I am currently living with three such creatures. My roommates are an unemployed dancer who unintentionally ate hash brownies from our freezer, a busking musician who likes to rant about politics with me, and (my personal favourite) an out-of-work actress who has taken over the apartment since she moved in a month ago.

We’ve had the usual roommate issues: dirty dishes left everywhere, garbage that doesn’t get taken out, bills not paid, doors left unlocked and shoes being worn in the house. But my ultimate favourite so far has been the case of my missing toothbrush.

I came home late one night and it was just gone.

My initial reaction was to mutter “stupid f***ing roommates” under my breath – an increasingly common curse these days. All I kept thinking was WHY would anyone take a used toothbrush?! I told myself that there had to be a rational explanation. I searched the trashcans, thinking it might have fallen in the toilet or been used to clean shoes, and then discarded. Nothing.

Then my imagination started to wander. Maybe the two annoying cats had learned acrobatics while we were out and taught themselves how to open the perilously high medicine cabinet. I laughed at the mental picture of the two cats standing one on top of the other, stealing my toothbrush as revenge for all the times I sprayed them with water to get them out of my room.

When I was a kid and my mum had lost something, she used to say, “Things don’t just sprout legs and walk off.” But if my roommates were telling the truth, they didn’t touch my toothbrush.

Maybe my Indian-made toothbrush was homesick and just couldn’t take it anymore.

The Special Meeting and Journey of a Dream

Tsundue was the bearer of the good news. He sat translating for me at the public discussion of the Special Meeting, wearing a traditional Tibetan shirt and blue chuba over his usual jeans and old sneakers, more happy than I have seen him in months. In between peoples’ questions and the panellists’ answers, Tsundue filled me in on the final recommendations of the meeting that was anxiously watched by Tibetans and their supporters around the world.

I had few expectations from this meeting. An important moment in the history of Tibet, I hoped that it would not add to divisions within the movement or discourage the passionate freedom fighters that surround me.

A lot of media coverage focused on how Tibetans decided to stick to His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s Middle Path approach. However, the resolutions, as I heard them, were a lot more nuanced. The majority of participants at the meeting did in fact agree to continue with the Middle Path but they remain open to the option of independence if there are no concrete results from negotiations with China in the near future. While no one has put a definite time limit on the Middle Path, I find it a definite step in the right direction. But I wonder how naïve it is to believe that China will now be forced to sincerely approach the negotiations, as some have argued. I think that the only way China will ever take the negotiations seriously is if there would be a third-party moderator. Which raises the question: is there any country or third-party that the Chinese leadership trusts enough, who would actually be an unbiased moderator?

There hasn’t been much response from China since the meeting. However, there has been some joking around town that perhaps the Mumbai terrorist attacks this week were China’s response. Interesting considering that the last bombs used in Delhi were proven to be made in China, and that it is well known that China supplies arms to Pakistan.

I was somewhat distracted during the Special Meeting because I was acting as a production coordinator for a friend from Canada who was in town filming a documentary film called Journey of a Dream (check out the teaser). It was perfect timing for Shenpenn and the crew to get some interviews with people who were attending the meeting, some meat for the more political tones of the film. Interviewing Lobsang Sangye and T.C. Tethong outside the meeting, we all felt that we were witnessing history in the making.

On a personal level, it was kind of strange to be an injie girl showing Tibetan friends around town, introducing them to people, organizing trips and interviews. But it was a great experience to see how films are made, and a pleasure to spend my days with such an awesome crew. I can’t wait to see the finished film in 2010!!

Life as a Holiday

I’ve been back in India for two and a half months and can’t help but wonder where all the time has gone. I guess the adage “time flies when you’re having fun” is true.

My life has consisted mostly of hanging out in a coffee shop; drinking, smoking and eating too much; trying to avoid fights at Excite, the only “club” in town; learning to appreciate sappy Indian, Tibetan and Western music; embarking on too many bus trips to and from Delhi (some way too much fun and others extremely lonely); crashing an Indian wedding; learning to write in Tibetan; and reading a pile books.

My intention to write more often completely flew out the window. But it is not dead. With the approach of the Special Meeting called by the Dalai Lama to discuss the future of the Tibet movement and my initial research into Masters programs, I have felt stirrings of inspiration again…