For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question Read Online Free Page B

didn’t mean that he maybe could possibly be arrested, hypothetically. He meant that if he went outside, his being arrested was entirely, any day, likely—unless
he was accompanied by a white person, in front of whom the cop, who looked at our faces and then walked right past, wouldn’t want to do something so unsavory as to blackmail an indigent war victim.
    I had misunderstood Htan Dah before we left. He’d said, “I think it will be okay if you go with me,” not “I think it will be okay if you go with me .” He’d meant not that I would be okay, but that he would. It was ironic that a young woman of European descent was his antidote, since his country’s last 120 years of international and civil war and humanitarian crises partially started with one.

II.
    PEACE HAS never been Burma’s strong suit.
    Well before the first century BCE, a people called the Pyu settled in what is now north and central Burma, in the great river-veined plains that give way to vast tracts of forested hills. The Pyu were so devoted to love and Buddhism, legend has it, that they wouldn’t even wear silk for fear of imposing on the worms that excreted it. Archeological evidence shows that they set up lovely cities, with irrigation systems, and prayed, and made inscriptions in stone—and warred with each other for power. And then they got sacked.
    Though the Pyu’s religion ultimately survived as Burma’s primary, they were absorbed into other migrating and conquering cultures. One was the Mranma, typically transliterated as Myanma, colloquially pronounced Bama, also called Burman, now commonly called Burmese. 2 Today, they are Burma’s dominant group, in all meanings
of the word. But back then, they were just one ethnocultural group intermarrying and -mingling with other ethnocultural groups in their kingdom, which was in the north of the country. There was also the Mon kingdom in the south, and princely Shan in the northeast, and elsewhere Chin, and Kachin, and Arakanese. And among yet many others, there was another group, who some historians have posited were actually Burma’s original settlers. Nobody quite knows where they came from; likely, it was from the north. But whenever, and from wherever, the Karen got to Burma, many settled in the hills running the border with what is now Thailand. They came to call the land Kaw Thoo Lei: land of—depending on the interpretation—white flowers, or no blemishes, or no evil. For centuries, they lived, as French explorer Henri Mouhot commented in the mid-nineteenth century, “on almost inaccessible heights . . . for the sake of their independence.” Though remote, those inaccessible heights are fertile, covered in mixed deciduous forest: hardwoods, ferns, bushes, bamboo, a lush flush of green over the mountains, which they quietly farmed.
    Since Htan Dah grew up in a refugee camp, he’d never lived on that land, but it was what he struggled to regain as an employee of BA. If he inhabited a peaceful Kaw Thoo Lei, currently labeled on a Burmese map as the misleadingly autonomous-sounding Karen State, his life would look much like that of the area’s original settlers. He would live in a hut he’d built, with the help of his neighbors, out of bamboo and thatch. He’d fetch water for drinking and cooking and cleaning from a stream or river running near the village, in which he could also catch fish. He’d collect eggs from his chickens and maybe there’d be pigs living under his elevated house, and after a rice-based breakfast he’d spend some of the day cultivating more rice and vegetables in a nearby field before returning to his home, which would rest in the shade of coconut palms and papaya, in a village of twenty or a hundred households. At the end of the day, fires would be lit all around to prepare rice with produce and meat, probably caught, possibly turtle, snake, fish, lizard, monkey, boar. Once in a great while, and even less often these
days, given their dwindling