journalism-school program at the University of Chiang Mai. It was a free, eight-month, highly intensive and selective course aimed at training reporters and editors from ethnic communities. I’d shot some standard interview questions at him, for practice, and promised him that they were going to ask why he should be picked.
They did indeed, he told me when he got back. He could hardly contain his awe of my powers of prediction.
As we ate breakfast, we made plans. I’d promised to take him into a city someday and to the movies, to which he’d never been, and he’d said he would take me to his camp, several hours’ drive southeast, to see pictures of his wedding. This was another reason he was keen on driving me to school: Though any motorbike trip was possibly dangerous for an undocumented runaway refugee, throwing a foreigner into the mix opened up the potential for even long drives. “No one bother me,” Htan Dah had said, “if I am with very beautiful white girl.”
Our meandering conversations and schemes helped occupy Htan Dah while he kept me company during breakfast and dinner. He’d continued to sit diligently at the table with me, though he always finished eating before I did, with his lightning-fast shoveling and chewing. That morning, as I ground every last bit of rice
into oblivion between my molars, he finally called me on it. As much as he enjoyed our chats, I was sure, his job as office manager, handling the books, the money, the cooking, hardly left him time for two-hour brunches.
“You are so slow,” he said, watching me chew. “Why don’t you eat fast?”
“Why should I?” I asked. “I’m not in a hurry.”
“But what if you are under attack, or have to run away?”
“Htan Dah, I’m from Ohio.”
“Yes, but I am refugee(!). We are taught to eat fast.”
Be that as it may, we were in peacetime Thailand, so this attack seemed like an incredibly hypothetical scenario, even though Htan Dah had mentioned something about refugee camps’ getting burned down on the very first day of class. But in all the times in my life I’d envisioned what it was like to live in a refugee camp, which had been approximately zero times, a camp being under attack and burned down wouldn’t have entered the picture. Since I’d been unable to imagine it, and since I’d gotten the sense that Htan Dah, with his copious exclamations, had a flair for the dramatic, I’d kind of dismissed it.
So boy, did I feel like an asshole when he turned in an essay with this intro for workshop on Tuesday:
Having been fallen a sleep at midnight, my parents, sister, aunt and I heard the children’s screaming and the voice of the shelling mortars simultaneously came about, and suddenly jumped through the ladder from the top to the bottom of the house to get away from the attacking troops’ ammunitions without grabbing any facility.
THE KAREN resistance had begun well armed—British occupation and World War II may have been fleeting, but weapons last a really long time—and though they had lost their chance at the capital, in the decades following independence, the KNU built the largest, richest, and most threatening insurrection in town. The rebels commanded
the passages to Thailand, taxing the teak and other smugglings flowing through the porous border. By the ’80s, the KNU claimed its annual income from border taxes and trade was in the tens of millions a year US, plenty to buy more guns and ammunition. Despite Four Cuts, huge pieces of what had always been Karen land in the area that even the government called Karen State were under KNU control, which infuriated the regime. Also, there was that whole bad-blood-from-being-on-opposite-sides-of-international-wars-for-more-than-a-century thing. And so in ’84 the Burma army, which had historically instigated only dry-season assaults, started fighting right through the rainy season.
Which brings us to a wee Htan Dah living in Thailand with his mother. For years,
They did indeed, he told me when he got back. He could hardly contain his awe of my powers of prediction.
As we ate breakfast, we made plans. I’d promised to take him into a city someday and to the movies, to which he’d never been, and he’d said he would take me to his camp, several hours’ drive southeast, to see pictures of his wedding. This was another reason he was keen on driving me to school: Though any motorbike trip was possibly dangerous for an undocumented runaway refugee, throwing a foreigner into the mix opened up the potential for even long drives. “No one bother me,” Htan Dah had said, “if I am with very beautiful white girl.”
Our meandering conversations and schemes helped occupy Htan Dah while he kept me company during breakfast and dinner. He’d continued to sit diligently at the table with me, though he always finished eating before I did, with his lightning-fast shoveling and chewing. That morning, as I ground every last bit of rice
into oblivion between my molars, he finally called me on it. As much as he enjoyed our chats, I was sure, his job as office manager, handling the books, the money, the cooking, hardly left him time for two-hour brunches.
“You are so slow,” he said, watching me chew. “Why don’t you eat fast?”
“Why should I?” I asked. “I’m not in a hurry.”
“But what if you are under attack, or have to run away?”
“Htan Dah, I’m from Ohio.”
“Yes, but I am refugee(!). We are taught to eat fast.”
Be that as it may, we were in peacetime Thailand, so this attack seemed like an incredibly hypothetical scenario, even though Htan Dah had mentioned something about refugee camps’ getting burned down on the very first day of class. But in all the times in my life I’d envisioned what it was like to live in a refugee camp, which had been approximately zero times, a camp being under attack and burned down wouldn’t have entered the picture. Since I’d been unable to imagine it, and since I’d gotten the sense that Htan Dah, with his copious exclamations, had a flair for the dramatic, I’d kind of dismissed it.
So boy, did I feel like an asshole when he turned in an essay with this intro for workshop on Tuesday:
Having been fallen a sleep at midnight, my parents, sister, aunt and I heard the children’s screaming and the voice of the shelling mortars simultaneously came about, and suddenly jumped through the ladder from the top to the bottom of the house to get away from the attacking troops’ ammunitions without grabbing any facility.
THE KAREN resistance had begun well armed—British occupation and World War II may have been fleeting, but weapons last a really long time—and though they had lost their chance at the capital, in the decades following independence, the KNU built the largest, richest, and most threatening insurrection in town. The rebels commanded
the passages to Thailand, taxing the teak and other smugglings flowing through the porous border. By the ’80s, the KNU claimed its annual income from border taxes and trade was in the tens of millions a year US, plenty to buy more guns and ammunition. Despite Four Cuts, huge pieces of what had always been Karen land in the area that even the government called Karen State were under KNU control, which infuriated the regime. Also, there was that whole bad-blood-from-being-on-opposite-sides-of-international-wars-for-more-than-a-century thing. And so in ’84 the Burma army, which had historically instigated only dry-season assaults, started fighting right through the rainy season.
Which brings us to a wee Htan Dah living in Thailand with his mother. For years,
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