Burmese Lessons Read Online Free PDF

places. The people who live here remain. They drive their cattle and fill their water buckets; they sell rice and fall in love. They write, they push through the labyrinth of silence, they wait. Which reminds me of Aung San Suu Kyi, whom I interviewed last week. She was gracious, but also as taut as a bowstring, aspointed as an arrow. “We are not waiting,” she said wearily, in answer to one of my awkward questions. “We are working.”
    I know they work hard, the hounded politicals, the people who believe in the inevitability of change. I have never met such dedicated, generous men and women. But the children work hard, too. While the labor of the politicals is often hidden, clandestine by necessity, the labor of eight-and ten-year-olds is ubiquitous. True, I have traveled narrowly here, only to the larger centers, on a steady journey toward individuals whose names have been entrusted to me by journalists and activists in Thailand and Britain: people who are willing to talk about dissident politics and their experiences in Burmese prisons. Sometimes these people are hard to find; sometimes they cannot meet me.
    But the children meet me everywhere and share big secrets with the foreign woman: the vocabulary of their daily lives. It is the child laborers who are my most dedicated Burmese teachers.
    Every day, no matter where I’ve been—here, Pegu, Mandalay, various townships in Rangoon—I sit in a tea shop at a low wooden table and watch children weighed down with trays of dirty teacups and bowls, children who teach me words and laugh at my mistakes. They serve, wash dishes, load and unload crates, mix the great, steaming vats of tea. For the most part it is good work, with a place to sleep at night and fairly clean air to breathe and enough food.
    It is one thing to search out members of the National League for Democracy, to listen to the writers and artists talk about their lives, their prison sentences, their forms of escape, their failure to escape. But the children move through the streets, across the fields and lanes, visible and oddly invisible in their enslavement. Who wants to interview them? Their degradation is taken for granted; it is part of the new Burma called Myanmar, a country filling up with railways, roads, highways, hotels, pipelines. Eleven-year-olds have helped build them all. Many child laborers are on their own, sent to work in the cities and towns. Either they are orphans or their parents are too poor to keep them at home.
    Without words, the children speak of the generals, communicating in a language filled with silences and omissions, as though their vocabulary were written with an eraser. What they do not have dictates who they are and who they can become. The lucky ones have attended school for three or four years; the unlucky ones have not, and never will. Though I use the words “lucky” and “unlucky,” none of this happened by accident.
    This morning at a roadside shop, I watch the smallest boy in the tea-making retinue. He perches on a low stool, scrubbing away at his pile of dishes. As he grows, he will understand more than he does now about why he has so few options, why he cannot read, why he is trapped this way and who has trapped him. He is one of the blessed ones, too—he’s not hauling cement or working on a highway or a railway crew. Every morning, before I finish my tea, he teaches me a few words in his language.
    Cup. Table. Sweet. Lizard. Child
.
    His name is Hla Win. He is nine years old. One morning, as I’m leaving, he calls out to me with the spontaneity of a songbird,
“Chit-deh!”
    Another Burmese lesson.
    “I love you.”

CHAPTER 3
THE CONDOM LESSON

    Whence comes my lust for vocabulary? I’ve had it since grade-three spelling tests, which the teacher called vocabulary drills. I loved them; I had to hide my enthusiasm from my fellow students. Once I started learning other languages, in my late teens, I became insufferable, a collector of dictionaries, a