The Burmese Girl and the Bangkok Madness
Author
Genghis Phone
Author Bio
GENGHIS PHONE is a former mass communication specialist who has traveled around the world for work and exploration of his interests. Burma has been consistently on top of his list of the most fascinating countries. In 2006 he started work on a fiction called “The Burmese Chair”, a story of sex and religion based on his personal observation and experience in the country. While doing research for the book, he had come to realize he couldn’t completely ignore the hard problem of democracy in Burma. Inspired by the heroic people of Burma’s pro-democracy movement like Aung San Suu Kyi, Min Ko Naing, and many others, and their incredible acts of bravery, he decided to take his book to a higher level. As a result, the original story of sex and religion evolved and ripened to become the “Burmese Revolutionary Days” series, with “The Burmese Girl and the Bangkok Madness” and “The Burmese Girl and the Rangoon Bombing” as the first and second book of a total of six books in the series. As much as an epic, “Burmese Revolutionary Days” is an intimate account of suffering, slaughter, and ruin, and a chronicle of Burmese people’s proud pursuit of democracy which has continued to remain elusive and out-of-reach. For the sheer scale of the project, Genghis Phone quit his job as the Vice President of Corporate Communications at a quasi-government agency and devoted himself to writing fulltime. He lives in Hong Kong.
Description
THE BURMESE GIRL, whose father was a Tatmadaw (Burmese military) officer, left the country in turmoil for England at a tender age. She later got married to a British citizen. An unexpected turn of events brought her back to Rangoon. She joined the pro-democracy movement. For her true grit, selflessness and sacrifices, she became the leader of her party committing to the restoration of justice, human rights and democracy to the country.
Is this the story of Aung San Suu Kyi, the icon of the Burmese democratic movement?
Actually, the facts above, curiously familiar as they are, belong to an entirely different heroine rather than that of the Nobel Peace laureate.
Her name is Maya. She is an ordinary Burmese girl, except that she is also very pretty. Like many of the young men and women of her generation who have poured their souls into the resistance movement to overthrow the military regime, she adores Aung San Suu Kyi (known to many as “The Lady”) and regards her as the undisputed leader of the Burmese people. The Lady’s famous statement – “I do not hold to non-violence for moral reasons, but for practical and political reasons, because I think it’s best for the country. And even Ghandiji, who is supposed to be the father of non-violence, said that between cowardice and violence, he’d choose violence anytime.” – is her motto.
In 2006, Maya returned to Rangoon to attend the funeral of a Burmese dissident who was once in love with her. The man had been sold out, imprisoned in Central Prison Insein and was tortured to death. A former student activist masquerading as a restaurateur in London was identified as the prime suspect behind the death of the dissident. To bring the culprit to justice, Maya traveled to Bangkok and was almost swallowed up by the coup in Thailand.
In the summer of the same year, a young Hong Kong man flew into Bangkok with his girlfriend, a Thai prostitute named Kaya. They were the persons wanted in connection with a case of murder and robbery in a tiny Asian city called Macao. They hoped to seek refuge in Bangkok whose seemingly lax law and order was considered their best protection, without knowing three months after they had landed in the city, a democratically elected government was toppled by the military.
Ah Man, which is the name of the young Hong Kong man, was later abandoned by his Thai girlfriend. He was left all alone to face his pursuers (the law enforcers as well as the local gangsters), who were extending their search into the area of Khao San where he had been hiding since his arrival in Bangkok.
To a fate probably even weirder than he could have imagined, Ah Man crossed paths with Maya. Captivated by the beauty of the Burmese girl, fascinated by her story of fighting a brutal regime, and lured by the glories of an impending revolution, Ah Man joined Maya as she returned to Rangoon. In the ensuing years, he would experience – adventure as well as misadventure – a train of some most tragic, confused and bizarre events that would have befallen the country, before a new era of reconciliation and reconstruction dawned upon Burma.
“The Burmese Girl and the Bangkok Madness”, a work of fiction, is the first book of the “Burmese Revolutionary Days” series. As much as an epic, the series is an intimate account of revolt, slaughter and ruin, as well as a chronicle of Burmese people’s proud pursuit of democracy which has continued to remain elusive and out-of-reach.
Book excerpt
Chapter 4, The Burmese Girl and the Bangkok Madness
I (KAYA) WAS CROWNED MISS TEEN at only fourteen in a beauty contest run by a US company of consumer products.
It was to promote a new brand of sanitary towels for teens. The first prize was a sewing machine, plus unlimited use of the towels for a year, commencing from the date of my first period. I never had the chance of laying my hands on the prize, which was sold straightaway for a few thousand baht to cover my mother’s medical expense for her chronic back problem. With what I had achieved at such a tender age, I naturally aspired to something big, which could help my family put poverty behind them. I craved that someday I would wear a larger crown, of provincial or national scale, a crown made not of paper and plastic but real jewels, and a prize worth not a few thousand baht but millions of dollars. Sadly, my lucky break never came, or it came too late to deter me from treading the path of becoming another piece of meat in the market of human flesh.
About two weeks after I turned sixteen, on one fresh and cool autumn evening with a big, silver moon in the sky, my father suddenly appeared in our home village in San Mei. He, an excavator operator of a construction company in Bangkok, usually came home only on important occasions such as Songkran (Water Festival) or His Majesty the King’s birthday, which are public holidays. If there were exceptions, it would be for something bad; for example, not long before he’d had to rush home with money for my mother’s medical expense after she had accidentally fallen off a slope and broken her shoulder. Although it was a little strange to see him show up at a time when he was supposed to be busy working in Bangkok, I and my younger brother, who was about thirteen, were ecstatic by his homecoming, and didn’t probe. He had brought me a belated birthday cake and a toy gun for my brother, who had thought of becoming a soldier someday. This was my father’s last homecoming because he never went away again.
Two days after his return he was found hanging under a poplar tree on the hillside. In his death note, he said all construction sites in Bangkok had been closed and abandoned because the government had done something gravely wrong, which he did not quite comprehend. He confessed that he was too tired to continue with the endless struggles with poverty. He was rather positive about his own departure because he, as a Buddhist, believed the curse of the poor family would be lifted after he was gone. He sounded only slightly apologetic for leaving us behind. He didn’t even ask me or my brother to ‘be good in his absence’; perhaps he was in a hurry. He concluded by reminding my mother to stop using drugs for her back pain because they were expensive.
I had a dream of him forty-eight days after he died. His soul was colorless, his apparition airy. He looked very sad. He said his death wasn’t enough to lift the curse of the family because an unthinkable calamity was about to occur, with the fate of the country at stake. “Today is my last day in this world. My time now remains in minutes and seconds. Therefore, listen carefully to what I have to say before I am completely gone: Your brother is the only hope of the family. You must protect him and do everything possible to help him grow up to become a useful man,” he sobbed. “Gotta stop now. I can see the gate opening and it is my turn to enter. Goodbye.” Then from apparition to shadow, from shadow to emptiness, he disappeared as my dream went blank.
With my father’s departure, the livelihood of the family, consisting of a sick mother and a kid brother, fell onto my shoulders. Despite the pressure, I resisted the call to become a bar girl—at least not before I had exhausted all other options. I still believed in the dignity of man; even when life was becoming an impossible daily struggle, I clung heroically to the remaining dignity of a former Miss Teen by turning down the more lucrative work of a bar girl. Instead, I got myself a job in a massage parlor, where you could still have the choice of feeling up meaty bodies for a living without having to put yours up for sale.
