We can also be friends forever

Sule Paya is a pagoda smack in the middle of Yangon, in the centre of a major crossroads opposite the town hall. Shapa sells postcards to tourists at the pagoda’s east entrance. She’s done so for over four years, she tells me, which means that she probably started working there when she was about ten years old.

“Many boys like to be my boyfriends, but I like more the foreign boys” she says.

Her English is better than most Burmese people I met so far and she learned it all from tourists – “I went to school only for one year”, yet her brown eyes gleam with intelligence that many university graduates would envy.

“You have very handsome eyes” she says with a flirtatious look and then reassures me that she doesn’t say that to every tourist. She quickly understood that I wasn’t going to buy any of her postcards, so we just chatted for a while, since there weren’t any other potential customers around. I noticed the looks of some passers-by, who I couldn’t but interpret as suspicious as to what this foreign man was doing talking so friendly with a little girl, obviously not buying any of her postcards. Shapa didn’t mind or notice the looks and started teaching me some Burmese expressions.

But I wasn’t there to meet Shapa – I was waiting to meet Tinwin, who I knew nothing about except that he described himself has being ‘sick of living in Myanmar’ while at the same time being ‘at one with myself and perfect – I’m Tinwin’.

With a big smile on his face he showed up on the other side of the street and came over to greet me. His skin was of much darker tone than the average person in Yangon and his features much bolder and less refined. We said goodbye to Shapa and went to find a tea shop. He took a while to go through all the tea shops he knew in the area to find one suitable and not too noisy for us to talk. He settled for a slightly up-market establishment called “Happy Burger” or something. We ordered some iced teas and sat down. After he kindly and full of excitement told me about all the important tourist attractions I should not miss in and around Yangon and some more unusual places that he could take me to at our next meeting, I tried to explain without disrespect for his previous suggestions, that I was really more interested in meeting people and that I’d like to know more about him. First he was a little startled, but then smiled and admitted that someone had recommended this to him as a good strategy for meeting foreigners: before talking about yourself, tell them about all the good places to go to and arrange to go there together, then you have more time to talk and become friends later. He agreed to make an exception with me.

“I’m from a village in north of Myanmar, near to Kichin state”, he started. “In my village there no cars and no streets, no shops and no plastic bags. There is a primary school, but no high school. Next high school in U-Yen.” In order to get to U-Yen, you either walked for a few hours over thin paths between rice fields, or you cycled along those same paths for about half an hour. So the one factor deciding whether a family from his village could send their child to high school or not was whether they could afford the price of a bike – about 15,000 kyats at the time – maybe about 30 Dollars. As most of the goods a family needed and didn’t produce itself were bartered from neighbours in exchange for other products, there wasn’t much money in the village. But luckily his family could afford a bicycle and so Tinwin didn’t only go to high school in U-Yen, but continued to study Economics in the next university town and then became the first person in his family to move to Yangon.

He arrived in Yangon on the 2nd May 2008 – the day cyclone Nargiss hit.

“Crazy”, I said.
“Yes, crazy.”
A long silence ensued.

“How was that? I just can’t imagine it. The first time in your life that you came to Yangon and then the storm hit the same day. Can you tell me more about that – if you don’t mind?”
He looked around the nearly empty burger place we were in and then said in a slightly hushed voice: “Next time maybe, better keep it superficial this time we meet.”

BKK - YNG

“I’m so sorry I’m late.”
That’s how everything starts.
With me, at least.

“OK OK” he said and something else that I didn’t understand. He bowed, took my backpack from me and stored it in the boot.
It was still very early, just after 5am, and I was already sweating. Partly from the usual stress of packing-as-the-taxi-is-waiting just five minutes earlier, but mainly from the humid climate I wasn’t yet used to. So the coolness of the taxi was a relief, but also a worry – air-conditioning in my mind always forebodes sickness.

“To the airport, please.”
“Airport, OK. Highway?”
“No.”

We had hardly reached the main street and I was already snoozing. As the calm taxi driver whizzed north through a waking Bangkok, I would only wake occasionally at a crossing or a light and be surprised at how many people were sitting in the many street-side tea shops and soup places at this time of day, eating and chatting as if it were lunch time. Then I dozed off again.

When I finally got onto the plane, I was looking forward to seeing the morning light on the landscapes below from my window seat, but my lack of sleep prevented me from this pleasure – I was gone long before take-off. I woke up over an endless array of paddy fields, as we descended through candyfloss clouds and mists down toward Yangon.

A wave of anxiety went through my mind as I waited in line for the passport control. Myanmar used to be totally closed to tourists and apparently still has quite haphazard and arbitrary visa application procedures, about which a lot of tips, advice and warnings are issued. What differs to other visa applications is the unbashful gleaning of information about your current and past occupations. Two friends of mine who went to Yangon as journalists entered as ‘fashion designer’ and ‘landscape gardener’, which were regarded as safe options at the time. For my application I had decided that honesty would be the best disguise: recycling expert. A little pompous maybe, but close enough.

Apart from my backpack on the luggage belt, two things were awaiting me behind the passport control: one of my best friends who I hadn’t seen in almost two years and a country that was mostly a mystery to me.