Kyi May Kaung's review of Mischa Berlinski's novel Fieldwork.

Mischa Berlinski, Fieldwork.
• 336 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (February 6, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374299161
• ISBN-13: 978-0374299163
http://www.amazon.com/Fieldwork-Novel-Mischa-Berlinski/dp/0374299161

Book review by Kyi May Kaung.
I bought Mischa Berlinski’s Fieldwork because of the picture of the pink hibiscus on the cover and the blurbs on the book jacket.
It did not disappoint.
As part of my job with a Burmese non-profit, I have made several trips to Chiangmai, Thailand, where Berlinski’s story of an anthropologist, Martiya van der Leun, who goes native, but goes a little too far, is set.
The novel begins rather slowly, with the narrator, Mischa, describing his time in Chiangmai. Chiangmai as a “cool Thai city” – cooler in terms of both climate, that is, a little less hot than sweltering Bangkok, and also “cool” in the sense of stylish and chic -- is full of non-profit organizations, working with Burmese refugees from across the border or with the hill tribes which live around the fashionable hill station, which is full of expatriates.
Berlinski successfully captures the do-gooder culture of the place, which does have a bit of cultural condescension about it, in the sense that the non-profit organizations think they “know better” than the locals, what the locals’ problems really are.
Anthropology as a subject discipline may have a bit of this. Berlinski describes with sensitivity the awkwardness of Martiya living in a one-room Dyalo hut as an observer with a Dyalo family, of which the household head would like to sleep with her. Berlinski is supposed to have originally wanted to write about the real life Lisu tribe, but his fictional Dyalo are no less compelling, especially in their belief systems.
The counter culture of the pi (Thai) or nats (Burmese) – the spirit world or animism, is beautifully depicted here. In Fieldwork, the rice spirit which possesses Martiya’s native lover is a character in his own right, and in the end possesses Martiya also.
When Berlinski as the narrator of the story arrives on the scene, Martiya has already been murdered, having met a mutual friend who goes and sees her in a Chiangmai prison only once. Martiya is in prison because she murdered a Christian missionary.
One of the most affecting scenes in the book is when this friend goes to see her in prison, and Martiya, a western woman and a researcher who is an ABD (all but dissertation) on her way towards a doctorate, crawls or grovels out into the waiting room in the traditional Thai style. Her hair has been cut in the short Thai style, somewhat like a “butch” hairdo.
In Thai and Burmese culture, and perhaps in other Southeast Asian cultures, the head is the highest and holiest part of the body and the feet the lowest or most lowly.
In the 19th century one Thai princess drowned because no one dared touch her body.
As a prisoner, Martiya was crawling out on all fours so her head would be lower than those of the other people in the room who were sitting in chairs.
The Dyalo and the non-profiteers are not the only two tribes or cultures that play a large role in this fascinating novel. There is also the intergenerational family of the Walkers, a Christian missionary tribe. Here, Berlinski does the missionaries’ God-talk particularly well.
As a learned person’s book, Fieldwork is full of satisfying intellectual detail. It is told backwards, after the fact of the murder, as Berlinski the narrator keeps finding out more and more.
In the end, it is a certain must-read, as it demonstrates vividly how each culture has its own way of thinking. Try as we might, we can only enter another culture at risk of total immersion, perhaps losing our own individuality and even our lives in the process.
Berlinski tells us that in the end, Martiya van der Leun did not go on to get her Ph.D. and considered herself as “just beginning to understand the Dyalo” when she died.
*
Kyi May Kaung (Ph.D.) has written fiction set in Burma and Thailand and spent decades in academia.