Crinnerly McCrae did not really like Burma.
Like many Westerners who called themselves Burma experts, she closed her mind to the things she did not like about it.
For instance, she did not like the military government, and she did not like the open pit toilets.
In her mind, she thought that a people with such a refined culture, so immaculate in their personal habits, however poor they were, would have discovered septic tanks on their own by now.
After all, the true Burmans of Central Burma had built the great 11th century kingdom of Bagan, and they had been renowned for their hydraulic engineering.
Just look at their canals.
But no, they must have four feet deep open pits sprinkled with quick lime in the countryside.
She looked guiltily around her, as if she believed all the people sitting on the polished teak floor in the renowned spirit spouse or nat kadaw’s waiting room could really read her mind.
Outside, in the noonday heat, the crows cawed and the pariah dogs howled.
Another thing she did not like about Burmese was their concept of time—their elastic time.
She’d been sitting on the floor like this, the sweat dripping between her somewhat pendulous breasts, in her gauzy Madras print blue and white halter top dress, wishing she had depilated her armpits during the weekend, for forty five minutes already, and still the shaman woman who was supposed to be able to tell fortunes accurately had not come out from the small doorway with the beaded green curtains.
Crinnerly tried not to think of the time she wasted as an anthropologist in Southeast Asia.
The traffic jams in Bangkok were some of the worse in the world.
The sky train had not been built yet.
But in Burma, cars were a luxury item, because only the military was in charge of car import permits, and they restricted the number of cars.
This was in 1975.
There were no traffic jams.
*
Dr. McCrae was not rich enough to put herself up in swanky hotels like the Inya Lake, built by the Russians, so she mostly stayed with friends, who were on the whole quite reluctant to have her sleep over, because they were afraid of the government agents and the village council elders who needed to know everything and often made spot checks of the see sayin or cooking oil ratio cards, which kept a strict count on the number of members of each household.
It was said to be so the government would know that there were no Karen or Kachin insurgents in town, being harbored in houses or huts.
But somehow, by giving gifts wherever she went and by dropping the name of the supreme leader Bright Sun, Chinnery, the daughter of a Scottish man and a Cambodian woman, had somehow managed to ingratiate herself with the few dozen families who formed the Rangoon or Burma elite, and she was able to travel freely inside the White Zones of Burma, where there were no ethnic insurgents, as there were at the periphery.
*
Chinnery stared at the three or four poorly dressed people sitting on the floor around her.
What personal problems brought them here, she wondered.
She decided she might as well use her time productively, so she flipped open her tape recorder, that she had bought for forty dollars in Bangkok, and recorded a few sentences, which she intended to use as a memory jogger for the semi-academic book on nat worship in Burma that she was drafting.
The fat woman and the thin man right next to her, who might have been her husband, looked at her curiously with an expression of their faces which said, These white people, do they have no sense of decorum? How gauche to open and use a tape recorder in a place like this, especially when the shaman is working professionally for her livelihood, and needs to be paid a donation.
What are these people going to do with the recordings?
Sell them overseas for a profit?
Chinnery ignored the glares of the other people in the waiting area and intoned into her tape recorder—
“Um. Animism is a subculture in Burma. I haven’t been in this village long. Um, it’s very hard to get a visa to come to study here.”
She did not realize that she was picking up the verbal habits of her American undergrad students, especially the young women, who “um-med” a lot and ended each of their sentences on an upward inflection, as if they were unsure of everything and were forever asking questions.
She re-started her tape noisily by pushing down a large rectangular button, and intoned:
“It’s very hard to get a visa.
“Twelve months my visa was in the works.”
At the word “visa” everyone turned around and looked at her silently.
At that time most Burmese could not travel anywhere outside Burma except with special permission from General Bright Sun. Most barely knew the difference between a visa and a passport, into which visas were stamped on each page.
“All my books and stuff are stored in four different places in America. Talk of academic gypsies.”
Her sound engineer boyfriend had told her to imagine someone when she was recording, so she tried to imagine herself giving a lecture at SOAS or the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. She hoped her lecturing tone did not put people to sleep.
It was a little hard to do among all these poor Burmese looking for some spiritual comfort.
“I lost one full time job,” she winced, “and hopped from temp to temp, waiting to come here. At last . . . ”she sighed, “Could only come finally because they wanted greenbacks, and now . . .”
“Try as I might I cannot really understand these people. But,” she became louder as she entered her familiar academic province, and its euphemisms, “this counter culture or subculture of spirit worship is so different from the prevailing Theravada Buddhism. I just jumped at the chance to come here. Ah, here she comes, the medium!”
*
Kaythee, the nat medium, rather ordinary looking and dressed in a white T-shirt with an ethnic jacket over it, and wearing a sarong or longyi, a wrapped long skirt sewn to form a tube, came in through the other door at the back, which led to the outdoor kitchen, Chinnery was sure.
Most Burmese kitchens were on verandas or set in small buildings a few yards away from the main house, to eliminate cooking odors of such things as balachaung, a sprinkling condiment made of fried onions, chillies, dried shrimp and fish sauce.
*
The medium was about age thirty, Chinnery estimated, though it was hard to estimate the age of Asian women. But Chinnery had a lot of experience from guessing the ages of her mother’s friends and relatives. Thirty, thirty five, that was about right.
Copyright KMKaung
7-30-2015
Photos--mine and from Wikipedia, nats--public domain.
