Myanmar is Multifaceted

I confess to arriving in Myanmar predisposed to look for its bizarre side. Everyone says it’s a weird country, which of course is music to the ears of most travelers. Why else do we go places, if not to see and do things that are out of the ordinary?

I told myself to rely on conversations rather than proclamations. The posted stuff does tend to be what you encounter first, though. Here and there were signs announcing:

Our Three Main National Causes

• Non-disintegration of the Union
• Non-disintegration of national solidarity
• Perpetuation of sovereignty

The in-flight magazine published a few government-approved lists, with titles such as “People’s Desire.” Among these desires are “Oppos[ing] those relying on external elements, acting as stooges, holding negative views.” The list of “Four Economic Objectives” concludes that “The initiative to shape the national economy must be kept in the hands of the State and the national peoples.”

Naturally, neither those subjects, nor any of the “Four Social Objectives” (“Uplift of dynamism of patriotic spirit,” etc., etc.), ever came up in chatting with people. Rather than non-disintegration of the union, everyone we spoke to seemed interested in non-disintegration of, say, their phone service or their bank account. Nearly all of the folks we met were lovely, generous, realistic, and industrious, making lemonade from lemons.

More than once we were approached by people who claimed to be students or academics. Their desire for English conversation and connections to the outside world bordered on the desperate. One self-described science professor spotted us walking along a side street and pulled over her car (twice!) to (double) check that we really wanted to be on foot. Her offers to drive us where we were going felt awkward for all concerned—we knew we didn’t really have a destination, and she knew she didn’t really have much waiting for her at the office. Getting ahead through education seems futile in Myanmar, where the government apparently closes universities and colleges on a whim, sometimes for months at a time.

Maybe the slice of the population we met wasn’t representative. Maybe in Myanmar there’s no such thing. Much more than its neighboring countries, it seems to be a place full of many ethnicities and landscapes and agendas. I was surprised by the variety of faces we encountered. The number of people whose people seemed to come from India and China was higher than I’m used to seeing in Bangkok.

Another surprise was the perfection of Shwedagon Pagoda. I knew it was going to be gold-plated and glittering, but I didn’t expect to feel so many forces swirling around, from the spiritual to the artistic, the touristic to the pilgrimatic. All roads lead there. A place to become restored, in case one’s faith has waned. Maybe the most stunning site in Asia.

Yet the same spot delivers quirkiness. Encircling the head of every single Buddha image on the Shwedagon grounds is a disconcerting neon halo. These recently installed rainbows, swirling and pulsing and spinning in endless different patterns, turn the serene into the silly.

We divided our eight days equally between Yangon and Bagan, not counting a quick break from the boundless Bagan to see where the road south goes from there. Abandoning ourselves to serendipity nearly always worked out, even though we often had no idea what was going on or what was being explained to us.

There was the time we got a little lost during a long hot stroll and ended up in the back of a pickup truck surrounded by 30 or 40 school kids and their lunch tiffins. The boys climbed onto the roof, the girls squeezed in wherever they could. Only one flat tire later, we arrived safely at a road we recognized.

We wondered at one point about the history of a handsome wooden monastery, but signage and local knowledge was in short supply, so we simply soaked up its beauty and called it good. Another time, the roly-poly abbot of a temple school mystified us with palm readings and palm-leaf Pali texts, before providing us a sparkling blessing in response to our donation. Sometimes we felt, by the time we got back to our hotel, that we hadn’t really done much. Oddly, Myanmar rewards not doing much. You just walk around for a while, take in the abstruseness, and end up feeling satisfied.