By Evan
The valley of sugar cane surrounding Gengma, by Evan
Gengma (耿馬) is a sleepy little County Seat (縣城) nestled up against Burma. It’s hardly worth visiting unless you happen to be going its way, and is in fact much less visited than the much smaller border town of Mengding (孟定鎮) 80 km to its west. It sits at the center of a long， deep valley surrounded by high mountains. This valley is the most exquisite example of that geographical feature I have ever laid my eyes upon. Its boundless rolling hills are planted almost exclusively in sugar cane, surrounded by a ring of bamboo mountains and covered by a perfect blue sky. If Norman Rockwell had done Chinese landscapes, he probably would have painted a series called Gengma.
It is not entirely, however, the physical beauty of Gengma that made our visit worthwhile. As always, it’s the people who inhabit a place who make it worthwhile. The first people we encountered on our drop from the mountains of Cangyuan (滄源) were the Dai (傣族). The houses became the two-story bamboo houses (竹樓), and occasional Buddhist monasteries alerted us to the religious nature of the place. The young women wore sarongs, tight to the waist and bright to the eyes, often complemented by conical coolie hats. The older women generally wrapped their heads in white turbans and their legs in long, black skirts. The Dai had planted over their half of the valley almost exclusively in sugar cane, barely knee-high under the late May sun. It was for the thousands of acres of sugar on their side of the plain that Gengma’s central feature was a monstrous, state-owned sugar factory — a rusty, gated cathedral of confection in the heart of town.
Across the main drag from the sugar works is a market about a half mile long and divided into four rows around a modern entertainment center at the middle. The row on the extreme left of this market is full almost exclusively of Burmese shops. In one of these stores, an older man with a bulging belly, strikingly Arab in features, wearing a white skull cap and a light blue sarong, invited me in heavily accented Mandarin to sit. The store sold shoes and every kind of hokey Chinese medicinal product you’ve ever seen. A few seconds later, his son emerged from the jade store next door. He looked like he had just stepped off the plane from Pakistan, except for his jeans, and he spoke Mandarin more flawless than the jade he was selling next door. His name was Zailarlin, and he had a million questions to ask me. I had to rush to make a dinner appointment elsewhere, but I promised I’d return the next day to sit with him again.
Zailarlin's English speaking uncle at left, his son poking around his back, me looking wild, and Zailarlin on the right, by Evan's camera
And so I did. When I arrived, he was keeping the books in neat Burmese (at least it was in very orderly lines — I have no idea what Burmese should look like). He closed his book and pulled up a chair for me. Quickly I learned that he, a native of Mandalay and a Muslim, had been with his family in Yunnan off and on since the age of 13. Most of that time, he had been in the border commerce town of Mengding, selling — what else? — jade. He was a member of the Rohingya, a group millions strong descended from Muslim traders from Arabia, Persia, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh who had accumulated in northern Burma. The craziest part to me was that he had learned to speak perfect Chinese. It was a bizarre-o moment for everybody. Here he was, indistinguishable to my eyes from a pure Arab, sitting over a display case full of jade, his thick bearded papa looking like a cross between Sinbad and the king from The King and I, and me, a dirty, wild haired white man, conversing in Chinese.
The first thing he wanted to know was whether I could read and write in Chinese. I explained I could, and he asked for a trick to learning. I wanted to explain that the only way I could think to learn how to write and read the proper way was to hire a teacher and be drilled every morning for two hours, learning the proper stroke orders on lined grid paper. Georgetown charged me the modest fee of $40,000 a year for this service (thank God for financial aid and loans)! Poor Zailarlin’s family couldn’t even afford to hire a Chinese assistant to watch over one of their two storefronts. All their money was being sent home or saved up for him — so he could impress an older Mandalay woman with whom he had fallen in love to marry him. I told him to maybe buy a children’s book, and he grabbed out a little pinyin / basic characters primer meant for five-year-olds and said with a little shame in his voice, “It’s for little kids, but I think I’m making progress.” I had no idea what else to say to him. It was the worst later when he asked me what he would have to do to get an email account. There’s no such thing as free email in Burma, and he couldn’t read English or Chinese. No good ideas about how to open an account came to me except to ask a Chinese friend to show him how to do it. I really felt like I was in a time warp talking to this young guy, super bright and knowledgeable, only 21 years old and fluent in three languages (Burmese, Chinese, and his people’s language), but who had no idea how to use the internet. He had only just gotten a cell phone a few months before!
Despite all the linguistic and technical difficulties, he had an appreciation for living in China. He called it “very open,” and “a place where you could feel free.” I had to ask myself, how hard must the devil have the people by the throat in poor old Burma to make anybody in their right mind think China is open and free. He said it’s very bad there, that nobody can do business without the “leadership” stealing everything. In the summer, rolling blackouts are a frequent nuisance. That said, he missed his home, especially that older girl his parents don’t approve of, but he figured his future lies in China if he ever wants to make anything of himself. In fact, it is his plan to earn enough money to bring back to Mandalay on his next visit to prove to that stubborn girl that he’s not just a “little brother” but is in fact a man and quell the last of her worries about marrying him. What things to be concerned about at his age!
Of course, making it on this side of the border ain’t as easy as all that. The Chinese aren’t the most receptive people in the world — only a week before, an old Burmese man had been beaten and his storefront wrecked after he insulted a well-connected Chinese man who had returned with 20 friends. He and his family aren’t allowed to go any further than Gengma. He spends seven days a week between the jade and medicine/shoe shops. The only time he leaves are when he takes a motorcycle to the border to pick up more supplies, or when he goes to the town mosque, where he said the local Hui Chinese imam pronounces the Arabic prayers terribly.
The imam of Gengma with his granddaughter, by Andy
The next morning we had breakfast with that Chinese imam with terrible pronunciation in front of his mosque, on which “unity between the races (民族團結)” is printed as big as “mosque (清真寺).” “Free and open,” is this society, yes, yes. The imam made us a mean bowl of noodles despite his wife’s protests that it was too much trouble to make them. Zailarlin had warned that she was a bitch, and he was right. The imam, relocated from Dali (大理) for 10 years to open only one of five such joints in the county, had not had foreigners in his restaurant before. He jumped on the opportunity to have our “expert” eyes examine the two key pieces of his prized collection: a Piastre de Commerce from French Indochina stamped 1899 and a New Zealand Half Crown from 1949 he had bought from a collector. He wrote “imam” for me in Arabic and Chinese (吾師 — I hadn’t known this), and in exchange Devi gave him some coins from America for his collection.
Back to Zailarlin, after a long spirited discussion about religion (he said Allah would punish those Muslims who denied their faith if men couldn’t, and that Allah could punish you a hell of a lot harder than men — zoinks) and our two countries, he asked me if I had been in the US for 9-11. He had watched the whole thing on CCTV from Mengding, and told me his family was deeply sorry for what had happened, and was even more sorry that it was done by Muslims. Around this time, his burly uncle walked in from next door.
His uncle looked almost central Asian, clearly a mix of Burmese and Rohingya, and his teeth looked as though he had meticulously filed each individual one to a point before applying a coating of red paint. In his hand, he carried a dentist’s nightmare of betel leaves, nuts, and shell paste. This man, 40, spoke very decent English that he had learned at the University of Mandalay in a cavernous voice. When I said “Burma”, he corrected me: “Myanmar.” I figured that meant he was a loyalist, but the next thing out of his mouth was: “I hate Myanmar.” He saw no future back in Myanmar and wanted to raise his son in Yunnan, he explained in his rusty English. He spoke no Chinese, which made three directional conversation difficult. The uncle filled my hands with thin Burmese cigars, bade me to come back whenever I want, and I left, wishing them the best of luck.
The town was full of more treasures than just jade. Just a shot from the market, I made the most exciting discovery of our trip in weeks, a parlor selling home-made ice cream! The owner was a very witty man from Guangzhou who used to make frequent trips between the border and home to resell jade. After years of making the same trip, he said he had wanted to go home, but a Dai woman “grabbed hold of him and wouldn’t let him leave,” finally anchoring him with a precious 3-year-old girl who sat with momma next to the counter. Now the only green thing he’s interested in brokering is his honeydew melon flavor. Personally, I preferred his milk and peach flavors — delicious!
Rebels without a cause. Lao'er is in blue, and Abo is in the center in a white vest. By Evan's camera
Speaking of delicious, the night before we left town, we were treated to a dinner of mint lamb, spicy dried beef (again, vegetarianism is sacrificed to courtesy), and other goodies cooked by a young guy named Abo (阿波) and his gang of hooligan friends. I should back up a little to explain this one. We had passed 10,000 km on our first night in Gengma and had celebrated with a few beers and some sweet local booze (楊梅酒). On my subsequent solo adventuring around town, I had come across a little restaurant with a bunch of kids wearing funny hats hunched over a table playing cards. They invited me in for a drink, and really, would you expect a stone afraid of gathering moss to refuse a good roll?
The restaurant was owned by Abo’s parents and run by him alone. At night after business hours, he turned it into his personal playroom, handing out corn moonshine and beers to his buds for free while they gambled and chain smoked into the wee hours. They all had hilarious nicknames in Chinese that you might translate as Lefty Pete, or Long-member Lenny. My favorite was a guy called “Lao-er (老二, a phallic euphemism),” who held the motorcycle speed record of the group at 170 km/hr. He was the son of a Lisu (僳僳族) father and a Wa (佤族) mother who grew up with the Dai and had a pretty little Dai girl hanging on his arm. They were both in high school but didn’t care a lick — he hadn’t been in weeks, she in months. He said he’d figure out a way to rig the Gaokao, and she said if she didn’t pass, “well, I’ll just marry into money!” Everybody laughed. It was a good time that night, and the next night when they made us a big delicious dinner out of the kindness of their hearts. It was disconcerting for Devi, who had just come from her first years of grad school in D.C., to hang out with 18-year-old deviants all smoking and drinking up a storm, but then again, this is the frontier! At least they had courtesy, social skills, and a core group of friends, a hell of a lot more than I could say about a lot of dopes with great Gaokao scores I had met at Peking University.
Like I own the place, by andy
Not all the kids in town were so fortunate in their social graces though. On my way to the Central Temple of town, I had found an 18-year-old girl staring into space next to some rusted playground equipment and surrounded by tall weeds. Was anything the matter, I asked? No, she said, just bored. Her parents had moved to Xinjiang when she was little, and she had been entrusted to her traveling aunt. The aunt had moved her from her native Shaanxi (陝西) to Hunan until high school graduation, and then finally to Gengma, where they lived in a hotel room. She had no friends, no job, no interest in reading or exploring, and really, nothing to say either. The words Tabula and Rasa came to mind. She was just whiling away time until that night, when she would ice skate in the entertainment center of the market, the opening of which had been a death knell for the long-ignored park where we sat.
She hadn’t even been to the Buddhist Temple down the road in four months of sitting on that bench, from which even her skinny right arm could easily nail a praying monk with a lobbed baseball. She followed me over with a look of extreme trepidation on her face, as though the throngs of orange-clad monks wandering hither and thither setting up rows of tables might pounce on her at any moment. As a monk explained that the tables were being prepared for giant meeting the following day, and that I should come back to see it, she slipped quietly out the front door and off presumably somewhere else to sit and stare.
The nice old Dai lady who fed us hollering for attention, by Andy
Speaking of that meeting, we certainly did show up the next morning, but not at 8 as I had been told to do. No, we’re idiots, and we showed up at 11:30, right as the morning session of the “First annual Second Convocation Training Conference of Theravada Buddhism in Lincang (臨滄市佛教協會第一屆第二次南傳佛教培訓會)” (yes, that’s a mouthful) was wrapping up its morning activities. “Coming early is not as good as coming at a fortuitous moment (來得早不如來得巧!),” said a well-groomed man with a fancy Canon camera around his neck and a conspicuously urbane wardrobe among all the Dai monks in their orange. He turned out to be the chairman of the Yunnan Provincial Buddhism Association (雲南省佛教協會會長), Mr. Lei Jin (雷勁). He was in town to survey the proceedings, which had representatives of every monastery in a four county area in town to learn from the masters. He impressed the hell out of me by handing me a name card printed in traditional characters in addition to Tibetan and Dai. Respect, Mr. Lei, respect.
He ushered us over to a table of other conspicuous men to eat lunch. Around us hundreds of monks from age 18 to 80 were busily scarfing delicious food being served to them by volunteer Dai women in white turbans who shuttled giant trays to and fro the smoky kitchen. “All food provided by members of the community,” Mr. Lei explained. As for the copious amounts of meat on the table, “practitioners of Theravada Buddhism are allowed to eat meat.”
Us with the "important men" of the event: Mr. Lei on the left, then Tikadashi, me, Andy, and Mr. Jing, by some monk
Another man to Mr. Lei’s left, gruff like a mafioso with tattoos covering his arms, heard the comment about the meat, lit a cigarette, and chimed in, “We’re not supposed to smoke, but I sure do. We’re not supposed to drink either, but I’ve been drinking since I was 8 years old!” This raspy voiced man was Mr. Jing (景), the Chairman of the Dai Minority Association of Gengma (耿馬縣傣族協會會長). He had been in the army in Beijing, and had then bounced up and down the political ladder at home, even serving for a time as police chief and county magistrate (縣長). “The first thing I did as magistrate,” he said pointing to the 500-year-old temple, “was to get the cows out of here.” During the Cultural Revolution, the beautiful temple had been spared demolition to serve as a public barnyard — talk about karmic cows. “Under the guidance of our provincial leadership,” the burly man most obsequiously patted the leg of the much more effeminate Mr. Lei.
After lunch, we took a quick opportunity to talk with the head monk about what the monks actually do. The monk, called Tikadashi (提卡達希) was in his 30’s, wore glasses, and had the temperament of an impatient librarian. He gave us a long explanation of how Buddhism started, which we already knew, but generally wiggled around the question of their daily activities. “First of all, we don’t do anything that harms our bodies, like drinking, smoking…” But I saw monks smoking at the gate, I interrupted truthfully. “Well, some of our monks don’t follow the rules,” he got a little annoyed that we had noticed. Finally he said that their job is to recite scriptures, translate old passages from Pali (an ancient Indian language) into Dai, and teach truth to the communities. “Whether they follow the right teachings is their own business,” he finished. Finally before leaving, I asked him for his “real name,” his Chinese name. He explained that he had been given one of those names, but now that he’s left his mother and father, and “all in the world are his brothers and sisters,” he’ll stick with his chosen name. In Pali, Tika means “long life” and Dashi means “lofty.” We posed for a photo op with the three central figures of the day, wished them well, and headed out toward our next lofty destination (long life not guaranteed!).
Great post.