How can many words can a picture say?

_{By: William Laurie and Withaya Huanok}

Others hawked foods that reflected the diversity of the region: local Kengtung noodles, Burmese mohinga, and Nepali homemade yogurt could all be readily found.  Islands of brightly colored fruits, vegetables, flowers, and meats dotted the expansive grounds, and smatterings of Tai Khün, Shan, Burmese, Chinese, Nepali, and other ethnic languages of Burma could be heard, spoken by the shoppers meandering amidst the bustling market.  Yet the Kengtung Market also offers another, far-less visible necessity of life: information.

The Burmese junta, the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), exercises draconian control over the flow of information.  The country routinely ranks amongst the bottom in measures of press freedom, counting amongst its peers countries such as Turkmenistan, Iran, and North Korea.  All publications are rigidly policed by the Press Scrutiny Board headed by military officers, and official news media in Burma are government-operated.  In this environment, innovative measures are employed to spread the news and make a political statement.  In January this year, poet Saw Wai published a love poem entitled February the Fourteenth, an innocuous piece in advance of Valentines Day.  However, astute readers quickly picked up what the censors missed: when the first words of each line are strung together, they read “General Than Shwe is crazy with power.”  The issue quickly sold out and Saw Wai was arrested, his whereabouts still unknown.  Similarly, not surprisingly, the release of Rambo IV, where an aging Rambo takes on the brutal Tatmadaw, tapped into popular sentiment, bolstered by the junta’s brutal suppression of the “Saffron Revolution” last September.  The film was quickly banned by the regime, which then blithely proceeded with its May 10th referendum to approve the new Burmese constitution, one which took 14 years to draft and would formally entrench military rule.  The process of drafting the constitution was neither transparent nor inclusive; the junta enacted Law 5/96, whereby any individuals discussing the constitution-drafting process could be jailed for up to 20 years.  Not surprisingly, the process leading to the vote has also been widely characterized as neither free nor fair, with intimidation of critics and allegations of fraud widespread.  Already, signs in Burma have appeared declaring “don’t cheat the people’s vote” and “we need more Rambo.”  Perhaps symbolic of the upcoming vote itself, these expressions of public sentiment were quickly whitewashed by the authorities.

There were no such overt displays of dissent in the bustling Kengtung Market.  After enjoying a breakfast of Nepali roti and mohinga, we stopped at a clothing stall.  A woman in her late 30s was sitting behind neatly-stacked piles of longyis, folding Shan shirts.  The market’s diversity also extended to longyis: some of the piles were in patterns typically worn by Burman men; others had designs more commonly worn by Muslim men, and not a few were checkered Kachin-style longyis, popularized as the informal uniform of members of the National League for Democracy, especially if worn with a white shirt.  The vendor beamed at us, asking the usual questions of where we were from and what we did, while sorting through her impressive collection of longyis and also pointing out the different designs.

“I’m Shan, from Kengtung,” she declared, with more than a hint of pride.  “I work in the government office, but not today.”  [It was Sunday]  She glanced around nervously, pausing briefly before almost whispering, “today is my day off but I have to work here.  Life in Myanmar is very difficult.  My pay is only 30,000 kyat a month; that is not enough to survive on.”

As she packaged our new purchases into a plastic bag, she added, “so many of the young people here go away now, especially to Thailand; to Chiang Mai, to Bangkok.  Sometimes even further.  We don’t hear again from so many of them.”

I handed her a wad of kyat as she passed me the bag; the purchase had used up almost all the kyat I had.

“Do you know where we can find a money changer here?” I asked.

She smiled wanly.  “Yes, of course.  I do that too.”

It was not until almost leaving the market that I noticed the design on the white plastic bag containing the longyis: it was a younger Rambo, long-haired, angry, carrying an automatic rifle.  Looking around the market, they were almost ubiquitously displayed at every stall.