Burmese Lessons: A true love story
Karen Connelly
Language: English
Pages: 400
ISBN: 0385528000
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Orange Prize–winner Karen Connelly’s compelling memoir about her journey to Burma, where she fell in love with a leader of the Burmese rebel army.
When Karen Connelly goes to Burma in 1996 to gather information for a series of articles, she discovers a place of unexpected beauty and generosity. She also encounters a country ruled by a brutal military dictatorship that imposes a code of censorship and terror. Carefully seeking out the regime’s critics, she witnesses mass demonstrations, attends protests, interviews detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and flees from police. When it gets too risky for her to stay, Connelly flies back to Thailand, but she cannot leave Burma behind.
Connelly’s interest in the political turns more personal on the Thai-Burmese border, where she falls in love with Maung, the handsome and charismatic leader of one of Burma’s many resistance groups. After visiting Maung’s military camp in the jungle, she faces an agonizing decision: Maung wants to marry Connelly and have a family with her, but if she marries this man she also weds his world and his lifelong cause. Struggling to weigh the idealism of her convictions against the harsh realities of life on the border, Connelly transports the reader into a world as dangerous as it is enchanting.
In radiant prose layered with passion, regret, sensuality and wry humor, Burmese Lessons tells the captivating story of how one woman came to love a wounded, beautiful country and a gifted man who has given his life to the struggle for political change.
left but fish bones. Sparrow picks up the deep-fried fish head with his fingers and carefully fits it into his mouth. One cheek bulges out in a fish-nosed triangle as he chews. Stretched lips, stretched mustache, stretched face. He ramps up the absurdity by batting his eyelashes like Betty Boop. A Karen man stops to say hello to Maung and the two guerrillas. Then a young woman joins us, cradling her woven shoulder bag to her stomach. “What’s inside?” Maung asks. She holds the mouth of the bag
it. I blink, absorbing the tears back into my eyes. “You want me to go away?” “I think it is better for now.” I stare at him. The brown skin has regained much of its vitality, its brightness, but his face is noticeably thinner. We can change in the space of hours. I look at his broad cheeks, his lips. There. I’ll have to be satisfied with that, looking at but not kissing them. I don’t know what else to say. Goodbye, I suppose. They are sending me home on the bus, like a child who has
business, really. I know that. I’m just …” The sentence remains unfinished. “I know that everything changes after children come. And you’re an artist. You’re a real writer, it’s part of you. But here that wouldn’t matter so much. To … to them. You’re a white woman with a Canadian passport, and if you have kids here you’ll have to support them. And him, too, possibly … if the NGO money gets thin. The money to raise a hypothetical family won’t come from the revolutionary coffers—I can’t imagine
affects people’s relationships?” He shakes his head. “No, no! Nothing like that here. Only the Thai soldiers violent, and the Burmese soldiers. Not the people, we all peaceful.” Right. As if he’s going to tell a white stranger about the personal problems of his neighbors. Or himself. I try to redeem myself by asking a few questions about the school. But he keeps talking about the cruelty of the Thai soldiers who guard the camp. “It gets worse. In the beginning, long time ago, they respect. Now
electrical connection between us still works, despite moonlit fiascoes, constipation, centipedes. As he turns to say something else to the women, his shoulder grazes mine. He moves past the group, walks back over to the water pump, and looks at me. We stand there staring at each other. I would like to have sex with this man for the rest of my life. (Or, for that matter, even just once or twice more, please God.) Is that a good-enough reason to get married? What am I thinking? He looks down at