For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question Read Free

screen up to me. I smiled, but no one said anything. The Guy, leaning against the wall with his arms folded, didn’t make any introductions, so I approached the only other girl in the room, who was standing in the back, and asked her name.
    She looked nervous, but after sucking in a breath she uttered
three syllables, completely unfamiliar Sino-Tibetan sounds fast in a row, and I didn’t understand. I towered over her tiny frame. When I leaned in closer and asked her to repeat her name, she backed away while she did. I still didn’t get it well enough to say it back to her, but told her my name in return. She just nodded.
    I sat on the marble floor among the legs of the white plastic chairs the guys were sitting in, quiet in the surrounding rise and fall of their soft tonal syllables, deep, bubbling, like slow oil over stones. The TV blared Thai. As it grew dark, mosquitoes sauntered in through the screenless open windows. In season on the mosquito-transmitting menu at the Thai-Burma border: malaria, dengue fever, Japanese encephalitis. My breeding and upbringing left me with no natural resistance to the two latter, and I’d opted against taking the sickening drugs for the former. Not wanting to further alienate myself by being the white girl who ran upstairs to hide under a mosquito net at dusk, I watched the guys laughing and talking, like a partygoer who didn’t know anyone where everyone was having too good a time to care. They were fit, bare calves and feet splayed in front of their chairs, their smooth faces smiling easily. I pulled my air mattress out of my bag and started blowing it up. I incurred some mosquito bites. I shifted my sit bones on the shiny tile. I stood up.
    “I’m going to bed,” I told The Guy.
    He nodded, and looked at me for a second. It was seven-thirty. “Are you okay?” he asked. I’d just taken twenty-seven hours of planes and automobiles and felt exhausted and alone. He wasn’t sure if I was going to lose it, but clearly I looked like I might.
    I said that I was fine. He knew I was lying, but what could he do? I’m like a baby I get so incapacitated and pessimistic when I’m sleepy. I wasn’t sure if I was going to lose it, either. But I’d glanced the phrases “Forced marriage” and “Human trafficking” on a piece of copy paper taped to the scuffed flat paint covering the wall behind the computers in the adjacent room, so even though I didn’t know
what that was about, I suspected that in this crowd, the circumstances didn’t warrant a breakdown.
    The wooden steps that wound from the living room ended upstairs at the front of the house. To my right was a big open room, its floorboards littered with straw sleeping mats. Straight from the steps, across a short landing, was a bedroom, my room, wide but shallow, more wood floors and walls, containing the door to the balcony. I dropped my air mattress in the back right corner, under the big blue mosquito net, and lay down.
    Maybe I’d thought it was going to become clearer upon my arrival, but I realized I had no idea who these people were, or what they did here, or even what I was going to do here. I appeared to have my work, whatever it was, cut out for me, since The Guy seemed to be among the few who spoke English. My digestive system had its work cut out for it, too, since these guys apparently ate sticks.
    A 1911 census reported that the Karen lived in Burma “peacefully, quietly, unobtrusively . . . avoiding all contact with the tribes they passed . . . preferring the hardship and obstacles of hills, jungles and uninhabited regions to the dangers of conflict with fellow beings.” Every missionary, explorer, and ambassador who ever encountered the ethnic minority that had for centuries farmed the mountains along the Thai border commented on their docility. And, lying there, feeling left out because I couldn’t participate in a language I didn’t understand, listening to my housemates laugh and holler downstairs, the