For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question Read Free Page B

cannot.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because! I am Karen!”
    “So what?”
    “So, I cannot go anywhere.” He dumped chunks of raw, pink meat into the oil, which sputtered furiously. “If I go outside, I can be arrested.”
    “Really?”
    “Yes! I am refugee!”
    Htan Dah’s exclamations suggested that none of this should have been news to me—though I soon realized that this was also just how
he talked. But all I really knew was that I was working for an organization that promoted democracy in Burma. The books I’d read about its evil dictatorship hadn’t said much about refugees, or mentioned that most of the Burmese refugees in Thailand were Karen, and BA hadn’t told me that my housemates were from Burma, or were refugees. I’d only just figured out that no one here was Korean.
    “I’m sorry,” I said. “Why would you be arrested because you’re a refugee?”
    “Because(!), I don’t have Thai ID. I am not Thai citizen, so, I cannot go outside refugee camp.”
    “Really?”
    “Yes! I can be fined, maybe three thousand baht.” That was nearly a hundred dollars’ worth of Thai currency, in a country where the average annual income was about three thousand bucks. “I can go to jail, or maybe, be deported . . .” We looked at each other, and he nodded in my silence, emphasizing his point with a sharp dip of his chin. “You have a lot of experience. You have been to a lot of places.”
    “Did you live in a refugee camp before?”
    “Yes. Before I came to BA.”
    “How long have you lived here?”
    “In Thailand?” Htan Dah asked. “I was born in Thailand.”
    A BA staffer with a slight frame and sweet face had sat down on my side of the picnic table, but as far from me as possible on the bench. I’d looked at him several times while talking to Htan Dah, trying to include him in the conversation, but he’d so far produced just a fixed, nervous smile. “How long have you lived here?” I asked him directly.
    “Me?”
    “Yes, you.”
    “Maybe . . . six . . . years,” he said.
    I asked him his name but, as usual, didn’t grasp it the first time. I asked him again.
    Ta Mla wrote the romanized version on a piece of paper and said it again. His name was pronounced just like it’s spelled. I asked him
to spell everyone else’s, which were also transliterated mostly phonetically, but that the beginning h s were silent and something additional was off about the spelling of “Htan Dah,” the pronunciation of which I still hadn’t quite caught. Ta Mla seemed to know as many English words as Htan Dah did, but couldn’t call them up as quickly, and his pronunciation was often difficult to understand. We repeated ourselves a lot while we traded names and birth dates. He was born in 1979, which made him a year older than I was. And Htan Dah was a year younger still.
    “Will you go . . . to . . . market? Today?” Ta Mla asked.
    “I hope so,” I said. I hadn’t brought a towel, and The Guy had promised last night to take me to buy one that afternoon, so I could bathe. “You guys don’t have a hot shower, do you?” I asked. Ta Mla looked at me blankly. I turned to Htan Dah, who wore a scowl that meant he didn’t understand the words I’d just used.
    “What?” he asked.
    Of course, most everyone in the developing world doesn’t take hot showers. But they are by no means unheard of in Thai cities, and I’d seen a tiny, on-demand water heater on the bathroom wall. “You guys have a water heater in the shower. Does it work?” I explained what I was talking about, but neither of them had ever known what that thing was for. It didn’t work, it turned out, and everyone here used the cold-water trough for bathing anyway, and if they hadn’t showered here, and they’d lived in refugee camps before. . . .
    “Have you ever taken a hot shower?” I asked Htan Dah.
    He frowned and shook his head briskly.
    “Do you know what I’m talking about?”
    He nodded. “I have heard of it,” he said. His