Somewhere in the Unknown World Read online

  They said, “No one will fight your fights for you.”

  I knew what my mother and father were fighting for: a Karen state. I learned the history of my people from my mother, a woman with broad bones and eyes just like mine, deep and dark, tempered fire. She had been a teacher and she raised me like a student. She told me about life for the 135 ethnic minorities in Burma before the British came and what happened after. How the British set up a hierarchy in the country and for once the ethnic minorities were seen as potentially powerful. She told me about 1948 when the British left and Burma became independent. She talked of how a military regime had taken over and set out to abolish the cultural centers and the traditional holds of the ethnic minorities. We, she instructed my brothers and sisters and me, were born to take part in one of the longest-running civil wars in modern history. She had given me a Burmese name to ensure my survival should she and my father die and the protection of their arms be taken away: Aung Kyaw Soe, but she made sure I knew it was not my name.

  I changed my name after I heard the story. I decided that I did not need the shield of an oppressor to survive. I questioned whether I even needed my mother and father’s arms, for they were more interested in the national tasks than the work of letting us be children. I chose for myself a Karen name. I became Kaw Thaw. In our language, kaw means “country” and thaw means “new.” I would be a new country unto myself.

  I was barely a man when I left my mother and father for the refugee camps in Thailand. I did not ask for their permission. It was 1994 and I had just graduated from high school, which was unaccredited but organized in the fashion of the old British powers. I did not know where my future would lead. Neither did they. I had a suspicion I might spend my entire life in the jungle, living and dying for a place that could never exist in a country the size of Burma. I left on the grounds of politics and practicality.

  In a refugee camp in Mae Sot, a district in western Thailand near the border, close to a village full of Burmese migrants and refugees, I enrolled in a medical training program. There I met the first woman who was not like my mother, and I fell in love with her for all the reasons I loved my mother. This woman stood out to me not because she was the most beautiful woman but because she was the most fun. She was not part of a big history she could not forget. She was just trying to become educated so she could help herself. That singular focus drew me. Her wanting to be independent and live spoke to me. I was far from the adults in my life, so there was no formal marriage. We agreed to a loving union. I was too young and unconcerned with what that might mean beyond having a casual bedmate and a conversational partner. In Mae Sot district, surrounded by the lush jungles, close to a waterfall, I took my first step as a man.

  In my union with the woman who decided to dedicate her life to me, we had three children together. Three stateless children, citizens of no country, recognized by no nation. My beautiful baby boys were born with dark black hair, skin the color of the earth. Their maternal grandfather, an old man who, like his daughter, belonged to the world as we knew it, not some imaginary place of freedom, gave my sons the gift of poetry, Karen names calling on their worth. Lao Law Kaw was the first; his name meant that he was worthy of a country. Lao Law Hok Koh was the second; his name meant that he was worthy of the earth. Lao Law Moo was the third; his name meant he was worthy of the universe. I lived like a sun, and they revolved around me like planets, the woman and children of the stratosphere.

  I wanted to shine brightly for my growing family. While I had never been a star pupil, I had been mothered by a teacher who had taught me how to learn. There was an opportunity for Karen refugees to leave the camp for Chiang Mai, the second biggest city in Thailand, in a program funded by a rich American named George Soros, a man who wanted to fight the politics of the world through the education of its people. It was an opportunity to learn English, the language in which much of the world functioned. Like before, I did not ask for permission. I applied. The first time I was rejected, so it didn’t matter. The second time, I was accepted, and it would matter, but I did not know it at the time.

  Chiang Mai was a life-changing opportunity for me. I took a plane for the first time. I saw the world from the sky. I knew that one did not need wings to fly. My heart hammered in my chest, and when I looked down at the earth, my family had disappeared entirely beneath the forest of green trees, the rise and fall of mountains, the valleys of rice fields. I was enrolled in the intensive college foundation course. In one year, I was able to take my GED on the Internet and graduate from an accredited institution in Maine. In that year, I could not return to visit my family because I was in Thailand illegally. Refugees are not allowed to attend Thai schools. In that year, I met teachers from America, Great Britain, and Canada. The world opened up before me and it offered so much more than anything I had known. In its bigness I did not miss my family and the life I had left behind, which I began to feel was no life at all.

  After my graduation, I applied for a full scholarship to go to college through the Soros foundation. I did so without second thought. I applied to Mahidol University and Bangkok University. I was accepted into Bangkok. I could not wait to adventure farther away from the place where my family waited. The four-thousand-dollar scholarship I had been awarded provided for everything: tuition, living expenses, and books.

  In the four years of my college education, I lived what I knew then and now as the best time of my life. I explored everything. I grew and grew and believed that I would grow with no end in sight. I lived as if I could die at any moment. I lived desperate for joy. There was no nation I was out to build. I was only building myself. I flung myself at the expanse of Bangkok.

  In that big, hot city, among the asphalt and the concrete, I burned like a fire rich with oxygen. My English raced ahead of me and I ran with it from one street to the next. I gained the respect of the Thai people around me and pushed against the stereotypes international people had of the Karen as simplistic. I liked sophisticated things: the taste of cold soda on my tongue was nothing like the bubbles of champagne slipping down my throat. The bitter greens of old were nothing compared to the sizzling meats available on the street corners and, better yet, in the sit-down restaurants on every stretch of the city. The sweat dripped off my skin like the hands that had held me as a child and the hands of my wife and children.

  I graduated with a degree in communication arts. I knew that I would not return to the confines of any camp. I would not leave the streets of joy for the exhausted roads of poverty. I knew I could find a job and lose myself in the city. Soros had not considered the draw of freedom for people who’d never known it; they had tied us tightly into groups and assumed we would return to the people with whom we were identified. Their assumptions were wrong.

  I had left my parents. I knew I could leave my children. The woman between them, I saw her in my dreams, standing on the edge of a small waterfall of memories, babies pulled close into skirts, eyes scanning the horizon for me. I saw her there waiting forever. I was equal to the tears that sometimes soaked my pillow at night. I knew that the sun would rise in the morning. The city called out in its many ways. Cars honked horns. Peddlers shouted out their offerings of steamed buns and hot soy milk. Even sirens were a call to song, the song of the forgotten, the song of forgetting.

  I found a job as an interpreter, an independent contractor, for the American embassy. I helped facilitate communication for Karenni, Burmese, and Kachin people in their search for resettlement. All of a sudden I was no longer just Karen. I had become part of something larger, engaged in work that was helping people like me work their way into futures where they could grow and sink in roots, not merely be vessels caught in the winds of war. I loved it. I applied for and was accepted to work for the International Organization for Migration where I taught orientation classes to Burmese refugees who had been approved for resettlement in the West—something that I myself was not interested in. I was earning good money. I even assuaged my guilt by sending m
oney back to support my children. Yes, I was a refugee, but I did not have to live like one or die as one.

  I met an American woman named Jill. She worked on a team sent to interview refugees for resettlement. Jill was tall and her skin was smooth and pale. Her eyes were large and brown and smart, unclouded by cynicism and unfazed by hardship. They were empathetic and kind. They were so unlike my own. Beyond these things, Jill was well fed, well educated, and well loved. She was comfortable in the world, like a rock at the bottom of the river, feeling the movement from above but steady and strong. Most intriguing, she was interested in me and I found her refreshingly interesting. Jill was drawn to me as I was drawn to her—perhaps because I was everything she was not. We became friends knowing we could be something more. Jill left Thailand after her professional responsibilities were through. We’d only known each other for two months’ time.

  Over email and on the phone through the spread of four years, Jill and I talked of our days. For the first time in my life, I could laugh with someone about the hard things because the threat of them felt far away. Somehow, with Jill, the world was not a place of struggle. Each day our bond grew stronger and stronger. I was not surprised when the time came and Jill asked, her voice soft and her words slow, weighted by all the reasons why ours was a risky match, if she could petition for me to come to America on a fiancé visa.

  I was scared. Jill knew about my children and the woman waiting for me. Jill knew there had been no formal marriage between us. Jill knew about my longing for security and my rebellious heart. And she still wanted to be with me. This time I would not be leaving behind a bad situation, which was my justification for everything I had done. This time I would be leaving good circumstances for a reality where I would have to start anew in the arms of one person who would have more power over me than anyone ever had. I hesitated.

  But the thing about life is this: when we are unsure, the Universe isn’t.

  In October 2010, Jill successfully completed the paperwork. I had been interviewed twice. I was approved to leave for America, to reunite with Jill in Washington, DC.

  I had been gone for so long, I knew good-bye was not necessary. Like my sister, I would leave with no good-byes. I would be dead to them. The consequences of my leaving would be ours to bear but we would all survive in the end, perhaps be made better by it.

  At Suvarnabhumi Airport, I looked at the giant airplane that was to take me across the world. The chatter of soft Thai voices faded. I remembered the plane ride I’d taken from the Mae Sot district to Chiang Mai, the wonder and the magic of that moment, the feeling that my whole world was going to change for the better. Now there was no feeling like that inside me. My palms were sweaty. I wondered if I would ever find a good job when my only usable skill was English and I was going to a country full of English speakers.

  I did not cry as I got on the plane. I trusted Jill too much for that. Jill, whom I had spent four years getting to know, more time via the Internet than I had ever spent with my first love or my children or anyone else—including my mother and father, my brothers and sisters. Jill and I had done nothing but communicate, again and again.

  On the flight from Bangkok, Thailand, to Washington, DC, I faced ahead and refused to look behind me at the old man I could hear coughing every few minutes or the old woman with a quivering voice who asked if he was all right, or the lie he told her each time she asked: “I’m just fine.”

  * * *

  A car honked. I jumped. The cold blew at me. Somehow in my memories, I had been warm, insulated from the bits of icy snow that flew at my face. The sidewalk was wet and soggy. The snow on either side was dirty. It was late winter in Minnesota. I’d been in the city by myself for a couple of months. I’d come for a job as a case manager for a nonprofit that worked with new refugees, Karen, Karenni, Burmese. Jill would follow, but she wasn’t here yet.

  I thought of the big building on the corner of University and Lexington Avenues, of my small cubicle and the stream of clients waiting to meet with me. Karen, Karenni, Burmese—we were all somehow more the same here than we were different at home. If there were someone to laugh with, maybe it would be funny. Take a people fighting a war, put them in a new country with more powerful people, and suddenly their fight against each other is no longer as important as their fight to merely survive.

  I pushed up the sleeve of my jacket with a gloved hand. I checked my watch, a gift I’d given myself in my Bangkok days, the days of making up for lost opportunities, perhaps a lost childhood. I had fifteen more minutes to walk two blocks.

  These days, I thought of my sons often. I wanted to know if they missed me, asked for me, thought of me. Who did they reach for in the night when they woke up from bad dreams? In the daytime, when they saw children run into the arms of waiting fathers, did they think of me? If they did, I could not picture it. I saw them clinging only to their mother and each other. My stateless boys. These days I found myself thinking: I cannot let the sun set on them in that place where there is no future.

  Jill was pregnant. She’d told me this in DC. It was one of the reasons for the move. I needed a sense of community; Jill knew there were Burmese refugees here. Her family was here. She’d grown up here. She wanted to raise her children close to family.

  My eyes had misted at the thought of a baby born to a country and a woman with the power and ability to raise her to become someone important, someone with citizenship. I knew I would have to learn how to be a father. This realization dried my eyes.

  As I walked into the big building, from the wintry day into the heated warmth, I saw myself reflected in one of its large windows. I knew what the world saw when it looked at me: a short man in a fine jacket going to work in a nice building, a man who has traveled far away from the place where his story began. I felt what the world would never see: a child seeking a way into the future and an adult looking for ways to return to the past, willing to forgo everything for the experience of a simple life in a village, chickens pecking at the earth, tall trees with canopies thick enough to keep me dry from the rains.

  —KAW THAW

  7

  In the Valley of Peace

  I WAS SURE I was lost beneath that blazing sun, walking between the endless headstones. I was doing my best to follow the figures of my aunt and uncle through the maze that is the world’s largest cemetery, Wadi-us-Salaam. I could feel the piercing heat on my scalp despite the scarf over my head. Sweat trickled down the sides of my face and my sunglasses slipped down the bridge of my nose. I felt my own foreignness beneath the hot Iraqi sun. I had been away for too long.

  All around me, there were headstones, hundreds, thousands, millions of them. In the blinding heat, they all appeared white in the spread of the cemetery. I looked around me hoping for a glimpse of the buildings of Najaf, the holy city that played host to this place, but in every direction I saw only the endless gravestones. The cemetery is on 1,485.5 precious acres of land. It had cost my aunt and uncle, my father and his brothers in America, nearly five thousand dollars to have Grandfather interred here.

  I knew from my family that Grandfather’s body was buried in a mausoleum with green tiles to represent that he’s a descendant of the Holy Prophet Muhammad. It should have stood out to me, but it did not. The cemetery was fourteen hundred years old. There were layers of bodies, crypts holding on average fifty bodies each, all over this place.

  I was in the most holy burial ground in the Muslim Shia world, the site of the burial of the first imam, Ali Bin Abi Talib, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad. There were an estimated five million bodies buried here. Most Iraqi and many Iranian Shiites have relatives here. During the Iraq War, there were between two hundred and two hundred and fifty bodies buried in this cemetery every day. On our way here, Uncle had told me, “There is good news. Since 2010, the grave diggers say that the numbers have declined to about a one hundred burials per day.”

  I could hear the Koranic verses coming from around me, coming at m
e from a distance far across the silence of the ages. As I fumbled through the endless rise of cement, I became one of many who’d walked on these grounds.

  I’d left this country behind when I was just three years old. I’d left before Saddam Hussein drained the swamplands of the south to seek and kill insurgents—which was what we were called then, we Shiites who’d taken to the streets to protest the government in power, the regime of Saddam Hussein. My family left in a great hurry after Grandfather was killed in 1991.

  After Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait began, the American planes had flown over our southern village of Al Fahood dropping sheets of paper with a message from the then president of the United States of America, George H. W. Bush, encouraging the people of Iraq to stand up to the power of Saddam Hussein. Grandfather, a farmer, picked up the pieces of papers that were caught in the branches of the trees he loved. He had planted the trees when he was just a young man so that his children and grandchildren and generations to come would never hunger for the taste of figs, lemons, palm dates, and the other fruits of our region. Grandfather read the pages that fell into the courtyard of our family home. The sheets of paper said that if we didn’t stand up to the regime, we’d see no freedom for our people, the Shia, in a country where we were the majority but did not occupy the seats of power. Grandfather, a handsome man who was only in his mid-fifties, a man with serious, piercing blue eyes, and a sharp aquiline nose, became a leading figure in the streets of our village protesting the Hussein government.

  For a brief moment, our village was full of hope that we were part of the people who would bring a greater peace to Iraq. From up north, we heard news that the Kurds had also taken to the streets and were protesting fiercely and proudly the horrendous dictator that had taken over our country. From farther south, we heard that many other Shia villages were also overcome with fervor for a revolution to end the rule of this despotic leader. We felt we were part of a movement to call forth a different dawn.