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Chapter 8 Fragments of Misery: The People of the New Fields Myanmar women are duty bound to protect their culture from the infiltration of alien culture and need to be more serious in nurturing the mass of women to cherish and preserve their culture and traditions, promote cultural heritage, strengthen nationalism and patriotism, and safeguard their originality. —General Khin Nyunt No need to pay the goldsmith! From the palm tree comes our gold! Rolled palm leaves are our earrings, chains of flowers are our necklaces . Pleasant to look at are we- the well mannered rural folk From the village of Aung Pin Lay near Golden Mandalay. —Paddy Planting Song Ruptured Lives Soon after the failed democracy uprising in 1988, mysterious fires swept through neighborhoods in central Mandalay and Rangoon suspected to harbor people with democratic sympathies, as well as those townships abutting sites marked for tourist development. Shanty towns, those bamboo thatch settlements in the shadow of the regime’s nation building endeavors, were not allowed to be rebuilt by their former residents. Instead, these urban dwellers were shipped, with their belongings and a few pieces of tin and sometimes other building materials, to rice fields on the outskirts of the major cities. Farmers were sometimes compensated for the loss of their acreage and given residential plots of land in what came to be known as the ‘‘New Fields’’ (Allot 1994). It seems that the lives of almost everyone I meet in the cities touch 148 Chapter 8 upon the New Fields in some way. Nu Nu, for example, is twenty-nine years old and speaks English, and, like almost all the women in my circle of friends in Rangoon, this skill allowed her to cash in on the small tourist industry and economic liberalization program pursued by the junta in the early to mid-1990s. Nu Nu is part Chinese, round faced, with long jet-black straight hair that she leaves unbound. She is always dressed in the latest fashion in longyis and wears western-style blouses in coordinating fabrics. Nu Nu’s family owned an apartment building with twenty apartments that they rented to tenants in a central Rangoon township. Until 1989, Nu Nu lived with her mother and her sister in a large family compound next to the apartment block. They had electricity for part of each day, a telephone that occasionally worked, piped water, and a garbage service. Nu Nu saw herself as an upwardly mobile young person, city smart and with much the same aspirations as other young people of the newly reemerging middle class. After the 1988 uprising, Nu Nu’s mother was told by the ward LORC commander that the families in this ward were to be relocated to a township out of the city. The houses and apartment blocks were to be bulldozed to provide new modern amenities such as department stores, air-conditioned showrooms, and ‘‘modern accommodation.’’ As compensation, the family was given two small concrete buildings in the New Fields. Her mother now lives in one, her sister lives in the other, and Nu Nu moves each year to a new rented apartment in the city. Rents continually rise, and she must either downsize or move a little farther out from the city center each time. A second woman in my circle of friends, Ma San San Pwint, is twentyseven years old and speaks English in a halting way, what the Burmese are fond of calling ‘‘Bunglish.’’ Her family is based in Mon state, the name of the narrow isthmus of land shared with Thailand that juts into the Andaman Sea. Although she was born in Rangoon, her elderly parents and older brothers (one a rice seller, the other an engineer) have moved to Moulmein (Mawlamyine), the capital of the southern Mon state. She works as a receptionist for a small, struggling tourism company and desperately wants to become an official government tourist guide. Our relationship is not a happy one because of her need, due to her impoverished status, to use the reciprocal power of anade (a: nade) in order to make me adopt the role of her ‘‘patron.’’ We met, soon after I arrived in Rangoon, through another friend, who suggested that San San Pwint would come to my apartment each afternoon and we would converse in Burmese, thus keeping me immersed in the language as much as possible. Because San San Pwint’s English is rudimentary and she does not have the same educational background...

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