Singing to the Dead: A Missioner's Life among Refugees from Burma (review)

Victoria Armour-Hileman's account of her time helping a group of indigenous Burmese Mon living as illegal refugees in Bangkok is everything a cool, aloof, postmodern dissection of their lives would not be: humane, compassionate, engaged, angry, loving, and frustrating all at once.

So much for postmodernism.

Although there is no ironic detachment in Singing to the Dead, that doesn't mean that Armour-Hileman is in any way predictable in her earnestness. One of her first contacts with the Mon who have taken refuge in a Buddhist wat is with a man whose "intestines are squashed into a pink, bulbous ball. He pulls the orange strap [of his sarong] further out," Armour-Hileman writes, "and his colon falls into his lap."

When the author tries to relate the sense of absurdity about the whole experience to her family in the United States, they chide her for thinking a man with a colon in his lap is funny. "'Isn't there a moral to this story?'" they ask.

There isn't, at least not one made for the kind of easy consumption that facile morality and shallow political debate demand. Real life is grittier, more complex, and in the end more interesting—if harder to come to terms with. "When you work where there is poverty, everything gets jumbled together: tragedy, stupidity, laughter, meanness, nobility, job, reverence, tenderness. My life overseas was concerned with love, war, and body parts. That's a hard combination to make sense of. What's the moral of the story?" Armour-Hileman asks rhetorically. And when she answers, "Gee, I don't know," it's not a flippant response.

Of the many people the author describes in Singing to the Dead, two stand out most strongly: Phra Dhamma and Nai Nya Naa.

Dhamma is a Mon Buddhist monk who likes to sprinkle his English with slightly-out-of-date idioms, such as "fit as a fiddle," and "in the pink." His family has been shattered by the Burmese military, and Dhamma ends up exiled to Thailand, and ultimately further. Throughout Singing to the Dead, Armour-Hileman and Dhamma have a relationship that is alternately professional, platonic, and charged with longings so inconceivable (Dhamma, as a Buddhist monk, is not allowed to physically touch a woman) that the forced formality between them becomes revealingly intimate.

When they part, for example. "We ride in complete silence for an hour, then sit in the airport for another hour. Phra Dhamma looks off vaguely and whispers in a dignified way, 'Can I cry here? I think I would like very much to cry.'"

Naa, although not a monk like Dhamma, seems to have achieved a level of acceptance of fate that is almost otherworldly. While fighting against the Burmese junta, Naa loses both arms—one just above, the other just below the elbow—and is blinded, save for some milky light that leaks through. With the help of the Mon community along the Thai-Burmese border, Naa marries, "a petite woman with a sweet round face and a body both slim and voluptuous."

Hoping to be of more use to his family, Naa takes his wife and children from the relative safety of the forest to Bangkok, hoping through surgery to regain his eyesight. Naa's efforts are heroic, willing to risk what light he has left in hopes of seeing those he loves.

"Watching Nai Nya Naa with his family, I think this is a man whose soul has been burned clean," Armour-Hileman writes. "Whatever is left of a human being after you take everything extraneous away, that's what he is. A man stripped down to his essence. A presence like clear, deep water."

Singing to the Dead defies expectations not because it breaks new stylistic ground, but because...