The Omen

By AUNG NAING OO

I was born in Thakala, a small town located on the Pegu-Syrian highway, 27 miles from Pegu and some 50 miles from Rangoon. In the 70s and 80s, it still took about three hours to travel to Rangoon on two buses and a ferry.

Socialism, with its rigidity, decay and underdevelopment, did not offer much for youngsters like us. Growing up on the outskirts of a small town offered even less.

In winter, we had soccer tournaments and a few festivities. Rainy season was the best for kids because we could swim in the river, play soccer in the mud or fish in the paddy fields.

In early summer, we enjoyed Indian vegetarian food and Indian films during the festivals at four Hindu temples in town. Even more exciting, I used to fight for a place in the crowd to see the fire-walking demonstrations, especially when my cousin participated. He was sickly, and he and his family believed he would be unhealthy for the year if he failed to do the fire walk.

But otherwise, life was tougher in summer. The heat was intense and food was scare. Around April, after the water festival, the neighborhood reservoir dried up, which meant we had to walk one-half mile to get fresh water every day, sometimes twice a day.

Occasionally, we went to the town cinema. There was no TV. TV came to town in 1980, along with the first telephones, when I was in middle school.

I remember going with my friends to the town council office, where the only TV was kept, to watch the BBC English lessons. They taught us, “Yes, I did. No, I didn’t” in Queen’s English. We often went home imitating the presenter, “Yes, I did. No, I didn’t.”

Most of what we watched was news from the state-run media, but there were also regular US programs like the “Six Million Dollar Man,” “Bionic Woman,” “Fall Guy” and “Charlie’s Angels.” We didn’t have a clue what the characters were saying, but we liked the special effects, modern gadgets and scenes of the West in these shows.

On Saturday nights, the whole family listened to Burmese radio soap operas, our prime entertainment.

Otherwise, we had a lot of free time. And so it was that I became, like so many Burmese children, a hunter, stalking small creatures that I could shoot with a slingshot. Birds were the most challenging.

Every day from the age of about 8, I spent my free time walking under the huge rain trees around the reservoir ear my house and practiced shooting at all kinds of birds—sparrows, sunbirds, myna birds, crows and swallows.

Even when I went to the fields to glean leftover peanuts or sweet potatoes, I carried a bag with a slingshot and mud pellets, and shot at whatever birds were in sight.

I was not a good shot. I missed most of the time. But the unlucky ones were my victims. One time a sparrow perched on a dry twig at the top of a rain tree. It was windy, and the shot was difficult, but the way the little bird rested on the leafless twig offered me a perfect target.

I tried about seven times and missed each time. But the bird didn’t fly away. I almost gave up and went away, because I had only a few mud pellets left. But I decided to try for the eighth time. The bird was truly unlucky.

Hunting small birds was common among boys my age, but not all adults approved of it. Killing is prohibited in Buddhism. The first time my mother saw me kill a bird—I was about nine—, she was furious.

A devout Buddhist and a strong believer in karma, she was convinced that I would pay for my sin of separating innocent birds from their families.

Hence her dire warning each time she saw me shoot at the birds: “You will be separated from your own parents and siblings alive if not by death.” She would warn me angrily, sometimes wagging her index finger at me.

She was very strict with us, but she never punished me for killing the birds. Perhaps, she thought her dire warning was enough punishment.

It was not only my mother who believed that shooting birds would bring bad karma. There was also a little rhyme that we children sang when we saw someone shooting at the sunbirds, to remind them of the enormous suffering that would result:

“The sunbird is worth only a morsel
Bu t [(if you kill it] you will pay for it
as much as a viss (worth) of hell.”

I even sang it to my friends who, like me, wanted to shoot every bird in sight, or when I saw them shoot at sunbirds playing in the bamboo groves. We thought that shooting the sunbirds was particularly bad because they were so small and totally innocent-looking.

Worse still, I never ate any of the birds I killed. We were poor but at least had enough rice to eat. And just one small dead bird could not make a meal. I could never kill more than one bird at a time so it never became my meal. Even if I tried, my mother would not approve it. So I shot at the birds simply for fun or to relieve my boredom.

In 1983, my target practice at the birds came to a stop when I entered the university in Rangoon, ending my boyhood days of running around in the fields with a slingshot. From what I had heard from the university students from my hometown, I would have plenty of things to do. So my habit of shooting at birds died of natural causes.

During my university years, I visited my family every now and then, and they also visited me in Rangoon. The first few weeks in Rangoon were hard. I had never been away from home for more than a week. And as I struggled to meet the demands of my new life at the university, I forgot all about my mother’s warning.

Then in September 1987—the final year of my undergraduate studies—the socialist government announced the demonetization of 75 percent of the currency notes, leaving only 25 kyat and smaller notes as legal tender.

It was too much for ordinary citizens, still reeling from the effects of the demonetization in 1985. This time around, it was worse: hard-earned currency became worthless in a matter of day.

I was poor but I received a small stipend from the government—900 kyat a year—to help cover my living expenses each semester. After the announcement, all I had was gone. I had only about 30 kyat—about four or five day’s worth of food—left.

The announcement came without warning and in the middle of our final exams. We had just finished sitting for the first exam, the compulsory subject of political science.

On the university campus, demonstrations began, and they soon spilled into the streets. The government swiftly shut down the university and bused students back to their hometowns, thus containing the protests. But rumors spread that many students had gone underground, with some leaving to join the Communists in the north.

I remained in Rangoon, where I taught private English lessons to high school students so that I could pay for my own expenses. One day during the university shutdown, my father appeared at the rented house I shared with my middle brother and a friend from my hometown the Hlaing campus. We were playing caroms as he entered the house.

He breathed a sigh of relief to see us. He told us that our family had heard rumors that we had left for the jungle after the riots. He did not believe it, he said, but he came to check us out at my mother’s insistence. Relieved, my father went home on the same day.

But his foreboding was not misplaced. Exactly a year later, in September 1988, I left for the jungle to join other students on the border who were determined to fight for freedom and democracy against the military. My middle brother, who stayed with me in Rangoon, joined me in exile in 1997.

Nine years after I went into exile, I called my parents from Washington DC—during a conference on Burma at American University. I was concerned about their safety. Any kind of contact with me could lead to their punishment, possibly imprisonment.

Holding the telephone, I could not decide what to do. I dialed a number for my parents that my childhood friend, who had since resettled in Australia, had given me. But I put it back down. I almost decided not to call.

John Jackson from Burma Action Group (UK) saw me fidgeting and resting my head on the payphone. He came over to me and asked what was wrong. Indecision was written all over my face.

He urged me to call. “No matter what may happen to them, you should let them know that you are alive and well,” he said. I thanked him for helping me make the decision.

When I finally called, I recognized none of their voices. They sounded so far away. It was a difficult conversation. Everyone—my mother, my father, my sisters and even a family friend who helped me in Rangoon—wanted to talk. They had so much to say. They had suffered so much, like everyone else in the country.

It was awkward. But I was primarily concerned about their safety. I did not know if it would make any difference. I even lied to them, telling them that I was calling them from England.

After I hung up, I did not feel relieved. I felt a heavy weight in my heart. It was all so surreal.

Twenty years on, I am still separated from my parents and siblings, with the military as firmly in control of my country as they were the day I left Rangoon. Like so many of my generation, I have lived through my adulthood far from those who nurtured and loved me as a child. I know the political reasons why I ran away, and have never been able to go back.

I am not superstitious or religious, but in my darker moments, I can’t help but think of my youth and all the innocent birds I thoughtlessly killed with my slingshot, and I can still hear my mother’s voice and her ominous warnings.