Letters from Shan State

What is it you want to know about Shan State and its people?

If it’s about delicacies, the following titles are your meat and drink: Khao Buk and Khao Yaku, Tai Sar Mei Shan, Nam Phit Phoo and Green Tea.

If it’s about festivals, go read “The Poy Sang Long Festival,” “The Taunggyi Hot Air Balloon Festival,” “Flowing Christmas Day”, Water Festival in Kengtung”, “Thamanae Festival,” “New Crop Ceremony”, “Manau Dance Festival” and “Akhar traditional wedding”.

Then there are compositions on politics, life in Shan State, hunting and a true love story plus two poems, many of which are quite poignant, especially when you remember that they had been written by youths who had just started to learn to write in English 9-months earlier.

A few of them I really enjoyed as I went through the 93-page booklet published by the School for Shan State Nationalities Youth (SSSNY), popularly known as Charm Tong’s School, a tribute to its founder and administrator.

One was about a girl student’s reminiscences on her life on a bus in Taunggyi. “I hurried on to the bus,” she wrote, “and already the bus was extremely full. I only had room for my two feet… The smell on the bus was terrible, like a mouse that had been dead for three days… I had to push and also pull people to be able to get out of the bus”. In the evening, it was the same scene.

It was like that day in and day out. But then though long being away from all of what she wrote about, she still “remember them and miss them much: the bad smell, the smell of Thanakha (Burmese traditional makeup), the innocent faces, hungry faces, guilty faces, selfish faces, and the views from the windows of the bus…”

Another is about a boy student’s life on the village when he was younger, young enough to enjoy playing Ma Tong Tang (Stilts) and racing it with other boys. “In my childhood days, ma-don-dang was my life,” he remembers.

But then one day Burma Army soldiers arrived at the village with their guns blazing. “Some one grabbed my hands and took me into a trench. It was my father… (I thought) “Where is my ma-don-dang?” Without thinking, I got up to go out of the trench. My father held me tightly with anger. “Where are you going?” he asked. “I am going to (bring in) my ma-don-dang,” I replied. “Are you crazy? You are going to be killed doing such bullshit!” he roared like a hungry tiger. The happy evening had turned into a bloody evening. The village had nearly turned into a graveyard.

Then there is a rather strange story about a boy who became a novice monk in order to escape being a fighter in the Mong Tai Army led by the late Khun Sa (1934-2007). However when the MTA surrendered in 1996, the expected peace did not come. What followed were the forced relocations that were to displace at least 300,000 people from 1,500 villages, an event reported in full by the Shan Human Rights Foundation’s “Dispossessed”.

Then one day he did a strange ting. One day, I saw the news about SSA-S (Shan State Army-South) fighting with SPDC around the Thai-Shan border. I was excited and I decided to go to Loi Tai Leng, a camp on the border, to be a soldier. When I arrived, I asked to become a soldier. They said, “You are still young-you cannot be a soldier. To be a soldier you must be 18 years old.” So, they put me in school first.

There are 2-3 other accounts I really liked, but I suggest you to read them as I did while I waited at the Chiangmai airport for my delayed flight to Bangkok.

For further information, please email to sssny@loxinfo.co.th