It might just be easier to call us the Ghost People. It seemed to fit this morning. Splash made the best of his Friday night, and accordingly saved his worst for us on Saturday morning. He apparently stopped for a brief rest last night against that nice solid pine tree on the way from the Fire Ring to the bunk house. It seemed to agree with him, given his time on The Other side of the Fence, but the seasonal change is real now. He joined the morning coffee crowd on the loading dock with limbs stiff under his Carhartt work jacket, first seen in morning wear this season. He said he was ready to work on the microwave clock on Sunday, taking some stiff pride in his readiness for something that won’t happen until tomorrow.
Then he slumped back and murmured a word most of us were unaccustomed to. “Tatmadaw.” Then he slumped back against a comfortable stone and closed his eyes. The rising sun held the promise of a return to warmth through the thin blue. At some point, anyway.
DeMille was concentrating on processing his second cup of coffee and not in full communication mode. Loma was alert but still resting. Mel draped “their” arm across the back on the battered Adirondack chair and looked at the tablet on “their” lap and laughed. “I thought we were going to talk about Foreign Devils this morning.”
Rocket frowned, since he had made a point of using proper pronouns and had tried to remember the new word all night. “I remember it as ‘Gweilo.’ It used to have some pretty severe connotation, but the Chinese claim it is no big deal now.”
DeMille reached over to his dictionary on the table behind his mug and leafed through it. “Funk & Wagnalls says it is a pejorative Cantonese slang for the term ‘foreigner.’ They say a better new translation in colloquial use is “ghost man,” due to the pale skin on many Westerners. So, it includes a cultural judgement in addition to field dermatology.” He closed the book with a modest thunk. “People who know what it means and are called ‘Gweilos’ get a little pissed off at it. We had a long memorandum about it from the Diversity Officer on my last afloat staff.”
“The Diversity Staff claim a lot of stuff. What does it have to do with Tatmadaws? Isn’t one a Chinese word and the other one Burmese?”
Splash almost moved a portion of his upper body. “Gweilo’s are foreign devils in Chinese. Tatmadaws are the Burmese Armed Forces, expressed in their native Sino-Tibetan language. So, in a way, the Tatmadaws could legitimately call all of us Gweilos. That includes the followers of one of the minorities that follow one of the Religions of Peace that were crowding other peaceful people, which is where The Lady got in trouble.”
“So, you are going to get around to why a journalist from Detroit is being held in detention by the Tatmadaws? Because he is a Gweilo?”
“In a way that is quite correct. But the way things are today, given the election, that is true about everything. That is the opposite of Tatmadaws.” His eyes closed after the exertion, and there was silence as the group pondered two disparate words without apparent connection. DeMille was clearly tired of the imposition, and waved at the only Intern who had showed up to work early on a Saturday morning. He waved to get the young woman- we were not sure of the proper pronoun- to walk by slowly with two of the posterboard footnotes to ensure everyone was aware we had a basic understanding of the underlying issues and had moved on to the actual matter under consideration.
One of the signs read: “Gweilo: Chinese Term for White Ghost. Formerly considered a vile and disparaging term for the imperialists- the Devils- who abused China. Out-of-Town Foreigners would be termed under the currently accepted and non-threatening identical word.” The Intern did a precise half turn, displaying the other sign. “Tatmadaw. Official name of Burmese National Defense forces, including Army, Navy, Air Force and associated internal security personnel.”
“What on earth are we doing having language lessons in related but incomprehensible tongues this early?” asked Loma, puffing on a Marlboro.
DeMille sighed as the Intern vanished back inside the loading dock to gather supplemental signs explaining the situation and outlining the reason for the discussion. “Danny Fenster has been detained by the Tatmadaws for months. He grew up in Huntington Woods in suburban Detroit and did some reporting there before he went overseas. There was hope that former Ambassador to the UN Bill Richardson could get him released during his visit back to Myanmar last week.”
“Did it work?”
“Not to our knowledge. He is still locked up but with another couple years added to the potential sentence for sedition.”
“Does that mean Danny is a Gweilo?”
“Depends. The Burmese have disparaging names for outsiders like everyone does. But close enough. Danny has been in Myanmar for several years. His reporting was accepted under the Aun Saan Suu Kyi government and ran a thing called Frontier Myanmar. When the Tatmadaws took over and arrested The Lady, they rounded up Danny and a hundred other journalists. Not all of them foreign devils.” He spat in the general direction of the low flames. “Some of them were locals.”
“It gets worse,” said Loma. “When we supported Bill’s last trip to Burma we were trying to get The Lady released from house arrest. We met some interesting and courageous people. Our favorite was an old Tatmadaw Colonel who came to see us at night. He had fought the Japanese back in the Second World war.” He fished in the pocket of his hunting vest and produced an image of Bill talking to the old Colonel. “There is more to it, of course. The courage of that old warrior seeking help from a Gweilo against his own government for justice was impressive. And now Danny is in the same bucket that The Lady was in when we visited back in ’95.”
“Was the SLORC who was ruling then the same thing as the Tatmadaws?”
“That takes a little modification, but close enough. We would have to learn a couple new regional words in Sino-Tibetan to explain it. The key thing is that what used to go on in Burma is happening again, and The Lady is back in trouble. We could just call the Tatmadaws the military dictators, but it has a regional component.”
“OK, so we start with the Gweilos who ruled Burma as part of the British Empire…”
“Be precise. The White Ghost Empire.”
“Who granted it independence and a democratically-elected government was overthrown by the SLORC, the alphabet soup that meant the State Law and Order Restoration Council. We were there in 1995 to talk to them and got The Lady sprung from house arrest. The SLORC reorganized in ’97, and were replaced by the “State Peace and Development Council, or the SPDC. We don’t like how that comes out in English. The regional Tatmadaw commanders, who had been members of SLORC, were promoted and transferred to the capital of Rangoon- or Yangon, the new name.”
“But the regional guys weren’t? Are they now the Tatmadaws? And wait, give it to us straight. What happened with The Lady?”
“She was the Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 1991 for her work as Chairperson of the National League for Democracy, the NLD, from 1988 to 2011. Then, with electoral margins of 80%, became State Counsellor of Myanmar and Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2016 to 2021. Now she is pretty much like Danny.”
“So, we want Danny freed and the Tatmadaws replaced by a real free election.”
“Mostly. But we would need more words to explain it.”
“Is that possible?”
“Dunno. We were hoping our Navy would call to provide a jet and Bill would want to go back again. With China flexing its muscles and an apparent lack of resolve by our own Government for a changing Asia that might not happen.”
“I think we have enough words already,” said Splash, waking suddenly. He looked at the now-cold coffee and frowned before reaching in the pocket of his coat for a bottle of something else. “We oughta see if we can get Danny sprung.”
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