Saving Fish From Drowning (2 page)

While it is impossible to corroborate the thoughts and motives of the Myanmar junta, I have included “Bibi’s report” as fictional imaginings of fictional characters. This may have clouded the line between what is dramatically fictional and what is horrifyingly true.

Let me briefly say, the truth of Bibi’s story can be found in numerous sources citing the myth of the Younger White Brother, the systematic killing of the Karen tribe, and even the military regime’s ban on reporting losses by its national soccer team. I apologize for any glaring inaccuracies, most of which are no doubt mine, but some may be

“Bibi’s.” Editors Molly Giles and Aimee Taub deleted chaos on the page and clarified where I was going and why I was lost. Anna Jardine exterminated an infestation of embarrassments.

One final and important acknowledgment: I posthumously thank Karen Lundegaard, who gave me her blessing to use the “Bibi writings” in whatever way I wished, who tirelessly answered questions, and who welcomed me as a friend. Karen succumbed to her illness in October of 2003.

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Tourists Flee Burma,

Fears Over 11 Missing Americans

By May L. Brown

Special Field Report for the
San Francisco Chronicle

MANDALAY, December 31—In the glossy, air-conditioned bar of the Golden Pagoda Hotel, pampered tourists escape the humidity with cocktails charged at upscale American prices. But none are celebrating the coming New Year in the wake of reports that 11 Americans on an art expedition in Burma have been missing for almost a week under “suspicious” circumstances. The jittery hotel guests exchange rumors ranging from drug-running and hostage-taking to revenge by disturbed Nats, mischievous spirits in Burmese superstition.

The tourists, four men, five women, and two children from the San Francisco Bay Area, were last seen on December 25 at Inle Lake as guests of the Floating Island Resort. Before dawn on Christmas morning the Americans and their Burmese guide climbed into two piloted longboats to watch the sunrise. The jaunt normally takes 90 minutes.

The passengers never returned, nor did the longboats and their crews.

The 61-square-mile lake, surrounded by pine-studded peaks, is a tangle of inlets to isolated villages and flotillas of tomato-growing paddies. The resort is in the mountainous region of southern Shan State, whose eastern border is the gateway to the Golden Triangle, notorious for its heroin trade. In past years, the region was closed to tourism because of warfare by ethnic tribes against the military government. Local tour operators emphasize the area today is trouble-free, citing that many resorts are even operated by the former warlords of other tribes.

The 11 tourists were first reported missing by another member of their group, Harry Bailley, 42, a British-born celebrity dog trainer featured on the television series “The Fido Files.” Bailley declined to join the sunrise adventure because he was ill with food poisoning.

When his friends failed to return for lunch and dinner, he notified resort management, who, Bailley complained, did not immediately contact local authorities.

On December 26, the group’s 26-year-old Burmese guide, Maung Wa Sao, called “Walter,” of Rangoon (Yangon), was discovered unconscious by two 10-year-old acolytes from a monastery in In-u, near the opposite end of the lake. Maung was suffering from scalp lacerations, dehydration, and a possible concussion. From his hospital bed, he talked to Shan State military police and claimed no recollection of what had happened from the time he climbed in the boat until he was found in the crumbling ruins of a pagoda.

Shan military police did not contact the U.S. Embassy in Rangoon (Yangon) until December 29. “Our office is working intensively with the Burmese military regime,” said U.S. consular staff Ralph Anzenberger. “The disappearance of 11 Americans on holiday is of great concern to all. For now, the identities of the missing are being withheld, given the uncertainty of what the situation might be.”

He declined to confirm reports that one of the missing women is a prominent journalist and activist for a human rights organization, Free to Speak International. The military regime does not knowingly grant entry to foreign journalists, Anzenberger said. But Philip Gutman, spokesperson for Free to Speak in Berkeley, told the
Chronicle
, “[She’s] written stories about oppression, all of which are credible and well-documented.” Gutman feared that the Burmese military regime may have detained the journalist and her companions, and that they may have joined a reported 1500 political prisoners. “They’ve been known to lock up anyone who criticizes them,” Gutman pointed out. “Their notions of human rights are pretty perverse.”

Gutman also acknowledged that the journalist has participated in rallies in support of Burma’s opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, “the Lady,” whose party’s landslide victory in the 1990 elections was illegally overturned by the junta. Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been under house arrest since 1989, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 1991. She has repeatedly called upon other governments to apply pressure on the junta by ceasing commerce with Burma. The U.S. imposed sanctions on new business development in 1997.

But that has not prevented tourists from flocking to an exotic destination at a bargain price. Tourism has steadily increased, that is, until now.

“We sincerely respect the Lady,” confided one Burmese tour operator, under condition of anonymity. “But to be honest, the government treats the people better when the tourists are coming. When the tourists are not coming, the gentle people are punished, not the government.”

Today, military police in gasoline-belching motorboats began another day searching along the shores of Inle Lake. Meanwhile, white-gloved staff at the Golden Pagoda Hotel in Mandalay are busy carrying out luggage. “Sure, it makes us nervous,” says departing guest Jackie Clifford, 41, a biotech investment consultant from Palo Alto, California. “We were going to fly to Bagan tomorrow to see all those incredible temple ruins. Now we’re seeing if we can book a flight to a Thai resort instead.”

She will have to stand on line. Many other guests have left for the airport to make similar arrangements.

• 1 •

A BRIEF HISTORY OF MY

SHORTENED LIFE

It was not my fault. If only the group had followed my original itinerary without changing it hither, thither, and yon, this debacle would never have happened. But such was not the case, and there you have it, I regret to say.

“Following the Buddha’s Footsteps” is what I named the expedition. It was to have begun in the southwestern corner of China, in Yunnan Province, with vistas of the Himalayas and perpetual spring flowers, and then to have continued south on the famed Burma Road.

This would allow us to trace the marvelous influence of various religious cultures on Buddhist art over a thousand years and a thousand miles—a fabulous journey into the past. As if that were not enough appeal, I would be both tour leader and personal docent, making the expedition a truly value-added opportunity. But in the wee hours of December 2nd, and just fourteen days before we were to leave on our A M Y T A N

expedition, a hideous thing happened . . . I died. There. I’ve finally said it, as unbelievable as it sounds. I can still see the tragic headline:

“Socialite Butchered in Cult Slaying.”

The article was quite long: two columns on the left-hand side of the front page, with a color photo of me covered with an antique textile, an exquisite one utterly ruined for future sale.

The report was a terrible thing to read: “The body of Bibi Chen, 63, retail maven, socialite, and board member of the Asian Art Museum, was found yesterday in the display window of her Union Square store, The Immortals, famed for its chinoiserie. . . .” That odious word—“chinoiserie”—so belittling in a precious way. The article continued with a rather nebulous description of the weapon: a small, rakelike object that had severed my throat, and a rope tightened around my neck, suggesting that someone had tried to strangle me after stabbing had failed. The door had been forced open, and bloody footprints of size-twelve men’s shoes led from the platform where I had died, then out the door, and down the street. Next to my body lay jewelry and broken figurines. According to one source, there was a paper with writing from a Satanic cult bragging that it had struck again.

Two days later, there was another story, only shorter and with no photo: “New Clues in Arts Patron’s Death.” A police spokesman explained that they had never called it a cult slaying. The detective had noted “a paper,” meaning a newspaper tabloid, and when asked by reporters what the paper said, he gave the tabloid’s headline: “Satanic Cult Vows to Kill Again.” The spokesman went on to say that more evidence had been found and an arrest had been made. A police dog tracked the trail left by my blood. What is invisible to the human eye, the spokesman said, still contains “scent molecules that highly trained dogs can detect for as long as a week or so after the event.” (My death was an event?) The trail took them to an alleyway, 2

S A V I N G F I S H F R O M D R O W N I N G

where they found bloodstained slacks stuffed in a shopping cart filled with trash. A short distance from there, they found a tent fashioned out of blue tarp and cardboard. They arrested the occupant, a homeless man, who was wearing the shoes that had left the telltale imprints. The suspect had no criminal record but a history of psychiatric problems. Case solved.

Or maybe not. Right after my friends were lost in Burma, the newspaper changed its mind again: “Shopkeeper’s Death Ruled

Freak Accident.”

No reason, no purpose, no one to blame, just “freak,” this ugly word next to my name forever. And why was I demoted to “shopkeeper”? The story further noted that DNA analysis of the man’s skin particles and those on both the blood-spattered trousers and the shoes confirmed that the man was no longer a suspect. So who had entered my gallery and left the prints? Wasn’t it an obvious case of crime? Who, exactly, caused this freak accident? Yet there was no mention of a further investigation, shame on them. In the same article, the reporter noted “an odd coincidence,” namely that “Bibi Chen had organized the Burma Road trip, in which eleven people went on a journey to view Buddhist art and disappeared.” You see how they pointed the shaking finger of blame? They certainly implied it, through slippery association with what could not be adequately explained, as if I had created a trip that was doomed from the start. Pure nonsense.

The worst part about all of this is that I don’t remember how I died. In those last moments, what was I doing? Whom did I see wielding the instrument of death? Was it painful? Perhaps it was so awful that I blocked it from my memory. It’s human nature to do that. And am I not still human, even if I’m dead?

The autopsy concluded that I was not strangled but had drowned in my own blood. It was ghastly to hear. So far none of this informa3

A M Y T A N

tion has been of any use whatsoever. A little rake in my throat, a rope around my neck—this was an accident? You’d have to be brainless to think so, as more than a few evidently were.

At the postmortem, photos were taken, especially of the awful part of my neck. My body was tucked into a metal drawer for future study. There I lay for several days, and then samples of me were removed—a swab of this, a sliver of that, hair follicles, blood, and gastric juices. Then two more days went by, because the chief medical examiner went on vacation in Maui, and since I was an illustrious person, of particular renown in the art world—and no,
not
just the retail community, as the
San Francisco Chronicle
suggested—he wanted to see me personally, as did esteemed people in the professions of crime and forensic medicine. They dropped by on their lunch hour to make ghoulish guesses as to what had happened to cause my premature demise. For days, they slid me in, they slid me out, and said brutish things about the contents of my stomach, the integrity of the vessels in my brain, my personal habits, and past records of my health, some being rather indelicate matters one would rather not hear discussed so openly among strangers eating their sack lunches.

In that refrigerated land, I thought I had fallen into the underworld, truly I did. The most dejected people were there—an angry woman who had dashed across Van Ness Avenue to scare her

boyfriend, a young man who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge and changed his mind halfway down, an alcoholic war vet who had

passed out on a nude beach. Tragedies, mortal embarrassments, unhappy endings, all of them. But why was I there?

I was stuck in these thoughts, unable to leave my breathless body, until I realized that my breath was not gone but surrounding me, buoying me upward. It was quite amazing, really—every single breath, the sustenance I took and expelled out of both habit and effort over sixty-three years had accumulated like a savings account.

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S A V I N G F I S H F R O M D R O W N I N G

And everyone else’s as well, it seemed, inhalations of hopes, exhalations of disappointment. Anger, love, pleasure, hate—they were all there, the bursts, puffs, sighs, and screams. The air I had breathed, I now knew, was composed not of gases but of the density and perfume of emotions. The body had been merely a filter, a censor. I knew this at once, without question, and I found myself released, free to feel and do whatever I pleased. That was the advantage of being dead: no fear of future consequences. Or so I thought.