The Ghost Road (Cont.) | Outside Online

Outside Magazine October 2003

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The Ghost Road (Cont.)

HEADING NORTH FROM MANDALAY, I climb onto the roof of a passenger car to avoid the conductor. The train lumbers along, stopping at every rice-pig-child village, then chugging slowly back into the country. Water buffalo chest-deep in black mud. Women bent in half in green rice paddies. Deep teak forests. Bicyclists on dirt paths. Asian pastoral—just like the brochures.

Twenty-four hours later, as the train slows outside Mogaung, I hop off, run down a dirt road, and leap into the first trishaw I see. The driver pedals me through Mogaung, but there is a roadblock on the far side of town. He wants me to get out right there, in front of the soldiers. Wagging cash, I get him to pedal down a side street before I step out. Not five minutes later, the police pick me up off the street. They don't say a word. They are very young—adolescents with weapons, driving a souped-up Toyota Corolla. The driver flips on flashing lights, plugs in a bootleg tape of an Asian girl singing Cyndi Lauper songs, and flies north out of Mogaung.

We're on the Stilwell Road, heading toward Myitkyina. After half an hour, we pull into a compound across the street from the railroad tracks, on the edge of town. I peer out and shake my head in surprise and relief. They've taken me to the Myitkyina YMCA. I register and am given a spare, clean room with a high ceiling. I shave, drop the key off with the clerk, and go back onto the street to explore. I hike muddy cobblestone streets between squat, nondescript buildings. I try to speak with people here and there, but no one will say a word to me. They ignore me, their eyes darting left and right. I end up in an outdoor market where wide-faced women sit under umbrellas amid a cornucopia of brilliant, alien fruits and vegetables.

Back at the Y, the desk clerk asks me how I enjoyed the market.

The next morning I hire a trishaw driver to take me out to the Irrawaddy River. When I come back, the clerk asks me how I enjoyed the river.

In the afternoon, it rains and I go for a walk alone, zigzagging randomly and speedily to the outskirts of town. At a wet intersection, I find one of the trishaw drivers who usually hang out in front of the YMCA waiting for me. I yank a handful of grass from the side of the road before accepting his offer to give me a lift back to the Y.

Early the next morning, I repack my bag, folding tiny blades of grass into my clothes and equipment. I leave and walk the streets of the town, returning to my room at noon. I find my pack right where I left it, everything folded precisely the way it was, but there are blades of grass scattered on the floor.

That night I slip through the window of my room and steal away, carefully climbing over a block wall with pieces of broken glass embedded along the top. I find an unlocked bicycle and take it, pedaling through the darkness to a corner where several old women, perhaps lost in opium dreams, sleep on the street. I lift a conical hat off the head of one of the women and slip a wad of bills into her shirt pocket. Now I'm disguised.

For the next five nights I leave my room and ride right past the roadblocks, with their sleepy sentries, and pedal out to the villages around Myitkyina. At dawn I return the bicycle and sneak back into my room at the Y.

In these neighboring villages, under cover of darkness, I finally find people who will talk to me. They are Kachins who are dying to speak to someone. A deluge of stories, always told behind closed doors, beside candles or oil lanterns that are frequently doused—and always in whispers. They are everywhere.

A shopkeeper who says that everyone is an informer here: "Trishaw drivers, businesspeople, teachers," he says. "Even good people are informers. This is the only way to protect their families: to give up someone else. It is poison."

This shopkeeper takes me to see a former government official who was tasked with beating tribals used for road gangs in the Karen state, in far eastern Burma.

"I was expected to hit them with a club," he says. "Not systematically, because then they could plan and train their minds to resist, but randomly. This works very well. It maintains the fear of the unknown. This is how to create terror in a human heart."

Sometimes I ask questions about the Stilwell Road, but they have stories of their own. What happened to me at Pangsau Pass is happening again: Traveling the Stilwell Road is becoming irrelevant, almost insignificant—a profoundly selfish misadventure, compared with chronicling these stories of suffering and struggle. On the third night, an interpreter is provided and people are brought to me at a secret location, an outbuilding on the edge of an old teacher's enormous vegetable garden.

A truck driver who uses the Stilwell Road delivering construction materials: "My wife washes clothes in the river for the bribe money," he says. "I must pay the soldiers every time I pass through a roadblock; otherwise they will take a part from my truck."

Two ancient soldiers who tell me about fighting for the Americans during the construction of the Stilwell Road, traveling ahead of the bulldozers and clearing the forest of snipers: "We knew the jungle," one says. "We could kill the Japanese. The Americans were brave but did not know the jungle, so we helped them. Then they left us. Now we are in another war against our own government, but America has forgotten what we did for them."

The son of a father who was imprisoned for friendship: "The bravest of all, Aung San Suu Kyi, came here in 1988," he says. "My father knew her; they were schoolmates. Just friends. When she left, my father was taken away. He managed to get letters out to us. How they tortured him with electricity. How they used an iron bar rolled on his shins. How they used snakes with the women. Put snakes inside the women's bodies. He was released after five years, and then he died."

A middle-aged woman who tries to speak but can only cry and wring her hands.

I write pages of notes, hiding them in a jar in the grass behind the YMCA.

On the fourth night, the woman who wept brings her daughter. The mother sits quietly in the shadows while her daughter speaks. She tells me she is 19 years old. She learned to speak English from Christian missionaries. She has dense black hair braided into a long ponytail.

"My mother came to tell you my story, but she could not do it," she says. "We have heard you are interested in the Stilwell Road." She tells me that, except in the far west, between Shingbwiyang and Pangsau Pass, the road still exists. She knows—she has been on it. Junta warlords have been logging in northern Burma and, in places, are rebuilding the road in order to transport the trees to China. Kachin households must provide one family member for the labor.

She was 14 when she was taken away in a truck and put in a work camp with 13 other girls. At night they were locked in a large bamboo cage in the compound. Nearly every night, she says, a different girl was dragged out and gang-raped by the soldiers. One of the girls in her crew bled to death. Another girl went mad. After a year, she was set free to find her way back home, walking barefoot back down the road.

She does not pause or weep as she tells me this, but her lower lip trembles.

"We have heard you want to travel the Stilwell Road. It could be done, but it would be very dangerous. I mean, not for you. For the people who would want to help you. But we would do it."

She tells me that since Myitkyina is now open to foreigners, tourists are coming. She believes someday there will be tourists on the Stilwell Road, and she wants them to know the truth. That it is not a road built by Americans. That was history. History is over. It's a road built by the Kachins.

"Do not believe it is a noble road. It is a road of blood. A road of death."

With both hands, she wipes away the tears now in her eyes, stands up, bows, and leaves with her mother.

My hands are trembling too much to write. I cannot listen to anyone else. I ride the bicycle around in the dark for the rest of the night, looking up at the cloudy Burma sky, asking myself, What am I doing here?

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