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BOOK
REVIEWS
Images of Myanmar's tragic past and
present
Waiting for the
Lady, by Christopher G
Moore
Bangkok A-Go-Go, by John
Hail
Reviewed by Gary LaMoshi
It is
an arresting image of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi
and one that poignantly conveys the struggle for freedom
in Myanmar.
Kazuo [the photographer] snapped three
shots of the Lady, her face in a dark, slightly
obscured profile, but he assured me that if I saw the
photograph, I would have no doubt that the person in
the photograph was Aung San Suu Kyi ... Her face - a
slight smile on her lips - was only slightly turned
towards the camera. Directly behind her, in the
rearview window, a clean hole appeared. A hard metal
ball had gone straight through the glass leaving a
spider web of cracks along the edges. The thugs had
used steel ball bearings. You have seen the
photographs. The Lady had only been a fingernail's
length away from the hole. A little bit more to the
side and she would have been killed. This
very real photograph, taken in 1996, appears on the
jacket of Christopher G Moore's novel Waiting for the
Lady, which traces the  tragedy of Myanmar over
three generations and much of East Asia. Moore has lived
in Bangkok since 1985, where he has been writing a novel
a year; Waiting ... reflects the depth of both
his regional expertise and his literary skill.
In the novel, the picture of Aung San Suu Kyi
becomes one of 19 shots taken with a camera that antique
dealer and photographer Sloan Walcott finds at the
airport in Yangon. When he arrives back home in Bangkok,
Walcott processes the photos. In addition to shots of
the Lady, there is another picture that grabs Sloan's
interest and rests at the center of the novel.
The last photo was of a girl with long,
slender legs wearing a robe curled up on a sofa. She
sat with one foot tucked underneath her other thigh. I
was drawn to her long fingers and delicate hands; one
was positioned on her exposed leg and the other she
used as a pillow under her face. Under the robe there
was a hint of large and firm breasts, the erect
nipples caused the robe to tent out. She might have
been sleeping or resting. From the angle of the shot,
only one eye was partially visible, and it was closed
... The positioning of the girl had been done by
someone who was a pro: a classic after-sex
composition, not smutty or overtly sexual, but
carefully nuanced with every part of her body in
perfect harmony. On closer inspection, the
picture reveals a blue scorpion tattoo on the woman's
thigh, heightening Sloan's curiosity and prompting him
to search for person who took the photos.
Sloan
traces the ownership of the camera to a Japanese
photographer, Kazuo Takeda, who has recently been killed
in a traffic accident in Japan. Takeda's father comes to
Bangkok to recover the camera and collect the photos.
Sloan omits the photo of the girl, but Takeda's father
identifies the missing shot and asks Sloan to destroy it
and banish it from his memory.
That request -
along with the lure of Ming dynasty bowls washing out of
Chinese graves in the rainy season and an impending
release of the Lady from house arrest - drives Sloan to
travel to Myanmar with Hart, his British collaborator on
a book about art of the Chin ethnic group with family,
imperial ties to Myanmar. Visiting Yangon's Drug
Elimination Museum under the influence of ice-cold
Tigers and smoking "fat ones" that fuel Sloan without
compromising his integrity as a narrator, they meet
Sarah, who studies Chin tattoos and joins their quest.
The group travels through a Myanmar where
tragedy and death are as evident as the jugs of diesel
fuel in the back of their Toyota station wagon, and
where the release of the Lady provides temporary relief,
not fundamental change.
In addition to creating
a convincing, entertaining narrator, Sloan, and a story
that engages the past and its images on several levels,
Moore crafts a tragic Myanmar landscape, mixing in-depth
knowledge of the place and its history with a compelling
tale populated with characters anyone would be glad to
have as travel companions.
The real man
behind the camera
Veteran journalist John Hail is
the real-life photographer who shot the photo of Aung
San Suu Kyi in the back seat of her Toyota after the
attack by military junta thugs. Based in Bangkok, Hail
was granted a visa to Myanmar in 1996, along with other
Western reporters, to cover construction of a
Unocal-Total pipeline along the Thai border. A wily,
local stringer led Hail away from the reporters'  official scrums to a
National League of Democracy central committee member's
house, where he found the Lady, interviewed her and
posed her for the photo.
Hail has now used these
experiences in writing his first novel, Bangkok
A-Go-Go, which grows out of his 30 years reporting
in Southeast Asia. From his Patpong bar, the main
character, Jerry Norpark, recalls the long, strange trip
that got him there. Introduced to Bangkok as an American
GI on leave from Vietnam, Norpark goes AWOL (absent
without leave) and lives on the fringes of society.
Writing letters for bar girls, Norpark wins a
promotion to teach English and gets mixed up with
student radicals during a period of revolving-door
military coups in Thailand. Love, politics and
friendship lead him to jungle exile, buffalo fighting
for family honor and land rights on the island of Samui,
clashes with American MIA (missing in action) hunters
and on to the back of an elephant surrounded by armed
Vietnamese troops on the wrong side of the border.
As Thailand becomes a model of Southeast Asian
probity, Bangkok A-Go-Go recalls how different
things were not so long ago and reminds us what a short
trip it could be back to those frontier days.
Waiting for the Lady by Christopher G
Moore, Heaven Lake Press, Bangkok, 2003. ISBN:
974-90755-6-0. Price: US$24.95. 342
pages.
Bangkok A-Go-Go by John Hail,
Heaven Lake Press, Bangkok, 2004. ISBN: 974-91588-3-0.
Price: US$11.95 (paper). 313 pages.
(Copyright
2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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