Yesterday we were stopped on our motor bike by the Thai Border Police. A checkpoint on a random village road. They were stopping everyone to check I.D’s: sarong-wearing women pushing carts to market or carrying baskets on their heads, children playing in the nearby yard, older men driving tuk-tuks looking for their next fare.
The officer wore his privilege like a badge of honor.
“Bai nai?” He barked with a condescending authoritative gaze. “Where are you going?”
Li gripped the handle bars and brought the bike to a halt. I clung tightly to her shoulders.
“Rongrien,” she said with a soft, barely perceptible voice. “To school.”
He looked her up and down. Considered her response.
The girls have very specific ideas about what it means to be the Police.
“Pew, pew!” They squeal, laughing and aiming their hands like guns. Those men will do whatever they wish with a State-less Shan or Kachin girl. Whatever pleases them in the moment. Your life is in their hands.
It wasn’t always this way in rural northern Thailand. In the early part of the 20th century, the concept of Stateless-ness didn’t yet exist. This was a different time- a time before the world was bordered and bound, before the paradigm of nationhood manifested itself with definitive certainty across the globe. People of multiple and intricately-interconnected ethnic groups lived and worked on this land; land that did not adhere to the boundaries so randomly and artificially imposed on what is now the sovereign Thai state. Tribes, villages and vast communities of overlapping languages, cultural practices and political and spiritual allegiances settled and migrated without concern across the borders of Thailand, Burma, Yunnan China and Laos.
It wasn’t until our military presence here in the 1950’s, during the American cold-war drama that we played out in Southeast Asia with such infamous fervor, that things began to change. Ethnicity was suddenly an issue. Difference was suddenly a thing to be feared. The “tribal” people who had lived on this land for generations could, after all, be communists. This was the narrative. This was how the paradigm started to shift.
Anyone who seemed, spoke or looked like an “Other” suddenly needed to be watched. Migrants had to be closely identified, registered, tracked. By the late 1960’s, as if overnight, you had to prove that your family had been living in Thailand for at least three generations in order to get your “pink card” and claim your status as a Thai citizen. This was, of course, easier said than done, especially for ethnic minorities, or “hill tribe” peoples who not only didn’t share a language or transcription system with the Thais, so couldn’t understand this new registration procedure, but also had no documentation to show who they were. Without birth records or any other such bureaucratically-acceptable signs of national allegiance, how can you possibly tell a government who you are?
During the 1970’s, thousands of people were dubbed “illegal migrants,” and made criminals overnight. Thousands were arrested, deported, jailed or fined. Land rights were denied, educational opportunities revoked, employment options dissolved.
And the march of progress began. “Illegal” workers are workers who work for nothing—pennies to the dollar, 20 baht a day if your lucky. 20 baht, or roughly 60 cents. Or, if they’re forced to, for free. The wealth of this country, much like that of the U.S. which built itself on the backs of the slave trade, was created at the expense of thousands of people who had no choice but to work for free.
The girls have a basketball and a school uniform and a sharp mind and each other—but they have no legal home. Not in Burma, not in Yunnan, not in Thailand, not in Laos. Their mothers work in the bars and massage parlors of Bangkok, because without land how do you make anything grow? Their fathers may be dead, or gone to the city, or struggling for a wage, or maybe they live across a border somewhere– the ultimate divide.
Once a week Li goes to a special payphone near the Burma crossing, a vast stretch of road that takes you from Mae Sai over a long bridge into the village of Tachilek. Her brother waits in Rangoon for her call. She wants her mother to send her this powder-cream that many Burmese women wear on their faces to keep their skin beautiful and clear. They want me, Li’s new colleague, to chat online with her brother about Universities in the United States. He thinks it’s a long shot, doesn’t know how he’ll ever get a visa, but he wants to apply. So we schedule a time.
I’ve written many songs, stories, poems and plays that intimately explore the concept of home. Many times I have stolen a lyric from myself: “Home is not a place.”
But I take the sentiment back. Home is a place. There is nothing so powerful as this place. And when its taken from you, stolen, rejected or otherwise denied, there is no greater isolation. Nothing makes you feel as unwanted, unimportant, and irrelevant as this.
No cliché can undo the damage. Home is not where the heart is, and you actually do need to look further than your own backyard.
The question lingers: Who belongs on this earth and who doesn’t? Who is allowed to be a person and who is denied? As if being a person was a privilege, not a right.
The police man waves us on without another word. Gives me a kind of seedy sideways look as we speed away. Li is silent for the rest of the ride, says nothing until we are back at the school, safely and securely back home.
