Parthien – Delta Fire

Near Pathien.

My first Burmese meal outside of Rangoon nearly killed me. Not because of the poor hygiene or bad water that I had expected, but because it was made from the sun. I’m not a total spice-pussy but this was horrific – what was I going to do if every meal in the Irrawaddy delta was going to turn my face inside out like this one? The restaurant was wooden and whenever a boat left the dock nearby the place swayed in it’s wake. I was afraid to breath on anything as I sensed the place would burn like a lit fart. As the only foreigner in the place - the only one in town as far as I knew - I attracted quite a crowd as I billowed steam and gasped like a cartoon fish.

            My new friend Win returned from the bathroom – actually he returned from walking outside and pissing in the river, we were in Burma after all – and sat opposite.

            “Are you ok, Max?” He was a little confused over my name.

            “Yeah.” I croaked, pointing to the plate of watercress and greens we were sharing as a beer snack, “Spicy.”

            “I think Myanmar food is more spicy than Australian food,” he laughed, snagging a hearty amount with his chopsticks. His smile drained away.

            “Holy fuck,” he gasped, showing an impressive grasp of idiom for a non-native English speaker. Before I could warn him he took a generous swig of beer and held it in his mouth. Rookie error. I watched his immediate relief turn to horror as the beer intensified the pain and he began pacing back and forth. Meanwhile the acid in my mouth must have burned through a new layer of face and I joined him, throwing my streaming eyes heavenwards and slapping tables.

            The restaurant staff watched the impressive spectacle – even the chef left his kitchen to enjoy the evil he had wrought. Eventually the pain subsided and I sat at the table while my ruined brain flowed out of my nostrils. I gingerly examined the offending dish with my chopsticks and realized our mistake. In the dim light, and after a few beers, we had mistaken the vicious whole green chillies for green beans. Win must have had at least three. When we’d recovered I proposed a toast to Myanmar food, and we both giggled.

After 25 hours on an ancient riverboat from Rangoon, I had arrived in the Irrawaddy delta port of Pathien earlier in the afternoon. I was prowling the streets looking for food when Win waved to me and asked me where I was from. We got chatting and he had given a short tour of town before leading me here for an early dinner. As we sat carefully picking around the chillies he told me he had learned English while working as a guide in Rangoon and had recently returned home to work for his uncle, learning the electrical repair trade. Because he was learning he earned nothing but was given food and board at his uncle’s house.

            “After two years, maybe I will make a salary,” he said.

            A 12 year old kid with a crew cut and a grubby shirt brought a plate of chicken curry, a bowl of soup and some rice. I handed Win an empty bowl but he pushed it away.

            “No, I can not eat this. It’s not halal. You know halal?”

            “You’re Muslim?”

            “Yes, there are many Muslim people in Pathien.”

            “So what is this?” I tapped his beer with a chopstick.

            He grinned and changed the subject. “You must come to my house.”

            As we walked past empty colonial buildings and a busy pier my new friend waved and chatted, showing me off like a prize. Everyone smiled and wanted to shake my hand and practice their English. At the back of a market where pig heads hung on hooks and dying fish flopped in shallow pans, we turned down a raised dirt road that ran through rice paddies. The house was a two room shack raised off the ground and surrounded by palms and banana leaves. If you ignored the chickens picking in the mud and the thatched roofs repaired with plastic sheets, the neighbourhood looked like a beach resort in Thailand. Win’s house had a sleeping room that he said that five of six people usually shared, a small kitchen and an everything else room with a television and a karaoke system. The house was swept clean and the only decorations were laminated posters of the two national heroes – Aung San Suu Kyi and her assassinated father, General Aung San. Two teenage girls, Win’s niece and her friend, lay on their stomachs watching music videos. They blushed when I said hello. Win introduced me to his aunt who was scrubbing the kitchen and his four year old nephew Mohamed, who was learning English. Little Mo gave me an impromptu demonstration, “How are you? One, two, three. I love you,” before hiding between mum’s legs.

            Win said he needed help with one of his girlfriends – he had many – so we walked to the night market in town.

            “What’s the problem exactly?”

            “I don’t know her name.”

            “You don’t know your girlfriend’s name?” He shrugged.

            The girl worked for her parents at a food stall on the waterfront section of Pathien’s bustling night market. She was slim and pretty, maybe nineteen, and Win said she spoke English but was very shy and that I should introduce myself. She stood behind a charcoal grill flipping Chinese sausage and tofu but when I walked over Win grabbed my arm.

            “No, her father is there. He does not like me.”

            Instead we went for a tour around the night market. Piles of cheap jeans and business shirts sat next to hand-woven traditional dress and herbal medicine. A steady stream of locals walked through the market, eating fried tofu or ice-cream. I stopped at a stall selling small logs of pale wood. Win told me it was the thanaka that nearly all Burmese women, and many men, wear as an all purpose sun block and skin treatment. The women at the stand quickly ground some bark onto a flat stone and mixed it with water. Laughing, she spread the tan-coloured paste on my stubbled cheeks. It was cooling and smelled woody.

“Do I look like your girl friend now, Win?”

“No, you are too ugly.” Imperfect English speakers can be so cruel.

Loud music boomed in the distance and as we rounded a corner I saw an inflatable blue arch brightly lit and advertising women’s cosmetics.

            “This is an expo from Rangoon.” Win explained and at a stall inside I bought us both an ice-cream which he said was his first ever.

            At a stage set up in the middle of the road a crowd had formed to watch a hip-hop dance troop perform. Two girls dressed as naughty schoolgirls, a la early Britney Spears, performed hair-tossing hip thrusts to a dirty beat. It was overtly sexual and I couldn’t imagine anything more out of place in this little Burmese town. The crowd loved it. When they had finished I bought a bottle of local rum for no other reason than it was 700 kyats and I couldn’t pass up 750ml of booze for under a dollar. At the hotel we had a couple of shots with the owner who showed us CCTV footage of a robed monk having urgent sex with a young women as she bowed to the Buddha to pray. Win said that it was the source of a recent scandal and I wondered if this was Burma’s first viral video. Better than those stupid cats, I thought.

            It had been a big day and I had an early bus to catch so I went to my room, leaving Win slumped over the bottle of rum watching English football with the owner.