She looked around the cafe suspiciously, eyes darting left, right, her back to the wall, before scribbling a few more letters on the corner of the back page of her notebook. I ask, What’s that. No response, but I notice the waiter has hovered toward our direction. The table to one side is a young couple, the man in a collared shirt and sunglasses, though we’re indoors. To the other side, a group of four, smoking, not talking.

The waiter leaves, and she begins scribbling once more, not looking down at the paper, but staring straight ahead.

I’d met her that morning, at a small shop near the big lake in Yangon, the capital of Burma. It was early April, that sweltering season that so perturbed British colonials stationed along the Irrawaddy, among them Orwell, and I’d stopped for a Star, the local version of Coke. She was carrying an English textbook, and as we left the shop, she mentioned that she had just begun studying English at a local college. Her spoken English was not good, though the written lessons in the book were quite complex. She was named, and you don’t forget a name like this one, Zin Mar Thet.

We stopped at a roadside juice bar, which seemed to be run by her parents, or at the least, an aunt and uncle; the relation between young and old was of that type that only exist among families. The Burmese enjoy their juices sickly-sweet, but it would be impolite not to have at least one glass. This roadside bar was not just on any road, however. It was on the corner of the lake and University, the street home to both the US Embassy and the home/prison of The Lady, Aung Sun Suu Kyi, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and freely-elected President of Burma, at least until the junta decided to nullify the results and put her under house arrest. That was nearly twenty years ago.

I told the girl I needed to go to the US Embassy, which just happened to be further down the road than Suu Kyi’s house. Heavy police presence lined the street, and we were two of only a very small group of people walking down the broad, shady avenue. As we pass the run-down compound with NLD – National League for Democracy – banners fluttering, the girl moves close and whispers, This house, Is where Aung Suu lives, you know? Many of her sentences end with that interrogative, you know?, expectantly. I did know, but I feigned surprise. Oh really, I asked. Can we go pay a visit? She shushes me, no, no, police, police, and grabs my arm. We walk a hundred yards further, and she says, ok, we can go back now. She knew the embassy story was a pretext as well. As we cross the compound again, she looks down at the ground. I look straight at the compound, and the policeman walking past it.

Later than evening, at the cafe, she finishes scribbling, and glances around nervously. It is a practiced glance, a quick dart of the eyes in every direction without the head needing to turn, an inconspicuous glance. She reaches for a napkin, and in so doing, slides the page across the table into my hand. I hold it beneath the table. In block letters, the penmanship of someone whose native script is different from that of English, is the following:

No. 2

Saw Mail

Sport Camp

ALONE tsp

Burma is a proper totalitarian state. Freedom of speech does not exist. Assembling in large groups can lead to arrest. Staying overnight in another house requires registering with the police; as a young Burmese man told me, this is why young Burmese pretend to enjoy hiking in the hills so much. Traveling between towns requires a permit for locals, and foreigners are simply banned outright from traveling to most of the country. Along the border regions, the Muslims in the west and the Christian Karen and Mizo tribes have it particularly bad. Reports of whole villages being massacred are not uncommon, and the army to this day recruits child soldiers. Heroin production is rife in the mountains, and the government is said to have its hands in the pot. This wouldn’t be surprising: in a desperately poor country, the capital is lined with enormous mansions said to be owned by top government officials.

Nonetheless, the Burmese remain an impossibly cheerful lot. A guide of mine, in the north of the country, was the fifth of ten siblings, five sons and five daughters, born to a lower-class family. She is not yet 30, but four of her brothers have already died, all from drinking particularly vile local moonshine. One sister is retarded and cannot care for herself. One has married an importer-exporter in Mandalay and reached the middle class, and the rest work backbreaking hours as fieldhands.

When my guide was 17, she was forced to leave her secret boyfriend, a peasant, and was placed in an arranged marriage with a relatively wealthy man from the city. She was considered the beauty of the town, with a broad, infectious smile, and had the rare opportunity to reach a better life. Nonetheless, she wanted to marry her peasant boyfriend, but given his status, it was impossible; she hasn’t seen him in years, and only knows that he now works at the airport in Yangon, 18 hours by bus from her home.

After conceiving a daughter at 19, she heard word that her abusive husband had a woman on the side. She confronted him, and he apologized. Soon after, while washing his clothes, she found a portrait shot of yet another mistress. By now, ten years later, they live ten hours from each other, and are for all practical purposes divorced, though this is legally impossible, and therefore she will never remarry. He has a bevy of women in Mandalay, and she is forced to support her daughter, as well as an orphaned niece and a grandmother, on her own.

A week before I’d met her, she had totaled her moped, which was her most valuable possession.

And yet, she laughed so much during our three day hike that we all but named her Giggles. When she saw me reading a book by Aung Sun Suu Kyi, with the lady’s picture on the cover, she grinned and mentioned that everyone in Burma loves this lady. It was not, as far as I know, a problem for me to have the book, but a local with such a banned book would face five years in a prison camp. Despite the risk, a democratic underground exists, and most people are able to see through the government media controls to understand the true political situation in their homeland.

Back to the cafe: I tried to interpret the paper. ALONE tsp? Am I supposed to appear alone somewhere? But when? My dreams of breaking into the underground, of passing samizdat, of knocking on forlorn factory doors in a certain pattern, sliding through the door when it opens a crack, and appearing in a smoke-filled room of poets in turtlenecks, and elderly educated figures from the colonial era, and foolhardy but idealistic students, all bantering back and forth in discussion of Mill and Locke and Paine and their Relevance to Our Present Situation, while an antique printing press noisily churns – gah, kah-WUMP, gah, kah-WUMP - in the corner, operated by a stone-faced gentleman with ink-covered fingers, spits out the latest monthly newsletter, and a reticent old woman circles the room with a tray of tea and snacks: perhaps, if only I could decode the message, this could be my chance. She had taken me past Suu Kyi’s house, had she not? And befriended the solitary foreigner, which is not an everyday occurrence in Burma. And her family, or “family”, happened to pick that corner to run their juice stand?

Saw Mail. Sport Park. ALONE Tsp. Perhaps there is a large sports park in Yangon, and Saw Mail is an apartment block, or a factory, within? I could get a map and check. As I puzzle over the code, she sits back with her drink and a blank look on her face. But Tsp? Perhaps I’m misreading her handwriting! I write on the corner of a bill, “Tsp?”, and slide it towards her.

She is puzzled. I don’t understand, I say. Oh, oh, Tsp, it is township, she whispers. Alone Township, in the west part of Yangon. This is my house. You will send me a postcard after you leave Burma?

Ah, right. Dreams dashed.

But no worry, because the next time I visit the totalitarian world…