One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [43]
A few days later, another girl Thinzanoo’s age drew a picture that illustrated the role school plays in the inner lives of these dispossessed children. May eagerly showed me her skills in English when she drew a picture of a girl named Susu and labeled it: “I am going to school.” Then she drew a picture of another girl, her hair done up, in nice clothes with a professional air about her, happy and pretty. This drawing said: “I went to school.” May looked like the first girl, Susu, but dreamed of the future in which she would evolve into the other girl in the picture, the one who had gone to school (Figure 8).
The kids in hiding want stability and opportunity. School shows them a way into a good job, into security and comfort, and into the society that they see and hear other children entering every day and that they are forbidden to enter. When the days stretch out without any change, without any hope, the simple wish for education can become an escape route, a route that their parents can rarely provide.
Thinzanoo was ashamed of how her family lives. When I asked about the war in Burma, she gave no answer, and tears formed in her eyes. When I asked what she likes to do, what she wants to do when she is older, the tears burst.
“She weeps,” my translator whispered, “because she is ashamed. She cannot think of an answer.” Her attitude echoed the somber mood of her father, and I thought of Siha, how he took his cues from his mother, and I looked at Thinzanoo’s father. Her younger brother, Ostar, drew a picture of their father (Figure 9). In the picture, he has short, neat hair. He wears a tie and a clean pink shirt. The man sitting beside us looked nothing like this. His prosthetic leg was dirty and chipped a bit. His hair was long and tangled. He had heavy, dark bags around his eyes. The children, very hesitant to speak with an outsider, deferred everything to their father. They looked on him with respect and admiration. In his face I saw weariness. He was not the man in the picture anymore. Fleeing his homeland, he had left that man behind. Now he found himself helpless to protect his family, depressed and uncertain. His own fear of the border, of the outside world infected his children and made them extremely nervous as well. I wondered how greatly their outlook would improve if their father could receive counseling or an opportunity to restore some of the confidence he lost when he lost his leg.
The children have no future. They cannot go home, they cannot settle in Thailand. Their entire world has shrunk to the size of the room on the twelfth floor of a Bangkok tenement, their worldview shaped by their melancholy and anxious father. They do not fear the mangy dogs outside or the crime in the bustling metropolis because they do not know it; they never experience it. They never experience anything outside.
I asked them to draw pictures of Bangkok as they saw it. The children’s drawings showed no resemblance to the city itself.
“I drew a mountain and the sun rising over clouds. I drew our house and a tree with a woman. The woman is growing a flower,” said Thinzanoo. She drew rural Burma, essentially, a pleasant scene from a life she desires, a life that has been closed off to her (Figure 10). Without the ability to assimilate into the new country, her only resource for images in her imagination is the memory of the past.
Their father looked at the drawing and smiled, his own eyes growing moist. His children were being erased from the earth, disappearing from reality in their fluorescent little room, and he was helpless to stop it happening. He looked at the drawing of Burma for a long time without speaking. The whole family looked quietly at the serene pictures of home, drawn from imaginations