What Happens When Nothing Is Done

The worst kind of running away, he knows now, is that from your own country.

Standing on the wooden dock of the cargo ship, a pack on his back, Hmin Myint Lu withered silently in the smoky winter air. No breeze blew to lighten his breath, so he felt for the last time the suffocating city smog, watched as the heat of the late afternoon shattered against the golden tip of the Shwedagon Pagoda. As the ship crept downriver, Hmin wondered if this was the last of Myanmar that King Thibaw and the beautiful Queen Supayalat had seen, too, upon their exile more than a century ago. The city of Yangon would’ve looked different then—no grand colonial buildings imposed in the centre; no rickety, low-cost development complexes cluttering the skyline; no glossy skyscrapers lifted in celebratory dominance—yet the unfaded green and gold, he knew, had been there, the brushes of jungle and glittered pagodas that endured war, earthquakes, democracy and dictatorship. Hmin wondered if the King and Queen had considered them all as he did now—lost to him yet timeless, as momentary flashes of the dearest memory. But his musings were short-lived, for he remembered that as captives of the British Empire the King and Queen must've been held below deck. So he watched it all shrink from view, and he knew then that his body, too, would stay suspended in this air—held as it was, burning and stifled, in the broken beams of the same, endless sun.

Soon, the city faded and the slums began, interlaced outskirts of the industrial zone. At this, Hmin turned his back to the land and entered the ship. Below deck was dark, dank, and creaky, and a sour fragrance wafted through standing air. Hmin found his room at the head of the corridor: he’d bribed his way to a single bunk in a cramped quarter of four. This ship was headed to Penang, Malaysia, but planned to make a brief stop in the waters of Dawei, where a smaller boat would bring him to shore. From there, a Thai friend with a motorbike would take him across the border—and he would figure out the rest in Bangkok. Hmin took a deep breath, reached into his back pocket, and sat on the edge of the bedframe. The wood groaned sickeningly, and he heard the sharp crack of splinters snap below the mattress.

In his hands he held a small black notebook. One of many—of hundreds—he’d kept on him through much of his life. Before the coup, Hmin had worked as an investigative journalist for The Myanmar Times: bilingual, on track to editor, and an occasional correspondent to BBC News. After the takeover, he’d disobeyed the Times CEO, taking it upon himself to uncover the military’s actions for the world: to seek out the protests, nightly arrests, criminal releases, army brutality, the deaths and despair yet resilience of his people. It had been a dangerous game. The night of his own arrest, he’d been scribbling furiously up until the second they’d heard the strays down the street start to bark; then rose the pots of the neighbourhood watch. That’s how they’d known it was coming.

Hmin flipped to the last page of his jottings in the notebook. He’d recorded how scared his sister looked, eight-months pregnant, rocking with a flashlight in her hands; how his mother gripped her wooden spoons; how his brother-in-law leaned, arms slack and head bowed, on a long metal pole. How the soldiers had entered their house and they’d jumped from the window, the clangs of spoons on pans but all he could hear was the air in his ears until the sharp, punctuated shots pierced through it all. Even now, alone on a boat, his body flinched at the memory. These were not just his thoughts but his world, he realised, condensed into the gloss of tiny pages, embraced in the soft, bendable moleskin. He bit his lip and wiped his face.

The door eased open, interrupting his thoughts. An old man shuffled in, followed by a young man around Hmin's age, and a young woman, heavily pregnant. She closed the door softly behind her, then lowered herself onto the bedframe across from Hmin’s. “Mingalabar,” she spoke softly, keeping her head down but lifting her eyes to Hmin's, addressing him through heavy lashes. “What’s your name?”

They passed the evening in hesitant conversation. Hmin learned that the old man, the woman's father, had been a leader in the 8888 Uprising; the day before, the family had gotten wind of arrests planned by the military of elderly citizens tied to historic protests—just as the old man had received the phone call confirming a diagnosis of stage III colon cancer. With no time to spare, they’d packed a few bags and headed to the docks, determined to find a way out. They had some cash, but they had no idea where to go or what to do. Hmin's heart twisted at their story: he watched the young woman rub her belly, gazing at it when she spoke as though it was all in the world she had left to live for. Hmin knew he could never understand such strength.

They turned in early. Dread had settled in with the darkness, shadowing the room, sinking from their stomachs to their toes like heavy stones through water. Hmin's body burned in pain—he wanted to close his eyes for a thousand years, if only his mind would let him. A few hours into the pitch black, as he shifted on the brink of sleep, a section of the bedframe suddenly gave way beneath him. His body jolted sideways as his mattress fell through the splinters, making a loud thump as his shoulder hit a stiff lump below. It dug into his back, so he flipped over and reached under the skimpy mattress to fix it.

His hand closed around nylon. Curious, he lifted the lump from the jagged wood and saw that in his hand he gripped a small duffel bag. He quietly drew back the zipper, then swore in surprise.

There, at the top of the bag, was a black notebook—tiny, made of moleskin, exactly like the one in Hmin’s pocket and the countless he’d left behind in Yangon. Hmin almost couldn’t believe it: in the darkest depths of a cargo vessel, miles from home, his senses deranged from unprocessed trauma and sleep-deprivation, this fragment of familiarity had been lying below a broken bedframe. Trembling with exaggerated awe or exhaustion, or probably both, he lifted it from the bag. It was frayed at the edges of the cover, and when he opened it the pages were water-stained, stiff and stinking of mould. Only one contained writing, a loose, shaky scrawl in black ink: Willowdene Cottage, Lake Winnipeg, Hnausa, Manitoba, Canada. He flipped through the rest of the pages with his thumb, but there was no more.

He returned to the bag, sifting softly through the rest of its contents—a flashlight, compressed windbreaker, basic first-aid kit—until, at the bottom, his hand brushed a crinkle of plastic. He drew this out of the bag, and another curse escaped his lips: for this was a Ziploc bag, in which hung two hefty stacks of US bills. For a moment, Hmin sat and stared at them. Then he opened the plastic—his hands truly shaking now—and when he placed them under the light of his phone, he saw that each stack was comprised of new, perfectly crisp hundred-dollar bills—and each stack was bound by a paper wrap, on which the number $10,000 was printed in both directions. Hmin read that number several times before counting the bills himself, all two-hundred of them, three times over. Numbly, he finally returned the bills to the Ziploc bag. At the sound of the young woman turning in her sleep, he quickly shoved the bag back into the duffel.

The next day dawned crisp at the roseate edges of the sunrise, and Hmin’s body felt entirely cold to the bone. Soon, the ship had slowed in Dawei’s waters, and the four refugees piled into an orange lifeboat suspended above the sea. A sailor accompanied them, and once they were lowered they sped towards land, the white strip of sand glowing on the eastern horizon ahead of them.

As they neared the shoreline, however, Hmin’s stomach dropped. A crowd stood on the beach, and in the centre, rifles in hand, red on grey in uniform, rose the Myanmar police. By the looks of it, they had arrived to break up a protest started by fishermen—just in time to catch sight of the little orange boat speeding to shore. As their rifles lifted, the sailor tried to navigate back out to deeper waters—but a shot fired, loud and clear through the haze, thudding into the side of the boat. Hmin yelped and lost his footing, stumbling to the bottom of the boat. The family ducked beside him, hands on the backs of their necks. The young man swore a string of curses, shaking, and the woman slipped to her knees, clutching her belly. The old man, staying silent, drew his arms around her. Another gunshot hit the boat, pitching them once more in the waves. Water sprayed over their backs, salty droplets clinging to their hair, drenching their skin.

Hunched on his elbows now, Hmin watched his companions—the shivering young man, the silent father, the young woman and her baby. He watched the woman grit her teeth and glare up to the sky through her lashes—as she did, her gaze met his for a brief second. Hmin took in the blackening brown of her eyes, dull and deadened with a terror that had swum in them for far too long. With the third gunshot and a cry from the sailor, Hmin tore himself from those eyes, blinked, and nodded quietly to himself. He set his teeth, and without thinking he reached for the duffel in the pile of baggage. He pushed himself up from his elbows and leaned toward the woman, taking one of her hands from her belly and pressing the bag’s handles into her fist. He stared into her eyes, hard, as he did—and then he grabbed his pack and jumped over the side of the boat.

Even the old man shouted at him as he did this, but Hmin had already made up his mind: he turned and waved them off. “Go!” he shouted, as forcefully as he could muster. Then he shouldered his pack, turned to shore, and raised his hands above his head as he waded through the waist-high water towards the line of weaponry before him. His shoulders relaxed as he felt the waves churn behind him, the whir of the motorboat’s engine fading from earshot. An officer lifted his gun to the distance, but Hmin shook his head emphatically. “It’s me you want!” he yelled over the water. “It’s me!” The officers lowered their guns as Hmin approached, clustering around him when he reached the beach. Hmin disappeared in the grey, beneath the hands and batons that flew to his face, pounded his shoulders, beat his body. The cluster moved towards a line of trucks parked on the street. From a distance, watching the scene vanish from view, this was the last that the young woman ever saw of him.

It wasn’t until the cargo ship docked in Penang that the woman ventured to open the duffel, finding first two tiny black notebooks. The money was tucked below them, padded by the crumpled windbreaker. Her husband found her crying when he returned from the latrine. “We will go to Canada,” she told him decidedly. Then she rubbed her belly. “And we will name him Hmin.” The young man only nodded, grabbed her hand, and helped his family climb to the fresh air of the dock.