I was born in a jungle camp of CPB (Communist Party of Burma) HQ on the ranges of Pegu-Yoma in June 1956. My father then was a divisional military commander of CPB Peoples’ Army and my mother was a central committee member of CPB Women Congress. Before they joined the Party my father was an ex-army officer and my mother a young high school student. They met in the jungle and got married with approval of the Party.
Started
in March 1948 the flames of Communist rebellion were still burning
bright but the military situation in the mid 1950 was not in their favor
like before in the beginning. Not only losing all their strongholds in
the population centers of middle Burma the Communist were now being
chased like the wild pigs in the jungle by the troops loyal to U Nu’s
AFPFL Government while the pro-government militia kept them away from
the towns and large villages.
In
the beginning of 1956 a huge military operation named Aungmaga was
launched against the CPB Central Committee HQ in the Pakoku District.
Led by Colonel Kyi Win the Tenth Brigade of Burmese Army even captured
the CPB HQ in early March 1956. When I was born the base military
hospital was just a makeshift jungle camp comprising a couple of
thatch-roofed bamboo huts in an abandoned teak plantation called Palway
Kyowaing on the Pegu-yoma north west of Pyimanar.
There
were male paramedics and a couple of midwives-cum-nurses and the matron
was sister Daw Moe Swe, according to my mother. The camp basically had
nothing decent to eat except the bamboo shoots and wild rock melons from
the jungle floor. To feed my mother and the wounded comrades Daw Moe
Swe and her fellow nurses and medics had to forage the jungle.
I
do not understand why these bloody Communists tried to breed in the
jungle. Maybe they didn’t have condoms or contraceptive pills back then
especially in a jungle. My sister born a year and half before me died
within few days after birth and my mother was half expecting I could go
the same way. But I survived miraculously even a brutal raid by the
notorious Chin troops. According to my mother the Chins attacked the
hospital camp one day and killed many and captured alive Daw Moe Swe and
the rest but she with me on her back escaped into the jungle.
My
mother was seriously malnourished and she was so thin and thus produced
an extremely underweight baby. I was just a tiny skeleton covered with
shriveled skin. This was what she so often said so many years later when
I became an adult fairly big and strong.
“I
couldn’t watch whenever Aunty Daw Moe Swe tried to inject you with some
medicine to keep you alive. You were so miserably thin, just bones and
skin, she always had a hard time finding one of your veins and you were
screaming with pain till you had no energy or voice left to cry out no
more.”
She
and the baby finally ended up with the family of a Party sympathizer in
nearby Pyimanar and a few weeks later I was given to her eldest sister
from the Delta town of Moulmeingyun about 200 miles away from Pyimanar
as she couldn’t take care of me anymore. She desperately wanted to go
back into the jungle and joined my father and his rag tag gang of CPB’s
Red Army. So she wrote to her sister to come meet her incognito at
certain date and time at Pyimanar Railway Station.
The
transfer of baby me was done unceremoniously on the noisily crowded
platform of the Railway Station. According to my adopted mother her baby
sister whom she hadn’t seen since she joined the underground CPB at
least ten years ago suddenly appeared beside her in the crowd and handed
her a small smelly bundle and a handwritten note and immediately
disappeared without even saying a word.
The
bundle was three months old me in my own liquidy shit as I then had a
non-stop diarrhea. And the note contained my name and my date of birth.
My mother couldn’t hang around too long as she was shit scared of being
captured by the police or the army or the town’s militia.
My
dear mother didn’t see me again till I was ten years old and she was
captured alive together with my younger brother by the Chin troops and
then released only after they had been kept at their battalion compound
in Magwe for more than a year as hostages till my father agreed to
surrender.
She
was extremely lucky as the CO, Colonel Min Kyi, of the Chin Rifle
Battalion which captured her was a young cadet officer in my father’s
guerrilla battalion fighting the Japanese in the last year of the Second
World War.
Eventually she was pardoned and she went back to her hometown Pakoku and lived with her aging mother and passed away peacefully in late 1970s. She came to Rangoon only once just before she died and my mother and many ex-commie mothers visited her at where she was staying. I was then in RIT and I was the only one in a university among the sorry bunch of jungle-born teenagers accompanying their mothers that day.
I
had basically no maternal or paternal bonds with both my parents for I
grew up a civil war orphan. My mother’s desperate cure for repairing
that serious detachment was frequently telling me stories and events
about that three months immediately after I was born and before I was
abandoned. Daw Moe Swe was always there in her stories.
How
she took care of me, how she kept me alive, how she suffered in the
hands of Chin soldiers because of me, and why she gave me a life worth
living. After the old lady was captured she still refused to surrender
to the army and they finally charged her with treason and jailed her 10
years with hard labor.
After
so many times hearing the stories I even started felling guilty for her
being in a prison for that long as if she’d delivered only one
Communist baby in her life and unfairly suffered for it. Only later I
realized she was the head matron of all the Communist midwives and
personally delivered or helped deliver hundreds of babies in various
Communist field hospitals. I was probably the last Communist baby for
her.
Eventually she was pardoned and she went back to her hometown Pakoku and lived with her aging mother and passed away peacefully in late 1970s. She came to Rangoon only once just before she died and my mother and many ex-commie mothers visited her at where she was staying. I was then in RIT and I was the only one in a university among the sorry bunch of jungle-born teenagers accompanying their mothers that day.
Almost
all of them I met that day were troublesome kids as if their difficult
jungle-births had basically damaged their brains. Drug-addicts and
petty-criminals almost all of them according to their complaining
mothers. But my mother didn’t say a bad thing about me to them even
though I ran away from home at least three times. And she didn’t mention
about me growing up basically in Aung-San-Thuria Hla Thaung Cadet
Regiment the army-boarding-school for the miscreant sons of army
officers.
Also
she didn’t say anything about me trying to get into the Defense
Services Academy (DSA) after the matriculation and how my father killed
my lifelong dream by not signing the parental consent on my DSA
application. I still remembered what he angrily told me then that he
would never let me become an army officer and kill the Communists of CPB
to whom I basically owed my life and thus my whole existence.
She
also didn’t tell them about me running away that year and joining the
army as a private and the horrible fact that I’d fought and killed the
Communists on the Chinese border in Kachin State for almost two long
years in the army.
As
my mother’s turn came to meet Daw Moe Swe and she introduced me to her
the thin old lady said to me a few simple words that have stuck with me
for the rest of my life.
“My sacrifices are well worth it as long as you’re doing something good for our country.”
From
that day onwards whenever I did something seriously bad I remembered
her words and felt guilty. When I did have a chance to emigrate from Myanmar to Australia in 1986 I hesitated for over two years. Even today I
still feel guilty for abandoning Myanmar in 1988 whenever I think of the
thin old lady I met many years ago.
Then one day in last week I accidentally clicked onto a Burmese democracy site called Myanmar ISP and pleasantly found an E-book named “Dawn Traveller” written by Yebaw Ngwe of CPB now in the Yunan Province of China. (For
some reason the normally secretive CPB is now allowing or even seemed
to be encouraging the old cadres to write their memoirs and I am now in
heaven after discovering the books.)
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