What to Do When a Dictator Came Calling

2009 Nobel Prize winners had been announced and awarded. I can name three without pausing to think: Paul Krugman, President Obama, and Herta Müller. A home town boy made good; my President, but who is Herta Müller?

She is the winner of Nobel Prize for Literature, and I found her win the most exhilarating. She is a German of Romanian origin, and her novels are about lives under a dictatorship of Ceauşescu: How people – the oppressed and the oppressors both– carries on. Scratching and hurting each other in innumerable ways. Very much like the characters in Florian Henckel von Donnersmach’s film “The Lives of Others.” I could have traded with Herta Müller a few of those stories, for I am sure that there is a deep well of common humanity underneath the veneers of cultural differences between countries.

A heroine in one of Müller’s novels is a seamstress who sewn her name and a message “Marry Me” into every trousers her factory exported to the West. I am sure a young Burmese girl in a similar situation of boredom and pettiness of lives under a similar regime could have come up with a similar solution. Only that no one has chosen to record it as yet.

But I have a real story to tell Herta Müller. Without the sensibilities of her talents and breadth of her experiences, I can show only the skin of the story.

The faculty at Rangoon Institute of Technology received a questionnaire asking us whether we are members of the BSPP (Burma Socialist Program Party), and if not where the application to join it can be obtained. The junior and senior faculty piled into too few private cars – a Hillman or two, a few Vauxhalls and a couple of Toyotas – and drove to downtown Municipal Building near Sule Pagoda. I ended up riding in a car where the Dean was a passenger. A provocateur in me said something provocative, and the Dean replied with a pithy Burmese proverb that silenced the provocateur in me. Were I able to channel Sara Palin, I could have said to the Dean “Only dead fish go with the flow.”

Now every time I saw a teen movie like “Grease” where everybody piles into available cars, all engines rev up and firing – ready to drive to a racing site or their own favored place to hang out – my memory invariably flashes back to that particular day at R.I.T! That day – more than anything else – was a “decider” [to borrow a word from former President Bush’s favorite locution “I’m the decider.”] for my decision to leave the country ASAP.