For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question Read Online Free Page A

supermarket, I knew there was no wheat bread or peanut butter. We walked past shelves of shampoo and whitening cream, canisters full of socks, novelty-ice-cream freezers, shining displays of cosmetics. Htan Dah shuffled close behind me as I wandered around orderly, well-lit aisles stocked with cheap candy and ramen and shrimp-flavored peas. When I yelled “Look! Yogurt!” he gave me a stiff smile. I looked around to see if everyone else was being quiet. They weren’t.
    I spent a small fortune—nearly $20, half a week’s stay in a guesthouse—on what staples I could find: containers of dairy, cashews, the store’s single package of cheese, which was orange and processed. I was hungry, or my upwardly mobile Western version of it, and when we stepped out onto the sidewalk and the sun hit my face with the spoils hanging from my fingers in plastic bags, I was triumphant. “Tada!” I sang. My companion looked at me, his face expectant and then vaguely confused. He had turned automatically when I’d trilled the self-satisfied interjection.
    “Oh my god! That’s your name, isn’t it?” I asked. “Do you know that phrase? It means ‘Look what I did!’ or ‘Hooray!’” But Htan Dah’s smile was still pained, and he nodded just barely perceptibly, though I was blathering excitedly, though everything he said in the house seemed to be punctuated with exclamation points. His movements became tense, his steps halted and cautious as we made our way to the motorbike.
    “Didn’t you notice the police(!)?” he asked when we got home.
    No. I hadn’t registered the officer while we were leaving the store. I had noticed Htan Dah’s discomfort and, earlier that morning, that he’d peered out the dining room/garage door repeatedly while we’d been eating breakfast. He’d ultimately gotten up and closed it, blocking out much of the light and the view of anyone who might be walking by. Htan Dah was registered with the United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees. It said “refugee” right next to his picture on his UNHCR papers. Which is why he’d identified himself that way when I asked him if he’d traveled. He would continue to remind me, a little impatiently, as a substitute for a negative when I’d ask him if he’d ever been to the movies, or driven a car: “I am refugee.”
    But he wasn’t, actually. Thailand never signed the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, and wasn’t bound by the international treaty to recognize and protect them. Though the country formally accepted UNHCR assistance with Burmese refugees in 1998, the agency didn’t have the authority to grant them refugee status there. Thailand refers to the 157,000 Burmese refugees in nine camps within its borders as “displaced persons fleeing fighting”—indeed, the No. 1 answer camp dwellers give when asked the reason for having left Burma is “running away from soldiers.” They are not protected under any laws. Outside the confined sanctuary of the refugee camps, the undocumented nonnationals are, as in most countries, violating immigration statutes.
    Enter one of the world’s most notoriously corrupt police forces, whose members generate a whole other income by robbing refugees. Those who are caught doing anything outside camp—working, shopping, walking—can be arrested and jailed, fined, deported. The UNHCR has acknowledged that rounded-up refugees have, despite carrying official UNHCR paperwork, been sent back to Burma. Everybody knows, though, that every scuffle with a Thai police officer can be ended with a bribe. Those who can’t afford bribes or, less likely, are picked up by an honest Thai cop, pay too: In the mid-’90s three refugees who were arrested while collecting bamboo outside their camp were sentenced to three years in prison.
    So everyone who lived in the house did so illegally. Every one of them had been arrested at least once, and when Htan Dah said that he could be arrested if he went outside, he