meat on his plate. In a word, it would seem that the Wa are also cannibals – at least if you take the word of their neighbours, the Lua’.
I asked Andrew and his friend to help me find a fortune-teller. Divination is a widely practised art in Burma. It is said that the Burmese, geographically placed between China and India – the two great sources of this tradition – have been especially skilled in combining the occult wisdom of their two neighbours, and that their practitioners possess great powers. Superstition has played an enormous role in the history of the whole region. It was the Burmese king’s hankering after one of the King of Siam’s seven white elephants, very rare and therefore magical – that sparked off a war which lasted nearly three hundred years – the upshot being that Auydhya was destroyed and the Siamese had to build a new capital, present-day Bangkok.
Even in recent times, astrology and occult practices have been crucial in the life of Ne Win and the survival of his dictatorship. One of the first things you notice on arriving in Burma is that the local currency, the kyat, is issued in notes of strange denominations: forty-five, seventy-five, ninety. These numbers, all multiples of three, were considered highly auspicious by Ne Win, and the Central Bank had to comply.
Like the Thais, the Burmese believe that fate is not ineluctable, that even if a misfortune is forecast it can be averted: not only by acquiring merits, but also by bringing about an event which is similar in appearance to the predicted calamity, thereby satisfying the requirements of destiny, so to speak. Ne Win was a master of this art. He was once told that the country would soon be struck by a terrible famine. He lost no time: he issued orders that for three days all state officials and their families should eat only a poor soup made of banana-tree sprouts. The idea was that by acting out a famine they would avoid the real one – a calamity which in the event never materialized.
On another occasion, Ne Win was told by one of his trusted astrologers to beware of a grave danger: a sudden right-wing uprising which would lead to his deposition. Ne Win gave orders that everyone in Burma immediately had to drive on the right-hand side of the road rather than on the left, as had been the rule since British times. The whole country was thrown into confusion, but this ‘right-wing uprising’ fulfilled the prophecy after a fashion, and the real revolt was averted.
In 1988 the same astrologer warned Ne Win that Burma was on the eve of a great catastrophe: the streets of the capital would run with blood and he would be forced to flee the country. Shortly afterwards, thousands of students were massacred and the streets of Rangoon really did run with blood. Ne Win feared that the second part of the prophecy might also come true. He had to find a way out, and the astrologer suggested it: in Burmese, as in English, the verbs ‘to flee’ and ‘to fly’ are similar. The president would not have to flee if, dressed like one of the great kings of the past and mounted on a white horse, he could succeed in flying to the remotest parts of the country. Nothing simpler! He got hold of a wooden horse (a real one would have been too dangerous), had it painted white and loaded it on to a plane. Dressed as an ancient king, he climbed into the saddle and flew to the four corners of Burma. The stratagem succeeded, and Ne Win was not forced to flee. He is still a charismatic figure behind the scenes, the eminence grise of the new dictatorship.
The new rulers too have their advisory fortune-tellers. Not long ago one of the generals was warned by an astrologer that he would soon be the victim of an assassination attempt. He immediately ordered a public announcement of his death, and so no one tried to kill him any more.
Obviously the reason why the famine, the right-wing uprising, the expulsion of the president and the assassination attempt did not happen was – how shall I put it? – that they were not going to happen, not that they were averted thanks to prophecies. But that is not the logic by which the Asians – especially the Burmese – look on life. Prescience is in itself creation. An event, once announced, exists. It is fact, and although it is still to come it is more real and more significant than something that has already happened. In Asia, the future is much more important than the past, and much more energy is devoted to prophecy than to history.
I had been told in Bangkok that there used to be an old Catholic mission in Kengtung, and that perhaps there were still some Italian nuns living there. We climbed up the hill to the church at dusk. A night light was burning at the feet of a plaster Madonna, and in the refectory young Burmese nuns were clearing the rows of tables after supper. I told one of them who I was and she rushed off, shouting: ‘There are some Italians here! Come…come!’ Down a wooden stairway came two diminutive old women, pale and excited. They wore voluminous grey habits and veils with a little starched trimming. They were beside themselves with joy. ‘It’s a miracle!’ one of them kept repeating. The other said things I could not understand. One was ninety years old, the other eighty-six. We stayed and chatted for a couple of hours. Their story, and that of the Catholic mission in Kengtung, was of a kind that we have lost the habit of telling. Perhaps it is because the protagonists were extraordinary people, and today’s world seems more interested in glorifying the banal and promoting the commonplace types with whom all can identify.
The story begins in the early years of this century. The Papacy, convinced that it would never manage to convert the Shans, highly civilized and devout followers of the Dharma (the way of the Buddha), saw instead a chance of making conversions among the primitive animist tribes of the region, thereby planting a Christian seed in Buddhist soil. The first missionary arrived in Kengtung in 1912. He was Father Bonetta of the Vatican Institute for Foreign Missionaries, a Milanese. He brought little money, but with that he managed to buy the entire peak of one of the two hills overlooking the city. It was there that they hanged brigands on market days, and the land was worthless: too full of phii.
Bonetta was soon joined by other missionaries, and in a short time they built a church and a seminary. In 1916 the first nuns arrived, all from Milan or thereabouts, all in the Order of the Child Mary. An orphanage and a school were opened, later a hospital and a leprosarium. As the years went by, Kengtung was caught up in the political upheavals of the region, and troops of several armies passed through it as conquerors: the Japanese, the Siamese, the Chinese of the Kuomintang and then those of Mao. Last came the Burmese; but the Italian mission is still there.
Today nothing has changed on the ‘Hill of the Spirits’: the buildings are all there, well kept and full of children. Father Bonetta died in 1949, and with other missionaries who never returned to Italy, he lies in the cemetery behind the church. Five Italian nuns remain: three in the hospital, and the two oldest in the convent, together with the local novices.
‘When I first came here you couldn’t go out at night because there were tigers about,’ said the oldest, Giuseppa Manzoni, who has been in Kengtung since 1929 and has never gone back to Italy. Speaking Italian does not come easily to her. She understands my questions, but most of the time she answers in Shan, which a young Karen sister translates into English.
Sister Giuseppa was born in Cernusco. ‘A beautiful place, you know, near Milan. I always went there on foot because there was no money at home.’ Her parents were peasants. They had had nine children, but the seven sons all died very young and only she and her sister survived.
Sister Vittoria Ongaro arrived in Kengtung in 1935. ‘On 22 February,’ she says, with the precision of someone remembering the date of her wedding. ‘The people had little, but they were better off then, because there were not the differences between rich and poor that there are now.’
The Catholic mission soon became the refuge of all the sad causes in the region. Cripples, epileptics, the mentally disabled, women abandoned by their husbands, newborns with cleft palates (left to die by a society that sees any physical deformity as the sign of a grave sin in a previous life), found food and shelter here. Today it is such people who tend the garden, look after the animals, and work in the kitchens to feed the 250 orphans.
It grew late, and as we got up to leave I asked the two nuns if there was anything
