After the Last Border Read online

  Mu Naw held the bags proudly slung on her shoulder back through camp, deftly jumping along the uneven packed dirt paths, up the hill lined with huts on large bamboo stilts, past the concrete bathroom area with the trickle of water where everyone—women on one side and men on the other—bathed discreetly, covering themselves with longyi while they washed. Her neighbors eyed her. A few friends waved. The large square bags were a symbol of the trip she was taking, of her new status in the world. She had seen others walking with those bags before they disappeared from the camp forever.

  The camp where she had lived in Thailand, Mae La, was supposed to be a temporary stop. After the infiltration of Laotian and Hmong refugees on the eastern border of Thailand in the 1970s and 1980s, the country had very little patience for the refugees arriving from Myanmar on the western border. Thailand had remained stable in spite of war in Vietnam, genocide in Cambodia, unrest in Laos, persecution of Hmong people wherever they lived in the region. The longest-running civil war in the world was not the problem of the Thai people. They designated land where those who crossed illegally into the country could live in ramshackle huts, packed together like pickled fish in a can. Mu Naw had not spent her entire life in the camp; she was unusual among her generation for that. Many of them could barely remember life in Myanmar and most left the camp only by sneaking out and avoiding roads with Thai police or military officials. Leaving the camp was illegal, and capture usually meant being returned to Myanmar. They lived cheek by jowl together, until rumors spread through the camp that doors were being opened for them in other countries. UN officers interviewed them, suddenly interested in their stories, verifying again and again that they were refugees—of course they were, why would anyone live here if they could live anywhere else? More officials came, from Canada and Sweden and Australia and the United States. Mu Naw stood outside the community center beside the dirt road, jostled by what felt like half the camp, when the first two groups of Karen people boarded rickety buses, everything they took with them in their coveted colorful bags. Everyone wanted to wave good-bye, to witness them actually leaving. Mu Naw waved and teared up when one woman wailed, watching her daughter and young grandson wave good-bye through the bus window. But she also felt a rush of excitement as the bus wheeled away in a whirl of dust and exhaust.

  Their empty huts were now fair game—daughters-in-law living in one room with their husbands’ entire family moved happily into an abandoned hut down the row. But Mu Naw didn’t even try. She knew as soon as she saw the first group leave that she and Saw Ku would go. There was no life in this camp.

  When it was her turn, she and Saw Ku were chosen to be among the first groups to resettle in the United States from Mae La. Her Buddhist mother called it luck; her Christian mother-in-law praised God’s hand in the UN selection process. Mu Naw thought perhaps it was a bit of both. There were thousands of people in Mae La camp who would give anything to be her, walking purposefully past her neighbors with bright plastic bags on her arm.

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  When they rounded the corner on the baggage carousel, Mu Naw was surprised that the bags that had felt foreign and new just days before now seemed intimately familiar, as if they had been with her all of her life. In her IOM sack, tucked inside her own woven bag, she had her passport and her daughters’ passports and the important documents they brought with them. In the checked bags, they had packed what was left: T-shirts, tunics, and two pairs of jeans for Saw Ku, woven tunics and skirts for Mu Naw and the girls, a few extra for them to wear as they grew. There were albums with pictures of each of their relatives, a jar of thanaka for the girls’ faces, cream for Mu Naw’s skin, a few clips for their hair, underwear and combs and toothbrushes. And that was it. There was nothing else to take.

  Seeing their bags, Mu Naw felt a pang for the box of letters she had left behind. Two days before she left, she found a tree near enough to her hut that she could find it again someday but far enough away where it would not be disturbed by her neighbors. She had dug a small hole in the hard clay dirt and placed a tin box near the roots of the tree. In it were all of the letters she and Saw Ku had written to each other over the months when they first admitted they liked each other when they were fifteen, saying on paper what they were too shy to express out loud. She had thought about taking the box, but she was not sure what would happen in their new place. This camp seemed more constant, more real than the fantastical new life she would lead in America.

  As she watched the white woman and Karen man talking to Saw Ku about the bags, at the end of an exhausting journey that spanned endless, monotonous hours, Mu Naw suddenly knew with a deep certainty she had made the wrong choice. She had thought she would go back with her daughters to dig up the letters in a few years. The idea of ever returning now seemed impossible; the English that had been a novelty spoken only by UN workers now engulfed her. The loss hit her in a powerful wave of grief. She could close her eyes and see the sun shining through the expansive green leaves of the tree, feel the muggy air on her skin, the claylike dirt beneath her sandals. It was perfectly clear in her mind but the tree was on the other side of the world, standing vigil over the teenage love she had shared with her husband; the tin box would rust, the letters disintegrate. Her daughters would never read them. She moved forward numbly, feet shuffling on the cold linoleum.

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  —

  The car ride from the airport to their new home was a dizzying, exhilarating experience. They had walked on a crosswalk where cars paused politely. The white woman led them around to the side of a dark van and showed them how to buckle their children into the car seats. The children slept, mouths open in exhaustion. They skimmed the smooth highway into town, the lights and buildings whizzing past at a rate that left her dazed. Mu Naw gripped the armrest, body hunched against the window in an effort not to throw up or cry or succumb to the powerful emotion she could not name that pressed down on her. She had only ridden in a car a handful of times in her life and it was nothing like this, the flight of an efficient machine through an electric landscape she had never imagined existed.

  They parked their car in a circle of light under a street lamp at an apartment complex with iron gates that were open. The air smelled like asphalt and clean laundry. The white woman and the Karen man took their bags and led them to an apartment on the first floor with a faint hint of cigarette smoke.

  The lock on the door stuck for a minute, but then they got it open and walked into a living room with a brown couch and a chair, some empty shelves, a tall floor lamp leaning slightly to the side. There was a table in the small kitchen, appliances on the counters, a refrigerator that whirred gently. In one bedroom was a large master bed with a red and white comforter. The other bedroom held two twin beds covered in white comforters. The sheets were already on the beds; the woman showed Saw Ku how to lock the door and put up the brass chain that would keep everyone out. She made him try several times, watching until he got it. The children slumped on the couch, staring at their father opening and closing the door and fastening the chain.

  Finally, they started to leave, the Karen man translating for the white woman that a church group had gathered all of this furniture for them, that everything was theirs to keep, that the refrigerator had some food in it. He added that the group had prayed over the apartment, a fact that pleased Mu Naw. They smiled warmly and Mu Naw tried to speak her new language, her “thank you” a bit garbled, but the woman understood and, after an awkward second of jostling, they hugged. Mu Naw barely came up to the woman’s shoulder. The Karen translator repeated his invitation—they would come eat dinner with him later that week. After they left, Saw Ku hastily locked and chained the door. No one mentioned when someone would be back to get them. They didn’t think to ask.

  They looked at each other and smiled. This was it. They were here. They dug through the bags for squashed, wrinkled pajamas; when Mu Naw unfolded them, the scent of wood smoke,
clay floor, dried bamboo rushed past her. They brushed their teeth in the bathroom where the water ran inside the house any time they wanted. They tucked the girls into the large queen bed between them, a little unit of four.

  As she crawled into the bed beside Naw Wah, Mu Naw imagined getting ready to sleep in their small hut in Mae La camp, laying out the mats, pulling the mosquito netting away from the wall, fastening it around them. The leaves in the trees outside would rustle; their neighbors’ conversations would seep muffled through bamboo walls until the thick night settled around them. The rice mat would smell pleasantly like earth; it would be flat and cool.

  This new bed was soft. The sheets were stiff and held the crisp wrinkles that Mu Naw would later know meant they had been unfolded from a package. The blanket was thick. The blinds above the headboard gapped slightly at the bottom and the light from a street lamp shone through the meager tree outside her window, forming shadows when the wind blew that made her jump. The white noise of the nearby highway was a motorized river, the constant stream disrupted by horns or loud engines. She could hear voices outside the apartment speaking in a language that did not sound like English, voices that spiked into an argument in the middle of the night. She lifted her head to see if Saw Ku was awake; he lifted his head too. He silently reached over their girls and took her hand.

  Chapter 2

  US REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT, 1945–1951

  A profound public awakening following World War II shaped American refugee resettlement policies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. US lawmakers, with the unprecedented support of constituents across the country who were horrified by the scale of the Holocaust, worked with the global community in shaping international agencies and programs, legislation and conventions, that would remain in place for generations. And all of it happened within a handful of years. The pace of the change was extraordinary.

  World War II left more than 10 million displaced people in Europe alone. On June 25, 1948, President Harry S. Truman and the US Congress passed the Displaced Persons (DP) Act, a landmark bill that provided special visas allowing about four hundred thousand European refugees to find new lives in the United States over a four-year period. At the time, the US immigration system was controlled by quotas; only a certain number of visas were available each year for people arriving from a handful of designated countries, which were almost entirely European. During the war, the government launched a few ad hoc policies that allowed some Jewish refugees and others fleeing the Nazi occupation to come to the United States, but there was nothing on the scale of the DP Act. It was one of the earliest instances of the American government’s officially recognizing refugees’ unique circumstances as victims of war and creating a separate immigration policy—not yet a program—to bring many of them to this country.

  Before the act was passed, in his State of the Union on January 6, 1947, President Truman praised the way the United States had provided aid and supplies to people “reduced to want by the ravages of war”—more aid since the end of the war “than all other countries combined.” But still he pressed Congress to continue to “fulfill our responsibilities to these thousands of homeless and suffering refugees of all faiths.” In an address to Congress six months later, he laid out the clear need for American resettlement to go hand in hand with foreign aid. He called it “unthinkable” that refugees “should be left indefinitely in camps in Europe.” Every other option was equally impossible for humanitarian reasons (“We cannot turn them out in Germany into the community of the very people who persecuted them”), economic reasons (“the German economy, so devastated by war and so badly overcrowded with the return of people of German origin from neighboring countries, is approaching an economic suffocation which in itself is one of our major problems”), and security reasons (“Turning these displaced persons into such chaos would be disastrous for them and would seriously aggravate our problems there”). Through it all, he appealed to Americans’ sense of obligation: “our plain duty requires that we join with other nations in solving this tragic problem” in order to “enable these people to take roots in friendly soil.”

  The arguments Truman and other lawmakers relied on after World War II would be repeated for the rest of the century whenever questions about refugee resettlement rose to the national level. After World War II, the moral imperative underlying Truman’s reasons felt especially charged: Americans owed it to our allies to keep them from bearing the burden of millions of persecuted people in need of immediate assistance. Americans owed it to the displaced people, who had already endured so many atrocities. And Americans owed it to the Allied soldiers who had fought, even died, to free these refugees; any national sacrifice US citizens would make was minuscule in comparison.

  The American public listening to Truman shared memories of a time in the recent past when they had not supported refugee aid, in what a later president would call a “stain on our collective conscience.” Less than ten years before, in 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt personally received telegrams from Jewish passengers of the MS St. Louis, a luxury liner that held 937 people fleeing the Third Reich. Their Cuban visas, which had been legal when they left the dock, were revoked while the passengers traveled. A Cuban official had been embezzling funds, selling visas to desperate refugees, and pocketing the money. While the refugees sailed, blissfully unaware, the Cuban government caught up with the official and negated the visas he had issued, driven by a public deeply fed up with the large number of refugees coming to their island nation. Despite diplomatic wrangling and hasty international negotiations, Cuba remained unbending—the MS St. Louis passengers were not allowed to disembark.

  The MS St. Louis sailed on to the coast of Florida, hoping for asylum in the United States. The passengers tried valiantly to explain their plight. Their telegram to President Roosevelt begged, “Help them, Mr. President, the 900 passengers, of which more than 400 are women and children.” Newspapers across the country covered the story. The subheading on the story for the New York Times captured the tension of that political moment: “Rumor That United States Will Permit Entry Is Spread to Avert Suicides—Company Orders St. Louis Back to Hamburg.” Refugee advocacy groups worked tirelessly in Cuba and in the United States; feverish behind-the-scenes political efforts ramped up in the White House and outside it, to no avail. The US did not allow them in. As the ship moved toward Europe, one headline read baldly, “Ship Steams Away to Return Refugees to Reich.”

  Eventually, through diplomatic negotiations, American representatives found four European countries willing to take in some of the ship’s passengers. More than a month after they first boarded the ship, 288 people arrived in England; almost all of them lived to see the end of World War II. The rest of the passengers who disembarked in Belgium, France, and Holland seemed to be safe; many had good reason to assume they would eventually make it to the United States. But within the year, Nazi troops invaded those countries. Of the passengers who stood on the deck and saw the shores of the United States, 254 died in concentration camps.

  Their journey came to be called “the voyage of the damned.” At the end of the war, the memory of those refugees and others who had begged for safety during Hitler’s genocide haunted the American public.

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  The United States ended World War II with a firm sense of the country’s role as a new—if not the new—world leader. It was a message hammered in the 1940s by radio shows, newspaper headlines, magazine articles, and political speeches, but especially at the movies. During and after the war, movie executives viewed it as their patriotic duty to work closely with the government to make movies in keeping with US foreign policy or public propaganda campaigns. The message about US preeminence was in such escapist films as The Gang’s All Here and Weekend in Havana—the blonde actresses wore Technicolor red, white, and blue, and the American good guy always won in the end. It was in more serious fare, such as It’s a Wonderful Life
and The Best Years of Our Lives, which explored the struggles of postwar American identity, always ending with their characters’ choice to do what was right even if it was hard. It was in every scene in which John Wayne led the cavalry or the troops or the cowboys to victory; one of his most famous lines summarized the mettle Americans would need: “there are some things a man can’t run away from.” The underlying message of these movies shaped the imagination of the American public about the sobering responsibilities required of strong leaders in service to the common good.

  Before each movie, short newsreels would play. Newsreels after 1945 showed the plight of European refugees to American audiences. In one film, a cheery newscaster voiced over black-and-white footage of women in skirts and headscarves, men in suits, small children walking along a road: “These are some of Europe’s stranded millions; displaced persons, participants in the largest, swiftest mass migration in history.” The films asked Americans to sympathize with the devastation caused “by the heedless greed of Nazi overlords, who pillaged the country and brought down upon its people the terrible burden of war.” The music underlined the pathos of the footage; in one newsreel a violin plays underneath the narrator’s voice as the camera zooms in on specific faces: “Footsore and weary, they await patiently, anxiously. This mother wonders where she will get milk for her baby. . . . This little girl will have to sleep in a ditch again tonight.”

  Newsreels showed the refugee camps, often repurposed from the very concentration camps from which refugees had been liberated. The camp model provided a central location for distribution of food and clothing “expedited by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, using United States Army trains and trucks.” There, nurses examined children “orphaned by the bombs of battle, the deadly aim of the Nazi firing squads, the hot flames of an oven inside a German death factory” for signs of typhus. People with “stomachs gnawed with hunger and ruined with a diet of grassroots and leaves, and bread mixed with sawdust” receive gruel and vitamins. The film depicted refugees looking at a community message board outside a large building where they have classes and receive orientations.