[The gifted water was also a welcome reminder of the hospitality of strangers in a period when trust was in short supply. During the height of the military dictatorship that ruled Myanmar for nearly 50 years, people said the walls had eyes and ears. In those times, it didn’t take much for Special Branch, the secret police, to turn a neighbor into an informer.]
By
Hannah Beech
Workers
at a clay pottery shop in Twante, a town on the outskirts of Yangon,
Myanmar.
Credit Minzayar Oo for The New York
Times
|
TWANTE,
Myanmar — When the bullock
carts lugging passengers and produce pulled into Yangon, coated in the umber
dust of the countryside, the people on board, if not the oxen, used to be able
to count on refreshment.
On many a street corner, often under a shade
tree, stood what looked like a dollhouse on stilts. Inside was a rotund clay
pot covered by a triangle of woven leaves. The pot held drinking water.
Cool without refrigeration, sweet with the
taste of earth, nothing slaked the insistent thirst of the tropics better,
according to some residents of Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city.
“I only drink water from a clay pot,” said Ma
Aye Aye Thein, as she sat on a plastic stool and occasionally fanned herself.
“I feel hot when I drink from plastic.”
The gifted water was also a welcome reminder
of the hospitality of strangers in a period when trust was in short supply.
During the height of the military dictatorship that ruled Myanmar for nearly 50
years, people said the walls had eyes and ears. In those times, it didn’t take
much for Special Branch, the secret police, to turn a neighbor into an
informer.
But even as the city disintegrated under the
junta, with chunks of mortar falling off once grand buildings and cracking the
skulls of passers-by, the water pots were still set out for the thirsty.
It was part of a tradition of meritorious
acts embedded in Myanmar’s Buddhist-majority culture, with the neighborhood
water pots refilled by retirees, housewives or anyone looking for some karmic
credit for a good deed.
“Putting water out is a Buddhist ideal to be
kind to others,” said U Candana Sara, a Buddhist abbot.
Now, many of these terra-cotta water pots are
gone, replaced in some cases by plastic bottles with tin cups chained to them.
Some of the little refreshment houses are full of litter or abandoned
altogether.
The declining presence of the shared pots
over the last few years is just one small change amid great upheaval in Yangon.
The military generals, who now share some of their power with a civilian
government, have decamped to a new capital, Naypyidaw, a city a few hundred
miles to the north, purpose-built to showcase their authority.
Yangon’s crumbling architecture is being
demolished, with British colonial relics making way for glass-sheathed
buildings. A city once trapped in a slower, poorer era because of governmental
neglect is being remade.
Clay jugs, heavy yet fragile, are not made
for mobile lifestyles in which people expect to take their water with them
rather than depend on the uncertain kindness of strangers. You can’t screw a
top on a terra-cotta pot.
So plastic is now a growing scourge in
Yangon. Disposable water bottles float in the Irrawaddy and Yangon rivers. They
crunch under the wheels of bullock carts, startling the oxen.
The potters who have fashioned the water
vessels for generations have had to adapt to this faster, more disposable
world.
U Nyunt Khin, 70, lives in Twante Township,
on the outskirts of Yangon, where the surrounding Irrawaddy Delta disgorges a
rich clay ideal for pottery. He has been making water pots for 40 years.
Business started souring a decade ago, he said.
Back then, he and his wife made 400 pots a
day, swirling a rough pattern on each. Today, he is lucky if he can sell 10.
“My business is disappearing but I will never
drink from plastic,” he said. “The flavor is bad.”
But it’s about more than taste.
“In some places, people don’t even put out
water at all,” he said, shaking his head at the parsimony. “We’ve lost our
morals. It’s like we’re returning to the Stone Age.”
Others worry the abandonment of the practice
will only intensify distrust in a city where Special Branch is back again, or
perhaps never really went away.
Eyes and ears are alert, not only in the
city’s teahouses but also online. In August, U Min Htin Ko Ko Gyi, a filmmaker,
was sentenced to a year of hard labor for social media posts deemed critical of
the military.
“The disappearance of clay water pots
symbolizes that there is no trust in communities, and less kindness,” said U
Sue Hnget, a prominent Burmese writer.
In Twante, dusk quickly turned to night, as
it does in the tropics. Mosquitoes began to bite. Mr. Nyunt Khin lit a kerosene
lamp, illuminating the pottery dust suspended in the air. Electricity is too
expensive, he said. The heat of the day still pulsed.
None of his five children wants to take over
his pottery business although, for now, he has convinced two to work the kiln.
The three others, all daughters, work in a cement factory.
If he is truthful, Mr. Nyunt Khin said, his
daughters are the ones who keep the family afloat, especially after Cyclone
Nargis, which killed more than 135,000 people in 2008, inundated the village
and forced him to rebuild his kiln.
Down a dirt path from Mr. Nyunt Khin’s
thatched warehouse, U Kyaw Soe runs a fourth-generation pottery business. He
knows he has to change with the times so he has shifted from water jugs to
flower pots and planters decorated with cartoon animals.
But Mr. Kyaw Soe has another backup plan for
his family’s future, one that has nothing to do with pottery. His older son is
learning Japanese, his younger is majoring in geography at college.
The village is littered with abandoned kilns.
Twante remains a place where many men in
sarongs and bamboo pith helmets smoke cheroots and women balance baskets of
vegetables on their heads. But the younger generation favors shorts and soccer
jerseys.
At night, bathed in the glow of a television
soap opera, the women of Twante worked, pouring boiled water not into earthen
vessels but into scavenged plastic bottles.
The refilled bottles went into a cooler
powered by a generator thrumming a bass note. Modernity, bright and loud,
drowned the night noises: the hiccup of geckos, the complaint of insects and
the rustle of palms heavy with coconuts.
When younger customers come to look at Mr.
Kyaw Soe’s flower pots, he said he has to serve them plastic bottles of
refrigerated water.
“They are not used to the taste from clay
pots,” he said. “They think it tastes like dirt.”
Follow Hannah Beech on Twitter: @hkbeech
Saw Nang contributed reporting.