Written by Wanna Tamthong
Translated by Tyrell Haberkorn
Illustrated by Summer Panadd

[คลิกที่นี่เพื่ออ่านต้นฉบับเรื่องสั้น “จดหมายจากเบอร์ลิน ถึงลุงควา จี”]

Over the last decade, Aan Press published a remarkable 20-volume set of books by Atsani Balachandra, also known as Nai Phi, a radical Marxist poet, critic, and translator. Alongside the publishing project, Aan Press held a series of contests, “Writing Nai Phi Anew” (โครงการเขียนใหม่นายผี 2019).  One of the contests invited submissions that rewrote Nai Phi’s original “Letter from Berlin,” published in Siam Nikorn (สยามนิกร) on 6 August 1951. Written in the form of a letter from a woman named Patoom to her love, Art, about traveling to Germany to join the Third World Festival of Youth and Students, held in Berlin from 5-19 August 1951, the narrator calls for improvements to the status of women and for peace, just as the movement against the war in Korea was gaining traction in Thailand.

At the time he published “Letter from Berlin,” Nai Phi was a prosecutor, but he soon resigned his position due to his opposition to the war and the need to go underground. The Peace Movement culminated in mass arrests on 10 November 1952. Nai Phi’s name was on the arrest lists but he fled and his revolutionary life with the Communist Party of Thailand began. He died in exile in Laos on 28 November 1987, and the Thai state only allowed the return of his body to Thailand ten years later in November 1997.

[To read Atsani Balachandra’s writings “Against Feudal Obscenity” featured in Sanam Ratsadon’s previous issue, click here.]

Those who submitted letters to the Aan Press contest interpreted both writing anew and letter in divergent, heterogeneous ways. The winning entry, “Letter to Uncle Kwa Kyi,” by Wanna Tamthong, who, like Nai Phi, is both legally-trained and a writer, offers an unexpected take on letters, exile, and Berlin.

The narrator of the letter, Hla Woe Sye, is a teenage Karen refugee who has resettled in Berlin after spending the first part of his childhood in a refugee camp along the Thai-Burma border. He writes to Uncle Kwa Kyi, who has remained in the camp, and tells him about his new life in Germany. Uncle Kwa Kyi lost his leg when he stepped on a landmine when he fled Karen State. Wanna writes that, “That night, the bomb buried in the middle of the forest took more than your left leg. The echoes seeped into your every auditory nerve and you lost your soul along with your leg.” Uncle Kwa Kyi quiets his mind in the refugee camp by building prostheses for other refugees who have lost limbs.

Nai Phi wrote his letter from Berlin to call for peace as the war in Korea was intensifying in 1951. Wanna Tamthong writes her letter from Berlin in the aftermath of more than one war in 2019.  What is most striking in Wanna’s letter is the experience of a different building code: her narrator explains that his new home in Berlin is one that “can be said to be built to last, which cannot be found in a bamboo house topped by a roof of banana leaves in a temporary refugee camp in which anything built to last is off limits to us.” Who are those to whom permanence – of home, life, and limb – is off limits?

In both Nai Phi’s and Wanna’s letters, the intended reader is not necessarily the named addressee, but anyone who comes across the letter. What does such a letter call upon us to do?

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Letter from Berlin, 2019

Dear Uncle Kwa Kyi,

Two years have passed since we last met. It’s a long time but also not a long time, depending on whether you see me as one who has departed or one who has just opened their eyes to the world. I hope that you are as strong as ever. I’ve wanted to write to you for a long time, actually, but was caught up in beginning my new life. It’s not been easy at all. Everything in Germany is completely strange. My first year in Berlin was taken up by studying German with the priest and volunteers at church. I studied German for eight hours a day every day, at church and at home. 

The priest kept saying that without the language I will have no future in this country.

Many months passed before I could speak and understand the people. When I first moved to Berlin, I hardly dared to go out anywhere on my own. Part of it was that I wasn’t yet confident in my broken German. But deep inside, I think I didn’t know how to adjust to this new world that had appeared so quickly before my eyes. It was the first time that I was in a house made of concrete with a sloped roof constructed of layers of beautiful tiles. It doesn’t matter that the tiles are faded and I never saw them when they were shiny white and new. This house can be said to be built to last, which cannot be found in a bamboo house topped by a roof of banana leaves in a temporary refugee camp in which anything built to last is off limits to us. Here, I encounter many roads when I go outside. I can choose to walk in various directions until I am baffled by which path to take first. And another thing, clothes and shoes are easier to find in Germany than bamboo shoots in a bamboo forest. Berlin gave me the opportunity to choose the clothes I wear and the shoes I put on for the first time. I am the first to tear off the price tag and put on the shirt I wear. The shoes I wear fit my feet and are so comfortable to walk in, Uncle Kwa Kyi. Neither so tight that my feet ache nor so loose so that they fall off after two steps like my last pair in the camp.

I always wondered before what it would be like if I got to sleep in a house that was solid with a roof that did not leak every time it was battered by rain. Now I have traveled a very long way, really far. Today I sleep happily in a house with Father and Mother. No one had to donate the clothes I wear. Most important, I have the right to walk wherever I want without a fence blocking my path.

I still remember well what it used to be like. After I helped Mother and Grandmother collect the corn, I liked to sit and watch Uncle make artificial legs at the clinic. I always asked you what kind of world was outside the walls of the camp. Why did it seem like every single one of the staff and volunteers who came into the camp were from another universe? Why couldn’t I go outside like them? When I was five, I dreamt of a candy that was sweet and very sticky that one of the volunteers often gave me. No candy like this was sold in the camp, only betel. I did not dare to run after her and ask for more, no matter how much I wanted to do so. The teacher would scold me if I bothered the volunteers too much. That volunteer never returned again. The volunteers who came gave out snacks to the children, but they were just little bags whose contents disappeared once you put them in your mouth. They didn’t leave a fragrant taste like the sweet of my dreams. It was the first time I wanted to go outside. I wanted to buy that candy to chew on again. I made a plan in my heart that if I ever got that wonderful sticky candy again, I would slowly savor and chew, chew and walk around the camp for the whole day until the flavor disappeared. I wanted that refreshing coolness to fill my mouth and nose again. 

After that, I often asked you and Mother why we had to be in this camp, when you both always said that our home was in Karen State on the Myanmar side. We simply crossed over to the Thai side temporarily to wait for the problems in our country to be resolved and then we would be able to return home. What I always wondered was how long is “temporary”? I was born in the camp and spent my entire life there. Older Sister Kye Thu, who lived next to us, liked to say that temporary was the length of time from when she was born until she grew up. But then another sibling, Little Sister Kye La was born. I didn’t see anything temporary about this. In contrast, our entire lifetimes seemed to be in the refugee camp. 

When was I finally going to get to be outside with Father?

And, Uncle, do you remember when I started to complain more and more and you said, “Try to be happy today, Hla Woe Sye. You still have two legs and so what do you have to be afraid of? One day they will carry you out to walk and see the world. When that day comes, you will see for yourself how much beauty or ugliness the outside world of which you dream brings to your life. Trying to see the world through the eyes of others is of no use. I can’t answer you, dear child, because the outside world that I saw 30 years ago is not the same as the world you will see. Go and see it with your own eyes, Hla Woe Sye. You will get out, this I believe.” Your words calmed me every time. 

Today I have seen the world, Uncle Kwa Kyi, I have seen the world outside the refugee camp. Even though ten years have passed since I began dreaming of that wondrous sticky candy.

Berlin is larger and more modern than the camp. I don’t know how to explain our new house so that you will be able to imagine it. I wish you could come here, too, even though I know there is no way you will move out of the camp except to return home. You refused the offer of a new home in America offered by the UNHCR officials, even though many others in the camp had been waiting for such an opportunity for many years. Your unshakeable tone and the light in your eyes when you told me that making and repairing prosthetic legs for those in the camp was all that brought your far-away soul back to your body remain etched into my heart.

You stepped on a bomb while fleeing the army that came to burn and destroy the village on the other side to come to Thailand. That night, the bomb buried in the middle of the forest took more than your left leg. The echoes seeped into your every auditory nerve and you lost your soul along with your leg.

You always say that you began to live again the first time you succeeded in making a prosthetic leg for someone else. I am happy that my brothers and sisters in the camp have you to dedicate so much to helping them. 

You don’t need to worry about me anymore. I have adjusted to Berlin faster than I expected. At the end of last year, I took the German language placement exam that every new refugee must take. The outcome is that last term I studied in secondary school with ordinary German kids. But a funny thing happened. Even though my school is full of German kids, my first friend in Berlin who sat next to me in the classroom was also a refugee. Al-Ahzab and I grew close without any difficulties.

Three years ago, Al-Ahzab’s family fled from war in Syria and walked barefoot for nearly three months to reach Germany. He came with his mother and younger siblings after losing his father when the Syrian government carried out a large bombing of the city of Douma to crack down on the rebels and radicals who had control of the city at that time. But Al-Ahzab’s father was not a member of a rebel group fighting the Syrian government or any kind of radical. He was just an ordinary person who didn’t want to abandon his home. 

Al-Ahzab said that his father believed that God would make Syria peaceful before too long. But it is too late. The war took his father’s life. The beseeching prayers of Al-Ahzab’s family did not reach he who is God. His mother decided (it is more correct to say that she was forced to decide) to leave the pain of the war and the home they built with their own hands in Syria to take him and his younger siblings to a safer country, like Germany.

Uncle, do you believe it? Even though I fled to a country that seems to have a future and is free of war, I haven’t escaped from war at all. Everyone around me carries wounds from war on their bodies or in their hearts.

The day when we know what will happen tomorrow will never come. Me, a person who had never seen the world outside the refugee camp and Al-Ahzab, the boy who had everything in his life, were both taken by war from the land of their birth and pushed to go on a journey to Berlin. We have been assimilated into Berlin through the German language and education.

But we are not really part of it. 

Refugees like us know each other’s hearts well. No matter where we are, we still await the day that we will get to return to our homes. Even though we do not have very much hope, it is still better than not hoping for anything. At the bottom of my heart, I still hope that I will get to see Uncle Kwa Kyi again. I hope that we will see each other in Karen State on the day that the indigo sky allows light to shine down on us once again.  

We will meet again, this I believe.

Hla Woe Sye