Run for the Mountains

By Gordon Young

For fifty-two years, Chanu, a Lahu-Lisu tribal man from northern Thailand, lived an adventurous life packed with danger as well as joy. Slave, farmer, prisoner, hunter, bandit, smuggler, soldier-guerilla, lover, winner, and loser-- Chanu wore many faces. His story spans a fascinating, tumultuous historical period in the infamous Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia. Follow Chanu and witness his life of unusual circumstances in Run for the Mountains. During some fifteen years of working, traveling, hunting and speaking with Chanu in his own language, Gordon Young recorded Chanus poignant story and now shares this with the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456830533

Gordon Young

Gordon Young grew up in Flint, Michigan, the birthplace of General Motors, where his accomplishments included learning to parallel park the family’s massive Buick Electra 225. After reaching an uneasy truce with the nuns in the local Catholic school system, he went on to study journalism at the University of Missouri and English literature at the University of Nottingham. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Utne Reader, and numerous other publications. Young has published Flint Expatriates, a blog for the long-lost residents of the Vehicle City, since 2007. He is a senior lecturer in the Communication Department at Santa Clara University and lives in San Francisco.

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Copyright © 2011 by Gordon Young

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Chapter One: Humble Origins

Chapter Two: The Lisu Way

Chapter Three: The Jappa and the Valley-Man Way

Chapter Four: The Fang-Chiang Mai Road

Chapter Five: Anybody’s Opium

Chapter Six: Dogs Eat Dogs

Chapter Seven: Kuomintang Opium

Chapter Eight: The Rough Trail

Chapter Nine: Far Over the Hills

Chapter Ten: Chiang Mai Discovered

Epilogue

Endnotes

Titles by Gordon Young

The Hill Tribes of Northern Thailand

Journey from Banna

Tracks of an Intruder

The Wind Will Yet Sing

For Chanu, who left us too soon,

For his family members, wherever they may be,

For my daughters, Lenore, Julie, Debbie, and Carolyn,

And all who fondly remember Chanu

*

Slowly the mountain

Enters the man who walks on its slopes alone

—Robert Bly

Acknowledgements

I WISH TO EXPRESS my hearty thanks to the following people:

My daughters, Julie, Debbie and Carolyn, for their devoted attention to the many details that go into compiling and publishing a book, and for steadily assuring me that Chanu’s story is one that many people will appreciate;

My sons-in-law, Jon Howell, Jeff Chase and Ron McMath, for closely reading drafts and providing excellent feedback and editing, as well as for cheering me on to the finish line of bookmaking;

Our dear friends, John and Paul Soderberg, for reviewing the manuscript and offering enthusiasm and invaluable editing advice; and, Paul, for designing the cover;

Our close friend, Daniel Furon, for cover consultation, for refinement of several old photographs for printing, and for his ample sense of humor;

My helpers at Xlibris: Sidney Cabading, for coordinating production; Violet Telron and Gemma Ramos, for overseeing production details; Kent Ishizuki, for directing marketing; and special thanks to Sergio Lee for encouraging self-publication of this biography and two other books.

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Southeast Asia

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North Thailand, showing Chanu’s travels from 1935 to 1955.

Scale:1 inch = approximately 50 kilometers.

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North Thailand, showing rivers and trails.

Scale:1 inch = approximately 80 kilometers.

ChaNu1.jpg

Chanu with the author in Chiang Mai, circa 1973.

ChaNuFamily87517ReplaceB.jpg

Chanu with his wife E-Mah and their daughter.

Prologue

T HE LIFE STORY of Chanu, a Lahu-Lisu tribal man born in northern Thailand, needed to be told. It was an unusual journey from the instant of birth through times when circumstances found him as a slave, farmer, prisoner, hunter, bandit, smuggler, soldier-guerrilla, lover, winner, and loser. His story spans an interesting and tumultuous period of history for anyone living then, especially in Southeast Asia.

I worked closely with Chanu over a period of some fifteen years, obtaining a first-person narration of his life’s story during long sessions at home and in the jungles around many campfires. Chanu recounted his myriad stories more pointedly to me during 1967 to 1974 when I started keeping notes on him for the purpose of writing his biography.

I determined to capture Chanu’s story on that morning in 1967 as we worked over a python skin: I never asked you, but where were you born, Chanu? Do I know the place? It had been a casual question, mainly to make talk as we worked. It wasn’t important, he replied, maybe like other hill people I got born in the jungles. My mother gave birth to me standing up, under the shade of an old crabapple tree. I had stopped working and turned to look at this man with a sudden new burst of interest. I knew that I was looking at a man whose story had to be told.

I was able to gradually obtain Chanu’s account up to 1974 when I left Thailand and Laos after my last tours of overseas duties; then I lost the valued opportunity of his personal comments to ensure accuracy with the dialogues I have recounted on these pages. They come from his voice, still fresh in my mind to this day. We shared a common language, Lahu; and Chanu’s story, translated from that language, comes to me in the only probable way that he and my many other Lahu friends expressed themselves.

G.Y.

Humble Origins

Chapter One

A YE-YA! WHERE DOES a man begin? I look back at it now, and I can only reason that it was a very busy time simply trying to keep alive in this world. My mother just stopped under that old crab apple tree and gave birth to me. Ai-ya , I can’t believe it.

That had been near the top of the Mae Mao stream, a good long day’s walk from Muang Fang. You know that area, but I never thought to mention the old crab apple tree. Up on the right fork, a man can go without too much sweat up the north ridge, and about halfway to the top, he comes to an old crab apple tree. It still stands there as far as I know because the Sheh-leh who came to make a village there many years later wouldn’t want to cut down that old tree, I’m sure. It had nice sour fruit that people loved to dry in the sun and chew. But I haven’t been back there again.

The Lisu people had a village in those days about a mile farther up the ridge, and that’s where my mother came from then, a Lahu woman married to a Lisu man. Though very pregnant, my mother walked up that ridge along with my sister behind her as they came back from the stream far down that ridge. When she got to the crab apple tree, she stopped and took her basket off her back and said to my sister, just a kid eleven years old, I’m going to have to give birth now, don’t be scared. Just like that. No screaming and thrashing around like many women might make. Just quietly getting ready to give birth. According to what my sister told me, she gave birth to me in the standing position, holding on to a low branch of that old tree where wild cattle had left their dung when they rested there in the hot seasons.

Anyway that’s the way it all happened. I slid down my mother’s skirt and came out on old dried cattle dung that covered the ground there. The midwife who helped E-Mah with my son would have wept for sure. But my mother, ai-ya-ya, she did everything by herself, and here I am talking to you, a grown man with kids of his own now, all born so easily and clean.

I can’t blame my mother for naming me Chanu-hkeh (Mr. Cattle Dung). That was very good naming because it followed what hill people believe as a good way to make babies less attractive to evil spirits. The more disgusting the name, the safer the child, as they say. Ask any maw-pa or paw-khu¹ in any village. What I know is what my sister told me years later after we ran away together.²

From what my sister described to me, our mother had been groaning quite loudly as she trudged up the ridge. Then she had stopped when they reached the crab apple tree, pulled the basket off her back, and looked around at her wet skirt. My sister thought that the water gourd in the basket had spilled until our mother explained in a typically stoic Lahu mother’s way that she was going to have to rest before giving birth. Our mother had said to her daughter, Child, don’t you be frightened now because you are going to see a baby get born.

She had simply stood there under the crab apple tree with her legs spread apart and holding a low branch of the tree. My sister was speechless with fear as she watched my mother pull a thread from the hem of her skirt, tie my wu-tu cord, then use a sickle she carried in her back basket to separate my body from the ya-hpuih sac. She then tried to hand my small body out to my sister after I started crying steadily and told the eleven-year-old, "Here, child, hold the baby carefully and wash him off with water from the gourd in my basket, because he slid off my skirt into the nu hkeh. There’s nu hkeh clinging to his sticky little body!"³ My sister gave one last horrified look at my slimy, dung-covered body and ran off into the jungles.

My mother had declared my name to my sister shortly before leaving that place, amazingly after what may have been only a few hours. And there had been no other way than using her own strong two legs to continue the hike from that place to the village.

I wish I could have kept my mother until this day because I have much to thank her for. She had taken me after I was born and with great difficulty washed the cow dung off and carried me half the night back to the village. It is hard to believe when I consider all the help and pampering my own wife needed in giving birth to my children. But real mountain people will do such things, you know, and they are just naturally very tough.

Aye-ya, just think of it! There was my mother carrying me in her arms all the way up that steep climb that you and I climbed with light packs and still sweated and rested many times, remember? Anyway, my mother was still bleeding when she got to the village, and it had to be well after midnight. All that time, she walked alone over a trail that leopards and tigers used routinely in those days to find livestock or even an individual human to kill. It wasn’t just bad enough that my mother walked alone that night, but she was bleeding as well, and I believe the smell of blood should have been more than inviting to certain big cats that had already tasted human flesh, don’t you? Aye-ya, my mother, how I wish I could have been a good son to her and taken care of her in her old age.

Speaking of leopards killing people around the old Mak Lang range in those days, let me go back again and mention my sister that night. She was eleven years old, as I said, and just very small for her age because she never got the good food my own kids ate. Well, after she ran from my mother and my awful little cow-dung-covered body, she too got caught in the dark and said that just after sunset, a tiger called from up the ridge in the direction she was going. She got panicky then and did the only smart thing a kid in the hills could do; she moved off the ridge and headed straight for a field hut that belonged to another family. Nobody was in the hut, but my sister knew enough to strike up a fire and stay there for the rest of the night. Maybe she would have died that night if she hadn’t taken refuge in the hut, and more likely, because she was so small and even more vulnerable than my mother. Some big cats will take a child before they take an adult for reasons I can’t understand unless they know the difference between tender and tougher flesh.

I wanted to mention that about my sister because you can see that I almost lost the only full blood relation the same night I was born. All the others are half-brothers and half-sisters and this is so complicated that I know only of one of them, Cha-heh, who has the same mother but whose father was a no-good Yunnan Chinese opium addict. Much less than my mother in my recollection is my father, who I am told was a Lisu man and who died right after I was conceived, from causes of which I do not know. They say he got sick and died quickly while out on a hunting trip. Could have been anything, evil spirits might have bitten him as some say. I don’t know.

My mother had seven children after my sister was born, and all of them died either in childbirth or shortly thereafter. I most certainly should have died right after I was born, so I understand something about the high mortality of hill children. And yet, I wasn’t the last child my mother had, even though she changed husbands twice after my father died. She had another baby every year after that by a Yunnan Chinese and then by another Lisu. So I was the ninth child, my half-brother Cha-heh is the tenth, and we who still live don’t know about those other five half-brothers and sisters who came after us. I do know that the birth of the fifteenth child killed my mother.

And so, I will continue from that point on since I can’t remember anything about those first six years of my life. I am told by my sister that after my mother died, she just could not bear living in the house of my mother’s last husband who, like the Yunnan Chinese before him, smoked opium and was very cruel to her. And so, she decided one night to run away right after our stepfather had tried again to rape her. My sister was seventeen then, and I can imagine what a beautiful girl she must have been at that age. A lot has to be said for my sister because it was miraculous that she escaped such a man as that stepfather we had and even the stepfather before him. She told me later that no man had ever raped her, and few others had tried such an unkind thing until that time. But she also told me many times about how free she had been with the Lisu men and boys who came to court her in honorable fashion. This was, of course, a very different matter, and it is only customary that a girl follows her likes and dislikes and chooses her own man for a little sexual fun. All mountain girls pretend to be virgins until they get married, but this is something we know is rarely true for them, once their breasts begin to develop even a little.

It must have been around midnight when our stepfather had gone back into a deep opium sleep that my sister Ee-shaw strapped my scrawny body on her back and walked out of the Lisu village. She had a lot of courage to do that because she had never been to the big valley before and she couldn’t speak a word of the Thai language. It took her two days to find her way through the jungles to the first big village just where the lowlands begin. I don’t know how she made herself understood, but she managed to find a family of Thai farmers that took us in. She told me many years later that she made love secretly to the man of the house and worked for the family like a slave for over a year, and that was why they let us stay there.

Then one day, Ee-shaw met a woman from the town of Muang Fang, and because she could by then speak pretty good Kham Muang Thai, she agreed to sell me to that woman for ten silver rupee coins (worth about $3 in those times). Now that may seem like a very small amount of money, but in those days, the British India silver rupee was worth more as local currency than the Thai baht, and for a poor mountain girl, that was a lot of money. The woman also accommodated Ee-shaw by introducing her to a young policeman in Fang. So I found myself in another Thai home, and memory really begins for me about that time. I saw Ee-shaw only a few times during those next four years and didn’t miss her because I was too busy working for this family. I was expected to do most of the work that children were assigned to do in that place and was not allowed to go to school like the real children of that family, but other than that I have to say that they fed me well and gave me clothes that were nearly as good as the two brothers I had. Things began to depress me when I was eleven years old and the other children would constantly tease me for being so dumb. They would show off to me by reading from their schoolbooks, and this one boy, Ai Mo, who was about a year older than me, would make it a regular duty to just harass me from the moment he returned from school. He was the favorite and could do no wrong; the father was so proud of him and set him up like he was some sort of little god.

Supposedly this family adopted me, and many times when I sat crying quietly after being humiliated by the other children, the woman would finally come around to me and tell me that I was her son and that she loved me like a son. These were just worthless words, I knew, because when I asked to be allowed to go to school, she would puff up with new anger and her face would get so ugly. It was as though I had insulted her, as though a monkey pet had dared to infer that he was a member of the human race and family. I wasn’t worth the rice I ate and didn’t work hard enough to earn it, she’d scream. Imagine that! And the truth was that I had to work constantly, like a buffalo hooked up behind a plow or a tiller, with no time to play as the other children did. No, I was really worse off than a monkey pet because if I was caught playing, I would feel the sting of that rattan cane again, and a pet monkey is allowed to play as much as he wishes.

During those last two years, there was one small bit of sunshine for me just the same. There was a Buddhist nun who insisted that I call her Pi (older sister), even though she was old enough to be my grandmother, and she was probably responsible for putting into my confused little head a few good things that people are supposed to do. She was so kind that at first I tended to distrust her; I was so unused to kindness that she even seemed as though she might be possessed with an evil spirit and disguised so that I would be enticed into a situation where she could change me into a frog or something. I really believed that, because what little I had been taught about maw-pa came from sketchy and terrifying things my sister had explained to me. But I can see that the more frightened I had seemed, the greater had been that very kind nun’s pity for me.

Certainly the nun tried to help me and even adopted me secretly. She couldn’t do that openly or legally because the people I stayed with were very resistant to any such thought. Yet years later, it was this same nun that gave me a Thai name and backed me up when I requested citizenship. So in a way, I am a member of her family today, and because she had many other adopted children, there came a time many years later when I was able to call a number of Thai people my brothers and my sisters. Among these was one very beautiful girl who had been a beauty queen after she moved with the nun to the far south.

Though it might only have reached my subconscious mind, the nun had explained mysterious Buddhist thoughts that I couldn’t begin to understand. I remember wondering why I should return good for evil that was done to me when such behavior simply didn’t make the smallest sense. She told me that I had to conduct my life so that I would gain merit. Merit for what? It seemed that all I was doing as a child was losing, not gaining a thing. But just the same I went along with the nun, nodding my head in simple agreement and showing her that I respected her words. In fact I really did respect her after I got to know her better, and I shall always respect that kind woman.

The time came soon enough for me to run away. Ai Mo had been very mean to me all that day, a Saturday when he didn’t have to go to school, and as though he had been my lord and master, he ordered me to climb up into the big mango tree.

I will not climb that tree, Ai Mo, I said as politely as I could.

You better climb that tree and shake down some mangoes, or I’m going to beat you up, Ai Mo replied.

That won’t be as bad as the red ants biting me, I said and kept right on sweeping up the leaves near the house.

Ai Mo got really angry then and came over to me and kicked me hard on my thigh. I was already mad enough to do anything and had been thinking about what a miserable life I had as a half-member of that family. And so I did it. I picked up a hard lump of clay and threw it hard at his face. If he had not tried to duck, it would have hit him in the chest, but he lowered his head, and it caught him full in the face. I was so angry that I felt a certain satisfaction in seeing the blood spurt from Ai Mo’s nose and mouth and seeing that hated so-called brother go down with a scream.

It was the beginning of a long run right there. Never have I run so fast and hard. I went right through the bean