Rangoon, Myanmar. January 29th, 2013.
The moneychanger hands my hundred-dollar bill back for the third time.
There’s nothing wrong with the bill. Well, one thing. A crease down the middle, from sitting in my wallet the way money sits in a wallet.
In most of the world, that’s just money. Here, it’s considered defective.
Everyone tells you the rule before you visit. Bring perfect dollars. Flat, unfolded, no marks, no stamps, no tears. Money that has never been treated like money. I flew in with an envelope of crisp hundreds. Then last night, out of pure habit, I folded one into my wallet.
So this morning the bill is worthless. Not discounted. Worthless, at this counter. The changer holds it up to the light, runs his thumb down the crease, hands it back with what looks like real regret. He’s not being difficult.
Nobody downstream of him will take it either, and everybody knows the rules except me.
Fine. My mistake.
Outside, the crows are arguing. Rangoon crows don’t caw, exactly. They argue. Hundreds of them in the banyans and on the wires, carrying on some dispute that never gets settled and never needs to.
I should say what I’m doing here.
For fifty years, this was a country you didn’t do business in. Couldn’t, mostly. Not with American money, not legally, not without a general as a partner. Then, in a few months, everything changed. Elections. The Lady out of house arrest and into parliament. Sanctions suspended over the summer. A foreign investment law signed in November. President Obama on the tarmac ten weeks ago as the first American president ever to set foot in the country.
So the door is opening, everyone says, and I flew in to see about doing business through it. Nobody can tell me yet whether that’s smart or reckless, which I’ve decided to take as a good sign.
In practice it looks like this: a man with an envelope of perfect dollars, walking around, listening. Due diligence, if you want to dress it up.
Back at the Strand there’s a note for me at the desk. Handwritten, beautiful penmanship. My meeting has moved. Not to a new time exactly, but to “next week, perhaps.”
The man I’m supposed to meet has no mobile phone. Almost nobody here has a mobile phone. We’ll get to why. So there’s nobody to call, nothing to reschedule against. The country will get back to me when it gets back to me.
I could wait in the lobby. It’s a good lobby to wait in. The Strand is from 1901, teak and rattan and brass, ceiling fans turning slow, a butler who materializes about the time you start wanting something.
I go walking instead.
Two blocks up toward Sule Pagoda there’s a crowd on the sidewalk. Thirty, forty people, pressed in around something. My first thought is accident.
It’s a cash machine.
An ATM. Brand new, protective film still on part of it, set into the wall of a bank. There’s a ribbon on it. An actual ribbon. A bank officer in a pressed shirt. A security guard standing next to the machine like it’s made of gold. Which, in a way.
A young guy in a Manchester United shirt tells me it’s one of the first machines in the whole country that takes foreign cards. Can he verify that? No. Can anyone here? Also no.
A man in a green longyi steps up and puts his card in with both hands.
The crowd goes quiet.
The machine thinks about it.
Then it pays. Kyat comes out in a brick. Money here comes in bricks, a hundred dollars is a stack of thousand-kyat notes thick as a sandwich, and the man holds it up, and the crowd doesn’t cheer.
They exhale. All together, all at once. I was standing right there. I heard it.
Then everyone presses in to look at the slot, the way you’d look down a well.
The crows, overhead. Unmoved. A machine in a wall doesn’t rate, apparently, if you’re a crow.
There’s a teashop across the street. Little plastic stools, tables knee-high, a long mirror on the wall gone cloudy at the edges. Milk tea is 300 kyat. About 35 cents. Refills of plain Chinese tea are free and endless, from a pot on the table.
The tea is very sweet and very good.
I take the stool with the sightline on the ATM. Whatever this is, I want to keep watching it.
The waiter is a boy, twelve maybe. He runs the entire floor. Shouts orders across the room in a code of syllables, slides glasses down between hands, keeps nine tables in his head with no paper anywhere in the building. He is excellent at his job, and I mean that with no qualifiers. I’d guess he’s from a village up-country, sent down to work. I’d guess he sleeps in the shop. But boys like him have run this city’s teashops for generations, and that’s roughly the arrangement, everyone says.
I should describe 2013 Rangoon a little, because I don’t think this exact moment will exist again, here or anywhere.
The sidewalks are stained red everywhere with betel spit. Colonial buildings from the British days stand in whole blocks. Courts, banks, the telegraph office. They are enormous. Magnificent, rotting, with trees growing out of the fourth-floor windows. The power cuts a few times a day. When it does, a thousand generators cough on in the same minute, block by block, and later they all shut off again. You learn the rhythm fast.
On Pansodan Street, men sell photocopied books off blankets. The prestige spot, top of the blanket, is George Orwell. Spiral-bound, photocopied Orwell. A year ago, I’m told, that inventory was a risk. Now it’s the bestseller table. Posters of The Lady are out on the same blankets, in the open. Two years ago, everyone says, that meant prison. Now it’s a poster. 500 kyat.
And the phones. Here’s the phones.
A SIM card in this country (just a phone number, the basic ability to be reached) cost about two thousand American dollars until quite recently. Two thousand dollars. For a SIM card. Now it’s a couple hundred and falling fast, and next year, they say, foreign carriers arrive and it’ll cost nearly nothing.
Sit with that one a minute. The technology didn’t change. It’s the same little gold chip the whole world uses. For decades the price was a wall, and the wall was a decision, and now somebody has decided otherwise, and the wall is evaporating in public, in real time, with a ribbon on it.
Nothing physical changed. A decision changed.
An older man at the teashop, gold teeth, checked longyi, sees me watching the ATM line and starts talking to me about banks. His English arrives slowly, but it arrives.
He tells me why the machine draws a crowd, and it isn’t novelty. It’s that nobody here trusts banks, and for good reason. In 1987 the government canceled most of the banknotes. Announced one day that whole denominations weren’t money anymore. Savings turned to paper overnight. His family’s too, he says, and he says it the way you’d mention old weather.
So for twenty-five years, people kept their savings in gold, in dollars, under floorboards.
And now there’s a machine in a wall promising to hand your money back any hour of any day, and a line of people deciding, one at a time, whether to believe it.
That’s what the exhale was, I think. Not “the machine works.”
More like: maybe this time it stays open.
Mind you, I’m guessing. I’m a guy on a stool.
Here’s what I keep chewing on.
Fifty years, this country was closed. Fifty years is longer than most lifetimes here. If you were born the year the door shut, you’re a grandparent now. Closed wasn’t a phase. Closed was the weather. It was physics. It was simply how the world is.
And then, suddenly, it wasn’t.
The prices are collapsing. The posters are legal. There’s a ribbon on a cash machine. Whatever “permanent” meant, it turned out to mean “until further notice.”
So I’ve been sitting here doing the math on what actually keeps a closed door closed.
Some doors are locked for real. This one was, for a long time, with guns behind it, and I don’t want to be cute about that. Locked is locked.
But most doors, in a life, in a market, in a career, aren’t locked. They’re just closed. And they stay closed because of one mechanism, and it’s this:
Nobody tries them.
That’s it. That’s the whole mechanism.
And the longer a door stays closed, the more the closed-ness starts to look like evidence. Five years closed? Must be a reason. Ten years? Definitely a reason. Look how long it’s been. The wall becomes its own proof. Nobody remembers the original reason, and nobody needs to.
The years do the arguing.
I’ve watched this play out in business over and over. I knew a guy who wanted to work with one particular company for years. Talked about it constantly. Never once approached them. They were “out of his league.” That was a known fact, the way water is wet. Then someone introduced them by accident at a conference, and he had a signed contract in six weeks. Six weeks. The door had been closed for six years and unlocked the entire time.
Who set the price on that door? He did. Same as the SIM card. A wall that was really a decision. Somebody’s decision, wearing the costume of a fact.
I’ve done it myself, with people I wanted to learn from, markets I never entered. Assumed the no. Never asked. Assigned them the “no” myself, to save everyone the trouble. Every one of those doors, I priced personally, and I priced them all at two thousand dollars.
In the afternoon I flag a taxi and give no destination. Mostly to move. Partly because in a city like this, whoever’s driving is the briefing.
The driver is late-fifties. Immaculate white shirt. Gold-rimmed glasses with one screw missing. His English is careful and a little formal. Tuned, he says, by twenty years of BBC radio kept low.
He was studying engineering here in the eighties. Then came 1988, and the universities closed. For years. By the time things settled, his cohort was thirty years old with no degrees and no jobs to use them in.
So, taxis. Twenty-some years of taxis.
He’s not bitter. Or if he is, he’s not spending any of it on me. He tells me about his son, 19, taking computer classes at a private school in the evenings. He taps the steering wheel and says:
“He is on time. I was not on time.”
Flat. No self-pity. Next topic. I looked out the window at the beautiful rotting buildings for a while after that one.
Because that’s the other half of the door question, and I’m not going to skip it: closed years cost. They cost for real. The driver doesn’t get his twenties back. This country doesn’t get its fifty years back. When a door finally opens, there’s no refund at the window.
A door only opens forward.
So here’s where I’ve landed, by mid-afternoon, on a plastic stool, watching a country try its own doors:
Permanent is almost never a fact. Permanent is a story that closed things tell about themselves.
Fifty years of junta looked permanent. A two-thousand-dollar SIM card looked permanent. The empire this hotel was built for looked permanent, and the lobby outlived it.
Is every closed door secretly open? No. Some nos are real. And doors close again. People here know that better than anyone alive. In 1987, the door on their savings closed overnight. That’s why the crowd exhaled this morning instead of cheering. Nobody in that line treats open as permanent.
Open isn’t permanent. Closed isn’t permanent. Nothing is.
Which is not a reason to stay home. It’s the reason to try the door while it’s your turn at the front of the line.
Because early looks like nothing the word promises. Early is a handwritten note that says “next week, perhaps.” A meeting with a man who cannot be phoned. A crowd around a cash machine, watching somebody else’s card, deciding together whether to believe. Nothing verifiable anywhere, which is not the obstacle. It’s the definition. By the time everything can be verified, it isn’t early anymore. There’s a line.
I didn’t mention something from this morning.
Standing at that crowd, watching a man take money out of a wall, I got a lump in my throat. Over an ATM. Couldn’t have told you why. It bugged me all through the first tea.
I think I know why now. I was watching people try a door that had every reason to stay shut. Twenty-five years of burned savings. Fifty years of proof. And they lined up anyway, one at a time, and put their cards in with both hands.
Everybody in that line was doing exactly what I flew here to do: stand in front of an open door and decide whether to believe it. They just had more on the table.
This whole country is doing it, at every scale, all at once. Writing off fifty years in public. Ribbon on it.
The least I can do is show up with perfect dollars and wait my turn.
Evening. On the way back down Strand Road I change the creased hundred at a different stall. This guy takes it, at 10 percent off, for the fold. Fair enough. Same bill, 10 dollars lighter for how it happened to travel. Aren’t we all.
The meeting is next week, perhaps. Perhaps. I’ve just spent a day looking at fifty years. I can do a week.
There are worse places to be kept waiting than a country waking up.
Through the tall windows the crows are crossing the river in loose hundreds, going to roost. Same as they did over the empire, same as they did over the junta, same as they’ll do over whatever this is becoming. They don’t know what year it is. It never seems to cost them anything.
The fan turns. The crows argue. The country will get back to me.
I take the stairs up.