Solely for Adventure
Among Insurgents, Walking Through Burma, by Shelby Tucker (The Radcliffe Press, 416 pp., $29.95)
A reason for this enthusiastic reception may have been that that this beautifully written book is in the fine tradition of English travelers, who, mostly for the adventure, set forth for exotic climes and later produce polished accounts of often-rude places. Its literary lineage includes Robert Byron's great The Road to Oxiana, an account of Byron's travels in Afghanistan and Persia in the 1930s and, more recently, Bruce Chatwin and, of course, Thubron himself.
Tucker is a Tennessee-born, Oxford-educated lawyer who lives in England. An intrepid traveler who once left home in the United States for Mexico with $1.42 in his pocket, Tucker adopted the mantra that he had come to Burma solely “for adventure,” a line he found himself repeating frequently to incredulous insurgents, who were engaged in civil war when Tucker made his journey in 1989. He was held in prison for three months in India because officials refused to believe that adventure was his goal and persisted in the belief that Tucker was a spy.
Travel by Elephant
The best explanation for the strange desire to walk across Burma, however, is presented when, as the locomotive en route to China chugged past what were once the khanates of Turkestan, Tucker thought of those who'd played the “Great Game” of spying along that route: “All risked their lives. Arthur Conolly [an English officer and spy beheaded in Bokhara in 1842] drew strength from religious certainties, but I do not believe that any of them [English spies] acted out of duty to Queen or Country. They were in it for the adventure and because they loved the outdoors — and might have wanted to test their courage, for in those now remote times the attributes of manhood were still valued.”
Tucker and Mats Larsson, a 23-year-old Swede who accompanied him, had plenty of opportunities to test their courage. They entered Burma through a part of China closed to foreigners. In order to slip past Chinese checkpoints, they disguised themselves. Because they didn't speak Chinese, they spent some time wandering around, confused, before they learned they were actually in Burma. Though Tucker had planned on reading up on Burma, “I did nothing more than pay a cursory visit to the Map Room of the Bodleian and obtain from a librarian some photocopies of obsolete charts.” He also relied on old maps from National Geographic.
Their route was across hilly northern Burma, among the insurgent Kachin people, one of the “hidden colonies” of Burma about which outsiders know relatively little. Tucker and Larsson were briefly detained by Communists and then befriended by Kachin rebels. It was with the help of Seng Hpung, missionary-educated deputy foreign secretary of the Kachin Independence Organization, and his forces, that Tucker and Mats made their journey, on foot and by elephant. Tucker greeted his 54th birthday “in a litter full of baggage, shotgun to a grinning oozy on an elephant.”
Tucker provides an analysis of the Burmese civil war and insights into the international drug trade, which he gleaned from conversations with Seng Hpung and captured members of the Burmese army. (Tucker “affected Red Cross credentials” to encourage the prisoners to be candid.) There is also Tucker's single experience with a “gentle but entirely spurious euphoria” from opium. At the time, the United States was supplying the Burmese army with a type of herbicide that was banned in the U.S. and that the army simply sprayed on the poppy fields of the insurgents, leaving their own crops unharmed, according to Tucker.
There is also a historical chapter on the work of Christian missionaries, whom Tucker, rare nowadays, greatly admires. A moving chapter recounts the triumphs and travails of the Morse family, Christian missionaries who were expelled from Burma. Tucker even writes of a Christian service being interrupted by angry Buddhist.
Never A Moment of Doubt
Throughout this book, Tucker exhibits a kind of near lunatic monomania — whether in haranguing Mats, a complete stranger encountered on the Siberian train, into joining him, or about his writing. Tucker had never been published before this book, yet he never doubted himself as a writer.
When asked by a young officer what he does for a living, Tucker replies that he is a writer: “You are a journalist?” “No,” I corrected, “I write books.” “May I know who publishes your books?” “No one publishes my books. It is humiliating. However, I am a real writer who writes despite great and constant discouragement.”
Most people who talk like this turn out to be disappointing writers. Tucker is the exception. This book attracted almost no notice in the U.S. last year, but HarperCollins is issuing in paperback this fall, and American readers will have a chance to rectify this injustice.
(This article is reprinted with permission from National Review Online.)
