*19-25.03.2006
Extra
New
Making Jokes On Junta
"The Kachin Duwa's Joke"
This first story is from an old friend of mine. It is not from Hittaing, but I mention it only because i t has a connection with the second-last story from Hittaing.
Back in 1982, I was hiking toward Mt. Khakabo Razi with a Rawang friend, Kyaw Khant, and each day we ate packets of rice and fish. This was on a mountain trail about 50 miles north of Nong Mong, the final outpost that had an airstrip, located in the extreme northern Kachin State, the Land of the Icy Mountains.
Kyaw Khant told me this funny story that long, long ago, a Kachin Duwa came to visit the Burmese King and was invited to a royal banquet. Each time he finished eating something, the Kachin Duwa would throw away the King's very expensive chinaware, dish after dish. "Why did you do that!??," blurted the King, shocked. The Kachin Duwa replied, "In my Land, we always throw plates away after we eat." The King was astounded. The Kachin Duwa must be fabulously rich! After all, t he precious teakwood and jade all come from Kachinland. So he was determined to pay a return visit to Kachinland and wangled an invitation.
Sometime later, the King arrived at the Kachin Duwa's mansion and eagerly waited to eat. He could hardly wait to see how the Kachins threw away their plates and he was going to throw away as many as he could to even the score! However, as each dish was served, the King was flabbergasted!
At this point, my story-teller Kyaw Khant explained, "You see, in Kachinland, we always eat our food on phet leaves.
....so saying, Kyaw Khant handed me the latest packets of rice and fish that we had cooked the night before at the village we had just come from. As we hungrily unwrapped the leaves, we laughed and had a good time eating. Next day, we continued our trek. Our mission was to search for the los t tribe of Tarong people, who are neither Rawang nor Kachin, but Tarong, a different people in their own right. "Different" is right. You could call them the Pygmies of Asia, only about four feet tall. We finally found them 100 miles north of Nogmung, the shortest people in Burma amidst the tallest peaks in the Land. In all, the long trek totalled 200 miles in a period of 20 days. This story will appear in my forthcoming book, "Motherland Burma Behind the Curtain."
Then and Now.
That was then, 24 years ago. Today, I was perusing through Democracy for Burma, a very popular website, when I came across an email exhorting us to visit www.hittaing.org, and so I did.
Hit Taing literally means the Shouting Post, a wooden colum n that was erected in the middle of the city where people could go to vent their anger about any personal grievances. Yes, even in those days of the Kings, one could openly and freely talk, no, not just talk, but actually shout about any sufferings. Compare it to now where even a furtive whisper overheard can lead to arrest, torture, and death.
Thus, we really need a modern day Hittaing and the cyber version serves the purpose extremely well, because we can Aw-Hit or Shout Out across the world. Well, www.hittaing.org turned out to be a very amusing website but it is mostly in Burmese. Living up to its name, it not only reveals what is going wrong in Burma, but even makes fun of it with exquisite satire.
"Taut Tee Taut Tet"
One particular article by a brilliant writer, Ko Ko Pway Li, is called "Taut Tee Taut Tet" (taut in this case rhymes with out, not ought) which had a well-known picture of King Thibaw, recognizable by the seated pose and seen in every middle school history book in Burma. Thibaw was the last King of Burma who was deposed by the British in 1885. General Than Shwe has claimed to have descended from King Thibaw, really believes he is of royal blood, and aches to be called king. Indeed his wife insists on a higher seat like a throne, and her visitors have to pay her obeisance like in the days of old.
Well, to humor these royal wishes, www.hittaing.org used computer graphics and transposed Than Shwe's face neatly on the body of King Thibaw, coming up with a very fetching portrait of "King Than Shwe". The General would be SO pleased!! After all, he is a dying old man, senile/ thu-ngai-pyan over-ripe old 75 years, about to fall from the branch like rotten leftover fruit.
On the other hand, King Thibaw, in that portrait, was only about 25 or 30 years old, and so Ko Ko Pway Li's head transplant has given King Than Shwe a new, young body, so that he is no longer Than Shwe, the Pan Thay (impotent). Surgeon Ko Ko Pway Li should be rewarded with a brand-new house in Kyet Pyay near the Naypyidaw so he can perform more surgery on each of the aging Generals and their wives, giving each one sexy new bodies, and paste them in Hittaing.org.
Ko Ko Pway Li also wrote a funny article about King Than Shwe, which is a true jewel in its own right. He recalls how each of the dictator Generals believed they w ere reincarnations of famous kings. For instance, Ne Win thought he was Anawrahta, King of the Bagan Dynasty; Saw Maung imagined himself to be Kyansittha, the great warrior-king. The deposed General Khin Nyunt, if I recall, fantasized he was Queen Shin Saw Pu....... no, I'm just kidding.
The master stroke of satire by Ko Ko Pway Li was how he wrote that all the younger generals were descended from another king, one who was notorious for having murdered his own father. It sounds so dull when I say it in English, and his original Burmese is truly a pearl.
At the end of his article, as a bonus, he added a separate story which I would like to translate because it is so funny and here it is.
"Because It Is So Cheap and Plentiful"
Recently, three very important government officials from Thailand, Korea, an d Burma had some important business and had to travel by train, accompanied by their PA's (personal assistants) . During the long trip, the Thai official got hungry and told his PA to bring out a couple of lobsters. They were so big that the plate could not fit both, and so the Thai very deftly picked up the extraneous lobster and flung it out of the window as if it was a piece of trash.
"Why did you do that?" the Burmese official hungrily asked. The Thai nonchalantly replied, "Oh, in my country, lobsters are SO cheap and plentiful." So the Burmese just had to rub his hungry stomach and sat silently, deep in thought. After all, food has become very expensive and meat is scarce in Burma. He felt so bad that the Thai had thrown away the lobster. But he did not dare complain or else it would be a loss of face, theikkhar kyaht.
Not to be outdone, the Kore an snapped his fingers and his PA brought a very expensive, fancy-looking cell phone. After he finished his call, he casually flung it out the window like a cigarette butt. "WHY did you do that?" the Burmese official asked. The Korean replied, "Oh, cell phones are SO cheap and plentiful in my country." Again, the Burmese official rubbed himself, this time in the face, because he felt like crying. After all, cell phones are expensive and hard to get in Burma, and the government has to be bribed heavily even to get an ordinary land-ine telephone.
He again sat silently, deep in thought. How was he going to outdo the other two? National honor, Naingandaw Theikkhar, was at stake. He snapped his fingers and his PA brought him a cigarette, While smoking, he snapped again for a stiff drink, and again, the PA jumped into action and poured a Johnny Walker Black, unthinkably unaffordable for a typical Burmese citizen. Of course, he threw away the cigarette butt and the PA came to fetch the empty glass. There was no way he could throw away the whiskey. No way.
Then Burmese assistant came to ask if there was anything, anything else that he could do for his boss.
"No, there is nothing more. You have done your duty well;"
said the official and his eyes suddenly gleamed as if he just had a bright idea. He grabbed his assistant by the back of his neck and threw HIM out of the window!
Both the Thai and Korean sprang up, shocked, aghast, demanding to know: "WHY did you do that???" The Burmese official explained in a bored manner, "Assistants like these, are so cheap and plentiful. They are so willing. You can order them to do anything.
For example, they take part in the Kyant Phoot (the latter-day descendants of the government's Socialist Party members) activities to organize and recruit new members. After the Constitution is written by the government and the elections are held, they want to be elected into office. They all want to be have important government positions, so they do their best to please their bosses.
Such assistants like him --- oh! they are so cheap and SO plentiful, SO plentiful!!........they are all over Burma"
The Thai and Korean both collapsed in their seats. That is the end of the story, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. To read more stories, please click on to www.Hittaing.org.
The Las t Story
The previous story about two foreign VIPs and a Burmese VIP reminded me of a similar story I picked up from the Democracy for Burma website a few years ago. (I don't remember all of it and so have ad libbed parts of it) Like that other story, it involves a couple of foreigners and a Burmese man. This story should be added on since it ties in very well with the earlier jokes about surgeries and VIPs.
The three famous surgeons mentioned above meet at an international seminar to present their most outstanding case histories.
The UK doc bragged about how he reattached a foot to a man when it was cut off accidently and he did such a wonderful job that later the former patient became a world champion footballer!
The French doc, not to be outdone, delved into his t hick briefcase, and pulled out a case file. From it, he described how a jealous wife cut off her husband's penis because he was nauk mee linnn (back light is on, i.e., committing adultery all the time). He bragged that he did such a superb job that the man recovered and then went on to bed several dozen more women and had many dozens of children!!
The Burmese doc --- older and wiser than the previous two, then
takes a deep breath, and said that many years ago, he was summoned to the home of a certain Colonel Ne Win because he was having an attack of neurosyphilis from the many prostitutes he had debauched. There were no antibiotics because the country was poor, but there were lots of stray dogs, and part of the Colonel's brain had degenerated. So the surgeon went to the road-side and caught a mongrel dog, removed part of its brain, and transplanted it i nto the deranged army officer. Then he bragged about how he did such a marvelous job that the Colonel later became a General and ruled over Burma for a quarter of a century!
That, my friends, is the end of the story. You may very well think that this last story is pure stuff and nonsense but there is a grain of truth. It is a fact that General Ne Win, during his lifetime, never went to a Burmese hospital, but always went to England for all his medical treatments. Rumor had it that it was to transplant his nose because he was a big Nhah Pwah Gyi, literaly a big puffy nose, an idiom for Sex Maniac.
It is really ironic that Ne Win elevated his political career by always blaming the British for everything that went wrong in Burma and blasted them for being evil colonialists. This way, he could escape responsibility for his own shortcomings.
Despite all his ranting against all things English his hypocrisy was such that he always went to England to have a good time, including horse-betting which he outlawed in Burma as a decadent capitalist practice. In his hey-day in the sixties, everyone had to wear the Burmese longyi (except for the military) because wearing trousers was considered decadent.
The most glaring of alll his penchants was for avoiding Burmese Medicine. Perhaps it was because he did not trust Burmese doctors even though his own father-in-law, Dr. Ba Than, was the Rector of the Number One Institute of Medicine in the country and his brother-in-law, Dr. Aung Than, was the Rector of the one and only Dental Institute.
Perhaps he was truly afraid his father-in-law, a profligate womanizer himself, might transplant a dog's penis and that his brother-in-law might transplant dog's teeth on him. Who knows? Perhaps the t wo physicians already caught Ne Win at an unguarded moment, scaring him forever against Burmese Medicine. ........ <{:-} <{:-}
Throughout his reign, Ne Win was notorious for having sex with any woman like a mad dog, and he devoured all of the nation's precious resources like the greedy dog he was, totally out of control....... >{:-} >{:-}
FUNNY STORIES FROM www.hittaing.org and Other Sources.
Translated by Yebaw Day
Your Comments here_
If you have evidences of genocide committed by military regime please contact burmadigest@tayzathuria.org.uk