Rickety

Most locations in today’s Myanmar tend toward the rickety and the untidy. Even elegant spots designed as showcases contain avoidable flaws—a stain, a lack of symmetry, a piece fastened with packing tape.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that few places here appear completed. Wires aren’t hidden, caulking is uneven, extra tiles are left stacked in a corner to be collected on some future day that never arrives.

Some of the structural flaws I notice may have become invisible to local eyes. People here might not find it unusual to discover a motorcycle parked in a corner of the hotel ballroom. Nor to mind that an extension cord used in the kitchen travels out the window, along the building’s exterior wall, then back into a bedroom… where it plugs into a socket whose plastic cover plate went missing in 1965.

By contrast, personal grooming is highly valued. As elsewhere in SE Asia, in Myanmar it’s important to keep up appearances. In Thailand I observed people going to great lengths to hide or downplay difficulties. Sometimes they would flaunt a new watch or car while making sure nobody ever saw their substandard housing.

Maybe here the veneer is thinner. It’s possible that most Myanmar people don’t have enough extra to be able to put up a front. The door that doesn’t quite close properly might not stem from a lack of caring, but rather from a lack of money or tools to fix it.

Accepting things as they are might also be easier than fighting against reality. Choosing not to mind a flyspecked front window or an intersection nearly blocked by community trash may be a sane response to a crazy system. (Though I have to say I draw the line at the widespread habit here of tossing heaps of garbage into every running stream. Where do people think it’s going to go?)

Probably I too should spend less energy wondering about exterior maintenance, or about the stacks of yellowing brochures piled up in the lobby of the National Museum. Yet I don’t think I’m wrong to be concerned about a lack of follow-through here. Finishing what you start results in more than just personal satisfaction—it sends a message about priorities. I prefer “Okay, so it’s not great, but it doesn’t have to be that bad either!" to “It is what it is.”