Between Borders: "The Spring Revolution" and Burmese Exiles on the Thai-Myanmar Border

Translated by / Diego Ge (The Inaugural Frontline Non-Fiction Translation Fellowship Fellow)

Written by / Wu Qin (Winner of the Third Season of the Frontline Fellowship for Chinese Creative Nonfiction)

Original article / 《國境之間：「春天革命」與泰緬邊界上的緬甸流亡者》(Click here to read)

Translation Mentor / Zhang Han (Journalist at The New Yorker and an editor at Riverhead)

Mae Sot is a border town on the Western end of Thailand, separated from Myanmar by the Moei River. Walking down the natural border of the river when I just arrived, I could sometimes hear softly sung Burmese pop music, sometimes people chanting sutra, and sometimes the roar of drones.

Across the Moei River was the Thai-Myanmar Friendship Bridge built in 1997, connecting Myanmar and Thailand. On the bridge was a border checkpoint; under it was an informal market lining along the border fence. On the other side of the fence were vendors, selling Burmese foodstuff, smuggled alcohol and tobacco; the customers from the Thai side would pick and choose. The shopkeepers' children hopped from one side of the fences to another and back—each agile hop effectively constituting an 'illegal border crossing.'

The informal market on the border. Photo by Wu Qin 

It was only after I had visited that market many times that I realized while we were standing in Thailand that the shopkeepers were not in Myanmar. Instead, they were on a patch of unclaimed land: a little sandbank in the middle of the Moei River, situated between two national borders. The sandbank village was home to stateless people who had no claim to any citizenship protection—some were Rohingya people, displaced by ethnic cleansing in Myanmar but refused entry by the Thai authorities; others were fugitives evading Thai or Burmese law, and thus had to take refuge on this enclave without a sovereign.

In a sense, Mae Sot is an extension of that little sandbank: the concept of nationality is fluid, unsettled, and constantly in flux.

The city is on the Thai side of the border, but it felt more like a Burmese city. People here spoke Burmese; most production and consumption took place around the flow of Burmese people. Here, very few people had permanent and official citizenship; some others were held in legal limbo, holding various types of temporary documentation issued by Thai authorities; most existed without any legal status, excluded from the modern order.

A Burmese billiard hall in the Mae Sot market. Photo by Wu Qin. 

The Border and the Stateless

One could say that the border, roughly sketched out by the Moei River, is like a prism, reflecting the flows and conflicts of history and the present here in this border town.

Zugar still remembers the difficult summer treks in his childhood, as he traveled from Yangon, the largest city in Myanmar, to Mae Sot to visit his grandmother. The family would first drive to Myawaddy, the Burmese border town across from Mae Sot, after which everything was up to luck. There was only a single-laned rugged road from Myawaddy to Mae Sot, sometimes open for travel in one direction, other times in the other direction. At best, one could make it through in 24 hours; at worst, one would need to wait for a full day in Myawaddy.

I met him in the Muslim neighborhood of Mae Sot in February 2023. As one moves from the plentiful Mae Sot markets to this neighborhood, the vivid colors particular to Southeast Asia dimmed; roads become more rugged, and the shanty houses more dilapidated—iron sheets and planks only half-covering the living rooms in the shacks. With few street lamps in the neighborhood, an atmosphere of danger loomed over the neighborhood in the evenings. Sounds of prayers and chanting waded through half-closed shutter doors; incandescent light shined above the children reciting the Quran, faintly illuminating the narrow streets. This neighborhood is rarely visited by non-Muslims—even the police are a rare sight. The city government had grown oblivious to this village.

Zugar's sister opened a food stall on the ground floor of their family house, selling a dessert called faloodeh. As the legend goes, the dessert originated in the Persian Empire, spread to Myanmar through India, and later to Yunnan, each place adding its own local flavors to the dessert. I had it before in Yunnan; I was excited to taste it again here. As I made conversation with Zugar while having the dessert, he invited me to dinner at his home.

His mother wore a Nikab that covered her face; his sisters also properly wore their hijabs. He wore a pair of retro-style square glasses; his curly, medium-length hair gathered behind his headband—his sense of fashion certainly stood out in this conservative Muslim village. At the time, he was 27 years old, working remotely as a programmer for a Singaporean tech firm. He told me he's Burmese Bengali—a somewhat paradoxical characterization, as 'Bengali' is often used as an exclusionary reference to the Rohingya people in the context of Myanmar politics. His grandparents from his mother's side crossed the border as war refugees, and his mother and uncle were born in the refugee camp on the border. He was born in Mae Sot, but he moved back to Myanmar as a child with his father, who was from Yangon. He spent his entire adolescence in Yangon until 2012, when an anti-Muslim riot broke out.

A Muslim couple in the Mae Sot market. Photo by Wu Qin

"We were terrified. In the Muslim neighborhoods of Yangon, we had young guys stand on guard 24/7 to protect the community from Bamar Buddhist rioters." His family moved back to Mae Sot soon after. Compared to the 'political exile' of past democratic movements, or the 'economic exile' of migrant workers, he says that his family was in 'religious exile.'

That was the last time he crossed this border. This time around, they moved right through the freshly constructed Asia Highway, arriving at Mae Sot around 4 hours after departing from Yangon. For ten years after that trip, he was stuck in Mae Sot. Lacking any documents, he had not even been to Bangkok.

Zugar never had a nationality; he might not get one in his lifetime. As a Muslim, it is incredibly challenging for him to acquire Burmese citizenship. After the anti-Muslim riots, he sought refuge in Thailand. After 10 years of waiting since arriving in Thailand, he finally received a "Stateless Card" in 2022, giving him legal status to stay in the country. This 'stateless' status, however, is not a path to citizenship. Only his children could become 'Thai'; he himself could not.

Fortunately for him, he was not alone: most people in Mae Sot were stateless as well.

Historically, Mae Sot has always been the first stop for Burmese refugees who flee to Thailand to escape the unending conflicts and turmoil in Myanmar. Since Myanmar was founded as a modern state, its Karen State, right across the border from Mae Sot, was in a constant state of war. This displaced many refugees, and gave rise to rebel forces in the state who move between the war zone in the jungles and the town of Mae Sot. Following the anti-Muslim riots and policies of systematic discrimination in Myanmar, Muslim refugees also started arriving, forming settlements for transnational trade. The political movements of 1988 and 2007 also brought in protesters and dissidents from Lower Burma.

The 'Spring Revolution', the latest in the history of political movements in the country, started after the military coup in February 2021. Within a week of the coup, hundreds of thousands of protesters flooded the streets of major cities in Myanmar, demanding the junta release its captive Aung San Suu Kyi, who served as State Counsellor of Myanmar and Minister of Foreign Affairs before the coup and restore the democratically elected government. The young generation came up with creative means of resistance, like banging pots and pans as symbolic demonstration, flash mob protests, and street performances. Civil servants left the governmental system in response to the 'civil disobedience movement'(CDM); workers across the country started general strikes. In response to the citizenry's nonviolent resistance, the junta responded with violence in increasing severity, eventually culminating in massacres and mass arrests.

Faced with brutal military repression, the resistance turned underground; more and more protesters fled Lower Burma. Some went into the jungles and joined Ethnic Armed Organizations; others crossed the border and became exiles. Thus, Mae Sot took in Burmese exiles once again following 'the Spring Revolution.'

A Sepak Takraw match in the streets of Mae Sot. Photo by Wu Qin

For Muslims and Karens in Mae Sot, national identities existed on a spectrum—the distinction between 'Thai' and 'Burmese' people is arbitrary at best. Most of the Burmese dissidents who fled the country for Mae Sot do not have passports and are wanted by the Junta: they are very clear about identifying as 'Burmese', whenever I talked to them—but since the start of their self-imposed exile, they have lost their rights and identity as citizens of Myanmar. Most of them are unable to apply for Myanmar passports, unable to return to the country without facing political persecution. Some applied for refugee status from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) field office to go to a third country; those who stayed applied for the 'Pink Card', labor permits issued for migrant workers through agents, and others applied for 'Stateless Card' (also known as 'White Card' or 'Hilltribe Card'), an identification document valid for 10 years, designed for minority ethnic groups on the border through paying more to the agencies handling passports and residency documents. Still others hid away in safe houses, as they could be harassed or extorted by local police if they went outside.

As Stephen Campbell, the author of Border Capitalism, Disrupted, points out, the Thai-Myanmar border synthesizes the promise of asylum and the practice of violence. People from Myanmar can cross the border when they face political persecution, without having to formally apply for political asylum under international law frameworks. However, the technologies of power on the Thai side of the border are also aided by the junta tyranny on the other side of the border, as the precarious condition of exile enables Thai authorities and businesses to exploit refugees for economic gain.

Since around 1990, more and more Thai factories moved to Mae Sot to access the labor of Burmese workers, who could be paid less than the minimum wage. Mae Sot thus became home to massive sweatshops worked by Burmese migrant laborers. Today, the town is the main base of production for the Thai garment industry. It had attracted cheap labor from Lower Burma for decades, partly also due to the demand for labor in construction and agriculture in surrounding villages. Every round of mass land confiscation in Myanmar by the junta, and every Western sanction imposed to counter military repression of pro-democracy movements, meant another wave of migrants and refugees flowing into Thailand from Myanmar.

For most displaced people, proper work authorization documentation is too expensive. Those who are able to afford these documents would move from the border to other cities in Thailand for better labor conditions. Those who can't afford these documents have a much harder time doing the same—most of them have to stay in Mae Sot. The systems of production on the border thus form a brutal ring in the chain of global capitalism, where Burmese migrant laborers are treated as disposable lives. Here, workers are deprived of social security amongst other rights; they have very little time off work, if any at all.

Since the 2021 coup, state violence in Myanmar reinforced the precarity of Burmese people in Thailand, as it enabled the extortion of Thai police, who could threaten to deport 'illegal immigrants' from Myanmar—a threat that feels more serious after the coup. Since 2021, over 50,000 Burmese people have flowed into Mae Sot in three years.[1] Without legal status, they became magical money trees for local police, who would stop and frisk Burmese people on the streets and threaten them with deportation or detention. The lucrative gray income made Mae Sot one of the most desirable places for Thai police from everywhere in the country to serve, creating fierce competition for law enforcement jobs in the city.

A "Welcome Home" sign installed in a compound in the border town of Myawaddy. Photo by Wu Qin.

The Burmese town across the border, Myawaddy, is closely associated with the 'telecom scamming compounds' within Chinese popular discourse. Horror stories of Chinese victims being abducted, enslaved, or subject to 'kidney harvesting' have attracted significant attention from the Chinese public. In fact, many people trapped at the scamming compounds, were from the lower classes in Myanmar, who were more impoverished as a consequence of the 2021 coup. As many of them were never in official registries and no one could claim or recognize their bodies, their lives are not considered 'newsworthy.'

On the border, almost everyone feels the perpetual presence of Myanmar's state violence through its absence. While I have never been to Myanmar, being in Mae Sot, I found myself increasingly immersed in Myanmar's cityscapes, its rugged hills and flowing streams.

[1] Editor's Note: this figure was calculated prior to the publication of the original Chinese text on November 20, 2023. Since then, the junta's conscription orders and the armed conflicts in Myawaddy led more Burmese people to flee to Mae Sot.

The Road to Exile

There are pins all across the Thai-Myanmar border on the Google Maps app on my phone, marking the routes that exile youths of the 'Spring Revolution' took to flee Myanmar. This was one of my favorite topics of discussion in Mae Sot: they would tell me one geographical name after another, and I would mark them down one by one on my map.

Yet, no matter where they departed, or which route they took, they all eventually ended up in Mae Sot.

When I first met Waso and Pyartho, I was struck by their incredibly similar appearances: both wore glasses with black frames, had braided hair, were elegantly dressed and spoke fluent English. I had a hard time telling them apart even after we became good friends. When I met them in February 2023, they had just arrived at Chiang Mai, Thailand's second-largest city, from Mae Sot, and were shopping for supplies every day. They had no legal status when they were in Mae Sot, so they stayed in the 'safe house' as much as possible.

The twin sisters are from a Muslim family in Myanmar, worked as school teachers in Yangon before the coup; they left their jobs in response to the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) after the coup. The CDM called for state employees to quit their jobs—a campaign launched by Yangon medical staff; it peaked when 400,000 state employees participated and cut ties from their state-sponsored employment, about half of which were teachers.

After quitting their jobs, the sisters started to engage in underground activities in Yangon. After surviving two years of heavy repression, a friend of theirs in their activism group was arrested by the military. Everyone else in the group went into exile and left the country. "We all agreed: if anyone's arrested, they should just give the interrogator the list of names—nobody ought to endure the tortures that they would inflict otherwise."

Waso and Pyartho could not get passports because they were wanted by the junta. They had no option but to smuggle themselves across the border, like many other Burmese protesters. They followed the smugglers all the way from Yangon, switched between vehicles, and crossed the entirety of the Karen State which borders Thailand. Just as they crossed the border and got on the smuggler's motorbike, however, Thai police showed up right in front of them.

In a panic, the sisters started conversing in Korean—this was the 'secret language' that they learned by binge-watching K-Drama for years. After a momentary confusion, the Burmese smuggler told the police in Thai that the sisters were speaking Rohingya, and that they must be Rohingyas. Convinced by their South Asian appearance, the police took them to detention alongside the smuggler.

In fact, for many years before the coup d'etat, Mae Sot had already been the point of transit for Rohingya refugees fleeing ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. Many Rohingya refugees were hidden in the influential Muslim community in Mae Sot. Most of them would not stay long in Mae Sot, as they move to Malaysia via the Muslim network in Thailand, connecting them from the Thai-Myanmar border to the Muslim-majority regions in Southern Thailand, across the border from Malaysia. Very few of the Rohingya refugees stayed in Mae Sot and joined local Muslims in trading everything from second-hand cars, and teakwood to gems in local markets. But if at any point they are arrested, Thai authorities would likely deport them on grounds that they had crossed the border illegally.

The exiles of the 'Spring Revolution' were in a relatively safer place than other refugees in Thailand. Facing international pressure, the Thai authorities agreed to not send dissidents who fled Myanmar back.[2] Over two years, the tens of thousands of resettled Burmese dissidents constructed an extensive safety net for themselves—built by the Myanmar government-in-exile (NUG, National Unity Government of Myanmar)[3], grassroots civil society organizations, international NGOs with programs focusing on Myanmar, and the UNHCR. News and funding circulate within this network so that when a member of the community faces difficulties, the community can help them out.

The twin sisters were rescued by this safety net, just a day after they were detained.

For Thein Tun, also a Yangon native, the journey of exile to Mae Sot was much shorter as he departed from the Karen State, right across the border. Like many, Thein Tun joined the People's Defense Force (PDF) after the coup and began training under the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) in the jungle camps near the Thai border. After his son was born, however, he quit the PDF and went into hiding in the Karen jungle.

In February 2022, he decided to leave Karen State with his family. He was luckier than the twin sisters as he did not run into the police. However, he didn't have any assistance on his journey. He had to walk across the border with his wife and child, together with some 30 Rohingya refugees and Burmese migrant workers.

While on the journey, he discovered that the refugees and migrant workers were not heading for the same destination as the Burmese revolutionaries. The Rohingyas were heading to Malaysia; some migrant workers wanted to work in garment factories in Mae Sot, and others hid in cargo trucks to travel to the Thai industrial port city of Mahachai, where the seafood industry thrives on undocumented Burmese migrant labor.

For many exiles of the Spring Revolution, however, their memories trace back to the same point in time and space: December 15th, 2021, at Lay Kay Kaw, Myawaddy township, the border town across from Thailand, where the largest and riskiest wave of exile took place since the coup in 2021.

Lay Kay Kaw was once known as the 'town of peace.' It was built with the support of Nippon Foundation of Japan during the 2015 democratic transition after the military and the KNU(Karen National Union) signed a ceasefire in 2012. The town was meant to provide accommodation for Karen people who had been displaced by the decades-long conflict. Before the February coup of 2021, there were more than 4,000 Karen villagers in the town.

After the 2021 coup, the town became a 'liberated zone' for the Burmese activists. Thousands of young protesters came to this town with the protection of the KNU as they fled junta rule. Most of them were there to join the People's Defense Force (PDF) as guerilla fighters, responding to the rallying call of the NUG. The town became a supply station and transit stop for the Ethnic Armed Organizations training in the jungles. There were also dissidents, journalists, and former representatives of the NLD (National League for Democracy) government, who came to Lay Kay Kaw for temporary refuge to rest and recuperate.

For the parents and brother of Saw Marner, a Karen revolutionary youth, this 'town of peace' has been home since construction finished in 2015. Like many Karen villagers, they welcomed the protesters and dissidents who arrived from Lower Burma after the 2021 coup. Almost every villager had a protester in their homes before the military's final assault; some even rented their Japanese-built houses in town to the urban middle-class visitors and moved into hastily constructed shacks in the field.

Ko Tin Maung was once an engineer in the Thilawa Special Economic Zone in southern Yangon. He was one of the first people to flee to the Karen jungles after the coup. After two months of military training, he realized that he wasn't suited for frontline work, so he set up a school and a library in Lay Kay Kaw for local children. At first, only 4 children attended the school; this number rose to more than 70 just before they had to flee again. Aside from academic courses, he also led the children in physical exercises. This was his fondest memory since the coup. He sent me a couple of videos of him playing games with the children. "I miss my kids. Lay Kay Kaw was like a utopia."

The school Ko Tin Maung founded in Lay Kay Kaw before it was bombed. Photo provided by interviewees.

Mg Saint is an experienced anarchist activist from Yangon. After the coup, he worked with the General Strike Committee. Due to his decade-long engagement in social movements, however, he was quickly identified as a 'fugitive' and broadcasted as a wanted criminal on military-controlled TV stations. They accused him of killing a soldier. His home in Yangon was raided by the military, and his wife and kids went into hiding with the help of friends in Yangon. He and his comrades at the General Strike Committee fled into the Karen jungles.

Everything came to an end just a month after Mg Saint settled in Lay Kay Kaw. The military assault started on December 15th, 2021. The 'town of peace' slowly turned into a market for arms dealing as it accommodated too many guerrilla fighters—this drew the military's attention.

At first, the villagers did their best to cover for the protesters and dissidents. However, the military soon began indiscriminate air raids. Tens of thousands of people in this town dispersed in an instant. People went on their paths to exile; some elderly people and children from the village passed from the bombings as they couldn't make it out in time.

The military went after the exiles as they went on the run—they were dispersed again and again on their journeys. There was no phone service along the border, which meant that a lot of people lost contact with each other on the run. Ko Tin Maung remembered a friend who lost track of his wife and three children while on the run; the youngest of the three was just 4 years old. He was worried that they wouldn't survive in this active war zone.

Mg Saint and his comrades resting in their journey of exile from Lay Kay Kaw after it was bombed. Photo provided by interviewees.

There were refugee camps and villages on both banks of the Moei River—these were long-term accommodations for the Karen people displaced by war. Saw Marner's parents and brother settled in a village next to the Moei River as Karen refugees. But the protesters from Lower Burma had to constantly cross the river and back. Local villagers would ask them to leave just as they were getting settled, as their presence would attract military drone strikes. But when they went to the Thai side, they would either be forced by Thai border forces back to Myanmar, or find refugee camps that refused to take them in.

"Many camps were involved with the underground arms dealing market. We do not know which side they're on, or if they supply weapons to the junta or their allied Ethnic Armed Organizations."[4] Mg Saint said with a bitter smile. "We have not seen a single UNHCR welcome sign that they claim to have installed."

After more than 10 days on the road, Ko Tin Maung and his friend found an appropriate border-crossing location. His friend managed to get in contact with his wife when they arrived in Mae Sot. She thanked Ko Tin Maung for setting up the school in Lay Kay Kaw and helping the children exercise—they would not have been able to finish the journey with her otherwise.

Just as they settled down at a camp next to the Moei River, Saw Marner's mom passed away. They were not able to hold a funeral for her. A couple of months later, Saw Marner's brother sneaked back into Lay Kay Kaw, as he wanted to take one last look at the house they hurriedly fled from. He found that the house was plundered clean—all the furniture and appliances were gone. A few months later, the 'town of peace' was under complete military occupation. The project that used to symbolize peace was now booty for the military after their sudden assault.

Saw Marner's brother finds their old home pillaged clean by the military after he snuck back to Lay Kay Kaw to see the house again. Photo provided by interviewees.

On my Google Maps app, the exiles swiped across satellite maps and terrain maps; as the pins fell on jungle hidings, farms and camps on river banks, on where smugglers dropped migrants off and where Ethnic Armed Organizations operated checkpoints; on the scattered loosely guarded spots on the border that one could cross with ease. Gradually, the border became more and more concrete in my mind. Cut by these paths of exile, the rugged border along the Moei River in my Google Maps app began to fall into fragments, broken down into patches of the exile reality.

[2] Translator's Note: One of the sources of international pressure is the inclusion of the BURMA Act in the U.S. National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023, which was signed into law by President Biden in December 2022. The bill authorizes the Department of State and U.S. Agency for International Development activities in Burma and the surrounding region to support pro-democracy activists, humanitarian assistance and reconciliation efforts.

[3] Translator's Note: The National Unity Government of Myanmar (NUG) was formed after the 2021 coup d'etat by members of the National League for Democracy (NLD), Ethnic Armed Organizations, and various other minor parties. It is a government-in-exile that currently operates from both within and outside of Myanmar. It has an affiliated military wing known as the "People's Defense Force" (PDF). For the purposes of this translation, the acronyms 'NUG', 'NLD', and 'PDF' will be used where appropriate.

[4] Translator's Note: "Ethnic Armed Organizations", or EAOs, are organizations that claim to represent a particular ethnic identity and have an armed wing in Myanmar. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_armed_organisations_in_Myanmar

The Town of Exiles

As Ko Maung, a labor activist from Yangon, drove me to a border black market for shopping, he got a call that asked him to pick up guerilla fighters coming over to Mae Sot from the jungle on the other side of the border, who were traveling here to fix their teeth. He was active in international labor movement networks for a long time. After fleeing to Mae Sot, he started researching Burmese migrant workers for INGOs and provided supplies for comrades in the Burmese jungles across the border.

Exiles fleeing Lay Kay Kaw to resettle in Mae Sot face an arduous journey; but for those who were already resettled in Mae Sot, crossing the border (irregularly) was a daily practice. The guerilla fighters in the jungle often came to Mae Sot for healthcare, entertainment, or just a sense of 'normal life' that they couldn't find on the battlefield. Walking in the markets of Mae Sot, you can see an amazing variety of clothes for different ethnic groups in Myanmar—and in between these shops, there are stores selling military uniforms. Combinations like this constitute "everydayness" here.

The border situation worsened after the shooting at the Siam Paragon Mall in Bangkok at the start of October 2023—traces of evidence suggest that the gunman was able to purchase a weapon thanks to an active illegal arms dealing market in Thailand, fueled by the ongoing war in the Karen state jungle that borders Thailand. It took more time for people to locate the loosely guarded spots on the border to cross.

A store selling military clothing in the streets of Mae Sot, with a Ben Tau Kong temple Lunar New Year banner hanging on top. Photo by Wu Qin. 

It has been almost three years since the February 2021 coup—Myanmar has drawn very little attention from the international press, but the struggle never stopped. In the absence of international attention, the revolution took place on the Internet and on the ground, with comprehensive strategies of mobilization and organization.

Lacking arms supplies from the international community, the ground troops of the 'Spring Revolution' relied on the support of Ethnic Armed Organizations as well as DIY drones. These drone parts and components were delivered from Mae Sot; the guerrilla fighters in the jungle would then assemble them. A guerrilla fighter friend of Ko Maung is an engineer responsible for assembling drones in one brigade in the jungle. Prior to the coup, he liked to fly drones for aerial photography—he never thought that this skill would come in handy now.

After the guerrilla soldiers finished dental treatment, Ko Maung drove us to the logistics storage to pick up batteries for agricultural drones. They transported the packages to the safe house, opening each one to inspect their contents, then resealing them in other disguised boxes, before sending them off to the border for the jungles on the other side. After the shooting in Bangkok, logistics management on the border became increasingly strict as well as border crossing. The Karen youth Saw Marner told me that his father and brother were arrested by the Thai police not long ago, for transporting drone parts from Mae Sot to the jungle, and were to be detained for 80 days.

There were real sacrifices in the war of resistance. Saw Marner sent me a picture from the jungle: one of his Karen friends on the battlefield had just lost a leg. He said with feigned ease: "It's like his family is cursed. Both his dad and grandpa lost a leg each in different wars since the independence of Myanmar."

After the aerial raid in Lay Kay Kaw at the end of 2021, 'Pink', a Burmese Muslim from Yangon, never got a hold of her boyfriend who went Lay Kay Kaw to join the PDF. Months later, after the military bombed the "town of peace", she heard from his fellow soldiers that he had died.

I met 'Pink' in February 2023 at Chiang Mai. Despite being a Muslim, she did not pray and believed in Marxism. Repressing her emotions, she narrated her story in broken English. "How I wish that the reason he's gone is that he had a change of heart and wanted to cut me off and that his friends were lying to me for him." It's been a year since her boyfriend 'disappeared', but she never accepted his death.

'Friday' was the only female guerilla fighter I knew. She was a singer from Mandalay, looked thin and pallid, alongside her three children, when I met her at the bar at which we agreed to meet in Mae Sot. She looked no more than 20-something years old; the oldest child next to her looked 6 or 7 years old. I asked her if they were all her children. She replied, "They are the children of my comrades; I adopted 5 of them." The other soldiers died in the revolution, one after another, from torture to death by the military, or accidental explosions, or disease in the jungle. Eventually, she took their children across the border and came to Mae Sot. "I've considered suicide many times. You don't know how taunting survivor's guilt can be," she said. She eventually persevered for the children; she is now working in a migrant school for the displaced Burmese children on the border.

'Friday' brought me to the fields on the border, and pointed toward a faraway spot under the clouds, and told me that was Lay Kay Kaw. Photo by Wu Qin.

I could sometimes hear the faint sounds of gunfire in the quiet nights in Mae Sot, reminding me that this peaceful little town and that jungle of war existed in the same world.

Those who came to Mae Sot before the 2021 coup could recall when there was only one bar there, with hardly any Burmese urban youths in modern and fashionable clothes. There are more than 10 bars today in Mae Sot, and Burmese-owned restaurants and tea shops everywhere. The arrival of tens of thousands of Burmese urban youths contributed to an unprecedented economic boom in this small town, turning it almost into a sizable city. That said, most roads in Mae Sot were still rugged; you could even be chased down by wild dogs when going out at night. But you can also see 7-Elevens, Robinson Mall, cafés, and UNHCR hotels set up to house those who have been recognized by the UN agency as political refugees and are in transit on their way to a third country for asylum.

The revolution is an omnipresent topic within the Burmese exile community in Mae Sot. Fleeing the country did not mean fleeing the revolution. The revolution continued, within Myanmar and in exile communities abroad.

In Myanmar, almost half of all public officials resigned in support of the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM); the military was forced to hire people who had not been trained or educated for professional positions, such as doctors, teachers, and engineers. People formed online platforms for oversight, mobilizing domestic and international boycott campaigns against military-operated food, energy, and banking industries. The call for "social punishment" attracted much attention and participation—on Facebook and other social media platforms, people surveilled, exposed, and publicly humiliated individuals linked to the military, as well as public officials who failed to participate in the CDM. Simultaneously, several revolutionary organizations established their own YouTube channels; those who could not participate in the revolution themselves could click on the advertisements on these channels, which would in turn generate income for these organizations.

A "People's Defense Force" guerilla fighter who lost a leg, in a rehearsal of a performance raising money for the revolution. Photo by Wu Qin.

I met Tin Hla, a consultant for the NUG and a Myanmar researcher, in a restaurant frequented by political figures in exile. He kept his voice low even in the empty restaurant, as he drew illustrations introducing different actors in the revolution, NUG (National Unity Government), NUCC (National Unity Consultative Council) , and various Ethnic Armed Organizations participating in the revolution. He came from an upper-middle-class family in Yangon and completed a self-funded postgraduate degree in the UK. After fleeing to Mae Sot, he wrote reports on Myanmar for an American organization while doing consulting work for the NUG.

Following the arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi and other core members of the National League for Democracy (NLD) on the day of the coup, the National Unity Government was formed by former NLD representatives, representatives of different Ethnic Armed Organizations, and pro-democracy activists, competing with the junta for legitimacy on the international stage.

The NUG abolished the 2008 Constitution of Myanmar; this was a constitution crafted during the military-directed democratic transition. While the Constitution made the first democratic election in Myanmar possible, it also required 25% military representation in both houses of the parliament, allowing the military to defend the old order within a parliamentary framework. For three years since the coup, the NUG has been working on creating a new Federal Democracy Charter, consulting with various Ethnic Armed Organizations.

As we talked, a group of well-dressed, middle-aged Burmese men walked into the restaurant and headed straight to the private room in the restaurant. Tin Hla briefly exchanged greetings with one of the men when he passed by us. He told me that the man he talked to is a former NLD representative, and many of those attending the meeting are members of the NUG.

Despite all being part of the community of Burmese exiles, different Burmese youths lived in very different worlds and realities. Burmese exiles who spoke fluent English and had college degrees like Tin Hla were active in networks facilitated by UN and INGOs. These organizations work to link the discourses of gender, ethnicity, labor, and refugees in Mae Sot to the international community. Most INGOs previously stationed in Myanmar moved to Thailand after the coup. Most Westerners chose to live in Chiang Mai, only occasionally traveling to Mae Sot for frontline news. Burmese people who secured jobs in these international organizations or civil society organizations funded by Western foundations had access to work permits. Most of them moved to Chiang Mai. The organizations with more emphasis on grassroots engagement mostly stayed in Mae Sot, either by choice or by necessity.

Ko Maung also worked for various INGOs, but he has grown wary of the language and ecology of these organizations. "Many of their agenda had been preset from a distance with Western worldviews and priorities. Even many civil society organizations had to write impracticable proposals just to get funding. Most people in this system were busy producing discourse and competing for the ownership of truth."

In this sense, INGO work in Mae Sot is still oriented toward an international audience, with the goal of producing presentable results. The INGO ecology breaks down frontline realities to spectacles of suffering, distributing them into different categories according to Western concerns such as human rights, gender, ethnicity, labor and refugees. By depoliticizing the dilemma of the Myanmar exiles in Mae Sot in a game of discourse-production, the INGO ecology effectively perpetuate the concrete, yet 'tolerable' hardships that the exiles faced, without providing a pathway to alleviate their suffering. Chiang Mai was one such place that produced the spectacle of suffering. Therefore, he chose to stay in Mae Sot to stay grounded in the frontline.

At a Chiang Mai University-hosted conference on Myanmar, a Burmese artist told the crowd, "We are well-educated, and we bring knowledge and resources to Thailand. The country should not treat us like Burmese migrant workers." After I told Ko Maung about the artist's remarks, as a labor activist, he did not seem surprised. "This is a very common sentiment for exiled elites living in Chiang Mai. Those in Mae Sot live in a much crueler reality."

Many Burmese youths in Mae Sot have complicated feelings about those who moved to Chiang Mai. As Kan Kaung, a Yangon native now living in Mae Sot told me, "Suffering is the most essential component of a revolution. Most of us who stay here are impoverished. The exiles who receive high salaries from international organizations are not in the same revolution as those who work factory jobs to survive. They basically live like white people." After the revolution started, he left his two apartments in Yangon and everything he had, before crossing the border into Thailand. He coordinated logistics and supplies in the jungle, making a round-trip across the border every week. His wife worked as an accountant before the revolution. Now, she works at a hair salon in Mae Sot from 7 am to 8 pm every day, with only one day off every month, earning only $150 per month.

Here, the line dividing highly-educated revolutionary youths and migrant labor seeking better opportunities is gradually fading away—indeed, the distinction between 'immigrant' and 'refugee' in this town has always been arbitrary at best.

As the horizon of the revolution seemed like it extended infinitely into the future, survival became the most important problem that exiles had to tackle. International funding proved insufficient to solve the problem of unemployment within the exile community. As the funds pass through Chiang Mai, there is little left as they arrive at Mae Sot. There are many well-educated people in the tens of thousands of exiles arriving in Thailand—only a few can find jobs in organizations working on Myanmar issues. The vast majority of exiles became cheap, expendable labor in the service and manufacturing industries on the border. They were paid far below the Thai minimum wage, having to seek 'flexible employment' as their lack of legal status subjected them to the exploitative system of labor within 'border capitalism'.

At the same time, migrant workers continued to pour in as the economy collapsed in Myanmar, compounded by the coup, political instability, general strikes, Western divestment, and the paralysis of the financial system. The family members of migrant workers who stayed in Myanmar found themselves out of a job; impoverishment and deprivation meant that the laboring masses had just as much grievance against the junta as the educated exiles of the 'Spring Revolution'.

Most ordinary Burmese people, including migrant workers and small business owners, wanted Aung San Suu Kyi to return and restore Myanmar to a pre-2021 coup normality. The NUG also saved a spot for Aung San Suu Kyi in the new structures of power that they have devised since the coup. However, the younger generation, having witnessed and experienced frequent ethnic cleansing and unresolved armed conflicts of minority ethnic groups in Upper Burma in the last democratic transition, lost faith in Aung San Suu Kyi—because for them, there never was a 'normality' to return to.

The Fog of "Democracy"

Whenever I spoke of "the coup", Mg Saint, the activist from Yangon, would always slyly retort, "Which one?" Of course, he knew that I was referring to the one in February 2021, but he always reminded me that the contemporary history of Myanmar is made up of one military coup after another, one struggle for democracy after another.

The Burmese historian Than Myint-U wrote at the conclusion of his 2019 work, The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century, "Three years before, when the National League for Democracy won its landslide election victory, some Burmese analysts had guessed that its government wouldn't last: differences with the generals would come to a head and there would be an army takeover. But nothing of the sort happened. There was mutual distrust and at times rising tension. But at the end of the day, the former political prisoners and their erstwhile captors had found a way to work together." Than Myint-U is the grandson of U Thant, the former secretary general of the UN.

But just two years later, the military chased Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD out of the political scene.

Mg Saint (left) in an anti-coup flash mob protest after the 2021 coup d'etat. Photo provided by interviewees.

Myanmar's history as a modern state unfolded almost solely as a binary opposition of democratic struggles and military dictatorships. A self-sacrificing goddess of democracy as she leads a people that needs to be saved stood against an arbitrary, autocratic, and evil general. The lines of justice were clearly drawn, formed by one dramatic historical moment after another:

In 1962, General Ne Win overthrew the first democratic government in Myanmar in a coup. In 1988, the military took over the state after repressing the "8888 democracy movement." In 2010, the NLD became a legal political party following the junta's active concession of power, marking the end of a half-century-long military dictatorship. In 2015, the NLD won by a landslide in the first free and fair election in Myanmar in decades. Just 10 years later, however, the "democratic transition" was brutally crushed under the watch of the international community.

The young people who were educated in the decade of the democratic transition constitute the first and only generation since Myanmar's independence to be truly connected with the world. Alongside the democratic transition came the internet and the popularization of smartphones. Overseas investors and INGOs flocked to Myanmar, giving rise to an unprecedented level of exchange and interaction between the Burmese people and the international community. Almost every young person I interviewed spoke fluent English; this was also a legacy of the democratic transition.

The largest anti-junta demonstration since Myanmar's independence erupted on Aug 8, 1988, in Yangon, known as the "8888" pro-democracy movement. Aung San Suu Kyi, who lived in Oxford at the time, happened to catch the historic movement when visiting her sick mother in Myanmar. She made a speech firmly calling for democracy as the daughter of General Aung San, the legendary founding father of modern Myanmar. This was her introduction to Myanmar's historical stage. The "8888" pro-democracy movement ended with brutal military repression and false promises of democratic elections. In the meantime, isolationist "Burmese socialism" transitioned into predatory development in post-1988 Myanmar.

Mg Saint traveled to Mae Sot from Yangon for the first time in 2009, when he was 22 years old, two years after the "saffron revolution." There were a lot of Burmese people in Mae Sot at the time: some arrived after the "saffron revolution," and others arrived after 1988 and stayed. Mg Saint's parents were of the "8888" generation. He was always suspicious of the junta's education since childhood, and eventually dropped out of college at the age of 20. The "saffron revolution" of 2007 was the first time he took to the streets. Named after the color of the robes worn by monks, the movement attracted much attention from Western media—the image of the monk protesting the junta quickly came to define the Western understanding of the movement. This was the first time Mg Saint saw someone killed by the military on the street. It was also the start of his life as an activist. Since then, he wanted to acquire a firmer grasp of politics, so he came to Mae Sot and studied English and politics at a British-founded educational institution.

However, just as Than Myint-U points out, the "democracy vs dictatorship" narrative, symbolized by Aung San Suu Kyi's opposition to the junta, not only obscured existing problems; it created more problems for the movement. The narrative implies that the West needed to save the 'goddess of democracy' from the barbaric and arbitrary generals of the Orient. Consequently, with every repressed democratic movement came punitive sanctions imposed by Western states. Every house arrest and every detention placed on Aung San Suu Kyi triggered stricter sanctions. Myanmar thus became one of the poorest countries in Asia since the 1990s. The sanctions led by the UK and the US lasted for a generation; their severity even exceeded sanctions against North Korea at various points.

As of today, there are around three to four million Burmese people working in Thailand despite abhorrent labor conditions, due to domestic economic woes.

Than Myint-U was born in New York. He received an elite education in the West and worked in UN peacekeeping operations. Since the 1988 pro-democracy movement, he advocated for Myanmar using his connections and provided policy advice for international decision-makers. After the military crushed the 1988 movement, Than Myint-U supported the West in imposing the harshest sanctions against the junta. However, in the 1990s, he felt increasingly uneasy about sanctions, as it became apparent that Western sanctions had failed to curb the excesses of the junta; instead, it caused a humanitarian crisis in Myanmar's lower classes.

Facing Western sanctions, the junta turned to a strategy of predatory development, supported by China's marketization in the 1990s. A minority attained wealth by becoming military cronies, working with highland militias in resource extractions, or engaging in other illegal trades. The illicit drug trade in Upper Burma and real estate development in Lower Burma complemented each other, as farmers lost their land and became migrant workers. The economic inequality at this point in Myanmar could even parallel conditions in colonial Burma.

Following the detention of Aung San Suu Kyi in 2003, the Bush administration imposed a series of sanctions of unprecedented severity. This devastated the budding manufacturing industry in Myanmar. At least 200,000 young female workers lost their jobs overnight and had to seek employment in the neighboring countries. International sanctions were not limited to investment or trade; they restricted international developmental aid as well. With these sanctions came wave after wave of humanitarian crises—the medical and educational systems were almost paralyzed in the 2000s.

These humanitarian crises, however, cannot really be subsumed into the "democracy vs dictatorship" binary narrative. Than Myint-U's, and any other voices calling for aid in Myanmar were ignored or sometimes even condemned. The opposition always placed 'the political' as the top priority issue; they considered 'democracy', represented by elections, to be the only solution for the crisis in Myanmar.

In 2015, the savior that the people yearned for had arrived; everyone thought that the future they prayed for was finally here. For the West, Aung San Suu Kyi was a boost for the project of global democracy promotion after the disastrous end of the Arab Spring. The middle class in Yangon started to expand; innovative entrepreneurs who were not cronies of the regime emerged; civil society grew more powerful; exiled intellectuals returned to the country in hopes of working for the NLD.

Just five years later, however, Aung San Suu Kyi's image started to change for many progressive youths. In 2009, Mg Saint participated in a sit-in protest at the gate of the prison where Aung San Suu Kyi was detained. Just before the election in 2020, however, he started boycotting the election with the same friends that he went to the protest with. "Over the past five years, we have seen how Aung San Suu Kyi became part of the system of power when she arrived at its very top. There is no essential difference between her and the junta." The exiled intellectuals who returned to Myanmar were not given significant positions; technical bureaucrats who worked for the first military-led civil government during the democratic transition were removed in power struggles. The new government gave important positions to former political prisoners of the NLD; their moral capital obscured the fact that they had no experience in governance.

As a labor activist, Ko Maung also boycotted the 2020 election, straining his relationship with his family. In his view, the NLD's five years in power had done little more than change Myanmar from the military crony capitalism of the 1990s to a neoliberal economy driven by global capital, profiting from the absence of Western sanctions. The underclasses remained impoverished and neglected; welfare programs for the poor had not followed the steps of reform. As Campbell and other scholars noted, despite promises by the transitional government to provide jobs through foreign-funded urban manufacturing, the most significant source of newfound economic growth and foreign currency inflow were actually the less labor-intensive industries of fossil fuel and natural gas extraction. Consequently, the transitional economy failed to create more jobs than it displaced by appropriating agricultural land. This meant that rural residents continued to emigrate on a mass scale as they sought supplementary income from outside the country.

As Ko Maung says, "Myanmar has always needed a 'social revolution' that addresses the question of redistribution." The various 'democratic revolutions' since 1988, however, placed their emphasis on political reform.

After the 2021 coup, foreign investors quickly left Myanmar. American sanctions on Myanmar's national bank had done little damage to the military, as the military managed to find loopholes to work around the sanctions. The sanctions hit entrepreneurs and ordinary people with no military connections the hardest. The garment industry that many in Myanmar relied on had not yet recovered from international sanctions brought by the 2017 Rohingya crisis or the pandemic in 2020; with the coup, the industry found itself in a more precarious position than ever before.

A Muslim cemetery in Mae Sot. Photo by Wu Qin. 

The Muslim "Outsider"

With the eruption of a new round of Israel's war on Gazan October 2023, I witnessed a renewed sense of ethnic division in Mae Sot. Local muslims prayed for Palestine in almost every mosque; the Islamic Association also began organizing donation campaigns for people in Gaza. Simultaneously, I have heard of Christian pastors from Karen-majority Christian churches openly supporting Israel.

The Burmese exile community on the border also became increasingly restless. Kyaw Swar U, a Muslim 'Spring Revolution' exile from Moulmein, Myanmar, told me that since October 7th, he witnessed a rising sense of Bamar Islamophobia within previously allied exile communities. In February 2021, Bamar activists and protesters saw military troops entering Yangon, brutally repressing the nonviolent movement that called for restoring the democratically elected government. These troops were the same ones deployed to conduct ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya people. For Bamar activists, this was a moment of collective reflection. They reflected upon their silence when they saw the junta's genocidal acts against the Rohingya people. Many demonstrated in support of Aung San Suu Kyi when she defended Myanmar's military against genocide allegations at the ICJ (International Court of Justice), in hopes of protecting the hard-won democratic regime. They started to express guilt for their complicity on social media after the coup. In the exile community in Mae Sot, they constantly apologized to every Muslim in the 'Spring Revolution' community.

However, this time around, the Muslim activists in exile discovered with frustration that there were Burmese 'revolutionary comrades' who began to claim that 'all Muslims are terrorists.' Ko MK, a leftist youth in the exile community, did not have a strong sense of his Muslim identity; but this time, he could not repress his anger either. "Many Bamar people in the exile community even compared themselves to Jews, and the Palestinians to Rohingyas, claiming that Israel is the promised land of the Jews, just like how Myanmar is the land for the indigenous Burmese, and that the 'kalar' should leave."

"Kalar" means "foreigner" in Burmese—an ambiguous ethnic category that refers to people of South Asian appearance, particularly Muslims.

Jumah in Nurul, the largest mosque in Mae Sot. Photo by Wu Qin. 

The binary distinction between "Indigenous" (taing-yintha) and "foreigners" (kalar) is a remnant of the colonial era; contemporary Burmese ethnonationalism continues to uphold this logic of 'blood and soil', creating a difficult politics of identity in today's Myanmar. Burma was a province of British India in the colonial era, and millions of people migrated from the Indian subcontinent to Burma during colonial rule. Because Burmese and Indian people are distinct in terms of appearance and culture, the colonizers imposed primary categories of "indigenous" and "foreigners" on the different ethnicities in Burma to facilitate population management. When the British colonial administrators separated Burma from British India in 1937, Indians made up half of the population in Yangon, of which half were Muslims. Burmese nationalism spawned by the anticolonial independence movement saw Muslims as a threat to Burmese Buddhists.

Before the Rohingya refugee crisis, most Burmese people in Lower Burma had never heard of the name "Rohingya." This was the name that the Rohingya people used to refer to themselves, meaning "indigenous people of the Rakhine state." For most Burmese people, however, they were known as "Bengali" or "Arakan Muslims"—the name "Arakan" being a historical name for the Rakhine State, a state in Myanmar on the country's Western coast, bordering Bangladesh to the Northwest. They were all seen as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh to Myanmar. The Burma Citizenship Law of 1982 uses 'ethnic nativity' as the firm foundation for citizenship—Rohingyas are not included in this conception of the Burmese nation.[5] Muslims of different ethnic origins also face difficulties in acquiring Burmese citizenship. They came from different places across South Asia, Western Asia and China; they converted or migrated across different generations. Their identities fall outside of the binary of "native" vs "foreigner" that the Citizenship Law uses as its framework.

I saw Soe Nay U and Kyaw Swar U in Mae Sot's largest mosque on a Jum'ah. They were both Muslim activists and exiles of the 'Spring Revolution' in Mae Sot. Soe Nay U was an Islamic scholar at a local Muslim educational institution in Mandalay. Kyaw Swar U, with a South Asian appearance, was Soe Nay U's student; both of them used to work for the NLD. Soe Nay U is a Burmese Muslim, or at least according to his mother's ID card. When it was his turn to apply for an ID card, however, the application was never approved. Eventually, the Ministry of Immigration and Population added the word 'Indian' next to 'Bamar' as they finally issued his ID. "This was to remind me that I had the blood of 'kalar' in me." On Kyaw Swar U's ID card, he is identified as Bamar, Indian, Pakistani, and Bengali.

The Muslim neighborhoods in Mae Sot. Photo by Wu Qin.

They were both supporters of Aung San Suu Kyi, and both faced violence from extremist Burmese Buddhists. They both believed that electoral democracy would solve all the problems Myanmar faced, until Aung San Suu Kyi stood in defense of the military's genocide of the Rohingya people at the International Court of Justice on December 19, 2019. Soe Nay U told me that the NLD called him that day, asking him to wear traditional Muslim attire and attend a rally to support Aung San Suu Kyi as a 'Muslim representative.' "They never liked to see us in Muslim clothing. They always said that since we are in an era of ethnic conflicts, they will not be responsible if anything happens when we wear Muslim clothes in public."

For Waso and Pyartho, Aung San Suu Kyi was an idol since childhood. They witnessed their father being arrested by the military when they were young; they saw him return a month later, having lost all his teeth. This was the origin of their hatred toward the junta. Their father was a Muslim author from the Shan State who lived in Yangon. He was arrested for writing a novel about a childhood friend who participated in the guerrilla forces in the "8888" pro-democracy movement. However, the twin sisters did not vote for Aung San Suu Kyi in the 2020 elections. As Muslims, they were consciously aware that Aung San Suu Kyi shares the same Burmese chauvinism as the military—even the "self-sacrificial" moral capital that she uses to mobilize pro-democracy movements is unmistakably Buddhist. Ethnic minorities have never been included in the 'project of democracy'; not to mention the Rohingyas who were not even accepted as a minority group in Myanmar, depriving them of Myanmar citizenship.

The simplistic "democracy versus dictatorship" binary obscures complex tensions in ethnic politics in Myanmar. Prior to the military's ethnic cleansing operations against the Rohingya people, Rakhine Buddhists had already spontaneously initiated countless acts of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya people; Burmese Buddhist extremists have conducted attacks on Muslim communities across the country. As Than Myint-U pointed out, the democratic transition actually amplified the spread of toxic ethnonationalism, as civil society organizations, political parties, business communities, and Ethnic Armed Organizations all mobilized for democracy by appealing to various ethnic identities. It is not surprising that the crisis of ethnic conflict exploded immediately after the democratic transition.

A Burmese restaurant in the Burmese market, at the suburbs of Bangkok, with portraits of Aung San Suu Kyi everywhere. Photo by Wu Qin. 

For twenty years or more, Aung San Suu Kyi had been portrayed by the West as an enchanting symbol of global democratic values in the distant Orient. The West expected her alone to tackle ethnic problems that were a consequence of colonial rule. She instantly fell off the pedestal the moment she demonstrated that she could not deliver on this impossible task. The "goddess of Oriental democracy" was no longer faultless following the Rohingya crisis in 2017; the Burmese people were no longer the innocent people who stood with the international community in resisting the junta. They have apparently revealed the ugly flip side of their ideology, as they stood behind Aung San Suu Kyi in defending the junta's crimes of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya people. The simplistic binary of the democratic aspirations of an innocent people contra the evils of the junta was now bankrupt. Consequently, the Western establishment showed less enthusiasm for the project of democracy in Myanmar following the 2021 coup.

After the 2021 coup, Myanmar's civil society places all the blame of the past decade of ethnic violence on the junta—the unresolved issues of bloodline and belonging left by colonialism are seen merely as the result of the junta dictatorship.Consequently, to this day, in the Bamar-centric narrative, all ethnic groups can once again stand united as victims on a common front , until the revolution attains victory. Taking back democracy has once again become the apparent panacea for Burmese politics in the eyes of the Bamar-centric leadership of the NUG and many of their supporters, a solution that they seem to believe will mend the trauma of ethnic violence in an instant.

The twin sisters told me that as Muslims who fled to Thailand to participate in the Spring Revolution, they thought the fate of the nation was more important than the fate of their own ethnic group. They included themselves in the common identity of "the people of Myanmar" as they fight for the Myanmar revolution. However, as Muslims, they never trusted the Bamar expression of guilt on their complicity with ethnic violence following the coup. "Their repentance over the Rohingya genocide is really just a façade to win the support of the international community. Many Bamar activists sympathized with Israel in its genocidal operations in Gaza precisely because they wanted to win the support of the Western establishment with the U.S. at its core."

Will Islamophobia and Burmese chauvinism revive when the revolution is won and order is restored? Soe Nay U was optimistic; he believed that this revolution could bring about a better democracy through a new Constitution. Kyaw Swar U was more pessimistic: "Even if we manage to restore democracy, ethnic hatred won't just disappear; the majority's defensiveness and discrimination toward minorities will still be there."

An impromptu mosque in Mae Sot. Photo by Wu Qin. 

Ko MK told me that the vast majority of Muslims in Lower Burma did not believe the "Spring Revolution" concerned them at all. "They hated the junta, but most of them believed that the revolution is a struggle between the Bamar people and the junta. The majority of Muslims are more concerned with Palestine than political issues in Myanmar."

The Muslims in Mae Sot find themselves in a similar position. Although most of them moved to Mae Sot from Myanmar, they do not identify with the 'common struggle' of the 'Burmese people'. For the most part, they remained invisible for most Burmese revolutionary exiles in Mae Sot; very few Bamar exiles would visit the Muslim neighbourhood here. Nevertheless, some Muslim exiles would try to earn a position in the trading companies directed by local Muslims to earn a living.

The Muslims who were already pious in Myanmar would be more welcomed, but the rebellious Muslim youths from the large cities would often face more significant challenges. "When we were in Myanmar, the 'Burmese' (referring both to the whole people of Myanmar and the ethnic Bamar people) discriminated against us Muslims. When we come here, the local Muslims discriminate against 'Burmese' people, and are unwilling to help us." The Muslim rapper from Meiktila, Mandalay told me with some frustration that he was repeatedly rejected by local Muslim trading companies because he had tattooed arms. He had to temporarily flee to Malaysia during the 2013 anti-Muslim riots in Meiktila. However, when he arrived at Mae Sot as an exiled activist, he became the 'Burmese,' excluded by local Muslims. The meaning of the word "Burmese" changed once and again in his storytelling: sometimes referring to "us", and sometimes referring to "them" – there is a discreet but ongoing flow of identity cognition and recognition.

Compared to other ethnic groups, however, the Muslim "Spring Revolution" exiles tend to feel more favorable toward Mae Sot. They felt that at least symbolically, they could rely on the powerful Muslim presence in this town. Ko MK is not religious, but he started growing a beard when he arrived at Mae Sot. With his South Asian look, his face became a "passbook" for dealing with local police. Soe Nay U and Kyaw Swar U liked to wear traditional Muslim robes on the streets here: this would be unimaginable in Myanmar. They no longer needed to feel shame for their Muslim identity.

Kyaw Swar U said with some joy, "Even if we were arrested now, it would not be because we are Muslims; it would be because of our status as undocumented immigrants. People of every ethnicity from Myanmar are the same in Mae Sot. We are all kalar (foreigners)."

The Muslim neighborhoods. Photo by Wu Qin.

I sat with Joe in Mae Sot's first bar at the end of October. Halloween was approaching; you could see pumpkins and ghost apparels everywhere. It almost felt like a different space-time altogether. Joe was from London. He moved to Mae Sot not long after the coup, and now works at the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma), an organization created by Myanmar's exiles of 1988.

In the Halloween atmosphere that felt quite anachronistic in this border town, he told me a Burmese "ghost story":

One of his Burmese friends in Yangon went to the Karen jungle after the 2021 coup. The friend's wife prayed to the spirit in their house every day for his safe return. Over 85% of Myanmar's population are Theravada Buddhists: living with ghosts and spirits was an important part of religious life. The ghost agreed but with a condition: "the pork in this house smells awful—please don't cook pork at home anymore!" She realized that even though they have never had a Muslim friend, their 'family ghost' was a Muslim. Soon after, she got news of her husband's safety. Since then, she stopped cooking and eating pork at home.

After Joe told me the story, I laughed: "even ghosts in Myanmar are into identity politics!" But then I started thinking—everyday people in this society have their own wisdom to accommodate differences and respect each other; how and why were these mutual hatreds imposed upon the very same people?

[5] Translator's Note: The 1982 Law prescribes that nationals of ethnicities that have "settled in any of the territories included within the State as their permanent home from a period anterior to 1185 B.E., 1823 A.D. are Burma citizens." Examples of these ethnicities explicitly identified by the law include Kachin, Kayah, Karen, Chin, Bamar, Mon, Rakhine, and Shan. The law also grants citizenship to descendants of recognized citizens. However, the law does not grant birthright citizenship solely based on being born in Myanmar. This means that it is challenging for Rohingya people and Muslims of various ethnicities in Myanmar to acquire citizenship, even if they were born and raised in Myanmar.

The Hidden Troubles of the Revolution

I went to an event at the second anniversary of the coup held in Bangkok, in February 2023. I saw a group of teenagers who returned from the scene of the protest. "Are you all Burmese?" I asked—wondering if they were all from Myanmar. They answered no. Just as I thought that they might be Thai, a girl introduced everyone in the group with somewhat broken English: "Burmese, Karen, Kachin, Chin, Shan…" I realized then that there is no single word in English that refers to all people from the country of Myanmar.

Modern Myanmar can be roughly understood in two parts— Lower Burma inhabited by Bamar majority mixed with ethnic minorities, and Upper Burma which is home to several distinct cultures, primarily inhabited by ethnic minorities. Together, they form the 7 states that make up modern Myanmar. But the country has always been named after the majority ethnicity—the Burmese people, be it the colonial-era name "Burma", or the name used by the junta, "Myanmar".

Aside from the divide between 'kalar' and 'native' identities, the question of Myanmar's national identity and cognition faces additional challenges when one considers the indigenous peoples of Upper Burma. There are seven ethnic groups that are defined as 'native' to Myanmar aside from Bamar people—including the Karen, Shan, Kachin, Chin, Karenni, Mon and Rakhine peoples. Their identities cannot be easily melded together either, due to the lasting armed conflict and historical mobilizations for political actions based on ethnic groups.

Than Myint-U wrote in The Hidden History of Burma that "those in charge of the 1911 imperial census viewed Burma with dread, as a zone of 'racial instability', fretting that the distinctions between races in Burma were neither definite, nor logical, nor permanent, nor easy to detect… they are unstable from generation to generation, the racial designation of a community sometimes changes so rapidly that its elders consider themselves as belonging to one race whilst their descendants claim to belong to another."

Yet the newly independent state of Myanmar failed to utilize this 'racial instability' to construct a unified national consciousness; instead, it solidified ethnic identities as it followed the lines drawn by the British that separated Lower Burma and Upper Burma, which were originally created to advance the British tactic of divide and rule in the region. The project of constructing a unified national identity has never been included in the visions of past democratic revolutions.

Federalism is one of the most significant and challenging items on the Spring Revolution agenda. Almost everyone from civil society, international non-governmental organizations, and NUG emphasized the re-establishment of the Federal democracy in Myanmar.

In 1947, shortly before the independence of Myanmar, the country's founding father General Aung San directed the Panglong Agreement, signed by various ethnic representatives. The agreement promised the many ethnicities of Upper Burma 'self-determination' and 'autonomy' and established the goal of jointly creating a federal state in Myanmar. But as General Aung San was assassinated soon before independence, the Panglong Agreement was suspended. 14 years after Myanmar acquired independence, the country descended into civil war as the military took power and asserted its legitimacy citing the ongoing ethnic conflicts and civil war; thus began the long period of military dictatorship in Myanmar.

I met the Karen youth Saw Marner for the first time in February 2023 in Chiang Mai. When I returned to Thailand the following October, he sent me a picture of burnt artillery shells, and his real-time location at a village in the Karenni state, on the other side of the border. Saw Marner and his friends spent countless nights in shelters that the villagers built as conflicts between the Karenni Ethnic Armed Organization and the military wage on.

The Karenni Nationalities Defense Force (KNDF) abandoned the stagnant federalist agenda of the NUG, and created its own "Interim Executive Council" and "Karenni State Consultative Council." This inspired other Ethnic Armed Organizations in other states of Myanmar to pursue similar projects of political organizing, as some of them also formed their own governments from the bottom up, abandoning their previous allegiance to the NUG.

Image of the remains of shells from a Karenni village, sent to me from Saw Marner. Photo provided by interviewees.

Different Ethnic Armed Organizations had returned to the negotiating table, with the facilitation of the NUG, to discuss the redistribution of resources and power in Myanmar after the revolution. Civil society organizations are also engaging in popular education efforts focusing on 'federalism': it's easier to acquire funding from the international community when you put the 'federalist' label on your project. The decades-long conflict between Ethnic Armed Organizations demanding autonomy and the junta has left far too many displaced, impoverished, or dead. Almost everyone agrees that a genuine ceasefire is only possible with a fair redistribution of power.

However, as the different forces found it difficult to reach a consensus, the efforts to draft a new constitution have stalled for more than a year.[6] Before a conference that set out to discuss the framework of a 'federal' system, Soe Nay U applied for a seat in the conference for Muslims to participate in the decision-making; his proposal was rejected. Minority ethnic leaders find it difficult to trust the NUG when they see that it is still being led by NLD leaders whose politics are defined by an apparent sense of Burmese chauvinism.

The newly founded Ethnic Armed Organization "Bamar People's Liberation Army" (BPLA) advocated for the creation of a "Bamar state", on par with all the other ethnic states inside Myanmar; this won the support of many progressive communities in Myanmar. The BPLA emerged as a branch that separated from the People's Defense Force (PDF); it demanded the end of Bamar rule over all other minority ethnic groups. There are 7 minority 'ethnic states' in Myanmar; in the popular consciousness, the 7 other provinces in Lower Burma are all 'Bamars'. This is widely seen as the foundation for the tides of Burmese chauvinism in Lower Burma.

Thus, the different pro-democracy factions found it challenging to reach a consensus. Is the NUG a 'national government', or a 'federal government' that represents the Bamar ethnicity, one that parallels the governments of Karen, Kachin, and Shan states? Would this lead Myanmar down a path of Balkanization? These are all causes for concern within the exile community.

Stan is a Burmese Chinese from Mandalay, and he speaks some basic Mandarin. Even as an ethnic minority, he still believed that a federation based on 'pure' ethnic groups would be progress compared to the status quo. I asked him with some hesitation, "As an ethnically Chinese, aren't you worried that you might still be an excluded minority within a federal Myanmar?" He fell silent for a moment, then told me, "Indeed: within each minority ethnic state, there will always be another group that's even more of a minority."

Muslim communities in Lower Burma also find themselves in a position that is fundamentally incompatible with a 'pure' nation-state, as their ancestry is defined by diverse ethnic origins, flowing across borders and across generations. There was never a place reserved for Muslims, a patch of land that they could claim as their own, in any Federalist visions proposed in Myanmar's history. In a Myanmar reorganized along ethno-national lines, would Rakhine Buddhist violence against the Rohingya people in Rakhine state for the past decades become more aggressive in the future? The future prospects offered by democratic federalism seemed to fall back upon an infinitely divisible and 'purified' concept of the ethno-nation as a fundamental political unit, a political logic reminiscent of the 'blood and soil' narrative that is responsible for mass atrocities and violence in the 20th century.

As my Burmese friends say, after many difficult discussions, "the 'revolution' (constructing a future) only begins when this 'revolution' (removing the junta) attains victory."

The revolution has also become captive to the nihilist imaginary of 'history repeating itself'. The core leadership of the NLD was arrested alongside Aung San Suu Kyi the day after the coup; despite the NUG deliberately leaving space for them in the new democratic order they envision, these core members of the NLD from before the coup never participated in, or witnessed the Spring revolution. In the junta's narrative, the events of February 2021 were not a coup; rather, they constituted the beginning of a 'state of emergency'. The members of the NLD who were not arrested split into two factions: the first is the revolutionary faction that formed the NUG; the second is composed of those who have agreed with the military to not take political action before the 'state of emergency' is lifted.

The military is negotiating with NLD members who have already agreed to refrain from political actions, in hopes of reaching an agreement with Aung San Suu Kyi and the arrested core leadership of the NLD. If they come to an agreement, the NUG could completely collapse. The suspicion amongst the exile community is that the junta would hold another election, which would lead to the NLD and Aung San Suu Kyi staying in power as a matter of course. Aung San Suu Kyi's status as the embodiment of democracy has never faded away in the popular consciousness; the NUG commands much less legitimacy than the NLD represented by Aung San Suu Kyi. The people will follow Aung San Suu Kyi and thus abandon the revolution.

A similar story played out during the 8888 pro-democracy movement. In the 1990s, countless numbers of people waited for that revolution to attain victory in the jungle on the Thai-Myanmar border.

Than Myint-U came to Mae Sot after the 8888 movement, and witnessed a wave of Burmese people of his age flowing into jungle encampments set up by the Karen Ethnic Armed Organizations. "At first, it was a few dozens of people, then hundreds; by December, there were more than 10,000 people in these camps." He attended the commencement conference of the All Burma Students' Democratic Front—their stated goal was revolution.

However, the growing popularity of Aung San Suu Kyi at the time was used by the military to suppress the revolution. The junta exiled the revolutionary government by promising democratic elections, which concentrated the people's hopes for democracy on Aung San Suu Kyi alone. In 2011, as the military presided over the democratic transition, it granted amnesty to political prisoners and welcomed political exiles back into the country. In 2012, the revolutionary government was dissolved; the revolutionaries who have yet to apply for political asylum to leave for a third country left the Thai-Myanmar border, as they returned to the open arms of Myanmar's democratic transition.

There are still many marks and traces left by the 8888 generation in Mae Sot today. The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) where Joe works at was created by political exiles who moved to Mae Sot after the 1988 pro-democracy movements. During the democratic transition, the archive moved to Yangon; after the 2021 coup, it moved back to Mae Sot, and started documenting the junta's crimes and human rights violations since the 2021 coup.

Most exiles of the 8888 generation have moved on to a third country from Mae Sot, or returned to Myanmar during the democratic transition. The exiles who stayed in Mae Sot spent their lives resisting assimilation; but their children inevitably became Thai—going to Thai language schools and pursuing their sense of purpose in Thai society.

If history repeats itself, the Spring Revolution government-in-exile will find itself in permanent exile. If the military reaches a deal with Aung San Suu Kyi, this revolution will likely be forgotten by history like other past resistance movements, as Myanmar celebrates its return to democracy. Even the name "Spring Revolution" might be rendered irrelevant in that version of history—the revolution could very well become just another "pro-democracy movement" that brought Aung San Suu Kyi back to the stage of history. Eventually, the Spring Revolution may be left only with a sigh of pity, for those who dig deep into the archives of history, exploring their ways outside of the apparently irresistible movement of history.

The story of Myanmar, then, will continue to repeat itself between the binary of "democracy" and "military dictatorship".

[6] Translator's Note: the original article was published in November 2023.

A Suspended Life

When I returned to Mae Sot in October 2023 to look for Zugar's family food stand in the Muslim neighborhood, I could not find them—the food stand no longer existed. I found out later that many people managed to get asylum through the UNHCR and left for other countries. Every neighborhood felt emptier than before.

The choice between staying and leaving became an increasingly sensitive topic in the community.

Ko MK was part of the first wave of people arriving in Mae Sot after the coup; most people who arrived with him had already left. He stayed behind with Stan and created an online education platform named "Burma Academy"—an educational resource for students and teachers who left schools for the civil disobedience movement. Despite their perseverance, they find it increasingly hard to believe in a swift end to the revolution.

Mg Saint told me that when he first arrived, everyone was firmly loyal to the revolution. Most people applied for the Pink Card that the Thai government established for Burmese, Cambodian, and Lao migrant workers; holders are only allowed to work in manual labor jobs and have to renew their permits every year. Through his connections, Mg Saint managed to acquire a "Stateless Card". His friends who held Pink Cards resented him, not because he could afford paying more for a better status, but for the implications of the ten-year validity of his ID—"Do you want this revolution to take that long?"

As Kyaw Kha complained, "I am very disappointed in the NUG. We responded to their call to leave the system but have been left in the dark for more than two years. We're on the brink of not being able to sustain our lives." Lwin Thu would always try to reassure him and ask him to spare a little more patience for the NUG: "The path of revolution is always treacherous." They were both students at a military medical school, and both were among the first medical workers to respond to the call of the Civil Disobedience Movement. After the military bombed the "town of peace" Lay Kay Kaw, they went to Mae Sot along with other exiles from the Karen state. Now, Lwin Thu works as a doctor in a refugee camp in Mae Sot designed to house villagers of Lay Kay Kaw who were displaced here. Kyaw Kha is unemployed and relies on his family's remittance every month to barely scrape by.

"The revolution's honeymoon is over," Mg Saint said in his signature sarcastic tone. Armed resistance and radicalization of peaceful protests were sparked by the army's massacres of peaceful crowds immediately after the coup; images of slaughtered protesters circulated on social media—these were the fuel for the armed uprisings of Ethnic Armed Organizations immediately after the coup. Three years later, however, there was little progress to be seen—people started to feel burnt out from the heat of the revolution.

In the exile community in Mae Sot, criticisms of the NUG are not rare. The NUG had given people too many false promises that the "revolution will be won soon." Many chose to trust these promises, however; how could one live on in this 'suspended life' without this kind of faith? Even those who had lost their hopes did not want to crush the hopes of those who still believed.

The NUG's legitimacy as a government follows not only from the legacy of the democratically-elected NLD, but also from the spirit of "sacrifice" that they espouse. The resistance led by the NUG is built on the moral capital of sacrifice, much like the Buddhist-style self-sacrifice in past democratic movements inspired by Aung San Suu Kyi. However, NUG members are also the quickest to leave—they exchange their 'sacrifice' for being prioritized in leaving the country.

In essence, the agenda of the international community is contradictory to the Burmese people's: the former wanted 'peace', and the latter wanted 'resistance'. International aid could only take place within the paradigm of 'humanitarianism'; any agenda touching upon violence is off limits for international aid. Western countries did not supply the resistance with arms as they did with Ukraine, but the junta continued to receive weapons from Russia.

Today, Lower Burma has mostly been pacified. Stan told me that Myanmar today resembled two distinctly separate worlds—the Ethnic Armed Organizations and their resistance in Upper Burma showed no sign of weakening, but daily life in Lower Burma began to return to normal. Many "former guerilla fighters" stayed in Mae Sot and stopped returning to the jungles; in Myanmar proper, many participants of the Civil Disobedience Movement who did not go into exile returned to the system because they had no other means to earn a living.

The NUG, for its part, continues to call on people to punish those who are returning to the system. Recently, the junta issued a new denomination of the Myanmar Kyat of Ks. 20,000—the NUG released a statement the next day, stating that "whoever uses this denomination of the currency is committing a crime." The statement asked the resistance movement to act against anyone using the currency denomination. Stan sighed, "The NUG couldn't give them jobs; who are they to blame those who returned?"

Compared to two years ago, the pace of the Spring Revolution slowed down. Fewer and fewer people flowed into Mae Sot from Myanmar; more people started leaving for a third country.[7]

The revolutionary radio channel "Federal FM", where the twin sisters worked, paid less than most manual labor jobs and did not allow them to take on other projects. Their excuse was that "it's a revolutionary period—you just need to endure this for now." But the revolution has gone on for far too long. Waso considered leaving the project, and becoming an English teacher in Thailand, earning a normal salary, then devoting the rest of her energy to the revolution.

When I contacted "Pink" as I returned to Mae Sot at the start of October 2023, she told me that she had returned to Yangon. I asked whether she had gotten in touch with her boyfriend, the guerilla fighter who had been missing for a year. She replied, "he has passed away in the jungle." She finally accepted her boyfriend's death and is receiving therapy in Yangon; she is not returning to the border again.

Saw Marner was one of the few passport holders in the Spring Revolution exile community. Together with his friends in the General Strike Committee of Nationalities, they rented a safehouse in Chiang Mai to be their co-living and co-working space. But he was planning to move back to Mae Sot as he didn't want to stay in Chiang Mai—he needed to visit his father and brother detained in Mae Sot prisons and travel across the border into the jungles of the Karen and Karenni states.

He often updated me on the good news from Ethnic Armed Organizations in Upper Burma in the resistance against the junta. Recently, the most significant piece of news came on Oct 27th, when three Ethnic Armed Organizations in the north of Myanmar formed an alliance, launching a joint attack on the junta in the Shan state's border region across from China. He sent me Chinese statements published by the Chinese Ethnic Armed Organizations of the Kokang region and asked me to translate them. The three Ethnic Armed Organizations—the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), the Ta'ang National Liberation Army (TNLA), and the Arakan Army (AA) launched the joint military operation to "overthrow the dictatorial rule of the military junta" and "eradicate telecom fraud operations". The Ethnic Armed Organizations in Northern Myanmar are widely perceived to have close ties to China, and they had stood on the sidelines for a long time since the coup d'etat. They found their military goals to align with the Chinese state's security goals; the resistance advanced with stunning progress, creating more commotion in the revolutionary situation. It also brought excitement to the Burmese resistance community in Thailand.

"We are different from the 8888 generation—we have experienced openness and freedom ourselves, and we will be more resolute than them." As many told me, the internet and other technological advances enabled organizations in the revolution to form organic connections and coalitions, mobilize more effectively, and create resistance. When asked about the possible prospects of Aung San Suu Kyi being released, everyone in the exile community told me that they would not accept any political compromises with the military that the NLD might pursue.

"If young people learned anything from this revolution, it is that we will not wait for a savior anymore—be it the West or Aung San Suu Kyi." Ko MK told me, "The revolution will continue until its victory." Regardless of what happens next, the revolution has evolved away from simply demanding regime change—it has become a revolution in the modes of thought, where young people dismantle the propaganda and lies of the ages past, and discover new ways to think and understand their nation, history, culture and future in collectivity.

Ko Tin Maung moved his library from Lay Kay Kaw to Mae Sot. The books that he had collected over the past ten years managed to survive the air raids in Lay Kay Kaw and were slowly transported out of the town. I met him in his small library at the center of the market. The books were almost all in Burmese, stacked by category on the shelves, and available for Burmese young people to borrow and read. He told me resolutely that he would not leave this place, "those who left started to integrate into the local life wherever they were; they have detached themselves from the collective struggle in Myanmar."

For the exiles of the Spring Revolution, Mae Sot was only a place of transit, a liminal space, where no one had any real contact with Thailand proper. It feels like that spot between borders where time itself is suspended. Those who stayed waited in the irreconcilable temporariness of the town, with the hope that the "revolution will be won soon."

A Saturday night, I met a fashionable young artist from Yangon, selling paintings in the night market. Like every other conversation I would start here, I asked when she arrived in Mae Sot. She replied, "I don't remember. Since coming here, time has become meaningless."

[7] Translator's note: The original Chinese text was written and published in 2023; the military conscription order issued in 2024 led to a renewed flow of Burmese people into Mae Sot.

A soccer match in heavy rain in Mae Sot. Photo by Wu Qin.

The Sandbank

It was pouring rain in Mae Sot in the evening of October 15, 2023. Mg Saint invited me to their soccer match at Mae Sot's largest soccer field. The team was half-exiles, half-migrant workers. Everyone's eyes were on the ball, despite the thunderous rain that day. It was the most memorable evening out of my time in Mae Sot—it gave me a feeling of 'normality', when this was usually nowhere to be found in this town.

For someone living in a foreign land with the determination to someday return to the homeland, time away from the homeland becomes time in 'waiting.' The 'future' can no longer be mapped on linear time; it overlaps with the 'past.' The burdens of history and the promise of futurity suspend the present. In this liminal time, 'living a normal life' becomes a form of betrayal; 'waiting' becomes the only form of loyalty that the exile can afford.

Mg Saint founded a mutual aid group called "The Home of Mae Sot" with his wife. Almost every other international NGO or civil society organization built their agenda entirely upon Myanmar, on the other side of the border, as if Mae Sot is a void that exists only for people waiting to return to Myanmar. "The Home of Mae Sot," however, focuses on the present. They work with Spring Revolution exiles, Burmese migrant workers, and the Karen people who had settled here long ago, organizing soccer games, film screenings, charity sales to fund the revolution, and food drives for the displaced and the impoverished.

Through their work, the political consciousnesses of migrant workers, political exiles, settled Karen refugees and the newcomer resistance community began to coalesce with each other. No one knew how long the revolution would go on for; but here, they practiced communal life to prepare for the "first day after victory."

I asked Mg Saint if he would return to Myanmar should the revolution succeed. He told me, "Maybe I'll visit, but Mae Sot is already my home." He and his wife took their 5-year-old daughter away from Mae Sot for the first time last week to the zoo in Chiang Mai, 4 hours away by car. He told me that they had never seen their daughter look so happy before.

In the enclave where most people arrived just to one day leave, like those who live on the sandbank on the Moei River between barbed wires, Mg Saint and his family had put down their roots.

A man sits on the side of the road in the streets of Mae Sot. Photo by Wu Qin. 

Postscript

(Written by Wu Qin, in November 2023; revised in October 2024)

Most interviews for this article were completed between February and October of 2023. In this process, there was a growing sense of frustration among the Burmese exile resistance community in Mae Sot over the situation of the revolution. Even with the alliance of the powerful Ethnic Armed Organizations of the Karen, Kachin, and Chin states, and the government-in-exile NUG, progress on the ground has been slow, as they had no international armed assistance, and faced an army that is better armed.

The situation took a sudden turn on Oct 27. In the Shan state bordering China, three Ethnic Armed Organizations (Kokang, Palaung, and Arakan) formed the 'Three Brotherhood Alliance' and launched 'Operation 1027,' with an agenda that addressed both Chinese demands for securitization and the revolutionary demands of toppling the junta to restore democratic rule. This was undoubtedly a boost for the Spring Revolution.

After the start of 'Operation 1027', "China's stance" has become a focus of discourse in the border Burmese community—people wondered whether the operation was approved by China. When I met up with my Burmese friends in November, everyone looked excited—even my anarchist friends who most despised authoritarianism would half-jokingly say, "Long live your presidency! China is our hero!" I never knew how to react to this sentiment. Myanmar's civil society also stopped boycotting Chinese products—my Burmese friends re-downloaded TikTok one after another. The path to overthrowing the junta is long—but the dynamism and energy of the early days of the 2021 Spring Revolution had returned. People were also organizing fundraising performances to raise army for the guerilla forces in the jungle.

As spring arrived, however, morale dropped once again. When I returned to Mae Sot in May 2024, the border town felt busy again—another wave of exiles traveled there from Lower Burma after the military starting conscripting people in March. There were new faces in every safe house, new community bars opened one after another. The 'revolutionary situation' became an awkward topic to bring up. Whenever someone tried to assure me, the 'outsider', of their determination in imminently defeating the junta, there would always be someone else who asks, "do you believe what you're saying yourself?"

I realized that when recording a revolution in the present tense, the situation is always volatile; that when the reader reads my work, the revolutionary situation may be very different. The revolution's eventual end could make the exiles' dejection, doubts, and worries for the future seem trivial; but it is precisely recording in the present that enables us to see the "creases", the life experiences of the everyday in times of change.

I want to thank my friends from Myanmar for understanding and accepting my ignorance, for giving me trust and friendship; the opportunity to witness the revolution, even just for a short moment, is one of the most important lessons in my life. I often feel a sense of shame for my role as an 'outsider' here—I have the ability to withdraw from the situation whenever I want to. Even before I finished this article, I started to feel somewhat melancholic for the fact that the project was coming to an end, and I'm about to leave this town. There were many moments when I felt that I was part of the collective suffering and struggle; but these feelings are illusory at best. I was only passing by to stay for a short while; the rage, the sadness and the sense of power that I got from the movement were all temporary at best. They will leave me when I leave this place, just as I close all the browser pages that were about Myanmar. My friends who stay here are stuck there, however—they don't have an easy way out.

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