"A man on a motorbike comes by and we then follow him through the streets of Mae Sot." So begins one of the narrative vignettes from "Frontier Mosaic." Based on extensive travel along both sides of the Thai-Burma (Myanmar) frontier and exhaustive research abroad, this new study is both social testimony and reportage on what it means to be trapped in these lands between.
Adamant that research should be done first hand, this is a book about contact, the writer's refusal to view events from the margin. Collating the stories of real people, each emblematic in some profoundly disturbing way of the tragedy of this region, the writer interviews economic and political migrants, among them fishermen, a deserter from the Burmese armed forces, sex workers, dissidents, labor activists, and boy soldiers. There are heart-rending stories of land-mine victims, abandoned orphans, of friends left buried in shallow pits in the jungle.
There are stories within stories. An inquiry into the workings of a minority media group is momentarily displaced by one of the staffer's own stories. Forking and bifurcating narratives are a reflection of the hugely diffuse nature of the Burmese community in exile.