There was a teenage girl, donning a trendy T-shirt,
tight-fitting jeans, and high heels in the middle of the night market in a
remote corner of Yangon outskirts. As the people went about its narrow
pedestrian-only alleyways buying vegetables and other daily needed goods, her
team put up a small boom-box and lighting system in one of the more spacious
intersections. The boom-box started
blasting the latest English club hits, the lights turned on to the small space
on the streets in front of the boom-box.
There the girl stood, and then she started dancing by
herself in the spotlight. Soon, people
started gathering at the intersection, perhaps attracted by the music that is
loud enough to be heard within three blocks in each direction. Stone-faced middle-aged men in traditional
man-skirts quietly gave disapproving looks, while excited pre-teens (and your
author in attendance) happily nodded to the beats, giving sly smiles to the
girl with the sick moves and hot body.
Despite all that, the girl ignored the commotion around her
and just danced and danced, all by herself, not afraid of the looks and with no
signs of stopping. Perhaps this was just
some PR stunt of small clothing business, but any Western witness seeing this
would gladly hail the brave teenage girl as a heroic pioneer and a vanguard
soldier of “modernity” in a country that only opened to foreign influences a
few years ago (and still has little pop culture scene).
Yet, to say that the Myanmar
still without nightclubs and entertainment celebrity-studded TV shows is “not
yet modern” would be quite inaccurate.
For instance, as he roamed the Buddhist pagoda-filled cities of Yangon
and Bago, the author discovered just how popular and widespread smart-phones
have become. With mobile shops on every
street corner and even Buddhist monks toying with their Samsung Galaxies, the
country is well on its way to adopting mobile Internet as its favorite
pastime.
But, at the same time, the speed at which “modernity” is
being accepted shows how lacking needed infrastructure to sustain modern
development still is at the moment.
Mobile Internet is popular because LAN
and Wifi are terribly slow and unreliable.
Roads are decent, but vehicles are such shortage that imported
second-hand cars running on the streets can be right-hand or left-hand
drive. And that night market where the
girl was dancing? It is in the middle of
a residential area dense with old apartment blocks.
And that is just the entrepreneurial spirit of a country
newly open to private business. Sure,
there are shortages of appropriate business real-estate or even clearly defined
commercial areas, but with relaxation of laws, no one can stop people from
turning first floors of decrepit apartments into stylish shop-fronts. The chain of clothing boutiques, restaurants,
electronic shops, and street stands peddling anything imaginable together light
up an otherwise grim, rundown concrete jungle without any functional streetlights.
All this is happening despite passiveness of both the
government and the Buddhist clergy, two of the most powerful and moneyed
institutions in Myanmar . Like the elders watching the dancing girl in
the night market, they quietly disapprove of the disorderly ruckus that is
private entrepreneurship in its current organic small-shop style. And they have not at all helped in investing
in a better business environment. In
fact, from all visual indication, the government is still prioritizing Buddhist
building schemes.
We see continuous renovation of the country’s famed golden
pagodas (basically re-gilding the whole thing with pure gold to replace ones
battered away by monsoon rains) and building new monuments in honor of the
Enlightened One. Every year, new
(gigantic) Buddhist statues and pagodas go up when the money can better be used
to fix up schools, clinics, and roads. Instead,
every concrete building, even in central Yangon , looks
like they are about to fall apart at any moment.
It is certain that once allowed to exist, no one can
eradicate the presence of private businesses that are now sprouting rapidly
everywhere. They are met by a population
that exponentially enriched by the influx of foreigners eager to see the
previously inaccessible country. People
with motor vehicles (a.k.a. “taxi drivers), restaurant owners, and hoteliers
are getting richer by the minute. And
with that, soon the traditionalists in the government and the pagodas will no
longer be the moneyed ones.
In the dancing girl at the market is any indication of
entrepreneurial resilience, the opening up of Myanmar
is heading in a beautifully good direction at the grassroots level. The bureaucrats and monks can stare and
disapprove all they want, and not lend a single hand in support. But guess what? No one can stop the private entrepreneurs
from being heard, seen, and attract attention by doing what they do best. They will just ignore the haters and continue
unabated. And that is what Myanmar
needs to become fully open.
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