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| Published in Washington, D.C. January 1, 1999 |
Thai "human zoo" cashes in on tribal refugees: "Giraffe-neck" Burmese women
By Richard S. Ehrlich
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
NA SOI, Thailand
Tribal "long-neck women'" suffer a lifetime shackled in a heavy neck brace of coiled brass, which deforms bones so severely that their throats appear stretched.
Now, as if touched by an alchemist, the burdensome brass which gives them an exotic, elongated image is turning into valuable gold.
Known also as "giraffe-neck women," these Padaung tribe females have been put on display for tourists to gawk at, alongside kitschy long-neck souvenirs including dolls, key chains, T-shirts, pen sets, portraits and post cards.
Ironically, now that they have become a money-making attraction, long-neck mothers and their unmanacled husbands have a new financial reason to cast their daughters into suffering this stilted existence.
The tradition of encasing a female's neck in metal reportedly began years ago to stop rivals from kidnapping them. By making Padaung tribe females too freakish to be desired by others, the coils also allowed them to be identified easily if they were captured.
Some outsiders, however, suspect the neck braces were invented by Padaung men simply to subjugate their womenfolk.
Whatever the origin, a glistening long-neck wife has since become a sign of status and wealth.
Because of slick marketing, the long-neck females' worth has increased recently.
The Padaung tribe is eagerly working alongside Thailand's tourism industry, the military, local businessmen, ethnic Karenni tribal insurgents and international tour groups from North America, Europe and elsewhere.
Starts with 5-year-olds
Some officials, investors and guides, however, praise the displays as a way for an impoverished tribe of refugees to sustain itself through handicrafts and other tourism-related businesses.
Parents perpetuate the neck braces onto their daughters, while insisting they want to maintain "tradition" and create an elegant, feminine look. When a family voluntarily chooses to conform to the Padaung tribe's custom, an experienced village woman will ring their daughter's neck.
"We begin putting coils on our daughters when the girl is five years old," long-necked Mah Nang told The Washington Times.
"I'm the best person in the village to put the coils on a girl.
''A 5-year-old wears 1 kilogram [2.2 pounds] of coiled brass. Then, when she is about seven years old, she'll wear 1 1/2 kilograms [3.3 pounds]. This will slowly be increased over the years to 5 kilograms [11 pounds]."
The rising spiral of brass is borne by a female's collarbone and shoulders.
One coil is long enough to encircle her throat several times with a polished, industrial-strength solid brass rod, about one-third of an inch in diameter.
The girl will remain coiled for the rest of her life, appearing somewhat like a traffic accident victim wearing a brace at an insurance trial -- albeit a brace of attractive, glistening, yellow metal. Sealed in the neck brace, the females appear to have their heads perpetually craning over the uppermost ring.
They are also limited in how far they look down or sideways because their jaw bone is kept upturned, rigid and extended. To alleviate the metal's eternal, painful rubbing against their skin and bones, most Padaung females insert a thick, handkerchief-sized cloth under their chin's jaw bone.
But endlessly irritated skin rubs raw, producing scabs and darkened, chaffed rings on the throat and shoulders. A mature woman sports a brass rod spiraling 20 times around her throat and collarbone.
Despite the appearance of possessing a long neck, X-rays from Burma's General Hospital in Rangoon show the shoulder bones have been forced down by the weight of the coils. The collarbone and upper ribs have also been pushed downward diagonally.
The bone crunching ultimately forces their previously horizontal shoulders into a slanting A-frame. By wrapping it all in brass, part of the shoulder bones appear as a lengthened lower neck.
Tamarinds used as polish
"To make the coils shiny, we use this brown fruit from the trees here," an eight-month-pregnant Padaung woman said as she squeezed dark brown tamarind in her fingers until it became paste.
"We rub it on the coils, and then use straw to polish it off,'' she added, squishing the tamarind paste into the coils and vigorously rubbing the brass. Eventually she bent over, splashed some water from a plastic pail onto her coils and upper torso, and picked up a handful of straw to wipe away tamarind residue.
Cleaning her entire neck brace took about 20 minutes, including time out to gossip with Mah Nang and other long-neck women nearby who were trying to sell souvenirs to European tourists.
"Are you the witch doctor lady?" a British woman asked Mah Nang. After the British couple grinned at the woman's brass neck, they bought souvenirs.
The British woman opted for "only one" neck ring, cut from a longer coil, and bargained it down to $4. After the sale, the tribeswoman necklaced the tourist with the single circle of brass.
When the British tourists asked Mah Nang if she had any other souvenirs for sale, the long-neck woman laughed and replied, "You can buy my husband. He does nothing. You can even have him for free."
Behind her, wandering through the hut, her husband smiled. He adjusted the "longyi" sarong most Padaung men wear and sat down to smoke a cigarette.
Mah Nang then played a four-string guitar and sang a Padaung-language song which sounded hauntingly like a languid, plaintive, U.S. Appalachian Mountain tune.
Mah Da, a 17-year-old who said she was seeking a husband, freshened her red lipstick and said, "When we die, we are buried with our coils on."
Mah Nang stopped singing and said of the teen-ager, "She would have lots of boyfriends, Thai and foreigners, to choose from to marry if we didn't have a rule that says we have to marry only within our tribe."
Many, but not all, mothers obediently follow tradition and coil their daughters.
Long-neck mothers and teen-age girls insisted they like wearing the brass brace.
"We have worn them since we were children," a twenty-some-thing Padaung woman said.
"So we are completely used to them. These coils are normal for us. They are comfortable."
Dirt Village Disneyland
The teen-aged girl, sitting on a wooden bench in front of her hut, tugged at the coils to lift them slightly from underneath near her collar and scratched under the lowest coils.
It was impossible to determine if the tribe purposely stressed the positive aspects of the tradition in an effort to attract tourists. Long-neck women who sold souvenirs always smiled, and -- as if in a dirt-village Disneyland -- gracefully stopped whatever they were doing and posed for free whenever tourists held up a camera.
But one long-neck woman, cradling her infant daughter, said, "No, I am not putting these coils on my daughter." She declined to elaborate.
Most of the Padaung tribe's 7,000 men, women and children live scattered in and around Loikaw, a town in northeast Burma, where the military government has outlawed the coiling of females.
Frustrated guerrillas from a larger tribe, known as Kayah or Karenni, dream of turning that region into an independent Kayah state. Some anthropologists believe the Padaung are an ethnolinguistic subgroup of the Kayah.
Over the years, about 300 Padaung have fled the off-and-on fighting in northeast Burma and settled on the Thai side of the forested frontier.
In Na Soi village, where some Padaung refugees live, Karenni tribesmen guard the entrance and demand about $7 from foreign tourists while allowing Thai citizens free access since the village is on Thai territory.
The name, passport number and country of residence of each foreigner is noted on a payment receipt issued by the "Karenni Culture Department."
This small Padaung and Kayah village of bamboo, thatch and wood huts -- set in low mountains amid dense forest -- has more than 50 long-neck females.
The surrounding northwest region also hosts a few other, smaller, Padaung refugee settlements, similarly dealing with tourists.
"I wish we had electricity here," a long-neck woman said, gesturing toward a cluster of huts, half of which boasted tabletop displays crowded with handicrafts, jewelry, and other souvenirs for sale.
"The people here say we can't have electricity because it would spoil the atmosphere and make it look too modern, and then the tourists wouldn't like it. But I want to watch television," she said.
Selling Handicrafts
Joe Cummings, U.S. author of the popular "Lonely Planet Guide to Thailand," said, "A myth says that the women's necks will fall over from atrophy, and they'll die, if the coils are removed. I've sat there and watched the women attach and remove the coils at will, with no problem.
"In interviews I've done with the long-necks in Thailand, they say they earn around $85 a month selling handicrafts, and from a small portion of the entrance fees collected from foreigners.
"The bulk of the entry fees goes to the KNPP," said Mr. Cummings, referring to the Karenni National Progressive Party, which uses the tourists' ticket fee to finance its smoldering guerrilla war inside Burma.
"The long-neck tourist thing is also big in [Burma's] Shan State, around Inle Lake, where conditions are more zoo-like," he said.
"But in both sides, they told me they weren't bothered by the gawking and photo-taking, which they consider to be part of their livelihood.
"To put it baldly: these ladies have chosen to hang out in Thailand and be photographed, diddle with handicrafts, and earn a little money rather than dodge rockets and/or work as army porters in an ethnic war."
Mr. Cummings, who is based part of the year in northern Thailand, added, "To naive tourists who get upset that the Padaung tourist villages seem like 'human zoos,' one must ask: Would they rather see the Padaung in their natural state in [Burma] -- in utter poverty, not knowing from one moment to the next whether [Burma's military] is going to level their village?"
Na Soi is six miles from the Burmese border, near northwest Thailand's mountain town of Mae Hong Son.
The occasional clashes between Burma's military and minority ethnic tribes along the border are currently a focus of Thai officials who want to move all Burmese refugees, including the long-neck women, to special camps despite protests from the tribe and tourism officials. The tribe warns the camp would be closer to border skirmishes. Tourism officials warn of lost dollars.
Worried about the possible shift, Poolsak Sunthornpanit, chairman of Mae Hong Son's provincial chamber of commerce, was recently quoted as saying, "All tourism-related businesses, such as hotels, restaurants and transportation services would be badly hit."
Mr. Poolsak added, "Long-necked [Padaung] are the star attraction to draw tourists to visit our province."
However, Mae Hong Son's deputy governor, Amornphan Nimanand, said, "If the tourists want to view the tribespeople, they will be allowed to see them in the new camps."
In Mae Hong Son and elsewhere in Thailand, long-neck women are used in ubiquitous advertisements to attract customers from North America, Europe and elsewhere to join group tours in the northwest mountains.
As refugees, the tribe appears to be at the whim of officials and others who can decide where they live and who can profit from their existence. In 1996, Thai officials investigated the reported snatching of several Padaung for use in an urban tourist attraction.
At Na Soi, meanwhile, the mood appeared relaxed and sometimes carefree as young long-neck girls teased each other, rode a bicycle and gleefully admired themselves in postcards for sale.
"That's me," said a long-neck woman pointing to herself in a postcard.
Touching the throat of another long-neck girl in the postcard's group portrait, she added, "And that's my daughter."