Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

AMY TAN
das, shrines, and turrets, edifices that contained things he could not
understand: secrets, glory in death, tributes to Nats, ideas of wor­
ship and history foreign and bizarre. As his eyes scanned the
panorama in a widening arc, he said quietly to Saskia, “Wasn’t that
a horrendous climb? I nearly passed out.”
“Look behind you,” she said. And he turned and saw on the other
side of the terrace a Japanese tour group, all wearing identical hats
and following like ducklings a women with a yellow flag held high. “I
went up that side,” Saskia said.
Harry looked again. He then saw the alternative route, a series
of escalators that led to a parking lot just slightly below, where
air-conditioned buses waited to whisk the tourists to their next
destination.
An hour later, he stood with the camera crew before a massive
gold statue of the Buddha in an elaborate alcove of the Mahamuni
Pagoda. It was lit by fluorescent tubes and colored lights, giving it the
look of the Coney Island arcade game Shoot the Freak. Good Lord,
Harry thought, a twelve-foot-high monument of gold. Its eyes ap­
peared to be staring down at its admirers. More than a hundred
people sat cross-legged before it, their palms open. Dozens of men,
the merit-seekers of the day, waited in line, holding tissue-thin
square leaves of gold. The women, who were not allowed to touch
the Buddha, gave their gold squares to a man in white. Harry
watched as a merit-seeker reached the foot of the Buddha, climbed
onto the Buddha’s knee, and stood as high as he could to press his
soft gold leaf onto the statue’s arm and rub. With each rub, the gold
melded into the Buddha’s body. Others pressed their gold on the
Buddha’s hand, which over the years had swelled to enormous pro­
portions from such daily devotion, the manicured fingernails so at­
tentively gilded that they appeared to be piercing the platform.
The merit-seekers had bought their leaves from poor men who did
nothing but pound gold for twelve hours a day with a hammer. They
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