Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

AMY TAN
follow boycotts? Same ones who say that eating hamburgers means
you approve of torturing cows. It’s a form of liberal fascism. Boycotts
don’t help anyone, not real people. It just makes the do-gooders feel
good. . . .” Wherever he really stood on the matter of boycotts,
Dwight keenly wanted to make this trip because he had learned only
a year before that his great-great-grandfather on his mother’s side
had gone to Burma in 1883, leaving his wife and seven children in
Huddersfield, a city of industry in Yorkshire. He took a job with a
British timber company, and, as the story was reported in the family,
he was ambushed by natives on the banks of the Irrawaddy in 1885,
the year before the British officially took over old Burmah. Dwight
felt an uncanny affinity toward his ancestor, as though some genetic
memory were driving him to that part of the world. As a behavioral
psychologist, he knew that wasn’t scientifically possible, yet he was
intrigued by it, and lately, obsessed.
“What is the point of not doing something?” he went on argu­
ing. “Don’t eat beef, feel good about saving cows. Boycott Burma,
feel good about not going. But what good have you really done?
Whom have you saved? You’ve chosen to vacation in fucking Bali
instead....”
“Can we discuss this more rationally?” Vera said. My dear friend
despised hearing people use sexual expletives for emphasis. Invoke
religion instead, she’d say to those in her organization—use the
“damn” and “God Almighty” that show strength of conviction. Use
the f-word for what it was intended, the deep-down guttural pleasure
of sex. And don’t bring it into arguments where hearts and brains
should prevail. She was known to have kicked people off projects at
work for lesser linguistic offenses. She observed that Dwight was
smart and abrasive, and this combination was worse than being sim­
ply stupid and annoying. It made people want to pummel him to
bits, though they might have agreed with some of what he had to say.
“Sanctions worked in South Africa—” Marlena began.
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