Free For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question by Mac McClelland

looked at me, realizing his mistake. “I don’t know,” he said softly.
    I felt bad. Guilty. Embarrassed, actually. There had been a time when I’d called myself a refugee, just the summer before. Though I hailed originally and most recently from Ohio, I’d lived in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit. There’d been a big to-do in the media about whether we New Orleanians displaced around the country should be called refugees, and I’d ardently defended the word’s use. Nay, I’d insisted on it. I’d brought nothing on my evacuation from the Gulf Coast but an extra pair of underwear, a toothbrush, a serape, and a deck of cards, and when the levees had broken, I’d been broken down for days, for lack of a job and an income and certainty. Calling myself a refugee had made my plight sound as heavy and traumatic as it had felt, even after I’d moved back to the city four months after the storm and then, just weeks ago, unable to take the stress, back out again. Here’s what I had had, though, I realized,
sitting next to Htan Dah: Citizenship. Domestic peace. The right to work, own property, travel, vote, believe in the possibility of future opportunities. Refugee, my ass.
    We made Htan Dah his own profile, and finally, he’d had enough MySpace for one night. He left the computer room, and I checked my email. But five minutes later he reappeared. “I want to practice,” he said, and logged in, staying up long past the time Htoo Moo had quit work for the night, after I’d gone to bed.
     
    BREAKFAST THE next day was business as usual, with my asking Htan Dah how he was doing and his saying “I am great! I am living!” with glittering eyes and teeth. When I sat down to dinner that night, though, he and Ta Mla and Htoo Moo spent a fair amount of time watching me and muttering to each other in Karen.
    “Something on your mind, tiger?” I asked Htan Dah.
    “We are talking about your girlfriend,” he said.
    Yeah, I’d thought that conversation had ended a little too easily. “All right. You can talk about it with me.”
    “Do you ever have boyfriend?”
    “Yes. I’ve had boyfriends and girlfriends.”
    This produced a moment of confused silence, which I filled with a lame description of the sexuality continuum, along with an explanation of the somewhat loose sexual mores of modern American gals like myself. Htan Dah responded by telling me that they had heard of gay people, since a visitor to the house had informed them of their existence—last year.
    “Last year!” I hollered.
    “Yes!” he yelled back. “In Karen culture, we do not have.”
    “What do you mean you ‘do not have’? You guys read the newspaper. You have the Internet.”
    “But in a village, Karen village, we do not have,” Htan Dah said.
    “There’s never been a gay person in a Karen village in the history of Karen society?” All three men shook their heads. “Come on.”

    “If there was a gay person, they would leave,” Htan Dah said. “It is not our culture.”
    “Let’s just say there was a gay person,” I said. “Couldn’t they stay in the village?”
    “No,” Htan Dah said. “I would not allow gay people in my village.”
    “Are you kidding me!?”
    Htan Dah held my gaze, though his seemed more uncertain the longer it went on.
    “Are you going to make me leave?”
    “No! For you, in your culture, it is okay,” he said. “You are not Karen. But in our culture, it does not belong.” Htoo Moo and Ta Mla were nodding, and I scowled at them.
    “You’re a refugee,” I said. “And it sucks. It’s ruining your life. But you would force another villager to become a refugee because they were gay?”
    Nobody said no. I turned on Htan Dah; I was maddest at him, and he was probably the only one who could follow my fast, heated English. “If there was peace in Burma and you lived in a village and there was a gay Karen person,” I asked again, “you would want to make that person another Karen refugee by making