interview by Dara Syrkin

“I have something good to tell you,” says Bernice Koehler Johnson. “We need to focus on the good things.”

Bernice has taught English as a foreign language in Thailand to Shan refugees forced to flee from their homeland in Burma. Their homes are burned, their rice fields confiscated, their children abused. The Shan flee to Thailand, where they are unwanted and, if they can find employment, work at the most difficult, lowest-paying jobs—toting heavy loads of bricks or spraying pesticides on crops for ten hours a day, six days a week. The Shan live in limbo, unrecognized as refugees. No international aid comes their way. When they leave their homeland, they risk being held in detention camps at the borders. They may never again see the relatives they left behind.

“There are 500,000 Shan refugees in Thailand,” states Bernice. “They show up with, if lucky, one change of clothes and a pair of thongs. My students still write their words very close together because paper was so scarce in their schools.”

Often Shan families cannot send their children to Thai schools. “The cost to send a Shan child to a Thai school is $25 for an entire year. That’s a big dent in the income of a family that earns about $75 per month. If the family has three or four children, it’s impossible.”

The Shan comprise about 9 percent of the population in Burma, the largest percentage of the many ethnic minorities in the country. They had their own independent country before British occupation; now Shan State is part of Burma. The state is rich in jade, rubies, diamonds, teak, and rivers for hydropower. “Greed. It boils down to greed. The Burmese want their land,” says Bernice.

Want is a driving force. “They’re talking about free and fair elections in 2010. The Burmese regime wants to be seen in a positive light by the world, but they rewrote the constitution to allow for a permanent place for the military in the government. There is no way such an election could be fair.”

Yet, the world hasn’t learned of the plight of the Shan. “Coverage is spotty. Occasionally, you’ll hear about Aung San Suu Kyi [the elected Burmese prime minister who has been under house arrest for fourteen of the past twenty years]. And you might hear about the Karen, another ethnic group in Burma. But you don’t hear about the Shan.”

Bernice learned of the Shan in 2001, as she searched the Internet for her next teaching job.

At 58, Bernice went back to school for her master’s degree in creative writing. To help pay tuition, she tutored international students. She knew traveling the globe and teaching were in her future.

Her first taste of teaching English in another country was in 1993 in a Hindu ashram in Bali. After that, she worked to earn her certification to teach English as a foreign language and completed her student teaching in Madrid. Bernice has taught English around the globe—in Spain, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Guatemala, Indonesia, and Thailand.

“I wanted to travel partly because of being raised on an isolated farm in rural northern Minnesota, where I did a lot of reading. Through books I knew I wanted to see the world,” says Bernice.

“And because I loved to read, I thought writing a book would be the highest achievement anyone could have. Creative writing was something I had always dreamed about. When I was growing up, though, I was afraid to talk about dreams for fear something would go wrong. Now, I think people should say what they want—it might happen.”

Bernice notes the same sense of hope in her Shan students. “I think we’re born hopeful, born to be optimistic. Despite all the difficulties Shan students face, they have retained their hopefulness. The Shan are closer as a unit because of the persecution they’ve suffered. They are so willing to help each other. They try so hard. And they’re incredibly generous. My former students often bought me presents, even though many of them shared one living space and only had enough money to eat two meals a day.”

“One Shan girl I know arrived in Thailand at age six having traveled from Burma in a basket on a horse. That girl grew up in a Thai orphanage and cried herself to sleep every night. At the orphanage, the children woke at 5 a.m. to clean. Then they studied English for an hour and then went to school. Now, as a young woman, the girl who arrived in Thailand on a horse is called on to speak to members of the United Nations and runs a school she started for refugees from Shan State.”

Bernice’s students are determined to have the world hear their stories. One reason they learn English is to communicate more broadly. “They want the Western world to know. It’s like an abused wife who keeps her story hidden because she thinks she did something wrong. But once she realizes she didn’t do anything wrong, she wants to tell the world what happened.

“My students want me to see things. One girl took me to meet her parents. ‘Now you see how refugees live, Teacher,’ she said as we sat in their concrete block home, a room at the back of an apartment building, which her janitor parents shared with another young man who was also a janitor. The girl’s parents had both been teachers in Burma.

“In Shan culture, teachers are highly revered. One year, the students put on a Christmas party knowing that I would appreciate it. One beautiful boy came to the party wearing a necklace with a cross dangling from it. ‘I didn’t know you were Christian,’ I said to him. ‘Just for tonight, Teacher.’

“After I left Thailand the first time, one of the boys wrote to me and said, ‘When you are here, you look like our mother,’ “ Bernice says with a smile. “They are away from home, away from their families, so I become a mother figure immediately. And it’s great being an older person in Southeast Asia. Older people receive immediate respect.” Bernice pauses. “My sons are grown and gone. Sometimes I think I’m more part of a family in Thailand than in Minneapolis.”

Bernice’s book, The Shan: Refugees without a Camp; An English Teacher in Thailand and Burma, includes insights about her nuclear and adopted families. “For years, I wrote stories about the Shan children. I would be moved by something and write about it. I tried at one point to put it all in one short story—which didn’t work. Finally, I took several years worth of stories and created a manuscript. I sent it to two publishers. One said it wasn’t Asian enough; the other said it was too much about refugees. I dropped the notion of publishing it for about a year. Then I searched on the Web with the words book publishers and refugees. Up popped Trinity Matrix Publishing. I wrote to them and told them about my book. The publisher immediately said he wanted to see the manuscript, so I sent it as an attachment to an e-mail. A few days later, he said he wanted to publish the book. ‘It makes me feel nostalgic and inspired,’ he said. It turned out that one of his grandmothers was Shan, and he’s a refugee from Burma.”

Bernice’s book will help let the world know about the plight of the Shan. But it will do more. Bernice’s life now revolves around the book and the Shan. She has started a nonprofit organization designed to pay teachers and allow students to attend school. “For $25, a student can have a year’s worth of instruction, books, meals, and a uniform. A teacher’s salary is about $75 per month. What we are doing is so little, yet it has a huge impact.

“Education gives people a better chance of getting good jobs; it builds self-confidence,” says Bernice. “We helped three of my former students get computer training. Two of them are now computer instructors, and the third one manages a website for an online news journal. Young people we helped get advanced English training now have good jobs that necessitate speaking English. The children who attend our schools revere their teachers; many of them want to become teachers—a job as a teacher is a whole lot easier than the back-breaking work their parents do.”

Oh, and the good thing? One of the students that Bernice’s group supports by helping his sharecropper parents with school expenses just received the highest grades of 52 children in the Thai school where he studies. “He’s studying in a foreign country, being taught in a foreign language, and he still received the highest marks in all of his academic classes and in citizenship as well. That’s a really good thing.”

Meet Bernice Koehler Johnson and learn more about the Shan at Raking Through Books Happy Hour Book Club on Tuesday, October 13, 5:30 pm, at Kieran’s Irish Pub, in Minneapolis. Raking Through Books