The Long-neck Karen – the Kayan use their own name for their tribe – are refugees from Myanmar. Some crossed over the border as long as 20 years ago, fleeing dreadful treatment at the hands of the Burmese army.
Many were born in Thailand, but have never been granted citizenship.
The UNHCR once offered to help find them third countries to live in but Thailand insisted they were “economic migrants” and therefore not eligible.
Dark hands, it is said, were at work behind the political scene – people who were making a fat profit from creating “traditional Kayan villages” and charging tourists to go in and gawk.
Whatever the truth, close to Mae Hong Son there is one such cluster of “villages” housing not only Kayan but other hilltribes people. It costs B500 a head to go in and frankly, although it might be a ‘must see’, it’s rather sad.
The women spend all day sitting at small stalls selling pretty much identical souvenirs, the kind of souvenirs that, when you get them home you wonder, “What on earth possessed me to buy that?”
Some work at looms producing complex check-pattern cloth. Others have learned to play guitar and sing. You can buy CDs of them listlessly singing Western pop songs with Kayan lyrics.
All of this has been described as a sort of human zoo. Which on one level it is.
On another level, it’s a refuge. As one Kayan woman explained (probably for the millionth time), it was better than being beaten, used as a human mine-detector, raped or killed, or all of the above – all real concerns in Myanmar until very recently, perhaps even now.
The overall feeling one gets from the women in the village is, “I know I have to put myself on display, but after years of doing this I’m damned if I’ll do more than the bare minimum for these gawkers.”
The smiles are thin, there is no animated chatting, no giggling. Maybe these are reserved for after hours.
Not all Kayan women wear the neck coils. Who does and who doesn’t is apparently decided by the auspiciousness of the day and date they were born. One five-year-old we met (one of the few Kayan who did giggle) wears a coil. Her mother does not.
The neck, of course, does not actually grow. Rather, the gradual lengthening of the brass coil over the years gradually pushes the collar bones down, shortening the body.
Thoughts inevitably cross one’s mind: “How do you get your neck clean? How do you scratch an itch?”
Some will tell you that the rings can never be taken off because the neck muscles are not strong enough to support the head. This is not true. Among the souvenirs for sale are photographs of Kayan women without their neck coils.
Looking at these photos adds another layer of guilty discomfort. Seeing the long bare neck has a faint whiff of pornography about it, as if they have taken their shirts off for the amusement of tourists.
How this form of bizarre adornment began is not clear. But the Kayan men apparently regard women with neck coils as desirable. Which in itself is bizarre.
But when you think of it, is it any more bizarre than having one’s breasts surgically slit open so that bags of silicone can be inserted?