Hope and Disillusionment

Jeffrey Wasserstrom reviews Clare Hammond’s “On the Shadow Tracks: A Journey Through Occupied Myanmar.”

By Jeffrey WasserstromMarch 10, 2025

• Politics

• Cultural Studies

JOURNALIST AND NGO worker Clare Hammond’s On the Shadow Tracks: A Journey Through Occupied Myanmar (2024) is a compelling and insightful book that mixes elements of travel writing and reportage with moving sketches of people and places. It provides enough basic information about the history and geography of the country once known as Burma that it should work well as an introduction to the Southeast Asian nation for those who have never read a book about it. Coming to it fresh from immersing myself in other works on the subject, I found the book to provide a sharp perspective on the nation’s initially inspiring but recently disturbing developments earlier this year. Reading Hammond’s account of her six-year stay in Myanmar, and of the period of repression and resistance that began not long after she moved back to the United Kingdom in 2020, set me thinking about many things, including what first sparked my interest in the country.

My lengthy “books to read someday” and shorter “books to read soon” lists both include titles about Myanmar. This is a dramatic departure from my graduate school days. During the two years I spent working toward a master’s in East Asian studies at Harvard and the longer period when I worked toward a doctorate in Chinese history at Berkeley, I was never assigned a single reading on what was then only called Burma. (The country’s rulers rechristened it Myanmar in 1989, the same year I got my PhD.) East Asian studies and Southeast Asian studies were largely seen as comprising distinct fields, as is still often the case, so none of my professors urged me to read works on the country, even though I was intensely interested in the topic of protests and massacres, and Burma had had plenty of both. What changed me from ignoring to caring about Myanmar was an encounter with an extraordinary student soon after I began my teaching career. Before I met Tun in the early 1990s, I had never spoken to anyone from Myanmar.

What struck me first about Tun was his fierce intellectual curiosity and disarmingly sweet smile. When we met, I was a member of the history department at Indiana University, and he was majoring in political science. One unusual thing about our first conversation was that he told me right away that he was not taking a class with me. Students who were not enrolled in my courses rarely sought me out. He explained that the reason he came to my office was that he had heard I had done work on the Beijing protests of 1989, and he wanted to tell me about the similar events in 1988 in Yangon, the capital of his country, which he had participated in as a high school student. He planned to write a thesis comparing the two protests, each of which was student-led and brought members of different social groups out onto the streets in numerous cities. Each of these movements also ended with soldiers killing civilians. The crackdown in Yangon had affected him directly, ending the lives of some of his friends, sending other people he knew into prison, and setting him on the road to studying in the United States as a political exile.

We took turns asking each other questions, him inquiring about the history of Chinese student movements and me drawing him out on his life story. I learned that he grew up as one of six brothers in a village outside Yangon that lacked running water and a regular supply of electricity. He became a determined critic of the ruling junta due to political conversations he had taken part in or overheard at Yangon tea shops. When the crackdown began, he had fled for his life, eventually arriving in Thailand, where he worked hard to improve his English and found a program that would help him get to the United States to study. His goal was to learn as much as he could about struggles for democracy, hoping to someday return to Myanmar and use what he learned to help the people there. I liked him immediately, won over by the way his intense expression when posing a question would give way to a warm smile. I thought him one of the gentlest souls I had ever met. It thus took me aback when he added one more bit of biographical information: between leaving Yangon and getting to Thailand, he had spent time carrying a rifle in a guerrilla unit.

Ever since meeting Tun, I have been on the lookout for interesting books on his homeland. Not surprisingly, I felt a special sense of mission when I prepared to go to Yangon in 2013, at a point when Myanmar seemed on a promising path and Tun had finally gotten a chance to go back and see his brothers. I also have been reading about the country more lately, as I just finished a short book on youth activists in different parts of East and Southeast Asia, including Myanmar. I probably would not have written such a book if I had not met Tun. In all this reading, one of my main goals was to understand as fully as possible something that has puzzled me from the day of that office conversation: How could someone like Tun end up in a guerrilla unit? Why, to this day, does he not regret making this decision to take up arms, and why does he support the growing militancy of the current generation of young activists in Myanmar outraged by the 2021 coup and the intransigence and brutality of the government?

¤

On the Shadow Tracks, Hammond’s debut book, addresses the complicated 11-year period that began with hopeful signs of potential democratization in 2010 and was followed in 2015 by an election that (as Hammond puts it) was widely “hailed as a triumph for liberal democracy,” but which ultimately ended in catastrophe in 2021. That year’s February coup led to widespread fury and despair, increasing violence in some areas already beset by civil war and ethnic cleansing, and causing suffering in regions that had previously been doing comparatively well. Hammond sheds light on facets of Myanmar about which many in the West will likely be ignorant, such as the eponymous “shadow tracks”—a vast network of special railway lines built by the military, often with forced labor and at the cost of lives, that are meant not for standard passenger and freight transport but rather to move soldiers and armaments between isolated locations. According to Hammond, these shadow tracks are not just infrastructure for weapons transport but are also themselves a weapon, a tool to intimidate and control the civilian population.

Hammond was a journalist covering financial issues in Hong Kong before moving to Myanmar because she found news of the country’s reforms “intoxicating.” She showed considerable courage traveling to the places she did, often overcoming official efforts to block her way. Her book occasionally brings to mind the reportage of George Orwell, who spent time as a police officer in colonial Burma doing “the dirty work of Empire,” as he once put it. And speaking of Orwell, Hammond’s book is as edifying and lively as Finding George Orwell in Burma (2005) by a writer who publishes as Emma Larkin, a pseudonym she first adopted to protect the safety of people she met while traveling around Myanmar. That work is, like On the Shadow Tracks, based on trips across Myanmar by an intrepid woman in her twenties. It, too, was a debut that had the feel of a book by a seasoned author. And Hammond, like Larkin, often quotes inhabitants of the country who came to trust her enough to tell her their stories.

¤

On the Shadow Tracks is structured around a quest Hammond began soon after moving to Myanmar in 2014, a few years after the ruling junta had surprised the world by releasing its most famous critic, Aung San Suu Kyi, from house arrest, and making other gestures to the world that it was ready to start on a new course. By that time, Myanmar had shed its status as a pariah nation, with official posts now going to civilians and members of opposition parties and little attention yet being paid to the treatment of the Rohingya, a persecuted Muslim ethnic group. Hammond set out to travel on as many military rail lines as possible. By doing so, she hoped to see much of the country and gain an appreciation for its tremendous topographical and ethnic diversity. She also thought that the trips would help her gain a better understanding of the multifaceted role that the military had long played in the nation, and seemed still to be playing even in the wake of the liberalizing moves that began in 2010.

Hammond fills the book’s pages with elegant sketches of people and places, along with an abundance of lively quotes from a wide range of people, including members of ethnic groups other than the majority Bamar (Burmese). These tales often concern suffering at the hands of a protean “Tatmadaw”—a Burmese term that can be translated simply as “the military,” though it means more than that. The Tatmadaw is an organization with many functions; all its members, especially its leaders, enjoy special privileges, including access to goods and services beyond the reach of others. As someone who has lived for a time in, often visited, and long studied the People’s Republic of China, I was struck by parallels between the Tatmadaw in Myanmar and the Party in the PRC, as different as those organizations are in many ways.

The Tatmadaw has controlled the country continuously since a 1962 coup put an end to civilian rule. The ideology governing it has gone by different names in different eras, but it has never lost control. During the Cold War and just after, there were times when it seemed that a movement from below might topple it or force it to share power, but whenever this happened, such as during the 1988 uprising and abortive Saffron Revolution of 2007, the status quo remained intact after a wave of killings and arrests, despite some personnel and propaganda changes in the aftermath of the crackdowns.

The period during which Hammond undertook her journeys turned out in the end to be a false dawn of democratization. The junta had given the impression that it was finally ready to loosen its hold and let Myanmar go the way that places such as Taiwan had done after a long period of martial law was followed by a process of liberalization. The Tatmadaw, however, retained its grip on many key levers of economic and political power, as Hammond came to realize while she traveled around the country. She also became disenchanted with Aung San Suu Kyi as an opposition leader.

Hammond conveys her gradual loss of optimism in this false dawn via her interviews, which give her an appreciation for the intractability of the country’s problems, especially the grotesque treatment of the Rohingya. Her subtitle, with its use of the phrase “Occupied Myanmar,” clearly signals her disillusionment, indicating as it does the continuity in military control and the persistence of civil war in many areas of the country. The phrase also serves to link Tatmadaw development projects, including building railroads using coerced labor, with the hard-edged colonial control exerted over the country by the British. Thinking of her travels as taking place in a country under occupation also suggests that Aung San Suu Kyi deserves to be counted among other historical figures who found ways to justify, at least to themselves, collaborating with conquerors, in her case by trying to deflect international criticism of ethnic cleansing policies.

¤

Much as I like On the Shadow Tracks, it has not displaced Finding George Orwell in Burma as my favorite nonfiction book about Myanmar. Larkin’s is the rare book that I have read three times, each time thinking of Tun as I did so. When I first read it soon after it was published, by which time Tun was an old friend and a professor, it offered a window onto both the colonial era and the dark period of Tatmadaw rule that had shaped my former student’s childhood and still showed no sign of ending soon. I read the book a second time on a plane bound for Yangon in 2013, when it provided a historical snapshot of a place that no longer existed. Myanmar, it seemed, might have finally broken out of its bad old patterns, a view cemented for me in part by the excitement Tun expressed about the trips he had made recently to the city where he had once protested (no longer the nation’s capital since the military built a giant new one). The third time I read Larkin’s book was last year while working on my latest book, The Milk Tea Alliance: Inside Asia’s Struggle Against Autocracy and Beijing. I was particularly interested during that reading in Larkin’s brief account of the events of 1988, as I have a chapter on Myanmar in that book that begins with an account of Tun’s life. Despite now being two decades old, with the Tatmadaw now again exercising power in a brutal and uncompromising way, Larkin’s book no longer seems a work about a country that has moved on and freed itself from its bad old patterns.

I doubt I will read Hammond’s book two more times. I do think, though, that it is well crafted and rich enough in insights to hold up well to a second reading. And I like to imagine a specific context in which I might return to it. If a day ever comes when Myanmar changes for the better, I could see myself taking On the Shadow Tracks along on a trip there. It would provide a lively refresher course on a period the country has finally left behind. I just hope, if that imagined second trip and second reading ever do take place, that the move into a completely new chapter of Myanmar’s history will prove a lasting and not a chimerical one.