This is an excerpt from Gordon Young’s book Journey from Banna, an autobiography that details the American hunter-turned-conservationist’s extraordinary life growing up in Burma in the 1930s. He was born in Yunnan, China in 1927 and became fluent in numerous tribal languages of the region, and he touches on a topic that has become a growing interest of mine -the “wild man” of Southeast Asia. Called the tek-tek in Cambodia, the tat-tat in Vietnam, the tua yeua in Thailand, the Batutut in Borneo, the orang pendek in Peninsular Malaysia and Sumatra, it is known as the dtaw in Burma (Myanmar). I’ve come across a fair amount of descriptions written by reputable writers such as Young, and I think I will try to update this blog page every week or so with excerpts from different texts. A note on the text: the Lahu are a tribal group that live in China’s Yunnan province, northeastern Burma, and northern Thailand, and Banna is a small village in Yunnan near the Burmese border. Young’s excerpt begins below.
I shared most of the thoughts and concepts that Lahu men believed, including their fears of a host of potential evils: evil spirits, ghosts, the dtaw (a supernatural man-ape, akin to the idea of a werewolf) and a Lahu version of loudly moaning banshees called mvuh-ne- kai. Such beliefs did inhibit me to a certain extent, but I had also ingrained in me a certain amount of my parental assurances that a Christian was secure from such fearsome doings of the devil and his demons. There were times when I found myself trying, with admitted uncomfortable nerves, to find a ghost or hear the “banshee,” both of which supposedly were more prevalent in the rainy season. Later I got much bolder, vocally challenging the black night to produce something. But my belief in the dtaw, something so vividly described to me even by my own father, really worried me and I didn’t dare challenge them. They had to be real because every Lahu, Christian, or Animist believed in them! Interestingly, to this day, the riddles and controversies over the existence or not of the dtaw has never been resolved to my satisfaction. I simply cannot discount them. I will never know why my dad did not tell me whether he simply enlarged the Lahu tales of ghosts and demons for the sake of storytelling or sincerely believed in them. Did he really believe in the dtaw, or did he enjoy embellishing folktales, making them sound like reality? Questioning these stories later in my life, I have always been baffled by the many tales that were told. I cannot accept that many wonderful taletellers lied to me, and bewilderment about the subject of dtaw continues endlessly.
Maybe Santa Claus really did exist at one time. Maybe people as reliable as my Lahu here, Sara Chakaw, did see them and combated them. He told me very seriously that he encountered a dtaw one dusky evening near his house in Banna chewing on an arm of a child, robbed from a nearby burial plot. He shot the creature and it struggled, dying on the ground, so he tried to put his foot on its neck to hold it down. But the dtaw struggled free and loped off down the hillside. Sara Chakaw said that the creature was about the size of a Lahu woman, around five feet tall, and very strong. He gave me a description that roughly suggests an earliest human, apelike and hairy, yet not of any known ape or monkeys of the region.
Unforgettable in my own memory are my own father’s stories. Among them was a vivid picture he left me when a dtaw is said to have come into his bedroom when he was a young man. He had seen dtaws before and even shot at one with his shotgun, wounding it severely, but not stopping it from running rapidly away. Lahu people warned him that he had invoked dtaw wrath and that he could expect retaliation from them. That, Dad said, was why the dtaw attacked him in his bed. Dad was ready with his loaded and cocked shotgun near his bed. He managed to bring the barrel between himself and the dtaw and pull the trigger. He blew the creature off his chest with a blast into its stomach and watched, by dim lantern light as it leaped up over the wall and squeezed through a gap between wall and roof. This would have been impossible except for very agile apes, even unwounded. Numerous Lahu individuals confirmed this even in later years and the story was the same. However, among my own relatives who were not there at the time, it changed from open discussion and apparent belief at one time to deliberate refusal to talk about the subject.
-from Journey from Banna: An Autobiography, by Gordon Young, 2011, pp. 33-34.
*For those interested in reading another Gordon Young excerpt, you can check out A Monkey Misunderstanding, which I also typed up from one of his books, the breathtaking Tracks of an Intruder, which is now out of print.
Accounts of the Wild Men of Southeast Asia 