Cafe Burma

In the midst of the Washington DC government district, sits the Cafe Burma, run by a 40-ish man and his 18-year-old daughter, Dewi. Dewi grew up as an American teenager but was also schooled in traditional Burmese values of maintaining the family’s honor and obedience to your elders. She yearns to escape the long hours working in the family business to learn a trade at college and raise a family of her own in America. Her boyfriend is reluctant to leave the old neighborhood, yet if she stays, she will never break free from the cafe.
Her father has quite different plans and he is becoming desperate. Without a son to inherit his property, all of it will pass to his brother. He has devised a plan to keep his money from his brother. Dewi must become his son through a sex change operation. She is now legal age to leave home, so he must act quickly to force this drastic surgery onto her as a ‘family duty’.
One day a famous Hollywood actor stops by for lunch. After talking to Dewi he eventually offers to talk to her about a potential part in his new movie filming in the area. Her boyfriend is angry because the discussion will take place at the actor’s hotel. The violent argument rips the couple apart. Both regret the split. Whenever things start to work out between them some new events keep reopening old wounds.
The Cafe Burma itself is not what it first seems to be. Hiring, training and supporting an intelligence network is expensive. Smaller countries cannot afford to do that, so they establish a spy team in plain sight. Ethnic cafes are the perfect cover. They are located near government offices in the hopes of someone revealing some secret over an informal lunch. Any profits finance their spy operations.
Many things happen in DC that impact all the other countries of the world. They could be economic, diplomatic, military, legal, financial aid, tariffs, the entire gauntlet of areas and topics. Often a decision or political action impacting a small country is never mentioned by the news media. These countries must ferret out what information they can. Their small embassy staffs deal with official Washington bureaucrats. They rely on their local spy nets to gather relevant information.
Each café was originally financed and staffed by their home country. The wealthier ones have more sophisticated listening and surveillance devices. The poorer ones manage with much less. Most of the managers have been here for years. To keep their dream job, they must feed a steady stream of intelligence tidbits back to their country. They can be replaced at any time. The managers are careful not to do anything that would cause them to be expelled or to be recalled home. With its crime and chaos, they find downtown D.C. a better place to live than their home countries.
A pair of FBI agents monitor the spies in the ethnic cafes like a protective uncle. Better the spy you know than the one you don’t.
Life in the cafe is never easy. Lately a new set of Chinese secret agents have been trying to force all of the small ethnic cafes into working for them, or else face ruin. A new corrupt health inspector is trying to extract bribes from the cafes. The local criminal gang is threatening violence for interference in their activities.
What will happen next at the Cafe Burma?