Thanks to Mandy Brett, Senior Editor at Text, who applied her pencil with taste and tact. Brian Castro encouraged me to push my writing further, no matter how uncomfortable, and that made all the difference. Jim Aung Thin answered all my questions about Rangoon and Burmese culture and Pam Aung Thin started the whole thing rolling with her childhood stories of Burma. Warren Shnider was a mensch. Margaret McCarthy, Steven Amsterdam and Glenice Whitting gave me great advice. Lauren Melton introduced me to various experts, including Ryan Propst who kindly shared his professional knowledge of gunshot wounds. Melanie Hendrata took my author photographs. Jean Cameron found and sent on a map of 1930s Rangoon.
I spent time researching this book at the British Library and the Wellcome Collection, London; the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne; and the Barr Smith Library, Adelaide. I wrote this book with the financial support of an Australian Postgraduate Award as well as a travel and research grant from the University of Adelaide.
Thanks to the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. And to the Readings Foundation and the Wheeler Centre, who fund the Unpublished Manuscript Fellowship awarded to The Monsoon Bride in an earlier incarnation.
Early versions of two chapters were published in the journals Strange3 and antithesis.
I have taken various liberties with the actualities of 1930s Rangoon. If you look for flowering padauk flowers in late May, you will be disappointed as they generally bloom a little earlier (but it is true that they flower only for a day). Aye Sein and Daw Sein’s association of activists is loosely based on actual student groups formed after the Lewis Street Jetty riots. I don’t know if anyone connected with the Saya San rebellion ever made it to Rangoon, but it seems pretty likely to me. I have reconfigured some of the titles and ranks within the Indian civil and medical services. Winsome’s convent school in Kalaw is also a fiction, but there were schools just like it throughout Burma.