“Ko Po Kyin,” she said, “you have done very much evil in your life.”
U Po Kyin waved his hand. “What does it matter? My pagodas will atone for everything. There is plenty of time.”
—George Orwell, Burmese Days
As it turns out, I would unravel the story of my maternal great-grandfather’s homeland—and discover that it was not some sort of mist-covered Brigadoon-style utopia, but a place that was saddled with every society’s ongoing crisis since the birth of modernity: a crisis of identity. Who are we? Who belongs here? These were familiar questions to me, after all: Determining who my own people were was a problem that had plagued me since I was a kid, unsuccessfully avoiding cold buckets of water at the suburban Thingyan festival in early April.
But now these queries had taken on an epic scope, thanks to my ancestral search. The seemingly benign personal quest that sent me back to Burma—my newfound avid interest in understanding my heritage—was, in fact, the core of the crisis that had splintered Burma, had indeed broken the world apart and spun my family halfway across the globe to the place I was born. But I didn’t know all of this yet. To understand it, I had to first find my great-grandfather, a person filled with passions and fears and convictions and doubts, and not the sepia-toned patriarch of the mystical good ole days.
Burma’s natural world was the lush, blooming backdrop in U Myint Kaung’s biography. I could imagine the papery white flowers of the teaks that began to bloom when the rains arrived in June, until the downpours receded in August. I knew that for much of the twentieth and early twenty-first century, the ruling military junta had exploited these tall hardwoods, which account for half of the world’s teak forests. The trees were destined at some point or another to become outdoor furniture or boat decking—timber from the East to make playthings for the West; money from the West to empower dictators in the East.
And then there was the jade—that green aluminum silicate believed by the Chinese to be the bridge between heaven and hell that streaks the rock formations of Burma’s jungles.1 My grandmother and mother had bangles made of the stuff, and I could still hear the way they made soft clinking sounds when rubbed together. Burma’s jade accounts for nearly three-quarters of the global supply, and continues to be extracted in brutal conditions that more resemble a squalid underworld than the celestial beyond.2
But back in the late nineteenth century, before U Myint Kaung had purchased his first pair of Saxon shoes, and when the British were just beginning their takeover of the Bamah and the Kachin and the Shan and the Chin, the export that put his country on the map had its humble origins in the fertile deltas of the Irrawaddy River, a place both unassuming and bloodless. Rice—Asia’s staple crop and Burma’s mainstay—brought this corner of Southeast Asia international acclaim.
With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, several years after U Myint Kaung was born, Burma became an agricultural powerhouse. Ships traveling from the port of Rangoon no longer had to circumnavigate Africa to reach the markets (and mouths) of Europe. A vessel could depart the warm waters of the Bay of Bengal and arrive in the chilly North Atlantic in five weeks, a voyage that had previously taken six months.3
Rapidly industrializing Europe and its cities of Amsterdam and Paris and Brussels needed food. Rice entered the Old World through the port cities of Hamburg and Rotterdam, Gdańsk, and Bremen4—not far from landlocked Luxembourg, where Henry Wagner would soon depart for the New World. The markets in Western and Northern Europe spurred rice production elsewhere—including the Carolinas, American states where backbreaking labor was very nearly a component of the soil. But in this moment, it was Burma under the British that became the world’s “rice bowl”—a claim that my mother’s mother and my mother (and even I, on occasion) never let anyone forget, lest they think our motherland some lazy-ass backwater with no real industry to speak of.
Where Burmese kings had restricted the export of rice, the British saw opportunity and dollar signs and set about conquering the rice bowl.5 Their first incursion began shortly after the Burmese made inroads toward British India, conquering the kingdoms of Manipur and Assam in 1821. In response, the Brits declared the kingdoms of Cachar (in Assam) and Jaintia (in northeast India) to be under their protection, setting the stage for confrontation: The First Anglo-Burmese War began in 1824.
There would be three wars between the British (assisted by the Indians, over whom they had established dominion) and the Burmese monarchy, culminating on November 27, 1887 (precisely ninety years to the day before my birth), when the British deposed the last Burmese king, lowered the country’s flag, and raised the Union Jack over the teak roofs of the palace compound. Thanks to Sa‘id Pasha, the tens of thousands of Egyptians who died slicing open that waterway from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, and the tens of thousands of dark-skinned laborers forced into a permanent hunch at harvest time, the port of Rangoon became a major shipping outpost.
From 1885 until 1910, rice production in Burma went from a few hundred thousand tons to 1.5 million tons.6 The British Empire was further enriched, and Burmese like my great-grandfather were now educated in British schools, taught to speak their language, and otherwise encouraged to adapt to the colonial powers.
Burma the British colony may have seemed a willing celebrant in the pageantry of global trade, but behind the curtain a steep price was being paid by the Burmese themselves. Rice was its own kind of hell. The seeding and sowing, the threshing and harvesting by hand—it was labor so tough that in later years the Burmese military would forcibly conscript citizens to harvest.7 (It is a system that largely remains in place today, albeit with deteriorating transportation infrastructure and worse crop yields.) Seeds and fertilizer, irrigation equipment: These all cost money, and Burmese farmers—even in the middle of a rice boom—struggled to find capital to cover the costs of growing the crop on their land. The cash outlay was overwhelming.
With no real banking structure to support the loans, the farmers turned to Chettiars, moneylenders from southern India who had decamped for Burma, seeing an open market for their trade.8 They’d lend money out to farmers, but should the farmer default, the land became property of the Chettiar. Rice productivity fluctuated with the seasons, harvests were unpredictable, and interest rates were high. Property titles began to default into the hands of the moneylenders, and farmers who had owned land for generations became tenants, subjects of absentee landowners who had neither the interest nor the inclination to be rice farmers. It was a bad deal for the moneylenders and their depositors back home; it was a bad deal for the farmers of Burma. It was not a very fine balance. The British rulers and their Burmese subjects understood this, particularly my great-grandfather U Myint Kaung. It was the cause to which he would devote much of his adult life.
To be clear: I had never, ever been interested in agricultural economics. Nor did I concern myself previously with Burmese crop yields or agrarian policy. I was confused enough about the 2007 mortgage crisis here in the States; it never dawned on me that one day I would find the subject of nineteenth-century Indo-Burmese moneylending something worth pursuing, let alone something that I’d actually find interesting. But it was interesting! Because it was mine.
This heretofore arcane data—the crop yields and agrarian policies and economics of rice—this was part of my family story. And for the first time, I could see how the titanic forces of global history (plus the more regional history of the Burmese almanac) was part of my ancestral tale. The opening of the Suez Canal, the colonization of Upper Burma, the appetite for rice in the lowlands of Europe—these massive, abstract forces that shaped the world were no longer nebulous, no longer something that just affected an unseen population in generally sweeping fashion. These seismic developments hit my backyard. Trace your ancestry and you end up charting the course of global struggle.
Maybe this was why so many people were so intoxicated by the practice: Who we are is a product of battles fought long before us. The winners and losers from centuries ago determine our very existence, as well as a not-incidental part of our day-to-day fate. Genealogy forces the realization that the “beginning” of any story—the uppermost branches of a family tree, the origin tale passed down through the generations—is no beginning at all. Go far back enough, and you’ll realize that your ancestors and their lives were inevitably part of a much grander narrative: the history of the world itself. No family story flows from nothing, after all.
So I had a stake in all of it—colonialism, war, the British Empire, the succession of Burmese monarchs, the rain in Rangoon—and within those epic forces was the thread of our story, in the form of a certain person named U Myint Kaung, a man who made decisions, chose certain paths, and came to be a certain way thanks to the chaos of history and the unpredictability of human nature. To seek answers in reference books would not be enough. I had to get down to the personal, to understand what specifically he’d done (or tried to do).
Without doubt, this would be the hardest part of the search. Though it may feel satisfying to couch your own family story among the great movements of time, you inevitably realize that history, as cruel as it is, has winners and losers. Because of this, one’s people may be (yes) champions or (gasp) villains. Of course, everyone wants to believe that their ancestors were the winners, the day savers and unsung heroes—or that if they were the losers, they were the valiant innocents, the ones fighting to keep the world from falling apart. But who were they really? Were they innocents, or were they criminals? Did they do the right thing or the very wrong one? I’d have to ask: What role did my people play in our newly discovered Burmese drama?
“Chettiar banks are fiery dragons that parch every land that has the misfortune of coming under their wicked creeping. They are a hard-hearted lot that will ring out every drop of blood from the victims without compunction for the sake of their own land.”9
This was the testimony from one Karen member of the legislative council before the government of Burma in 1929. The Great Depression had pushed tensions between the farmers and the lenders to an all-time high. In 1930, Chettiars occupied 6 percent of total land in Burma. Eight years later, they owned a quarter of the country.10 It was putting it mildly to say that this chafed at the national identity of the Burmese.
Before things reached this point, there had been a plan for another way. The British, seeing the writing on the wall with the Chettiars, had a lightbulb moment: a way to finance rice production without Indian interlopers and, in the bargain, school the Burmese in the ways of thrift and Christian responsibility. They called this lightbulb the cooperative credit societies, a three-tiered Rube Goldberg machine designed to produce virtue, credit, and rice.
The co-ops fell into three tiers: At the bottom were credit societies (made up of individuals and households). Managing them were the credit unions, composed of several credit societies, who were supposed to vet community members for loans. At the very top were the banks (chief among them the provincial bank) controlled by the British—and which, when necessary, lent to the credit unions. The banks were able to do so thanks to their deposits from the well-to-do public, of which a fair share were European.11 My great-grandfather worked at the essential pivot of the whole system: the credit union. U Myint Kaung’s job was to make sure money was going to the right people: Burmese with that elusive “money sense.”
It was a pyramid structure—one that was supposed to be rooted in trust and community responsibility—but the word “pyramid” was an unfortunate indicator about how successful this particular financial strategy would end up being. You could already see where there were problems with this plan: If the credit societies lent to wayward Burmese with no real money sense, or if the credit union did a crappy audit about the financial solvency of the individuals it was lending to, well, then…someone was gonna pay for it.
The societies proliferated in the early 1920s across Burma. But by 1925, the “cooperative movement was clogged with bad Societies” and loans were being made “too easily.”12 Something called the Calvert Committee was convened to assess exactly how this happened and it recommended the provincial bank be “wound up forthwith.” (British English didn’t allow for much alarmism, but this signaled the proverbial hand hitting the proverbial red button.) By 1932, the all-important provincial bank had been liquidated.
What happened, exactly? The Calvert Committee pinpointed “an inherent weakness…characteristic of the Burmans.” That flaw was “a certain delicacy in dealing with the faults and misdemeanors of their neighbours. [The Burmans] prefer to put up with the administration [of] malpractices in the hope that…the Government may one day come and put things right.”13
In other words, the Burmese, in the eyes of the committee, were simply too polite to turn down bad candidates for loans—too weak to say no to their neighbors and fellow farmers who were looking for capital. U Myint Kaung and the other supervisors at the credit unions had performed faulty audits (or none at all), and compensated for these bad decisions by papering over them. These supervisors were declared to be “untrained, uneducated in co-operative banking or co-operative principles and unfit to be let loose amongst any body of cooperators.”14
Terms such as “untrained” and “let loose” should give you a sense of the respect accorded the Burmese supervisors, who by all (British) accounts ran their cooperatives with the competence of roving, wild (albeit occasionally benevolent) pigs. The bottom of the cooperative society pyramid was riddled with negligent assessments, crony capitalism, rotten apples, and financial obfuscation—in part due to that thing that the British wished so badly to improve upon—the Burmese character. A second, more far-reaching report again focused on Burmese competence: “In Burma, the character of the people is such that a system of official control cannot succeed.”15
In trying to get a wider look at my family history, this is what I discovered: My people were weak and dishonest and stupid and corrupt. But if you asked anyone in our family if they thought that the patriarch U Myint Kaung had been a powerhouse government minister, some sort of proto–Ben Bernanke of agrarian finance, they’d have said yes without hesitation. My grandmother glossed over a lot of details in her retelling of our family history, but when I asked her about her father’s position, she enunciated very clearly when she dropped that title: deputy commissioner for the Cooperative Societies of Upper Burma, a sort of bureaucratic humblebrag.
Did she not know that the cooperative societies were…a disaster? That they were at the center of Burma’s own little financial bailout? Did we not know our people were failures? Or did we just not care? I cared, in part because America was going through its own reconciliation of Financial Sins, and it pained me to think of my great-grandfather as an actor who’d brought so many Burmese to their knees, courtesy of a failed banking system. (I, unlike the British assessors, was not ready to pin the blame on a certain, unavoidable character flaw in the Burmese people. The system itself seemed pretty faulty and badly managed.) More than that, though, I was both incredulous that this history had been entirely hidden until now (it seemed painfully ignorant to crow about a title if you didn’t understand the work), and also, in some strange way, relieved by the humiliation. It made U Myint Kaung real, in a way that all the other stories about him had not: He had tried and he had failed. Just like I had, just like everybody who populated the world in which I lived. Shame was hard, but it was also humanizing. Much more so than my grandmother’s icky and ingratiating Legend of the Dodge, this family story, based in shame and disgrace, made U Myint Kaung a real person.
My grandmother may have been too busy to follow the specifics of her father’s career flameout, given the fact that she was off studying and flirting with nine-fingered suitors at Rangoon University. But discovering the epic shitstorm that was the Cooperative Societies Experiment definitely illuminated U Myint Kaung’s later decision to leave behind all of his worldly possessions and head up to the monastery to devote the remainder of his life to Buddhist meditation. This was a common practice in Burmese society—the pursuit of an existence devoid of materialism—but it was made all the more poignant after the cratering of his lifelong endeavor. He was done with the material world.
Maybe he was now convinced that the path to redemption lay in selflessness, in commitment to the community. Those British officers knew a lot about making shoes and whiskey cake, but they didn’t understand his fellow countrymen, and they certainly weren’t in any position to make pronouncements about the true nature of the Burmese.
My mother later told me that after the whole system of cooperatives came crashing down, U Myint Kaung’s wife—who came from wealth and had invested all her money in the co-ops—lost all of her savings. Aghast and inconsolable, she confronted her husband: “Why didn’t you warn me about what was to happen?” she demanded. According to my mother, he reasoned (quite phenomenally): “If the workers and the farmers did not know, then why should you?”
If he was not good at his job—if he was guilty of professional malpractice—U Myint Kaung appeared to have been an intensely moral person. For me, he exists only in anecdote, and therefore these stories—told mostly by my grandmother—are all I have to divine his motivations. But I think he must have been scarred by what happened to his country’s economy and what he had done to precipitate its failure. I also believe that he held on to the ideals that brought him to this line of work in the first place, up until the end of his life. That became especially clear when I considered one particular story about him that I had known very well even before I embarked on the project to figure out who my people were. My grandmother had repeated it countless times—and each time she did, it gave me a sense of pride.
After having relinquished his ties to the family and spent some unspecified amount of time at the monastery, U Myint Kaung got word that his wife had begun the unsavory practice of moneylending—making small loans and then charging interest, the very thing he had worked to eradicate (or at least marginalize) in setting up the farmers’ cooperatives in Upper Burma. She had, after all, lost most of the money she once had.
From my grandmother’s recollection: “He marched down the hill to our home and said to my mother: ‘Are you starving? Do you want for anything?’ She protested—vaguely—and then begrudgingly admitted she did not want for anything, nor was she starving.
“Well, then,” he said, “Don’t bargain so much.”
And he turned and went back up the hill. She never charged interest again.
While the British (and Burmese) worked to stabilize an economy that was on the precipice of financial collapse, the seams stitching together Burma’s patchwork union had more than begun to strain. To be clear, Burma is one country in the same way that Iraq is one country, which is to say it’s not. It—like Iraq—is a collection of contested land that’s been fought over for decades, with some years bloodier than others. Burma’s borders were drawn arbitrarily over time and in the aftermath of battle, by conquerors and colonialists alike. The tensions between the Chin and the Shan, the Karen and the Kachin—as well as the wealthy Bamah and the British ruling class—while already significant, were under remarkable strain in the waning years of colonialism, right as my grandmother came of age.
I knew this, growing up, mostly because Burma’s war within a war—the ethnic tensions that had exacerbated the military campaign to subdue the country and harvest its riches, both human and environmental—was a part of discussions about the problems plaguing the country. And yet, for whatever reason, I had never seen this truth as a hindrance to my claim of being “Burmese” and the secret pride that my tribe, our tribe, was the one for whom the country was named.
For a few years in the late aughts, I ran a nonprofit organization focused on combating international human rights violations around the world. As part of this work, I went to the Thai-Burma border to visit refugee camps where entire generations of children were languishing: This was the cost of Burma’s forever war with itself. Ethnic minorities had been uprooted and forced to the margins, whether because of intertribal conflict or (more usually) targeted campaigns of violence launched by the military regime. The camps were sprawling cities, without adequate resources for a population that would live in them for years on end. And yet, amid this heartbreak and turmoil, I couldn’t forget the fact that these Burmese were not Bamah Burmese—they were Kachin or Chin or Shan or Karen or another tribe. And though I felt terrible for them, was angry at the deplorable situation and resolute about holding someone responsible for it, I couldn’t help but notice a sneaking and unshakable sense of ethnic superiority within myself.
My people were not in these camps, after all. They were not forsaken into misery and squalor, but had instead escaped it when they could, because of their resources and education and class. This was evidence of the powerful narcotic of identity: how quickly, and easily, one could go from pride to superiority, from celebration of self to dismissal of others. Even as I recognized this, even as I grew older and more acutely aware of how vigilant one needed to be in pushing back against the dark impulse to separate Us from Them, there was still something in me that clutched at supremacy, however subconsciously, as I thought about Burma’s miseries. The distinction was a refuge—and who didn’t want a refuge?
I was trying to find meaning in connecting my family story to blood and land, but blood was precisely the thing dividing the land, carving it into subgroups and territories. Blood was the thing that would continue to fuel division, to speed the dissolution of society and break apart the Burma that my mother and grandmother could still dream so vividly about. It was the seed of our despair.
As it turned out, my grandmother’s allegiance to Burma was tied not to the country, necessarily, but to her slice of it, her ethnic subgroup, her class. Even after the British lowered their Union Jack for the last time on January 4, 1948, Burma’s tribal strife continued to escalate, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Our family wasn’t in the hills of Shan State or pushing off the Karenni Christian army (far from it), but simmering race tension could be found right in our kitchen. Quite literally simmering.
“We had an Indian cook who made the most delicious curry,” my grandmother wistfully recalled. By way of a coda, she offered—always—this caveat: “And he robbed us blind.”
From these aromatic and lusty recollections, I could very nearly taste this curry. For most of my adolescence, when I was confronted by soggy grilled cheese sandwiches and limp tater tots in the school cafeteria, my mother offered impossible childhood stories of her own: the family driver dropping off stacked tiffin carriers during her school lunchtime, small aluminum containers filled with piping hot vindaloos and dals, all prepared by the same masterful-if-greedy hand. But the story always ended in the same refrain: He robbed the family blind! Oh, this cruel price we had to pay, unspecified rubies for untold biryanis. It was an impossible choice, but there was only one to make. The cook was dismissed, taking with him all those curries and vindaloos—and what a loss this was. Replacements were hired, but no one could replicate that harmony over the stove. That Indian cook! Who was he? No one ever mentioned his name, only the dishes he prepared.
From the outset of the Indian-Burmese commingling, many Burmans, including my grandmother, referred to Indians as kala. The word’s origins may be from the Sanskrit word kula—meaning “caste man”—or kala, for “black man.” Or it may be from the Burmese word ka la—the term for “coming from overseas.” Even after half a century in the United States, my grandmother always referred to Indians as kalas, which we American-born offspring giggled at but didn’t quite understand. As it turns out, she might have been calling them, basically, house negroes.
According to public health and humanitarian professional Nance Cunningham, a prominent scholar on the Burmese language, most explanations for the word that you hear nowadays “are colored by prejudice.” Cunningham offered that kala might mean “coolie”—but then doubled back on that by noting that there already happens to be the word ku li in Burmese. Further, a chair in Burmese is often referred to as a “coolie sit”—so the word “coolie” was also already in play. In the end, we concluded that kala had something to do with blackness—a racist designation with assuredly classist suggestions.
By the late 1980s and ’90s and the early aughts, my grandmother had officially lived in America for thirty, forty, fifty years. She had gay friends dating back to the 1970s—friends with whom she drank cocktails after work at the Library of Congress, friends who were hers for life (most of them died before she did). She spoke glowingly of the young black men who delivered groceries to her small one-bedroom on Capitol Hill in the 1960s, right after she had arrived in the States, and as she retold these stories, over time they went from being “young black men” to “young African American men.” She fully grasped the implications of the language around identity, and she understood the social merits conferred by having gay male friends in the disco era, of engaging with young black men during Jim Crow.
So she knew well the power of identification, especially as it informed the American hierarchy of the enlightened, one in which educated white liberals were allegedly at the top of the pyramid, and, among the immigrant classes, Asians were often at the very bottom: reclusive, tribal, still clinging to the ways of the Old World. She was not going to be lumped in with any suspicious Korean shop owners of the Rodney King era, nor would she be confused with those country Chinese who didn’t understand nappy hair. She went out of her way to promote her most Western acceptance of those two pilloried subsets: sexual and racial minorities. This, as much as her fluency in English and predilection for cosmopolitans, was hard evidence that she had assimilated, and was therefore somehow greater than the sum of her own parts. In her seeming tolerance, ironically, she moved closer to a certain white, liberal American ideal.
And yet, long after she received her American passport, she still called Indian associates, waiters, and friends kalas (mostly behind their backs). This term was usually dispatched with a smile, and because of this, her discreet bigotry had the veneer of a sort of delicate charm. The in-laws and cousins and grandchildren excused her use of it, in most cases pleading ignorance. Or we dismissed it as a vestige of home rather than indicative of some deep-seated racial animus. My mother, more acutely aware of how inappropriate it was, would shush my grandmother in Burmese after every utterance, while my uncle would scowl and let out a disapproving bark. But it never stopped her, really. In this I had found, whether I liked it or not, another catch in the family narrative.
I heard echoes of my grandmother’s awkward behavior in a classic tale ritually recounted by urban liberal white folks every year: the trip back home for the holidays, where our enlightened white friend’s beloved uncle or grandparent lets loose a racial epithet over dessert, poisoning the atmosphere. It was not easily laughed about, because that kind of racism—white racism against black people, immigrants, or Jews—was connected to the worst of American and Western history, to pogroms, to slavery and lynching, to genocide. For some reason my grandmother’s vague slurring of Indians seemed more benign—embarrassing more than genuinely disturbing. Until I examined that snag a little more closely.
Her general predisposition toward Indians as untrustworthy outsiders, a race to be skeptical of, became less acceptable and certainly less charming once I looked at the blood-soaked history of our Burmese intolerance. In trying to better understand Burma and race, and just how offensive the word kala might have been, I picked up a small used library book from the University of California, Irvine. An out-of-print book, The Indian Minority in Burma by N. R. Chakravarti, is written with a highly critical eye toward the Burmese, as if to dispel my ideas about bigotry being discreet. In a rebuke to what I had always thought of as my grandmother’s funny little cultural aversion, it outlines fifty years of subjugation and violent oppression of the Indians at the hand of the Burmese.
For context: There were a lot of Indians in Burma when my family arrived in Rangoon in the 1930s. A whole lot more than I realized: Rangoon, in fact, had become a mostly Indian city. I didn’t—couldn’t—have known this, because in her recollections, my grandmother never once discussed the city or its inhabitants. She always spent much more time on her specific, cloistered world of teatime bananas and English-language newspapers.
For many years, it was assumed that Burma would become a Chinese state. According to the colonial historian Sir George Scott, “Unless some marvellous upheaval of energy took place in the Burman character, the Chinese were almost certainly destined to overrun the country to the exclusion of the native race.”16 Ah, but the lazy Burmese never did cede their country to their northern, ostensibly far more industrious neighbors (that would come approximately one hundred years later). In fact, it was the Indians who effectively colonized their fellow colonized:
In 1872, Indians were 16 percent of Rangoon residents.
By 1901, they were 50 percent. Burmans made up only 33 percent of the city.17
Indians were propelled by poverty back home, and encouraged to migrate east by an immigration policy that miraculously managed to infuriate the native-born Burmese population for its lack of protections for them and punish the newly arrived Indians, thanks to a lack of protections from the Burmese. The Indians migrated in vast numbers: In 1922, 360,000 of them migrated to Burma. By the 1930s, Indians owned the capital city: They built Rangoon; they ran its businesses and they conducted its trade. The Indian Chettiars already had a monopoly on moneylending, and by virtue of that played an instrumental role in the agricultural sector, but they dominated the trade and banking industries, too.
Still, in much larger numbers—perhaps as much as 99 percent of their country’s immigrant population—Indians were Burma’s laboring class. They harvested crops; they mined silver and lead; they ran ships up and down the Irrawaddy; they moved earth and pulled rickshaws. They tailored suits and made dresses. In 1931, the second-largest occupation (not including semiskilled or unskilled workers) held by Indian migrants was domestic service. That year, census records tell us that 11,242 male Indians were employed as house help—and at least one of them worked for our family.
For their role in the engine room of the Burmese economy, the Indian laboring class (unsurprisingly) got little in the way of respect or security. Many were brought over the border by unscrupulous labor contractors known as maistries—sort of proto-coyotes of the nineteenth century who hauled their cargo over the Bay of Bengal in subhuman conditions. Here’s Gandhi’s description of what seemed like an impossibly wretched situation on the sea route to Burma, the so-called Golden Land:
There are for the use of these 1,500 passengers two tiny bathrooms and twelve latrines….This gives an average of one latrine to 75 passengers and one bathroom to 375 passengers. There is only a sea-water tap in the bathrooms, but no fresh water tap….There is a sort of a running corridor in front of each set of latrines….Dirty water and urine from the latrines flow into this corridor….Foul water continues to roll to and fro on the floor with the rolling of the ship….The lowermost deck is nothing better than a black hole. It is dark and dingy and stuffy and hot to the point of suffocation.18
Indians seeking promise in Burma paid hefty fees for this scummy, sewage-filled experience. It didn’t necessarily get a whole hell of a lot better after landfall, either. Upon disembarkation, most immigrants entered the very bottom of the food chain: They earned abysmally low wages and lived in hellish setups, crammed as they were into squalid, disease-infested lodging houses that were “perennially flooded with rain or tidal waters or with stagnant pools of sullage waste.”
They were shuttled into this dark misery by the scores: A report of the Rangoon municipality noted one home where inspectors “found in one room 23 inmates—the dimension being only 18 × 14 feet.”19 Opiate and alcohol addiction surrounded by filth and open fornication: This all formed what was described (not necessarily hyperbolically) as “a tragic total complex of their slum life.”20
So it was grim, and though the British took notice, they remained mostly bloodless in their assessments. Speaking at the annual dinner of the Rangoon Trade Association in 1930, British governor Sir Charles Innes diagnosed the problem thusly: “No one can read what the Rangoon Health Committee wrote in its report about the lodging houses of Rangoon without a feeling of shame, but also of apprehension, for these lodging houses must be hotbeds of tuberculosis and other diseases.”
Translation: These bottom dwellers might be carriers. Shouldn’t we do something to make sure they don’t infect us all?
I don’t know about whether our family’s gifted curry maker lived in squalor, but the fact that many (if not most) of his countrymen and -women did adds context to his thievery. And while the disappearance of baubles and gemstones was grounds for dismissal from the family home, perhaps there were more nefarious forces that cemented his fate. In other words, the cook may have stolen those family jewels, but one doesn’t imagine that his termination was hard to come by. Indians, after all, were regarded as lower caste—my grandmother had no compunction referring to them as kalas for the rest of her life. It was very clear that he wasn’t deemed a valued part of the family, even if his dal was sublime.
The Indians in Burma were like Mexicans in America or the Senegalese in France—marked with the scarlet O of “outsider,” despite the fact that there existed webs of connections weaving their homelands together with their destination countries. This part of Burma’s—and my family’s—history surprised me (though it shouldn’t have): how very precisely history repeated itself. My ancestral spelunking had not simply revealed a more squalid story than I’d imagined, but—more jarring than that—that story paralleled the moment that we were now living through, and indeed had lived through.
I’d always presumed that that we, my Burmese folk, had been the oppressed: forced to flee our homeland to reboot in America, a gang of brown exiles who created a new life on Western shores. But as the tortured reality of Burma’s history unfolded in my research, I realized that we outsiders were once insiders, perched atop a rickety system of class and caste. Turns out, we the marginalized had once marginalized a whole class of our own—we’d just done it on the other side of the globe and left it out of the stories we told ourselves in later months and years.
Inevitably, this was true for families and their ancestors everywhere, but the real mistake everyone made was in pretending that these behaviors and sins and denials weren’t a reliable pattern in our collective history, and in telling one another and our children that back then it was just great times and golden oldies, simmering curries and shiny new cars.
Even in Burma’s halcyon days, the problems were the same as they were today: the powerful versus the powerless; tensions around immigration and labor and dark skin. How did a society react when forced to grapple with an influx of people from elsewhere, people who happened to be driving the economy of a country but were nonetheless relegated to its lower miseries? Shame and marginalization!
History has no real beginning or ending, we simply choose points that are most convenient for the narrative, especially as it concerns the stories about our success. In other words, a lot gets left out.
The legacy of the Indians in Burma spanned wars and marriages and dinner plates, but any public accounting of their number and density was (and remains) further complicated by class distinctions among the Indians and, of course, the divide-and-conquer manipulation that the British Empire perfected among its colonies. Upper-class Indians were the soldiers of the British during the Anglo-Burmese wars and therefore deemed forevermore the patsies of colonial rule in the eyes of the conquered Burmese. Up until Burma formally separated from India in 1937, Indians often took the high-ranking positions in the British government of Burma, and the country’s army was composed largely of Indian soldiers.
In a 1938 pamphlet on Indo-Burman conflict, a young Communist leader named Thein Pe Myint put it bluntly: “When the British attacked and occupied Lower Burma as well as Upper Burma by unlawful force, their work was done mainly by the Indian Sepoys. For this reason, we Burmese hate them.” (Emphasis mine.)21
Indian officials lived and drank and dined largely among themselves (or with the British), rather than with their brown brethren, and therefore the relationship of immigrants in Burma to the middle- and upper-class Burmans especially—my family, for example—was not one of Brown Solidarity, but of intrusion and of oppression. U Myint Kaung may have gone to British schools and worked for the British monarchy, but he was still a Burmese Buddhist. He knew exactly who had conquered his country and with what assistance.
My family was still living in Mandalay when the Rangoon riots of 1930 began at the docks as a fight between Burmese laborers and Indian dockworkers. Indian workers—pressing for higher wages from their employers—struck on May 8,1930, and the largely British firms that hired them opted instead to break the picket lines with Burmese workers. Seventeen days later, the shipping masters cut a deal with their Indian dockworkers by agreeing to four pence extra per head in daily wages—and the Indians ended up paying for this paltry raise in blood.
The lately employed Burmese scabs didn’t appreciate being replaced once contract negotiations had been completed and the strike was over—keep in mind this was the beginning of the Great Depression—and they took to the streets of Rangoon with swords and iron bars and anything else that could inflict maximum pain. For nearly three days, Indian workers and shops were targeted, and because the capital city was an Indian city, not much of Rangoon functioned during what was termed a riot, but was really a rampage: no sanitation systems, few public services, and no business activity to speak of.22
In the end, there was no full accounting of how many people died, but most estimates place the figure in the nebulous “hundreds” of deaths and “thousands” of injuries.23 For these three days of terror, there was very nearly no response. Accounts vary, but only two arrests seem to have been made—neither one for murder or destruction of property.24
No compensation was doled out to the families of the slaughtered. Rangoon’s Indians mostly just hid, then shut their mouths and went on about their business. They stayed in the city, a seemingly inextricable part of its fabric, until a formal separation between India and Burma was announced in 1937, and Burma was made a separate, autonomous colony under the British crown.
But this didn’t stop the bloodletting. Burma remained under the British thumb, and nationalism was on the upswing. The Indian minority in Burma had few (if any) protections under the law, despite what had happened to them in the decade prior, and their complicated history fighting the Burmese on behalf of the British made them prime targets for a restive, angry citizenry. The burgeoning nationalist movement—led by Burmese Communists—played a not-insignificant role in this.
This is Thein Pe’s assessment of the situation at that time:
The Indians never consider the interests of the Burmese. They are always seeking their own benefit. They never dream of working together with the Burmese for better or worse; instead they segregate themselves into a privileged minority. On many occasions in national politics as well as in district and urban administration, they make alliances with the Europeans just to oppose the Burmese.25
My grandmother was just finishing her studies at the university in 1938 when the tension came to a head—again. A small booklet, printed in 1931 by a Burmese Muslim named Shwe Hpi, was highly critical of the Buddhist priesthood. Almost no one had heard of Shwe Hpi or read his pamphlet, but seven years later, as Burmese nationalism was cresting, several nationalist papers picked up old excerpts and printed them for general consumption.26
If you didn’t grow up in a predominantly Buddhist nation, or with a Buddhist parent (especially my Buddhist parent), it’s hard to conceive of the role that monks play in society. In Burma, they are the very embodiment of piety and enlightenment, and as such are accorded the utmost respect. On my first visit to Rangoon in 2008, my mother would make me cross the street to avoid the monks who were strolling around the city in the early mornings, begging for alms. This was a sign of obeisance—a word that nobody used as often as my mother (in fact, apart from my mother, I’ve never even heard anybody use the word “obeisance”).
The rest of the world came to understand the importance of Burma’s monks during the Saffron Revolution of 2007—so named because of the saffron-colored robes worn by the thousands of monks who took to the streets to protest the oppressive military regime that had run their country into the ground and put their democratically elected leader under house arrest for more than a decade.
These monks weren’t only wizened old vegetarians, or men with dusty bones accustomed to incense-filled prayer halls. Yes, the 2007 revolution featured a selection of wise old abbots, but most of the images beamed back to the West were of virile young men who looked more like freedom fighters than the elders of holy cloth common to the increasingly aged churches of America and Europe. These monks meant business; they were men of action. That the government summarily cut them down and drove them into hiding was not just an affront to democracy; it was a rebuke of Burmese values. For exiles and citizens alike, the image of a military officer wielding a baton against a monk was a sign that things—already pretty awful—had reached the very bottom of the dung heap.
But in 1938, Shwe Hpi’s pamphlet decrying the previously unassailable monk took on outsized importance. Nationalist broadsheets such as The New Light of Burma and New Burma inflamed the situation by printing editorials targeting the Indian Muslim minority. This begat public apologies from Burma’s Indian population, which seemed to do little to stem the tide of anti-Muslim anger.
Also in 1938, racial and religious hostilities reached a crisis point during a demonstration at the country’s holiest Buddhist shrine: the Shwedagon Pagoda.
Amid the pagoda’s gold-leafed spires and tinkling bells, violent anti-immigrant rhetoric fired up an unruly mob of protesters—who then descended the hill and launched an “indiscriminate attack on Indians…on a scale very much larger than that witnessed in 1930 and 1931, including cold-blooded murders, grievous hurts, looting, arson, etc.”27
Once again, the government proved mostly useless, and once again, there was no full accounting of the lives taken or interrupted by injury, nor did anyone determine how much business was lost or destroyed. This period of marauding and aggression stretched from July to September 1938 and was described as “a long period of horror” for Rangoon’s Indians—one that likely wounded and claimed lives into the thousands.
Little was done by almost anyone in the wake of this bloodshed. The government response—even in India—consisted mostly of unanimous and official public indignation, rather than any measurable action to protect the people who had built Rangoon and were being crushed in its racist rampages.
The Burmese account insisted that Indians had instigated the violence by stabbing a Buddhist monk—and later spearing a Burman to death. Thein Pe did, however, concede that “the Burmese being more hot-blooded, reckless and impetuous than the Indians can easily turn the tables against their aggressor.” And so they did.
The Indian Legislative Assembly asserted that its government—as well as the British and Burmese—had been criminally negligent in protecting Indians’ interests in Burma. But the Burmese had no interest in curbing the movement that gave rise to the chaos: nationalism. In fact, the outrage in India over the violence against Indians in Burma had the awful, circular effect of further inflaming Burmese tempers. Nationalists “considered it an uncalled-for interference in Burma’s internal affairs and threatened to take retaliatory measures if the Indian agitation was not stopped.”28
It was sickening, the rage and destruction, hell-bent nationalism run amok—but also familiar to anyone raised in the twentieth-century West. Why did we keep doing this to ourselves, over and over again? I’d thought, or hoped, that Burma before its fall had been somehow different, exempt from the cruelties of the masses, free from the bloody entitlements of power. It was not.
And as I learned about all of this from Mr. Chakravarti’s little yellowed out-of-print library book, I began to wonder: Where was my family when Rangoon was being torn apart? How had no one ever mentioned this to me? Fine, the Indian curry was magnificent, but somehow the violent oppression of Indians in our own backyard never made it onto the family radar. The Burmese public was not in the dark: Fifty thousand copies of Thein Pe’s pamphlet detailing what had happened were distributed to the Burmese public—the highest recorded circulation of that type of material in Burmese history.29
My grandmother graduated from Rangoon University in 1938 with honors in Pali and a minor in Sanskrit—the sacred language of Hinduism that formed the basis of the Indian language and Burmese holy texts. She understood well the fact that one culture had a very great deal in common with the other, especially in the realm of the devout—but in all her recollections about those golden years, she never made mention of this carnage.
It wasn’t just Mya Mya Gyi, or the rest of our family, that conspicuously avoided this chapter. It was like amnesia, or maybe even a cultural lacuna: Burma had erased from its collective memory what had happened to these people, or, more specifically, what the country’s most virulent strains had done in the name of body purification. So much so that my grandmother—nearly seventy-five years later—still felt free to refer to the race of the punished as caste men, black men, outsiders, the house negroes of the good old days, never once mentioning that they had been subject to abuses and assaults too numerous to catalogue. How weird this seemed in retrospect, and how strangely disgusting that she would focus on the loss of rubies and pearls and lamb vindaloo as the Seriously Traumatic Event Involving an Indian that befell her and our family, rather than this insane, terrifying chapter of violence that she had presumably borne witness to.
With this history in the near background, much of Burma’s Indian population fled the country following Japanese occupation in World War II; those that remained were expelled in 1962—a not-surprising (though still foul and heartbreaking) decision on the part of the ruling military junta, which was intoxicated with nationalist fervor. For the most part, this forced exodus of Indians from Burma was better documented as a chapter of great shame. There were too many Indian exiles who remembered too much about all the things they had lost in departure—businesses, friends, lives. There was so much detritus in the wake of this expulsion that Rangoon was never the same again.
I began now to see the outlines of a noxious pattern in the accusations and amnesia. In Burma, it had been the targeting and expulsion of Indians—while here in the United States, it was Mexicans and Muslims and Guatemalans and Hondurans and Sudanese and Syrians (they were most certainly darker, whoever they were). It was the very same fracturing, along the very same lines—sad confirmation that animus and violence and expulsion always end up screwing everyone, even the people doing the expelling. (Ask the Burmese of today whether the expulsion of the Indian minority was a good thing for their economy, to say nothing of their reputations.)
This was an important development, in and of itself: I could point to this Burmese tragedy as evidence that the xenophobes here and elsewhere were on the wrong side of history, but what was perhaps more noteworthy—what all of this research revealed—was that my folks may have been the ones wearing the MAKE BURMA GREAT AGAIN trucker hats, with Shwe Hpi standing in as their Trump. At the very least, they were the ones turning a blind eye to the chaos, a blindness that carried over even into our new start in America, where the Indians remained kalas—even half a century later—just as the Mexicans will probably remain wetbacks to some other, privileged set of future Americans.
The self-loathing didn’t end there. As it turns out, it wasn’t very hard to find the truth, or at least the context behind all of my grandmother’s lovely stories. Yes, it took reading a few books and a fair amount of Googling and the deployment of a (somewhat) fine-toothed bullshit comb, but not much else. As far as my great family project was concerned, this was merely scratching the surface, and yet how easily it gave way! How swiftly the picture dissolved from “bananas at teatime” to something much more complex and sad and violent. I felt like a sucker for having indulged in the old-timey elegance of her stories, for not having questioned what was really going down mere blocks from the light-filled house on Shan Road. I felt like a simpleton for having believed our family mythmaking—I, who prided myself on having some sort of magical, twenty-first-century gimlet eye. Was this any better than the tourist of the American South visiting the old plantation houses, marveling at the china and the gowns and the sweeping staircases, never once glancing past the big house to the slave quarters just beyond?
As all this historic information shook my conception of self and family in the here and now, so, too, did this research throw a mammoth-sized wrench in the narrative of repression and exile that my family had been spinning for much of the past few decades. I’d boasted throughout my adolescence about my grandmother’s status as a pro-democracy activist, her zeal for the righteous cause of Aung San Suu Kyi, and her personal fight for democracy in Burma. But that fervent patriotism, it turned out, was born of a darker strain of ethnic nationalism.
In July 2013, Time magazine, arbiter of newsworthiness and chronicler of international trends, ran as its cover story a picture of the monk Ashin Wirathu, under the headline “The Face of Burmese Terror.” Wirathu is headquartered in Mandalay, in central Burma, and some people refer to him as the “Burmese Bin Laden” (something he apparently accepts without compunction), the figurehead for a growing violent Buddhist movement that seeks to destroy the presence of Islam inside Burma’s borders. But the language he uses is basically torn from the pages of the Burmese nationalist papers of the 1930s:
“We are being raped in every town, we are being sexually harassed in every town, being ganged up and bullied in every town,” he announced to The Guardian in 2013. “In every town, there is a crude and savage Muslim majority.”30
Never mind that Muslims account for only an estimated 5 percent of Burma’s population. (Buddhists are the overwhelming majority at 90 percent.) Wirathu’s followers have done their best to shrink that percentage through slaughter: One particularly gruesome rampage at a Muslim boarding school killed thirty-two students and four teachers. The most persecuted among them, the Muslim Rohingyas, have lived for decades as landless, stateless citizens in the southwest Rakhine State—where they languish in squalid camps, and are unable to vote in elections to perhaps choose representatives who might take into consideration their plight and lift them from this deplorable existence.
In 2012, after the rape of a Buddhist woman by an allegedly Muslim assailant, ethnic tensions exploded: The Rohingya became targets, and 140,000 of them ended up in camps for internally displaced persons.31 By 2016, the Burmese military was in an all-out assault against the Muslim minority: In one particularly brutal incursion, 1,500 Rohingya homes were burned. An estimated 65,000 of them fled to Bangladesh at the end of the year, forced out by violence, systematic rape, and destruction.
And by 2017, the Burmese government was engaged in what one top UN official called “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”32 Rohingya villages were being burned, their residents raped, killed, and otherwise hunted. The depravity was not to be overstated: Babies were being thrown into fires, stabbed to death—as their mothers watched, gang-raped and left for dead. Whole families were being extinguished, live grenades thrown through the front door. As a result, more than 400,000 Rohingya fled Burma—desperate to survive.33
In the eyes of certain international observers, this systematic and sanctioned violence is often explained as Burma’s (deeply troubled) effort to stave off Muslim jihad: The Burmese government—and indeed figures like Wirathu—are fighting against the encroachment of Islam in Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka), lands that were formerly Buddhist territories. This is their mission to secure ancestral lands, or at the very least act as a bulwark against a rising tide of violent extremism (never mind the twisted irony). But—as I discovered in my running of the bullshit comb through history—wasn’t this Buddhist cleansing mostly a contemporary expression of long-held bigotry against Indian Muslims?
Most uncomfortably, I began to rethink my family’s very own brand of Burmese nationalism—which, okay, had nothing to do with rioting or marauding or any bloodlust that I could pinpoint, but was firmly rooted in the same nationalism championed by the heroes of the movement who overthrew the British. My grandmother had long been a vocal advocate for Burmese democracy. She attended monthly protests and organizational meetings, regularly taking minutes for a group of exiled elders who were intent on one day regaining power, once the military had been ousted or had surrendered in a bloodless coup. She read news from the home front fanatically and held strong opinions about what was happening back home, reserving her most pronounced disgust for the military leaders who had destroyed her country beyond recognition. The actual battlefront may have been on the other side of the world, but she considered herself a soldier nonetheless.
The leader of this de facto movement, the spiritual guide in both Burma and abroad, was (and is) a woman named Aung San Suu Kyi: daughter of the military demi-god Aung San, who led the Burmese in the struggle for independence from the British and for whom there is a national celebration (even now) every year on January 4. From birth, Daw Suu—as she is known—has been an object of fascination to all Burmese, given her lineage, but she took on mythic qualities after the 1988 uprising, when she happened to be in the country (she had been living in England with her family) caring for her ailing mother. Witnessing the events unfold around her, she evolved into a de facto leader of the resistance movement, making speeches and writing what would become the seminal texts in the pro-democracy movement.
She was subsequently placed under house arrest, where she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 (and was unable to accept it, lest she leave the country and never be allowed back in again). In the intervening years, her husband died and her children grew up motherless, but Aung San Suu Kyi remained unbreakable. She would not leave her Burma. She forsook her family, because in this struggle, she understood herself to be more than a woman, a wife, a mother: She represented the hope of freedom for the Burmese people. She was known—to all of us—simply as “the Lady.” The great leaders of peace and reconciliation—Mandela and Tutu and Havel—all claimed her as one of their own, and so she was.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s democracy, born from the independence politics of her father, was the accepted standard in our household. What she did, we did. What she said, we said. And yet, as it concerned these roots, I knew quite little. I just assumed that because the military dictatorship was so impossibly villainous, the woman who resisted them against all odds was necessarily righteous and infallible.
But what of her political ideology, her ties to a certain Burmese nationalism that remained celebrated into the current day—even by said impossibly villainous military dictators? Aung San, her father, had been assassinated just as Burma was coming into its own, when his leadership might have been put to the test. I knew so little of this history, and how it might inform the movement that my family was now a part of.
As is often the case when it comes to colonialism and its demise, the nationalists were the ones who sounded the battle cry of independence. Aung San was their hero. He led the negotiations with the British to return the country to its rightful owners, but Aung San’s political associates were also key players in that ugly chapter of 1938 in which scores of Indians were targeted and killed.
Aung San himself may not have been a xenophobic murderer, but he was a signatory to Thein Pe’s pamphlet, the one that made no secret of the thorough disgust felt by the Burmese toward the Indians. It wasn’t called Burma for the Burmese…but it might as well have been. The Indians were a pox, a metastasizing disease that threatened the whole of Burma:
Betel-quid shops were owned by the Indians….Textile shops were owned by the Indians; the big bazaars were owned by the Indians; the wholesale trades were run by the Indians; shoe-repairers were Indians; the hosiery-factories were owned and manned by the Indians; sand-soap was sold also by the Indians; the luxurious perfumed soap was also sold by the Indians; the capitalist money-lenders were Indians; Indians; Indians; Indians—everywhere Indians—nothing but Indians. The darawans were Indians; the High Court Judges were Indians; the compounder (dispensers) were Indians; the Medical Superintendents were Indians; jail warders were Indians; and the Prison Officers were also Indians. Wherever you go you will find Indians, nothing but Indians.34
It was like Invasion of the Body Snatchers! Indians were everywhere!
Thein Pe—and, by association, Aung San—made note of the “approximately one million Indians in Burma. As our population is approximately only twelve millions, there is a ratio of 12 Burmans to 1 Indian. It is really alarming.” (Emphasis mine, again.)
It was straight out of a right-wing super PAC ad, this fearmongering, this Us-versus-Them-ing that was happening, sermonized through pamphlets and speeches. And it wasn’t just some nefarious political operative with a penchant for sensational YouTube videos who was doing this, it was the leader of Burma’s revolution, the hero who everyone in my family revered, the guy I’d known about (if not specifically) since birth, the father of the freedom-fighting woman on whose behalf my grandmother had protested on all those Sundays on the hot pavement outside of the Burmese embassy in Washington, D.C.
In the wake of assassinations (primarily Aung San’s) and power grabs immediately following independence, Burmese nationalism continued its fever-induced mutation. Rabid nationalism expelled the Baghdadi Jews and Parsis and all remaining Indians from Rangoon and Mandalay. It reengaged one of the world’s longest-running civil wars within the ethnic tribes. Businesses, banks, schools all were forced to adapt: International owners, investments, and curricula were all excised. Nationalism basically shut the country down and stole its sunlight. The British were always implicated in Burma’s near century of misfortune, but what about the Burmese who pushed them out?
This dangerous and deadly self-regard did not end when the military junta eventually ceded (at least half of its) power to a democratically elected government, either. Aung San’s daughter, the very same icon my grandmother had championed, was now, decades later, turning a blind eye (at best) to the systematic execution and persecution of her fellow countrymen, the Rohingya. Daw Suu, now in control of Burma’s government (though constitutionally barred from officially becoming its prime minister), reacted defiantly when faced with news reports that the Rohingya were being targeted en masse and fleeing the country in staggering numbers. “There have been allegations and counter-allegations,” the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate insisted in late September 2017. “We have to make sure those allegations are based on solid evidence before we take action.”35
She pointed to attacks launched by an armed local group calling itself the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) on Burmese police outposts in the region, limited in number and scope but deemed, by her, to be “acts of terrorism.” Was this the justification for a military response that displaced nearly half a million people? Was this the same woman who had been held up as a paragon of justice and human rights just a few years prior?
Most disturbing (and for me, at least, most unbelievable) was the reaction to this modern-day violence and upheaval by the Burmese themselves. One report described the response in Rangoon following Aung San Suu Kyi’s questionable commentary that year. Her words were “met with applause and cheers from large crowds [in the city] who had gathered to watch live on large outdoor screens amid a party atmosphere.”36
Daw Suu may have been out of touch with the international community where it concerned the Rohingya, but she was apparently very much still in favor with her fellow Burmese—they agreed with her. Buddhist nationalism was hopelessly intertwined with the religious and ethnic hatred that had plagued Burma when her father was alive (and probably well before that). No one knew any better than they had nearly a century ago.
We, as a family, had always maintained that the violence and insanity in Burma was…violent and insane, which is why my grandmother could be found in front of the Burmese embassy for so many years, which is why she maintained a steady grip on political news out of Burma, which is why she situated herself at the nexus of the exiled pro-democracy movement, rallying for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi. “Those people!” she would say, in reference to arbiters of her country’s decline, too angry or frustrated to summon an adjective to describe their evil, their incompetence. But weren’t those people us, in some ways?
I had always assumed we were in no way implicated in Burma’s destruction, its internecine killings and brutal subjugations. We had left, therefore we were exempt from examining whether we, too, might have harbored some of the same exclusionary, misguided ideas about Burman superiority—the delusion that allowed a Nobel Laureate to look the other way when ethnic cleansing was happening in her backyard. That sort of behavior, that strain of poison, had always been understood to be someone else’s and not ours—despite the fact that those behaviors helped shape our very identity—the identity I was so eager, now, to explore and celebrate, to reignite within my own life.
The profile we had drawn for ourselves was in direct opposition to that of those who’d stayed behind: Burma was repressed, calcifying, broken…but we were not. We read the newspapers and studied French and spoke English, but we never stopped to think that these delicious fruits were in some way linked to a very sad harvest, from seeds that we had somehow helped sow. Our family remembered when Burma was the rice bowl of Asia, but not what we had done to precipitate its decline. Instead, we mourned the glorious past and longed for it once again, a luxurious thing to do from the other side of the planet.
But when I’d begun peeking into the spaces between the lacquer boxes and law degrees, what I discovered…was turmoil. My grandmother’s gentilities belied real problems: deep-seated animus and moral hazards, violence and economic calamity. Not just Burma’s, but our own. Aung San Suu Kyi, whose beatific face decorated mugs and T-shirts and keychains, stuff I’d dutifully smuggled back home to show my friends in the West, had turned out to be a fraud. It was like looking in a treasure box only to find the bones of a skeleton. This was the first time it occurred to me that the stories we had told ourselves—and indeed believed—were just that: stories. The truth, as it turns out, was complex (it always is), but more than that, it was fractured, like a stained-glass window that had shattered into tiny pieces and was nearly impossible to put back together.
Up until this point, our story of success had been a necessary and constant rebuke to the narrative of Burmese collapse. But now, as an American (as we all were), I could finally look back and realize that, lo and behold, we had failed, too.