NAMES FOR LIGHT
Also by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint
The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, a Haven
NAMES FOR LIGHT
A Family History
THIRII MYO KYAW MYINT
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2021 by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint
The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
Early versions of portions of the Sittwe section and portions of the second __________ section appeared in Territory.
This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. Significant support has also been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, Target Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
This is a work of creative nonfiction. The events, places, people, and conversations depicted here have been recreated from memory and some have been compressed, summarized, or otherwise altered.
Published by Graywolf Press
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Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
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Published in the United States of America
ISBN 978-1-64445-061-1
Ebook ISBN 978-1-64445-154-0
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
First Graywolf Printing, 2021
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020944217
Cover design: Kyle G. Hunter
For my family
Contents
I
Leymyethna
______________
Gayan
Denver
Sittwe
II
Leymyethna
Yangon
Minbu
South Bend
Sittwe
III
Hinthada
______________
Gayan
Madrid
Sittwe
IV
Hinthada
Yangon
Minbu
Providence
Sittwe
V
NAMES FOR LIGHT
I
Leymyethna
My great-grandfather died a man but was reborn as me. He died in a small village in the jungle, the son of a princess hiding from war. The village where they hid was called Leymyethna, four faces, a village built around a pagoda of the same name, bearing a four-faced Buddha. It was my great-grandmother’s village, the place where she was born.
The city where I was born was also once a place to hide. Yangon, the end of yan, of peril, enmity, strife. It was a place where there were no enemies, where enemies could not follow. Except enemies did follow, so that by the time I was born, the city had been conquered thrice, by the British, the Japanese, and the military junta. Three enemies to symbolize the three torments of the mind: greed, aversion, delusion.
My great-grandfather’s death was foretold by a trunk that slipped off a bridge and fell into the river upon the family’s arrival in the village. My great-grandfather’s trunk, full of his precious things. The son of a princess, my great-grandfather had inherited diamonds and rubies, sapphires and pearls, jewels my mother had never seen but had heard her mother talk about with remorse, for all the jewels were eventually sold, one by one, to educate my great-grandfather’s sons.
No jewels were sold to educate my grandmother. She was one of seven children, the eldest daughter, my great-grandfather’s favorite child. Her brother, the eldest son, did not call the doctor when my great-grandfather was dying because, my mother said, he resented the love his father had shown only to my grandmother. My grandmother who was born a girl and born second. She was fourteen when her father died, when the cities were bombed, the schools shut down.
Many years after my great-grandfather’s trunk fell in the river, my mother dreamed two trunks were thrown into the artificial lake in the center of the city where she had married my father on a floating, mythical bird. My mother was inside of one trunk, my brother in the other, and both trunks were coffins, sinking into the lake, filling up with cold water, and in the dream my mother tried to scream, to break out, she threw her body against the lid of the trunk, kicked and clawed, but it would not open, she could not breathe, until finally, she ceased to struggle, she accepted death, and as she closed her eyes, the trunk opened and her body floated to the surface. Alone in that cold water. When my mother awoke from the dream, she knew that my brother would not live.
Except my brother did live, since he returned as my eldest sister, who was born with a birthmark on her foot in the same spot where my grandfather had placed a thumbprint of ash on my brother’s foot before he was cremated.
There are no marks on my body from a previous life. Unlike my eldest sister, I was born perfectly blank, perfectly bare. For years, I waited for a mark to appear, a sign of who I was or had been or would become. I searched my body, read and reread it carefully. The sharp point of a tooth, the shape of my hands, the places where I could not bear to be touched: my back, my pelvis, under my chin. I was afraid to change my body in any way, to leave my own mark upon it. I got no tattoos, no piercings. I never dyed my hair, and the one time I had it chemically straightened, I shaved it off afterward. I believed I had to keep my body plain and pristine if I was to receive a sign.
More than once, I believed I had immaculately conceived a child. It is possible for a body to mimic the conditions of pregnancy if the mind believes, possible for the uterus to expand, for the cervix to soften, for the belly to swell. My belly did not swell, but for several months, I felt nauseated and tender, and did not bleed. Every time I found the blood, on the sheets or on my underwear, it was both a relief and a loss.
And my great-grandfather’s trunk was recovered. The trunk that slipped off the bridge and fell into the river. The river was not very wide or very deep, and men from the village dove into the water to retrieve it. The family jewels were saved, to be locked in an attic and eventually sold.
Only my great-grandfather had seen his trunk fall into the water. He had seen it sink beneath the surface, carried away by the current. He could not unsee what he had seen. He knew it was an omen of death.
As a child, I conflated my great-grandfather’s body and his trunk of possessions and imagined it was he who slipped off the bridge and fell into the river. I imagined the water turning pink where he hit his head on a rock, the water carrying him away, downstream, then around a bend, so my great-grandmother and grandmother could no longer see him. All rivers lead to waterfalls or to the ocean, so I imagined my great-grandfather was transported somewhere no one could follow him, although my grandmother did try, since she moved south to Yangon, then called Rangoon, a city by the ocean, and my parents and I tried to follow him even farther since we moved across the Pacific. As a child, I imagined that one day my great-grandfather’s body would wash up on a beach in Half Moon Bay the way dead whales, jellyfish, and cows sometimes did.
Even when I learned that my great-grandfather had died of a hemorrhagic stroke, a blood vessel that ruptured in his brain, even when I learned that he had died sitting in a chair, not drowning in a river, and that, for my great-grandfather, dying in the jungle, dying
in wartime meant dying in the comfortable ancestral home of his wife, the daughter of a village elder, I could not erase the path that the river had carved in my mind. From under the bridge in Leymyethna, south to join the Pathein River, then through the delta into the Pacific Ocean and across it to the shores of Northern California. A path created by my great-grandfather’s body, or rather the absence of his body, an absence that I had to fill with my body since I was reborn from him.
I do not know if there really is a four-faced Buddha in the pagoda at Leymyethna. The name alone made me imagine it. Myethna means face or surface, but it could also mean cardinal direction. Maybe there are four Buddhas inside the pagoda, seated back-to-back, facing the four directions, or four Buddhas in each corner of the temple, or four windows to let in varying amounts of light, from the east, west, south, and north.
When I learned the cardinal directions in two languages as a child, I thought the English version made more sense: north, east, south, west. It was satisfying to begin at the top and make my way clockwise, in a circle, as if place and time worked in the same way. In Bamar, I had to make a cross, east to west, and south to north. I understood that the sun rose in the east and set in the west, and that was a day, a measure of time, but I did not understand what the south-to-north axis measured. In my textbook, there was a picture of a little girl with her arms held out to her sides facing the sunrise. The girl seemed to suggest that east to west and south to north intersected only at the origin point of a body. South was inscribed on her right arm, north on her left, and west was on her back, which was to me, the reader. Only east floated on the horizon before her, drawing her gaze and mine.
_________________
In a story about the before-and-after life the awakened one asks a girl four questions.
Where do you come from?
Where are you going?
Do you not know?
Do you know?
She answers I do not know to all the questions except the third. Do you not know? he asks. I do know, she says. What she means is, she knows she is going to die.
I know some things as well.
I know, for example, where I was born. I know where I lived from the age of one until the age of seven. I know where I lived from the age of eight until the age of eighteen. I know no one wants to know about the places where I lived after the age of eighteen. No one wants to know about the choices I made. I know that few who ask that question, the first question the awakened one asked the girl, want to hear me speak at all. Most want me only to listen. They want to tell me where I come from. No, not California, but where I really come from, before and before, back and back, to the time when I was still there, and they were already here. I know that is where they think I am from, where they think I still belong—there. Over there. Elsewhere. Far, far away. The place they have never heard of, or they read about once in the news, or their friend visited, or they visited, too, or it was a neighboring country but close enough, they travel a lot, they have seen a lot, they have seen people who look like me.
Sometimes I forget what I look like because I see myself every day. I look in the mirror and I see skin the color of skin, hair the color of hair, eyes the color of eyes. I forget to see what they see: difference, otherness. But I do not forget for long because soon I am told how I look. Soon—at the supermarket, the park, a bar, a clinic, in the back seat of a car—I am looked at, stared at, and commented upon.
The color of your skin and your hair.
You look like you could be.
You look like you aren’t.
Then the questions, the same ones every time. Just curious, just out of curiosity. And I am here to satisfy. I am here, in this country, so it is the least I can do. Nod and smile and keep my mouth shut. I want to shut my eyes too because there is nothing to see. Because the ones staring at me are blank, empty, and invisible. The many different colors of their skin become one color that I am not supposed to see, that no one is supposed to see, a color that absorbs no visible light, reflects them all back.
Where do you come from? he asks the girl. I do not know, she says, and he knows exactly what she means. She does not have to explain. The awakened one cannot read minds, but he does have perfect wisdom.
I was born in Yangon, the capital. From the age of one until the age of seven I lived in Bangkok, a different capital of a different nation. In the old days, the two nations were always at war and the boundary between them was always moving, shifting east or west as kingdoms rose and fell. In the old days, a new capital was founded each time a new king came into power. Palaces were destroyed by armies, earthquakes, left to crumble, or dismantled, moved, and rebuilt. In the old days, I say, though I know days do not age, but simply begin and end. The young days, I should say, the days that passed quickly, the days that passed away, that died young. The dead days. And it is true those days are dead: the kings whose beautiful names I learned are dead, the queens whose names I did not learn are dead, the laborers who built their palaces are dead. Before I turned eight, my family moved away from capital cities forever to a place with strip malls, ranch-style houses, and foothills in every direction.
It was a place I had no name for, still have no name for. San Jose, Cupertino, Saratoga, Silicon Valley, South Bay, Bay Area. None of these names could hold the place together for me. It was a place without a center, a city that did not surround. As one drives through, the streets change their names and change them again, but remain the same. I never dream of this place. This place where I lived from the age of eight until the age of eighteen, this place where my parents still live, this place I return to twice a year, this place I say I come from.
This place repeated enough times begins to sound like displaced.
Displaced is where we moved to, displaced is where I grew up, displaced is where I am from.
There is a city I have dreamed of for as long as I can remember. It is not Bangkok or San Jose or Providence or Madrid or South Bend or Denver. It is not any other city I have passed through or visited. The dreams always begin with my body moving through space, walking or running across a wide street, the roof of a building. It is gray in the city, always dim, neither night nor day. The light is artificial, fluorescent; I do not know where it comes from because I never look up. In my dreams, I take the city for granted. It is the place where I am and have always been, too familiar to be looked at. The other people in the city form a collective body and move together as one mass. I do not look at them either. I do not know if they look like me, or if I look like them. In my dreams that does not matter. What matters is that I do what I have to do.
My goals are so simple I can never remember them when I wake up. A question to answer, something to find, a person to meet. When the dreams begin, I am confident I will accomplish these tasks quickly and easily. I am so confident I allow myself to be distracted, to delay and explore a bit. That is when the dreams change, when the city becomes a maze. Familiar streets do not lead where they should, landmarks disappear. I take a wrong turn and then I take another one. Sooner or later, I am lost. Night falls and the crowds thin. I do not know where I am, but know I am far from where I’m meant to be. I know I am moving farther away still.
In these dreams, I never think, I want to go home. I want to give up this task and go home.
I have no home in the dream city. I never dream of a place to return to. The city itself is where I live, the streets, the alleyways, the secret stairs and passages that only I can find. At the end of the dreams, when I am frustrated, when I am scared and beginning to panic, it never occurs to me to find shelter, to rest. I only think, I want to be there already. The place where I am meant to be, the place I have not reached yet, the unknown. That is the place I yearn for.
In the story about the before-and-after life, the girl has no name. She is called only the girl, the maiden, or the weaver’s daughter. The girl has no mother either, only a father, the weaver. The girl works in the weaver’s shop. That is why she was late to the awakened o
ne’s talk.
The girl’s mother died when the girl was young, and her mother’s death was the girl’s first memory. Or the girl’s mother died giving birth to the girl, so the girl grew up knowing she was born from death. Or the girl’s mother died not long before the awakened one came to their town, so the girl had lately been thinking of death. Life is uncertain, death is certain, life ends in death. When the awakened one asks the girl the four questions, she knows what she does and does not know. She does not know what came before birth, or what comes after death. She knows she will die. She does not know when or how or where. The point of the story is that no one knows. We are all just making it up. Beginning and ending and beginning again.
After her encounter with the awakened one, the girl returns to the weaver’s shop. Struck on the breast by her father’s loom, she falls down dead. Her father and the townspeople are chastened.
Gayan
In another small village surrounded by another jungle, another great-grandfather dies an early death. I do not know as whom or what, or where he is reborn. My father does not claim to know either. There are thirty-one planes of existence and humans dwell in only one.
The village where my great-grandfather died is called Gayan, a very small village by the Irrawaddy River, just before it reaches the sea. It is the same village where my great-grandfather was born. His family had been the most prosperous one in the village, the largest landowners. My great-grandfather died because his family lost their land, because he had to sell their land to keep his sister’s husband out of jail. In those days, my father said, a man could be thrown in jail for not paying his debts. My great-grandfather’s sister did not want her husband thrown in jail, her husband who bought rice when the price was low and sold it when it was high. He was a gambler, my father said, which was not an honest way to earn a living.
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