Names for Light

by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint

  My great-grandfather earned his living through the land he owned, land that was farmed by men, women, and children who did not own it, who would never come to own it, no matter how hard they worked. They rented the land from my great-grandfather and paid him in crops and money made from the sale of the crops. I do not think it was not an honest way to earn a living either.

  When my great-grandfather sold the land, not to these families who had been farming it for years, but to the debt collectors, he was left with only a plot of land for himself. A family farm, which he would have to work with his own hands. My great-grandfather could not do it. He did not know how to earn a living with his hands, with his body, how to make a life.

  So, he died, my great-grandfather, the father of my father’s father. And I am sorry I have broken this chain of fathers and sons by being born a daughter. I am sorry that my brother died. My brother and my great-grandfather are both remembered only for their deaths. My brother died in infancy, at the beginning of his life. My great-grandfather, at least, had a chance to live, to become a man and a father, to raise five sons.

  Of the five, my father says, apart from my grandfather, their lives did not go so well.

  The eldest died from injuries sustained in a street fight, soon after their father’s death.

  The second eldest became a gangster.

  The fourth went AWOL, was caught, and imprisoned.

  The youngest died young of illness.

  As the third son, the one in the middle, my grandfather held his brothers’ diverging lives together. He was the one recurring character in all the stories that my father told us, my sisters and me, of our great-uncles and their misadventures. The story about the sampan that was hijacked by guerillas and later sunk in the ocean. The story about the horse-cart business and the drunk Japanese soldiers who put an end to it. The story about the cousin who got pregnant out of wedlock and the family feud that started on her behalf. My grandfather always played a minor role in these stories; he was always the observer, the outsider looking in. As a child, I was not interested in him. It was my great-uncles whom I loved to hear about. The second uncle, whose name meant ten thousand, and the fourth, whose name meant one hundred thousand. They were both tricksters, foolish as often as they were cunning, unlucky as often as they were lucky. They lived as if they had thousands of lives to spare, and in my father’s stories, it seemed that they did.

  If I had a thousand lives, I might have been more like my great-uncles: braver, bolder, and wilder. But I have only one life, at least only one at a time, and in this life, I am my father’s daughter and my grandfather’s granddaughter. Like them, I am the observer, the outsider, always in the middle of a story but never at the center of it.

  Sometimes, I think I would like for someone else to tell a story about me. I would like for someone to imagine me the way I am always imagining other people: my great-grandfather who died of the loss of land, the stress caused by the loss, the sleepless nights. I imagine him standing at the edge of his small plot of land, in the dead of night, surrounded by fields and paddies that no longer belong to him. The blooming rice smells soft and sweet, a dog howls in the distance, and the water of the paddies glints silver in the moonlight. If my great-grandfather had been a woman, I think it would have been said that he died of a broken heart.

  But no one will imagine me the way I imagine my great-grandfather because nothing has ever happened to me. Nothing as bad or as important or as final as death. My sufferings, though numerous, are small. They are so small that even all together, listed by magnitude, or in chronological order, I am afraid they will not have the weight to shift any balance, to change anything or anyone. This is the reason I am the storyteller and not the story. I do not have the makings of a protagonist. I do not like to make decisions, to take risks, to assert or involve myself. I have never hit another person, never punched, slapped, or even pushed. I do not want to touch what causes me aversion. I do not want to throw my body against it. I prefer to keep my body to myself, to keep myself to myself. I want someone else to imagine me at the center of a story because I believe if they got it right, if they told the right story about me, then I could live inside that story, inside someone else’s words, and the words would create the person I wanted to be so I would not have to pretend to be that person anymore.

  After the death of her husband and her eldest son, my great-grandmother gathered her surviving children around and asked them what they wished to become. A single word laden with longing and hope. And because the verbs are left un-conjugated in Burmese, left untouched, the same word describes the past, present, and future. What will they come to be, these fatherless children? Their mother was a landowner’s wife, a landowner’s widow, a woman who had never worked with her hands. All she had left now were the family jewels, like those my other great-grandmother, my mother’s grandmother, sold, one by one, to educate her sons. My father’s grandmother sold her jewels as well, and for the same purpose, though she had enough sense to ask her sons first if they wanted an education.

  My grandfather was the only one to say yes. His elder brother chose to inherit what was left of the land, and his younger brothers were too little to know what they wanted.

  I do not know what it was my great-grandmother wanted. Long ago, before the first baby, before her marriage. I do not know what she had wished to become when she was a child. Was it to be a landowner’s wife? The wife of an anxious, fragile man. The kind of man who would die of heartbreak, not over the loss of a person, but over the loss of land. Had my great-grandmother wanted a daughter? Had she wanted children at all? Whatever you wish to become, my father said my great-grandmother told her sons, I will work so you will become, I will make it happen.

  Nights when my great-grandfather walked the fields, trespassing on land that no longer belonged to him, hoping perhaps to be bitten by a poisonous snake, hoping perhaps to die and haunt the fields forever, I imagine my great-grandmother slept soundly in her bed under the canopy of a mosquito net, her long hair spread in a dark halo around her head. Her eyelids flutter like a moth against the light, and she is trapped inside a beautiful dream of a different life, a life where she had married a stronger man, or had married no one at all. A dream of running barefoot in the dirt, climbing trees, and bathing in the river; things my great-grandmother had perhaps never done, being a woman of a certain class, the mother of a formerly prosperous family. I imagine this dream for her anyway. The earth warm under her bare feet, her thick braid slapping against her back with each step, and her body weightless, flying like an arrow to its mark.

  Denver

  It was the city she had prayed for, had longed for the way women in fairy tales long for children. For nearly a year she had built the city with her own desire, for warmth, blue skies, belonging. Lying sleepless in her twin bed or kneeling before a statue of the Lady of Lourdes, she had made promises and begged without shame. It was a bit like falling in love.

  She had never seen the city before, not even in photographs. She feared that photographs would replace the city she had built in her mind. No one she knew had spent much time in the city, though everyone spoke of it. Everyone spoke of every city because city itself was the magic word. They all longed to be where people were.

  And when she finally arrived, it was not to the city of her desire, but an entirely different place. Flat and functional, its colors bleached by the perpetual sun. Her apartment was empty of furniture so the first thing she did was go to a mattress store to buy a mattress. The salesman asked for her name and she gave it to him, spelled out each letter slowly. One r and two i’s at the end. M as in Mary, n as in Nancy. When she was finished, the man looked at what he had written down and it was correct. She felt relieved. But then he kept looking at her name. He looked up at her and asked, Where does your name come from?

  Because she had woken early that morning to get to the airport, and because she had not eaten anything before her flight, she answered automatically, My mother, she made
it up. She was too tired and too hungry to process the real question behind his question. I mean, the salesman said, What is your ethnicity? And again, she answered without thinking, as if stating her date of birth, her weight and height—Burmese, she said, even though it was not an ethnicity but a nationality, and one that no longer existed. Oh, the salesman said. He looked at her the same way he had been looking at her name. Is it Burma or Myanmar? he asked. Before she could answer, he began telling her what he knew about the coup and the dictatorship, which was very little.

  In that moment, what she fixated on, what made her angry was the fact that he mispronounced Myanmar as Ma-yen-mar. It’s Myanmar, she said.

  She was afraid to speak to anyone in the city after that first encounter at the mattress store. She felt that what had happened with the salesman had been her fault. She must have signaled to him in some way that she was willing to answer his questions, that she was at his service. She remembered now that her mother was rarely kind to strangers in this country. Her mother rarely made eye contact, rarely smiled, and boldly ignored questions that were directed at her. It used to embarrass her, what she thought was her mother’s rudeness.

  She was beginning to understand her mother better now. She ate her meals on the floor in front of her coffee table because she did not want to buy more furniture. The coffee table was found at the back of a thrift store, the kind of place where the sole cashier is too tired to make small talk.

  In the place where she lived before, the place that was not a city, she had longed to be with others. She had longed for crowds and noise. Now, in the city of sunshine and crisp mountain air, she did not like to leave her apartment. Once, two of her friends came to visit her in the city, and when she took them to a park, a man accosted them. A man she had never seen before, a stranger. The kind of man her mother had warned her about as a child. A lu sein, a green person, unripe, unknown. Because green was an unlucky color for her mother, a color her mother never wore, she understood that green people, strangers, were to be avoided as well. She and her friends were walking through the park when the man walked up beside them and smiled. She did not smile back. The man drew uncomfortably close. Her instinct was to put her body between him and the bodies of her friends. Then the man spoke. Do you come from Vietnam? he said, still smiling, his eyes darting between her and her female friend. No, she said, pushing the word at him. No, we do not come from Vietnam. No, we do not want to talk to you. For a second the man’s smile lingered, the way a decapitated body continues to move even after its head is cut off. Then the smile slipped off his face and she walked away.

  She walked and walked, but there was no place in the city where she could be alone. The ceaseless blue sky gave her no privacy, no space or separation from the heavens. She felt there was no distance left between the holy and herself and so the holy was no longer holy. It was obscenely green parks and unrelenting sunlight. Streets that ran in straight lines and met one another at perfect right angles. The highway to the mountains packed with cars every weekend.

  There was no place in the city, she thought, where the Lady of Lourdes might appear. No grotto, cave, dell, or ravine, no shade for an apparition. She went for walks along the secluded trail behind her apartment building, passed chain-link fences, ditches, and alleyways, where on Wednesdays her neighbor’s garbage cans would be lined up stinking. The trail ended at a park, adjacent to a looming hospital, and if she walked to the middle of it, past the golf course, but just before the community pool, she could almost pretend she was no longer in the city. The Lady of Lourdes appeared to a young girl in the countryside and for a long time the girl was not believed. If she had been the one to see the Lady, she would not have told anyone. She would have kept the Lady to herself, her own private miracle.

  Another time, she was at a dive bar at the edge of the city. The bar was across the street from an art gallery where literary events were often held. Both the bar and the gallery were far from downtown and the surrounding gentrified or gentrifying areas were people who attended literary events usually drank. She did not drink, it was against the fifth precept, but she went to the bar anyway. As soon as she entered it, she knew she had made a mistake. Everyone inside stopped what they were doing and stared at the group she had entered with, stared at their relative wealth and privilege, their collective whiteness. She does not know if her companions even noticed. She felt ashamed for having entered the bar with them, for being one of them, for having become one of them, and then felt ashamed for being ashamed of her friends and colleagues. She separated herself from the group and was making her way to the bar to ask for a glass of water when a man approached her and introduced himself. He was an elderly man, very drunk, with swan-white hair. You are an Indian, he said. I can tell. I am part Indian too, a half-breed. What kind of Indian are you? She said she was not any kind of Indian, sorry, but it was loud in the bar and he could not hear what she said, or maybe he did not listen. He said, I know you are an Indian. Let me guess. No, she said, and shook her head. Are you Cherokee? he said. No, she said. Are you Lakota? Are you Sioux? She shook her head no, no. No, I am sorry, so sorry. I know what you are, the man said. And she did not want to take that knowledge away from him. An elderly man with white hair and a white beard, cheeks collapsed and wrinkled. He did not look white or Native or anything else to her, only old, and she thought it was beautiful how time made everyone look more or less the same, and she really was sorry that she could not be for this elderly man a person he could recognize.

  And it wasn’t only strangers, strange men, who were the problem, who were to blame, who were just trying to connect. People she knew at the university were also complicit. They raved to her about Burmese restaurants in cities she had never been to and would probably never visit. They left newspaper clippings about the Rohingya in her campus mailbox. They told her that they too were always being mistaken for Scandinavian or German. No one thinks I look American either. They told her they too could relate to the weight of accumulation, since every time they walked down the street, they were catcalled. Every single time.

  She was frequently catcalled, too, but her hearing was bad so she could never make out what had been said, what words had been flung at her from the car window before the men sped off, laughing. She could never tell if it had been a sexual or a racial slur or both. It didn’t seem to matter. The men drove away, or she walked past them, and the interaction was over.

  It was much worse when the interaction didn’t end, when she didn’t know how to end it. Such as the time she went to the Christmas market downtown and stumbled upon the aromatherapy shop. The shopkeeper was a large man, barrel-chested, with a big voice. As she and her boyfriend approached his tent, she heard the shopkeeper explaining something very loudly to a woman. She began perusing the different essential oils and her boyfriend wandered off. She asked the shopkeeper if he had any special formulas and he brought out a few for her to try. She smelled the first one and recognized the scent of jasmine. Her favorite lotion as a teenager was a light purple concoction called Night Blooming Jasmine; she treasured it so much and used it so sparingly that it eventually expired and rotted. You have a good nose, the shopkeeper said, and she was pleased. Then he said, Where are you from? She said, California. He paused, then said, I mean, what is your heritage? She did not know why, but for once, she decided not to answer. It was her last day in Denver before she went home for winter break, to the two-bedroom walk-up that her parents owned, the first home they ever owned, just a mile from her old middle school, where her mother still worked. She said to the shopkeeper, I’d rather not tell you. He said, OK. Then he said, You know, I only asked because jasmines don’t grow in this country. She said, I told you I was from California. He said, But were you born there? She said, Do you ask your white customers that question? He said, Yes, I do. She said, I don’t believe you. He said, I ask people where they come from all the time and you are the first person who reacted this way. He said, I don’t know what you are ashamed of. He
said, Denver is a melting pot. He said, My wife and I, we have traveled all over the world. He then began listing all the countries they had been to, but she was angry and crying and could not speak. Her boyfriend, her future husband, found her and led her away. Next time, he said to the shopkeeper, just say sorry. The shopkeeper called after them in a singsong voice, Sorry.

  Someone once told her all the trees in the city were planted by settlers, and even though she did not believe it, she began to feel a tenderness toward the trees. As she drove to the university through a tunnel of green, the trees on either side evenly spaced, all the same girth and height, it was easy for her to imagine them as saplings growing neatly in a row. The surrounding city not yet a city, but an open plain. The trees had been brought here by forces outside of their control, she thought, but unlike her, they could not leave, but had to continue growing in this strange land where no trees had grown before. It pained her to think that if the settlers had not planted the trees, had not received shade from the alpine sun, perhaps they would not have stayed, would not have colonized the land and violently displaced the natives. It pained her to think that it was the trees that had made this city livable for them, that made it desirable, even when there was no gold found in the river. The river was buried beneath the city now, enclosed on either bank by concrete walls that rose up to boulevards and streets. Only the city’s most desolate inhabitants, the city’s exiles, sought shelter at the water’s edge, sleeping under the shade of a bridge when a tree could not be found.