I once rushed to the mirror when I felt one of my seizures coming on. The familiar tightening in my feet, the familiar dread. The mirror I sought was the floor-to-ceiling one that covered the sliding doors of the closet I shared with my sisters, a mirror that covered an entire wall of our bedroom, that reflected everything in that room back to us. I knelt by the mirror because I wanted to see what I was not supposed to see, Medusa’s face, the Gorgon’s head, my own face turned to stone. I wanted to see what I looked like when I was no longer myself, no longer in control of my face or my body. It was like a view into my past lives, or my future lives, a view I should not have had. When chanting the metta sutta, the discourse of loving-kindness, one sends metta to both beings that are good to be seen with the eyes and beings that are not good to be seen with the eyes. As a child, I asked my mother who the latter beings were, and she said ghosts, spirits, and devas, which she translated as angels, were all beings who were not easy to see. She did not say they could not be seen because she herself saw them sometimes. Not good to be seen did not mean invisible. It only meant difficult to see, difficult to look at. It was difficult to look at myself in the mirror as my face tightened, hardened, and changed. I wanted to be pretty, I wanted to be beautiful, and it was terrible, terrible to see what I was instead. A ghost, a spirit, or an angel. Not good to be seen with the eyes. I looked anyway. I fixed my gaze on the mirror as best I could and looked and looked at what it had to show me. I kept looking long after the episode had passed, long after I was myself again.
Yangon
The first time I returned to the city where I was born, my little cousin swung a metal pipe in the front yard of our grandparents’ house, and it hit my eldest sister, and she bled, and cried, and believed she would be poisoned by the rust. That night, and every night after that, during our short visit, she had terrible, fevered dreams, dreams that infected me and my middle sister since we slept beside her beneath the same mosquito net. Collectively, we dreamed of the crawl space underneath the house, the darkness there, red screams, and the glint of metal. My mother said the house was cursed. The house where she grew up, on a tree-lined street with a wrought iron gate and jasmines blooming in the garden. The house where she lived with her father and mother even after she was married, even after she had given birth to her first child. The house where my brother had fallen ill. The house he never returned to. My eldest sister believed the house was trying to kill her a second time; she begged my mother to never bring her back there again.
My eldest sister has not returned to Yangon since. My middle sister has returned three times. My middle sister was once my great-grandmother, my wife in our past life. My mother says I followed her into this life. Before my middle sister was conceived, my great-grandmother appeared to my mother in a dream, her long white hair loose down her back, a thin gown covering her nakedness. My great-grandmother told my mother she was coming to her, coming to take refuge in my mother’s body. My mother panicked. She had plans to go back to school, a scholarship to pursue her master’s in England. My mother begged her grandmother to come back another time, she made promises, tried to compromise. But my great-grandmother said there would be no other time. This was her only chance. When my mother awoke from the dream, she cried, and my father comforted her, reminding her that they had been careful, that there was no chance she was pregnant.
A few weeks later, my mother found out that she was.
The second time I returned to Yangon, I arrived four days before my twentieth birthday, and ten days before my twenty-first. The first birthday was measured by the Gregorian calendar, and the second by the Burmese. I had two birthdays every year: June 9, and whatever date fell six days after the new moon of Nayon, the third month of the Burmese year, corresponding with Gemini, the third sign of the zodiac. By the Burmese measurement of age, a person was as old as the year in which she lived, and not the year she had completed. Age was measured by the present, not the past.
My mother always said I must have been reborn from one of the student protestors in the 8888 strike, because I was born ten months after the uprising and nine months after the bloody coup that followed. My mother did not like to imagine that I had suffered a violent death, but I romanticized the uprising and the young people who had died for it—shot down in the streets, suffocated in a police van, or executed in the prison yard. I liked to believe this was the brief life I had had, between my great-grandfather’s and mine, the life of an activist, a revolutionary, a martyr.
That summer I turned twenty in Yangon, my mother showed me the clinic at the edge of the city where I was born, and where my elder sisters were born before me. She pointed out the building from a distance. I looked out the car window. The building was dark and boxy, provincial. My mother said the clinic had been small and run-down even twenty, twenty-five years ago when we were born. The children’s hospital in the city center was modern and impressive, but my mother was afraid to return there. It was the place where my brother was born, and the place where he had died.
Earlier or later, our relatives took us to the artificial lake in the center of the city, the lake where my mother and father had been married in a palatial hall on a copy of a royal barge. The barge was called Karaweik, in the singular, though there were two mythical birds shouldering the weight of the hall. We walked out onto the docks, my mother and I, and posed for many pictures with Karaweik and the Shwedagon Pagoda in the background. All around us, young couples were embracing by the water, hidden among the trees, and though I knew that my brother had died at the children’s hospital, I also believed he had drowned in the lake. The great royal lake in the center of the city that was constructed by the British. It was an artificial lake fed by pipes that diverted water from an artificial reservoir.
I think it made my mother sad to return to the place where she had married my father without my father. Yangon, or Rangoon, as my parents still called it, belonged to both of them. It was the city where they grew up, where they met, and where they fell in love. My mother and father were both nineteen years old when they fell in love, and younger when they met. My father wooed my mother by borrowing her books and returning them with love letters tucked inside. That is the story I have always been told. Maybe it was just one borrowed book, just one letter, but in my mind, that single letter multiplied and reproduced, and I imagine my young mother opening book after book and discovering love letter after love letter. My young mother, nineteen, or perhaps still eighteen years old when she receives the first letter, when the first book is returned. The girl who would one day become my mother, but who is yet a stranger to me. I see her always in the moment of opening a book, the moment of my conception, I think, a moment that begins interminably, begins over and over again, so the book in my mother’s hands is always the first one, and the love letter she finds always still unopened.
My parents had attended the same high school, English Methodist, and the same university, Rangoon Arts and Sciences. Their high school was so large that they did not meet until after they graduated, at a party thrown for students from their school who were going to the same university. My mother and father were introduced at this party. For the rest of the summer, my mother said, she kept seeing my father everywhere around the city: at the market, on the bus, at the cinema. When the rains came and my parents started at the university, my mother became friends with my father’s cousin, a second or third cousin, and my father used this connection between them to borrow my mother’s books and return them with love letters hidden inside. My mother read the love letters and wrote her own in return. They began to date. This meant they ate lunch together and rode the city bus home together. After dating for five years, they were pressured by my father’s parents, who were planning to move to the United States, to get married. They did. It was April 1982. They were both twenty-four years old.
Exactly a year later, my mother and father will have birthed and lost a child, my elder brother. For the rest of their lives, my mother will speak of my brothe
r incessantly and my father will hardly speak of him at all.
What my mother will say: that he was such a handsome, chubby baby. Fair skin, clear brown eyes, black velvety hair. A perfect, healthy baby boy. Seven pounds, two ounces. Born in Tabaung, March, the last month of the Burmese year, the beginning of summer. A Wednesday son, like his grandfather, my mother’s father. They brought him home to my mother’s parents’ house, where my mother and father lived after they were married. They were so happy, my mother and father. Two newlyweds, new parents. Their happiness lasted several days, maybe a week, maybe longer. Then, my brother fell ill. He would not drink milk. Or, he would drink and then vomit, become dehydrated. They took him back to the children’s hospital where he was born. Then they brought him home. He did not get better. They took him to the hospital again, and this time, they had to leave him there.
What my father will not say: if he had wanted a boy, a son. If he ever felt disappointment that the next three children were all girls, all daughters, though we called ourselves by the pronoun tha, son, instead of thamee, daughter. If he ever blamed himself for my brother’s death, for not being in the delivery room when my brother was born, when the medical student pulled him out of my mother’s body with forceps. If his aversion to hospitals and doctors began with my brother’s stay in the neonatal intensive care unit. If he had always been anxious and protective, cautious to a fault, or if there was a time before my brother’s death when he had been more carefree, more trusting. If there was a time when he believed that nothing bad could ever happen to him or to anyone he loved.
Minbu
Many miles up the Irrawaddy River from my grandfather’s small village of Gayan, past Rangoon, which sprawled farther in the east, past Hinthada, which was cradled in the river’s bend, so far north that Sittwe lay on the other side of the Rakhine Yoma, my grandmother was born in the small city of Minbu, on the western bank of the Irrawaddy.
My grandmother was her parents’ only child, but she was not their firstborn. There had been three other babies born before her who died in infancy. All three had been sons. My grandmother, like me, was the fourth-born child, the first to live, while I was the third. My father said my grandmother said when she was born, her father did not come home for a week. For a full week, he stayed away because he could not bear to see her, could not bear to meet yet another child he might lose. At the end of the week, however, when my great-grandfather finally came home, when he looked upon my grandmother for the first time, he fell in love.
I never liked the number four, never thought of myself as the fourth child in my family. Three was my favorite number. Three, which sounded like my name and had its shape when written down. T, h, and r were the three consonants with which I identified. I thought four, ley, which in Bamar was a homonym for heavy, also sounded heavy in English. Four like door or oar, the immense weight of water. Four was a masculine number, I thought, like all even numbers. In Bamar numerals, it was the mirror image of three. A number that is replicated from three, though darkly, since all mirrors are to be wary of, all mirrors reflect the world slightly askew, revealing ghosts who cannot be seen with the naked eye, or not revealing the living dead who have no reflection. In Bamar, four is the first number that is reflected, the beginning of the descent into reproduction. Like my grandmother, I am the fourth-born child, but graciously, my brother died so I could become the third in my family, the third of three daughters. Three is the most common number in fairy tales.
My grandmother’s father fell in love with her, my father said, and did not want another child. Once afraid to love my grandmother at all, my great-grandfather became afraid of un-loving her should another child be born, perhaps a younger brother, a son. He did not want his daughter to have to share his love with anyone, my father said. But my great-grandmother had to share her husband’s love. My great-grandfather had affairs, and eventually a mistress. This was the other reason they did not have more children after my grandmother. My father said my great-grandfather’s affairs began when they lost their firstborn sons. That was his excuse, my father said. My grandmother was the last fruit of her parents’ love, of whatever love still remained after the deaths that came between them.
My great-grandparents met and fell in love in Rangoon, just as my parents would two generations later. Like my parents, who were introduced by my father’s cousin, my great-grandparents were also introduced by a family member, my great-grandmother’s older sister. My great-grandfather, who was studying law at university, was a boarder at my great-grandmother’s sister’s neighbor’s house. He met my great-grandmother when she came to Rangoon, to stay with her sister.
Back in her village, my great-grandmother was receiving many offers of marriage, and her father was eager for her to accept one of them. My great-grandmother and her older sister were children from their father’s first marriage, and their father, who had recently remarried a younger woman, was anxious to have his grown daughter leave the house. He was ready to marry my great-grandmother off to anyone, my father said my grandmother said, even to the neighboring village chief’s son, who had come to court my great-grandmother dressed in a paso, a garment better known by the Malay word sarong, and close-toed leather shoes. My great-grandmother tried not to laugh, my father said my grandmother said. Nobody wore shoes in Burma, my father explained, especially not in the jungle, and especially not with a paso.
My great-grandmother’s older sister invited her to come to Rangoon to save her from their father and from her country suitors. My great-grandfather, an educated man from a well-to-do family, was considered to be a far superior match. I assume he also wore hnyat phanat, sandals, like a sensible person and a proud nationalist.
Despite his infidelity, my father said my great-grandfather had many good qualities. Among them were his humility, his sense of humor, and his kindness. To illustrate my great-grandfather’s character, my father shared two stories.
The first story had to do with my great-grandfather’s older brother, who was also his neighbor in Minbu. My great-grandfather’s older brother was an official in the British colonial government, and thought so highly of himself that he had his servants call him “paya,” or “lord,” which, historically, was a form of address reserved for royalty. As a prank, my great-grandfather paid the neighborhood children to address him as “paya” as well. I do not know how long this went on, but eventually, my great-grandfather’s older brother found out, and was so furious he showed up at my great-grandfather’s house brandishing a government-issued gun.
In the second story, a drunk man was loitering outside my great-grandparents’ house, raging and cursing. When the curses became personal, my great-grandfather went outside to confront the man. This ended with him punching the man in the face. Once on the ground, however, the drunk man began to cry, and my great-grandfather felt so bad, so sorry, he ended up giving the man a small fortune.
The next day, and for many days after, all the drunks in Minbu gathered outside my great-grandparents’ house, walking in circles, hoping to be punched.
Of my great-grandmother, my father said she was a soft person, pyau, which also meant weak or passive. My father said my great-grandmother was never angry about my great-grandfather’s affairs. She was the kind of person who could not feel anger at all, he said.
Once, my great-grandfather’s sisters found the address of a woman who was having an affair with their brother, and they brought my great-grandmother to this woman’s doorstep to confront her. When the woman opened the door, my great-grandmother’s sisters-in-law began berating her, and like the drunk in the other story, the woman began to cry. Instead of joining her sisters-in-law, my great-grandmother pulled them away from the woman’s house, and begged them to never do something like that again.
I do not know how my father extracted all these stories about his grandparents from my grandmother when I could never get her to tell me anything about her life. Before my grandmother passed away, and before her dementia, I had tried many times
to ask her about her youth, her childhood. She was the only grandparent whom I saw regularly growing up, and whom I continued to see, twice a year, whenever I went home. My father’s father passed away a couple of years after I met him for the first time, when I was still a child, my mother’s mother passed away even earlier, and my father’s father lived in Yangon, and I had only ever met him three times in my life.
My grandmother lived within walking distance from my parents, and I saw her weekly. When I was very young, my parents used to drop me off at my grandmother’s house when they needed a babysitter. I remember my grandmother always offered me English biscuits out of a tin can, and I always refused. She would watch soap operas or beauty pageants she had taped, and I would sit by the window in the front room and watch the cars pass on Rainbow Drive, waiting for my parents’ tiny white car to come into view. As a child, I never asked my grandmother any questions and the only question she ever asked me was Would you like something to eat? It was only after I left home, and only after my grandmother’s health began to deteriorate, that I thought to ask her about her life. By then, it was too late. I never asked the right questions and I could never get my grandmother to talk. Everything I knew about her, I learned from my father.
Names for Light Page 4