It was from my father that I learned that my grandmother had had a golden childhood. My great-grandfather was a very successful lawyer, a defense attorney, maybe the most sought-after one in all of Minbu, and my grandmother grew up in a house so large it covered an entire block. As an only child, her father’s beloved child, she was spoiled in exceptional ways. Once, my father said, my grandmother accidentally broke a drinking glass. Being rich people, my father said, even the glasses they used to drink water were expensive, and the one my grandmother broke had been imported from England. My grandmother’s mother scolded her for her clumsiness, but her father brought her into the dining room, where the family’s most valuable and precious china was on display in a glass cabinet. Porcelain plates, crystal goblets, decorative items, gifts from clients. My great-grandfather arranged all of it on the dining table. He then handed my grandmother a bat and instructed her to smash it all.
South Bend
Her first year, she ran around the lakes, Saint Joseph and Saint Mary. Saint Joseph was the smaller lake and Saint Mary the larger. They separated the university from the seminary and the women’s college. Young priests and young women, the two groups that needed most to be sequestered. She began running around the lakes when the trees were green and stopped when they were bare, when it was so cold she could no longer feel her gloved hands. When the chipmunks disappeared, when the swans flew away. When it began to snow, and the snow melted and froze, and more snow fell over the ice.
Her mother called the city a taw myot when they first arrived. Her father had insisted on helping her move in and her mother had insisted on helping her father. She felt a bit embarrassed to have both her parents accompany her at the start of graduate school. It made her feel like she was back in the fifth grade and her father was waiting right outside the door of her classroom, ready to carry her backpack and charm her teacher. She was old enough to carry her own backpack, she thought, to move by herself. She had, after all, just returned from a year of living abroad, of speaking a foreign language, of traveling alone all over Europe.
A taw myot was what her mother called any place that was not a major city, not Yangon, not Bangkok. The way her mother said the word taw, wistfully, with a touch of pity, always evoked for her clashing emotions, pride and shame, longing and revulsion. Taw meant jungle, forest, wood, it meant rural, it meant wild. Because her mother was born in Yangon, the capital, and her father was born in Hmawbi, a rural township northwest of the city, her mother used to call her father a taw tha, a son of the taw, when she wanted to tease him for his simplicity. From the back seat of their rented car, she looked out at the flat horizon, the low trees, the low sky, the wide expanse of green on either side of Douglas Road. Taw myot was close, she thought, but not quite right. She was not yet familiar with the term rust belt.
She was on a special scholarship for people historically under-represented in higher education. This was the language the university used. First generation, low income, African American, Asian American, Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, Hispanic, Native American, and/or. She had not even applied for the scholarship, though she must have checked some boxes on her application or submitted a FAFSA, which automatically brought her under consideration. She chose to attend because of the scholarship and because the English department had allowed her to defer her admission when she received the fellowship to Spain. If she had had more ambition, or more money to pay for another round of application fees, maybe she would have reapplied, to more prestigious schools in more exciting cities. But she was like her father, a taw tha, with simple needs and desires. A stipend that paid for food and rent. A library. Some place to run or walk. She made a total of $10,000 a year. Her student loans from college amounted to three times that much. Still, she considered herself very lucky.
She began dating them perhaps because they were also broke, more broke than her, though equally uncomplaining. They reminded her of her uncle, the one who passed away from liver failure when she was in college, who smelled like leather and cigarettes, who always said Don’t do as I do, do as I say. Like her uncle, they had close-cropped hair and aquiline features. Like her uncle, they were an affectionate drunk, not a belligerent one. Alcohol made them sentimental, it made them tell her how pretty she was, how much she meant to them, how lucky they were. Things no boy had ever said to her. The first night, they did not kiss, only cuddled on their couch, watching a classic science-fiction film. After they drove her back to her graduate-student housing, she had lain awake in her twin bed with a giant, crushing feeling of dread. Something had been set in motion, a choice had been made, and the dread arose perhaps from the knowledge that she was powerless to unmake it now, to stop or pause or turn back, she had to live out this choice, let it run its course.
For the next two years, she was glad she was not alone, through the cold, interminable winters, the snow falling steadily from November to May. She did not have a car and they drove her everywhere, to the grocery store, to restaurants, to parties at friends’ apartments. Once, they even drove her to Lake Michigan, in the dead of winter, when all the gift shops were closed, and there was not a tourist in sight. She had never seen snow on a beach before. It looked unreal, the black water, the white snow, the icy sand. She got out of the car with the intention of walking down to the water. The wind felt like it was made of needles. She got back in the car.
By the time the snow from the first winter melted for good, she had moved away from the lakes and closer to the river. From her little blue house with its fenced-in yard, she ran down to the river, past Saint Joseph High School, its football field and stadium lights, past the old-age home and the preschool. She ran along on the East Bank Trail, through downtown South Bend, past the park by the dam and the fish ladders, the orange sculpture, under the tunnel, past the second park, under the bridge. When she finally stopped to walk, under the concrete bridge, with its vaguely patriotic graffiti, her body felt so hollow, so empty and light, that she would always feel the need to cry, to produce something from her body, a liquid or a sound. The trees and the grass and the water sharpened into focus, deepened in color, but she could never cry, never give back to the river, she could only begin running again.
She and three of her friends moved into the little blue house together because its prior inhabitants had always thrown parties at the house and invited them. Every other party they went to took place in someone’s spacious, brand-new, and utterly characterless apartment, every apartment exactly the same, same stairs, hallway, balcony, and duck pond. Only the blue house was unique. It was cramped and old, and every party there ended with people sitting or lying down on the drab kitchen floor.
Her room was the smallest one in the house, at the foot of the stairs, added on after a fire burned down the kitchen. It was built like a covered porch or a sunroom, except in a city with no sun. Her room got so cold in the winter she had to sleep with a space heater on through the night, afraid it would catch on fire. She did not know if anyone had died in the kitchen fire and did not want to find out.
She did not mind having the smallest room because she spent so much time in their apartment, anyway. Whole days, whole weekends, doing what, she cannot even remember now. Probably reading, watching movies, talking. There was not much else to do. They were from a truck-stop city in the south and used to this boredom. They watched football and basketball. They played video games. They listened to queer electropop and Atlanta rap. They had a tattoo of a character from the cover of a pulp science-fiction novel she had not read, had never even heard of.
They had already been dating for a few weeks when the subject of her race first came up. She had been telling them about the time an elderly man in front of the library asked her if she came from China. She had been sitting on the lawn with her friend’s dog when this man and his wife and their dog approached. First, the man asked if her friend’s dog came from China. The question struck her as ridiculous. Her coat is so black and shiny, the man said, like your hair. That was when he directe
d the question at her. Do you come from China?
They expressed the appropriate amusement and outrage at her story, but then fell silent. But what is your ethnicity? they asked shyly. Somehow, she felt proud that they had not even known. It seemed to prove to her that they did not have a fetish, that they liked her for who she was.
After the elderly man in front of the library, no one else in South Bend ever asked where she came from. No one on Notre Dame’s campus, no one downtown, no one at the community learning center or the juvenile detention center where she volunteered. This did not mean there were no other incidents. Once, an undergraduate in a writing group she helped to facilitate mistook her for another student in the group who was Asian. Once, a man at a party kept joking she was married to her roommate because her roommate was South Asian American. Once, a classmate at a party at her house joked that she could not speak English when she did not hear his drink order. Once, at a job interview, the person interviewing her expressed surprise that she was recommended for the position of Spanish translator.
Despite the interviewer’s doubts, she got the job. She worked for a psychology lab at the medical school that was studying the effects of racism on depression among Mexican American teenagers in South Bend. A colleague translated the surveys and consent forms from English to Spanish and she translated them back into English. The two versions, the original and her translation, were then compared. Months later, when the study was over, the principal investigator wrote to her with the results. Teenagers who had a sense of community were less prone to depression, even if they experienced the same levels of racism. Her problem, she realized then, was that she had no community, and had never had one, outside of her own nuclear family.
Her mother had warned her that she should never be with a person who was also born on a Friday. Two Friday borns, two hamsters, could not survive together. One or both of them had to die. She does not know who it would have been, her or them, but she believes her mother. Nights when they huddled together, separated from the snow, wind, and ice by only a thin sheet of glass, broken venetian blinds, she had felt, inexplicably, that they could not adequately protect each other. She remembers one night distinctly. They broke up over the course of nearly a year, but she remembers the first night, the first night the breakup felt real, inevitable. Lying in bed next to each other, after a disastrous fight, the kind where they had yelled and she had yelled and they both had cried all over the apartment before ending up in bed, exhausted, she had said, I feel like a limb is being cut off. And that was what it felt like, like the removal of a part of her body, a part of herself.
Later, when she was just beginning to date her husband, whom she knew, even then, she would one day marry—there had been no dread, no fear after their first kiss—she met a woman whose ex-girlfriend had gone on to have a baby with a man. The woman thought it was unfair, how her ex-girlfriend could now have an easy, so-called normal life. She suspected that this woman thought she too had gotten off easy, ending up with a man while her ex had become more openly queer. She thought the woman was probably right, but she did not really believe in fairness anymore.
Sittwe
My mother was so homesick in Sittwe that she flew back to Rangoon twenty-two times during the three years of her term. The first time she returned was in January of 1987, after only a month in Sittwe. When my mother appeared unannounced at her parents’ home in Rangoon with my middle sister in her arms, her father had thought she had come back for good. I knew you wouldn’t be able to live there, my grandfather said, I told you not to go in the first place. As a prank, my mother played along. She waited until my grandfather was done gloating to announce that she was in Rangoon only to interview for a scholarship.
The previous year, my mother had planned to go to England for graduate school. She had been accepted into a master’s program for teaching English as a foreign language at the University of Warwick and had received a full scholarship from the Burmese government. When she became pregnant with my middle sister, however, she was forced to give up her scholarship and her spot in the program. My mother was devastated. During her pregnancy, she became obsessively focused on a single goal: to win another scholarship, to recover what she had lost, what she felt had been taken away from her. My mother’s mother had dropped out of college to get married, and only returned to finish her degree years later after the birth of her fourth child. I think my mother wanted a different life from my grandmother’s. I think she wanted to prove that she did not have to choose between a family and a career. She could have my sister and a master’s degree. She could be a mother and still have dreams that were hers alone.
My mother’s dream, when she lived in Sittwe, was to go abroad. In Bamar, the word meant another country, an other country. My mother said many Rakhine thought of my family as having come from abroad. They thought of Rangoon as a foreign capital and Burma as a foreign state. My mother often referred to Sittwe as a place not even considered Burma. She believed she had been transferred to such a place because it was her kan to go abroad. My parents were both fervent believers in kan, which they translated as luck, but which I came to understand as karma or fate. My mother believed she had the kan to go abroad, but because she had given up her scholarship, because she had not gone to England, she had been sent to Sittwe instead. The place most foreign to her within national borders.
Every day, my mother road a sidecar along the Kispanadi River to teach at Sittwe Degree College. A sidecar was the clever Bamar word for a kind of rickshaw with a passenger seat attached to one side of the bicycle. This daily commute by sidecar was the only image I had of my mother in Sittwe. The bicycle pedaled expertly by its owner, racing the river itself, and my mother, being used to city buses, not yet immune to the excitement of it all: the cool, humid air rushing at her face, the dark waters of the Kispanadi a viscous, opaque mass, and the sky equally obscure, a block of gray threatening rain.
The sidecar ride along the river was also, I think, the only image my mother had of Sittwe. With all the flying back and forth to Rangoon and the stormy weather and the protests and the school closures, my mother did not get to see much of the city or the rest of Rakhine State. She had wanted to see the white sand and clear turquoise waters of Ngapali Beach. She had wanted to visit the Mahamuni Buddha Temple in Kyauktaw. According to Buddhist legend, the Mahamuni Buddha image was made when the Buddha himself visited the ancient kingdom of Arakan, the region that was now present-day Rakhine State. The Mahamuni Buddha image was said to be one of the only likenesses of the Buddha made during his lifetime. When the Bamar conquered Arakan centuries ago, the original statue was taken to Mandalay, which was then the capital of the Burmese kingdom. The Rakhine king replaced the lost statue with a replica and a new legend grew around the new Mahamuni Buddha image. Whoever visited the temple in Kyauktaw three times and prayed three times for what they wanted would have their wish granted.
My mother wanted to visit the Mahamuni Buddha Temple in Kyauktaw so she could have her wish to go abroad be granted. Kyauktaw was north along the Kispanadi River, which farther upstream was called the Kaladan River. On a map, the town seemed relatively close to Sittwe, but without a car, or a boat, and with two small children to care for, my mother could not manage the trip. All I saw of Rakhine State was our apartment, my mother said.
In their apartment, she put up a photograph of the Kyauktaw Mahamuni Buddha image on her altar and prayed to it, very intently, three times on three different occasions. My mother hoped that the image’s power of wish fulfillment would still work despite the many layers of representation. A photograph of a replica of a likeness. My mother had faith in the power of translation, of rebirth, in the idea that despite whatever was lost across languages, bodies, and lives, there remained something essential, something untouched and untouchable, that could still be transmitted.
The one place my mother did visit in Sittwe was Point, which was what the locals called Sittwe View Point, the southernmost tip of the city where th
e river emptied into the ocean. There was a beach there, my mother said, at the mouth of the sea, except in Bamar the phrase was more beautiful, the opening of the sea, or the threshold of the sea.
For my eldest sister’s third birthday, in February of 1987, the family went down to the beach at Point to celebrate. My mother even brought two separate outfits in which to photograph the birthday girl. In one portrait, my sister is wearing a pleated red dress and white flip-flops, and in the other, she is in a bouncy white dress and turquoise sandals with bunnies on them. In both photographs, my sister is bedecked in a hat made of flowers, and seashell necklaces and bracelets too big for her little wrists. She looks like a happy toddler at the beach.
The photographs were misleading, however, because my eldest sister was not happy in Sittwe. My mother said my father had to take my sister on outings to Point regularly to cheer her up. Back in their apartment, my mother said my sister spent whole days lying on the large pine chest they had brought from Rangoon, barely moving at all. My eldest sister herself claimed to remember this. I lay on that chest, my sister said, because I didn’t want to touch anything else in that apartment. The pine chest and the other luggage my parents had brought from Rangoon were all my sister had left of home.
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