Shortly after my grandfather’s father died from the loss of land, his eldest brother, a boy of sixteen or seventeen who had been acting as the man of the family, died as well and my grandfather was sent to live with his uncle in Rangoon.
Rangoon was a port city newly established as the capital at the end of three wars fought over nearly a century. My great-grandfather’s uncle worked for the victors, the British, as most people did in the city. He was an inspector of distilleries. My grandfather was sent to a private Bamar-language school along with his cousins. The government schools taught only English. At the government schools, students had to pray, wear Western clothes, and take English names. Children were stripped of their unique names and called by an English first name followed by their father’s name.
My mother’s father had gone to a colonial government school. His unique name was Win Kyaing and his father’s was Ba Cho. At school, my mother’s father became Walter Ba Cho. The boy Win Kyaing was erased. But my father’s father was not erased. At the Bamar-language school, he was allowed to keep his unique name, Kyaw Myint. I do not even remember the name of his father. It is a relief, to be able to forget the names of the fathers.
My grandfather wanted an education because he wanted to own something that could not be lost, to a gambling brother-in-law, to debt collectors, to fires, floods, kings, thieves, and the other calamities of existence. At the Bamar-language school, my father said, the children were taught not only Bamar, English, math, science, and history, but also patriotism, which in Bamar translated not to love for country but love for a people. Love for myo, my father’s name and my own, meaning relative, kin, race, nation, and people. I do not know who is a part of this people and who is apart from them. I do not think I will ever learn.
A few years before my grandfather would graduate from high school, his uncle, his guardian in Rangoon, died, unexpectedly on one of his inspection rounds. A drunk man stabbed and killed him. My grandfather’s aunt was plunged into suffering, my father said. She entered the story only after her husband’s death, as if she were his ghost. My grandfather’s aunt suffers her husband’s untimely death and my grandfather suffers as well. His education comes to an end before it is complete, and he is sent back home.
When my grandfather returned to Gayan, the countryside was ravaged. The term my father used, pyet see, meant ruined, damaged, or destroyed. Pyet, to break or to lose. My grandfather’s family were no longer landowners and no longer wealthy. My grandfather’s brothers were their father’s sons and did not know how to farm the land that was left to them, how to work the land, how to live off it. My great-grandmother did not know either.
My grandfather’s uncle was the third man in his life to die an untimely death, the third father figure. I wonder if my grandfather returned to Gayan, where my grandfather’s father and elder brother had died, so he could die as well. I wonder if my grandfather thought that was what men did, what it meant to be a man. I wonder if he joined the army, the resistance, because he hoped it would kill him.
My grandfather returned to Gayan without his high school diploma, but because he had any education at all, soon after he joined the Burmese Independence Army, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant. In Gayan, my father said, there were no schools, nothing, not even today. I could not find the village on any map, and do not even know if it still exists. My grandfather and two other officers, the only educated men in Gayan, were given a hundred men to command. My grandfather was only sixteen years old.
Meanwhile, back in Rangoon, Bogyoke Aung San, the former student activist and revolutionary turned general, addressed the Burmese army. It was not the Burmese Independence Army, which my grandfather had joined, but the army that the Japanese had created in its place a year later, the Burma Defense Army, which was then later renamed the Burma National Army.
Names change often when a country is created by men. Men know that names, that words, hold power. This is why they impose their names on women. They know that an independence army can exist only before independence has been won, that a national army implies there is already a nation. In 1945, the Japanese wanted to signal that independence had already been won, that Asia had been returned to Asians, and that a new nation had already been established. Despite what the Japanese called the army, none of this was true. Burmese people had simply exchanged one foreign colonizer for another.
In his speech to the army, Bogyoke Aung San commanded his men to kill the nearest enemy. My father repeated those words as if he heard them himself, though they were spoken more than a decade before his birth. The nearest enemy meant the Japanese. The soldiers understood what their general meant. They fled to the mountains. The Japanese forces were better trained, better armed, and better provisioned than the Burmese army, which was mostly composed of young volunteers like my grandfather. The only advantages the Burmese had were the land and the climate. The densely forested Bago Yoma and the rain that seemed not to fall from the sky, but to spring up from the ground itself.
The land did most of the killing for them, my father said my grandfather said. The Japanese soldiers my grandfather fought were already mostly dead. Starving because they could find no food, in the abandoned villages they passed or in the mountains. The villages were abandoned because the villagers fled and hid when they learned the Japanese were approaching. The villagers took their stores of food and destroyed what they had to leave behind. The men my grandfather killed had not eaten for weeks. They could barely walk, my father said, much less fight. Some of them did not even have the strength to carry their guns. I imagined they dragged their guns behind them, through the mud of the jungle, or leaned on them like canes. I imagine the Japanese soldiers were young men, though aged by hunger and disease. It was nothing to be proud of killing men like that, my grandfather told my father. Men who were already dead. The only dead man I have seen is my grandfather, lying in a casket, as if asleep.
My father’s favorite story to tell was the one about how my grandfather’s life was saved by a chicken. One day, a nearby village sent over a chicken for my grandfather and the other two officers to eat. A live chicken. A rare meal in those days of hiding in the jungle. The Burmese soldiers were not starving the way the Japanese were, but they were not eating well either.
My grandfather did not trust his men to cook the chicken for him. He did not trust that they would not eat most of it while they cooked. My grandfather was a glutton, my father said, so he took on the task of cooking the chicken himself. As he was tending to his pot of chicken, a villager brought news of ten Japanese soldiers nearby. My grandfather and the other officers had a hundred men between them. A hundred men against ten Japanese soldiers. They knew that their men wanted to fight, that they were tired of only killing men who were nearly dead. The other two officers decided to fight, but my grandfather’s chicken was not yet ready, so he stayed behind. All one hundred of the men left.
In a little while, before the chicken was even ready, they stumbled back to camp, the survivors. There was only a third of them left, maybe thirty men. They said to my grandfather, Lieutenant, we have to run. The ten Japanese soldiers that the villager had reported were only the scouts. There were three hundred more men behind them. Three hundred well-armed and well-trained Japanese soldiers. The Burmese men had no training, the officers themselves had none. They were all slaughtered. The other two officers died, shot and killed. Most of the men under my grandfather’s command died as well. Those who were left, his men and the men of the two officers who had died, fled deeper into the jungle, higher up the mountains. But my grandfather did not leave the chicken behind. He had two of his soldiers lug the pot between them.
I wonder how my grandfather’s chicken tasted. I wonder where he learned to cook. If his mother ever taught him, or his aunt in Rangoon. I wonder if this chicken from the village was the first meal he had ever cooked for himself. I doubt he had spices hiding in the jungle, that he had fish sauce, so far from the ocean, from the delta where he was born. I
wonder if he missed Rangoon, or if he missed Gayan. I wonder if being so far from home, it was as if his father and his brother were still alive, as if they had never died, as if they would be waiting for him when he returned, along with his mother and younger brothers. I wonder if he could forget that the land had ever been sold, the family land he was meant to inherit. I wonder if he could forget that anything bad had ever happened to him before the war. If the chicken tasted like chicken he had eaten as a boy, chicken that the family cook had prepared, if she had been the one who taught him how to cook.
But it is more likely that the chicken tasted like death, an animal he had killed with his own hands, hands that had killed men. The chicken was meant to be shared between him and the other two officers. The two men who died while the chicken was cooking.
I also wonder about the bodies of the dead. The men that my grandfather killed, or his men who were killed in turn. I wonder if they were burned or buried, or if they were left to rot. In the jungle, I imagine the dead decompose quickly. In the jungle there are tigers and leopards and pythons, bacteria and microorganisms that emerge from the ground and consume the dead with invisible mouths. I imagine it is a dangerous place to lie down. But I don’t want to imagine the jungle only as a place glutted with death. To my grandfather and his men it was also their home. The jungle, the forest, the wilderness, the taw. My father called Gayan a taw myot, a town in the wilderness, in the forest, in the jungle. Gayan, a jungle town, where my grandfather was born, a small village. My mother used to call my father a taw tha to tease him. Taw tha, son of the taw, a peasant. It was mostly these men who died in the war, sons of the jungle. Their bodies fed the living land.
And the land tried to claim my grandfather’s body as well. At the end of the war, just as he was about to descend from the mountains, to leave the jungle, he was seized by a malarial fever, the kind that had killed many men during the war. For a full month, my grandfather was too sick to travel, sick with the bird fever, as the disease is called in Bamar.
I did not know why malaria was called bird disease when the sickness was spread by mosquitoes, not birds. My mother said it is not because birds spread the disease, but because birds can be infected by it as well. Avian malaria. I never liked birds. I did not like their clawed feet, or their sharp beaks, or their black, vacant eyes. Their corpses littering the street, flattened, like inkblots on paper, blood smeared on the asphalt. Once, as a child, I accidentally stepped on and killed a baby bird and I have since been afraid of birds, dead ones, falling from the sky. It is a nightmare I often have. The heaviness of their bodies, dropping to the earth. When I see birds in the sky, I can think only of that, the weight of their bodies, suspended in the air.
My grandfather dropped like a dead bird, but then he rose again. His fever broke. He recovered, survived, and lived, to return from the mountains, and the war.
Madrid
In Madrid two things were in abundance: metro stops and convenience stores. The convenience stores sold everything: snacks, toiletries, school supplies, even socks and underwear. This is why they are called convenience stores in North America. In Spain, they were called chinos. They were run almost exclusively by East Asian families. She did not know if the families were even Chinese. She did not know if they owned the stores. She could only guess at how they felt about the term chino.
Sometimes she entered the stores for the pure pleasure of listening to other Asian people speak Spanish. When a teenage son or daughter was at the register, she was especially pleased. Then, she was afflicted with guilt. She remembered all the well-meaning people in her life who had remarked on how well she spoke English. The enthusiasm in their voice. The biases they betrayed. She remembered how much she resented them and how much she resented this language, which was her native tongue, though not the only one.
And to have two native tongues is to have a split tongue, a forked tongue, to be duplicitous, as in deceitful, dishonest, disingenuous, though the prefix dipl- only means twofold, double, two-faced, Janus-faced, double-dealing. It is unacceptable to be two things at once, to see both sides, to not choose one or the other. To be both a man and a woman, a native and a foreigner, the oppressed and the oppressor.
She cannot remember why she chose to apply for a fellowship to Spain when she could have gone anywhere in the world. In her application, she had written about García Lorca’s Poet in New York as if that book meant something to her, when it did not. She had been to New York only a handful of times when she was in college and had despised the city. Maybe that had been her connection to Lorca. Or maybe going to Spain was for her a way of returning to the motherland, the heart of the empire, the country of namesakes. She had spent her childhood going on field trips to nearby missions and even built a model of Mission San Juan Bautista in the fourth grade, out of Styrofoam and cardboard. During the project, she remembers her mother said, If I had grown up in this country, I would have failed every class.
When she arrived in Madrid, at the airport on the outskirts of the city, the landscape did remind her of where she grew up. The bald, dry earth and the dark green shrubs clinging to it, the low trees, foothills in the distance. Only, instead of strip malls and ranch-style homes, there was Madrid, the capital city, with its promenades and plazas and roundabouts, which were handsomely named glorietas. The city’s grandeur made her feel small but important, as if she were the protagonist of a Hemingway novel with some gorgeous, lyrical title. She had never felt more American in her life.
She soon learned, however, that many people in the city thought she was Chinese. She walked down the street and people shouted china, china to get her attention. Street vendors, people advertising nightclubs, people trying to lure customers into their restaurants. Once, a teacher at the school where she worked asked if she would tutor the teacher’s child in Chinese. Her roommate’s son said she should have taken the job. You could have made something up, he said. She was annoyed at being mistaken for Chinese because she did not think she looked Chinese at all. If people were going to shout at her on the street, she thought, they should at least make a better guess. Whenever she was mistaken for Filipina, or Cambodian, or Laotian, or Latina, or Native American, it was usually by people who identified as such, and she felt almost complimented. No Chinese person had ever thought she was Chinese. This was probably because China and Burma shared a border.
She did not expect anyone to take her for an American. She did not even wish it. She was embarrassed by the American tourists on the metro, their fanny packs and sunburns, how they seemed to assume that no one around them could understand English, loudly appraising the city the same way she had once heard boys at a fraternity evaluating female party guests. She did not feel much camaraderie with her compatriots on the fellowship, either. Many had come straight from college and acted as if they were on an extended spring break, or, worse, an anthropological field study. They complained about the slow service at restaurants and long lines at the bank as if these were moral failings on the part of Spaniards. Her roommate’s son, her first friend in the city, used to laugh at the word Spaniard, how unsexy it sounded compared to español, which she agreed was smooth and sinuous. With her roommate’s son, and her one other Spanish friend, she derided all of America’s faults as she perceived them: monolingualism, consumerism, imperialism, political apathy. Behind her rants was real shame. She felt it when her roommate’s son revealed that his college tuition amounted to a little over a thousand euros a year, when a teacher at the school where she worked took a full sixteen weeks of paid maternity leave, when she went to the doctor for an upper-respiratory infection and there was no co-payment for her visit or medication. The dream among her American friends, the few she made, was to find a Spanish boyfriend and a reason to stay. But really, she did not want to stay, despite all the benefits. She did not want to become a bitter expat, to take up smoking and lose her accent, even though she suspected that this was the only way she could ever become fully American. Only in a foreign country co
uld she feel that she belonged to hers.
Halfway through her year in Madrid, a friend from college who was Chinese American visited her for a few days. She does not remember anyone yelling china, china to her friend in the streets, but she does remember her friend telling her stories about men mistaking her friend as part white. One story was about a man on a bus and another story was about a man in a lecture hall. She was baffled by why her friend was sharing these stories, as if they were interesting or funny, with almost a touch of pride. For a brief moment, she felt as if she had missed something, a joke or a twist, and then she remembered. She had heard similar stories before, from a girl in high school who had gone to Hong Kong one summer. That girl had recounted, in the same tone, with the same carefully contained excitement, how many people in Hong Kong had asked her if her father was white. That was the detail she remembered, that people had asked specifically about the girl’s father.
Earlier or later, she offered to let her friend borrow her ID card so her friend could visit museums for free while she went to work. The friend laughed at the suggestion. I can’t pretend to be you, the friend said. She tried to argue. It was true, they did not actually look alike, but they were both Asian and they were in Spain, so it would not matter. But you are so much darker than me, the friend said, and held out her pale arm for comparison.
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