Names for Light

by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint

  Or maybe her friend had not held out an arm, and she had only imagined it because the gesture was so familiar to her. Maybe her friend had said instead, if I were three shades darker, or but I am so much lighter. Her memory is inexact. She cannot remember, for example, how she responded, how the remainder of the visit went, how she and this friend eventually stopped being friends.

  When she was a child, there were women, often nearly strangers, always white, who expressed envy for her skin color, which they described as tanned. These women would grab and stroke her arm, lament about how many hours in the sun or the tanning bed they would have to spend to achieve her hue. This rarely happened when she actually did have a tan, when her skin turned deep and rich. Only her mother dared to comment on her skin then, teasingly calling her a dark-skinned ruby stone. When she asked what that meant, her mother said that though light skin was the standard of beauty, dark skin was considered precious, a mark of value. The last queen of Burma and her daughters had all been dark.

  Toward the end of her time in Madrid, people stopped asking her if she was Chinese and began asking if she was Ecuadorian or Peruvian or Nicaraguan. This made her happy. She thought it meant her Spanish had improved. At the time, she did not consider why speaking poor Spanish was equated with being Asian. She did not consider how speaking poor English was also equated with being Asian. How being a foreigner anywhere, an other, was often equated with being Asian. Asia, the East, the Orient, the exotic land behind a mirror where everything is backward and upside down. At the time, she did not consider all this. She was just pleased to hear elderly ladies call her bonita and guapa, to hear them tell her, Wherever you’re from, you’re beautiful.

  She was born in the Chinese year of the snake. She does not know what snakes symbolize according to the Chinese zodiac, but in the Buddhist stories she knows, snakes are related to nagas, giant shapeshifting serpents, half-human and half-ophidian, with magical powers. Her parents translated naga into English as dragon. It made sense to her. The year of the dragon precedes the year of the snake. She thought snakes were simply dragons who had lost their wings. She thought they had forked tongues because they were shape-shifters, part dragon, part human, part mortal, and part divine. In school, it was not the story of Eve and the serpent that captured her imagination, but the story of la serpiente emplumada, Quetzalcoatl, a deity for whom Cortés believed he was mistaken. She always hated that myth, which made Moctezuma out to be gullible and superstitious, deserving of his tragic fate, as Eve deserved her banishment from Eden. She could not conceive what it must have been like for the conquistadors, to believe that wherever you went, you were a god.

  Sittwe

  For a long time, I believed I was conceived in Sittwe, in the haunted government apartment where the electricity only came on at night and the water only ran in the early morning. I believed I was conceived under the city’s perpetually gray skies, perhaps on a rainy day, perhaps even in the midst of a tropical storm. My parents always spoke of Sittwe as a place of exile, a place of banishment, and as someone who had lived all the life I could remember in places where I was an exile, an immigrant against my will, it gave me comfort to believe that my life had begun in Sittwe, far from home. Somehow, it was easier to believe that I was conceived in a foreign place than in Rangoon, where I was born, and where my mother was born before me.

  I have no memories of Rangoon. I cannot remember my mother’s parents’ house where my family first lived, or the small house they later built and moved into, on my father’s parents’ land. Growing up, I heard so many stories of these places that it almost felt like they were a part of me too. I knew that my mother’s parents’ house was actually on the Pyi Thar Yar side of the railroad, but when my mother was young, Pyi Thar Yar was not as well-known of a neighborhood as Bauk Htaw, so she grew up saying she was from Bauk Htaw. I knew that when my grandparents first bought the house, nothing west of the railroad was developed, it was just a quiet, open area, but now Yangon has expanded, and Pyi Thar Yar has become a bustling urban neighborhood. I knew that Saw Bwar Gyi Gone, where my father’s parents lived, was in the northern part of the city, almost an hour away from my mother’s parents’ house by bus. I knew it was close to the international airport and to Rangoon Institute of Technology, but also close to Insein Township and Insein Prison, which even then was notorious as a place of torture.

  I knew all this, but unlike my sisters, I had no memories of playing in my mother’s parents’ garden, chasing my grandfather from banana tree to banana tree. I had no memories of riding a tricycle through the wooded acres of my father’s parents’ backyard. I had only a few family photographs to prove that I was really there, that once there was a time when I had lived in a house my parents built, on land that my grandparents owned.

  Though I was not conceived in Sittwe, it was in Sittwe that a bay-din saya, an astrologer, told my mother that she would get her wish to go abroad only after she had another child. My mother was distressed by this prediction. She had not been planning to have a third child. She had not planned to have a second child or a first, either. My brother, my middle sister, and I were all, more or less, happy accidents. Only my eldest sister had been wanted, after the loss of my brother.

  My mother did want me later on, though, after she had a dream, around the time of my conception, of a child lifting her out from an abyss, a pit into which she had fallen. A lucky child, my mother said, a child sent by bodaws. Bodaw was a title of respect for weikzas, holy beings with magical powers who lived in the woods and the mountains. Weikzas, my mother said, achieved near-immortal lifespans through meditation and other practices and many of them were waiting for the next Buddha to be born. The monk my mother’s neighbor took her to in Sittwe was known for his ability to communicate with weikzas. My mother said one could tell the weikzas had visited if the incense sticks in the monastery curled in a coil when they burned. The monk told my mother that weikzas looked after her and our family. My mother believed that I was a gift from them.

  When the Phone Maw ayekhin broke out in March of 1988, my mother returned to her parents’ house in Bauk Htaw with the children. Anytime anything happened, my mother said, you’d find me back in Rangoon. The school year ended in February, so my mother had been in staying in Sittwe only to be with my father, who had yearlong duties as the English department chair. After a few months, during which the riot police shot at, killed, beat, and arrested hundreds of student demonstrators, my father was finally able to return to Rangoon as well. It was right before things got to be very bad, my mother said, in June or July. You know what happened in August.

  My mother went to the airport on three different occasions with my sisters to pick up my father, and each time his flight was canceled. The airport was in Mingaladon, across the city from my mother’s parents’ house, past the university campuses where the marches had started, and past Inya Lake, where student protestors had drowned after the police opened fire on them. My mother said my father’s flights were canceled because of my sisters’ bad luck, but July was also the beginning of the rainy season, when the monsoon brought torrential rains, and it was more likely the flights had been canceled due to bad weather. The fourth time my mother went to the airport to pick up my father, she left my sisters in the care of my grandparents, and went alone. This time, my father’s flight was on time. The plane landed safely and the family was reunited.

  Before my father returned to Rangoon, my mother had been staying at her parents’ house in Bauk Htaw. This was where my parents lived after they got married. Growing up, I heard many stories about my father’s misadventures living with his in-laws. Once, he dropped a bar of soap into the well and the whole family got diarrhea. Another time, he threw a pressure cooker into the backyard, where it exploded. My mother referred to the house as the place where my brother was born, though he was born in a hospital. She meant it was the place where they lived when he was born, the place where he had lived, however briefly.

  After my brother’s
death, my mother believed the house was cursed, that it was unlucky, that, in some way, it had killed my brother. Before my eldest sister was born, she had my grandparents’ detached garage converted into an apartment. A second story was added, and the garage itself was lined with bricks to keep it cool.

  The house my parents moved to after my father returned to Rangoon, the house where I was conceived, was one they had built themselves on my father’s parents’ land in Saw Bwar Gyi Gone right before they received their transfer orders to Sittwe. In the one photograph I have seen of the house, it looks like it is being swallowed by the ground, its uneven brick walls barely visible behind a mound of dirt and rocks. Only its tin roof, not yet rusted, shone aboveground. My mother said my father’s older brother, who also lived on the land, forced them to build on low ground, practically in a ditch, because he did not want their house interrupting his view. Their house was built so low that a neighbor’s dog once jumped on their roof and wouldn’t come down. It was a very bad omen, my mother said.

  On August 8, 1988, soon after my family reunited and resettled in the Saw Bwar Gyi Gone house, the country erupted in a nationwide strike and mass demonstrations, which came to be known as the 8888 ayekhin, or uprising. The strike was the culmination of several months of protests and marches that had been ongoing since March, and of several years, whole decades of enduring the military government’s abuses, mismanagement, violence, and corruption. My grandparents remembered the student protests of 1962, when General Ne Win first seized power, and my parents remembered the protests in 1974 when UN secretary-general U Thant died and the government denied him a state burial. The 8888 ayekhin was larger than both of these movements and anything that came before. The demonstrations spread all over the country, even to Sittwe, where I imagine my parents’ students at Sittwe Degree College were marching in the streets too. I never asked my parents why they did not join the demonstrations, but I already knew the answer. They had small children to care for, and they did not want to die.

  I have always believed in my mother’s prophetic dream that I was a lucky child, a child blessed by weikzas, the worship of whom, I later learned, was forbidden by the government at the time. I have always believed that I had more luck, more good fortune, than anyone else in my family because I was conceived in the short month of hope between the general strike on August 8 and the bloody crackdown that followed on September 18. But my mother said August had not been a hopeful month, but one of uncertainty and fear. You were conceived in pure chaos, my mother said. My father said the government had fostered an atmosphere of anarchy in order to justify the coup they had planned. Thousands of inmates from Insein Prison and other prisons around the country were released under mysterious circumstances, and my father and the other men in Saw Bwar Gyi Gone, which bordered Insein Township, had to organize a neighborhood watch. My mother said there were nights when everyone in the neighborhood hid together in a ditch when there were rumors of a raid. And in fact, there were riots and looting, especially of government property, which many people, including my parents, believed was carried out by the military itself. It was anarchy, my father said, that’s what the military wanted, so they could take over again.

  Every student protest in the past had ended with government forces opening fire on unarmed protestors. In September of 1988, two months after General Ne Win had resigned, the military staged a second coup. They declared martial law, and in cities all over the country, the military fired into crowds of peaceful protestors. In a farewell speech Ne Win gave on the day of his resignation back in July, he ominously foreshadowed this violence. When the army shoots, it shoots to kill. Thousands died and thousands more were injured, were arrested, were tortured, were disappeared. I do not know how many.

  IV

  Hinthada

  I do not want to repeat the story I have heard, of how my grandmother and her sisters were kept at home for seven years following the war. How they were not allowed to attend school. I am afraid it is the story you have been waiting for. I am afraid I have been given the opportunity to speak only because I am saying what you want to hear, what you wish you could say, what you are saying now, through my body, behind the protection my body offers with its brown skin, black eyes, and black hair. It is the story you have been telling for centuries now, of how brown women need to be saved from brown men, or even from brown parents, brown mothers. My great-grandmother was not brown-skinned like me. She was light-skinned, but she was not white, so it is all the same. Whiteness is not a color or a race or an ethnicity but a construct of power, the power to speak, to tell stories, not only about oneself, but about other people.

  My grandmother had to protest to go back to school. She had to turn over the alms bowl, my mother said, to refuse what was freely given in exchange for what was withheld. My grandmother did not eat until her mother allowed her to return to school. Then, my grandmother walked to Hinthada High School by herself and enrolled in standard 9. She had only passed standard 7 before the war, but she skipped standard 8 and took the standard 9 and standard 10 exams in one year. How old was she? I asked my mother. Around twenty, my mother said. The age when a novice monastic can become fully ordained, the age when one comes of age.

  Once, a white man said to me, you are so privileged you might as well be white. We were in Italy, this man and I, for a conference entirely paid for by the university we both attended. In line for pastries at breakfast, the man—who, at the time, I thought of as only a boy, a classmate, and a friend—confided in me that this was his first time in Europe. He then asked me where I had been in Europe, and when I told him—the Netherlands, Spain, France, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Lithuania—he delivered his pronouncement, with real disdain, though masked as a joke, because, after all, we were friends.

  When my grandmother graduated from high school, she had to protest again in order to go on to university. Another hunger strike, another fight with her mother. She was twenty-four when she was finally allowed to go to Rangoon.

  At the end of my grandmother’s second year at the University of Rangoon, her aunt and uncle decided that it was time for her to be married, that she was educated enough for a woman. The man they had in mind for my grandmother worked under her uncle in the Income Tax Department. He was an income tax officer, nine years older than my grandmother. She saw him once at the Shwedagon Pagoda, and he saw her, and from a distance they each decided the other was suitable. They did not speak until their wedding day.

  I do not want to tell this story about my grandmother because I am afraid it is the only story I am allowed to tell. Brown woman locked up, hidden away, uneducated, and married off. The moral of the story is: look how much better off we are. Look at me, the granddaughter, free to pursue her Western education, free to marry the white man she loves. The first time I met my mother-in-law she asked, How are women treated in your culture? I am the woman who has emerged from my great-grandmother’s house to answer this question, to tell my grandmother’s story. After seven years and two generations, after crossing oceans and nations, I have emerged so I can be put on display, proudly, as a token of civilization and progress. Look at how much better off I am.

  My mother said her father used to boast that he respected her mother’s uncle so much he would have married anyone the man suggested. My grandmother hated my grandfather. She used to tell my mother all the ways she would torture him once he got old and sick and had to depend on her. All the ways she would seek her revenge. She was sure that he would be the first to die, since he was nine years older. It was only on her deathbed that she forgave him, forgave him with her eyes when she could no longer speak. My mother was not present when my grandmother died, but my aunt told her that their father had been very sweet, very tender and devoted, that he had never left their mother’s side. He had loved her, and my grandmother did not know it until the end.

  Years later, a friend and I are trading stories over lunch, and I tell him about the time I was told I might as well be white. I tell my f
riend that I feel ashamed of how I responded at the time. I had felt the need to defend myself, to explain that I had traveled to all these European countries only because I had won fellowships and scholarships, that I never went anywhere as a child, not even in California, because my parents could not afford that. I realize now, though, I tell my friend, that even if I had been wealthy, even if I had been to Europe on a family vacation, I would never be white. No matter what my privileges amounted to, they would never add up to that. A few months after this conversation, my friend sends me a message. I can’t stop thinking about what that white dude told you in Italy, he says. I go from laughing to being pissed.

  I rarely allow myself to be pissed, to be angry, for very long, because angry women are not listened to. Because angry women are emotional, and they need to calm down. Calm down, stop being paranoid, don’t have a chip on your shoulder, don’t victimize yourself. Be reasonable, be logical, be open, be kind, give the benefit of a doubt. You’re not a black man, being shot in the streets. What is the worst thing that has happened to you? What is the worst thing that has happened to your family? Speak your trauma. Tell us how hard it is to be you. But just don’t blame us. Don’t blame America. America saved you. Don’t blame white people. White people are saviors. Tell us your white-savior story. Tell us about the nice white people who helped you out. Who drove your mother around. Tell us about their good hearts, their good intentions. Don’t tell us they were condescending. Don’t tell us they exotified you, fetishized you. Don’t tell us they touched your skin without your permission and thought they were paying you a compliment, thought they were being nice. They were being nice; you better believe it. Be grateful for the rides. Be grateful no one spit at you, or yelled at you, or called you slurs. Be grateful this country has come so far. Be grateful it’s just curiosity, just friendliness now. Why can’t you be friendly back? With a name like that, what do you expect? Of course, people need to hear it a few times, need you to spell it out, need you to tell them what it means. Some words are just more difficult for English speakers to pronounce; it’s purely linguistic. Tell us how to pronounce your name in your language. Yes, your language, the one that belongs to you, the only one that is really yours. This language, English, of course, is ours.