When my mother and her brothers and her sister were very young, my mother said, my grandmother would sometimes ask them to listen to the bullfrogs. Can you hear them croaking? she would ask. The bullfrogs came out to sing before and after it rained, and it rained almost every day in Rangoon, except in the dry season. The bullfrogs croaked very softly, and my mother and her siblings would have to quiet down, put away their toys, and become very still in order to hear them. They would have to move to the window, which was above the bed, and hold their breath. Eventually, they would all fall asleep for their nap.
I don’t know if I ever heard the bullfrogs, my mother said. Or if they were only in my head. I don’t know if your grandmother ever heard them either.
Yangon
I spent almost exactly a year, the first year of my life, in Yangon. This does not make me feel like it is where I am from. I think one should remember the place where one is from. One should have at least a single memory. Though from the nativity story of the awakened one I know that, regardless of what I remember or forget, I will always be connected to the place where I was born. I know from that story and other stories of childbirth that women return to their childhood homes to give birth to their children. The place where one is born, though it may not be the place where one is from, will always be the place where one’s mother is from.
The awakened one’s mother, the queen, however, did not make it back to her childhood home. She gave birth to the awakened one in a grove halfway between the palace where she lived and her parents’ home where she was born. She held on to the branch of a sal tree, and as she was standing, the awakened one emerged from her right side, where a white elephant had touched her in a dream. The awakened one was thus born in an in-between place, neither his mother’s home, nor his father’s, but a grove of flowering trees, the flowers just blooming.
Thirty-six years after the birth and death of my brother, I asked my mother a question I had never asked her before. What was his name?
Not the name I had always known him by, the name my parents called him, a nickname, his home name, which I will not repeat here, outside of the home. Not the name meaning older brother, an endearment, which could even be flirtatious if used on a boy who was not actually one’s older brother or cousin. Not the name my brother must have earned only after his death, since he became a big brother only after he died. Not the name my parents used to tell us about him, the older brother who would always be younger than us.
I was not asking my mother for that name, a name made up for children. I wanted to know the name my parents had given him before he died. The name they had given him at birth, the one that he was meant to carry through a long and complex life.
I am always looking for beginnings. The first that was lost, the brother I never met, the country I cannot remember. I am always looking for the moment when I can enter the stream of myself. It is not the moment of my birth, but long before that. The moment of my parents’ union, their wedding held on a mythical bird floating in an artificial lake, their love that began with a borrowed book, with a handwritten letter. Or the moment of my previous death, in my great-grandfather’s body, hiding in the jungle from the war. Or in a stranger’s body, shot in the streets by the first soldier who pulled the first trigger.
There is often a price to pay for in-betweenness, for finding beauty and resting there, as the awakened one’s mother did, and seven days after his birth, she died. With her death, the awakened one was cut off from the memory of where he was born. In Bamar, the word for womb has the word for home inside of it. The womb is our first home, and many times as a child, I used to rub my head against my mother’s belly and ask if I could go back inside. She would laugh and say I got too big, I wouldn’t fit anymore, and I would laugh, too, but it made me sad. There was no way home, no way back. I was blocked by my own body. Sometimes I wish I had memories of Yangon so that I could claim it. So I could say, Yes, that is where I am from. My sisters have memories, of my grandmother’s cooking, of playing with my grandfather, of attending school. My eldest sister remembered walking to school through the woods, having to pass by the caged pigs, who scared my sister, and once she got lost and ended up spending the evening at a neighbor’s house, unable to find her way home. I have heard their stories so many times it is like their memories are mine, but I know that they are not. I have no memories.
My mother said my brother’s name. She said it soft and quiet, but without hesitation, as if she had been waiting all these years to say it. It was only after his name left her lips, left her body, that my mother seemed to realize that she had spoken it aloud. The spell was broken. I had finally asked the right question.
I had not known that there would be an answer, that my brother would have a different name from the one I had always known him by, that he would have a real name, a name that he was meant to use when he grew into a man. It was as if my mother only remembered this name when I asked her, as if she were surprised by the knowledge she still kept inside her. The name she had given her firstborn child. There was a sadness in her voice when she said it, but also hope. What does it mean? I asked, though I always resented it when strangers asked me the same question about my name. I was no stranger; I had a right to this knowledge.
In the beginning, then, there was my parents’ wedding on Karaweik, a replica of a royal barge, a palatial hall shouldered by two giant birds gliding on the water. The mythical birds golden with red tails, the guardians of my mother’s nightmares. My mother had not wanted an extravagant wedding; it was her father who reserved Karaweik for the reception. Only the best for his daughter, no matter the cost. The cost, my mother believed, was my brother’s life.
My mother believed birds were a bad omen. She had dreams of the barge burning on the lake. A royal barge built long after the royalty was killed or exiled. Birds are terrifying because they upset the hierarchy of the universe. Lowly animals flying close to the heavens, reptilian, winged, celestial and bestial. As a child, I imagined the thirty-one planes of existence suspended above and below one another, the human realm below the celestial realms, and above the realms of animals, hungry ghosts, demons, and hells. Birds flying overhead always made me feel like I was at the bottom of the ocean.
The word for home in Bamar is the same as the word for house. Aain, a dwelling, a shelter, a residence. A hollow word, whereas home is full. Aain, like the sound of a gong, or a singing bowl struck on its side. A sound that opens, that begins. Home sounds like a mouthful, like the feeling of fullness, of bloating, homeland, expanding to cover the earth. One can fall ill from the idea of home, the idea of its loss, homesickness is felt in the body, though it arises from language. There is no abstract concept of home for the Bamar. There is a people, a land, a country, all words that evoke patriotic feelings, but home, aain, is very private, very intimate, and every house is a home, not only the house that belongs to me. Even haunted aains are someone’s homes, the ghosts’, perhaps, for the dead too need places to live. In English, there is no such thing as a haunted home. In this language, all ghosts are unhomed, and people without a home are ghosts.
In the beginning, there was a borrowed book, with a love letter tucked inside. So, as a child I borrowed book after book, from the school library, the public library, and the shelves of generous teachers, in search of that first book and that first letter. I never found the letter, and in its absence, I would fold myself into the books, bury myself in them. A figure of speech, to bury oneself in books, but an accurate one, for reading for me was a bit like dying. When I read, I left my body for a little while and as a ghost haunted others’ lives and watched over them, even inhabited or possessed them. But maybe it was the books that possessed me, that filled my body, so that for years afterward, I was caught in this cycle of acquiring and purging my ghosts, of reading and writing, reading and writing. Dying slowly, dying bit by bit, not until I was dead, but only until I found it: the moment of my beginning, which would not be mine alone, not mine at all, which, I belie
ved, would necessarily exclude me. A moment that took place long before my birth, and long after my death. And though I never found the love letter, I did find bookmarks, scraps of paper, receipts, grocery lists, ticket stubs, and, once, even a polaroid of a girl in the back seat of a car, staring straight into the camera.
My brother’s name, my mother said, means light.
Not a burning, dazzling light, not brightness, but soft and pleasant. Do you understand? my mother asked. I can’t explain.
To me, his name sounded like the word for enter, for inside, win or winn, my mother’s name and my mother’s father’s. A light shining from the inside. A window lit up at twilight, in winter, the snow and the sky the same white-blue and the window a small glimpse of yellow, glowing softly in the quiet cold. Clear and wide vacant space, another translation I found of my brother’s name. The space between the stars, or between the earth and the moon. The light that travels that wide expanse.
Minbu
My grandmother’s golden childhood came to an end with the war. The night before her city, Minbu, was bombed, the larger city across the river, Magway, was bombed first. The people in Minbu had never seen explosions before and mistook them for fireworks. The city did not have many electric lights yet, and it was beautiful to see the night sky lit up. The river was very wide, the Irrawaddy, the lifeblood of the country, and the two cities were far enough apart, with an island between them, that the explosions were muted, and the sounds of people crying out in fear and pain did not carry across the water. In Minbu, people gathered at the riverbank and clapped.
Years later, after the war, my grandfather would sail up the same river, the Irrawaddy, which connected Gayan and Minbu, and countless other villages and towns and cities, to court my grandmother.
River is a noun derived from a verb, that which rives, which splits, rents, or severs, which tears asunder. River, splitter, renter, severer, tearer or terror. To be a river is to carve up the earth, to tear it apart, violently, with water, which has no hands. Even the sound of the word pricks the tongue. The v in the middle, which splits the word itself in two, ri and er, beginning and ending with an r, almost a palindrome. I repeat the word again and again, tasting the sharp point of the v, the suffix that follows parting my lips.
The Bamar word for river is myit. Or, the English word for myit is river. Myit, the word I learned first, meaning root or river, rhyming with pyit, the word for thick, and only one letter off from my name, in both Bamar and English. Myit, meaning deep and myint, meaning high. Bamar speakers must have known that opposites are not vastly different, but often almost the same. Like a shadow, or a reflection.
The morning after Magway was bombed, planes dropped flyers over Minbu. They were going to be bombed that night. The story my father told was not of my grandmother, who made it safely to the beach, which was the designated evacuation site, but of her relative, an uncle, who had forgotten something back at his house. He told his wife he would catch up with her at the beach, but he never showed. When the bombings ended and they returned to the city the next day, they found the uncle’s body blown apart at the threshold of his house.
My grandmother’s mother died during the war, when the family was hiding in the countryside. I asked my father what she died of, and he said, she was a very fragile sort of person. It was said she died because she could not endure the fright and shock of the war. But it’s hard to say, my father said, in those days, during the war, they couldn’t take her to see a good doctor.
My other grandmother, my mother’s mother, had also lost a parent during the war, when she was about the same age. For a long time, I thought it was a strange coincidence that both my grandmothers would have suffered the same fate. Both great-grandparents were in their early forties when they passed away, and both grandmothers were teenagers. It was only later that I realized it was not a coincidence at all, but simply a common fate for many families.
The British invaded through the rivers, through the myit, which they renamed river. The roots of the country became that which tore the country apart, that which split, rent, and severed the land. The British sailed up the Irrawaddy with their Trojan horse of a fleet, with their decoy prince, and the people lined up along the banks to watch it pass. In Bamar, the words for invasion, conquest, and occupation are everyday words, the same words I used as a child while playing. To invade is to butt in, to conquer is to boss, and to occupy is to hog. I do not know if the Bamar words were meant to soften the shame of being colonized, of falling for a mean trick, or if it is the English words, our euphemisms, that allow English-speaking children to grow up and colonize others without shame.
If the English word for river had not been river, but had been something else, root, for example, or depth, I think the British would have sailed up the Irrawaddy all the same. Roots too can be parasitic. There are plants that extract nutrients and water, not from the earth, but from the bodies of other plants. There is a name for roots that do this: haustoria. There is a name for every kind of violence.
I never asked my grandmother about how the war affected her, except once when she was already losing her memory. We were seated at the dining table at my aunt’s house. My father, me, and my two aunts who lived with my grandmother. My grandmother acted as if she did not hear my question. Maybe she did not, or maybe she did not want to answer. My father and my aunts filled her silence with their own stories.
At the end of her life, my grandmother no longer recognized me. The last time she spoke to me, she said, Who is this child? Who is this pretty child? I did not know how to answer her. It’s me, I kept saying. Don’t you remember? It’s me. But my grandmother did not remember. She could not even remember her own children.
My grandmother had seven children who lived. Three boys and four girls. I remember hearing once, as a child, that she had had as many as a dozen pregnancies. She had spent over two decades bearing and birthing children. My youngest aunt, who was a decade younger than my father, said it was because my grandfather loved children so much he always wanted to have more. I wonder at what point a woman begins to lose herself to her children. At what point her body is created from them, by them, rather than the other way around.
After the war, after my grandmother’s mother passed away, my grandmother’s father married his mistress. I cannot imagine that either my grandmother or the mistress could have been too happy with this arrangement. My grandmother, my father said, married my grandfather young so she could escape her new stepmother.
My grandmother and grandfather were half first cousins. My grandfather’s father and my grandmother’s mother were half brother and sister. The two that died young. The two from the family that lost all their land. My great-grandmother’s older sister, who had played matchmaker for my grandmother’s parents, was the same woman whose husband gambled away their family’s land. Because my grandmother grew up in Minbu, in the north, and my grandfather grew up in Gayan, which was in the south, almost by the ocean, they did not see much of each other growing up. The one time my grandmother visited Minbu as a child, my grandfather, who was older by a few years, made her cry when he stole her snack and ate it. He received a good spanking for that, my father said, laughing.
Right before the war broke out, during the Japanese occupation, the grandfather that my grandparents shared was dying, and my grandmother and her mother returned to Gayan to be with him during his final days. My grandfather had also returned to Gayan from Rangoon, though he had not yet joined the independence army, not yet left for the mountains. My great-great-grandfather took a few months to die, and during that time, my grandmother and grandfather got to know each other, for the first time, as teenagers. I do not know what was exchanged between them during this liminal time, this time of suspended death and imminent war, but a few years later, after the war, my grandfather sailed up and down the Irrawaddy to court my grandmother, and soon, they were married.
When I was young, I used to think about all the babies my grandparents had who did not
live. I asked my mother once why they did not live, and she said she did not know. My mother said, in those days, right after the war, many babies died.
I have an image in my head of a baby drowning in a shallow tub. Not the built-in, porcelain-enameled kind found in American homes, but a large steel basin, used for collecting rainwater. The baby is one of my grandmother’s babies who died. It is dying now. I see its little head slide under the water. I see it but no one else does. I do not know if my mother said one of the babies drowned, or if I imagined it all on my own. I see the baby drowning, dying, and I think I understand my grandmother better, her timidity, her distrust, the way she held her lips or her shoulders, tightly, like she had something to protect.
Names for Light Page 9