Names for Light

by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint

  Providence

  In the beginning, there was a train to Boston. This was the first day she felt grown up, riding a train on her own, and being the first day, the feeling was still wonderful. She looked out the window, the white beech trees floated by, trees unlike any she had ever seen, cold unlike any she had ever felt, and the song she was listening to, the moment existing inside of that song, unending as well, and she thought she would always be eighteen and it would always be autumn, before the first real winter of her life.

  On the ride back from Boston, the woman driving them, who would kill herself a few years later, said the glowing night sky was just a remnant of summer. At this latitude, the woman said, the autumn sky always had a touch of orange. She sat in the back seat in the darkness. It was September, the first of the ember months. Walking across the main green later that night, or another night that week, that year, or the next, she looked up at the sky, framed by the trees and the slanting roof of Sayles Hall. There were no stars, no moon, only a thick layer of clouds, opaque and absolute.

  The first time it snowed that winter, the first real winter of her life, she nearly slept through it. She had stayed up the night before to write a paper. Her phone rang and she turned it off. There were knocks on the door and she ignored them. She was a heavy sleeper. Finally, her roommate returned to wake her up. The roommate opened the curtains she had shut and said, look. She looked up from the bed. It was snowing. She went to the window. The red brick sidewalks were speckled with white, Charlesfield Street gleaming black with wet. She looked at the telephone lines and tried to catch the moment when the snow crossed them. She could not see it. She went back to sleep that day, but it became a habit of hers to sit by a window, usually late at night, and watch the snow fall. Snow, which her ancestors had never seen, she thought, though it soon occurred to her that probably her earliest ancestors had seen it, the ones who descended from the north, who crossed the Himalayas and endured the cold and ice, for the promise of a fertile valley.

  She, too, had traveled far, across an entire continent, of which she had seen very little, for the promise of the new, the unknown. A place that no one she knew had ever been to, a place that would be hers alone. The name of the city itself sounded like a promise—Providence, in the foreknowing and care of God. On a run with a friend one evening, she remembered looking into the lighted windows of professors’ homes and feeling nostalgic for a childhood she had never had, which she glimpsed inside of these homes. Family dinners around a large mahogany table, a fireplace, bookshelves lined with history. She was always looking into or out of windows, separated from the world by her own reflection.

  Sometimes, it even felt as if she were looking into her own window, her own life, which she could not enter. She loved, and her love was unrequited. Their hands knocked together when they walked but his never grasped hers. She was always standing at a threshold, to his room or his building, the heavy door held open by his body, though she too could feel its weight. One night under the portico, he had said, The highway sounds like the ocean, and she had held her breath to listen. She could not hear what he heard, but the shadow of trees danced against the brick wall of his building and they made her feel underwater.

  In the bathroom of an organization where she worked one summer, an organization that had been founded by queer youth a decade ago to oppose deportations and racial profiling in the city, there was a quotation taped to the bathroom wall that read, Rather than falling in love we must learn to stand in love. The quotation was attributed to a Buddhist monk she had never heard of. She had always disliked the phrase to fall in love. She did not even know if an equivalent phrase existed in Bamar. When her parents told her stories about their courtship, they used the word kyait, like, when talking about the past, and chit, love, when talking about the present. They never explained the moment when words and feelings changed.

  The summer she worked at the political action queer alliance, she and her unrequited love went on two long walks to the Steel Yard. She went to buy a bicycle and he accompanied her so he could interview the Marxists and anarchists who worked there. He was writing a thesis on anarchist movements in the United States, the only development studies major to focus his research on a so-called developed country. The Steel Yard was two miles from campus and he walked his bike the entire way so they could ride back together. A boy walking his bike so he could walk with her. The most romantic gesture she could think of at the time. In her memory, the two visits to the Steel Yard blend together. She tried to pay a Marxist and he threw up his hands. The mechanic working on the bike she chose called her a woman, which no one had ever done before. Both times, her bike was not ready, and they had to walk all the way back to campus. She cannot remember the third trip she must have made to the Steel Yard, when she was finally able to pick up her bike. Did she ride back alone, under the highway overpass and across the river, helmetless on streets with no bike lanes? She cannot imagine it, but she cannot imagine walking her bike, either, the entire two miles back to campus. She did not possess his patience.

  Her unrequited love’s mother was born in the same part of the world where she was born and had moved to this country at the same age she had. When they discovered this fact, her unrequited love had lit up, and she felt or imagined some of his tenderness for his mother transfer onto her. First generation, second generation. She was his past and he was her future, though what she wanted was to be his future. What she wanted was to reenact her parents’ courtship. Meet at eighteen, borrow books, exchange love letters. She was eighteen when she met her unrequited love, and so was he. Their birthdays only one day apart, though given the difference in time zones, it was likely they had been born at the same time. They did not borrow books, but on their shared birthday, they would gift them to each other. Or maybe this happened only one year. There is only one book on her shelf, a slender volume with a blank white sky on the cover, that she is certain she received from him. The summer she traveled to the country where she was born and he traveled to the country where his mother was born, they had exchanged emails, despite not having regular access to the internet in the so-called developing world. She wrote to him from internet cafes, or the homes of well-to-do distant relatives. The emails were not the love letters her parents had written during their courtship, though she had thought they would one day be precious.

  Years later, when she is teaching creative writing to undergraduates, she is amused by how many of her students’ stories are about first love, and how many of them are touchingly bad. Her unrequited love’s lasting gift to her, she thinks, is that he did not allow her to write a love story. Their story was not a story about love. It was not a story at all. There was nothing that was theirs, only what was hers. The city’s twilight, the streets washed in lamplight, in rain or ice. Storm drains and the sound of water falling darkly into the sewers. She loved not him exactly, but the absence of him, the distance of him. Walking back to her dorm alone after saying good-night or watching him onstage from the back of the crowd. This did not mean it had nothing to do with him, because it did. It could not have happened with anybody else. It: the coming into herself, the beginning of herself. Out of all the books she read in college, used or library copies, there was only one in which she recognized herself. A translation from the modern Greek, a novel about a young woman who joins the underground resistance and falls in love. Or maybe it was the other way around, the young woman joins the resistance because she falls in love. There was a line she memorized from the book. A question. I used to think of him in the prison yard, with the bitter taste in his mouth … his loneliness at night … But when it came down to it, who thought in that way of me? The first real winter of her life was followed by the first real spring. The falling snow turned to rain before it landed, the ice melted in the river, and the magnolias bloomed. Spring became her favorite season in the city. At the earliest sign of warmth, she and everyone around her would bare their bodies—arms and legs, shoulders, throat, and feet. Goosefle
sh covered their exposed skin but none of them felt cold. It was springtime, when the whole world was budding, when she biked in the rain with a plastic bag over the seat, biked in a dress, not caring who saw her underwear. She was safe. She had arrived. She no longer had to explain herself: presence, body, or name. When she began writing again, no one told her to write about her country and her people, no one told her to use her gift, her talent. Talent was a public-school word, she learned, it only had meaning in places where it was rare, remarkable. At her private university, where she was accumulating tens of thousands of dollars in loans, it was presumed, but also questioned, deemed “problematic” and irrelevant, like all her other lower-middle-class beliefs and values. Integrity, humility, fairness. She wanted an education so she could help others, so she could make a difference, give back, all the clichés. But the more she learned about the world, the less she wanted to be any part of it. All she could do was watch the snow fall, the rain, listen to a storm drain, a distant highway, notice the way the sky changed colors. She wrote all of this down, which preserved it somehow, a small part of it, made glossy and hard under the tip of her pen.

  Sittwe

  Sittwe, in both Bamar and Rakhine, means where war meets, or where one meets war. Where two parties meet in war. Twe, to meet or to encounter, but also to see, to sight, to glimpse. To see war coming, by land and by sea, and to meet it. Sittwe, where war was sighted and where war was fought. A city born from the battlefield, a memorial for the dead. The Rakhine believed that all who fought in the war against the Bamar died. A war without survivors, a city that was never a city until it was lost.

  After the military coup in September, the second in my parents’ young life, universities and colleges slowly reopened, and my parents were asked to return to Sittwe. My father turned thirty-one just a day after martial law was established. My mother’s birthday was a few months later, at the end of November. By then, my father had flown back to Sittwe, and my mother had moved back in with her parents in Bauk Htaw. In the second trimester of being pregnant with me, my mother had begun to bleed. Her condition was called a threatened abortion. The doctors prescribed bed rest, so my mother submitted a medical leave to Sittwe Degree College and stayed behind in Rangoon with my sisters.

  In the months my mother spent lying in bed pregnant with me, the new military government, which called itself SLORC, the State Law and Order Restoration Council, washed all the temples and pagodas in the city. To cleanse the country. To prepare for a new beginning. It was to cover the evidence of their slaughter. The bloodstains on the temple walls and floors.

  My parents had one year left of their term in Sittwe, but after what happened in the aftermath of 8888, what they had lived through, they were not planning to do another three-year term, in Sittwe or anywhere else in the country. My mother’s dream to go abroad became my family’s dream, or, rather, their urgent plan.

  My father began applying for teaching jobs abroad, and as soon as her period of prescribed bed rest was over, my mother spent all her time in Rangoon lobbying for my father and her to be transferred back to the capital. She figured they would find more opportunities to go abroad in Rangoon than in Sittwe. When her medical leave expired, my mother submitted maternity leave, and managed to stay in Rangoon for the duration of her pregnancy. She returned to Sittwe only after I was born, for her duty report at Sittwe Degree College, a bureaucratic formality that needed to be observed in order for her to be transferred elsewhere.

  My mother left me in Rangoon for two weeks with her parents when she returned to Sittwe for her duty report. She said soon after I was born, her uncle invited an astrologer to divine my fate, and this person had told my mother that I should never be brought to Sittwe. I was a lucky child, my mother said the astrologer said, but I would lose all my powers if I was taken to Sittwe. If I stayed in Rangoon, however, I would be able to bring both my parents back to me.

  My mother believed the astrologer. She believed that I had magical powers, that I was a child gifted by weikzas, a child that had been promised to her in a dream. So I was left behind in Rangoon, for my own protection. When my mother returned from Sittwe, weeks or perhaps only days later, there was a letter waiting for her. A letter addressed to my father from a university in Bangkok. The thing she had been waiting for all these years.

  In June of 1990, a week after my birth, SLORC changed all the names in the country. Burma became Myanmar and Rangoon became Yangon. In 1962, when the first military junta took power, they too had changed the country’s name, from the post-independence Union of Burma to the Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma. In 1990, the second military junta changed the name again to Union of Myanmar. They claimed that Myanmar was a more inclusive term than Burma, which translated to land of the Bamar, but Bamar and Myanmar were synonyms, so Myanmar also translated to land of the Bamar. There is no word, no name that unites all the people who lived or live in the region now encompassed by the boundaries of the present-day country. Like a human body, the region’s boundaries had always been ambiguous, always changing. The Bamar themselves recognized that we were not indigenous to the land, that once, we too had come from elsewhere, from abroad, from outside. The word for ethnic minority in Bamar is taing yin thar, which means native, aboriginal, or indigenous. Minority is implied. To be ethnic was to be marked and marginalized, but also to be more of a native in Burma, the land of the Bamar, than the Bamar themselves.

  My father received an offer to teach at a university in Thailand. Normally, schools did not hire instructors without an in-person interview, but the person who wrote my father’s offer letter was going on sabbatical and wanted to expedite the hiring process, so he bent some rules. My mother said this was fortuitous because my father would have never left the country without a job offer. You know how he is, my mother said, and I knew because I was the same: cautious, anxious, resistant to change.

  Even with the job offer, my parents could not leave the country for several more months. In August of 1989, they were transferred back to Rangoon, now spelled Yangon, and asked to work through the end of the year. It was only in January of 1990 that my father finally left for Bangkok. I do not know if he knew then that he would never come back. I think he must have known. My father always liked to say, I never look back, in a silly voice, as if he were a tough guy in an action movie, but I think he meant it. In July of 1990, my mother followed him with three children in tow. My eldest sister was six, my middle sister was about to turn four, and I had just turned one.

  When my parents speak about Burma, they still use the old, pre- 1990 names. The British were remarkably—if not maliciously—bad at transliterating Bamar words, but my parents still said Rangoon instead of Yangon, Prome instead of Pyay, and Tenasserim instead of Tanintharyi. When my parents speak in Bamar, they pronounce these names properly, but whenever they switch to English, they return to these British misnomers out of habit. When I was older, I learned that many Western countries, including the United States, used the country’s old name, Burma, as a way to not acknowledge the legitimacy of the military junta. I wondered if it was also possible to not acknowledge the legitimacy of British colonialism. I had always resented having to identify with Burma, Burman, and Burmese, when all of these were anglicized names. Bamar was what I identified with, what united my family with other immigrants and refugees, regardless of race, or ethnicity, or religion. It was only when I returned to Yangon to teach English one summer in college that I heard the word Myanmar used as an identity marker. We are Myanmar, my teenage students said. It was one of the few phrases they had been taught in English. Myanmar, a nationality. Something from which those of us who grew up in the diaspora had been excluded.

  In my first-grade Burmese textbook, there was a map of Myanmar and its seven states and seven regions. Each of the states was marked by a cute cartoon couple dressed in traditional ethnic garb. Above Kachin State was a Kachin couple, the girl bedecked in a cylindrical headdress and the boy in a head wrap; above Kayah State was
a Kayah couple, the girl wearing a one-shoulder dress and the boy wearing trousers; above Kayin State was a Kayin couple, the boy and girl both wearing the boxy tunics I recognized because my aunt Stella was Kayin and had once gifted us these tunics for Christmas. Above Chin State was a Chin couple, above Mon State a Mon couple, above Shan State a Shan couple, and above Rakhine State a Rakhine couple.

  There was no Bamar State. Instead, the Bamar couple was positioned above the seven divisions, Irrawaddy, Bago, Magway, Mandalay, Sagaing, Tanintharyi, and Yangon. The Bamar girl was wearing a htamein with a blouse and shawl, her hair in a half bun, and the boy was in a paso and a collarless jacket. All the couples on the map looked identical except for their dress.

  On one of the twenty-two trips my mother took between Sittwe and Rangoon, her plane got caught in a storm. My mother was traveling alone with my middle sister, who she remembered was bouncing in her lap, before falling asleep on her, like a little monkey. Just as the plane was about to begin its descent to Sittwe, there was an announcement from the cockpit. Due to the bad weather, the pilots could not find the island. To make matters worse, the plane did not have enough fuel to fly back to Rangoon, so the crew had no choice but to fly in circles and hope that they caught a glimpse of land. When the announcement ended, the lights in the cabin began to flicker. It was like a movie, my mother said. The plane was jumping up and down, everyone was panicking, crying out, my knees were shaking. My mother thought she was going to die. After some time, a second announcement came on. The pilot said they were almost out of fuel, so they had no choice but to guess where Sittwe was and land the plane blindly. The storm had reduced visibility to almost zero. My heart and my intestines were flipped upside down, my mother said, my whole chest was frozen with fear. As the plane descended, my mother said all the prayers she knew, dredged up some courage, and prepared to die well. Then, finally, she heard the wheels touch down on asphalt, on solid land. Outside, the storm was still raging, the heavy rain and wind pounding against her small plastic window, but she knew she had made it, she was still alive.