by Alex Wagner
Anyway, for nearly all of her ninety-eight years, my grandmother had been keenly, fully alive. She was selfish (she felt no embarrassment in being waited on by my mother, or me, or really anyone who was interested in the job), but she was also intermittently benevolent, not necessarily when expected, but as dictated by whim.
As it concerned our relationship, her benevolence mostly took the form of food (breakfasts of Burmese yellow peas and rice) and jewelry (gold bangles)—though it wasn’t merely the act of proffering some edible or material good that was the gift, per se; it was her communication of confidence in who I was, who I had grown up to be. She made clear that if she hadn’t approved of my life, I would not have gotten her emerald rings. I knew this because of the gifts not given to other children with questionable career paths or controversial political beliefs. No emeralds for them! Instead, they got smiles—and expedited conversation.
While she was undeniably picky, she didn’t worry about unpleasant things—instead, each day, she rolled her Buddhist prayer beads through her gnarled, tiny hands, drank what we roughly estimate to be four glasses of wine, and slept soundly for eleven hours a night. She watched the news religiously, and she couldn’t stand Republicans.
And she was an excellent source. In the twilight hours, when most nonagenarians had a hard time recognizing the faces of those immediately in front of them, she could still answer questions about events that had taken place decades ago. Her recollection of the faintest details—the name of a principal who had shown her father kindness at the turn of the twentieth century, or the piping hot chicken noodle soup she tasted on her very first trip to America in 1951—was so effortless that we took it for granted. Born in 1917, she had seen most of the twentieth century, and indeed her biography was a chronicle of its spectacles and miseries, its cruelties and opportunities.
When we discussed our grandmother’s impossible life, my cousin Geoff recalled Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children—not because Rushdie was Indian and we were half-Burmese and our parents had lived under the same British Raj—but because Rushdie’s narrator seemed to have fully understood the impossibility of summarizing her particular type of twentieth-century life, one that had survived colonial rule and dictatorial regimes to emerge, finally, into the beginnings of a democracy. “To understand just one life,” wrote Rushdie, “you have to swallow the world.”
Mya Mya Gyi was born in Pakokku on February 16 in the year that was colloquially known as the Year of the Great Fire, which by all outside accounts was 1917. In that year, Europe was still charting the course for much of the globe even as it was being shattered by a war that would reshape that very same world. From Camp Dodge in Johnston, Iowa, my paternal grandfather was shipping off to Europe to fight in World War I as part of the 163rd Depot Brigade. My maternal grandmother, meanwhile, was born under the British flag. Burma—along with India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—was part of the British Raj and referred to in those days as “India.” And yet to suggest to my grandmother that they were Indians—or Brits—would seem laughably absurd. We were Burmese, of course! she’d protest. But the soil beneath their feet was not their own. The land belonged to someone else.
My grandmother was ethnically Bamah, and there’s a reason the country was (kind of) named after her people: They were at the top of the socioeconomic ladder. With more than 135 ethnic groups within its borders, Burma from the beginning was a diverse and cosmopolitan culture, and that wasn’t even counting the Baghdadi Jews who set up Rangoon’s shops or the Italian traders who came to King Mindon’s court in the mid-1800s. There were the Chin, Kachin, Shan, and Karen people—each with their own dress and cuisine, and often their own armies.
If anything united Burma’s disparate tribes, it was the ruling military junta that took power in the early 1960s and engaged in a brutal campaign of oppression against the country’s ethnic minorities—a battle so bloody and violent that it would keep Burma at war with itself for nearly half a century. But beyond this common enemy, you’d be hard pressed to find common cause among the various ethnic groups.
The main difference between our family in Burma and other families from other tribes was class. My grandmother was the daughter of a Burmese civil servant named U Myint Kaung—a man who bought three pairs of Saxon shoes with his first sizable paycheck and introduced the family to Christmas stockings and whiskey cake from Rowe & Co., the luxury department store in downtown Rangoon.
When my grandmother informed me of this, it went a long way in explaining why she directed her ire toward the Indians, not the British: It was the British who proffered luxury items (that her family could afford) and indoctrinated young Mya Mya to a glittering world beyond the Burmese shores—while the Indians were simply continental neighbors who had triumphed in the war of colonial favoritism, an ignoble victory if ever there was one. U Myint Kaung had decidedly European tastes, but he wore those English Saxon shoes with a traditional Burmese aingyi and gaungbaung, sartorial declarations of independence.
He was raised in the Wesleyan Methodist mission schools and spoke fluent English, but remained a devout Buddhist, one who had no issue giving up his worldly possessions near the end of life to become a monk (much to his wife’s chagrin). Nevertheless, he spoiled his youngest daughter, my grandmother, awfully.
She was the youngest of the family, the last daughter in a house of six children. Daw Tin Pu and Daw Tin U were the eldest daughters, and when it came time for a third, their mother very badly wanted a son. She was instead gifted another daughter, whom she unapologetically and somewhat unbelievably named Kyi Kyi Thein, which means (roughly) “No more”—as in “Please: No more girls.” The heavens either didn’t hear the request or opted to teach our family a lesson, and another daughter, Kyi Kyi Nyein, was born. Apparently, her name was an even firmer exhortation to whoever might be listening: According to my grandmother, her name was best translated as “Seriously, stop—no more after this.”
Maybe the distress calls had their intended effect, or maybe it was just time, but, finally, a son was born, and he was named Aung Myo. Aung meant “successful,” and Myo was for the town in which he was born: Maymyo, a picturesque little hill town in northern Shan State. After all the desperate and demeaning nomenclature, “Successful one from Maymyo” seemed downright platitudinous, but I suppose it was better than “Thank God, finally one with a penis!”
By the time my grandmother was born, the gender war seemed to have come to a close, and she was named Mya, the Emerald, a stone of “calm contentment.” She was lucky not just in her name, but in everything else, too.
“I was introduced at a young age to Cadbury chocolate,” she recounted, in the way that other children had been introduced to arithmetic or Aesop’s Fables, as if the elementary indoctrination into chocolate would somehow prepare her well for life and its unknown twists and turns. “And we had bananas at tea time,” she boasted, suggesting these tropical fruits were somehow a sign of superiority. At the age of sixteen, my grandmother begged her father for a car, a relatively newfangled machine in 1931. “Whenever I spelled the letters D-o-d-g-e,” she added, “my father had to spell Y-e-s. I was quite spoiled! Quite spoiled. I was the youngest. The first one I saw in a catalogue, my father directed [my mother] to go buy it in the capital city. With cash”—as if credit would cast doubt on the family solvency.
If doling out Cadbury and bananas and motorcars at a young age did anything, it imparted upon Mya Mya a sense of entitlement and of high-class taste. This became more than a hallmark; it evolved into some sort of secret badge that my grandmother wore—always—to distinguish herself from everyone else. In fact it did, in some ways, prepare her for the future. When she fled Burma nearly forty years later with nothing, and had to start over in the West, knowing the taste of milk chocolate and the thrum of an American motor was like currency. She could return to these tastes, these experiences, these objects, as if they were proof that yes, her life
had been extraordinary and uncommon. They were her security when she had no money, a cultural savings that would never be drawn down, come what might.
And indeed, even for me, these objects and acquisitions were reassuring proof that we were somebody. My grandmother’s charmed life in Burma—as she recounted it to me—was evidence that the blessings we would accrue later on, here in America, were not a function of circumstance or otherwise arbitrary largesse, but the continuation of a blessed existence that we had somehow earned, one that had followed my family from the life they left behind on the humid deltas of Rangoon…all the way to the Atlantic coast of the United States. I believed, with her stories as my proof, that the inevitable accrual of good things was in a way my inheritance—and that nothing could ever take that away.
Mya Mya’s mother, Daw Thet Kywe, was described to me as “not a giggling type of Burmese woman.” You could probably divine that fact based on her hardcore naming preferences for girl children, but irrespective of that, the decidedly un-giggly type of Burmese women in my family saw giggliness as an indicator of vapid personalities and/or moral turpitude. Our un-giggling matriarch was adventurous and ambitious, captivated by metropolitan life. It was she who requested that the British transfer her husband, a man of “country” tendencies, from dusty Pakokku in Upper Burma to the leafy delta city of Rangoon, where she traveled several times a year on shopping trips to buy diamonds (love of diamonds was apparently a genetic trait). Their first city residence in the capital was a luxury two-bedroom apartment on Fifty-second Street, one with running water and what was known then as an English toilet.
While her three eldest sisters were educated in English missionary schools only until the fourth standard, my grandmother Mya Mya and her sister Nyein went unusually far in their schooling, given the fact that in Burmese society (as in the United States in the 1920s and ’30s) female students did not tend to advance into higher education, let alone graduate school. My grandmother began college at the age of sixteen, when she entered Rangoon University. Nyein graduated second in her class at Rangoon Law School and forevermore would be quoted in family lore as saying that her ambition in life was to be “the first Portia of Burma” after Shakespeare’s cross-dressing lawyer in The Merchant of Venice. Such were the highbrow feminist reference points in our family, which, despite the strangely misogynistic names of my great-aunts, offered no further indication that women were to be treated as any less than full, voting members of the household…if not outright dictators.
“My sisters smoked—and they liked English food,” my grandmother told me. “They rolled their own cheroots when our father was away on business, and they kept them in big lacquer boxes to hide from him.” He may not have liked his daughters sucking on the small green cigarillos made with uncured tobacco—but in Burmese society, women were often the primary tobacconists, and they remain so today.*1 “My oldest sister in Mandalay smoked cigarettes. She read the newspaper every day, cover to cover. And she could talk about anything.”
According to my grandmother, Nyein’s reference points were so specific and timely that when she disliked a particular shirt Mya Mya was wearing, she one day announced—with disgust—“You look just like the wife of Patrice Lumumba!”*2
My grandmother and her sisters quarreled with one another in the catty, upper-crusty fashion of characters in a Brontë novel. Instead of empire-waist dresses, there were longyis. In place of tea and scones, it was bananas and biscuits. These genteel, prosperous scenes, as described in my grandmother’s oral histories, gave the impression that life in those days was charmed and charming, and maybe just a little bit shallow. My mother also recounted impossibly romantic stories about her own adolescence in Burma: games of lawn tennis and croquet, swishy embassy parties under twinkling lights, the fragrance of frangipani blossoms wafting in the air as she walked to school. My own walk to school was punctuated with the smell of car exhaust and the cattish breath of the crossing guard who stood at the intersection of Davenport Street and Reno Road. My mother, meanwhile, could still smell the soil after the monsoons, remembering vividly how she would use a giant palm leaf as an umbrella when the rains arrived.
* * *
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My grandmother eventually left home and settled down. Never one to be plagued by self-doubt, she announced to me that she was “quite popular,” and by that she meant “I had a whole lot of boyfriends.”*3 She added, by way of explanation, “They used to visit my house. As friends!” Her older sister was no fan of these platonic visits, and scolded my grandmother to behave. “You should be prim and proper like a Buddhist girl brought up by a decent family. Don’t spoil our name. You should behave yourself. Don’t flirt with all these people!”
One lowly student (a history major, Mya Mya specified) tried his hand at courtship, about which her sister was “quite nosy and observant,” pointing out “there was only half a thumb on one of his hands.” Said lover’s chances from then on, naturally, were doomed. Ultimately, she married a man named U Thant Gyi, a family friend and (scandalously) a widower ten years her senior, patriarch to his own clan of four children. Unfailingly gentle and good-natured, he was as much a father as a husband to his young bride—friends joked that when they wed, U Thant Gyi had five children: his four, plus my grandmother, Mya Mya.
U Thant Gyi was a relatively powerful government bureaucrat in the Burmese education department, happy to indulge his wife’s whims, never fighting and preferring to run away from home for days at a time rather than deal with her nagging—at least according to my mother. But his marriage to my grandmother was a successful one, in that they had two children together and stayed married until the end.
Here was the place where our stories—my grandmother’s and my own—finally intersected. I knew U Thant Gyi firsthand, though our time together was brief: Mostly what I remembered were his last days on terra firma, when he was dying of esophageal cancer and had been brought home to gaze at his garden through a set of sliding glass doors. I was nearly three years old and carried around with me a bottle of childrens’ pink Tinkerbell nail polish, which he graciously allowed me to paint on his fine, dark Burmese hands. Even as a child, I remember being struck by the generosity of this gesture (my father would never have indulged the same), and this quiet benevolence remains, in my mind, the most marked (and, to be honest, the only) trait that I remember about him. That and a predilection for Brach’s butterscotch candies, which turned out to be genetic. But still: I did touch him—and therefore my connection to all that history was tangible, tactile.
Despite all the granular details my grandmother could recount about life back then, her memories still felt weightless. They were intoxicating and pleasant, like perfumed vapors from an old armoire, but they were decidedly incomplete and very nearly transient, offering little to hold on to. That is to say, I had certain information—but what did I really know?
And so I began my own research to fill in the blanks, to better understand what was happening outside of the plush interior of the family’s Dodge motorcar. After all, the things happening elsewhere—which was to say, in the streets immediately outside their happy compound—were terrible enough to force my family out of Burma…forever. Somehow, this sweet story went rancid, and the good ole days became a voyage of flight and exile. I realized that as much as I delighted in the stories of newly purchased Saxon shoes, as vividly as I could imagine the Cadbury chocolate softened by Rangoon’s tropical heat, these stories carried as much heft as the tales my parents told at Christmas about sleigh rides and chestnuts. U Myint Kaung was Drosselmeyer in The Nutcracker, a benevolent character filled with seasonal largesse; our sugar plums were bananas.
I knew that my grandmother had a cunning way of curving reality to fit her needs, of seeing what was worthy and lustrous rather than what might have been impoverished and painful. This was equally a result of privilege (comfortable people enjoy comfort, after all) and deprivation (better
to focus on the good ole days when living in the mean present).
Perhaps this was why Burma still felt so distant to me—I was romanced by the elided storytelling, but it had simultaneously kept me at arm’s distance from the country itself. It was impossible to make a connection to Burma when Burma might have been the Sugar Plum Fairy’s backyard. I lived in the age of Trumpism and dating apps, ISIS and Soylent meal substitutes, dystopian realities that seemed wholly at odds with my blissful Burmese heritage. If I really was going to dig in and determine whether these were my people, I needed some sort of corroboration about what, exactly, was really happening.
I realized that apart from Mya Mya’s recollections of the halcyon days of banana-noshing Rangoon Society, I didn’t really know what else had been going on in the country, especially at a time when so much was changing. Burmese independence from the British was right around the corner, and the beginning of modern Burma’s slide into oblivion was about to commence. What was happening while the cheroots were being rolled and the newspapers thumbed through?
All I knew about Burma in that period was that the military began to flex its muscle, and that the place where George Orwell lived for several years somehow morphed—rather quickly—into a reasonable facsimile of Animal Farm itself. But what, exactly, happened to refashion what had been a nascent but well-regarded independence movement, complete with a booming economy and an educated population, into a place of nearly unrecognizable hope and despair—in just a few short years? What could have caused a generation of Burmese, including my family, to abandon the frangipani blossoms and night markets, the bustling shopping centers and fragrant curries from home—for a cold, unknown place on the other side of the world…and to never look back?