by Alex Wagner
My mother and grandmother never expressed a single sentence of regret about leaving Burma behind, and yet they remembered the place with near-mystical reverence. I couldn’t square these two notions and realized I had only the most embarrassingly vague understanding of the circumstances in Burma when they left. Who exactly was in power? How restive was the population? What did the rest of the world know about what was going on? When did the poison start coursing through Burma’s veins? No one in my family seemed to know, or if they did, they must not have been paying close attention. But I would have to. At this point in my career as a journalist, I understood that few old timey narratives were purely uncomplicated, happy ones. It always rang alarm bells when anyone got misty-eyed about the good times, because, in reality, those were often the actually pretty bad times for quite a few other people, especially the characters outside of the immediate story line. One man might want to make America great again (actually, a few men) but a boatload of people were plenty happy with how far America had come since then.
The stories that I’d been presented about home, or at least the heartwarming edits from my father’s and mother’s sides, had been remarkably free of complication: Could that really be?
I already knew the answer. After all, they weren’t in those places anymore—they’d left them! Why the flight—and what happened in departure? It was one thing for my elders to hold these polished narratives close to their hearts, well-worn keepsakes that reminded them of home, but if this was going to be my story, I needed to understand it truthfully. And apparently, that began with some very basic information.
I started scouring the Internet, ordering out-of-print books and obscure volumes of history that could provide a window onto Burma in the great period of our family heyday. I looked for clues, hooks into the past that might shed some light on the circumstances beyond the house on Shan Road, trying to unwind the relationship between the Brits and the Burmese, as well as (and perhaps even more important) the Burmese and the Burmese.
My cousin Geoff had been a Fulbright scholar in Burma and immersed himself in all manner of historical research as part of his fancy-pants Columbia University doctoral work. We were discussing our family history one afternoon when he mentioned in passing that U Myint Kaung had worked as a director of Burma’s cooperative societies. I had no idea what these “cooperative societies” were, but I didn’t let on to that fact, lest Geoff grasp how woefully unprepared I was to embark upon this research. I nodded, and he kept talking.
“I think the co-ops were kind of a failure?” he offered, as if he also wasn’t quite sure what they were.
Geoff looked at me and I looked at him, blankly. While I couldn’t offer my cousin anything in the way of confirmation or denial, I remember thinking this was strange: Failure was not something that had ever been mentioned in conjunction with our halcyon days of triumph and cheroots. Nor was it something associated with our family on the whole, because we were naturally successful and inclined toward unprecedented achievement. I’d found a snag in the carefully woven story. So I pulled it.
*1 The cheroots are fairly noxious, though.
*2 I’m not exactly sure what kind of shirts Pauline Lumumba—wife of the Congolese independence leader—was preferential to.
*3 Not a bad metric, all things considered.
“Ko Po Kyin,” she said, “you have done very much evil in your life.”
U Po Kyin waved his hand. “What does it matter? My pagodas will atone for everything. There is plenty of time.”
—George Orwell, Burmese Days
As it turns out, I would unravel the story of my maternal great-grandfather’s homeland—and discover that it was not some sort of mist-covered Brigadoon-style utopia, but a place that was saddled with every society’s ongoing crisis since the birth of modernity: a crisis of identity. Who are we? Who belongs here? These were familiar questions to me, after all: Determining who my own people were was a problem that had plagued me since I was a kid, unsuccessfully avoiding cold buckets of water at the suburban Thingyan festival in early April.
But now these queries had taken on an epic scope, thanks to my ancestral search. The seemingly benign personal quest that sent me back to Burma—my newfound avid interest in understanding my heritage—was, in fact, the core of the crisis that had splintered Burma, had indeed broken the world apart and spun my family halfway across the globe to the place I was born. But I didn’t know all of this yet. To understand it, I had to first find my great-grandfather, a person filled with passions and fears and convictions and doubts, and not the sepia-toned patriarch of the mystical good ole days.
Burma’s natural world was the lush, blooming backdrop in U Myint Kaung’s biography. I could imagine the papery white flowers of the teaks that began to bloom when the rains arrived in June, until the downpours receded in August. I knew that for much of the twentieth and early twenty-first century, the ruling military junta had exploited these tall hardwoods, which account for half of the world’s teak forests. The trees were destined at some point or another to become outdoor furniture or boat decking—timber from the East to make playthings for the West; money from the West to empower dictators in the East.
And then there was the jade—that green aluminum silicate believed by the Chinese to be the bridge between heaven and hell that streaks the rock formations of Burma’s jungles.1 My grandmother and mother had bangles made of the stuff, and I could still hear the way they made soft clinking sounds when rubbed together. Burma’s jade accounts for nearly three-quarters of the global supply, and continues to be extracted in brutal conditions that more resemble a squalid underworld than the celestial beyond.2
But back in the late nineteenth century, before U Myint Kaung had purchased his first pair of Saxon shoes, and when the British were just beginning their takeover of the Bamah and the Kachin and the Shan and the Chin, the export that put his country on the map had its humble origins in the fertile deltas of the Irrawaddy River, a place both unassuming and bloodless. Rice—Asia’s staple crop and Burma’s mainstay—brought this corner of Southeast Asia international acclaim.
With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, several years after U Myint Kaung was born, Burma became an agricultural powerhouse. Ships traveling from the port of Rangoon no longer had to circumnavigate Africa to reach the markets (and mouths) of Europe. A vessel could depart the warm waters of the Bay of Bengal and arrive in the chilly North Atlantic in five weeks, a voyage that had previously taken six months.3
Rapidly industrializing Europe and its cities of Amsterdam and Paris and Brussels needed food. Rice entered the Old World through the port cities of Hamburg and Rotterdam, Gdańsk, and Bremen4—not far from landlocked Luxembourg, where Henry Wagner would soon depart for the New World. The markets in Western and Northern Europe spurred rice production elsewhere—including the Carolinas, American states where backbreaking labor was very nearly a component of the soil. But in this moment, it was Burma under the British that became the world’s “rice bowl”—a claim that my mother’s mother and my mother (and even I, on occasion) never let anyone forget, lest they think our motherland some lazy-ass backwater with no real industry to speak of.
Where Burmese kings had restricted the export of rice, the British saw opportunity and dollar signs and set about conquering the rice bowl.5 Their first incursion began shortly after the Burmese made inroads toward British India, conquering the kingdoms of Manipur and Assam in 1821. In response, the Brits declared the kingdoms of Cachar (in Assam) and Jaintia (in northeast India) to be under their protection, setting the stage for confrontation: The First Anglo-Burmese War began in 1824.
There would be three wars between the British (assisted by the Indians, over whom they had established dominion) and the Burmese monarchy, culminating on November 27, 1887 (precisely ninety years to the day before my birth), when the British deposed the last Burmese king, lowered the count
ry’s flag, and raised the Union Jack over the teak roofs of the palace compound. Thanks to Sa‘id Pasha, the tens of thousands of Egyptians who died slicing open that waterway from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, and the tens of thousands of dark-skinned laborers forced into a permanent hunch at harvest time, the port of Rangoon became a major shipping outpost.
From 1885 until 1910, rice production in Burma went from a few hundred thousand tons to 1.5 million tons.6 The British Empire was further enriched, and Burmese like my great-grandfather were now educated in British schools, taught to speak their language, and otherwise encouraged to adapt to the colonial powers.
Burma the British colony may have seemed a willing celebrant in the pageantry of global trade, but behind the curtain a steep price was being paid by the Burmese themselves. Rice was its own kind of hell. The seeding and sowing, the threshing and harvesting by hand—it was labor so tough that in later years the Burmese military would forcibly conscript citizens to harvest.7 (It is a system that largely remains in place today, albeit with deteriorating transportation infrastructure and worse crop yields.) Seeds and fertilizer, irrigation equipment: These all cost money, and Burmese farmers—even in the middle of a rice boom—struggled to find capital to cover the costs of growing the crop on their land. The cash outlay was overwhelming.
With no real banking structure to support the loans, the farmers turned to Chettiars, moneylenders from southern India who had decamped for Burma, seeing an open market for their trade.8 They’d lend money out to farmers, but should the farmer default, the land became property of the Chettiar. Rice productivity fluctuated with the seasons, harvests were unpredictable, and interest rates were high. Property titles began to default into the hands of the moneylenders, and farmers who had owned land for generations became tenants, subjects of absentee landowners who had neither the interest nor the inclination to be rice farmers. It was a bad deal for the moneylenders and their depositors back home; it was a bad deal for the farmers of Burma. It was not a very fine balance. The British rulers and their Burmese subjects understood this, particularly my great-grandfather U Myint Kaung. It was the cause to which he would devote much of his adult life.
To be clear: I had never, ever been interested in agricultural economics. Nor did I concern myself previously with Burmese crop yields or agrarian policy. I was confused enough about the 2007 mortgage crisis here in the States; it never dawned on me that one day I would find the subject of nineteenth-century Indo-Burmese moneylending something worth pursuing, let alone something that I’d actually find interesting. But it was interesting! Because it was mine.
This heretofore arcane data—the crop yields and agrarian policies and economics of rice—this was part of my family story. And for the first time, I could see how the titanic forces of global history (plus the more regional history of the Burmese almanac) was part of my ancestral tale. The opening of the Suez Canal, the colonization of Upper Burma, the appetite for rice in the lowlands of Europe—these massive, abstract forces that shaped the world were no longer nebulous, no longer something that just affected an unseen population in generally sweeping fashion. These seismic developments hit my backyard. Trace your ancestry and you end up charting the course of global struggle.
Maybe this was why so many people were so intoxicated by the practice: Who we are is a product of battles fought long before us. The winners and losers from centuries ago determine our very existence, as well as a not-incidental part of our day-to-day fate. Genealogy forces the realization that the “beginning” of any story—the uppermost branches of a family tree, the origin tale passed down through the generations—is no beginning at all. Go far back enough, and you’ll realize that your ancestors and their lives were inevitably part of a much grander narrative: the history of the world itself. No family story flows from nothing, after all.
So I had a stake in all of it—colonialism, war, the British Empire, the succession of Burmese monarchs, the rain in Rangoon—and within those epic forces was the thread of our story, in the form of a certain person named U Myint Kaung, a man who made decisions, chose certain paths, and came to be a certain way thanks to the chaos of history and the unpredictability of human nature. To seek answers in reference books would not be enough. I had to get down to the personal, to understand what specifically he’d done (or tried to do).
Without doubt, this would be the hardest part of the search. Though it may feel satisfying to couch your own family story among the great movements of time, you inevitably realize that history, as cruel as it is, has winners and losers. Because of this, one’s people may be (yes) champions or (gasp) villains. Of course, everyone wants to believe that their ancestors were the winners, the day savers and unsung heroes—or that if they were the losers, they were the valiant innocents, the ones fighting to keep the world from falling apart. But who were they really? Were they innocents, or were they criminals? Did they do the right thing or the very wrong one? I’d have to ask: What role did my people play in our newly discovered Burmese drama?
* * *
—
“Chettiar banks are fiery dragons that parch every land that has the misfortune of coming under their wicked creeping. They are a hard-hearted lot that will ring out every drop of blood from the victims without compunction for the sake of their own land.”9
This was the testimony from one Karen member of the legislative council before the government of Burma in 1929. The Great Depression had pushed tensions between the farmers and the lenders to an all-time high. In 1930, Chettiars occupied 6 percent of total land in Burma. Eight years later, they owned a quarter of the country.10 It was putting it mildly to say that this chafed at the national identity of the Burmese.
Before things reached this point, there had been a plan for another way. The British, seeing the writing on the wall with the Chettiars, had a lightbulb moment: a way to finance rice production without Indian interlopers and, in the bargain, school the Burmese in the ways of thrift and Christian responsibility. They called this lightbulb the cooperative credit societies, a three-tiered Rube Goldberg machine designed to produce virtue, credit, and rice.
* * *
—
The co-ops fell into three tiers: At the bottom were credit societies (made up of individuals and households). Managing them were the credit unions, composed of several credit societies, who were supposed to vet community members for loans. At the very top were the banks (chief among them the provincial bank) controlled by the British—and which, when necessary, lent to the credit unions. The banks were able to do so thanks to their deposits from the well-to-do public, of which a fair share were European.11 My great-grandfather worked at the essential pivot of the whole system: the credit union. U Myint Kaung’s job was to make sure money was going to the right people: Burmese with that elusive “money sense.”
It was a pyramid structure—one that was supposed to be rooted in trust and community responsibility—but the word “pyramid” was an unfortunate indicator about how successful this particular financial strategy would end up being. You could already see where there were problems with this plan: If the credit societies lent to wayward Burmese with no real money sense, or if the credit union did a crappy audit about the financial solvency of the individuals it was lending to, well, then…someone was gonna pay for it.
The societies proliferated in the early 1920s across Burma. But by 1925, the “cooperative movement was clogged with bad Societies” and loans were being made “too easily.”12 Something called the Calvert Committee was convened to assess exactly how this happened and it recommended the provincial bank be “wound up forthwith.” (British English didn’t allow for much alarmism, but this signaled the proverbial hand hitting the proverbial red button.) By 1932, the all-important provincial bank had been liquidated.
What happened, exactly? The Calvert Committee pinpointed “an inherent weakness…characteristic of the Burmans.” That flaw was �
��a certain delicacy in dealing with the faults and misdemeanors of their neighbours. [The Burmans] prefer to put up with the administration [of] malpractices in the hope that…the Government may one day come and put things right.”13
In other words, the Burmese, in the eyes of the committee, were simply too polite to turn down bad candidates for loans—too weak to say no to their neighbors and fellow farmers who were looking for capital. U Myint Kaung and the other supervisors at the credit unions had performed faulty audits (or none at all), and compensated for these bad decisions by papering over them. These supervisors were declared to be “untrained, uneducated in co-operative banking or co-operative principles and unfit to be let loose amongst any body of cooperators.”14
Terms such as “untrained” and “let loose” should give you a sense of the respect accorded the Burmese supervisors, who by all (British) accounts ran their cooperatives with the competence of roving, wild (albeit occasionally benevolent) pigs. The bottom of the cooperative society pyramid was riddled with negligent assessments, crony capitalism, rotten apples, and financial obfuscation—in part due to that thing that the British wished so badly to improve upon—the Burmese character. A second, more far-reaching report again focused on Burmese competence: “In Burma, the character of the people is such that a system of official control cannot succeed.”15
* * *
—
In trying to get a wider look at my family history, this is what I discovered: My people were weak and dishonest and stupid and corrupt. But if you asked anyone in our family if they thought that the patriarch U Myint Kaung had been a powerhouse government minister, some sort of proto–Ben Bernanke of agrarian finance, they’d have said yes without hesitation. My grandmother glossed over a lot of details in her retelling of our family history, but when I asked her about her father’s position, she enunciated very clearly when she dropped that title: deputy commissioner for the Cooperative Societies of Upper Burma, a sort of bureaucratic humblebrag.