by Alex Wagner
Or you might hop a flight to Accra and revisit the slave traumas of Ghana’s past, traveling along the 156-mile southern coastline, where the crumbling castles and forts of the blood trade still echoed with the terrors of the 1700s. There was, after all, something particular and particularly resonant in the land, something that made the past come alive when one put foot to ground. And if it could be this way for those who were removed decades (or centuries) from their personal histories, why not so for us first-generation Americans? Nowhere was it written that family members needed to stay away from their ancestral homes for several hundred years before a long-lost son or daughter might book a ticket back in the hopes of discovering something meaningful or clarifying. Heritage travel, as they called it, might not just be for reminiscences of the long, long ago: Perhaps it would be equally as useful to recall the recent past.
And so: First, I intended to hunt down evidence that we once lived there. I wanted to see the old family homes, imagine my grandfather puffing on a cigarette and making the decision to leave for America under cover of night. I wanted to see the (re-creation of the) teak palace in Mandalay where my great-great-grandmother once served in the shadow of the king. There were so few photographs or heirlooms that survived our exodus from Burma that it was sometimes hard to believe those times had ever really come to pass—the tiffin carriers full of vindaloo and English-style garden parties, the lacquer boxes of hand-rolled cheroots. Everything about the place was masked by the gauze of distance and loss, like a famous shipwreck that everyone talked about but no one could find. Here was my chance to savor whatever was left.
I wanted to touch and see the things that had remained here after we’d left, something that was (unlike us) permanently Burmese, and could, in this way, vouch for our history here. This was, of course, going to be close to impossible, because Burma’s information architecture approximated that of a sandcastle: haphazard and frequently demolished by the elements.
I knew that the place I would need to visit was the National Archives of Myanmar, but gaining entry to that building would require navigation through approximately sixty-seven layers of unreasonable bureaucracy born of intense paranoia and general ambivalence to transparency. I knew this mostly because the information available online in the United States—after I risked passage to an archives website that Google Chrome warned was unsafe for my computer—insisted that any requests for entry be accompanied by a letter, sent to the Burmese embassy, detailing what, very specifically, you were researching and why. It might take weeks for a reply, if you got a reply at all.
I was no scholar, and had no academic institution to vouch for me, but I convinced my New York City–based book editor to sign an official-seeming request on letterhead, confirming that I was working on a book and would need access to records pertaining to “Myanmar history and social development,” which was as benign-sounding as I could make it without verging into actual misrepresentation. I decided I would need backup in this endeavor (especially because I neither spoke nor read a word of Burmese, apart from questionable kitchen lingo pertaining to dried shrimp and fried summer squash), and so I brought along my Burmese-speaking(ish) and very expert cousin Geoff, who was working on his PhD and therefore had endless oceans of time to spend in libraries, and in fact relished the thought of more of it. I filed a similar petition on Geoff’s behalf, hoping his status as a “doctoral candidate” at Columbia University might somehow grease the wheels, or at least endear us to the authorities.*1
Naturally, we received nothing in the way of response from the Burmese embassy, but I decided not to let this reality deter us in our travel. I had held low expectations regarding any sort of correspondence, anyway, and figured the request must have been lost in a mountain of paperwork piled on a bureaucrat’s crowded desk, somewhere. Extensive travel around the world and my personal proclivity for cajoling had taught me that it was oftentimes easier to convince people of what you needed—or wanted—in person. Upon arrival in Rangoon, Geoff and I promptly got to work contacting anyone who might have even passing knowledge about how to gain access to the archives.
To help us navigate the byways of the past and present, Geoff suggested we enlist his former Burmese language tutor, a sassy fixer named Yu Yu, who had assisted a number of demanding and occasionally pushy Americans during their travels around Burma, including Anthony Bourdain when he filmed an episode of his big-budget food show in Rangoon. (We made a point of visiting several of Bourdain’s favorite noodle shops and pestering Yu Yu to order whatever Bourdain had ordered. I figured it couldn’t hurt.) Anyway, Yu Yu understood the general futility of navigating Burmese bureaucracy and agreed it would behoove us to ask for advice from a visiting scholar who had already successfully gained entry to the records.
Yu Yu made several cellphone calls that led nowhere, or delivered to us conflicting information about how feasible our quest was, and we mostly remained hopeless, although not despondent. Until one morning, as we were headed somewhere else (I don’t remember where) and our trio stopped at a money changer and ran into a very important French guy of many degrees and affiliations who had basically Gone Burmese (he was the type of French guy who insisted upon speaking in Burmese to Burmese and English people alike). This French guy was notoriously dialed in to the System, and practically laughed us into the street when we asked, with furrowed brows, how we might ever gain sanctioned entry to the archives—as if it was asking for the pass code to the Secret of NIMH.
Effectively, he told us (in Burmese) that it was really very easy, and that all we had to do was get this one very famous Burmese academic to write us general letters of recommendation and then we could show up at the archives with these letters and meet with an official on site who would give us the necessary credentials. It was so easy! (Would it really be so easy?) The very important French guy grabbed his thick stack of Burmese kyats and whizzed out of the money changer because (obviously) he was very busy, probably attaining another achievement of importance.
Yu Yu set about contacting this very famous Burmese academic and requesting a letter of recommendation from a man who had never met us and had no idea what we were doing in Rangoon. As far-fetched as this sounded, it was apparently something the famous academic was accustomed to doing, so much so that his son—who ran a local bookstore—had the template on hand and yes, sure, he could print out two copies with our names and have his father sign them. I’m not sure his father was the one to actually sign the letters, but at this point we were no longer asking questions.*2 We assumed this was just the Burmese government’s delightful protocol—an elaborate scavenger hunt featuring obscure personalities and arbitrary tasks. Impossibly, we got the letters and were on our way.
The archives were located on a drowsy residential street and happened to be far less menacing than I had imagined. Most of the Burmese government buildings I’d seen so far were hulking turn-of-the-century stone behemoths constructed by the English as if to withstand a world war (and indeed they did, for the most part). While this structure was far from flimsy, it sat only two stories high and had the welcoming air of a very large bungalow (a bungalow with a central marble staircase). Geoff and I practically skipped through the main gate, now convinced that we belonged, until we were stopped by a patrolman in the guard house who looked at us askance and demanded our papers.
After presenting our questionable letters of recommendation, we signed the register (this seemed like progress) and made our way to the bungalow/archive main building, only to be told that we would need to present our papers once again to the deputy director general of the archives. We were ushered into a second-floor waiting room that had the stale and disconcerting air of a 1960s interrogation room. I could have been—but was not!—grilled on my Communist sympathies.
Geoff and I waited quietly, apprehensive about what was to come. Despite whatever connection I had to the country, the unpredictable nature of Burmese bureaucracy made
me feel like I might get deported at any minute, never mind the fact that I wasn’t looking to uncover anything particularly incendiary. Eventually, the deputy director general, a heavyset man in official uniform, entered the room to review our paperwork and otherwise make Geoff very nervous. He appeared confused about who Geoff was and why he might be assisting me, which Geoff attempted to explain using what I can only imagine was convoluted Burmese. The deputy then demanded to see the recommendation letter from my editor, though I’m not exactly sure if he knew or cared about the actual publishing house or the project or even how legitimate it all might have been. Mostly, I sensed, he just wanted the paper.
Of course by this point, my editor’s spiffy signed letterhead, the one that politely vouched for my character, was languishing on the desk of some paper pusher at the Burmese embassy in Washington, D.C., useless to me in Rangoon. All I had on hand—back in the car out front with Yu Yu—was an unsigned Word printout on regular white paper stock. It didn’t look very convincing. I excused myself from the room so I could run back to the car and huddle in the back seat and fake my editor’s signature on the letter,*3 hoping that the ink would dry in the time it took me to return to the deputy director’s office.
I handed the letter over to the deputy, wincing at my very obvious forgery and noting that my editor’s “signature” bore no resemblance to his actual name. But given the myriad indiscretions that had accompanied this comedic process, I foresaw that this would not necessarily be an issue. Once the deputy director general gathered all of our application materials in a cardboard folder, he disappeared once again for an extended period during which Geoff and I exchanged nervous glances and hushed commentary.
“What do you think he’s doing?” I asked, in a stage whisper.
“I don’t know!” Geoff replied, giving me a look that said Shut the fuck up!
To our great satisfaction, the deputy returned with approval, plus notes from the director general himself regarding the specifics of our archive access. My editor’s letter appeared to have been read: As proof, there was a red checkmark at the end of it, as if to signal that it had been vetted, though I’m not sure exactly what was being verified, other than ink. The deputy director noted that if we desired any records between the years 1963 and 1965, the request would have to be assessed through an official request, and approved (or not) accordingly. Those were some of the most fraught years in Burma’s struggle after independence. The government seized and consolidated power, nationalizing the economy, expelling foreigners, and otherwise laying the foundation for the country’s precipitous decline. It was no surprise those years were off-limits.
Those years were also, of course, the most critical ones in my family history—1965 was the year we finally left Burma for the United States. My grandfather had felt the hand of the government clamping down and realized that if there was to be a future for his children, it would not be in their birth country.
If the Burmese festival of paper had begun with a bang, it was not yet over. After we received our approval, Geoff and I exited the interrogation room and were escorted to the reading room, where another application process began. Here we were handed a sheaf of papers—the first page of which was ominously blank. We were asked to sign a ledger (name, date, address, degree completed—again the focus on academic degrees—subject matter, book title, and records requested). We were then required to complete a two-page application asking much the same thing, and then told to compose a handwritten letter (on that blank sheet of paper) addressed to the director general—once again, saying much the same thing. The woman who was helping us complete this secondary application informed us that we would need to present our passports, as well as two passport-sized photographs, which I did not happen to have on hand. We would have to return the next day.
But before Geoff and I left, we asked about the method by which archival materials were requested. The assistant demonstrated by performing a sample intranet search—helpfully, in English, for the non–Burmese speaker in the room (me). While the Burmese government had reverted most official information back to the native tongue, there still existed a strong English presence, especially in older materials—after all, the country had been English speaking during much of the time that its information architecture was initially developed. The assistant typed in the sample search term “repot.” In doing so, I could only assume she meant to type “report” and instead spelled the word the way the Burmese pronounced it—which was indeed closer to repot than report, with its hard r. I was quite sure entering “repot” in lieu of “report” would not turn up any entries, and was preparing myself for an awkward exchange wherein Geoff and I would have to politely spell the word for her, but lo and behold, the search turned up numerous “repots” (police repots, financial repots, and the like). To say that one needed to adopt a Burmese mind-set to begin one’s research in this country was an understatement. You had to think Burmese, speak Burmese, and, apparently, spell Burmese. A new hypothesis started to dawn on me: Maybe this whole search was fucked.
A day later, passport-sized photos in hand, we were finally allowed entry to the archives and granted full research privileges (except the years 1963 through 1965), which was both exhilarating and a complete letdown. I was looking for birth records, property records, government records—anything of that sort, really—but what quickly became clear was just how impoverished the record collections were. So little had been kept. It was as if Burma’s history since independence in 1948 had been nearly wiped away.
Birth certificates were a pipe dream: If my mother’s palm leaf ever truly existed, it had been lost long ago. Property records were virtually unsearchable, and you could forget about any census documents. The British kept organized records of their own citizens who were living in Burma and India but didn’t (of course) bother to record the births or deaths or marriages of anyone who wasn’t a Brit by blood. England may have been the ruling colonial power, but unless you were from the kingdom itself (or were progeny of the kingdom), your entrance to and exit from this earthly realm were not the concern of official record. And anyway, the bulk of those records, ones pertaining to the governance of the country (where I might find more information about U Myint Kaung and his work, for example) were all stored neatly away in what I could only imagine was a climate-controlled room somewhere in London.
Instead, what I could find on native soil was a motley selection of random records: an omnibus of declassified telegrams from the Burmese embassy in Washington, planning memos for official state visits (including from India’s Jawaharlal Nehru and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser), and an excess of paper about the rules governing various state programs. Hidden among these seemingly dull documents I found something that mattered, a glittering diamond document in this bureaucratic rough: a page from my own family’s story. A booklet of rules for the state scholars program—a government program that allowed the most promising young Burmese the chance to study abroad and, in turn, broaden their horizons.
One of my mother’s cousins, a young man named Maung Aung Lay, had been a state scholar but tragically died in a plane crash on his way out of Burma. He was a physics scholar, bound for the University of Chicago, and my mother could vividly remember learning of the news of his death: “It wasn’t night-dark, but light-breaking dark—it was early in the morning. The sun hadn’t come up yet,” she recalled.
My mother had been staying at her aunt Yee Yee and uncle U Thein Han’s house, a frequent occurrence given my grandmother’s general lack of interest in spending any considerable amount of time with her own children. (Much of my mother’s childhood was spent with these two.) They were Maung Aung Lay’s parents.
“I would always sleep with my aunt,” she explained. “And when she got out of bed, I’m sure I followed her. I remember that she and my uncle were listening to the radio that morning, one of those funny, old, wood and cloth-covered things. It was rectangular, and it stoo
d on a bookcase in their living room. They were so intently listening to the radio that I’m not sure they knew I was with them. My aunt had her ear close to it because I gather they didn’t want to turn it on, really. I knew something was wrong—there was something very troubling and ominous about this radio listening, especially at that hour. It was dark, after all; why would they be listening so carefully to the radio?
“The next thing I remember was that there was a lot of hushed talk and weird crying sounds coming from the bedroom. I don’t remember any news coming to me afterward—basically I sort of put it together. But I don’t remember a scene where I found out.”
Maung Aung Lay had left for America a few days before. He flew from Rangoon to India, and his plane went down upon takeoff from India en route west.
My mother had told me this story countless times, and it always struck me as both eerie and tragic: the bright future Maung Aung Lay had ahead of him, and the terrible end he met just as he was starting this new life, but also that scene back at home, with the radio in the early morning darkness. My mother couldn’t remember the aftermath, but it clearly haunted her for the rest of her life.
“I remember being in a red sweater that morning,” she told me. “And for years after, I had a hard time wearing that color.”
For me, reading the rules of the program that ultimately took him away from us (forever) was a way to get a little closer to him, however indirectly. I wanted to envision his application, the anticipation as he left home for the first time. Among other things, I found out that there were certain conjugal taboos imposed upon Burma’s youngest and finest minds: “No state scholar shall marry during the tenure of his course and if he does so, the scholarship shall be terminated.” You could imagine the lovelorn scholar, away from home for the first time, an easy mark for a tragic or complicating romance.