by Alex Wagner
As a state scholar, my cousin faced a rigorous physical exam prior to departure, one that checked for all the diseases of the era (scarlet fever, smallpox, syphilis, and so forth) and required a rather intrusive assessment of everything from his respiratory system (“Comment more fully on the condition of the applicant’s lungs”) to his endocrine system (“Urine: Specific gravity? Reaction? Albumen? Sugar?”). I couldn’t remember the last time I had been asked about the specific gravity of my urine as part of an academic scholarship application.
I giggled through most of these rules, but they managed to convey an impression that the world, at that moment, was a huge place. It was not the planet that I’d grown up on, one that had been casually shrunken by the Internet and Cathay Pacific airlines. Sixty-five years ago, the crossing of borders and commingling of cultures was a deeply serious thing.
I’d come to imagine our family as a cosmopolitan clan: a great-grandfather who wore Saxon shoes, a grandmother who preferred American motorcars, a mother who went to see French films with her English school classmates. But these rules made me remember that we were also ordinary Burmese; we were stripped down to our skivvies and made to say aah, blood tested and language screened like everyone else who wanted to try their hand at America. I could imagine my cousin poring over this little rule book, itself the only constant in his soon-to-be-new life (a life, alas, he’d never begin). For a moment, sitting in the archives reading room, I felt a tingle of the dread and excitement that he must have felt, knowing that the world would never be the same for him again.
There was also a page of my grandfather’s story in this little booklet. He oversaw the state scholars program during a short embassy stint in Washington in 1956. At that point in his long career as a Burmese bureaucrat, he was the undersecretary for education, but he also had personal experience with studying abroad: In 1951, my grandmother and grandfather had both been awarded Fulbright scholarships to study in the States.
According to my grandmother, she was not sure how this came to pass; the government “just selected about ten of us,” she said. She remembered that she took Trans World Airlines to Bombay and stopped for a week in Paris.*4 The only French my grandmother knew was “Je voudrais une omelette avec champignons et un verre du vin blanc” (“I would like a mushroom omelette and a glass of white wine”), a phrase she managed to butcher spectacularly whenever she uttered it out loud in the years hence, which she did more frequently than made sense. She recalled that for their one-week stopover in Paris, she and my grandfather stayed at the Hotel du Lys on the rue Serpent, and that she immediately fell in love with French press coffee and croissants. “I couldn’t have cared less about what my husband did,” she said, and by way of explanation offered, “We were very close to the Champs-Élysées.”
My grandmother had been fearless, of course. “I wore Burmese dress,” she explained, “but saw Parisian ladies in their spring coats and went and bought a short coat in green at the Galeries Lafayette. They had perfumes and colognes there and I bought a bottle—Arpège, I think?” How easily, how seamlessly, she had managed the City of Lights. But no, she protested: “I was a hick! You know,” she added, “the Burmese really can’t pronounce ‘Champs-Élysées.’ ”
They flew into New York and took the train to Washington, and then my grandmother was off to study for a few months at Kansas State Teachers College in Pittsburg, Kansas. That was followed by a brutal winter at the International House at the University of Chicago (“I liked it because I could get good Chinese food!” she said), and then it was on to Maine, where she stayed with a Mr. and Mrs. Nielsen in Augusta and tried skiing and chicken noodle soup for the first time. “Sebago Lake was nearby,” she recalled, “and the salmon caught there was sent to the White House!” (The American harvest made a deep impression.)
My grandfather, meanwhile, was completing his graduate studies at Indiana University. News clippings from the United States detail “Burmese visitors” who stopped in at several American universities in the winter of 1951. In an article detailing the apparently close relationship between Burma and Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, the Bucknell student paper made note of a recent group of scholars from the region, including one U Thant Gyi, my grandfather, whose pastimes included “scouting and photography.”
How curious it must have been to live in Augusta or Indianapolis, coming—as my grandparents were—from the leafy delta of Rangoon. And yet how easily they had done it. Perhaps it was destiny? The village elders told my grandmother that, growing up in the tiny, dusty town of Pakokku, she used to always say, “When I grow old, I’m going to America.” My grandmother couldn’t remember where this desire came from, exactly, but she insisted it was true. The elders of her village were sure, even then. She recounted their conversations: “Mya, you know, she was always talking about going as a child.”
I asked my grandmother if it was hard when she finally arrived in America. In those long, cold months in the middle of nowhere, did she miss home? “Oh,” she said, “there was no time to miss Burma.” For those six months, she never wrote home or called her children—not once. I’d always thought assimilation was an act of valor that required self-sacrifice and a strong heart. But my grandmother suggested you had to be a certain type of cutthroat, too.
After they returned from that year abroad and before they left Burma for the last time in 1965, my grandmother worked as the head librarian at the U.S. Information Service library at the American embassy in Rangoon. I scanned the archives’ intranet for anything that might shed some light on the happenings at the embassy compound, in the hopes that she or the library might be mentioned. There were a few reports, but nothing revelatory.
From the period in which my grandparents were stationed at the Burmese embassy in Washington, D.C., declassified cables revealed not much more than intra-staff skirmishes. One particularly spicy report detailed the “administrative gangsterism [!] that already exists among subordinate staff,” presumably relating to a certain third-tier secretary who had been pressing for a salary increase.
The seemingly hunky-dory account was odd. In the late 1950s and ’60s, the Americans were locked in a pitched geopolitical battle to stop the spread of Communism around the world, and wanted to ensure that Burma wouldn’t turn into another Vietnam. My grandmother knew this, and her life was, in some ways, shaped by it. She revealed that she’d first gotten the job at the USIS library because the soon-to-be-former librarian was suspected of having Communist ties. Her husband had been targeted as a possible sympathizer and the home office in Washington made clear the position was to be filled by someone else. In stepped my grandmother. It was not a point of family pride that she gladly stepped in amid a witch hunt against her colleagues—one wonders what she would have done if she’d been called before the House Un-American Activities Committee—but it was her posting at the USIS library that eventually led the U.S. State Department to get our family out of Burma after the government fell.
My grandmother and grandfather, former Fulbright scholars who’d tasted the West, their home a center of Rangoon society where Burmese and non-Burmese mingled easily, were easy targets for a military government that had announced its course as the “Burmese Way to Socialism.”
After General Ne Win regained power in a bloodless coup in 1962, westernized Burmese, especially officials who had served in the previous government (my grandfather had been an official in the education department shortly before the coup), were eyed with suspicion. My grandfather was soon demoted to the post of a high school principal. Shortly thereafter, my mother was observed taking French lessons, and a government representative made clear that this sort of thing was not permitted: Burma was returning to her roots; foreign elements were not tolerated. Amid the nationalization of the banks and the closing of the universities, it was clear then that the life they’d had in Burma was no longer—and so they looked to America as their next (and final) destinatio
n.
The Library of Congress needed an expert on Pali, and here was my grandmother—available and ready to move. They held the job for her for nearly two years while she got her papers in order (she never did get a passport, but the U.S. government didn’t mind). And so, taking up that post at the USIS library several years prior was, in the end, a move worth making for my grandmother—all things considered. But you wouldn’t have known from the archive’s cache of cables (at least the ones that I had access to), that McCarthyism had made its way up the delta to Rangoon.
I had been hunting for some paper trail that would lead me back to my people, something I could touch with my own hands—whether a birth certificate or land deed—that would prompt a profound spiritual revelation about my heritage, but I was not going to find it in these archives. The elements, however man-made, had washed our particular sandcastle away.
I was annoyed (we’d really had to hunt down the very important French guy and that famous Burmese academic…for this?) but ultimately, I suppose it wasn’t all that surprising: Did I really think that a military junta that had driven the country’s economy into the ground, shuttered universities, and otherwise prevented the free exchange of ideas and conversation…did I really think those guys would take the care and expense to preserve historical record of their mayhem and the events preceding it? Probably not.
I was disappointed. Angry, even. Yet I’d also seen glimpses of the family story—my story—in at least a handful of documents cloistered away in the Burmese archives. And in those moments, I felt some small frisson, a mild but nonetheless decidedly unearthly vibration of familial recognition—the thing I’d come halfway around the world hoping and searching for. Of course I wanted more. Fortunately, the archives weren’t the only source of information for this sort of emotional ancestral quest.
Yu Yu told us about someone named U Aung Soe Min, Rangoon’s own Renaissance man. U Aung was an art dealer, musician, bon vivant, and connector of people and places in the former capital city; a collector who—through patience and networking and luck and curiosity—had amassed an impressive collection of primary historical documents, one of the best around. One afternoon Geoff and Yu Yu took me to his gallery, a rabbit warren of rooms, each crowded with eight-foot-high stacks of vintage newspapers, magazines, posters, documents, pamphlets, property titles, propaganda, and paintings. There was absolutely no organization to the collection, with trade ledgers from the late 1800s stacked alongside Burmese agitprop from the 1960s. You had to be guided through each document—or stack of documents—by the man himself. There was no intranet, only the musty air of a hoarder’s lair. But, then again, the man did know how to spell the word “report.”
I wanted to know how U Aung had managed to obtain all this…stuff. He explained that after the military took power in the late sixties and nationalized the country, most of Burma’s libraries had been shuttered and destroyed. Some remained as tools for socialist propaganda, and were open for individual research projects. These were essentially socialist libraries. There were private libraries and private collections, as well. “But in 1993 and 1994 and 1995,” he explained, “everything was destroyed.”
Those years in Burma were ones of (particular) tumult. The international community was calling for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi. The junta declined. It continued to arrest and jail political opposition figures and other pro-democracy reformists. And the crackdown was not—apparently—limited to people.
“The libraries, the old books and documents, they were just on the streets. People sold them on the street,” he said. “I witnessed this. Archives of the Japanese occupation? On the street. Those valuable documents, research, interviews, collections of local history—both social and economic—were totally gone. The socialists wanted to erase that history.”
U Aung (wisely) thought there might be private collectors interested in the material, and started buying the documents from the street-side book merchants.
“I wanted to start the most serious collection,” he explained. “Most are not my interest, but they may be needed in the future.”
Rangoon’s de facto archivist collected as much as he could from these haphazard fire sales and document dumps. When old or famous writers and academics passed away (the type of men and women who would have had sizable private libraries), he’d hear about it on the streets from the booksellers. “They sold everything,” he said. “It’s very sad in Burma; the generations don’t maintain their previous generation’s work. It’s very bad.”
The work of purchasing and archiving Burmese history wasn’t just arduous and heartbreaking: It was also kind of illegal. U Aung told me that many of the books from the 1970s (presumably political manifestos) were hidden until the pro-democracy movement really gained steam in 1988 and ’89. “Someone brought those books to me, donated them to my library—because the government didn’t like those books,” he said. For this, U Aung was arrested. “They didn’t give a reason. They just said, ‘He has some affiliation with the underground movement.’ The government,” U Aung concluded, “doesn’t encourage libraries.”
And so, piled up in his various rooms (there was more stocked away in U Aung’s apartment and at other locations around town), I found…all sorts of things. There were political cartoons with a distinctly national subtext: “Nyo, darling, this is the time when our country really needs her sons…and there is no greater duty than to fight for her freedom.” Indeed, “Nyo, darling!”
It was sassy and camp, and it was unlike anything I’d seen before. There were motion picture yearbooks from the fifties: evidence of a flourishing and occasionally insurgent Burmese cinema. There were happy-looking illustrated guidebooks to Burma’s ethnic minority groups. There were pop-art pamphlets and cheeky photo illustrations of bosomy Burmese pinups, enticements for I’m not sure quite what. There wasn’t a shred of evidence of my grandmother’s Fulbright program, nor was there even a dim hope of finding my mother’s birth certificate, but what I found in U Aung’s collection was maybe, in a way, even more valuable.
Here was evidence of Burma’s flourishing cultural and intellectual life. Here was comedy and irony in full color. Here were ways of writing and thinking about government and society that I could understand. No doubt this was due in part to the fact that Western references were paramount—“Nyo, darling” was more Lichtenstein than Lichtenstein—but also because the documents were sophisticated and funny and suggestive.
I’d never thought about Burma like this before, primarily because my relationship to the country had always been dusted in regret or confusion or reverence. There was so much distance between that world and my own—a childhood filled with Garbage Pail Kids and episodes of Real World, an American mishmash of the goofy and ironic—and indeed I had come back to Rangoon looking to exploit this chasm for spiritual revelation.
But looking at the film stills from the heyday of independent Burmese cinema, I could easily imagine what it might have been like to be Burmese. I hadn’t ever thought about this in a practical way: not just identifying with Burma as an ethnic and historic designation, but actually living life as a Burmese person. With U Aung’s cached material, I could envision a Burmese life, as I had thus far lived an American life. I could see myself at revival and art house theaters, opining about obscure Burmese directors, collecting vintage posters for my teenage bedroom or writing thinly disguised political manifestos for campus publications—just like I had growing up in the States, experimenting with vegetarianism and trying desperately to develop an appreciation for Truffaut films and Constructivist art.
What I learned in this moment was that Burma wasn’t all palm leaf birth certificates and mohinga*5 hawkers at the night market. It was also breasty pinups and campus poetry. I should have known that, of course—how stupid it had been to assume otherwise—but I’d had no proof. So here was my revelation: I could now imagine a vivid interior life as someone who’d
grown up in Rangoon rather than in Washington.
As exciting as this was, it also made me angry—because these piles of artifacts were just that: remainders from a golden era, a bygone worldview, a discussion that had ended (abruptly). There were plenty of expats and experts who might lecture me on the vivid Burmese intellectual life that existed even now, in spite of (and in reaction to) the political realities of the day. But from my admittedly brief time traversing the information highways and byways of Rangoon, this particular brand of interesting and occasionally joyful cultural output seemed to have met the same end as Burma’s libraries: It had been tossed out on the street. At least as far as I could tell from my entirely abbreviated research sojourn in the homeland. I’d visited the university library, which had archived some interesting campus publications from the 1940s, ’50s, and early ’60s, but those, too, had come to a grinding halt once Ne Win shuttered the campuses, suspicious that they were hotbeds of revolution and unrest (and indeed they were).
The only remnants I could find of this funny, freaky, hidden past was U Aung’s haphazard collection, scraped together by one man who understood the loss. Did societies really unwind themselves like this? Who spoke fluently and with vivid language, only to revert back to Morse code? It didn’t seem possible, but here was proof that it was.
And, I wondered, who was at fault? What idea took hold that would burn a thriving culture and scatter its ashes? Was it the same culprit that was behind the slaughter of Muslims and the expulsion of Indians? The same menace that prevented my mother from improving her French and smeared my grandfather for his cosmopolitanism? The same power that insisted on nationalism as the ultimate virtue; that valued blood over every other form of identity? Could it be the same thing that I was now embracing, if in a seemingly more benign form—the force that sent me hurtling back to Burma in the first place?