by Alex Wagner
Rumors abounded about the hotel group that was going to turn it into a luxury respite for French, British, and American tourists, but in fact it was leased to the Anawmar Art Group, with plans to turn it into a museum showcasing what could only be a staggering private collection—one that, as yet, no one had seen. It would take a lot of art to fill a space that massive, to say nothing of its quality or provenance. It surprised me how much everyone else was convinced of the goodness of this endeavor.
Than Myint-U was gracious enough to meet with Geoff and me and give us an abbreviated schooling in the history of Rangoon’s most extraordinary colonial buildings; he sent us on a walking tour with YHT guides who revealed some of the city’s most impressive gems. But as far as opening up the Secretariat, he was noncommittal. The last person to tour it had been a high-ranking U.S. official named Barack Obama, and while Geoff and I were clearly very important cultural ambassadors, it was not exactly the same thing.
At the time of our visit, the American ambassador in Rangoon was a lionhearted man named Derek Mitchell—who, together with his impossibly organized and convivial wife, Min—managed to make serious headway in improving Burmese-American relations (and supporting Burmese democracy in general), and somehow found the time to offer certain wayward travelers (me) excellent bowls of homemade mohinga.
I decided to push my luck and plead with him to get us into the Secretariat. I employed obtuse suggestion (“I hear the Secretariat is nice this time of year!”) at first, before descending into outright begging (“I cannot leave this country without seeing the Secretariat!”) until the ambassador relented/indulged and made a few calls to see what might be done. Barack Obama had been a distracting guest, I could only presume, so here was a chance for the ambassador and his wife to tour the grounds uninterrupted. They could thank me later! Several days before the end of my sojourn in Rangoon, we gathered at the gates of the Secretariat a few minutes before twilight and, miraculously, we were let in.
In the magic hour, the building was startling in its scale and deterioration. A story-high clock was stuck at eight o’clock, the numerals mostly missing, a family of pigeons nesting below. Whole wings of the building had seen their roofs cave in, the windowpanes long since gone, as bats cruised through the hallways before the sun dropped. But around another corner, things would be largely intact, in need only of a good mopping to be once again functional. A Victorian-era staircase, with its massive curving metal frame and the ghost of a dome that once topped it, was like something from an ocean liner. Vast, empty rooms were everywhere—rooms so big they suggested a Soviet-era gymnasium, with barrel-vaulted ceilings and iron pillars. You could almost smell the cloud puffs of hand talc.
Walking through the Secretariat was like a waking dream, and not necessarily a good one—one of those night-sweat-inducing anxiety dreams where you stroll through the halls of school, but everyone has already left for the summer and you’ve missed the final and now where are you? Lost. It was a vast, melancholy building, full of memories that weren’t mine but still too palpable to ignore. I thought about my mother’s stories about her father, and could hear the shuffle of feet, the thrum of typewriters, the hustle of a government office readying itself for its next act. The sound of life, of busyness, felt as if it had just momentarily drifted away—but how? I was sad and lucky to be inside.
When we finally got to Aung San’s assassination room, I was nearly hyperventilating with excitement. For so long I had known this man, or at least his legend. My research had complicated and distorted that legend, but I still couldn’t escape the sheer Holy-Shit Factor of walking into a room where one of the most important people in the country’s history had been shot.
If I couldn’t retrieve my mother’s birth certificate, if our family homes had been destroyed, here was something concrete that might bring me back to the thing I’d been looking for since I landed at the Yangon International Airport: a reflection of who I was, indelible proof of my belonging. My outsized expectations for some sort of heritage supernova had diminished considerably; I no longer expected a whiz-bang revelation that would knock me sideways. But I still hoped there could be some sort of quiet reconciliation, where I could at last place myself in the context of these people, this place, their blood, this land. Here was my last shot at finding myself in a national myth.
We took off our shoes, per Burmese custom, and stepped into the room. It was not what I had expected. The walls were covered in wood-grain contact paper and linoleum, apparently papering over the bullet holes—some of the only physical testimony to Burma’s bloody and violent transition out of colonialism. Linoleum! It was so corny and unbelievably hokey that it was almost funny. At the front of the room were garishly blinking colored lights surrounding a shrine to Buddha. I nearly winced at the sight of all this, trying to imagine the same room in America. What we might do to “fix” something broken but still central to our history. No amount of imagination stretching could really convince me that anyone would ever put just a little putty over the crack on the Liberty Bell or dry-clean Jackie’s pink suit and sell it as a vintage piece.
But then Geoff the PhD student reminded me that my reaction was predictably and obnoxiously Occidental: Who was I to say what an appropriately “historical” treatment should be? To begin with, keeping the shot marks on display would have been tacky and gruesome, no? It wasn’t as if we kept JFK’s bullet-riddled car in the Smithsonian, after all.
Secondly and perhaps more important, the Burmese had a different understanding about time (and especially artifacts), in no small part dictated by Theravada Buddhism. I had experienced it during my visit to Bagan, where eleventh-century stupas and shrines had been casually “repaired” with slapdash twentieth-century brickwork. Historians and preservationists, the folks at UNESCO, they were all horrified. Bagan might have been a World Heritage Site if not for its crappy and widespread masonry fixes.
But Burma’s Buddhism stipulated that one accrued merits from building one’s own pagodas and stupas, and so it was in nobody’s best interest to spend a disproportionate amount of time, money, and concern on pagodas and stupas built by someone else. If you weren’t going to get credit toward nirvana, what was the point? It was crass by Western standards and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was witnessing a tragedy, but, then again, it came from a genuine belief about priorities, about the things that held weight in this short, terrestrial existence of ours. It made me think about what mattered to me.
Buddhism taught freedom from material objects, which, of course, is why it’s so widely adored by the shopping-obsessed West, but here was an instance of its converse: Why spend too much time worrying about what happened to these old piles of brick? The government knew that tourists wanted to see the ancient structures, and therefore they had some monetary value, but wouldn’t the tourists prefer to see artifacts that weren’t crumbling? Enter the repair crews. (And when it came to anything outside of filling its own coffers, the military junta was cheap. It was no surprise they hadn’t sprung for UNESCO-certified restoration.)
Maybe some or all of the same forces had been in play during the whole trip—the poorly kept archives, the indifference to historical records, the absence of my grandfather’s photo on the principal’s wall—and were at work again when it came to the room I was presently standing in. I tried hard to reconcile these spiritual, political, and economic realities, but I realized I was just too deep into this epic voyage to find a meaningful bridge to my heritage to let it all go now. It was, in the end, somewhat devastating that all the things I’d hoped to find—echoes and shards of some life we’d once had that I might use to conjure a connection—had been lost or repainted or thrown out on the street or papered over.
The Anawmar Art Group told us it was planning to complete its rehabilitation of the Secretariat in what its well-coiffed representative estimated was “two to three years.” This seemed effectively impossible unless the Ana
wmar group was somehow able to bend time, or limited themselves to a pretty surface renovation of the massive building.
Somehow, many people—smart people, I might add—were convinced that Anawmar would actually restore Aung San’s assassination room and allow the people of Burma to live with their own history for a few minutes. And that the restoration wouldn’t be crude or ham-handed or somehow further degrade the integrity of the building. And that the spending of tens of millions of dollars on the project would be driven by an unstinting belief in progress, not profit, and history, not vanity. Maybe it was my own jaded and increasingly bitter outlook about Burmese restoration, but the plan seemed implausible. Everyone else seemed okay with that.
I thought about my mother’s email once more as we walked out of the building: This had been our anchor, she’d written to me. It had been left to bats and dogs and potentially shady art world denizens, but the Secretariat was still standing. I could take issue with the state of affairs across the board, but at least I had seen these places, slid my hand down the same balustrade that my mother had as a little girl, hand in hand with her father.
The Wesleyan Methodist mission school of the 1920s no longer existed, but I’d put foot to ground in Mandalay, the city where my grandmother lost her first teeth and learned how to read. I never found my mother’s birth certificate, and my grandmother’s dorm hall had been repainted and replastered, and Aung San’s bullet holes were no longer visible, but I had learned something about my heritage and my people and my relationship to both, which came as a surprise.
These were not eureka moments, nor any of that immediately tangible heritage recovery stuff I’d arrived in Burma hoping to experience. Connecting back to my people was more complicated than a series of meaningful encounters over exotic noodles and nostalgic tours of former stomping grounds, as it turned out. But after all the searching and seeking and cajoling and sneaking around, I managed to get a glimpse of the past (our past!) in its most unlikely and unusual iterations. I had—however impossibly—felt the vibratory echoes of my family’s history.
Still, I was going to be angry about Burma and dislike a lot of it, just as I had gotten angry about our family history, and disliked a lot of that, too. I questioned decisions made by the Burmese people and thought—in many cases—that they were stupid and unwise ones. I felt compromised and confused. And now I just wanted to go home, where my connection to place and people was unquestioned, where things were less heavy and less fraught with the emotional weight of loss. And home, for me, was America.
I’d stepped foot where my people had lived and breathed and taught and fought—but what of that astronaut without a base station? Here I’d visited a new planet, but I hadn’t found an old home. There was no recognition like the one you hear from those who’ve traveled the galaxy—that moment when they spy Earth from thousands of miles away, peering through that tiny glass portal of the space shuttle and know, with ten thousand percent certainty: That’s home, and that’s where I belong.
Maybe, then, it was time to try the other side of my knotted family tree, the all-American one whose more distant branches had lately grown even more gnarled, the Catholic intertwined (maybe) with the Jewish.
I’d gone east—so now it was time to go west.
*1 The Burmese, including my family, have a preternatural obsession with education degrees. To get a PhD is to be nearer to God, closer to nirvana. When I was growing up, my grandmother always used to specify that so-and-so was a “medical doctor,” rather than the (presumed) doctor of letters. “Medical doctors” were equally impressive, and the expectation was that everyone should aspire to be a doctor of some kind.
*2 In fact, I am sure: His father did not sign it.
*3 Sorry, Chris. Desperate times and all that.
*4 The children—my six-year-old mother and her four-year-old brother—were not advised of their parents’ yearlong sojourn, and were left with their aunt and uncle and given no explanation. “They were happy to have them,” was my grandmother’s assessment. My mother is still outraged to this day.
*5 Mohinga is the national noodle dish of Burma, sort of the Burmese answer to pad thai.
*6 The takeover of the Burmese economy by the Chinese was cause for consternation, but had the advantage of ensuring wide availability of excellent Chinese food, which was not a bad thing at all.
*7 Than Myint-U was the grandson of Burmese diplomatic legend and former UN secretary-general U Thant. He had also written a few books about Burma, including The River of Lost Footsteps, that most every Burmese person had read or held an opinion about. Generally, he made me terrified about my own half-Burmese inadequacies regarding language, culture, and history.
Thomas Wolfe had it right: You can’t go home again (especially if that home was never yours to begin with). Burma, with its slapdash reconstructed stupas and molding colonial relics, its informal archives of comic books and agitprop, had upended my ideas about what I was looking for. I’d assumed that I could unwind my mother’s immigrant story and return to her roots, comingle myself with the Burmese by exploring our left-behind blood and land, and claim both for my own. I’d hoped I could scavenge the remains of Our Family Before America and find something resonant and true there that would leave me less lonely, more sure of my place in the world.
What I found, instead, was that I was a damn Yankee. By the end of the trip, I was ready for pizza, or, at the very least, soft cheese. I was tired of trying to communicate in Burmese. I was fatigued and angry about the punishing heat on the Tropic of Cancer that made me listless and exhausted. I sounded like a spoiled American brat—maybe because I was one.
Begrudgingly, I conceded that I was not “American” in the way my mother was “American.” She, unlike me, was Burmese first, and then she was American. She lived in the United States, and she was happy to live in the United States, but she was, and would always be, Burmese first—whether she chose to acknowledge this or not. I was not Burmese first, as much as I had hoped to be, as much as I hoped that my Burmese half might compensate for my confused whole. But even if I cared deeply about my mother’s roots, I still couldn’t muster a deep sense of identification with them.
Perhaps I had more in common with immigrants who’d disposed of their earlier selves and histories, and thought, effectively, “So what?” when it came to what their ancestors had left behind.
In other words, immigrants like my father’s family.
* * *
—
Europeans who came to America were drawn to these shining shores in part for liberation, after all. They were looking for the opportunity to become something different than they’d been in the Old World; to shed the constraints that defined the places they fled. Or that was the story, at least.
When they got here, America struggled to integrate each European wave: the German and Irish, the Southern Europeans. The Jews. Each one was accused of diluting the country, of lowering the average IQ, of breeding quickly and without adequate resources, of being cultural usurpers. But nativists eventually found a way, in time, to make sense of these masses yearning to breathe free. One by one, they were tossed into the great melting pot and made American. Or, some might argue, generically white—a critical designation, as it would turn out. The point is, to reap all that America had on offer, European immigrants assimilated into new constructs of identity: one part joining, one part forgetting. We, the children of this cultural amnesia, were now keen to (of all things!) remember, desperate for clues that might lead us back to the very place that our ancestors had left behind.
My father’s family had taken a few elements of their Irish Catholic heritage—the church, the European names, the penchant for dishes involving boiled cabbage—and held on to them in the New World, small keepsakes around which to organize their American identities. They told wistful and probably inaccurate stories about the old days—because to be an American was to
be an immigrant, and it was common understanding that every second- or third-generation immigrant had to be in possession of at least one or two discreet, heartwarming chestnuts from the Old Country. Those keepsakes, in turn, became totems of shared American identity—but that was about it, as far as family history was concerned. They assimilated. And in the process, those elements of their identity—religion, language, and culture—had become “American,” and not alien.
I wondered what got lost in this. In sanding down the differences, something must have been forgotten or thrown away—potentially something of value. With the research I’d done and conversations I’d had, my sensitivity toward the negative space in our family stories had grown. I felt drawn to the thing that might be missing—the thing that might have pointed my family, and me, toward a deeper sense of self and community than anodyne multiculturalism or assimilated identity could ever offer. And for my family, that might have been…membership in the Tribe of Israelites: the Jews.
Were we, really, Jewish? I had rumor and anecdote on my side, but I didn’t have irrefutable proof. Where my mother’s side of the tree had necessitated the unwinding of something irreconcilably exotic—where I worked to find myself in Bagan and Mandalay and Rangoon—my father’s side of the tree required the very opposite approach. Take an inherently basic history and confuse it. Mightily. (Possibly.) Burma had left me feeling that perhaps I was nothing more than simply American—the experience had placed me back at square one solitaire. But my father’s story still offered some redemption from that loneliness: a gang of bearded ancestors, a tribe of one’s own, if you will. It was time to start sleuthing around and bothering strangers for obscure information. Again.