by Alex Wagner
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Did she not know that the cooperative societies were…a disaster? That they were at the center of Burma’s own little financial bailout? Did we not know our people were failures? Or did we just not care? I cared, in part because America was going through its own reconciliation of Financial Sins, and it pained me to think of my great-grandfather as an actor who’d brought so many Burmese to their knees, courtesy of a failed banking system. (I, unlike the British assessors, was not ready to pin the blame on a certain, unavoidable character flaw in the Burmese people. The system itself seemed pretty faulty and badly managed.) More than that, though, I was both incredulous that this history had been entirely hidden until now (it seemed painfully ignorant to crow about a title if you didn’t understand the work), and also, in some strange way, relieved by the humiliation. It made U Myint Kaung real, in a way that all the other stories about him had not: He had tried and he had failed. Just like I had, just like everybody who populated the world in which I lived. Shame was hard, but it was also humanizing. Much more so than my grandmother’s icky and ingratiating Legend of the Dodge, this family story, based in shame and disgrace, made U Myint Kaung a real person.
My grandmother may have been too busy to follow the specifics of her father’s career flameout, given the fact that she was off studying and flirting with nine-fingered suitors at Rangoon University. But discovering the epic shitstorm that was the Cooperative Societies Experiment definitely illuminated U Myint Kaung’s later decision to leave behind all of his worldly possessions and head up to the monastery to devote the remainder of his life to Buddhist meditation. This was a common practice in Burmese society—the pursuit of an existence devoid of materialism—but it was made all the more poignant after the cratering of his lifelong endeavor. He was done with the material world.
Maybe he was now convinced that the path to redemption lay in selflessness, in commitment to the community. Those British officers knew a lot about making shoes and whiskey cake, but they didn’t understand his fellow countrymen, and they certainly weren’t in any position to make pronouncements about the true nature of the Burmese.
My mother later told me that after the whole system of cooperatives came crashing down, U Myint Kaung’s wife—who came from wealth and had invested all her money in the co-ops—lost all of her savings. Aghast and inconsolable, she confronted her husband: “Why didn’t you warn me about what was to happen?” she demanded. According to my mother, he reasoned (quite phenomenally): “If the workers and the farmers did not know, then why should you?”
If he was not good at his job—if he was guilty of professional malpractice—U Myint Kaung appeared to have been an intensely moral person. For me, he exists only in anecdote, and therefore these stories—told mostly by my grandmother—are all I have to divine his motivations. But I think he must have been scarred by what happened to his country’s economy and what he had done to precipitate its failure. I also believe that he held on to the ideals that brought him to this line of work in the first place, up until the end of his life. That became especially clear when I considered one particular story about him that I had known very well even before I embarked on the project to figure out who my people were. My grandmother had repeated it countless times—and each time she did, it gave me a sense of pride.
After having relinquished his ties to the family and spent some unspecified amount of time at the monastery, U Myint Kaung got word that his wife had begun the unsavory practice of moneylending—making small loans and then charging interest, the very thing he had worked to eradicate (or at least marginalize) in setting up the farmers’ cooperatives in Upper Burma. She had, after all, lost most of the money she once had.
From my grandmother’s recollection: “He marched down the hill to our home and said to my mother: ‘Are you starving? Do you want for anything?’ She protested—vaguely—and then begrudgingly admitted she did not want for anything, nor was she starving.
“Well, then,” he said, “Don’t bargain so much.”
And he turned and went back up the hill. She never charged interest again.
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While the British (and Burmese) worked to stabilize an economy that was on the precipice of financial collapse, the seams stitching together Burma’s patchwork union had more than begun to strain. To be clear, Burma is one country in the same way that Iraq is one country, which is to say it’s not. It—like Iraq—is a collection of contested land that’s been fought over for decades, with some years bloodier than others. Burma’s borders were drawn arbitrarily over time and in the aftermath of battle, by conquerors and colonialists alike. The tensions between the Chin and the Shan, the Karen and the Kachin—as well as the wealthy Bamah and the British ruling class—while already significant, were under remarkable strain in the waning years of colonialism, right as my grandmother came of age.
I knew this, growing up, mostly because Burma’s war within a war—the ethnic tensions that had exacerbated the military campaign to subdue the country and harvest its riches, both human and environmental—was a part of discussions about the problems plaguing the country. And yet, for whatever reason, I had never seen this truth as a hindrance to my claim of being “Burmese” and the secret pride that my tribe, our tribe, was the one for whom the country was named.
For a few years in the late aughts, I ran a nonprofit organization focused on combating international human rights violations around the world. As part of this work, I went to the Thai-Burma border to visit refugee camps where entire generations of children were languishing: This was the cost of Burma’s forever war with itself. Ethnic minorities had been uprooted and forced to the margins, whether because of intertribal conflict or (more usually) targeted campaigns of violence launched by the military regime. The camps were sprawling cities, without adequate resources for a population that would live in them for years on end. And yet, amid this heartbreak and turmoil, I couldn’t forget the fact that these Burmese were not Bamah Burmese—they were Kachin or Chin or Shan or Karen or another tribe. And though I felt terrible for them, was angry at the deplorable situation and resolute about holding someone responsible for it, I couldn’t help but notice a sneaking and unshakable sense of ethnic superiority within myself.
My people were not in these camps, after all. They were not forsaken into misery and squalor, but had instead escaped it when they could, because of their resources and education and class. This was evidence of the powerful narcotic of identity: how quickly, and easily, one could go from pride to superiority, from celebration of self to dismissal of others. Even as I recognized this, even as I grew older and more acutely aware of how vigilant one needed to be in pushing back against the dark impulse to separate Us from Them, there was still something in me that clutched at supremacy, however subconsciously, as I thought about Burma’s miseries. The distinction was a refuge—and who didn’t want a refuge?
I was trying to find meaning in connecting my family story to blood and land, but blood was precisely the thing dividing the land, carving it into subgroups and territories. Blood was the thing that would continue to fuel division, to speed the dissolution of society and break apart the Burma that my mother and grandmother could still dream so vividly about. It was the seed of our despair.
As it turned out, my grandmother’s allegiance to Burma was tied not to the country, necessarily, but to her slice of it, her ethnic subgroup, her class. Even after the British lowered their Union Jack for the last time on January 4, 1948, Burma’s tribal strife continued to escalate, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Our family wasn’t in the hills of Shan State or pushing off the Karenni Christian army (far from it), but simmering race tension could be found right in our kitchen. Quite literally simmering.
“We had an Indian cook who made the most delicious curry,” my grandmother wistfully recalled. By way of a coda, she offered—always—this caveat:
“And he robbed us blind.”
From these aromatic and lusty recollections, I could very nearly taste this curry. For most of my adolescence, when I was confronted by soggy grilled cheese sandwiches and limp tater tots in the school cafeteria, my mother offered impossible childhood stories of her own: the family driver dropping off stacked tiffin carriers during her school lunchtime, small aluminum containers filled with piping hot vindaloos and dals, all prepared by the same masterful-if-greedy hand. But the story always ended in the same refrain: He robbed the family blind! Oh, this cruel price we had to pay, unspecified rubies for untold biryanis. It was an impossible choice, but there was only one to make. The cook was dismissed, taking with him all those curries and vindaloos—and what a loss this was. Replacements were hired, but no one could replicate that harmony over the stove. That Indian cook! Who was he? No one ever mentioned his name, only the dishes he prepared.
From the outset of the Indian-Burmese commingling, many Burmans, including my grandmother, referred to Indians as kala. The word’s origins may be from the Sanskrit word kula—meaning “caste man”—or kala, for “black man.” Or it may be from the Burmese word ka la—the term for “coming from overseas.” Even after half a century in the United States, my grandmother always referred to Indians as kalas, which we American-born offspring giggled at but didn’t quite understand. As it turns out, she might have been calling them, basically, house negroes.
According to public health and humanitarian professional Nance Cunningham, a prominent scholar on the Burmese language, most explanations for the word that you hear nowadays “are colored by prejudice.” Cunningham offered that kala might mean “coolie”—but then doubled back on that by noting that there already happens to be the word ku li in Burmese. Further, a chair in Burmese is often referred to as a “coolie sit”—so the word “coolie” was also already in play. In the end, we concluded that kala had something to do with blackness—a racist designation with assuredly classist suggestions.
By the late 1980s and ’90s and the early aughts, my grandmother had officially lived in America for thirty, forty, fifty years. She had gay friends dating back to the 1970s—friends with whom she drank cocktails after work at the Library of Congress, friends who were hers for life (most of them died before she did). She spoke glowingly of the young black men who delivered groceries to her small one-bedroom on Capitol Hill in the 1960s, right after she had arrived in the States, and as she retold these stories, over time they went from being “young black men” to “young African American men.” She fully grasped the implications of the language around identity, and she understood the social merits conferred by having gay male friends in the disco era, of engaging with young black men during Jim Crow.
So she knew well the power of identification, especially as it informed the American hierarchy of the enlightened, one in which educated white liberals were allegedly at the top of the pyramid, and, among the immigrant classes, Asians were often at the very bottom: reclusive, tribal, still clinging to the ways of the Old World. She was not going to be lumped in with any suspicious Korean shop owners of the Rodney King era, nor would she be confused with those country Chinese who didn’t understand nappy hair. She went out of her way to promote her most Western acceptance of those two pilloried subsets: sexual and racial minorities. This, as much as her fluency in English and predilection for cosmopolitans, was hard evidence that she had assimilated, and was therefore somehow greater than the sum of her own parts. In her seeming tolerance, ironically, she moved closer to a certain white, liberal American ideal.
And yet, long after she received her American passport, she still called Indian associates, waiters, and friends kalas (mostly behind their backs). This term was usually dispatched with a smile, and because of this, her discreet bigotry had the veneer of a sort of delicate charm. The in-laws and cousins and grandchildren excused her use of it, in most cases pleading ignorance. Or we dismissed it as a vestige of home rather than indicative of some deep-seated racial animus. My mother, more acutely aware of how inappropriate it was, would shush my grandmother in Burmese after every utterance, while my uncle would scowl and let out a disapproving bark. But it never stopped her, really. In this I had found, whether I liked it or not, another catch in the family narrative.
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I heard echoes of my grandmother’s awkward behavior in a classic tale ritually recounted by urban liberal white folks every year: the trip back home for the holidays, where our enlightened white friend’s beloved uncle or grandparent lets loose a racial epithet over dessert, poisoning the atmosphere. It was not easily laughed about, because that kind of racism—white racism against black people, immigrants, or Jews—was connected to the worst of American and Western history, to pogroms, to slavery and lynching, to genocide. For some reason my grandmother’s vague slurring of Indians seemed more benign—embarrassing more than genuinely disturbing. Until I examined that snag a little more closely.
Her general predisposition toward Indians as untrustworthy outsiders, a race to be skeptical of, became less acceptable and certainly less charming once I looked at the blood-soaked history of our Burmese intolerance. In trying to better understand Burma and race, and just how offensive the word kala might have been, I picked up a small used library book from the University of California, Irvine. An out-of-print book, The Indian Minority in Burma by N. R. Chakravarti, is written with a highly critical eye toward the Burmese, as if to dispel my ideas about bigotry being discreet. In a rebuke to what I had always thought of as my grandmother’s funny little cultural aversion, it outlines fifty years of subjugation and violent oppression of the Indians at the hand of the Burmese.
For context: There were a lot of Indians in Burma when my family arrived in Rangoon in the 1930s. A whole lot more than I realized: Rangoon, in fact, had become a mostly Indian city. I didn’t—couldn’t—have known this, because in her recollections, my grandmother never once discussed the city or its inhabitants. She always spent much more time on her specific, cloistered world of teatime bananas and English-language newspapers.
For many years, it was assumed that Burma would become a Chinese state. According to the colonial historian Sir George Scott, “Unless some marvellous upheaval of energy took place in the Burman character, the Chinese were almost certainly destined to overrun the country to the exclusion of the native race.”16 Ah, but the lazy Burmese never did cede their country to their northern, ostensibly far more industrious neighbors (that would come approximately one hundred years later). In fact, it was the Indians who effectively colonized their fellow colonized:
In 1872, Indians were 16 percent of Rangoon residents.
By 1901, they were 50 percent. Burmans made up only 33 percent of the city.17
Indians were propelled by poverty back home, and encouraged to migrate east by an immigration policy that miraculously managed to infuriate the native-born Burmese population for its lack of protections for them and punish the newly arrived Indians, thanks to a lack of protections from the Burmese. The Indians migrated in vast numbers: In 1922, 360,000 of them migrated to Burma. By the 1930s, Indians owned the capital city: They built Rangoon; they ran its businesses and they conducted its trade. The Indian Chettiars already had a monopoly on moneylending, and by virtue of that played an instrumental role in the agricultural sector, but they dominated the trade and banking industries, too.
Still, in much larger numbers—perhaps as much as 99 percent of their country’s immigrant population—Indians were Burma’s laboring class. They harvested crops; they mined silver and lead; they ran ships up and down the Irrawaddy; they moved earth and pulled rickshaws. They tailored suits and made dresses. In 1931, the second-largest occupation (not including semiskilled or unskilled workers) held by Indian migrants was domestic service. That year, census records tell us that 11,242 male Indians were employed as house help—and at least one of them worked for our family.
For their role in the engine room of the Burmese economy, the Indian laboring class (unsurprisingly) got little in the way of respect or security. Many were brought over the border by unscrupulous labor contractors known as maistries—sort of proto-coyotes of the nineteenth century who hauled their cargo over the Bay of Bengal in subhuman conditions. Here’s Gandhi’s description of what seemed like an impossibly wretched situation on the sea route to Burma, the so-called Golden Land:
There are for the use of these 1,500 passengers two tiny bathrooms and twelve latrines….This gives an average of one latrine to 75 passengers and one bathroom to 375 passengers. There is only a sea-water tap in the bathrooms, but no fresh water tap….There is a sort of a running corridor in front of each set of latrines….Dirty water and urine from the latrines flow into this corridor….Foul water continues to roll to and fro on the floor with the rolling of the ship….The lowermost deck is nothing better than a black hole. It is dark and dingy and stuffy and hot to the point of suffocation.18
Indians seeking promise in Burma paid hefty fees for this scummy, sewage-filled experience. It didn’t necessarily get a whole hell of a lot better after landfall, either. Upon disembarkation, most immigrants entered the very bottom of the food chain: They earned abysmally low wages and lived in hellish setups, crammed as they were into squalid, disease-infested lodging houses that were “perennially flooded with rain or tidal waters or with stagnant pools of sullage waste.”
