by Alex Wagner
“We are being raped in every town, we are being sexually harassed in every town, being ganged up and bullied in every town,” he announced to The Guardian in 2013. “In every town, there is a crude and savage Muslim majority.”30
Never mind that Muslims account for only an estimated 5 percent of Burma’s population. (Buddhists are the overwhelming majority at 90 percent.) Wirathu’s followers have done their best to shrink that percentage through slaughter: One particularly gruesome rampage at a Muslim boarding school killed thirty-two students and four teachers. The most persecuted among them, the Muslim Rohingyas, have lived for decades as landless, stateless citizens in the southwest Rakhine State—where they languish in squalid camps, and are unable to vote in elections to perhaps choose representatives who might take into consideration their plight and lift them from this deplorable existence.
In 2012, after the rape of a Buddhist woman by an allegedly Muslim assailant, ethnic tensions exploded: The Rohingya became targets, and 140,000 of them ended up in camps for internally displaced persons.31 By 2016, the Burmese military was in an all-out assault against the Muslim minority: In one particularly brutal incursion, 1,500 Rohingya homes were burned. An estimated 65,000 of them fled to Bangladesh at the end of the year, forced out by violence, systematic rape, and destruction.
And by 2017, the Burmese government was engaged in what one top UN official called “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”32 Rohingya villages were being burned, their residents raped, killed, and otherwise hunted. The depravity was not to be overstated: Babies were being thrown into fires, stabbed to death—as their mothers watched, gang-raped and left for dead. Whole families were being extinguished, live grenades thrown through the front door. As a result, more than 400,000 Rohingya fled Burma—desperate to survive.33
In the eyes of certain international observers, this systematic and sanctioned violence is often explained as Burma’s (deeply troubled) effort to stave off Muslim jihad: The Burmese government—and indeed figures like Wirathu—are fighting against the encroachment of Islam in Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka), lands that were formerly Buddhist territories. This is their mission to secure ancestral lands, or at the very least act as a bulwark against a rising tide of violent extremism (never mind the twisted irony). But—as I discovered in my running of the bullshit comb through history—wasn’t this Buddhist cleansing mostly a contemporary expression of long-held bigotry against Indian Muslims?
Most uncomfortably, I began to rethink my family’s very own brand of Burmese nationalism—which, okay, had nothing to do with rioting or marauding or any bloodlust that I could pinpoint, but was firmly rooted in the same nationalism championed by the heroes of the movement who overthrew the British. My grandmother had long been a vocal advocate for Burmese democracy. She attended monthly protests and organizational meetings, regularly taking minutes for a group of exiled elders who were intent on one day regaining power, once the military had been ousted or had surrendered in a bloodless coup. She read news from the home front fanatically and held strong opinions about what was happening back home, reserving her most pronounced disgust for the military leaders who had destroyed her country beyond recognition. The actual battlefront may have been on the other side of the world, but she considered herself a soldier nonetheless.
The leader of this de facto movement, the spiritual guide in both Burma and abroad, was (and is) a woman named Aung San Suu Kyi: daughter of the military demi-god Aung San, who led the Burmese in the struggle for independence from the British and for whom there is a national celebration (even now) every year on January 4. From birth, Daw Suu—as she is known—has been an object of fascination to all Burmese, given her lineage, but she took on mythic qualities after the 1988 uprising, when she happened to be in the country (she had been living in England with her family) caring for her ailing mother. Witnessing the events unfold around her, she evolved into a de facto leader of the resistance movement, making speeches and writing what would become the seminal texts in the pro-democracy movement.
She was subsequently placed under house arrest, where she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 (and was unable to accept it, lest she leave the country and never be allowed back in again). In the intervening years, her husband died and her children grew up motherless, but Aung San Suu Kyi remained unbreakable. She would not leave her Burma. She forsook her family, because in this struggle, she understood herself to be more than a woman, a wife, a mother: She represented the hope of freedom for the Burmese people. She was known—to all of us—simply as “the Lady.” The great leaders of peace and reconciliation—Mandela and Tutu and Havel—all claimed her as one of their own, and so she was.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s democracy, born from the independence politics of her father, was the accepted standard in our household. What she did, we did. What she said, we said. And yet, as it concerned these roots, I knew quite little. I just assumed that because the military dictatorship was so impossibly villainous, the woman who resisted them against all odds was necessarily righteous and infallible.
But what of her political ideology, her ties to a certain Burmese nationalism that remained celebrated into the current day—even by said impossibly villainous military dictators? Aung San, her father, had been assassinated just as Burma was coming into its own, when his leadership might have been put to the test. I knew so little of this history, and how it might inform the movement that my family was now a part of.
As is often the case when it comes to colonialism and its demise, the nationalists were the ones who sounded the battle cry of independence. Aung San was their hero. He led the negotiations with the British to return the country to its rightful owners, but Aung San’s political associates were also key players in that ugly chapter of 1938 in which scores of Indians were targeted and killed.
Aung San himself may not have been a xenophobic murderer, but he was a signatory to Thein Pe’s pamphlet, the one that made no secret of the thorough disgust felt by the Burmese toward the Indians. It wasn’t called Burma for the Burmese…but it might as well have been. The Indians were a pox, a metastasizing disease that threatened the whole of Burma:
Betel-quid shops were owned by the Indians….Textile shops were owned by the Indians; the big bazaars were owned by the Indians; the wholesale trades were run by the Indians; shoe-repairers were Indians; the hosiery-factories were owned and manned by the Indians; sand-soap was sold also by the Indians; the luxurious perfumed soap was also sold by the Indians; the capitalist money-lenders were Indians; Indians; Indians; Indians—everywhere Indians—nothing but Indians. The darawans were Indians; the High Court Judges were Indians; the compounder (dispensers) were Indians; the Medical Superintendents were Indians; jail warders were Indians; and the Prison Officers were also Indians. Wherever you go you will find Indians, nothing but Indians.34
It was like Invasion of the Body Snatchers! Indians were everywhere!
Thein Pe—and, by association, Aung San—made note of the “approximately one million Indians in Burma. As our population is approximately only twelve millions, there is a ratio of 12 Burmans to 1 Indian. It is really alarming.” (Emphasis mine, again.)
It was straight out of a right-wing super PAC ad, this fearmongering, this Us-versus-Them-ing that was happening, sermonized through pamphlets and speeches. And it wasn’t just some nefarious political operative with a penchant for sensational YouTube videos who was doing this, it was the leader of Burma’s revolution, the hero who everyone in my family revered, the guy I’d known about (if not specifically) since birth, the father of the freedom-fighting woman on whose behalf my grandmother had protested on all those Sundays on the hot pavement outside of the Burmese embassy in Washington, D.C.
In the wake of assassinations (primarily Aung San’s) and power grabs immediately following independence, Burmese nationalism continued its fever-induced mutation. Rabid nationalism expelled the Baghdadi Jews and
Parsis and all remaining Indians from Rangoon and Mandalay. It reengaged one of the world’s longest-running civil wars within the ethnic tribes. Businesses, banks, schools all were forced to adapt: International owners, investments, and curricula were all excised. Nationalism basically shut the country down and stole its sunlight. The British were always implicated in Burma’s near century of misfortune, but what about the Burmese who pushed them out?
This dangerous and deadly self-regard did not end when the military junta eventually ceded (at least half of its) power to a democratically elected government, either. Aung San’s daughter, the very same icon my grandmother had championed, was now, decades later, turning a blind eye (at best) to the systematic execution and persecution of her fellow countrymen, the Rohingya. Daw Suu, now in control of Burma’s government (though constitutionally barred from officially becoming its prime minister), reacted defiantly when faced with news reports that the Rohingya were being targeted en masse and fleeing the country in staggering numbers. “There have been allegations and counter-allegations,” the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate insisted in late September 2017. “We have to make sure those allegations are based on solid evidence before we take action.”35
She pointed to attacks launched by an armed local group calling itself the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) on Burmese police outposts in the region, limited in number and scope but deemed, by her, to be “acts of terrorism.” Was this the justification for a military response that displaced nearly half a million people? Was this the same woman who had been held up as a paragon of justice and human rights just a few years prior?
Most disturbing (and for me, at least, most unbelievable) was the reaction to this modern-day violence and upheaval by the Burmese themselves. One report described the response in Rangoon following Aung San Suu Kyi’s questionable commentary that year. Her words were “met with applause and cheers from large crowds [in the city] who had gathered to watch live on large outdoor screens amid a party atmosphere.”36
Daw Suu may have been out of touch with the international community where it concerned the Rohingya, but she was apparently very much still in favor with her fellow Burmese—they agreed with her. Buddhist nationalism was hopelessly intertwined with the religious and ethnic hatred that had plagued Burma when her father was alive (and probably well before that). No one knew any better than they had nearly a century ago.
We, as a family, had always maintained that the violence and insanity in Burma was…violent and insane, which is why my grandmother could be found in front of the Burmese embassy for so many years, which is why she maintained a steady grip on political news out of Burma, which is why she situated herself at the nexus of the exiled pro-democracy movement, rallying for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi. “Those people!” she would say, in reference to arbiters of her country’s decline, too angry or frustrated to summon an adjective to describe their evil, their incompetence. But weren’t those people us, in some ways?
I had always assumed we were in no way implicated in Burma’s destruction, its internecine killings and brutal subjugations. We had left, therefore we were exempt from examining whether we, too, might have harbored some of the same exclusionary, misguided ideas about Burman superiority—the delusion that allowed a Nobel Laureate to look the other way when ethnic cleansing was happening in her backyard. That sort of behavior, that strain of poison, had always been understood to be someone else’s and not ours—despite the fact that those behaviors helped shape our very identity—the identity I was so eager, now, to explore and celebrate, to reignite within my own life.
The profile we had drawn for ourselves was in direct opposition to that of those who’d stayed behind: Burma was repressed, calcifying, broken…but we were not. We read the newspapers and studied French and spoke English, but we never stopped to think that these delicious fruits were in some way linked to a very sad harvest, from seeds that we had somehow helped sow. Our family remembered when Burma was the rice bowl of Asia, but not what we had done to precipitate its decline. Instead, we mourned the glorious past and longed for it once again, a luxurious thing to do from the other side of the planet.
But when I’d begun peeking into the spaces between the lacquer boxes and law degrees, what I discovered…was turmoil. My grandmother’s gentilities belied real problems: deep-seated animus and moral hazards, violence and economic calamity. Not just Burma’s, but our own. Aung San Suu Kyi, whose beatific face decorated mugs and T-shirts and keychains, stuff I’d dutifully smuggled back home to show my friends in the West, had turned out to be a fraud. It was like looking in a treasure box only to find the bones of a skeleton. This was the first time it occurred to me that the stories we had told ourselves—and indeed believed—were just that: stories. The truth, as it turns out, was complex (it always is), but more than that, it was fractured, like a stained-glass window that had shattered into tiny pieces and was nearly impossible to put back together.
Up until this point, our story of success had been a necessary and constant rebuke to the narrative of Burmese collapse. But now, as an American (as we all were), I could finally look back and realize that, lo and behold, we had failed, too.
The fundamental problem with discovering skeletons in your closet is the impossibility of putting them back in there. Unearth the disturbing lurking among the familiar, and its very likely that you’ll keep looking for other, possibly more disturbing things—that you’ll find yourself strangely and revoltingly eager to see how many bones pile up. Maybe I was just unusually self-punishing, but the revelations about my family history made clear (to me, at least) that I needed to go back to the source of the conflict and confusion: I needed to go to Burma.
I had a very specific mission in mind: I was coming for my mother’s birth certificate, written—as family lore would have it—on a palm leaf, per Buddhist tradition, and left to rot in some unnamed corner of the Burmese archives (maybe) for three-quarters of a century. My mother could be creative with her birthdate (a skill I, too, was perfecting with each passing year), but this recovery was not a bid to prove her right or wrong. It was mostly so that I could reaffirm for her (for us), a birthright that had been dimmed by immigration and naturalization, globalization and Westernization, time and distance. I wanted to give her a piece of home, something that was undiluted by all the history and mileage that had come after.
This trip to Burma wouldn’t be my first: I’d done that on New Year’s Day 2008, and I’d dragged my mother along with me. The evening newscasts in 2007 had been filled with images of bloodied Burmese monks protesting the brutality of the ruling military regime, and I’d decided that we could no longer sit on our gentrified American haunches, numbly watching CNN. So we’d packed our bags and made a three-day pilgrimage back to her birthplace, careful to stay in family-run guesthouses so as not to funnel dollars to the evil military government, ever-vigilant about keeping a low profile, silently raising our fists in protest as we sped past the home of Aung San Suu Kyi, who at that point was still under house arrest.
It was a heartbreaking trip. My mom hadn’t been back to Rangoon since she’d left nearly forty years prior. I remember sitting on the plastic tile floor of our room at the Queen Shin Saw Pu Hotel one night as the tinny local loudspeakers blared an announcement in Burmese. The night sky was dark like pitch, and the fluorescent lights in our room made us both look wan and slightly seasick. We’d visited all of our relatives who’d remained in Burma and made offerings at all the pagodas, but here it was only day two and we had nowhere else to go. My mother didn’t recognize what had happened to her city, and all those wistful memories she’d had—the frangipani blossoms and palm leaf umbrellas—seemed to have vanished against the rancid poverty and buckled sidewalks. I couldn’t imagine coming home and feeling like a stranger, and so I didn’t hold it against her when she said she wanted to go back to Thailand.
This time, I wasn’t returning to Burma because I felt guilt
y or particularly fired up about bearing witness to whatever political and moral savageries were being perpetrated against the citizens of the country. Aung San Suu Kyi’s house arrest had ended, and anyway, I’d gotten new perspective on her and her father’s nationalist tendencies. A new and quasi-democratically elected government was to be installed in Parliament—the first in over half a century—and the United States had reopened trade relations. Political prisoners were being released. Things, maybe, were beginning to look up.
So I would find her birth certificate, yes, but I was also going to Burma in search of some magnificent and elusive personal connection. So much of my research into our family history had left me feeling adrift, confused, slightly chilled—in the interest of rounding out our family portrait and filling in its details, I had inadvertently changed its composition entirely. I would take one more shot at trying to connect to my blood via the land itself. I would go to the place, set foot on soil, breath the air, and experience a life so different from my American one that it would surely force some sort of epic revelation born of unseen connection, some meaningful intimacy, some sense of belonging, however fraught. Right? I mean that was my intention, at least.
I was not alone in my decision to make a heritage voyage. All over the world, (relatively prosperous) second- and third-generation immigrants were returning to their ancestral homes to hold what can best be termed an Experiential Séance, in which the ghosts of ancestors past would come alive through the touring of homes, monuments, cemeteries, castles, distilleries, and the like. In Ireland, you could take a chauffeured tour of the fifteenth-century Bunratty Castle or have a tipple in Cork—a veritable Angela’s Ashes expedition that was sure to return you back home with a keener, more tactile understanding of your left-behind blood.
