by Alex Wagner
Maybe—but I wasn’t ready to land on that damning conclusion just yet. Instead, U Aung’s words echoed in my head: “It’s very sad in Burma; the generations don’t maintain their previous generation’s work.”
* * *
—
With this loss as motivation, I was increasingly antsy to see as many artifacts as I could before they were tossed out on the street or demolished or otherwise forgotten by nearly everyone. At the top of my bucket list were the old family homes: I would crisscross as much of Upper and Lower Burma as I could, in the hopes of verifying that they existed, proof that we’d really been here. So much had already turned to vapor; here was my chance to savor a remnant of the past before it, too, evaporated. Before I left for Burma, my grandmother had given me vague directions that weren’t much more than a trail of anecdotal bread crumbs: “We lived across the street from Saint Xavier’s church,” she said, “and near my school, the Wesleyan Methodist mission school.” If I asked for any more specifics, my grandmother tended to get a faraway look in her eyes and change the subject because she really didn’t remember much more than that, and anyway I’d be lucky if I remembered half as much as she did by the time I was even forty-five.
Armed with little more than her coordinates, I flew from Rangoon to the ancient capital city of Bagan, and took a boat up the Irrawaddy River to Mandalay with my husband, Sam, my newly wedded partner in crime, recently off a six-year stint in the White House and therefore conveniently blessed with some time to engage in things like taking a boat up the Irrawaddy River, for no reason other than his wife thought it a good thing to do. In addition, Sam was an inveterate traveler who had, among other things, gotten lost in the Malaysian jungle and bartered for fish in Croatia, and so the prospect of a (possibly) daring river adventure must have piqued his interest.
I, meanwhile, thought the boat ride would be romantic, a voyage back in time to the era when the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company had escorted my grandmother and her family out of Rangoon during war. At the outset of the trip, just as we boarded the hulking ship in the warm, dark hours of an early Burmese morning, Sam looked wistfully out a porthole and announced that this reminded him of a trip down the Amazon he’d taken several years prior, a multiday journey wherein he was forced to hunt and kill some sort of Jurassic river animal for dinner. I didn’t want to kill any reptiles, just to commune with the past—to feel the churn of the waters of Burma’s longest river, in the hopes of summoning the ancient vibrations of my family story.
As it turned out, the twelve-hour boat ride was painfully slow and remarkably lacking in scenery—the Irrawaddy in this stretch is no rushing river. She lazes and curves, shallow and silty, through much of the featureless terrain between Bagan and Mandalay, at depths of sometimes merely a few inches. Sam drank approximately seventeen beers over the course of the voyage and fell asleep for many, many hours while I “took notes” and refreshed myself on all of George Orwell’s observations about my mother country. The trip really had only a plate of shipboard noodles cooked by the first mate to recommend itself. I spent much of my time praying for snacks to issue forth from the tiny mess.
While those were good noodles, all of the Burmese associates I ran into later asked why we didn’t just drive. “It’s much faster!” they would say, not accepting this silly desire for nostalgia. And in truth, when we finally stepped away from the sluggish waters of the northern Irrawaddy, I was happy to be in the former capital of Mandalay, smaller than Rangoon but still bustling with industry, thanks to the heavy investment of Chinese business.*6
Mandalay was where my grandmother had lived after her birth in Pakokku (near Bagan) until she was sixteen, when she and her parents decamped for Rangoon and all the glittery things the capital had to offer. One of the only photos from her childhood shows a seven-year-old Mya Mya standing with her siblings and parents in the front yard of a large teak house, saluting her father in awkward fashion, possibly custom when it came to formal Burmese family portraiture.
I wanted to find that house, assuming it was still a house.
The Internet revealed to me that there was one Saint Francis Xavier Church in Mandalay, which I hunted for (and found) because I knew my grandmother’s elementary school, Wesleyan Methodist Mission School, was supposed to be nearby. Sam and I walked around for a few blocks before stumbling upon it and were then shooed away from taking any photos by a very friendly security guard who explicitly shut me down, and did so with a beaming smile. “No!” he enthusiastically called out to me as I held my camera aloft. “No!” (He looked so happy about the denial I had to check twice.)
In the yard of the mission residence next door, I made enough noise poking around the grounds and speaking loudly to Sam about the likelihood or unlikelihood that this was the place my grandmother had gone to school that the headmaster’s daughter, a cheerful and sleepy young woman named Gracie, came out to see what was going on and offered to introduce us to her father, the Reverend Dr. Zaw Win Aung. The reverend later informed me, to my great chagrin, that the original church, mission school, and mission residence had all been destroyed during World War II. This did not bode well for our family house, which had been located within blocks of all these buildings.
My great-great-grandmother, an attendant in the court of King Mindon Min, had purchased the home from one of the queens (there were several of them), an imperious woman who would sell the property only to my great-great-grandmother, presumably because she was already vetted through her years of service. The house, not surprisingly, was located on the outskirts of the palace compound, which was a magnificent teak paean to opulence and the shameless harvest of natural resources. After the British gained full control of the country in 1885 and the last Burmese king was exiled to India, the British took hold of the palace and renamed it Fort Dufferin, effectively converting it into a military frat house, where soldiers lived among the remnants of the palace and generally broke shit. During World War II, both the Allies and the Japanese bombed Mandalay to smithereens. Almost nothing survived.
And yet, I walked and walked and walked that damn neighborhood, looking desperately for this house, even though the chances of it still standing were slim to none. I’d look down at the old photo taken from the front yard, then look up along the streets for anything even vaguely resembling that house—convinced that it had to be standing, somewhere; that history couldn’t keep disappointing me; that all of our time in this country hadn’t simply turned to vapor and ash and dust.
And I think I found it.
Masked by laundry lines and fencing and disrepair, here was an old teak house on a corner, in roughly the right area, with a yard the right size to have once grown hollyhocks and jasmine. There could be no unimpeachable proof, of course. I had to make an independent decision to believe that this was our house, and to further conclude that I was satisfied with this decision. Which was unnerving. All along, I’d thought this journey would offer definition and certainty. But what I was learning was that when it came to heritage, where it concerned identity, there was no hard stop. In fact I would have to decide—on my own—what was enough, what was proof, what was an answer worth accepting. As with the house, I’d have to determine that I’d found what I was looking for: There was not going to be a finish line.
* * *
—
I didn’t stop looking in Mandalay. I went on the hunt to find any place I could, knowing that “finding” was an inherently subjective concept. Back in Rangoon, I had general coordinates for my grandmother’s first apartment in the city, the one that had running water and an English toilet. It was on East Fifty-first Street, and it had been located “around the corner” from the post office. I found the post office, which was (amazingly and impossibly) the same one that had stood in 1933, but all the apartments around it had been refaced or rebuilt.
I knew that I wouldn’t be able to determine exactly which building had been hers, but
I hoped that I’d see some façade or otherwise timeworn structure, one that looked like it could have been hers, and might therefore allow me to imagine it indeed had been. But nothing exuded any sort of lingering scent of our Burmese history; nothing looked as if it had withstood the decades in between the last great war and the present day. The trail was cold. I nearly got run over trying to take pictures of some random street corners and eventually went back to the hotel, where Sam was busy scouring the neighborhood streets for a plate of delicious Shan noodles that would rival the ones we’d had on our float down the Irrawaddy.
After my grandparents returned from their two-year embassy posting in Washington, D.C., my grandfather was made the undersecretary of education in the administration of Prime Minister U Nu—a well-intentioned but unfortunately ineffective leader. A contemporary of Aung San’s, he became a proponent of democracy and democratic ideals in the years following Burma’s independence, but none of this would come to pass in Burma’s tumultuous mid-century climate of civil war and social unrest. When the military coup d’état ousted U Nu’s government in 1962, my grandfather was “demoted” (my mother’s term) to a position as headmaster of the former Saint Paul’s English High School in Rangoon, which was subsequently glamorously renamed Basic Education High School No. 6.
Basic High No. 6 was a sprawling, proto-Hogwarts-style academy, where the children of the British, Burmese, Anglo-Burmese, and Anglo-Indian elite were schooled in preparation for their eventual leadership roles as captains of industry and government. My grandfather took his diminished posting in 1965, and I returned with Geoff nearly fifty years later, to see what was left of this tenure.
The first thing you could say about Basic High No. 6 was that it was pretty far from basic: The structure took up an entire city block and was a magnificent sprawl of marble hallways and turn-of-the-century brickwork, surrounded by giant athletic fields for cricket and football and whatever other sports the men and women of superior lineage liked to play.
But it was clear that time had laid a heavy hand on the school, and that the upkeep had been impossible, given what else was going on in the country. The part of the campus still in use was shabby and in need of repair: Cobwebs and thick soot coated nearly every surface, paint was peeling on the walls, classroom furniture was rickety and mismatched. The part no longer in use looked like a sunken ship. Former classrooms were filled with stacks of broken chairs, discarded sinks, vintage electronics, and piles of nondescript yellowing paper. Geoff and I managed to nonchalantly usher ourselves into the wings of the building not open to the public (security was not particularly tight, which is to say it was nonexistent). The walls were covered in black mold, the cornices and eaves home to pigeons and other noisy birds, the glass windows long ago broken out. Athletic fields had been completely taken over by vines and weeds. It looked fucking haunted.
The school was open that day—apparently students were sitting for some sort of exam that morning—and we found our way to the principal’s office (the only time I had willingly and enthusiastically sought out the principal’s office) to see if U Thant Gyi, my grandfather, had somehow left his mark.
Yu Yu came to meet us and, with her ineffable charm and fluent Burmese, managed to get us into the offices and into the correct room. On the wall of Principal Kyaw Kyaw Tun’s office were older watercolors and newer photos of all the esteemed Burmese headmasters of Basic Education High School No. 6: There were Tun Aung and Captain Ba Hein and Myat Htun.
Kyaw Kyaw Tun was enthused and we were interested. But there was nothing for U Thant Gyi, the first headmaster of the school when the government seized its reins in 1965. Surely there had been a mistake; we asked and asked. We even had Yu Yu come in and ask (again) in more official and therefore intelligible Burmese. But no, there was no trace of U Thant Gyi. Only Wikipedia seemed to remember, on its list of the school’s headmasters since nationalization. There, at the top, my grandfather’s name. But it was nowhere else.
Maybe it made sense: He’d stayed for only one year, after all. The government wouldn’t let U Thant Gyi leave for America with his wife and children, and so he’d stayed behind in his demoted position for only as long as it took him to find a route back to the States. The Library of Congress had already guaranteed safe passage and a new American life for my mother and grandmother and my uncle; he alone needed to find a way out. (He emigrated in 1968 and never looked back.)
But if I was being cynical, it was no coincidence that he’d been wiped from the record. He’d forsaken Burma, and in return, he was ghosted (as far as public record was concerned). Disrepair and overgrowth and black mold notwithstanding, the Burmese government still considered its Basic High No. 6 to be a breeding ground for the country’s leaders, and why would they champion a man who had so cavalierly left this all behind? Here was their retribution.
I thought about it and figured that my grandfather, one of the gentlest and most good-humored men on earth, would probably have laughed, or shrugged it off. They could have their broken-down Burmese public school; he got America, after all. I—the American granddaughter and presumed beneficiary of this decades-old trade-off—would have to satisfy myself with that. (Looking at that wall, I still felt a sense of loss.)
Another day, Geoff and I went to Rangoon University to find my grandmother’s old campus dorm at Inya Hall. We rolled up in a sputtering taxi (there was no other kind) to find that the whole dorm complex had been repainted a flat burnt sienna with a fresh gleaming white trim that made the building look brand-new. The marble floors had been polished, and sunlight was streaming in. Young women—co-eds, I guessed—were chattering on the upper floors. Clean laundry was fluttering on the small balconies, and giggling conversations wafted across the grassy, palm-filled courtyard below. I could almost see and hear what it must have been like to be a student at Rangoon University.
After all the soot and mold and birds-roosting-in-the-cornices that I’d experienced thus far, I hadn’t expected to see any kind of modern-day hustle or bustle. It was disorienting—and somewhat depressing. I talked to Geoff about this sinking and semi-despondent feeling, about how I felt cheated by the spanking rehabilitation, the glimpse into a diorama of living history. As much as all the broken chairs and moldy documents elsewhere were depressing, they’d also felt real: This was what happened with the passage of time. (Time was fairly elastic; one man’s minute was another man’s hour.) In most of what I’d seen so far, there was unadulterated evidence that time had ravaged the landscape. For those who left, this was reaffirming, even if it was tragic (to think of what might have happened to us if we’d stayed!). But the rehabilitation, the erasure of evidence that something chaotic and destructive had gone down, and instead that everything was just as it always was—this seemed to be the worst kind of lie.
We’d grown so accustomed to seeing things exactly how our parents had left them—the weird luxury of decay—that to see a place where time had ticked on, where repairs had been made and indentations fixed, was disappointing. Maybe even distressing. Because people had continued moving forward with their lives. The past had been reclaimed, and there was no part of it left for us. As it turned out, even though we left…maybe we were the ones who’d been left behind.
* * *
—
If there was one place in the whole of Burma where history and tragedy lay largely untouched for half a century, it was the Secretariat building. Here was the place where the father of modern Burma, Aung San, was assassinated (along with six cabinet ministers) on the nineteenth of July in 1947, less than a year before the British Union Jack was lowered for the final time and the Burmese were granted control of their own country.
Aung San’s death was a cataclysmic event, the gunshot that changed the course of a nation. (Imagine if Lincoln had been killed before the end of the Civil War.) When the military staged its coup in 1962, it closed off the Secretariat to public view with wire and locks.
Security guards and packs of wild dogs acted as pretty convincing deterrents to any would-be amateur historians or otherwise snoopy citizens. Word on the street was that the bullet holes were still in the wall of the council chamber, and that the room itself had been made into a shrine. But the rest of it—all sixteen hectares of the complex, the cupolas and domes and wrought iron staircases and parliamentary halls—had been locked away for fifty years, left to the elements and destroyed in sections by cyclones and earthquakes. The Secretariat had become—through neglect and endless gossip—the place of legend, of ghost stories, of conspiracy theories.
Naturally, I wanted in. To see the room where Aung San had died; to examine this perfectly preserved vestige of Burmese history. But not just because, duh, of course any sentient and self-directed detective would want in, but because we had family history in that building, too. (And unlike evidence from all the other disappointing and inconclusive attempts we’d made thus far to revisit that history, this relic was likely intact, if for nothing else than people didn’t generally fuck with roving packs of wild dogs.)
My mother emailed me while I was in Rangoon:
I vaguely remember visits to the Secretariat with Poh Poh [my mother’s father] when I was very young. Distinctly remember walking that long passage, along the balustraded balcony. I don’t know if Poh had his offices there, but the building was among the places that anchored our world.
It was a place that had anchored our world. Maybe it still could.
I set about trying to sort out who could get me in. I knew that the Yangon Heritage Trust, run by a scholar/author/shot caller named Than Myint-U,*7 was working with the Burmese government to determine what, exactly, to do with the building. It was a prime specimen of colonial architecture, one that hadn’t been messed with in a very long time, and was ready (according to the government) to be repurposed.
