by Alex Wagner
Mindon Min, according to these texts, was a shrewd leader who never accepted the word of his courtiers as truth and therefore had spies everywhere. According to historians, they included “monks, queens, princes, princesses, ladies-in-waiting, senior and junior officials, members of the ahmudan class [crown service groups], holy men, nuns, medicine men, masseurs and barbers.” It was Homeland, if Homeland had been set in a palace compound in northern Burma.
Among the cohort of men and women who made it their duty to attend to the whims of Mindon Min and his four wives was my grandmother’s grandmother, an attendant to the court. In our family, recounting this fact was always accompanied by the communal basking in hushed glory, but as I discovered in a listing of the various personages…there were a lot of attendants at Mindon Min’s court.1
PERSONAL ATTENDANTS IN THE COURT:
35 pages who carried the royal insignia on state occasions
40 royal tea servers
60 bearers of the royal betel box and other personal utensils
100 royal slipper bearers
40 bearers of the royal white umbrellas
10 lectors who read aloud from religious books
15 grooms of the chamber who acted as messengers
450 gentlemen-at-arms
220 bearers of the royal swords in state processions
155 chamberlains or lictors, a company of men chosen for their height and whose duties also included the policing of the palace
That was a lot of royal slippers. As the British detailed it, Burmese court life was regimented to a very nearly absurd degree—betel box carriers were lower on the ladder than stewards of the royal white umbrellas. Shoes were never to be worn in the presence of the king, and the buttoned-up, bewigged British unsurprisingly found this practice appalling (so much so that this became the topic of intense diplomatic dissent).2 But an accounting of these courtly flourishes tended to distract from the larger point of Mindon Min’s rule: He managed to shepherd Burma through the last, truly golden days of a semi-autonomous state. It sounded like my great-grandmother had worked for a fairly decent boss, insofar as the king was her boss.
After the southern half of Burma fell to the Brits in 1852, Queen Victoria (or at least her advisers) was increasingly interested in expanding her dominion north. Mindon Min, seeing the long fingers of one imperial power closing over his kingdom, reached out for the hand of another, in the hope that partnership with a different—but equally ambitious—crown might serve as insurance against total annexation by the other.
Mindon Min thus attempted to deepen his alliance with the French, the mortal enemy of the British. By 1873, Mindon Min’s corps of diplomats had signed a commercial treaty with France.3 This partnership did not make the British particularly happy, given all the success (if you could call it that) that the French were having in Indochina, subjugating native cultures and introducing baguettes and so forth.
As I was reading this, a fairly small citation in a dusty British history book, I realized there was indeed a connection between Burma and Luxembourg that had nothing to do with me: Both countries had been bystanders in the same feud of nations, tested for loyalty and exchanged as a show of power, like children in a divorce. Daw Thet Kywe and Heinrich Muller had more in common than I’d realized.
As the English saw things, it was time to contain the French, who were making tracks elsewhere on the planet, too, particularly in Europe’s backyard—specifically, Luxembourg. At nearly the same time as Mindon Min’s emissaries were inking that trade deal in Paris, the French were coming off a war over several German states. The French were ambitious and tenacious during this particular period (what imperial power wasn’t?): Remember that French concern over German unification under the Prussians eventually led to the Franco-Prussian War. And just three years earlier, the same two powers had been fighting over control of Luxembourg.
On the other side of the planet, back in Burma, the English saw this French aggression in Europe, coupled with the French advances in Indochina, and they didn’t like it. Nor did they appreciate Mindon Min’s new trade partnership with France.
It didn’t help matters that Mindon Min was getting ever older and more infirm. Sensing his imminent death, his son Thibaw—more accurately, his son Thibaw’s future wife and her mother—orchestrated the coordinated slaughter of any and all royal children who might pose a threat to Thibaw’s ascension to the throne. Fratricide and patricide were not uncommon measures to secure the crown (in Burma and elsewhere*2) but the scale of the slaughter made it one for the Burmese history books. Upon learning of it, the British were both horrified and skeptical, although crown carnage was not exactly an alien concept to them.
British-Burmese bilateral relations under Mindon Min, while largely peaceable, had frayed, especially where the French were in the picture. Where did the new king Thibaw’s sympathies lay? (And also: Was he a sociopath?) Thibaw, increasingly in debt, took a page from what was now a fairly well-worn playbook: He made overtures to the French.
The British had tired of Burmese efforts to play one imperial superpower off another. They issued an ultimatum effectively demanding the king cede sovereignty and hand over Upper Burma…or else.4 Perhaps unsurprisingly, Thibaw—a king who had overseen the slaughter of the entire royal family in order to take the throne—understood the implications of this ultimatum, and refused.
With one side woefully overpowered and outgunned, the Third Anglo-Burmese War did not last long. In fact, its brevity was an expression of its asymmetry, and there’s no substantive accounting of it that doesn’t contain certain pathos, even if you believe that monarchs are tyrants. The end of the Konbaung dynasty—a dynasty that spanned 133 years—was brought about in precisely thirteen days. On November 27, 1886, the British annexed the whole of Burma.*3
It was, apparently, a day like no other.
According to the account of one Brigadier General G. S. White, a British officer in attendance as his country’s flag was raised over Mandalay, where it would hang for nearly half a century: “The sun was pouring a flood of golden light on the last hours of Burman independence.”5 (Of course, the British would see the light as golden.)
Thibaw and his queen Supayalat were sent to spend the rest of their earthly days in India, the other country ruled under the British Raj. The Burmese royal court was no longer, and the men and women who once bore slippers and white umbrellas, carried royal betel nut boxes and acted as messengers, astrologists, and advisers, were killed or cast off to live as common folk in the capital city of Mandalay, outside the palace gates.
Among those who survived this wildly tumultuous period of Burmese court life was my great-great-grandmother, Daw Thet Kywe’s mother. We don’t know exactly when she left the court—whether she stayed on until the end of Thibaw’s reign or left after Mindon Min died; we just know that somehow—as part of the spoils—she was sold that teak house across the street from Saint Francis Xavier Church and around the corner from the Wesleyan Methodist mission school. The very same house I’d seen in photos, and maybe the same house I’d found a few months prior, as I was stumbling around Mandalay on a wild-goose chase for memories.
What dawned on me at this moment, sitting in the climate-controlled stacks of the British Library, was both the absurdity and the synergy of my dueling family histories. If there had never been a bloody European land skirmish in the nineteenth century, there might not have been a Franco-Prussian War. If Henry Wagner and his future father-in-law had never gotten tangled up in the Franco-Prussian War, they might not have left for America.
If there never had been a bloody European land skirmish in the nineteenth century, the British may well have left Upper Burma alone. The Burmese court would have stayed intact, the British would never have gained full control of the country, and the military junta that seized power in a coup and subsequently drove my grandmother and mother of
f to the United States…might never have come to power.
In other words, the Europeans—and their territorial aggressions—had upended two people on opposite sides of the globe, for very different reasons at the very same time. Multiple helixes of my great-grandfather’s and great-great-grandmother’s deoxyribonucleic acid ultimately came to be physically intertwined in the fourth quarter of the twentieth century (that is, through me), but the comingling of fate and fortune had begun much earlier, thanks to the sabers and cannons of Western Europe.
America was the beginning, a new chapter as far as genetic science was concerned—but in a weird way, it was also the conclusion of a story that had begun a long time ago.
*1 Slaughtering scores of relatives is unfortunately not uncommon in the Burmese Game of Thrones. King Thibaw, Mindon Min’s heir, was credited with a coordinated, timed family bloodbath following his ascension to the throne, though in all likelihood it was his future wife and her mother who were behind it. Also, Mindon Min, together with his brother Kanaung, overthrew his half brother to gain control of the throne. So I suppose he wasn’t entirely innocent.
*2 Too many countries in Europe to count, plus lots of Asia and the Mideast (and Africa, Latin America, and Oceania undoubtedly?).
*3 Exactly ninety-one years—to the day—before I was born.
From this globe-encircling history I’d gathered in the overly air-conditioned stacks of the British Library, I concluded that there might be no better testament to an existence in the crosshairs than my DNA itself. The information I’d uncovered had given me a firmer grasp on my family history, but parts of it remained abstract. I’d set foot in the cities where vestiges of our lost lives still lingered, like contrails and poltergeists—yet rather than finding spiritual peace or a sense of belonging, some lifeline that inextricably linked me to my heritage, I had amassed a complicated, confusing (but inarguably more truthful) understanding about who I was, about my people. Still, I had settled on stories that I could only reconstruct by sparse paper trails before they vanished into the mists, and I was forced to imagine important connections and motivations.
But there was another way, less reliant on imagination and decaying paper. It spoke a universal language that could pinpoint me—and only me. It was my genetic makeup: the indelible evidence that bore testament to exactly where I’d come from.
DNA could reveal precisely who my people were—and whether (ahem) there were any more chapters that my family members had glossed over or otherwise deleted from our history. Beyond that, science would tell me exactly how wide—rather than narrow—my identity truly was. The movements of empires, the costs of war, the ambitions of peoples would be mirrored in my blood. I’d know irrefutably where I came from and to whom I (at least technically) belonged—and in a scientifically precise way. No more reliance on chat boards or archivists or reams of godforsaken microfilm: The information was within me! In my saliva and in my veins, I would be revealed as futureface or Cosmopolitan Everywoman or a Jewish Burman.
What would science have to say?
Thanks to technology and its overserved handmaiden “innovation,” there were multiple DNA test services that offered exclamatory, brain-freezingly incredible promises in their online advertisements for this particular aspect of self-questioning: Validate Uncertain Relationships! Confirm Family Lore! Gain a Genealogical Leg Up! and, perhaps most urgently, Determine Your Neanderthal Percentage! I was quite sure that my Neanderthal Percentage was very, very, very low.
At this point in the marketplace search, there were several options for such endeavors—three of the most popular were Family Tree DNA, 23andMe, and AncestryDNA. I didn’t know which one of the myriad, brick-breaking DNA-based ancestry tests might return the most comprehensive information and therefore decided to do several of them. I figured I’d combine the results and determine at least the general coordinates of my heritage, if not the pinpointed locations.*1
On my mother’s side, I wondered how closely the results would correspond with what I’d determined over the course of the past several months about my Asian heritage. It was possible that the DNA wouldn’t show me anything new, but that seemed delightfully unlikely, given the general proceedings of this entire project: I could only imagine an unforeseen or otherwise inexplicable result—Parsi bloodlines or Chilean DNA—and the dismissal and loud scoffing that might result. My mother and grandmother were not just Burmese—they were unquestioningly Burmese, in the same way that someone was allergic to cashews or left-handed. As far as they knew, we had never lived anywhere else, never been anyone else. My father had a story about his heritage, but it was never airtight: He had grown up knowing that we came from Someplace Else, and this offered an opening, however slight and untested, for an origin story that might be different than what he’d imagined. No such possibility existed on my maternal line. The people who had come to America were still alive, and they could attest to the fact that there was no mystery surrounding our roots, about who we’d been before arrival on these shores. And their answer was this: They were Burmese. They had never bothered to consider anything else, mostly because there was no need to.
As it concerned my paternal line, I had essentially given up on the Jewish Theory at this point, though some tiny part of me still hoped that DNA would offer a rebuttal to all the evidence I’d gathered thus far and reveal that I (somehow) had Ashkenazi blood. This was the same part of me that hoped we would one day get rid of the electoral college and the penny: It wasn’t a particularly sane or significant part of my rational brain, but it existed nonetheless. But mostly I wanted to see if—in between the Irish and Luxembourg blood, the Western/Continental histories we’d been passing down through the generations—there might be something unique or exceptional hidden away.
This is what DNA testing offered most people: the suggestion of mystery, of strangeness, of singularity. That maybe you were, in fact, descended from the Pharaohs, that your particular blackness wasn’t born of slavery but of untouched African blood—as if your people had miraculously escaped the horrors and the rapes, the exiles and escapes, the flights and trauma, and existed as exceptions to the American rule. Perhaps your Mexican roots were royal Mayan, or your red hair was from the Vikings, not the Scots.
Part of me wondered about all this. Was this a scholarly search for the truth—come what may—or was it just an adjunct to the rest of our mythmaking about the past: a search for evidence that might confirm that we’re made of special stock? If I was being truthful, that’s exactly what I still wanted to have confirmed. The more I knew about my family, the more information I had about their compromises and crimes, their weaknesses and failures…the more intense my yearning became to find, buried among these newly unearthed facts, something extraordinary, mythic, unreal. As if to balance out the mundane, messy reality of this family history: I wanted an epic. Don’t we all?
The Family Tree DNA test, cited in various ancestry forums on the Internet, boasted the “most comprehensive Y chromosome, autosomal, and mitochondrial ancestry DNA database for genetic genealogists.” Was I a “genetic genealogist”? I supposed I was. Family Tree DNA’s website assured me—in decisive, graphic headlines—that it would trace ancestral lines with scientific rigor, suggesting itself to be the most clinically comprehensive of the most widely used tests, though at this point I had no idea what made an autosomal test different from a mitochondrial one or, for that matter, how the Y chromosome fit into all this. (I just knew I didn’t have a Y chromosome, right?)
If Family Tree DNA positioned itself as the most clinically comprehensive of the top tests, the service offered by a company called 23andMe*2 was the most user-friendly—and the most seemingly high-tech. The company began operations in 2006 with the goal of providing its customers specific, personalized DNA-based information about genetic predisposition for various and wicked cancers and other possibly debilitating diseases—with the stated aim of sharing th
is data for increased collective citizen health power and awareness.
Critics of this relatively newfangled practice made the point that society should also consider how factors unrelated to genetics—variables such as environment and economic stability and access to health care—might inform someone’s health outcomes as much as, say, his or her genealogy. And that, not insignificantly, you had to be careful when giving people potentially devastating information: Were they prepared for it? Was society prepared for it? Which is to say: What happened if you started marginalizing entire communities based on their DNA-based proclivity toward something terrible? Health data could be heavy stuff, handled improperly.
But wasn’t it better to have people aware of various hideous and wicked illnesses than…to have them unaware of various hideous and wicked illnesses, false positives notwithstanding? Genetic scientists made the argument that their conclusions wouldn’t necessarily damn entire subsets of American society, and indeed that their goal was to do the very opposite. Give people the information, get them the help they needed. Society wouldn’t stigmatize carriers; it would allocate research and medicine to help them. Information was power! I certainly thought so—but then again, I was the person that opted in for extensive bloodwork every time I went to the doctor just in case I had contracted killer bee flu or some other unlikely ailment that was hiding just under the surface, ready to send me to the grave in a matter of hours.
The FDA disagreed. According to the government, consumers could misread the health data (or indeed the health data could be flawed: “FDA is concerned about the public health consequences of inaccurate results”), with disastrous consequences. In its letter to 23andMe, the FDA conjured certain apocalyptic scenarios:
