Iron Fist

For the longest time, you despised this woman. This was the woman who couldn’t help herself but turned the volume up as she watched her TV shows when you were studying.

You had been slowly finding out that this distant relative didn’t have your interests at heart. 

Quiet fights went on every day. You secretly unplugged the TV before 7 pm. The woman plugged it back in, turned on the TV and watched the shows. That was in 2006 and you were 14. You were preparing and studying for what you had been told to be the most important exam of your life.
Aversion to the TV dramas where people cried and wailed and screamed started early for you. Surely there were things that actually mattered more than these fake and forced tear-inducers playing on TV. You liked to believe that you had better taste.

You complained a little but mostly you went about your teenage life. You went to school, you studied, laughed with friends and looked forward to your future. You did not like the feeling of resentment building up for this woman. Regardless, it did. You fantasized driving the woman out of this place. For now, the woman cooked and cleaned so you had to accept her presence. Without her, there was no continual adult presence in this place. She must have been helpful in her own ways. Regardless, you fantasized about ruling this household with an iron fist in the future.

Many years later, you did. You now made decisions and you had control over what you chose to have control over. You restricted her from using your family’s private cars. You made sure she did not get to have family privileges. No big allowance is given to her under your watch. Any family privilege she got to have, she had to have in secret. You did not approve but you looked away. 

You still think about the day you finally kicked her out of the household. She packed up many years of her life in an hour. The housekeeper called her a taxi and she left. The air in the house turned clean again. The light bulbs seemed brighter. Even the plants looked greener. Being considered a bully among the relatives was a small price to pay for what was now a perfectly clean and free household. Better than incense. Good riddance. 

What had targeted the woman also had to pass through you. The brute force of anger left you and you were still in disbelief. The house was cleansed and it was a relief to let go of what had been a blatant misalignment in your living environment. But you were surprised to find you did not feel victorious.

Then you drove back to your office. In the car, it was as if nothing had changed. As if nothing had shaken up the woman’s life and your life just an hour ago. Traffic moved the same and the road to Yangon was still full of potholes. You started playing the songs you had listened to as a teenager. The singer was now widely boycotted in the country because of his problematic political affiliation. Yet, you wanted familiarity and found it hard to not play his old songs you had saved on your phone. Your teenage life was shaped in small ways by what was played among your friends and the memories associated with them. These songs, regardless of your current beliefs, had comforted you amidst your teenage stress. As he sang, you sang with him. 

After all, you were the product of your circumstances and childhood tendencies.

You now live in a city whose buildings glow with lights all day and all night. But it’s hard to shake off this feeling that power would be cut off at any point. The expectation was trained into you over the previous few years where electricity was not a stable commodity in your home city. Your brain still prepares you for sudden unexpected outages every day.

A few months after the woman left, you found her slippers back at your house door. Someone in the family had let her return. There she was, acting docile and agreeable. It must have been hard for her to be back. She was cooking when you got home. She murmured a small greeting when she saw you. You reciprocated. Then you both went about your day.

You saw her cleaning the kitchen cabinets the next day. You now noticed her grey hairs. In fact, her head was covered by many. Her eyes had wrinkles now. She was slower in her movements. 

You started remembering the facts.You remembered the early mornings she had woken up before you did. How she had made sure breakfast was prepared and lunch was made ahead of your school time. How she had complained and complained but made sure things were done. She had no claim to the house but she lived inside it for years, full of self-interest but also being useful. 

Similar to you, she was also a product of her circumstances. She possessed a temper that must have been shaped by her life experience.

Time had touched her while you were busy despising her. Everyone had been aging in the background, including you. Both your friends and strangers will keep aging. So why all this intensity, really. 

But you simply couldn’t help yourself, could you? You have to allow yourself to feel, act, react and you also get to come to terms at the end of it all.

You hope you forgive yourself as you try to forgive the woman. One can be selfish and human. One can be unkind and human. You would like to hold contradictions with more grace and serenity. Maybe even with more compassion. 

You know true victory would feel like real peace. You would like to experience that.

You are here

It was one night when she was sitting in silence that she heard its call again. It was a sound that sang softly but firmly. This was not the first time she had heard it. For a long time, it had always been humming away in the background. Sometimes it murmured gently. Occasionally, it rang violently. It’s always there.

Four months later, she took a 12-hour flight. She landed and immediately blended into this big mixed pot of people. It was cold and her coat was heavy. Just 20 hours ago, she couldn’t imagine not being able to wear her light slippers. Now, socks and sneakers had her all bundled up and warmed. People walked so fast they walked a hundred miles a minute. She could see Big Ben and London’s Eye. This familiar feeling of being a very very small person in a big city enveloped her. It was strangely comforting. 

She pushed her wheeled suitcases on the smooth pavements. It was very convenient. She checked into her hotel room. Her phone was at 7% battery but she could charge it anytime. There was 24 hour electricity here.

It was early dusk when she stepped out of her hotel. It was cold but it felt quite alright. Beautiful buildings, clean roads, the feeling of safety and plenty of convenience at her fingertips. Things that made you feel like you were in a truly developed country. The tools are right there at your disposal. This is what you could possibly need in life, right? Then she would see homeless people in this wealthy country and wonder “What is this a failure of?”

Who was she to pass judgment? But this was an automatic response from someone who for the previous 2 years, witnessed instability in her home country and its tragedies and victims. In the midst of it, she saw communities and families who tried their best to make ends meet and still managed to provide for themselves and those in need. 

Anyway, she was not here for anything else. She was here to answer the call. 

For the next few weeks, she was on many trains heading to different towns.

In those towns, it seemed as if plenty of choices of many potential lives were waiting for her. She could drop her luggage in a small house somewhere and those lives would be hers to live. Cottages, small cars parked in front of them and a little garden next to them were a sight to her tired eyes. Occasionally, she would see through the glass windows, people moving around inside, somebody cooking in the kitchen, a cat jumping onto the table, somebody reading on the couch. That could be her. 

She saw herself tending to the garden, taking an early morning stroll among tall green trees. The birds chirping and singing. Then her walking back to the house and reading a book with her pets on her lap. 

It had taken so many years and a lot of courage for her to admit to herself that all she wanted was this. Simplicity and an undistracted focus on the things that matter to her. 

For so long, she had had countless battles with her own time management. The procrastination. The laziness. The belittling herself. Why wasn’t she doing more? Why doesn’t she know more?

And then why couldn’t she just relax? 

But here she was, walking past cottages, occasionally seeing bunnies run across in front of her, under the unobstructed blue sky, she was at peace. She was grateful for her small team back home, trying their best on their own at work, so that she’s allowed her own time and distance. 

Who would have thought? All you had to do was take a 12-hour flight and a whole different life would be available. A life she has yet to live? 

But she does have a life now that she loves. And where would she even fit this whole other new life? 

The small slice of time that is available to her and everyone she knows, against the backdrop of all the time there has been, unsettles her. The future also holds plenty of time that would unfold, without her and everybody she knows. 

Civilizations have risen and fallen. Peoples have been conquered, converted and transformed. There had been incomprehensibly plenty of time when the universe was a hot sphere expanding, cooling down since time immemorial. There had been so much time. Yet here she was, having to really weigh out how to spend a mere few years here and there. A tiny creature planning out an even tinier time allocation, against a cosmic scale of time and space. 

She imagined a piece of carbon crystal forming, hundreds of miles beneath the earth, way before anybody she knew ever came into existence. It grew slowly over millions of years, colliding, enveloping other crystals, expanding and taking its place beneath the ground. Then it sat there. For many years, it would sit still and quiet. For a few, it would twist, grow in different directions and get fed nutrients from the surrounding earth layer. What sort of sound would they make so far beneath the earth, or what frequencies would they emit? What sort of other unknown soil-dwelling creatures would pass by them or live alongside them? 

In recent times, those crystals would be shaped and cut and named “diamonds”. But their origins and timeline dwarf the existence of most of what she knows on earth. Even in the world history that she learnt, all historically important figures, who lived a thousand or two thousand years ago, lived only a little while before she does. 

What a relief to realize that most harmful human-centric views and ways of living are a recent phenomenon. They have not been around forever and will be subject to time and dramatic change. 

Even the greatest injustice and cruelty will come to an end. The whirlwind of suffering, unnecessarily inflicted pain and merciless indifference will end. Nothing is invincible.

Impermanence frightens her but also brings her great comfort. She feels more resolved to allow herself more things that she enjoys when she still has the time.

She would tell herself that she wouldn’t let petty problems bother her anymore. 

That would be a lie. She’d still spend countless evenings, thinking and feeling anxious about her incomplete to-do lists. Go shop for a jewelry display case. Do laundry. Watch less TV. Read.  

Why isn’t she doing more? Why doesn’t she know more?

But at least now, she knows better. She spends more mornings, noticing the quiet comfort of the bed that she gets to wake up in. She notices the contentment in the warm cup of coffee she gets to have.  And the noises that her playing cats make outside her room feel like a blessing.  

She also makes sure to not miss the joy and safety of having someone she loves pick her up from the airport when she lands back home, with whom she’ll have endless bickers and moments of reconciliation. 

She gets to go after any pursuits she wants to and is now brave enough to drop any agenda that she doesn’t want to take on in her life. 

As limited as she is, she is very fortunate. She just needs to allow herself to feel so.  

On Discipline

On this day a few years ago, she passed by a row of jewelry shops in Chinatown in Yangon. They were empty, except for their employees in uniforms sitting idly by behind the counters. The whole shop was seemingly devoid of any commercial transactions. She was having a good day that day. Her own small jewelry store that was tucked away in an obscure corner of Yangon, was generating a good amount of revenue that day and that month, online. Her only two employees at the shop were bickering with each other but were busy, keeping track of the transactions. She had just left the store for a coffee. It must have been sprinkling on the muddy streets of Yangon. But her footsteps were light and her heart was lighter. With the anticipation of a good warm cappuccino, she felt boundless and infinite. She felt that anything that she put her effort into, would do well. The world just buzzed by, around her. She was having a solitary victorious moment. Everything was all right.

She thought of Father and his kind heart. She thought of him starting a business, growing it, managing his own team and meeting all kinds of nasty people along the way. He must have had his own solitary victories too. The type of joy that no one else would feel equally about. The type that you are okay with keeping to yourself. No sharing or announcement necessary. 

In his younger days, he had excelled and graduated top of his class but couldn’t go to the medical school in Myanmar to become a doctor because he wasn’t a Myanmar national citizen. The medical university was deemed the most prestigious in the country, even more so back in his days. But this regret was expressed only by the people around him, never by Father himself. He could make a good life in other ways and found opportunities everywhere. Prestige followed him.

It was then that in her mind, the decoupling of a prestigious life and a traditional medical profession quietly started. There was a good life to be made anywhere and anyway. Whenever she was with Father, she was loved and free. 

Mother was the one who disciplined her. Make your bed, wash your own dishes, study hard. Be a good girl. She willingly obeyed. Mother would punish her whenever she didn’t. Mother was strict and she was scared of Mother. She was also scared of the bad life Mother said she would have if she didn’t follow the rules. 

Their home had a spacious yard where big old mango trees resided and gave them ample of mangoes yearly. Every year during the season, mangoes were freely shared with their neighbors and their relatives. Cardboard boxes, full of mangoes, sat on top of one another in their waiting room, waiting to be distributed. Some ripe and some not yet. She, surrounded by them, felt something that she couldn’t put into words back then. Now, looking back, she believes that what she felt was wealth. She felt wealthy.

Father was away the whole day for work every day. Whenever he came home, he brought back books for her. Sometimes brochures for exciting new classes that might interest her. Swimming, piano, mandarin, he tirelessly drove her and her sister to all these classes. He must have loved that she was excited and happy to try new things. 

After Father had long passed, Mother would worry about her oldest daughter who is now an adult. How is she organizing her life daily? She is hardly disciplined. Her room is a mess. She forgets things. Mother doesn’t trust her with the family’s cars because she doesn’t take care of them. She hardly takes care of her own self. Mother keeps waiting for her to transform. 

Mother always tells her that discipline is everything. Without discipline, everything falls apart.

She wants to tell Mother she agrees. Even though what it looks like to them might be different. She wants to tell Mother that when she was growing up, moments of transformation had happened countless times. They had happened not when she was facing the punishment of Mother. Nor when she was having regrets about her countless mistakes. To her, being disciplined is hardly about making the bed, keeping the room tidy, nor about not kissing the wrong boy. 

Transformation happened mostly in the moments of softness when Father made her feel free. It happened in the lifting of any restricting veil and social conventions. It had happened in sparking curiosities and wonders. A wealth of options to come. Choices to make. You can be anything you want, Father said. And she believed she could be anything she wanted. She wants to tell Mother that even with her own countless imperfections, she is now who she wants to be. 

Discipline to her is having the strength and resilience to go after what sparks her curiosity. The formation of habits that enable her to build a life she wants to live. 

Transformation happened in the solitary victory moments like today, that made her want to have more of it. She could mold her business in any way she wants to. Boundless and infinite and empowered. That’s what she feels. 

Discipline is just a semantic term. A good life is what you want. 

On Coming Home: To my 22-year-old self

Published in Parami Journal of Education October 2020 Issue

Right now, you are lying awake on your dormitory bed in a snow-filled college campus that you’ve called home for the last four years. Your anxiety keeps you awake because in two days, you will land in Yangon International Airport with two large suitcases, a US college degree and with only somewhat of a plan for your future.   

You will have your luggage unpacked three days later, in your parents’ apartment back in Yangon. You get your first job easily, thanks to your US college degree, albeit at a pay that is below what you think you deserve. You drive daily to work in a small purple car that fits easily onto the congested downtown roads of Yangon.

The first time you are stopped by a Yangon traffic cop, you will not know what to do. So you will give him an attitude. You, along with two other cars in front of you, have missed the red traffic light because it is not located at a spot visible to those unfamiliar with Yangon roads. The traffic cop will mask his desire for an easy bribe by raising his voice against you. He will insist on how you’ve broken the rules and subtly imply how you now have to pay the price. But nobody, least of all this parochial traffic cop, is going to get away with misplacing blame on you for money. You refuse to acknowledge the need to pay him off. He takes away your driving license, and you drive home in rage and in defeat against what you firmly understand to be pure corruption and a systemic abuse of power.

Similarly, you’ll be at a loss as to how to act when you come across middle-aged Burmese men who hold senior positions in Burmese government institutions. The grey hair, the traditional longyi and their dismissive attitude towards you will provoke intimidation, silence and disdain in you. You silently wonder if traditional gender roles still apply in these organizations. They, after all, are known to be one of the most rigid institutions in the country. Should you adhere to the conventional Burmese woman role or the role of an obedient youngster, roles both of which are that of acquiescent silence? But you’ve read Gloria Steinem and you’ve heard Sheryl Sandberg talk and felt the liberation that speaking up afforded you. You strongly believe in the value of your perspective and your voice. Regardless, you will spend plenty of time weighing what you want to say against whether you should be saying them at all.  

You’ll miss the waffles that your college canteen offers on Sundays: the chocolate chips melting on the fresh warm waffles. Your school dining hall was where you learnt to love bread and raw vegetables. Your hunger now demands for pizzas and quesadillas, extra cheesy.   

It was in the US college library that you discovered Alice Munro, a Canadian Nobel Laureate in literature whose portrayal of the depths and nuances of human emotions has touched you. You rarely read Burmese novels because your teachers in your Myanmar high school had told you novels would teach you about nothing but romance. Romance was said to corrupt young minds and it is frowned upon if you take an interest in novels. So your affinity for literature started with novels written in English words that disentangle and dissect the multiplicities of joy, indifference and heartaches. You found out that you can still fall in love with Jane Austen’s character Mr. Darcy without getting consumed by a desire to desperately look for a husband. You appreciated the complicated human emotions articulately described in written words without surrendering your youthful innocence. Literature in English, you learnt as you flipped through the fiction books in your study cubicle, is a beautiful thing. Your world expanded in another dimension with every new English word you learnt. 

Now at home in Yangon, you want to incorporate your own small company. The incorporation fee costs almost as much as USD 1,000. That is not including the fees you would need to pay your legal counsel to draw up paperwork. You wonder why it costs USD 1,000 to register a small company while the country’s GDP per capita is barely that. 

There is a government-issued suspension on the on-going construction of high-rise buildings in Yangon. The new democratic government has announced its intention to re-review all the high-rise building permits, to ensure they are not conflicted with Yangon development plans. With no mention of the end of the review period, a construction worker that you have met now has to roam around Yangon as he struggles to earn his daily living. Decisions made with little practical insights, however good the intentions are, are now leaving the construction workers and daily laborers uncertain of their daily income. Retrospective laws and arbitrary processes still inflict significant harm to the economy and daily livelihoods of people despite the democracy that your country has recently and proudly ascended to. Good political ideology means little when it doesn’t trickle down to every citizen. 

These brief observations of inadequacies will become less and less relevant in the few years following your return home to Yangon.

Because, two years later after you get home, as you sit comfortably behind your computer screen, you will receive in your inbox a digital copy of your new company’s certificate of incorporation. DICA, the government body responsible for handling company registration matters, has now implemented its online registration system. You now only pay USD 170-dollar registration fee through their online portal from the comfort of your home. You are impressed by the speed and the accessibility of the process.  

You feel awed the same way when you find the first functioning vending machine at Pearl Condo that swallows your Kyats and spits out Coke bottles. Never have you felt the legitimacy of Kyats better than the time you see its notes get accepted into a machine whose sensors are enabled by foreign technologies. It is as if the Kyat notes are only now put on the world map, recognized, usable and valid. 

You appreciate the “Burmese” sense of humor that is both subtly and distinctly different from what you see in American movie series. Memes have exploded in Myanmar, along with satires and parodies.  You are now in touch with the wits and humors of millions of Myanmar citizens, thanks to the liberalization of Myanmar telecom industry and over 98% mobile phone penetration. The written words that can make you laugh and feel emotions are now not just exclusive to English ones. 

There are more choices of restaurants in Yangon now. You can use your Myanmar SIM card abroad. Certain groups once marginalized and made fun of, such as LGBT community, are now tolerated, if not embraced. There is shipping available from international e-commerce websites to Myanmar.

Things are getting better. You’re comfortable. 

This is not to say that you now have to willingly accede to the rest of the inadequacies of the “norms” in Myanmar, whether those are flawed social beliefs or harmful retrospective laws that get decided on a case by case basis. In fact, it is quite the opposite. There is more to wanting change than demanding. It is important to realize the limitations of the very world views that have opened your eyes and broadened your horizons. Looking from outside and appreciating the outside views can only teach you so much. A true application of knowledge and critical thinking that you went out of the country to acquire, also needs to happen through the lenses that look at history and appreciate developments in all aspects. One way is to look at the rise of the living standards evidenced by better shopping opportunities, more people with rising income affording to purchase private vehicles, and to realize that these are not without their costs.  Air pollution and congestion are some of many.   

Another is to welcome the influx of global exposure and appreciation of their cultures. But read histories written not just from the perspectives of the current global powers but also from those of the countries that were colonized and are now gaining their foothold in global integration. Learn of the global powers’ conquests over territories, cultures and languages. But realize that no perspective or culture can claim superiority over another. It is important to leave room for appreciation of the Burmese history, culture and even for some of the traditions deemed redundant to you but are held dear by many. 

How do you appreciate the developments while minimizing the costs? You do it through actions and patterns that will lead to true change. 

So, next time you are questioning whether you should vocalize your thoughts in a meeting, shed your prejudice against whoever is in the meeting and you will share your opinions. It is important that you participate and contribute.  Discard your reservation in seeking joy in Burmese books. Pick up a novel and learn the different ways in which ideas are communicated in the Burmese alphabet. Appreciation of literature, just as you had discovered in your young adult life, is a learned skill.

You know you will probably always have disdain for the corruption in law enforcement. So you will stand up to them. Stand up whenever you are forced to pay a bribe. Speak out against bullying, misogyny and injustice. Speak out in a way that will lead to true change. 

Coming home is about bringing back the broadened eyes and the new perspectives that your journey offshore has afforded you. It is equally about unlearning the biases that were developed alongside the new perspectives. This way, knowledge and experience captured far from home, is now made expanded and whole by coming home. 

“The manuscript was written in 2018, 3 years after the author relocated to Yangon in 2015, and is an accumulation of personal encounters with developing Myanmar between 2015 and 2018.”

A Stroll Turned Sour

It takes 10 minutes to drive to her office from her apartment. It takes the same 10 minutes if she walks. She is one of the lucky few in Yangon that has both her office and her home within walking distance. When Yangon traffic congestion becomes painful, she can leave her car parked at home and choose to walk. But that is an option that she seldom takes. 

In the monsoon season, forget about walking. The rain, the puddles and the floods on Yangon’s downtown streets are a nuisance. The mud trails her footsteps and there is not a lot of public shelters available to pedestrians. But under a blue sunny sky, walking can be a pleasant experience in Yangon. A leisurely stroll, even. She walks up the pedestrian overpass and looks down at the congested roads below. She walks through the roadside vendors selling colorful Burmese snacks. She passes by ancient buildings whose architecture makes you curious about the historical colonial era. She sees the traffic jam on the streets and sighs in relief that traffic jams are not her problem today. But she, like most other women, encounters another form of torment. 

She will walk by a moving car in a lane and the person in the driver seat will slow down to say something vulgar at her. Something about her ordinary outfit, or her hair, somehow catches his attention. So he has to make a comment. Some boys will start singing loudly when they see her alone in their sight. Some sales staff employed by shops on the street will start following her in the disguise of wanting to sell her something. 

And all within 10 minutes.

This is not an isolated event. She comes across catcalling daily. She has learnt to figure out which streets are wide enough so she has room to walk outside of the earshot of any other pedestrian. She does not want to be subject to unwelcome comments loud enough for her to hear or whispers meant for her to react to. 

So she holds her irritation and her disgust and keeps walking. 10 minutes later, she will go into her air-conditioned office building, a shelter from outside heat and catcallers. The building has polished floors, grand doors and is filled with better-mannered professionals. This is her true place. Her true world that is guarded against the outside streets where catcallers lurk and street harassment pervades.

Inside the office building, she will talk to women who run successful growing businesses, who hold strong and sometimes controversial opinions. She gets to be a part of meetings where there are women who have dared to dream, worked hard and embraced obstacles. There are many successful “female leaders”, enough for her to believe that sexism in Myanmar is perhaps a thing of the past. Living in a country governed by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Laureate, a globally revered woman whose qualities not only include determination, formal qualifications and eloquence but also a softness and a warmth that seem to elude a conventionally stereotyped man. One is tempted to believe that she lives in a society where opportunities and accomplishments come in a genderless form. All it takes seems to be your hard work and your attitude. Surrounded by many male colleagues who will let you talk uninterrupted, who could not care less about what you wear, let alone give unsolicited comments on it, you cannot possibly think that you live in a country with rampant sexism. 

Fewer parents now force their daughters to adhere to strict social conventions. More young women now believe that they can fulfill their dreams, no matter what profession they are in or want to be in. There are more women running for public offices. Goals can be reached, barriers can be overcome and ambitions achieved. A life of balance and fulfillments, if you want, is yours. 

But sexism need not be a blatant rude curse word, nor a vulgar one, like the ones you hear on the roads. 

It also lies in misogyny, so subtle that they come in a form of societal complacency of unacceptable behaviors. When you are cat-called, you are made to believe that this is normal and is to be accepted and shrugged off. You are made to believe that boys will be boys. That those boys don’t know any better. That it is what it is. 

Misogyny and inequalities lie also in the attitude of the environment that stays silent. That is where toxic masculinity survives and thrives. It will come in the form of domestic violence where men’s displays of strength are more accepted than the violence is penalized. It is when you shout something vulgar at an unsuspecting woman and expect to get away with it. It is more often than not, on the shoulder of the victims to carry the stress and shame. Why don’t you just ignore it, you will be told. Discard those comments. After all, what can you do? There are no immediate fixes. No easy remedy. 

It is not only formal education that betters the world. It is the collective culture that has the capacity to change perspectives. Cultures and attitudes are shifted by conversations. Conversations are powerful. They spark movements. 

Street harassment is not always about women vs men. It is the harrassors vs the rest. The receiving end of the harassment now happens to be mostly to be women. Everyone, regardless of gender and sexual orientation, deserves safe streets, safe public transportations and safe homes.

It should be acknowledged that gender equality progress still has to be furthered. Because an equality, so fragile that it needs a private car, a senior position title, or a “decent” outfit that covers the entirety of your arms and your legs,  is not true equality nor a true absence of sexism. 

An equality so limited that its absence pervades the rest of the demographics and seeps into the life of every woman who has to get through daily life, walking on the streets. An equality so exclusive that street harassment is only escaped by people who are fortunate enough to have private transportation. All it takes is a stroll out of your house, a step out of your car and a walk out of your office building to be cat-called and encounter verbal harassment. 

In the end, the women issues are rarely about just women. They are the issues that apply to the whole society, to people of all genders who want a better world to live in. The society is made better by the involvement and contributions of all genders. Everyone should be empowered  to participate and contribute. Empower it In the legislation, in the law and on the safety of the streets. Allow people to play the part in the society that they want to play. Safe streets, enjoyable walks, safe public transportations have to be available to everyone. After all, there is nothing more ordinary than having a safe street. Let’s not pretend this is not possible.

Mortality, Fear and Rational Hope

Your lunch was dropped off a few minutes ago at your apartment. As the delivery man handed you the box that your meal was in, you stepped back to be as far from him as possible. You calculated how many droplets could be in the air, coming through the open front door, invisible, harmful and insidious. You disinfected the package and put the food onto the frying pan, the only way you feel safe eating outside food: by blasting heat on them. You imagine the heat attacking the cell membranes of the pathogens, rendering them incapable and harmless. Every package from outside now reminds you of your vulnerability to the virus and your own mortality. 

Your close friend’s dad had died when she was 12. One night her dad had gone downstairs to go to the kitchen and he was found motionless on the floor a few minutes later. He was healthy and young when he suddenly dropped dead of a stroke at the age of 45. The next morning, the teacher announced to the whole class that the beloved father of your classmate’s had passed away. A sudden tragedy. An immeasurable loss. No love will ever be a match for the one you receive from your parents, the teacher reminded everyone. There is no shelter like the one your father provides.. As your friend’s spot in class sat empty, you were stunned by the news. The death felt close. 

You watched your friend, her mother and brother, cry and wail at the burial. As the coffin was lowered down into the ground, you could not believe that it contained a human body that, a few days ago, was breathing, moving and occupying important spots in people’s lives. Her mother, wearing all black in mourning, was indignant in grief. The perpetual vacancy that was to follow would affect their family the most and gnaw at their heart for a long time. The sky had fallen and their lives would forever be changed. You were shocked by your own sudden recognition that no one was out of reach of death’s claws. Everyone is going to die, was now not just something you heard from adults. You were now seeing it unfold in the form of their tears, grief and the coffin. Your first realization of the concept of mortality arose as you stood by the burial ground of the father of your friend.  

In your Buddhist beliefs, you were taught that deaths are always in one. The soul or whatever it is that you embody, leaves your physical body and goes off to the netherworld. Alone. Everyone experiences death alone as they do births. In the samsara cycle, everyone goes through life forms alone. It was one thing to learn that as truth when you were consistently hearing that in buddhist sermons. It was entirely a  different thing to realize, imagine and feel the depth of how true that aloneness must be, outside of your material world. It was upsetting for you to learn and imagine. 

That day of the burial, you got home and you asked your Mother what chores she needed help with. You willingly helped set the dinner table, helped with serving rice and dinner dishes. Out of obedience, you stopped cracking your knuckles because Mother for a long time had been saying it was bad for you and your fingers. You reminded yourself to do what you could to make your parents happy. You love them and they are all you have. You for a moment had also spontaneously accepted the unpredictable mortality that was all around you. 

That night, you studied hard. You did not want to let your parents down with a lack of academic efforts. You studied inside your yellow mosquito net till the late hours of the night. That was in the early 2000s in a small town outside of Yangon and nobody you knew had modern comforts that existed outside of mosquito nets. You felt happy, studying and knowing that your family members were all asleep soundly and safely. That the next morning, they would very likely wake up. If not, you did the best you could for them tonight. 

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Now, as you are having your lunch inside your apartment, you feel shielded from mortality by the walls.  A fragile shield nonetheless, occasionally broken when you need to go take out the trash, or when you have to come face to face with a stranger who is providing you an essential delivery service. Yet in many ways, you are protected. Even more so when you hear sounds of a hint of forced normalcy outside.  A car passing by. A neighbor talking on the phone on the stairs. People outside carrying on as usual because they can’t afford to stay inside. It is hard to imagine an ordinary future succeeding this current time of unsettling isolation.

But nobody can be accused of not trying to look forward to a good future. 

Just this morning, through a computer screen, you serviced a customer who took her time inquiring, selecting and purchasing jewelries. “Would this necklace length look good on my neck?” “I want to go to work wearing this ring so it needs to be durable and fresh looking.” “I don’t mind  some flashiness if it is still classy.” 

It was nice to look through someone else’s lenses and look forward to her future with her. A future where she would put on a nice outfit to go to work, dressed and accessorized to her heart’s content. 

There is also a young boy who purchased a ring to give to his girlfriend as an anniversary gift. A ring with a purple stone, outlined by diamonds, sparkly, shiny and disinfected. A testament to the love that would be allowed to blossom in the future. “I want to make her happy because we didn’t get to see each other these few weeks.” 

There is a certain level of meticulousness that comes with looking forward to a future. The planning needs some things to be arranged and set up specific ways.  The ring has to be small and minimal so that it can be worn in an office setting without too much fuss. The coming vacation has to be in a mountain because she has been craving to look at spacious greenery outside of the buildings of Yangon, stacked up against each other. The ring has to be engraved this way because we are going to get married on this date. 

There are many ways you can make peace with the uncertainty. One is to take joy in the certainty of the present moment and do what brings you joy. Do one nice thing for yourself. Serve others with kindness. 

Imagining a future and planning towards it, is another.

Celebrate life. Enjoy the clean water you get to drink every day. Appreciate the fresh air you breath. 

These small celebrations of life are not defiance against mortality. Nothing is.

In fact, they are a surrender and an acceptance of it, that is balanced between purpose and uncertainty. 

What is remembered

The first time they had a fight, he went out of the room and lit up a cigarette. At the flip of the lighter switch, he felt better already, inhaling and exhaling the smoke. Nicotine doing its almighty work, subtly but powerfully altering his mood. He took comfort in the floating cloud of smoke swirling around him and his own argument, impervious to anything outside.

On the other side of the door, she put together all the clothes in a basket and did laundry. She had to cleanse her and her clothes of these frustrations. Some things are not so grey. They are black and white and you can see who’s right clearly. Why can’t he? And she wondered what nicotine had on him that her logical explanations did not. Meanwhile, the laundry machine whirred cycles after cycles until it washed and dried the clothes of excessive water.

Then he came back into the room and they hang the washed clothes together.

He must have had some hopes when he pursued her. She was cordial, chatty and told him that the thought of seeing him at the end of the day was getting her through work. He imagined her typing away at her computer, surrounded by the immediate misery but with a hopeful expectation to get out in a few hours. Into pleasant evenings with him, after work, he had hoped. His place in her life would not just be assured but would become a necessity.  He probably believed that he would also end up better than he was before. And he did in certain ways.

They went for a dinner at a restaurant of her choice. She sat next to him, instead of sitting at the opposite end of the table, like she usually did with other people. He loved his friends, she found out. He took joy in talking about his childhood as she ate and listened. It was not so much of a conversation where information of each other was exchanged. He would not ask her many questions. He would just tell her about these people that he loved, his family, friends and the life that he led. The full and happy childhood. Like hers.

Plenty of people talk about getting comforted by food. But that night, she really felt it, having a warm bowl of soup next to him. The soup had Enoki mushroom, lotus roots and dried tofu in it. All he was doing was cluelessly slouching, talking and putting more sushi rolls onto her plate.  Eat more. Eat, eat. And he talked on and on. Comfort was so simple with him that the reciprocity of the information exchange in this conversation, became unimportant.

Later, she would suggest that they both should go take a train ride on Yangon Circular Railway. It would be nice to just sit on a train and gaze out into parts of Yangon that they never seen. They would firsthand see the actual commuting of Yangon people from here and there because trains are not a form of transportation in Yangon that was commonly talked about or thought of. Not to them anyway. The government subsidized the rail transportation so they could buy the best seats on the air-conditioned train and it would still cost them very little.

It was during the rainy season so he preferred not to go in the rain. Next week might be sunny. Let’s go then, he said. That year, it rained for so many consecutive weekends and they eventually forgot about the plan altogether.

Instead, during those weekends, they would learn about each other over breakfast. He would choose sleeping in over breakfast most of the time but what say would he have on this now? They would shop together. She just started her first job and getting a sweet taste of earning her own money and spending it. The fridge, the washing machine, the kitchen tools, they would go buy together. He helped her accessorize her house. She would teach him how to get rid of a cockroach that’s running around in the bathroom. He needs to know such practical things, she said. She also made him watch horror movies with her. All the gory details in the movies, she could look at. That was her favorite because it was a release of her fears, imaginary or real. She could face those terrors in his safe company and it liberated her.

They kept themselves busy that way. She kept them busy.

The last time they had a fight, she drove to where he was and returned all of his things. On the way back, she made a list in her head of all the things that she was going to do that she hadn’t been able to for a while. The lampposts lining up on both sides of the road seemed to be leading to her liberty.

She told herself that he would never meet somebody who fixes his resume as well as she does. There’d never be somebody who cares about his future and potential as much. He wouldn’t meet  anybody like her who still understands as much as he does the meaninglessness of it all in the end.

And he wouldn’t. Instead, he’d later meet somebody who holds his hands when he was cold.  Somebody who takes care of his well-being and bundles him up with blankets and love when he was sick. Someone who makes him feel at peace, as everyone should.

She would forget right after she got home that all of this happened. How do you remember the memories you made with a stranger? One late evening, after a busy day at work, she would come out of the office building and step into her car. The relief of solitude after all day interactions with people reminded her of him and the way she had felt around him. She was grateful that he loved her with a love that was unguarded. In a world where she made herself rush through things, he made her walk a little slower, worry a little less and a tad happier. And that was all she needed. And that peace is what is remembered after the relevance of each other in his and her separate lives has been erased.

Mothers and daughters

There is a small and shabby Mohinga shop standing attached to a house on the 93^rd street in Yangon. Their Mohinga is called Yay-sein Mohinga which is different from the typical kind sold in Yangon. It comes from Mawlamyaing, a city in the northern part of Myanmar’s southern tail that lies connected to Adaman Sea. The soup is thin, less salty and the noodles soft and smooth. A bowl of Yardlong Bean submarined in water sits next to 3 tiny bottles of spices on the table to be all eaten together with Mohinga. They cut up gourd into little chunks, deep fry it so that the customers could dip it into tamarind sauce and eat it as an appetizer.

Mother loved that Mohinga, ordering one serving after another, up to three servings in one sitting. She gulped up water and then ate this bowl of Mohinga at an impatient pace. Her permed hair was short enough to not interfere with this process of eating when she bent down to the bowl to eat. The noodles were her favorite. The soup was just a consolation prize that helped her ease into finishing the bowl empty after all the noodles were eaten. One more, one more she asked the waiter to bring to the table with Nga Phel and Pel Kyaw.

There was a slight tinge of embarrassment and discomfort instilled in her daughter when she saw all those empty bowls piled up on the table as Mother kept eating. She was annoyed by the oblivion that Mother slipped into while eating. Mother’s indulgence and satisfaction were irritating and always well concealed from people who did not watch her eat. How did Mother, a tiny woman, have an appetite so excessively disproportionate to her body?

Perhaps it is the fact that this home restaurant is run by a family from Mawlamyaing who speak in an accent similar to the one in Mother’s hometown. Mother used to have that accent but it faded overtime after she moved to Father’s city when they got married.One visit a year to her hometown did not help her keep it. It is the comfort of distant familiarity that amplified her appetite.A stomach satisfied and a longing calmed by food.

Later in the day, Mother and Father dropped the daughter off at Mandarin Class. The teacher was scary and made her stand in the corner for a long time when she could not recite some paragraphs smoothly. She hated the fact that she always understood her teacher perfectly in Mandarin but could not string the words together to make a decent sentence. Her cousin in the same class was way worse. The lazy kid that he was, he was always punished, got pulled in both ears by Teacher numerous times. He would pout, sulk and when he got home, complain to his mother. His mother in turn let the aunts know and subsequently the grandma. Then a definite conclusion was reached by the whole family; the teacher was too biased and disqualified to teach him. After all, he is the favorite kid in the family. Someone untouchable. But why? She couldn’t comprehend.

His parents had eloped and married without the permission of the rest of the family. His mom had been a maid, scrubbing people’s dishes and floors in her brown skin darkened from the sun and bruised from the battles of life. People said that his dad (her uncle), a skimpy awkward person, saw his mom carry a bucket of water across the road and his heart flew out the window.Secret exchanges of looks and letters, impelled by the forbidden, united them in the corners of the house, under the staircases. When it evolved into a stronger love that only marriage, a lifetime commitment, can depict, the family disowned his father for two years. They took him back in when he was reported to be seen driving a bus to make his living.

Despite his parents’ ugly history, he grew up spoiled by the relatives. It was his awful laziness and reluctance to learn that made her feel superior. She felt more encouraged to maintain her better position in Chinese Class and later, in everything else in life. Fortunately, it came quite easily to her. She learnt confidence from her victories over his shortcomings. She still checks on him occasionally to make sure he was still that kid without any potential that would match hers.

Mother did not care for that nor encourage it. Mother’s important values were in being disciplined and organized. Thorough planning is everything. A person without a plan is a boat without a paddle. It goes everywhere and nowhere. Her daughter was a person of indulgence and spontaneity. Neither an organized person nor a planner, she was also uninhabited in her relentless pursuits after desires. Not every desire has to be negative, does it? Goals are desires. Ambition is desire. To her, going everywhere is not the same as going nowhere.

Both of them would have their own reasons for why they were right. And they were.

She went away for higher education, away from Mother and Mother’s ideologies. She entertained ideas that would drive Mother mad. She relished in the exotic delicacies that Mother would have turned her nose away from. She happily rode in roller coasters that were too high, speedy and twisty even for Mother’s younger self to enjoy. She found people similar to her in whom she found reassurance and familiarity. She had a home independent from Mother’s.

When they occasionally talk to each other over the phone through the static noise, Mother asked her how she was. She asked the same of Mother. They did not talk about anything else. They did not risk arguing and leaving things unresolved. Not with the Pacific Ocean between them. She had built up experiences that were too different from Mother’s. Their struggles were too distant to assuage dissatisfaction in each other. Mother would later blame her on going away. She would blame Mother on never going away. What did Mother know of her battles? Voices were raised and doors were slammed. Cars were driven out to faraway places where the absence of each other fulfills instead of empties. Both of them would eventually find peace in reticence and in distance. Out of sight, out of mind.

She stumbled upon the Mohinga shop and ordered a bowl, with Pel Kyaw and Nga Phel, because she did not find savory Mohinga without an accessory snack. She put in the Yardlong beans when the bowl came and spiced the whole bowl up till the soup turned red. The poorly cleaned tables and dirty walls were expected and the shop did not fail the expectations. Dropping her superiority hygiene claims, she swallowed Mohinga out of hunger, unappetizing as it looked on the stained table cloth.

The chili spice always made any type of Mohinga taste better for her. In the soft noodles and the thin soup, her stomach found satiation. She liked it. She liked the smoothness of the noodles and the comforting warmth of the soup. For the first time, the hunger dissolved into a sweet relief of forgiveness. It was understanding and empathetic. Three servings did she finish. Three empty bowls piled up on the table. Looking at them, she unlearnt the embarrassment she had felt years ago when she came here with Mother. She sympathized.

It is the feeling of reconciliation that comforted her. This ability to relate to Mother somehow reassures her that all is not lost.

Like Mother, like daughter. Even if it is only in one singular way.

For now.

Nettles

Last night I had a dream that my room was full of lizards, big and small, all white and disgusting with their little toes and their unshapely sticky bodies. I woke up much later after the dream, panicked, scared and thinking of you. On the table next to my bed, there was a short story book I picked up at Frankfurt Airport three years ago. On the cover was a picture of a child’s feet on a big tree branch, tiptoeing, waiting to jump. It wasn’t a New York Times Best Seller nor was the author a name I had heard of back then. I kept reading it on the flight while the passenger sitting next to me complained about the lights that were on the whole night.

When I was 10, you told me about this Burmese person who won a small English writing competition in Reader’s Digest, with his winning article published on one of the pages. It was about two children trying to save up for a bike, buying it and going on a trip. No big plot, no dramatic twist or turn, you said. It was just simple and beautiful. You would have loved this book that’s now sitting idly on the table next to me. All these short stories, all the simple little things that the author noticed and wrote meticulously about at the age of 80. I guess one of the advantages of gaining age for some people is that they have noticed so many things over the years that they know which trivial things are to be taken for granted or shrugged off and which small things are to be glorified and written beautifully about. She does it right, amongst other things. You would have told me about the author if you had discovered her first.

I remember the last book you bought for me. It was with a dominantly yellow cover and all wrapped up in plastic, sitting on a shelf of a bookstore in Bangkok, a city that I came to resent. You told me to just take it home. It was a break I needed from my college semesters – to be able to read for pleasure however preposterous or brilliant the characters in the book turned out to be.

When you are a 10-year-old kid, you secretly take pride in yourself whenever you finish a book, thick or small. There’s always a big sense of accomplishment seeing that all these pages are defeated by your sheer willpower and dedication. All the knowledge that you think you gained. That one pigtailed girl that sits next to you in class cannot and have not read a book this big. That boy sitting one row away doesn’t know the meaning of this complicated English word. All sorts of things that kids use to establish how smart they are, you find yourself doing those after the final page of a book is finally turned.

But you didn’t force me to finish reading the whole book. You didn’t put that big weight on me. You knew better.

You were proud when I had a tiniest desire to pick up a book and read. You were proud when I bought home a small thesaurus because I wanted to know how many other words have the same meaning as the word “love”. A lot, I found out. You were proud when my English essay won a third place just because the judge wanted to give out an effort prize. Getting validated in small things like that, makes a kid happy and fearless. And especially a small kid that has insomnia over a tiny lizard that she has seen in the kitchen, two rooms away from her room.

Now, even after years, there I was, alone at 3 am after a nightmare, your memories have held me safe and loved.

Reclaiming Yangon

At 6 pm on a Wednesday evening, Yangon traffic hums endlessly along Pyay Road, too busy to sympathize with the exhaustion of the working people, but not too lengthy enough for people to forget that at the end of this grueling traffic, there’s a home waiting for them with warm cooked meals, or a favorite Korean TV show to watch with family members… and you. You with a new hair cut, your nails bitten down to tiny squares on your fingers and a pinch of warmth and happiness.

A few months ago, I found myself recently graduated and relocated to the familiar sunny abode of Yangon, a city of excitement, 1.5 dollar SIM cards and 50-cent breakfast. Thousands of miles away from the snowy upstate New York and multiple layers of coats and gloves, Yangon sees 40 degrees sunlight and half-naked men unapologetically walking around downtown. Who needs a shirt when you have a big belly to cover yourself up anyway? And then there’s this parking problem that makes you go in rounds and rounds in Chinatown until you find a spot tiny enough to not get taken by bigger cars yet wide enough for your purple Honda Fit to slip right into.

5 months later, here I am, getting to know Yangon again where old restaurants are getting replaced by up and coming cafes and bars, the excitement of the budding nightlife in Yangon. Burmese people jump on the consumerism wagon like no other, you said, looking at the crowded shopping malls and people lining up to pay for the newly imported goods they just bought. Then you would make slightly racist jokes and watch me laugh in denial. Streets after streets, getting caught by one traffic cop after another, I’m reclaiming Yangon as my city…. my city with you in it.  I who have only craved and enjoyed companionship in the chilly frozen college town, now find myself draped in warm sunlight, contented watching you drive on the left and happy in your company. I want to tell my friends about you. About how you profusely sweat at a tiny hint of spice in your food and how I secretly remember the type of cigarettes you ask for at restaurants.. Disarmingly down-to-earth and physically 2 inches away from me, you’re a good thing. This is a good thing.

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On the way back, distraught, I hit two cabs from the back 10 minutes apart, one of whom tried to almost literally squeeze money out of me. But I couldn’t care less about the damage that wasn’t there. So I got back into my car and abandoned the mad and confused cab driver on the road.

Today, as I slip out of my bed at 3 am and start my day, I will miss you. Next time, when I’m at a bar with nameless people, I will pick up the phone..