Burma (Myanmar) has received a great deal of attention from the international community of late, not least for the spectacular ascendancy of militant, nationalist movements, and the historic national election in November 2015. Media and academic coverage of the country has expanded considerably over the last several years. Yet, and as the editors of Burmese Lives: Ordinary Life Stories under the Burmese Regime point out, Burmese people themselves remain “faceless abstractions” (p. 4) in most popular and scholarly literature on Burma. Burmese Lives seeks to offer “a more nuanced picture of the socio-cultural dimension of Burma's ethnic diversity, of the people's everyday lives, of their agency and limitations” (p. 4). Foregrounding a personal narrative approach that emphasizes life stories and “lived experiences,” the eleven contributors to the volume set out to provide an intimate look at the embodied lives and histories of ordinary Burmese.
Burmese Lives is the second volume to result from collaboration between Wen-Chin Chang and Eric Tagliacozzo. The first, Chinese Circulations: Capital, Commodities, and Networks in Southeast Asia (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), has been widely acknowledged as a valuable contribution to the fields of Southeast Asian, Chinese, and global history. Chang is also the author of Beyond Borders: Stories of Yunnanese Chinese Migrants of Burma (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2014), a penetrating study of the transnational lives of Yunnanese Chinese and Sino-Burmese men and women that showcases how the personal narrative approach illuminates broader national and transnational movements and processes. In the capable hands of these two scholars, there is every reason to expect Burmese Lives to make for an engaging, insightful read. And it does not disappoint.
Following the editors' introductory essay, Mandy Sadan gives a richly textured, poignant account of her mother-in-law, Maran Ja Bang, a daughter of a chiefly Kachin family, and her husband Sadan Awng Tu. In the next essay, the Kayan Padaung writer Pascal Khoo-Thwe narrates the lives of his mother, Esther Than, and other family relations in his hometown of Pekhon in southern Shan state. Through the individual and family stories recounted in these chapters, the reader learns of the experiences and life arcs of non-Bamar (non-Burman) women, men, and communities in post-independence Burma; the everyday social, political, and economic dynamics of regions affected by armed conflict between the government and various nonstate armies; internal colonization and state projects of Burmanization; commercial land grabbing, displacement of small-holder farmers, and forced economic migration; the endemic problems of alcoholism, gambling, drug addiction, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic; and the (un)forging of familial and communal ties through these trials and tribulations. These themes reappear in subsequent essays by Maxine Boutry, Wen-Chin Chang, Karin Eberhardt, and Ardeth Maung Thawnghmung.
The protagonists in Boutry's essay are members of a Burmese-Moken island village in the Mergui Archipelago in the southernmost part of Burma, a historically multiethnic borderland that hosted, in addition to Moken and other sea-nomads, Burmese, Thai, Malay, and Chinese people. Boutry explores the origin narratives of his Burmese-Moken interlocutors, beginning with the story of Maung Aye, the first in a long line of Burmese pioneer-settlers who took Moken wives and developed close ties to Moken communities in the face of government attempts to expand military and economic control over the archipelago and its populations. Chang develops her essay around the life stories of two Chinese traders and their experiences of migrating to Upper Burma and engaging in illicit, border-crossing trade. Eberhardt follows the life and activism of Sara Yaw Htung, a lifelong agriculturalist who has worked towards propagating sustainable agricultural practices in Burma and, especially, in northern Shan state. Mahn Nyunt Maung, a Karen civil servant and writer, is the protagonist of the essay by Thawnghmung. Stories of Mahn Nyunt Maung's brief stint with the Karen National Union (KNU), his membership in the pro-Burmese-government Karen United League and then the Burma Socialist Program Party, and his eventual escape to KNU-controlled areas in the Thai-Burma border chronicle the fraught history of the Karen-Burman relationship. Together, these essays provide a window into the interethnic, interracial, and interfaith encounters that structure and mediate the internal colonization, Burmanization, and nationalization of the country.
Another recurrent theme in Burmese Lives is that of making women visible. In this respect, the first two essays by Sadan and Khoo-Thwe are read productively with and against those by Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière and Ma Thida. De la Perrière relates how her interlocutor, Laylay, an urban, working-class Bamar woman and longtime research assistant and friend, became “a woman of mediation” (p. 71) who brokers deals between government authorities and everyday people. Laylay's shifting experiences of dependency on various patrons—including de la Perrière, the only female or foreign patron to appear in the essay—highlights the gendered, sexual, class, and racial dynamics of mediation, patronage, and dependency in Burma.
Ma Thida describes her experiences of growing up in a multicultural and multiethnic family and city (Yangon), and of becoming and working as a medical doctor and a writer in Burma. Her self-narrative serves as an indictment of the state of health care in the country, where professional health care providers are “dictators” (p. 212)—more interested in money and power than in the well-being of their patients—and patients, regrettably, lack awareness “of their own responsibility for care of their illness” (p. 218).
The essays by Sadan, Khoo-Thwe, de la Perrière, and Ma Thida make women visible in uneven ways. Some herstories (re)told by these contributors depict Burmese women in their full complexity and multiplicity, while others will strike the reader as one-dimensional and unsympathetic. But they all rightly resist representing women as victims or self-sacrificial bearers of hardship and suffering, drawing attention to their resilience, agency, and resourcefulness.
The tenacity and creativity of ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances are running themes in the remaining essays of the volume. Tagliacozzo explores the meanings and experiences of the pilgrimage to Mecca for Rakhine, Indo-Burmese, Rohingya, and Chinese (Panthay) Muslims of Burma, who have been long maligned as “unassimilable foreigners.” The Rakhine musicologist U Thein Aung, a prominent practitioner of the Bamar tradition of thachin gyi, is Hsin-chun Tasaw Lu's interlocutor. Lu records U Thein Aung's self-narrative of defiance against increasing nationalism, commercialism, and, thus, inauthenticity, of thachin gyi. James Scott's protagonist, the medical doctor U Tun Win, similarly finds refuge in music (and film), though mostly of the American kind. Scott interprets U Tun Win's obsession with Western music and film as a way to escape and express his political and personal disillusionment.
Burmese Lives brings together a series of vividly narrated life stories that evoke, to borrow the title of Sadan's essay, “the extraordinariness of ordinary lives” (p. 25). The recording of these life stories is in and of itself a major feat. While there is a tendency toward under-interpretation, this may be preferable to over-analysis or over-theorization. Many readers will appreciate the restrained presence of the contributors in most of the essays. They emphasize the vital importance of listening to and recording faithfully and respectfully the lives and experiences of their interlocutors, seldom allowing their own desires and perspectives to dominate. Burmese Lives is a remarkably coherent book, a rare achievement among edited volumes.
In concluding their introduction to the volume, the editors convey their hope that in “a less Orwellian future … Burmese authors inside of Burma will write their own follow-up to this volume, describing their own lives and thoughts for all the world to read” (p. 18). In fact, writers, artists, journalists, and scholars within Burma have, for many decades of repressive rule, turned towards personal life stories of “ordinary people” as a subject matter, source, and method. Authors such as Khin Hnin Yu and comedians such as the now internationally renowned Zagana have dedicated their careers to “ordinary life stories under the Burmese regime,” even if they have privileged the experiences, views, and subjectivities of some Burmese people over others. It is hoped that the interest in Burmese lives that this volume will undoubtedly generate will lead to rigorous engagement and dialogue with existing vernacular sources and scholarship, and inspire scholars to think through and with local epistemologies and practices of exploring ordinary lives.
