What I Won was "Best in Show"

Copyright Kyi May Kaung 3-8-07


Tuesday March 6, 2007 dawned with the wind still going “woong” in Burmese round the corner of the oh-so-tall building I live in. It came in the slight spaces between the sealed window and the window frames. It was frigidly cold and I had a sinus headache.
By about noon, I had to start to get ready to go to an awards ceremony in Virginia. I sneezed in bouts of 3 to 6 at a time, my whole body seeming to convulse with the force of my sneezes. I remembered a friend of mine who was a nurse saying “We Asians have smaller nasal cavities and are more prone to sinuses.”
A colleague of mine from Thailand – he is a Burmese refugee activist poet also, called to say he would have to walk about 30 minutes to the metro where a board member of The Northern Virginia Review was going to pick me up, so he would not be coming. It was too cold. He’d try to come to my art show opening. I said I understood. I would have stayed in bed myself also – but I was the one receiving the award.
Connie picked me up at the metro an hour before the ceremony was scheduled to start in Annandale. She waited for me at the foot of the escalator, not the top as she had said, because of the wind. I was so relieved to see her – and felt I knew her so well, after all she was a fan of my short story Black Rice, and had selected it for an award. I rushed up to her and hugged her. In my heavy wool coat and with a shawl over my head, I felt like a Russian bear.
It was further to Annandale campus than I had thought. During the drive, Connie flipped her right hand, I thought at the beam of sunshine coming through the windshield. I am convinced that with global warming there is hole in the ozone layer over the greater Washington DC area. The sun is too glaringly bright, brighter than it has ever been before and I don’t think it is my aging eyes. Connie said, “It’s dog hair.” I thought of two dogs, a St. Bernard and a Border Collie, that I am very fond of.
At the Ernst Cultural Center, Connie parked her car and told me she had made a trip to the Punjab, to study Sikhism. I told her again about hearing that my cousin, Ah Par (one of fictitious names I have given him) recently passed away in Rangoon. My character Black Rice in the story is partially based on my cousin Ah Par, who was nearly executed during the Karen Uprising in 1948, but the revolver jammed. He was rescued by a Karen officer whose name he would never reveal. In 2004, a Karen leader told me the name of the man who had rescued my cousin, but I forgot it again. By now the fiction has become more real to me.
I wrote the story in Philadelphia about 10 years ago. My marriage was disintegrating, I was browned out after the Ph.D. and I was trying to get accustomed to the loss of my country. The clampdown on the pro-democracy movement had started on Sept 18, 1988 and continues to this day. I wrote poetry every day and worked part time at Annenberg Center as an assistant house manager.
The day I finished my dissertation, I felt so empty I started my creative non-fiction memoir. Black Rice was in the middle of the novel, as an elder cousin who had brought the political realities of Burma into my young life, by telling us stories on his visits.
I wove Black Rice, the character in my short story (well, actually it is a novella) out of at least 3 other stories and my observations of the Indian “maestry” or mason/supervisor and his Indian worker. Kalama (Indian Girl) in my story became Black Rice’s Indian mother. The “maestry” changed color too, and became a rich Chinese contractor.
I took out Black Rice from the memoir as a free-standing piece in 1997, and sent it to the Philadelphia Inquirer. They liked it, but at the time, they had just run a report on Burma. So I sent another story Band of Flesh, about conjoined twins, and they published that in their Sunday magazine. Then Black Rice must have grown pale, in the piles of mss in my apartment, while I moved to DC, worked in radio, worked for The Burma Fund, traveled all over and wrote “other things.”
Due to a friend, B., taking a great liking to Black Rice, I started sending it out again about 6 months ago, and The Northern Virginia Review accepted it, then they also accepted a painting of mine Mars Ranger, then they told me I had won a prize.
So, the awards ceremony.
The keynote speaker Meena Nayak, author of Endless Rain and other novels, was riveting. It was so easy for me to relate to her going to Kashmir to research her story that it was scary. Are we, as one friend of mine charged, addicted to danger?
It was good to meet the editors Dorothy Seyler and Steve Drasner. Fortunately, Dorothy mentioned the number of different prizes they were handing out in her introduction. So I was not too alarmed when it wasn’t Black Rice which was awarded the short story prize.
What I won was what Dorothy called the Best in Show, that is, the best in this annual edition #21. I felt like a pot of tulips in full bloom at the Philadelphia Flower Show. You know how bulbs are forced to bloom early in March – layers of bulbs are buried in big pots and watered and kept at about 50-70 degrees Fahrenheit, until they all bud and bloom at once for the show.
I won for Black Rice, as well as my painting Mars Ranger, done without a brush.
Prizes are always nice. And it’s always nice to have people come up and say how much they liked your story. At the buffet, another board member, it must have been, said to me, “I love your Black Rice.” For a moment, it felt as if she was praising something I had cooked, and I looked around at the tiny spring rolls, the dainty quiches 1 ½ inches in diameter in green and yellow, the juicy brown meat balls and the cake, with light beige chocolate icing and “The Northern Virginia Review” piped on it in white, and thought, Where is the rice? – before I realized she wasn’t talking about the food.
Another writer friend Marianne Villanueva, told me in Berlin at the House of World Culture where we were fellow invitees that “writers need an ego boost now and then.”
I felt so good for the affirmation TNVR was giving me.
I talked non-stop and invited Meena to do a book launch at my Salon in Silver Spring, and she accepted, and I talked some more with Tanya Gupta, who won a poetry prize. The taxi Tanya called for never came, so Steve Drasner took us back to Vienna metro and Tanya and I talked some more on the train.
Today, I am making a brown colored pressed rice dessert for my art show opening Mostly Burmese Mugs.
But this rice is only brown from the brown sugar in it.
Black Rice is a glutinous rice that is black-purplish naturally – and is very popular in Burma as a breakfast food with fried dried fish and crushed sesame seeds and oil. It is also the basis of a Portuguese sweet in Burma called dohl dohl. (The Portuguese first came to Burma in the 16th century as mercenaries with guns, cannon and gunpowder).
I cooked the rice for the dessert Shwe Htamin (Golden Rice) in the rice cooker, and have cooled it and pressed it down in a tray using aluminum foil and all the tin cans I can find.
Why is it rice and everything else cooks so much faster here than in Burma? Is it because I can just switch on my stove, I don’t have to blow at firewood or hot coals, or is it because the rice itself is more modified and cooks faster? Or it is time that moves faster as I age?
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