Guest book reviewer Lila Snow on Amy Tan's Saving Fish from Drowning

Photo "Red and Black Koi" copyright Kyi M. Kaung

SAVING FISH FROM DROWNING, a book by Amy Tan.

This book was published in 2005. A group of American tourists go to China and Burma. The repressive regimes make you wonder about the wisdom of this trip. The group has two children, a 12 year old girl and a 14 year old boy.

The girl manages to smuggle a puppy across many check points. The boy is thought to be a God who can make people disappear because he does that with card tricks and that is what causes serious trouble.

The group has a secret documentary film maker and a not so secret TV veterinarian. When the group goes off on an excursion and disappears, without this veterinarian they would probably never be heard from again. He is an expert at getting attention. Fortunately he drinks and missed the boat for the excursion because of a hangover.

When the group disappears and the news is broadcast on CNN, 73% of Americans want to invade Burma and a fair number say, “Nuke ‘em.” This is scary.

Amy Tan is knowledgeable about ethnic groups in Burma and the political problems there. The book is rich in so many ways. Tan made her name with THE JOY LUCK CLUB writing about an ethnic group she knows well --- her Chinese family, but SAVING FISH is a quantum leap into a totally different body of knowledge. She writes extremely well. This is her seventh book.

Artist Lila Snow is represented by International Visions Gallery in Washington DC. She is the author of a memoir, WITH A NAME LIKE TUCHMACHER. This book review is published here with Lila Snow's permission.

In Memoriam Chao Tzang Yawngwe -- July 25, 2004

Replica of Thai (Tai or Shan) palace at 2006 Chiangmai Flower Show.
Photo copyright Kyi M. Kaung. The Yawngwe Haws at Goodliffe Road, Rangoon (accidentally burned down) and in Yawngwe were much more modest than this. Golden yellow color is royal Thai color.

This tribute was published in an abridged version in The Irrawaddy in 2004.

*



Yesterday a friend in the media sent me a short email note. “He passed away at 6.30 this morning (Sat). I have just talked to his brother Harn.”

No doubt she was preparing a radio tribute.

Eugene Chao Tzang Yawgwe, activist and scholar, was one of the sons of the late Saw Shwe Thaike, first president of democratic Burma that existed immediately after Independence from Great Britain. Eugene was an unusual human being who combined insights from experiences as different as armed struggle for the freedom of his native Shan States, to a later life of political activism and scholarship.

In addition his father the Yawngwe Saopha, (in Burmese -- Nyaungshwe Sawbwa) was the head of not the biggest but certainly the most powerful of the hereditary Shan States. My mother indeed, with her fond memories and love of the Shan States always referred to the Nyaungshwe Sawbwa as Sawbwa Gyi “the great Sawbwa.”

Together with the Mongpawn Sawbwa Sao Sam Htun, who died after the same assassination attempt in which Bogyoke Aung San, Aung San Suu Kyi’s father died, Nyaungshwe Sawbwagyi probably was among the most progressive of Shan leaders and one of those who believed most in the Panglong Agreement.

Although to this day the spirit of Panglong, with its basis in racial and ethnic equality, can be said to be alive among those of us who believe in democracy, in Burma/Myanmar (Burma slash Myanmar, as a careful non-profit administrator says; very prophetic that “slash”) it is all but badly dead, mortally wounded.

Greatness is a matter of the heart and soul, of openness of mind, of magnanimity. Eugene’s family and mine go a long way back. When the war broke out and the Japanese army invaded, my father was an education officer in the Shan States. My parents were newly married and my mother had lost her father, of a stroke at sadness from leaving a home in Moulmein to looters. Nyaungshwe Sawbwagyi gave refuge to about 40 families like my parents – in the forest near a stream – Yatsauk (Lauksauk in Burmese). As a result my mother’s memories of the war were “like a picnic in the woods with wild birds.” Most of these families were Burman.

In Rangoon, Eugene and his siblings lived in a big wooden house, a haw or palace on Goodliffe Road. Due to his younger sister Ying being my classmate at school, I visited there once -- for the day, as we used to say. Other classmates of a gossipy nature would never believe it when I said everything was very calm and the Mahadevi and the other aunties and all the children and half brothers and sisters sat down and had tea together. Ying said “We’ll go and visit Eugene,” who was in a vast bare room, reclining on the floor propped up by triangular cushions which I did not know then were Tai(Shan) in style. Eugene in those days was slim and pale and looked a bit like the male version of the princess on a pea. Ying and I at that time talked almost all the time about our wish to become writers. Little did we know that life would give us more than enough material to write about. Sometimes, I think, too much. We did not chat with Eugene long. He was about 7 years older than us, and at that age 7 years is a vast gap. Ying and I were then about 14 or so.

I cannot remember now whether I visited the Yawngwe haw while my father was still alive or after he died. In any case, life began to change for all of us; for me because of my father’s death in a car accident and for the Yawngwes because of Ne Win’s 1962 coup. We lost touch after that and it was in the early 1980s, in America, before I was again in touch with Ying.

In the early morning of March 2, 1962, Ne Win staged his coup. The night before my mother together with Kitty Ne Win had been a judge at a beauty contest in which my friend Naw Louisa Benson was a contestant. In the morning we heard news of the coup on the grapevine and for the first time, that deadpan announcer’s voice on BBS (Burma Broadcasting Service) announcing the next decree from the top.

Eugene has written about or spoken about the time of the coup: The gunshots in the night (actually early morning) during which he rolled out of bed instead of standing up, a reflex that certainly saved his life. Then crawling to his father’s room. His mother was in England, seeking medical treatment for a gynaecological condition. In 2000 I also spoke to Patricia Eliot, Sao Hearn Hkam (Nyaingshwe Mahadevi’s) biographer. “Trish” told me that the family had taken refuge behind stacks of Buddhist scriptures that the Sawbwagyi had had printed for one of his voluntary positions in a Buddhist association.

Eugene related how he came on the body of his younger brother Sao Myee, on the lawn that morning, shot by the soldiers who came to arrest their father. To this day, whenever I look at the photographs in Eugene’s autobiography, The Shan of Burma: Memoirs of a Shan Exile, or Patricia Eliot’s The White Umbrella, my heart jolts when I see pictures of Myee Myee. He was the same age as my younger sister and if he were alive now he would be 57 or so.

When I met Ying again in Princeton in 1987 at first I was reluctant to ask about her family, especially Eugene. In Burma, the military government had published the information – that is, disinformation, that Eugene had fallen in battle, as a leader of the SSA (Shan State Army.) So it was only after our 3rd or 4th meeting that I broached tentatively to Ying “And Eugene?” “What about him,” Ying said in her usual brusque manner, “He’s not dead, he’s alive and well in Canada.” I knew I should not ask the details of how they got out of Burma, as it might endanger people who had helped them.

It was only in 1997, at a Free Burma Coalition meeting in LA, that I finally met up with U Eugene again. He did not seem much changed, smiling and laughing. His younger daughter, he said, takes after her aunt.
After that I’d see U Eugene every few years or few months. I interviewed him for radio and he wrote up a message in Shan. He said he taught himself Shan as a young adult.

In 2000 when The White Umbrella was published I was all set to go and interview his mother the Mahadevi. But she was starting to loose her memory and Eugene was out of the country traveling, and then I got sick myself, and so I returned the air ticket that work had issued for me. I do regret it now.

But around 1995 I did have a chance to thank his mother in person for saving our family during the war. 1995 was the first year I went on the circuit, talking openly about my thoughts on Burma. Canadian Friends of Burma invited my mentors, Josef Silverstein and Ronald Findlay and me, to some of the first activist conferences on Burma, in Toronto and in Alberta. Since I have known Dr. Silverstein since 1984 and Dr. Findlay since the 1960s, it was good to step out onto the contentious Burmese arena with trusted mentors close at hand.

In Alberta I was standing at the podium reading my paper, when there was a soft rustling, like the sound of leaves in Autumn, riffled by a breeze. “Riffled” I just see in my dictionary, is the sound of pages being turned quickly, and it sounded like all the 40-50 people in the room were turning over their notepaper at the same time. I could not understand it; my paper must be boring them.

Then I understood as a diminutive figure with white hair walked in. People craned their necks backward and stretched them upwards and whispered, “It’s her.” I stopped reading as nobody’s attention was on me nor my paper any more.

The Mahadevi was dressed quite simply, even shoddily or carelessly and her hair was no longer the jet black I remembered. When she smiled one could see a broken tooth or two. It seemed incredible that someone so elderly and no longer in a powerful position, could still have so much charisma. At lunch she told me she had asked her son Tiger if this Kaung was the daughter of U Kaung, and on being told it was, she had come over. Time was very short and I decided I must thank her for that long ago time when she and her husband looked after my parents. Why, if my parents had died then I would never have been born. What if I never saw her again? And, in fact, I did not.

I ran after her into the ladies’ room, took her hand in both of mine and thanked her.

After the conference, in the cold of a Canadian evening, she sat stoically in the cab of Tiger’s truck. He had rushed into the seminar and forgotten to turn off his lights and the battery had run out. Tiger being a geologist, the truck was splashed liberally with mud.

Ying told me in 1997 that the military had been mad at her mother because when she was an MP for the Shan States, her mother had first started to call attention to the human rights abuses being perpetrated by the army in the Shan States.

My last memories of Eugene are also happy ones. In March 2002, the same trip indeed when we heard of the house arrest of Ne Win and daughter, at the end of a conference in Bangkok, U Eugene sat at breakfast near the swimming pool of the hotel we were all in. The Thai day was heating up and Daw Khin Ni Ni Thein and I were planning to go sightseeing in Ayuthya.

“Look” Ni Ni said, cocking her chin at Eugene, “always so niftily dressed.”

Eugene was wearing a silk shirt, whose colors shifted between peacock blue and purple depending on the angle the light hit it, the angle one looked at it. “Shot silk,” I murmured. Almost all his fingers seemed to have rings on them. We smiled and waved at U Eugene and I wrapped some fruit in a paper napkin for our trip.

At the Burma Studies Conference in Gottenberg, Sweden in September of the same year,
Eugene, as activist and scholar, gave the keynote address. Some of the things he said that night still stick in my memory.

Conferences like that are more strenuous than most people think. For one thing there’s the months of preparation to do the research and say something meaningful about one’s chosen topic. Then usually the events are crammed in so close within a few days that, as even my younger colleagues sometimes say, one needs to train like for the marathon to go to one of these.

As a result I was pretty tired by the time the dinner was over, and the keynote address was at night. My limbs ached and my eyelids were ready to drop. But I woke up with a snap when U Eugene started to speak.

He briefly related his life story. His time with the political groups at Rangoon University, his time in the jungle with the SSA, exile in Chiangmai. Of his decision to migrate from Thailand to Canada he said:

“Khun Sa wanted me to be his Prince Norodom Sihanouk. Since King Sihanouk ‘rescued’ the Red Khmer, he reasoned that I would likewise be able to clear up his opium warlord image and provide him with a mantle of legitimacy and respect. I realized that there was no way I could keep on refusing his invitation. So I left Thailand in 1985 and thus landed in Vancouver as an immigrant.”

Eugene ticked off the flaws of Burma Studies as a discipline. As I feel he was right on the mark, I would like to quote at length on what he said. Also that meeting in Gottenberg was the very first time that the old “Burma watchers” a group of people that Zarni called Orientalists, had sat down with activists for the very first time. So Eugene’s remarks were very appropriate.

He said that activists were forced by circumstances to make decisions “up close.” And so they lack an overall view.

“Scholarship on politics is important to obtaining a more comprehensive understanding of politics, to understanding the structures of power and relational dynamics within a power system.”

The flaws of Burma Studies as a field are

1. the politics of national unity
2. the international relations perspective which sees “Burma” as a monolithic nation state.
3. seeing society as undifferentiated
4. one dimensional analysis.

“Burma Studies is particularly weak in integration of theories with issues and problems.

“Burma Studies seems to float in a theoretical vacuum. It is based on West-centric models.”

“--- explanations offered by academics of chronic performance failure of Ne Win’s socialist-military regime do not shed much light in this regard. Failure is nowhere attributed to the failure or incapacity (more likely) of the regime to govern properly – but attributed to bad planning, corruption, drought, flood etc. And currently the humanitarian crisis, which is on everyone’s lips, has not been explained. It has become a given, something that simply is, that happened all of a sudden --- the fact that the ruling regime or government is the problem does not even enter the equation.”

At that very same conference, Dr. Alice Khin Saw Win, a physician, stated that 1988 and the social, political and economic disruptions that followed had a direct role in the AIDS crisis.

Dr. Chao Tzang Yawngwe concluded that memorable speech two years ago by saying
“To know what one is dealing with holds the key to effective action.”

As we go on with our lives, our loss as dissidents and activists as nothing compared to the loss suffered by Daw Nu Nu Myint (Mrs. Chao Tzang Yawngwe) and her family. We should try to remember the humanitarian goals and the belief in freedom and democracy of someone like Eugene Yawngwe.

*

Copyright 2004 Kyi May Kaung

Economist and Friend of Burma: Louis Wallinsky (1908-2001)

Photo -- Young and Old Magnolia Grandiflora -- copyright Kyi M. Kaung

By Kyi May Kaung – written in 2001


Louis Wallinsky, Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of the Union of Burma under the late U Nu between 1952 and 1958, one of U Nu's closest friends and longtime friend of Burma died on Christmas Eve at his home in Washington DC.

At the time of his death Louis was still active as an advisor on things to do with Burma, especially with regard to the Institute for Community and Institutional Development which brings Burmese students whose education has been disrupted to study at international universities. ICID was set up by prominant activist Dr. Zarni who also founded the well-known Free Burma Coalition.

Zarni was very close to Louis Wallinsky who served on the board of ICID from its founding until the time of his death. It was natural therefore that I should first hear that we had lost Louis through an email that he sent.

Even if I had not heard of Louis Wallinsky many years before I first met him, I would still have thought him remarkable. He was a tall, thin man, with silver grey hair falling down the back of his head almost to his shoulders. His hair contrasted favorably with his black coat and he usually wore a black beret, that made him look vaguely French and "left bankish." He used a walking stick and even though at some meetings he asked to be driven home around midday as the business-at-hand had been addressed, he was usually alert and would give his opinions in careful, well-considered, succinct words. He also tended to be very direct.

At that time he was 92 or 93. It seemed to me Lou used words and thoughts with great economy and effectiveness. Whether that was due to natural inclination, his early training as an economist or to age I never found out. I did find out though that he had been in Berlin when the Nazis came into power. He had also written a play called "Heil Hitler!" At a private interview in his home in 1999, I asked him whether he still wrote plays. He said he stopped as he had had no success.

I had first heard of Lou in Burma in the mid-sixties when his book Economic Development in Burma, 1951-60, New York, Twentieth Century Fund was published in 1962. At that time the story at the Institute of Economics in Rangoon, Burma was that Than Nyun, later Dr. Than Nyun, had had to re-orient his dissertation topic because he had initially been focused on economic planning in Burma but then Wallinsky's book, which was very comprehensive, had "beaten him to the punch." The conventional wisdom at the time was that whatever research was done on that period was bound to be eclipsed by Wallinsky's work as Louis had the advantage of being a hands on economic planner with access to statistical records and documents, as well as to the democratic leadership.

In the relatively few years that I knew him, I did not have the good fortune to be one of Wallinsky's close friends. As Zarni wrote recently in an informal obituary, "His house was a hospitable stop for many prominent Burmese expatriates and exiles, including U Kyaw Nyein, Bo Set Kyar, Wendy and Marjolaine Law Yone," and others.

I saw Lou usually at annual ICID board meetings and once when Zarni moved away to work in Chicago. The farewell at Marjolaine's house was on another cold December evening, in rooms decorated with poinsettia and red berries.

Zarni was inaugurating ICID brochures, which I learned had been printed with seed money donated by Lou. I remarked on the design of the pamphlets and asked who wrote it and Zarni replied, "Uncle Lou and I."

As we said our goodbyes and started to leave, Lou wrapped his navy blue scarf around his neck and said, "We're going to miss our Zarni aren't we." I thought there was a hint of wistfullness in his voice.

Maybe because of this remark I got the idea in my head that I should like to interview Lou and ask him about the Burma he had known and so I made an appointment.

One brisk winter morning, I walked from Ward Circle near American University about a mile to the building on Massachusetts Avenue where Lou lived. (Before Lou died whenever someone gave me a ride and we went around Ward Circle it was always on the tip of my tongue to tell whichever Burma activists were with me that Louis Wallinsky lived "near here," but I was always worried that Lou living alone, somehow the information might leak and someone might harm him. Now that Lou is beyond all pain and hurt it is safe to say "he lived alone at his home on Massachusetts Avenue.")

I walked past a church, a synagogue and a stand of scant leaved beech trees on my way to see Lou.

I called up from the reception desk. Lou answered the phone and came down to the lobby. He looked clean and tidily dressed in trousers and a red and white checked flannel shirt. He said he'd tell me about the time he and General Ne Win, "bumped heads with each other."

The apartment must have been a big one as it had bookshelves, paintings and normal sized furniture in it and seemed to wind backwards into other rooms beyond the immediately visible living-dining room and kitchenette. A big bank of windows on the wall opposite the door we entered by looked down on the part of the building built into the slope. The dark polished wood dining table had place mats, a couple of pots with blooming white narcissi in them and a complete set of chinaware all stacked up on it. Lou said the widow of a close friend of his had just brought the flowers. They looked like they had been lovingly forced indoors to bloom early, but there hadn't been enough light and so the flower stems were long, lank and pale, and now soft and bent over. The china looked like it must be the set Lou had before he lost Mrs. Wallinsky. It looked like it was all stacked up ready to use so Lou would not have to bother with reaching up to shelves or opening and closing cabinet doors.

A big framed pencil drawing of former Prime Minister U Nu hung on the wall on the left. Lou said his sister Anna Wallinska, who was an artist, had made it. The drawing, which was about 36 by 70 inches, and quite large for a pencil sketch, was a rather good likeness. In the portrait U Nu looked fresh and round-faced as he did in photographs of him from the fifties. Lou said his sister was a painter and had painted in many different styles. The two abstracts flanking the portrait were collages made after she "fell in love with Shan handmade paper. After a time though her fascination faded and she made other things." The collages looked very modern although they must have been made in the fifties or early sixties.

Lou asked if I would like a cup of tea. He boiled some water on the gas stove in a small sauce pan which had a few pieces of dried noodle in it. I asked how he managed and he said he "managed fine," there was a woman who came to do the cooking. I asked if he was writing his memoirs and he said no, he was putting his papers in order, "besides I look after myself, and it takes longer you know." He gestured cavalierly towards his books and confided, "I've forgotten everything I've read in those books," and laughed. I laughed too, envying him his vantage point of age, which allowed him to value the real things of life versus the stuff in books.

He sat down in the brown leather chair that he said was his favorite. I sat down on the sofa across from him, facing the window. He wanted to know why I wished to interview him. I said because I wanted to ask him about his impressions of Burma.

We talked first of the Pyidawtha Plans with which Lou Wallinsky, as a member of the firm of Knappen, Tibbets, Abbot and later McCarthy, had been intimately involved.
I asked if it was true as we had been taught in our economics class at Rangoon University that the Pyidawtha Plans had to be abandoned because the Korean War boom ended and the price of Burma's rice exports fell. Wallinsky said that was true but also the government was able to find other sources of foreign exchange and about 80 % of the projects were completed.

He talked about the Burma Pharmaceutical Industry, which he said was "U Nu's baby." He said that at first U Nu was not too happy with him, as an economic advisor he "was younger than the PM (U Nu)" "But he got used to me later," Lou said. I told Lou that at the time the Rangoon wags used to call BPI the "Burma packing industry" because everything was bought from overseas and then the pills were stamped in the factory in Rangoon; that it was such a pity but Myanmar was now becoming known for other kinds of pills; speed pills not vitamins. Lou said U Nu once gave an order that a piece of land be cleared of "junk" that was lying on it so that the land could be used for a project and was "mad when he drove by a few days later and the land had still not been cleared."

From this I gathered that attention to detail, in other words micro-management, was not unique to the present military rulers of Burma, though of course U Nu's administration was much more humane.

Lou said that U Nu had struck him as an extremely intelligent man. When I asked if he could reflect on the characteristics of the civilian leadership of democratic Burma in contrast to the present rulers, Lou replied that he really could not as he had no knowledge of the military. He said as economic planners for the U Nu administration, their firm had concentrated only on economic matters and had not advised on military matters at all.

A reliable source told me that KTA(M) had been kept on after what Wallinsky called "the first coup of 1958" (the Caretaker Government) and also after "the second coup of 1962." According to this source, Fritz Werner, notorious for connections to Ne Win and his regime, which are purported to continue on a warm footing to this day, was "advisor on military matters" in the early sixties at the same time Wallinsky was economic advisor.

This source said "Dr. Wallinsky and Dr. Werner" were known as the two foreigners advising the Revolutionary Council, though on completely different matters. They had separate briefs and no connection with each other.

In Burma as a student I had attended briefings by U Thet Tun of the CSED (the central statistical organization) in which U Thet Tun had told us an anecdote about going in a helicopter to see if there were enough bamboo forests as raw material for the paper factory. I had heard that a few years later all the bamboo bloomed and then died and there had been a pulp shortage. But Lou did not talk to me about the paper mill.

I asked Lou if it was true that U Ne Win was extremely charismatic. "He wasn't charismatic, only a few women found him so," Lou muttered. He continued thoughtfully, "Anybody with a certain level of power is bound to be charismatic, the question is whether it is true charisma or emanating from power." He then told me of the three occasions in which he had observed Ne Win at close quarters.

The first time was at a dinner party. General Ne Win came with his wife Kitty but was very quiet, Lou said. He appeared affable and courteous. Wallinsky said he thought Ne Win was unsure of himself and his social skills.

The second time he saw Gen. Ne Win was at the golf course. Lou said he used to go to play golf with another American who was a Fulbright professor and this time they went in his friend's car with his friend's driver at the wheel rather than in his car.

"The driver pulled up rather quietly in front of the building. There was a man standing there, bending down with his foot on the railing, tying his shoelaces. He was startled by the car pulling up silently behind him. I saw it was Ne Win. He was livid. He yanked open the front door, pulled out the Burmese driver, and started to punch him. My friend wanted to go to the driver's aid but I prevented him. I knew that when Ne Win came to play golf he had a full security contingent with him and anything could have happened."

Having in a way grown up on Rangoon stories about the general's violent temper; how he had hit a Chinese man on the golf course with a golf club because the man was obstructing his path; how he had pummeled a scholar who had imbibed too much at the annual research conference dinner for insulting Kitty and so on, I was not really surprised by what Lou told me. I was in fact expecting to hear something like that. I asked whether the attack was pretty vicious and if the victim had fallen to the ground.

Lou replied that by that time he and his friend had hastily gotten out of the car and the driver had not fallen to the ground because he was up against the car.

Lou also told me of the time that Gen. Ne Win kicked the butt (literally) of the foreign diplomat who was ahead of him in a reception line. I asked if Gen. Ne Win was Chief of Staff at that time and Lou said "No, he was head of state. It was after the coup."

I asked Lou why he thought Gen. Ne Win did things like that, and Lou said he thought it was because he was insecure and was afraid of things he did not understand, like foreigners.

Lou also told me about the time they went to a formal ball in connection with some charity or other. "Mrs. Gore Booth (the wife of the British Embassador) was there, and she was just a lovely lady. I stood in line to dance with her and so did Ne Win. Mrs. Gore Booth had a dance card on which all her dances were lined up. As she stood near us she dropped her card on the floor. I stooped down to retrieve her card for her and Ne Win bent down also. We bumped our heads against each other and from the impact, I gather he must have been quite stunned too." I couldn't help thinking that there was something metaphorical about Lou's recollections.

Of U Nu, Lou said how much he admired him and how intelligent U Nu was. He said, "He might not have been the best person to be Prime Minister, but he was certainly the best there was around. Certainly his colleagues and associates respected him enormously and deferred to him."

Of Wallinsky himself, Zarni wrote:

"Of Russian Jewish immigrant parents who later immigrated, Lou was born in London in 1908. His father was active in the US Labor Movement in New York, from whom Lou seemed to have picked up his strong social conscience. He studied economics at Cornell, City College of New York, The New School, and Berlin, served as consultant to the United States War Production Board, then became Financial Director of the World ORT Union where he supervised its chain of some 80 vocational training schools for Jewish displaced persons in the D.P. camps of Germany."

I asked Lou whether his Jewish background had made him more empathetic towards the plight of oppressed people like the Burmese. Lou said it certainly made him more sensitive to such issues.

Zarni continued:

"Lou's later work concentrated on problems of economic development, culminating in his Associateship with Robert Nathan, the capacity in which he led an economic advisory team to Burma for six years. As economic consultant he worked in 18 countries. In retirement he served as Director of a special International Commission of the World Jewish Congress studying issues facing world Jewry. In addition to professional publications which include "Economic Development in Burma" and "The Planning and Execution of Development," Lou (also) wrote a play. Lou had set up a scholarship/research trust fund at Cornell Economics Department and donated, to the Southeast Asia Collection at Cornell Library, his correspondence with prominent Burmese nationalist and ethnic leaders, as well as Burma papers.

"Lou had this trademark -- no nonsense social attitude, while being proper. He had his own personal shortcomings, as we all do, but he lived a very rich and full life. Three of the most memorable stories Lou shared with me include his experience seeing, with his wife Dorothy, a ghost going through their bedroom in the residence in Rangoon, his sitting on Emma Goldman's lap during an organizers' meeting at his parents' place in New York, and his having to walk backward after an audience with the Shah of Iran in Teheran!

"I will miss him deeply. Lou is survived by a son and two daughters. The memorial service for Lou is scheduled to be held in New York on March 23, 2002."

The last time I saw Lou was this summer. Another board meeting. That morning I just happened to pick the taxi driver from hell, who drove me in circles for 45 minutes until finally I recognized the house where the meeting was usually held. Late. The meeting was already in progress. New members, exciting new developments. Lou was sitting at the head of the table, his back to the windows. He was in shirt sleeves and as neat as ever.

Outside the trees had a young green color on them. The azaleas were ablaze and someone had brought in a big branch of pink frilly ones and stuck it in a vase on the sideboard. We had coffee and cheesecake.

I once wrote a poem in which all my favorite people, all my favorite things were all together in one room at the same time.

Among the people in this poem were Burmese democracy leader and Nobel Peace Prize Winner Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and her husband, the late Professor Michael Aris.

I realize now that must have been how I felt that morning.

In November FBC had a conference at American University. I decided to read some family oriented poems of loss on the last day. There were so many panels to attend, there was hardly time to talk to Zarni. He said he would sit by me at dinner. Even then, time has now grown very short. Zarni pulled some family pictures out of his wallet and slid them towards me. I took a look, and then nudged his arm and passed them back. He carefully tucked them in his billfold. The speeches had started.

After dinner he got up and said he had to go, he had to see Uncle Lou. Would I be reading the poem about the death of the father that I had translated. I said I would if I had time. Zarni had also lost his father in the previous year. I thought how many people there must be like that.

"Go, go," I said to Zarni, sounding like my grandmother, "it's much more important that you see Uncle Lou." I wondered how Lou was doing this winter. Zarni hurried off.

*

As our interview of 1999 drew to a close the winter light outside Lou's windows faded softly. The room inside seemed to have an inner light of its own. I got up and got ready to leave, thanking Lou and apologizing for taking his time, for perhaps tiring him. Asking too many questions. Lou smiled and protested, "I'm never tired by something like that, it invigorates me."

Louis Wallinsky, Rest in Peace.


Kyi May Kaung (Ph.D.) currently works for The Burma Fund as Sr. Research Associate. She is writing a book on Economic Transitions in a Democratic Burma for the Fund. The views expressed here are her own and do not reflect the views of The Burma Fund.


*

(Author’s Note: I wrote this in 2001. As I was not able to publish this obituary anywhere at the time of Louis Wallinsky’s death, despite repeated attempts, I am publishing it now on my Blog. I did the interview of Wallinsky described above under duress at “the workplace from hell.” The manager in charge then did not allow me to broadcast the interview – no reason given, but he implied that Wallinsky was “senile already,” something patently not true. I did the interview on my own time, on my day off.

After Louis’ death, two other Burmese broadcasters from 2 different radio stations asked me for sound bites of Louis’ voice, which only I had. I gave them to these 2 friends, who mentioned my interview on air.)

* All Words and Images on this Blog copyright Kyi May Kaung. All rights reserved, including in media not yet invented. This article may not be mirrored, copied, disseminated or reproduced.

Tribute for the late Taw Myo Myint -- Burmese Dissident

Wandering Jew Flower -- Photograph copyright Kyi M. Kaung

Mother demonstrating the war in Iraq with fake coffins at Arlington National Cemetery -- August 2004.

Photograph -- copyright Kyi M. Kaung.

Taw Myo Myint, political activist, Burmese dissident, wife and mother and my good friend, died of breast cancer in Los Angeles two days ago. It is with the heaviest of hearts that I sit down to write this on my laptop. I wish that this onerous rite of mourning were not something I have to do, for Taw and her loved ones, and also for those in the struggle who remain and have no other alternative but to go on. And also for myself, because at such times as this one does not know what else to do but write.
Taw was untiring in her efforts for social justice and political change in Burma. She told me often, she and her husband U Khin Maung Shwe, and their young daughter Stephanie (Htet Htet) were the only ones demonstrating with handmade signs in front of the UNOCAL building, rain or shine, continuously almost every weekend for months on end.
I first met Taw when she invited me to stay at her house in a predominantly Spanish speaking suburb of LA. It was 1997 and I was going to my first conference convened by the Free Burma Coalition at UCLA (University of California in LA). Friends that I knew previously through my marriage and who were allegedly close to Secretary 1 (Lt. Gen. Khin Nyunt), the head of the MI or Military Intelligence, had just told me obliquely that I was unwelcome in their home because “the monk had told them not to admit two legged guests.”
I felt four legged and realized my friends (should I call them former friends?) were getting cold feet because I told them I was coming to FBC. A mutual acquaintance in the pro-democracy movement, Ohmar Khin, told me that whenever she herself was in LA she stayed at Taw Myo’s, and gave me Taw’s phone number. I was already booked into a cheapy motel near UCLA, but when U Khin Maung Shwe and a friend picked me up at the airport and were about to drop me off at the motel, I realized I would meet and be able to interview more people at their home, and it would be easier as a non-driver in LA to stay with them. And so I checked out of the motel after paying for one night, and moved to Taw’s guest room, which was really Stephanie’s room.
For the duration of the one-week conference, Taw and U Khin Maung Shwe had about 20 people camped out with them. One seldom sees generosity like that especially in America and Taw and her family were subsisting on U Khin Maung Shwe’s salary. It was not as if they were millionaires with very deep pockets.
Taw cooked meals for the whole group of us. Her husband and other volunteers drove us back and forth to campus and to El Segundo to demonstrate in front of the UNOCAL and TOTAL offices, protesting the natural gas pipeline in southern Burma which uses forced labor. In deference to my age I was in a room by myself, two other women guests were sharing the next room and Htet Htet was with her parents. At the back of the house and garden were other small buildings, which I later found out were occupied by long term residents who were political asylees and refugees from Burma, and whom Taw and U Khin Maung Shwe were helping by giving them a place to stay till they got on their feet again. All the male guests were sleeping on the floor in the living room lined up like sardines.
It was not at all difficult to interview the political activists one after the other at Taw’s kitchen table in addition to the interviews I conducted on site at UCLA. I even recorded a program of nursery rhymes with Htet Htet singing and Taw humming along.
Taw told me of an incident in Burma when she was on a bus alone and a soldier had come up and started inspecting the insides of everyone’s Shan bag. The soldier found a long needle used to sew up gunny sacks holding rice in the bag of a young man. “Isn’t this a weapon? Are you denying this is a weapon?” The soldier demanded. He took the young man off the bus and while the young man was knealing, pleading at his feet, he kicked him so hard in the face with his army boots that, Taw said, the skin on the young man’s face peeled backwards upwards and his face started bleeding. Then, with his wounds still raw, he was marched off somewhere and no one on the bus ever saw him again. I could see from the expression on Taw’s face as she told me this that she thought the young man had probably been arrested or shot.
*
Taw told me about participating in the 1988 mass demonstrations in Rangoon and then of fleeing to Thailand through the jungle with her husband. She described hiding under piles of dry leaves to elude SLORC forces. At the refugee camp she set up a mohinga stall as a way of providing employment for the refugee students. Her daughter was born in America.
Our ride to El Segundo for the demonstration had elements of humor in it, because the well meaning neighbor whom U Khin Maung Shwe had asked to drive the second car, the one we were in, to El Segundo, apparently had left/right confusion and could not read road signs fast enough, so we kept getting lost in LA and barely got there in time. But the demonstrations – planned by FBC, including artist/writer Edith Mirante, went off well and beautifully. At one point we were all in the small lobby of either the TOTAL or the UNOCAL building, accompanied by the FBC legal advisor, the students shouting slogans to “Get out of Burma!” and the voices reverberating off the glass walls through the impossibly green and shiny leaves of the potted plants. We were back in the square in front of the building by the time office security realized what was happening. On getting home we were relieved we were in the U. S. of A., and not in Burma, where we would have become instant “guests” of the military regime.
Taw and U Khin Maung Shwe were arrested once in Los Angeles, after they chained themselves to a truck to protest the pipeline. In spite of protestors chained and locked to the wheels, the driver of the truck tried to move it a few feet, and Taw sustained a back injury. At that time Stephanie was still only about four years old, and while her parents were in the lockup, had to stay with friends. Taw told me that the feeling that she had as the big steel doors clanged shut was indescribable.
After my first visit in 1997, Taw became a close friend of mine, who would listen patiently while I related all my trials and tribulations in the democracy struggle. She helped set up NLD (LA) -- for Liberated Areas, not Los Angeles. She continued helping recent asylees. A famous poet stayed in their house for months. I joked with her sometimes on the telephone “Shouldn’t you be putting salt in the hearth to get the guest to leave? Can’t you try to be less generous?” I urged her to set up as a non-profit so she could legally ask for donations and apply for grants. Then at least she would get some help. But as a descendant of the last royal family of Burma (she was descended from Pakhan Gyi Supaya, the sister of the last king Thibaw) she was a proud, independent minded woman and preferred to do it with her own funds, in her own way.
Some of the people she helped were indeed ingrates and rewarded her and U Khin Maung Shwe by bad mouthing them in California dissident circles. I used to try to remonstrate with her, “This is getting like the famous Burmese saying. (The dog) sleeps on the piece of leather, and gnaws at the leather’s edges. Can’t you try to be less kind?” but I knew even as I was saying that, that a good person cannot stop being good, in the same way as it is futile to try to straighten out a crooked person, like putting a dog’s crooked tail into a bamboo tube to straighten it out.
I last saw Taw in person in 2001. She still had a couple of semi-permanent houseguests. I made a fruit cake for the big birthday celebration of one of her guests, which was being held at her house. On an impulse she opened her kitchen drawer full of mismatched cutlery and gave me a bamboo ladle, that was new and that she obviously liked herself. I tried to refuse it but she kept pressing it on me, so I brought it home.
She noticed the cancer only about 8 to 9 months ago. I knew her to be a very religious person and I was a bit concerned that like Daw May Kyi Win, the Burma-born librarian at the Burma Studies Center in DeKalb, Illinois, who died of cancer soon after diagnosis and refusing chemotherapy, Taw also might “accept her fate” too easily and stop fighting the disease.
As it was, she did have chemotherapy. I tried to check on her every 2 to 3 weeks by phone. Always, she tried to come to the phone, even though the last time I spoke with her, she was obviously very weary. I did not talk long. I told her I wished I could come and see her, stay at my niece’s and come and visit her for a short while.
We joked about her hair growing back and how cool it must be with this new short haircut.
The day she died, I realize now, I woke up depressed. I thought it was just Monday or winter blues when the sky is so often gray. I had a stomach upset and so I decided to boil myself a barley porridge using the ladle Taw gave me. I forgot the pot and the barley burned and parts of the ladle were blackened, like the bamboo craft toys from Kyaikhtiyo pagoda festival.
At least now she is beyond pain.
My heart goes out to her entire family: U Khin Maung Shwe and Htet Htet, Taw’s parents in Burma, her brother in law in China, and I send sincere condolences and metta (loving kindness) with this tribute.
As one of the famous Burmese dissidents, the founder of FBC, now trying engagement with Burma, once said, “What people discount is love.”
We do a lot of things for love of other people, or for love of the truth, or due to our desire to keep the faith and find and create a better future for those we love.
Taw Myo Myint knew who she was and was not afraid of dying. She was one of the most exemplary and fine human beings I have ever met.
*
Kyi May Kaung (Ph.D.) is a writer and political analyst based in Washington DC.
· Note: I am publishing this on my blog site over two years after Taw Myo Myint passed away because whenI sent it out at the time, none of the editors I sent it to, decided to publish it.
· Taw Myo Myint died of stage 4 breast cancer at an LA hospital on March 13, 2005.
· All women, please have regular gynaecological checkups, self-examinations and mammograms.
*
Copyright Kyi May Kaung. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Fan mail from the Burma-Thai Border --

Dear Sayama,
Thank you for your sending message..
i'm usually visit to your bog....
That's lovely job...
best,

xyz

Publisher's note: Sayama in Burmese language means Teacher (female)

Saya = Teacher (male)

I hope rare slipper orchids grow in my bog.

Special posting for lovers of flowers from Burma.

Watch Chinese botanist Yin Kaipu and American botanist Daniel Hinkley "go crazy" sighting rare species in "The Mother of Gardens" in N.E. China. It's just across the border from Burma in Yunnan and Huangdong mountains, my friends from Burma.

One wonders how many genera are still left in Burma, with mass environmental degredation.

As my former writing mentor James Rahn of Rittenhouse Writers Group used to say on reading my fiction: What will the flowers do next?

Clip from PBS' The First Flower, already posted on You Tube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3S4LQrvoFs

Four young Buddhist novices gaze at ---

Burmese expat writer and political analyst Aung Naing Oo, sees recent oral history and our "necessary myths" in this realistic and "summery" painting from Burma.

Think about the happy art and the cruel reality in our land of sunshine and smiles.

See


http://www.irrawaddy.org/aviewer.asp?a=7058&z=166

Archives: From when Burma's Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was briefly free.

Featuring Burmese Democracy Leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s travels in 2003, from the web site of the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma (The NCGUB) – the Burmese Democratic Government in Exile:


Strengthening People’s Power for Democratic Restoration in Burma

By Zaw Oo with Kyi May Kaung and Zaw Win Hlaing

May 27, 2003.

www.ncgub.net/mediagallery/download.php?mid=20070419161114176

My latest articles in Asian Fortune

1. East meets West in Cool Jazz: Bob James and the Angels of Shanghai

http://www.asianfortunenews.com/site/article_0507.php?article_id=6


2. My article on Hla Ohn Mae, Burmese Dissident.


http://www.asianfortunenews.com/site/article_0507.php?article_id=21

My poem on global warming:

Photo "Beheaded tulip on gas burner" copyright Kyi May Kaung

All f-ed up –

It’s very hard convincing you.
As hard as convincing someone
who exports Burmese teak
that all the forests of Burma are
going, going, gone.
I tried so hard, showing him satellite photographs
of Burma, all brown.
But it made no difference
he wasn’t ready to believe it
though he himself told me once
the girth of the logs is getting smaller
and smaller.

Now you say:
How can there be global warming
it was so cold this year, today? I start to explain:
It isn’t how cold or how hot each day is
it’s the average mean temperature,
but you’ve already stopped
listening.
And someone who educates girls in Africa
says she loves it, this year summer is so early.

What to do?
If even those closest to me
some times talk like this?
The couple in Boulder
who are anti-globalization
say, as they put me on the shuttle bus
to Denver Stapleton Airport, in a major snow storm:
This is what will happen
Spring will get earlier and earlier and then disappear
altogether.

Already we shoot straight
from winter to summer --
I’ve noticed flowers getting confused
since ten years ago.
In 2004 the magnolias were frost bitten dark brown.
This year, the tulip petals are singed with heat.
See my illustration:
Beheaded tulip on a gas burner.

April 30th, 2007.

Copyright Kyi May Kaung

Gretchen Dunn's dance -- placeDISplace - at my Dr. Kaung's Salon, Silver Spring, MD, April 27, 2007.

Photos and words copyright Kyi M. Kaung.
Dance and costume Gretchen Dunn.

I met Gretchen Dunn, dancer/choreographer at a FieldWorks Multidisciplinary workshop run by Laura Schandelmier and Stephen Clapp, at Liz Lerman Dance Studio in Takoma Park last fall. The first version of her dance placeDISplace that I saw, there was a woman, walking in a parched landscape, I thought, contemplating her bundle of sticks one by one.
I was happy to invite Gretchen to Space 7-10 where I run a Salon. Amy Kincaid helped me find a suitable date, made posters and helped out with the other logistics.
The version Gretchen danced last night, which she says is probably her final version, is more concentrated.
Laura, a superb and highly capable dancer herself, calls it “finely etched.”
To the mesmerizing drone of the music, composed by contemporary Hungarian composer Balázs Temesvári (pronounced Bar-large Ta-mesh-var-rie), Gretchen again “worked with the sticks.”
At different points in the dance, she seemed to be running her hand around a pot or bowl of water, preparing food, greeting/recognizing members of the audience, lying down exhausted, being startled by a sudden sound off stage. Post traumatic stress, suffered by a refugee or displaced person?
The title “placeDisplace,” for me at least, seems a bit too clever and cute for such a serious piece. But of course, it is the artist’s choice, the naming.
The sticks themselves, which Gretchen said she collected over a period of time, are beautiful abstract pieces, seemingly possessed of great symbolic or religious value.
After the performance, the audience engaged Gretchen in a lively question and answer session.
Is there a narrative story line? In the studio performance in Takoma Park, as Gretchen walked more with her burden of sticks, (there was more space to walk,) it looked like there was more “linear or narrative story.”
At Space 7-10, which is so small, only 7 x10’ and already filled by about 20 members of the audience on chairs or sitting on the floor, Gretchen’s dance piece is both more intimate and more intense.
Gretchen was able to hold us in rapt attention throughout. It is truly a thought-provoking piece.
Thank you, Gretchen Dunn, for honoring our small space with your lovely performance.

Obituary -- U Kyaw Htun: Writer. Journalist.

Two days ago I came back home after doing some chores such as food shopping and going to the post office, and found my answering machine blinking. It was Daw Khin Aye Tint of Columbia, MD. telling me that her husband U Kyaw Htun had passed away on April 11th (2007).
I knew he had been very unwell. Since the last 3 years or so, when he finally retired for good, Ma Ma (Elder Sister)Tint, used to call me on weekends and talk to me. I had the premonition that as a trained nurse and RN, and one of the most intelligent and gutsy women I have ever met, she realized that she might soon have to part with her beloved husband.
I never met a more loving couple than them. They were tolerant of each other’s small quirks, at the same time that they deeply appreciated each other’s admirable qualities.
For me, they were family friends of long standing, over half a century.
I realize that even for Burmese who are not of his generation, the name will not ring a bell. He did nothing political and was not a public figure. Though a writer and a connoisseur of fine literature (on one holiday visit I saw him reading John Updike), he never wrote a book, and he never gave interviews, though I asked him at least twice.
He was just a very decent and fine human being, who upheld his principles, was a good son, husband and father, and a good friend of great loyalty.
By any standard, he had a phenomenal career.
He studied at the University of Chicago during the U Nu regime in Burma, while my father was DPI or Director of Public Instruction. He was one of Burma’s first western trained journalists. He then returned to Burma and worked for the late U Thant, who later became Secretary General of the U.N., and was at the time U Nu’s Minister of Information.
I was six or seven when Uncle Kyaw Htun, as I called him then, came back from Chicago and brought dolls and party dresses for my sister and me.
I don’t know what happened later, probably the military coup of 1962, staged by Gen. Ne Win, that might have made it impossible for him to work in journalism.
When I was a teenager, U Kyaw Htun worked in hotel management, for the famous Aratoon brothers, who owned the Strand Hotel. On one memorable occasion, he invited all 6 of our siblings and first cousins to a formal dinner, no adults included, at the Strand. There we had a full course western meal, which an Indian waiter in white, with a white linen napkin draped over his arm, served. For dessert we had Baked Alaska. For days afterward, I puzzled over how a block of ice cream like a brick, with meringue in peaks around it, could be baked and served in slices. By then my father had already died in a car accident, and we were living with our aunt and uncle and their family.
It was during this time that he met and married Ma Ma Tint.
My mother was very fond of them both. She said that when my father died, the majority of his former students disappeared, but U Kyaw Htun was the most faithful friend of all, and always visited us regularly.
In the sixties he worked for USAID.
Then they migrated, and he worked at the Asian Development Bank in Manila and at the World Bank in Washington, DC.
When I got the Fulbright Fellowship in 1982, they helped me get settled into my on-campus apartment in Philadelphia and took me home to visit with them for Thanksgiving and other holidays.
I began to appreciate how hard life is for immigrants, even if the head of the family works at the World Bank.
Because he was a writer, and had a writer’s eye, and so did Ma Ma Tint, and because I was so homesick, I spent quite long periods of time at their house.
Ma Ma Tint baked bread by the dozens, and sewed, fixed the house, told me stories.
After my children arrived and after 1988, oddly after I moved to DC to work, I was able to visit them less, as they also had health problems and I did not drive.
But now and then we’d talk on the phone.
After retiring from the World Bank, U Kyaw Htun worked another 15 years as a copy editor at the Washington Times.
He once told me of going to visit Gen. Ne Win and Daw Kitty on one of their visits home, and of how he overheard Mrs. Ne Win telling the cook to go and buy some tea, as there was no tea in the house. Ko Kyaw Htun said, “Living well is the best revenge.”
As an immigrant myself, I think “living,” that is, surviving, is the best revenge.
U Kyaw Htun leaves behind his wife Daw Khin Aye Tint and 4 children.
R.I.P.
*
Writer’s/publisher’s note: I just realized I have 2-3 other obituaries on file that were never published, because I could find no one to publish them. I have decided now to publish these at a few day’s interval each on my personal blog, as a tribute to people I have greatly admired and cared about.

Article by Ying-Ju Lai, about me and my art, in Asian Fortune

http://www.asianfortunenews.com/site/article_0407.php?article_id=10

Poet Tim Seibles' Recent Class at Busboys and Poets

DC Poets Against War was so kind as to give me a scholarship, so I was able to attend poet Tim Seibles’ recent class at Busboys and Poets on “Getting out of your head,” that is, writing in personas other than one’s own.
As I mentioned to DC PAW’s Sarah Browning (lovely name for a poet – think of Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How do I love Thee, let me count the ways”) I have only once, or maybe twice, tried being in someone else’s head in a poem. The one poem I remember writing, is trying to think like a dictator who hates women.
This was so very unpleasant, I told Sarah, I popped right out again.
In my short and long fiction, I am often able to inhabit male characters. Black Rice is one.
Seibles’ class was a great chance to also visit Busboys and Poets. That was my first time there. I always feel I benefit greatly from classes, and I now prefer one day classes.
I was surprised at how busy it was at Busboys and Poets, and the hordes of liberals there – I assume they are liberal, and the stacks of activist and anti-war, environmental books.
My activist and Burmese friends, make sure you go there at least once. There is talk that it will be moving from its current location.
One of Tim Seibles’ reasons for getting out of your own head now and then, all very good reasons, are:
“As writers, we become too enamored of our own voices. After all, we hear our own voices in our heads all the time. So it is good to go away and then when we come back, it is fresh again.”
I found the writing exercises we did in class extremely useful.
Imagine oneself an animal: I imagined myself the cockerel belonging to the Siamese prince – known as The Black Prince, Narasuan. As a boy, Narasuan was taken to Burma (Hanthawaddy) by the Burmese warrior King Bayinnaung, as a hostage after Bayinnaung successfully laid siege to Ayuthia. The Siamese boy and the Burmese crown prince set their pet cockerels to fighting each other, and the Siamese boy’s pet won.
You know that our domestic chicken is inherited from the colorful S.E. Asian jungle fowl. In Bali, in Ubud in the evenings, the fighter cocks are set in bamboo cages by the lanes, to get some stimulation. I tried to photograph their amazing colors through the bamboo. There were purplish reds, black and white feathers. Deep golds.
No wonder I saw toys of jungle fowl in the bazaar at Ayuthia and at Narasuan’s shrine. The cock fight was an omen that Prince Narasuan would later return to Siam and throw the Burmese out.
Tim Seibles’ other writing exercises were equally effective.
Then we all went to dinner. The (Thai) food we had was more visual than tasty. It was high on “verticality,” the food constructed on the plate like tents and skyscrapers. And it was a bit too pricey for someone like me, almost entirely educated on scholarships.
But the company was Great.
I can’t recommend more highly going to dinner with other poets.
For pictures, of the reading the next day, photos by Dave Phillips, (DC PAW’s Melissa Tuckey’s husband,) and photos taken at the dinner, by Ben Browning, Sarah’s son --
See http://picasaweb.google.com/Philucky/TimSeibelsFriends--

Take a Poet to Dinner! The real French fries, from real potatoes, at Busboys and Poets are superb.

© KMK

My one day arts and crafts show at Mayorga Coffee Factory, Silver Spring, MD. April 21, 2007.

One of my tabletop landscapes -- crafts, photo, all words copyright Kyi M. Kaung.

A portion of the exhibit. Painting second from left by other artist, Susan.

Photo by Kyi M. Kaung.

Looking out onto Georgia Av. from interior of Mayorga Coffee Factory.

Photo copyright Kyi M. Kaung

I never realized before that painting and exhibiting requires so much physical labor.
And it would all be impossible for me to do, except that I get so much help from my friends.
This time, Alexis from American University called me months ahead. Then she checked closer to the date to see if I am still available.
It gets easier as one has “sets” on different themes or in different styles, ready to show. But I don’t like to show the same things over and over, it’s boring. A friend once told me she recognized “that painting of X’s, you know which one I mean, it’s been there since 2001.” Sometimes, in area galleries, I recognize works I have seen exhibited elsewhere before, but in certain cases I am happy the work is not sold yet. Maybe one day I will buy it. Meantime, I enjoy seeing that sculpture in a catalog.
I met up with Alexis at the Mayorga Coffee Factory, it is of course a Café, selling fair trade coffee, on Georgia Av. in Silver Spring.
Kandi, the manager, was really helpful and said she would provide tables and the white tablecloths. She was also understanding, when I said I might have to drive more nails into the walls, to hang pictures. The wire and hook arrangement is very difficult for someone like me, who can’t cut mats straight and can’t drill holes in frames and twist on wires. I hang my oils on canvas inadvisably by their stretchers. I am not the only artist who worries about the price of professional frames.
I barely slept Friday night. I am the last minute type.
I found out taking about 20 paintings, 20 pieces of wearable art and maybe 20 pieces of ceramics across town for an exhibition, is quite a job, packing and pricing. Setting up, then taking down, packing and transporting back home.
I like to have it all ready by my front door for pickup in the morning.
Wow! Was I glad to see the 2 strong young men in Festival T-shirts who came to pick me up in a van.
One of them also helped me with set up and artists’ relations at Mayorga.
Even then, on the drive back, they told me they were ready to take showers and go to sleep, and I was as tired.
I dither between “going commercial” and “going non-profit” like this.
In cases like this for a good cause – this event was sponsored by International Rescue Committee and other non-profits helping refugees and asylees -- the people I meet and the connections I make are as important, if not more so, than selling art.
I’ve been looking for a long time for organizations that help victims of torture, and so was so pleased when Elise Pierce of ASTT (Advocates for Survivors of Torture and Trauma) walked up to my table.
Wow! Have I met many walking wounded!
Sometimes, just looking at brochures give me story ideas.
I want to thank Mayorga, Alexis, Tom, Er-San, who helped me.
My friends who came by to see my collages.
At 7 PM, I fell asleep on my couch, wondering if I should get up and take a photo of the sun shining on my papaya plant and one of my panel paintings. The next thing I knew it was 5 AM Sunday.
I took the photo at sundown the same time today. My Burmese relatives, when they visit me infrequently from Burma, maybe once in 25 years, can’t understand why I have so many plants in my apartment, but then, few of them have endured winters in the west. I explain, but I doubt they understand.

I doubt they understand either why I paint and write so compulsively.

Only another artist or writer would understand.
*

Letter to Irrawaddy Magazine -- April 18, 2007

"Woman" -- pencil drawing copyright Kyi May Kaung

4-15-07

Dear Irrawaddy,

I am writing to commend you on your recent cover issue of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi: The Face of Resistance, in your print edition.

Between 2001 and now, I have been to very many international academic conferences on Burma, and sad to say, the majority of them seem to be dominated by the pro-junta, anti-sanctions lobby -- "The Steinberg Cabal."

So it is refreshing, as well as truthful and energizing, to see your Tribute Edition for "Suu Kyi," as your magazine insists on calling her.

I am also glad to see that the direct "eye-witness" accounts by Razali Ismail and Thierry Falise, give the lie to the malicious rumor we were hearing around that time, before the Depayin Massacre in 2003, that "Daw Suu is stubborn." In fact, Ismail writes that she was willing to engage in meaningful dialogue with the generals, and Falise (p.33) writes that she realized the thin line Lt.Gen. Khin Nyunt had to walk, and "advised international diplomats not to expose (him) too much, for fear of undermining any progress he might make."

As it turned out, her fears were justified when Khin Nyunt and his coterie were all deposed and arrested in an internal purge within the junta in the fall of 2004.

Of course, she was absolutely right in saying it had to be real dialogue.

Not just "How are you? And "How's the weather?" In fact, Ismail says she told him that the much vaunted dinner with the generals (photo in Irrawaddy) was just the occasion for a "monologue with the senior general doing all the talking."

I also wish to draw your attention to the fact that on April 5, Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago conducted a Burma and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi Focus Day.

Barbara Victor, author of The Lady, a biography of Daw Suu, was the keynote speaker and Prof. Emeritus Clark Neher, Activist Maura Stephens and I were on a panel "Burma: Internationalism and Solidarity: Global Perspectives" moderated by Danny Postel, Writer and Sr. Editor, Open Democracy and introduced by David Leaman, Assoc. Professor, Political Science, NEIU.

For a more detailed write up, please see my blog http://kyimaykaung.blogspot.com/

I hope you will publish this letter, so that people inside Burma and hopefully even Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, will know that she still has our love and support.

Kyi May Kaung (Ph.D.)
Writer and Analyst
Washington, DC.

My Trunk Show on March 30th, 2007.

M. in traditional Burmese ensemble Golden Sunset -- (not for sale.)

A. in my hand-painted linen scarf -- Archipelago -- go to Alchemy to buy!

E. in Light Pink Linen-Lined Indian Silk -- My Valentine.

A. in Rainbow Coalition Scarf.

L. in faux vest/scarf -- held together with -- a chopstick!

E. in Black Chrysanthemum (SOLD)

W.M. in long thin fuzzy scarf.

A. in brown handmade batik

A Fun Time was had by all.

Thank you Gorgeous Models, you made my clothes look so good.

All photos and clothes, and paintings on walls, copyright Kyi M. Kaung

Till the end of April, five select items are at Alchemy, 8025 Georgia Av. Silver Spring, MD 20910 -- 301 565 2262

Contact Brenda.

Snap 'em up before someone else does.

http://www.artandalchemy.com

"Who am I?" at Dr. Kaung's Salon, April 6, 2007

On April 6, 2007, I had the great pleasure of hosting historian Bijan C. Bayne and cultural anthropologist Tomiko Anders with their presentation of “Who am I?” -- about cultural, racial, national and personal identities and identifiers, at my Dr. Kaung’s Salon at Space 7-10, Kefa Café, Silver Spring, MD.

Both Anders and Bayne are working on their own video documentary projects. Anders described her project consisting of interviews of people of “three or more mixed racial identities.” Bayne spoke of his project about people from other countries who were exhibited as “exotics” in America and Europe in the 19th century. He was not “blaming” about this practice, in the days before photography or TV, even while recognizing that the feelings of the “exhibited” have never been recorded, and most probably was extremely painful emotionally and even physically damaging.

Both Bayne and Anders have previously given talks at Space 7-10, Bayne about his project “Show People” and Anders, about her project, tentatively titled “Mergence.”

I see in my mind’s eye the extremely beautiful faces of such highly talented, racially mixed persons as Tiger Woods and Angelina Jolie, as I write this. It’s fashionable these days, but Bayne says, “There are ugly people too.”

Our Kefa - Space 7-10 co-ordinator and director Amy Kincaid, whom I always thought of as “Irish” due to her name, (or is “Kincaid” a Scottish name?) brought up the modern concept of color blindness. How we should all strive to be color blind in our friendships and associations.
{Remember the scene in the movie about Idi Amin, The Last King of Scotland, 2006, when Forest Whitaker (who won an Oscar for this role) playing the “murderous, charming” Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, accuses his personal physician of “being English.” To which the doctor says, “But I’m not English, I’m Scottish!”
“Well, why didn’t you say so?”
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0455590/ }

My father gave me a black doll when I was a child in England in the early fifties. I distinctly remember running downstairs to fetch it before bedtime, while my parents were in Paris on a short vacation, and a young couple was staying with us, “to look after us.” They were newly married and hugging and kissing each other on the sofa, when, at 5 years old, I rushed in, grabbed my doll from under the Christmas tree, and rushed out again. I know now that “golliwog” which was the name for such dolls in those days, is derogatory. I found this out in the 90s when someone called Indian-born, British writer Salman Rushdie “a wog” at the time when Khomeini put the fatwah on him for his novel The Satanic Verses.

Some of the salon attendees at “Who am I?” shared some of their personal experiences with race issues. What I forgot to share (I was so tired from getting back from the airport a few hours earlier) were some “racial episodes” that others have related to me. A young Burmese women told me that in elementary school in L.A. a classmate spat directly in her face. She had to wipe the spittle off. She said she was so ashamed, she had never even told her parents. I see no reason why a victim should “feel ashamed.” It’s something for a perpetrator to feel ashamed of.

Another acquaintance, an amateur Burmese pop singer whom I am no longer in touch with, said he loves San Francisco and was driving in his car with the top down, when another car with two Indians in it, stopped with a squeal of brakes right next to him at a red light.

He said he cussed them – “Khwe kalar tway,” in Burmese. (“Damned Indians.”)

At which “the Indian” in the next car turned to him and said in perfect Burmese, “Ah Ko Gyi (Elder Brother), please watch your language.”

At the Salon, you’ll see from my pictures that the attendees were rapt, and everyone said to me afterwards, “That was a good one.”

They also talked about their reactions to my “Mostly Burmese Mugs,” that is, “mugshots” or portraits show, then on the walls at the time.

I’d like to refer you to two other artists who share my fascination with the human face, emotions, national or culture of origin, (in my case “Burmese” -- whatever that is) and art and impressionism.

Please see:
1. Rachel Kent: The Many Faces of Cherry Hood,
2. Claire Roberts: The Slow Art of Ah Xian
In Art in Australia http://www.australia.com/article

Focus on Burma and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi at NEIU, April 5, 2007.

Sometimes out of the dull gray of Burmese politics and cold weather in exile, a spark of light and joy shines.
And sometimes it comes very unexpectedly, this finding of people of like mind. Sometimes, as now, the invitations actually come by email, and almost look like spam, except that spammers can’t spell and have no imagination.

Those of you who know something about Burma, will know that the pro-democracy struggle, led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi (Daw=Ms. in Burmese), has been going on now since the mass demonstrations of 1988.
Daw Suu (or Aunty Suu) as she is affectionately known inside and outside the country of Burma, which the junta which rules it insists on calling “Myanmar,” – has been in and out of house arrest for a cumulative total of 13 years now.
At the beginning of her first house arrest, in spite of being incarcerated at the time of the elections, her party, The National League for Democracy, won an overwhelming majority.
The military junta which still rules Burma has never honored the results of the election, and has continued to harass and oppress the NLD, as well as the people of Burma. “It’s equal opportunity oppression,” as the late dissident, Dr. Chao Tzang Yawngwe, once said at an international meeting in Gottenberg, in 2002.
As a Burma expert I am often invited to international meetings, but disappointingly, the majority are now dominated by people who are willing to dis Daw Suu, in return for promoting pro-trade policies with the junta. I consider this reprehensible.
At the beginning of this year, I wrote a number of foreign policy articles for Open Democracy on line, as well as Foreign Policy in Focus.
As a result of these articles, I was invited to be on a panel about Burma by Northeastern Illinois University, which was co-sponsoring the Conference together with Open Democracy.
I happily accepted when the invitation came by email.
Barbara Victor, who wrote The Lady, a biography of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, was the keynote speaker. On April 5th, Ms. Victor spoke of how she came to go to Burma to interview Daw Suu. Ms. Victor is a journalist with a very impressive resume who normally writes about the Middle East. She has interviewed such notable people as President George W. Bush and Gaddaffi.
She described how her publisher asked her to write the book, and she went to Burma with the help of a business woman Miriam Marshall Segal, then “friendly” with Gen, Saw Maung, whom she called “Mon General” according to newspaper accounts at the time. In 1998, with the collapse of the Asian Tiger economies, Ms. Segal’s business Peregrine Inc., also crashed. I distinctly remember using a falcon’s shrill cries as a mini-sound byte in my on air political and economic analysis column, Reading between the Lines, at that time.
Barbara Victor movingly described an overwhelming atmosphere of fear in Burma which she said she had never experienced before, even though she has covered many major wars. She said, the MI or Military Intelligence, followed her everywhere and insisted she stay the three months she was in Rangoon, in the government guest house, not in an hotel. She told me that Col. Hla Min, included in internal purge together with his boss Lt.Col. Khin Nyunt in 2004, was her “handler” in Rangoon.
During Ms. Victor’s presentation, we were treated to a slide show of photographs of Daw Suu and her father, the founding father of Burma’s Independence (from Great Britain in 1948) – Bogyoke (General) Aung San.
It is sobering to think that this beautiful and frail looking woman is so strong, and has suffered so much, for freedom for Burma. Though of course, she herself has always said, her suffering and sacrifice is nothing compared to that of all the people of Burma.
The Conference was organized by Dr Hamid Akbari of NEIU, Danny Postel of Open Democracy, Dean Murrell Duster and Assistant Dean, Yasmin Ranney. It was also co-sponsored by the Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh Leadership Fund at NEIU. Since Dr. Mossadegh was the democratically elected leader of Iran, who was also not allowed to assume power, we see the parallels with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD in Burma.
The morning panel was chaired ably by Danny Postel. Prof. Emeritus Clark Neher, Northern Illinois University, and Maura Stephens, U.S. spokesperson for the International Campaign for Freedom for Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma, were also on the panel with me.
I gave an opening short summary in 20 minutes of the important events, regime changes, economic and political systems in Burma from the late 19th century and colonization by Great Britain, to World War II and the Japanese Occupation, Independence and then the military coup of 1962 – and the various dates between 1962 and 1988 when the military shot at Burmese citizens who were un-armed and demonstrating peacefully. I emphasized the importance of 1988 as the watershed event which has impacted and shaped all of our lives. Prof. Neher, I found, also shared some of my revulsion with the junta. Maura Stephens related how she met a Burmese dissident who was on hunger strike to the death to lobby the U.N., how she became involved in the Free Burma Movement, and she also described the current work that she does helping Burmese refugees.
In the afternoon, we saw 2 films about Burma: John Boorman’s Beyond Rangoon, and the recent Frontline documentary by Evan Williams.
There was also a moving Prayer Circle during which Prof. Dan Creely described the sacred fire that had been brought to NEIU from a Native American traditional Healer. We then sat in a circle and shared whatever we wished to share as we were each given the “peace totem” in turn. Most moving were what a young man who had been an NLD member told us. A journalist who was imprisoned and tortured in Burma and his family were also there.
I’d like to thank everyone at NEIU and Open Democracy, for bringing us all together. There is indeed good energy emanating from this place.
I pray for Daw Suu and all the people of Burma and hope this darkness in our lives will soon be over.
--

Photos from my art show Mostly Burmese Mugs - March 13-April 7, 2007

I had another very rewarding experience at Space 7-10 at Kefa Café, 963 Bonifant St. in Silver Spring, MD. (Two blocks from Silver Spring Metro).
Here are some photos that I took midway through the show.
I love best – Lady Vanda on the wall next to the door,

and the impromptu “painting” made when I lifted my camera just as a delivery truck parked outside.
The captions by Bijan C. Bayne were also a great success.
Ababe, joint owner of Kefa together with her sister Lene, said, “The captions make you wish to go on to the next painting, and see what (it) says.” She also added, “They make you look at the painting, and then think, and then look at the painting again.”
To be truthful, they were a great surprise to me. After I invited Bijan to write the captions about three months ago, I purposely tried not to talk about the portraits. Nor did I think about them much until Audrey Dutton at The Gazette and Ying-Ju Lai at Asian Fortune interviewed me about the show. Both correspondents, interestingly, look on them as “human rights portraits” – and so did some of my Burma and arts colleagues.
To me, they are fictional creations, much like the fictional characters in my novels, short stories and, sometimes, in my poetry. I’d like them to be seen as human and humane, and then of course as having something to do with human rights. I am surprised that no one up till now has seen that “Min Gun, Revolutionary,” whom I named after the big bell at Mingun in N. Burma, has no arms inside the empty short sleeves of his light blue shirt and so could be a land mine victim. I only noticed it myself a while ago.
So it should not have surprised me when Bijan came up with serious one liners, that seem to bore into the soul of the “people” depicted on canvas. I had expected him to write funny, somewhat longer captions, perhaps to offset the seriousness of all the portraits. For instance, none of them smile, and a friend in Thailand who gave me permission to paint from her photograph, did not recognize herself. I seem to have taken everyone’s smile away, but that may be because I can’t paint teeth. J In all the stone friezes portraying apsaras or heavenly spirits (nats in Burmese) at Angkor Wat in Cambodia, there is said to be only one apsara who is smiling and showing her even little teeth.
Amy Kincaid, who directs Space 7-10 said, “Kyi is funny as well as serious,” and Mary Thomas, who with her husband Tom Thomas, regularly attends my Salon there, said, “”But there’s nothing funny about the portraits.”
And indeed there isn’t.
Bijan with his characteristic modesty, shrugs and says, “It’s just a reaction to the paintings. If someone else had written them, they would be different.”
“It’s all perception,” Tom Thomas says.
*
We Burmese, on the other hand, are known for our insouciance. We are always laughing and smiling, which has caused some reporters to conclude that we must be happy people and there are no human rights abuses in Burma. I myself think we laugh and smile and tell jokes, the more nervous and afraid we get. I remember my aunt’s husband, Uncle U Tint, telling jokes frantically the night after my father’s funeral, in an attempt, I think, to cheer me up. So as to appreciate the all out-effort he was making, I laughed.
My aunt then said, “She’s so young, she doesn’t understand.”
But of course I did.
*
All Words and Images on this Blog copyright Kyi May Kaung, unless specifically attributed. Mirroring and plagiarizing prohibited.