Rooted Beyond Erasure
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“With a three year old and a baby that you’re carrying? There’s no way that you’re going to be able to make that journey through the jungle, and to make it out with [everyone] in one piece. I think that it was luck and remarkable, due to her fortitude, that all three of them managed to survive.”
The earliest memories Amy Hardingson, a writer, activist and community artist, has of her great-grandmother, Hilda, are of a quiet strength. Her very presence connected Amy back to a land she had only known through fragmented stories and faded photographs.
It was 1941, and the shadow of the Second World War loomed large over Burma. Hilda was in her twenties when her life, and that of her descendants, would be altered forever. They were of Eurasian heritage, with a unique blend of cultures and roles within the colonial British Empire. Their family was economically advantaged, Christian, and bore anglicized names; many, including Hilda's husband, were train drivers, and connected to the British bureaucracy. “They’re in this particular pocket of Burmese society at the time,” Amy describes.
But their privileged position did not last. The British, unable to hold Burma against the Japanese advance, retreated to India, and the new occupiers issued an ominous warning: anyone connected to the British faced life in a Japanese concentration camp. So Hilda, with her three-year-old daughter and her seven-month-old son (Amy's grandfather), embarked on what is called “The Great Trek” to India, a desperate and difficult journey. Their plan was to travel north by train, then through the jungle.
But on the way, tragedy struck: a bomb injured Hilda's husband, and soon after, malaria claimed his life, leaving Hilda alone with two tiny children. She tried to hide from the Japanese forces, but was eventually discovered and, due to their Anglicized names and Catholic faith, she and her children were interned in various concentration camps for over a year. It was a miracle they survived. “It was too difficult for my great grandmother to ever talk about,” Amy reflects. For her grandfather, those times formed “really confusing memories, snippets of bodies piled up,” that he only occasionally spoke of towards the end of his life.
After the war, a new chapter began. Hilda married a British soldier they had taken in as a lodger. Following the Japanese defeat, their initial intent was to stay in Burma, but the situation shifted again with Burmese independence, Aung San’s assassination, and the rise of nationalism. Once again, their identity had put them in danger, so a decision was made to move to the UK. Hilda initially saw it as temporary, and even considered leaving her children with their grandparents. But her new husband thought it was important that they stick together as a core family unit. In 1947, they all came over to the UK by ship.
Amy was born in the port city of Southampton, and as she grew up there, she often felt the weight of her mixed ancestry. The question “Where are you from?” became a constant refrain. “I’ve been asked ever since I was a school child walking down the streets,” she says. This led to what she calls a “mixed-race imposter-syndrome and anxiety,” a frustrating dance with people who “wanted to understand what box to put you in.” Amy's typical-sounding British name, her parents and grandparents being from the UK, yet clearly looking different: none of it computed for those seeking an exotic name or a neat narrative to fit her appearance.
Amy's identity has always been intertwined with the realities of racism and historical erasure. The general lack of knowledge in the UK about Southeast Asian history in general, and Burma specifically, only compounded this lack of a sense of belonging. This feeling, coupled with the racism Amy has personally experienced, has helped her arrive at this truth: “it doesn’t matter if you can have a very English name, you can tick any British box in terms of culture that you think you know be, it doesn’t matter! Some people are just going to be racist to you anyway.” This realization has helped her understand the importance of knowing her cultural heritage and her ancestors. And she says, overcoming internalized racism is key to helping people in her situation forge a healthy and holistic sense of self and identity.
For Amy, this process has been healing. After her grandfather’s passing, she sought to understand her relationship to her British-Burmese ethnicity beyond his direct influence, and what it meant for her children, who pass as white. It’s about ensuring that the erasure of stories doesn’t continue, because her family’s stories are “part of British history, it forms part of Burmese history. We’re just denying these stories when we are chopping off these parts of ourselves to try and fit in, and it doesn’t even work,” she says.
When her grandfather passed away, Amy inherited a treasure trove of his photographs and Hilda's papers, including a meticulously typed family tree, spread across six sheets of paper. It went back several more generations than she had ever expected. Amy found that her mixed heritage stretched back to the very beginning of British colonialism in lower Burma, to the 1870s and 1880s. Some of her ancestors had two names, a Burmese one and a European one adopted after marriage. Hilda even noted “married Burmese” for some spouses, without recording their names, a fascinating detail that hinted at the complexities of identity within the community. This long history of mixed identity challenged the narrative that Amy's mixed-race existence was somehow an abnormality.
After giving birth to her daughter, Lucy, Amy was determined to create a strong connection with her family’s complex heritage. She made a conscious effort to integrate Burmese culture into their daily lives. Food was an easy entry point. Amy has always loved cooking and eating Burmese food. They found a beautiful, bilingual (English-Burmese) picture book, I See the Sun in Myanmar, a story following a child's day, interspersed with photographs. In these small ways, Amy preserved their narrative and identity.
At nine years of age, Lucy became an active participant in this legacy. Influenced by her friends, she joined Girl Guides (known as Girl Scouts elsewhere). The organization offered badges on a diverse range of topics. When it came time to choose a charity badge, Lucy's decision was immediate and heartfelt. “On going through the options, she immediately said that she would like to support a Burmese charity [and chose Better Burma, the humanitarian arm of Insight Myanmar] because we have been talking about Burma on and off ever since the coup there,” Amy said proudly. A regular donor to Better Burma herself, this resonated with her in a wonderful way.
Lucy’s project was a sponsored reading challenge, where she committed to reading for a minimum of ten minutes daily for a week. The outcome was more than was expected: Lucy raised £170, or roughly $200 USD! The impact of her efforts was profound. They received an email from Better Burma with a full report and several dozen photographs, detailing how her donation provided food and drinking water for 160 different families for a week. Seeing messages and photographs of people receiving donation packages with her name on them, and even invitations to visit Myanmar, made Lucy feel like she had made a direct connection to the communities she was helping.
Another experience that reinforced Amy’s thinking about the importance of heritage and community was her participation in a documentary about parenting in the diaspora, called Raising Us. It provided another validation for her identity by connecting her family story with many others who share similar or overlapping experiences.
They continue to seek out these connections. Amy took Lucy to an exhibition of Burmese treasures at the British Museum, where Lucy absorbed every detail, fascinated by the artifacts and historical exhibits. It was a powerful experience for Amy, to watch her daughter’s great interest in her heritage. Lucy has now even begun asking her own questions, exploring her identity separately from anything that Amy is exposing her to. Amy hopes her young son, Sam, also develops a similar interest and curiosity about their family, their history and their heritage.
Amy likens a positive connection with one’s heritage to a thread: “If you don’t do anything with that thread, like any kind of material, it can get thinner, or it can start to fray. It can get very fragile.”