Episode 38: Feeding Freedom, Not Fear
A world-renowned expert on Burmese cuisine and author of the best-selling book Mandalay: Recipes and Tales from a Burmese Kitchen, MiMi Aye never imagined that one day she might become an activist. But as she has become increasingly invested in Myanmar’s current crisis, that is the role she has begun to take on. She is turning over her sizeable internet presence— she runs the site Burmese Beyond, and her own foodie podcast, MSG Pod— to speak out on this issue.
With family connections in Yangon, Mogok, and Mandalay, her parents moved to England just a few months before her birth. Yet she was raised in a Burmese home, and from an early age, cooking helped her establish a more intimate connection with not just her motherland, but also her own mother, as she remembers being intrigued from a young age to learn the magic behind her mom’s prowess in the kitchen.
Having deep connections to the full range of Burma’s cuisine— running the gamut from humble street stalls to five-star dining— MiMi Aye was concerned when the pandemic broke a year ago, noting that the restaurant industry especially has been suffering. And although she feared that a sudden military takeover would only place a greater strain on this already reeling industry, Burmese cooks have not been idle. Far from it, in fact! Many of them, along with food delivery workers, have been at the forefront of cooking and delivering food in mass quantities to the large numbers protesters taking to the streets each day, as well as to “Civil Disobedience Movement” employees who are refusing to return to their jobs as civil servants. While the degree of organization necessary for this herculean task might seem overwhelming to an outside observer, the Burmese may be the one nationality properly trained to do just that, as they have regularly provided food to hundreds of thousands of monastics on a daily basis for countless generations.
From here, our conversation moves on to a profound moment of personal introspection and vulnerability that MiMi Aye shared from her Twitter feed, in which she said:
Something I don’t really talk about is to be Burmese, especially if you’re of a certain age, is to be afraid, from bitter experience. It’s a low-level, visceral feeling most of the time, but sometimes, like now, it can be overwhelming. Because all the worst things you can imagine that could happen to you or your loved ones can happen and has happened, to you or to people you know, because of the Burmese military. Right now, I don’t even want to eat, let alone cook anything. There’s a reason Aung San Suu Kyi’s most famous book is called Freedom From Fear.
MiMi Aye notes how many younger Burmese followers have thanked her for these words, noting that their parents had always told them something similar, but growing up with greater personal freedoms, they never had quite understood their parents’ fears. Similarly, many foreign readers were also appreciative of gaining further insight into the personal toll wrought by this crisis.
This leads to a discussion on how Myanmar is perceived by those outside the country, and the stereotypes and biases at play. For MiMi Aye, the most disconcerting of these is the Western characterization of the Burmese woman as demure and in need of “saving” by men. If this was ever in doubt before, she points to the multi-faceted roles that Burmese women are now playing in the protest movement, which should be enough to allay any misrepresentation.
Soon after the military coup was initiated in Myanmar, MiMi Aye transformed her platform to immediately begin her advocacy. One of the first things she began doing was warning the world-- as well as the younger Burmese generation-- exactly who the military was and what they were capable of. I asked her what kind of response she was getting from members of Generation Z back in March as they heard her describe this terror organization, and this is what she said.