Episode #126: Fiction and Fun in Burma
“It's about a young woman who is between high school and college and becomes interested in Burma, and plans to spend a summer volunteering there in a monastery,” Rose Metro says, describing the basic plot of her novel, Have Fun In Burma. “It's set against the backdrop of the violence against the Rohingya people… So I guess it's a coming-of-age story, but combined with a sort of Passage to India-like story of a young white woman going to a place that she does not understand very well.”
Rose, on the other hand, cannot be said to not understand Burma very well. An academic who has been studying the country for over two decades, she specializes in the education of Burmese refugees in Thailand, “particularly around the area of history and conflicting versions of history.” With this in mind, she chose to step outside her chosen profession to try her hand at writing fiction. For an issue as complex as the recent conflict in Rakhine state, Rose decided that fiction would be a more effective medium than straightforward non-fiction for exploring its many facets. She says, “I felt like the discourse [around the Rohingya crisis] had become very polarized, and I wanted to write something that would invite readers to take on multiple perspectives, or to maybe understand an aspect of that conflict that hadn't been apparent to them earlier.”
An avid reader of Burma-related material, from scholarly tomes to travelogues to historical accounts, Rose is well aware that the country has long been viewed through an exotified, Orientalist lens, and she very much wanted to avoid such distortions in her own writing. “I can write about representation, and how the people in the country are represented and frustrations I've had with that,” she notes, describing the angle she came to take. “And I can write about my own experience as a white American coming into that culture.”
Being quite conscious of this past narrative, Rose explicitly draws attention to two classics of colonial literature in her text: George Orwell’s Burmese Days, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. “I wanted people to think about ways that they've seen Burma or other colonized countries represented, and to think, therefore, about the tradition of literature about colonization, and the relationship to current practices of international organizations and NGOs coming into countries and often doing what they think is best for people, without always consulting those who they're supposedly helping.”
One of the ways Rose portrays these differing and layered perspectives is through interactions (and subsequent misunderstandings) between her Burmese and American characters. For example, she illustrates this through the protagonist, Adela Frost, consistently using direct forms of communication in a culture that is far more comfortable with indirect speech. Another problem Adela has is in recognizing and adhering to different cultural norms. “It's hard [for her] to understand boundaries and relationships [in Burma],” Rose explains, “and Adela gets tripped up as she oversteps boundaries. She misreads signs.” These two cultural blinders converge in disastrous ways for Adela when she becomes convinced that her own good intentions and ideals are enough to “resolve” the Rohingya crisis. This represents a trait Rose has seen present in the United States. “Americans always think they have the solution, the answer, and can fix everything. And so they will go anywhere, and insert themselves into any situation that's happening.”
Similar to Adela, the other characters in the book represent archetypes of the types of people who would be encountered in 2010s Burma. One such example is Sarah, an American who has been around for several years, and who “functions as a kind of gatekeeper, like, ‘I'm more devoted to Burma than you are,’ or like, ‘You don't know what you're doing.’” Rose explains how because the country had been closed to outsiders for so long, the few foreigners who had managed to spend extended time there, gained a deeper knowledge of the culture, or enjoyed wider access to important contacts, frequently developed a kind of superiority complex vis-à-vis newer arrivals or those who were less knowledgeable.
Another important character is the Buddhist nun, Daw Pancavati. Thematically-speaking, she portrays a mother figure and caretaker to Adele. But on a deeper level, “she plays this role of showing her by example what can't be explained in words.” Although Daw Pancavati was not based on any one specific person, her character was inspired by a nun that Rose had met while on a retreat at Chan Myay Yeiktha monastery. “I never spoke to her, but she showed me what to do,” Rose recalls. “She showed me how to walk. She showed me how to eat. She showed me how to bow. It wasn't like a didactic, ‘You're doing the wrong thing’, but rather her teaching was really gentle. And it was really, really beautiful. I had this one moment where she was walking really slowly in front of me [in the Mahasi style of practice]. And I was like, ‘Who showed her how to walk that way? And then who showed that person how to walk that way?’ And I just had this feeling like, it goes all the way back to the Buddha! There's this chain of teaching and experiential teaching of showing people how to do things that is this amazing lineage!”
Then there is U Pyinnya, a monk learning English from Adele, and based loosely on Burmese monks that Rose, herself, had taught along the Thai border. U Pyinnya is from Rakhine state, and his ethnocentric views clash with Adela’s perspective; she wants to promote anti-racist and progressive policies, while he feels that Muslims are a danger to his faith and the State. And finally, there’s Thiha, a young medical student involved in the democracy movement. Although there is much to be admired about him, Rose does not portray him in an idealized way. As important as she felt it was to represent the brave and selfless Burmese people she had met working for human rights, she also thought it was also essential to humanize them. “[T]hey make mistakes, and they do things for mixed reasons [like everyone, everywhere]. I wanted to humanize that archetype.”
While such diverse characters may well not communicate skillfully across cultures even in the best of times, their misunderstandings take on far more serious consequences, with the story built around the developing Rohingya crisis. As a young progressive from the West, Adela applies her values and perspective to the unfolding violence, unable (and perhaps unwilling) to understand how the Burmese characters see the situation differently. Because they cannot even agree on a shared set of facts, let alone find a resolution, the tension mirrors the wildly divergent ways that the Rohingya crisis was covered by the media—which was one of Rose’s main intentions in choosing to craft her story as fiction.
“I've done a lot of academic writing about Burma,” she says, “and it has its purpose, and it's valuable, but it also is very limited. It gets tiresome to defend an argument, and at some point, you're just like, ‘Do I even really believe this anymore? Why do we have to argue for a specific interpretation or a specific perspective?’ Instead of saying, ‘This is what's wrong, or what's right,’ just like, these are some things that people say, and it's interesting to try to strive for believability, rather than to strive for accuracy.”
While Adela’s failure to find common ground with other characters more obviously speaks to cross-cultural miscommunication on one level, for Rose, it also points to a much deeper element that underlies the human condition: an understanding of conditioning and karma, particularly through the paṭicca-samuppāda, or the Law of Dependent Origination. “[Adela] reached the limits of her conditioning and her knowledge,” Rose explains. “I think we're always looking for that moment when we can start over or start fresh, without this baggage of our past karma. And that moment does not come. We can only ever operate from the karmic situation that we're in, which is dependent on all our different past actions.”
Rose brings the subject of meditation into her narrative as well. Adela is taught a Mahasi style practice by the abbot of the monastery she is spending the summer at. Her descriptions of Adela’s transformation during the intensive retreat is particularly enthralling, and are loosely based on Rose’s own memories of her initial courses. Indeed, one of Rose’s motivations in describing the practice is to encourage readers to consider trying it themselves. However, in the story, Adela’s practice becomes derailed by the tendency of, in Roses’s words, “Americans [wanting] to fix everything. We also want to reach enlightenment in like two days, to go sit in a cave somewhere and be like, ‘I shall emerge enlightened!’ And so that conquering mentality, there's a carryover, right? That's the parallel with colonization, like, ‘This knowledge is mine, and I'm going to get this knowledge and I'm going to use it to do whatever I want with.”
But it was also important to Rose that the meditation part of Adela’s journey, and its role in the wider Burma experience, did not happen in isolation, but was integrated into everything else taking place both at the monastery and in society at large. “I would say definitely, the vast majority of my academic Burma-friends don’t consider themselves Buddhists and don't practice meditation; and the vast majority of my meditation friends are not particularly interested in Burmese politics.” For this reason, Rose wanted to find a way to combine the two through the story of Adela’s journey. “I did want to bring that together and have those two perspectives coexist in one book.”
“I think that's just the central tension,” Rose goes on to say. “We have to have that balance of compassion and equanimity. That's so hard. How can you keep being open to feeling empathy for people when their suffering is so great? But also, how can you not just be like Adela and be like, ‘Okay, I'll fix it….’ If it has any chance of reducing suffering, either mine or someone else's, it's worth doing. I think that kind of humility is something that can take a long time to get to.”