Episode #184: Rising Above Borders (Bonus Shorts)
Tu Lor Eh Paw grew up one of six siblings in a bamboo hut in a tiny village in Karen state in eastern Myanmar, with coconut, lime, and banana trees in their backyard. There were just ten other families in the area. With no running water, one of her daily childhood chores was to fill up buckets at the local water source, which she remembers enjoying. There was no electricity, and because the village was too small for any church or monastery, her first school lessons came at the feet of her aunt.
Tu Lor’s mother was a local Karen Christian missionary, and met her father while serving in his village. Tu Lor grew up celebrating Christian holidays and basing her ethics and values on Christian teachings. The majority of Karen are actually Buddhist, although most Karen living deep in the mountains also hold to animist beliefs (a point that Eh Nay Thaw recently discussed in his own recent podcast conversation), regardless of their professed faith.
When Tu Lor was just a child, her mother unfortunately passed away, and her father made the difficult decision to move most of the family to a refugee camp. One reason was that he felt he just couldn’t support the entire family in the village anymore. Another was the compounding of decades of oppressive fear that generations of her family had experienced at the hand of the Burmese military. “My grandparents, they ran their whole life,” she explains, “they ran, starting in World War Two. And then my parents, they ran themselves. And then my siblings ran too, but I was too young to remember anything.” Periodically military jets would strafe nearby villages, seemingly at random, creating a near constant feeling of instability. Yet another was the Karen resistance forces. They pressured Karen families for recruits, and Tu Lor’s father did not want that for any of his sons. At least in the refugee camp, there was a school, a church, and relative safety.
When the fateful day to move to the camp arrived, Tu Lor was so upset about leaving that she hid deep in the woods in the hope that her dad wouldn’t be able to find her, which delayed their trip by a day. He did, however, and after a day’s to walk to the river, and another day by boat, they arrived at the camp in Thailand. Her father left the children with an aunt in a small house where around ten people would be living; their father set up camp near the river, midway between the village and the refugee camp, so he could earn money to help support his family while being closer for frequent visits. Of her camp experience, Tu Lor says, “It wasn't the most ideal of places, but it was better than being away from my other siblings.” They lived there for two years.
Two years later, when Tu Lor was just eleven years old, the family moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota. Thinking back to that trip today, she wonders how they even made it through the airport, it was all so strange. Arriving in the thick of winter, her first thought was, “Hey, what’s all this white stuff?!” They did not have the right clothing for that climate, knew few people there, and couldn’t speak any English. Her siblings ended up going to different schools.
Fortunately, Minneapolis boasts a sizeable Karen community (as discussed by Jesse Phenow on a recent podcast episode). Tu Lor attended the Karen church in town, and quickly make friends with other Karen children. However, she was also determined to become bilingual and bicultural, and integrate into her new homeland. She soon excelled in all her classes at school. Reflecting back on voluntarily staying after school and taking the bus by herself, getting extra English tutoring and attending summer school, she wonders how she managed it all.
While some immigrants find maintaining a positive sense of their primary cultural identity a challenge, Lu Tor always knew who she was. “I was never ashamed to speak my own language, I was never ashamed to practice what I believed was right.” Nonetheless, she had to negotiate her Karen and American identities differently in her different school experiences. The public schools she attended “were very diverse,” she says, “so I didn’t have to pretend like I'm somebody else. But then when I went to university, it was a whole different environment, and so at times, I did code switch, just to make it easier for myself to not have to go through so much of the altercation with my other peers. And so sometimes I did feel like I wasn't being authentic.”
And while Tu Lor has made the most of her new life in the United States, she can’t help but feel a sense of guilt when thinking of her remaining family back home. She still has siblings living in the village, she notes, “so I still can picture what they're going through, even when I enjoy all the freedoms that I have here. I still have nieces and nephews that are that are probably going to be stuck in that environment for a long, long time.” She is constantly thinking of what she can do in the United States that will help those back home, and recently landed on the idea of funding an electricity project (the severe lack of power and overall problems with the electricity grid in Myanmar was discussed by Guillaume de Langre on a recent podcast episode). However, the region is now under such heavy assault by the Tatmadaw that she knows a single bomb could easily destroy years of work and effort, and so sadly, she feels it doesn't make sense for her to invest in this project now.
Tu Lor has also made it a priority to branch out beyond the Karen immigrant community and connect with other refugees in Minneapolis, such as Laotians, Somalis and Ethiopians. She also feels it is of particular importance to educate American friends and peers, who have lived something of a sheltered life, about the harsher realities that so many others in the world face. “I want to share my story so that other people can learn from it, so that other people can be enlightened by my experience, and be able to see the world outside of their own comfort zone,” she says, adding that she doesn’t believe anyone can truly be free when others are still living under oppression.
While Tu Lor is hopeful about the democracy movement in Myanmar, she is also strained by the stress and trauma that never seem to go away. “I'm tired of it at this point,” she acknowledges, “I'm tired of having to go through the same thing, talking about the same thing.” She’s tired of the international community barely paying attention and providing scarcely any support, and tired of hearing about yet more airstrikes around her home village. “But I am hopeful that we're finally going to get the freedom that we want.”