SUNDAY, JUNE 20, 2010 Book World BURMA REVIEW BY WENDY LAW-YONE Glimpses of wrack and ruin
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or most of the past half-centu- ry, ever since Burma fell under military rule, news from that closed-off country has been relatively scarce and almost al- ways bad. But in recent years a
series of shocking events — the murder and torture of Buddhist monks who dared stage a peaceful protest; the government’s denial of help to victims of Cyclone Nargis; the ongoing mistreatment of the last elect- ed leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, who is still under house arrest — has turned Burma into an international cause célèbre. Heads of state weigh in regularly with denounce- ments of the military dictatorship, Holly- wood celebrities champion the Burmese cause, and debates on the country’s fate proliferate in international conferences, on the air, in print, on the Internet. As I write, nine books on Burma are stacked on my desk — two memoirs, two journalistic accounts, one graphic novel and four his- tories — all published by mainstream houses, or to be published, within the year. With elections pending in Burma — bla- tantly rigged and guaranteed to raise hackles far and wide — many more works are undoubtedly in the pipeline. Although it may be nothing more than coincidence, it seems remarkable that four out of the current bumper crop of books are by women: two Americans, a Canadian and a Burmese. In “Everything Is Broken,” Emma Lar- kin (a pseudonym) returns to some of the territory of her first book, “Finding George Orwell in Burma.” The catastrophe that draws Larkin back in 2008 is Cyclone Nar- gis, which struck the delta region with apocalyptic force, leaving more than
100,000 people dead and wreckage on an incalculable scale. Compounding the dis- aster was the stubborn refusal of the mili- tary government to allow international aid to reach the victims. “Everything Is Broken” is Larkin’s eye- witness account of the cyclone’s chaotic af- termath, both in Rangoon and throughout the devastated delta. Larkin’s writing is graceful, and the final third of the book de- scribing her work with the survivors is all the more powerful for her unobtrusive style. But due perhaps in part to her low- key interviews and subdued investigations and in part to the anonymity of her sourc- es (a necessity under repressive regimes), other sections have an offstage quality that makes for less compelling reading. Another author returning to Burma for
a second book is Karen Connelly, whose first was “The Lizard’s Cage,” an award- winning novel set in a Burmese prison. This time, Connelly’s nonfiction subject is love. Although this is principally a memoir of her affair with the leader of a Burmese dissident group, the subtitle of “Burmese Lessons: A True Love Story” clearly refers as well to this Canadian writer’s fondness for the country and its people. Connelly is a poet with many volumes to her credit and a narrative flair to her prose. But those who pick up “Burmese Lessons” more out of a special interest in Burma than out of curiosity about how a Western woman copes with seduction, passion, re- jection and constipation while carrying on an affair with a Burmese revolutionary may feel shortchanged. About Maung, the revolutionary, we learn very little, apart from a few breathless details about his healthy libido. What exactly Maung does
EVERYTHING IS BROKEN A Tale of Catastrophe in Burma
By Emma Larkin Penguin 271 pp. $25.95
BURMESE LESSONS A True Love Story By Karen Connelly Nan A. Talese/ Doubleday 382 pp. $27.95
FOR US
SURRENDER IS OUT OF THE QUESTION A Story From Burma’s Never-Ending War By Mac McClelland Soft Skull. 388 pp. Paperback, $15.95
UNDAUNTED My Struggle for Freedom and Survival in Burma By Zoya Phan with Damien Lewis Free Press 284 pp. $26
in the daily service of revolution remains unclear. One is left with the impression that he does very little — rather poor PR for the dissident movement. Much of the action in “Burmese Les- sons” takes place in the Thai border town of Mae Sot, home to an ever-shifting popu- lation of Burmese refugees, illegal migrant workers, dissidents and the NGOs and Thai police overseeing them. Mae Sot is also the setting for Mac McClelland’s “For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question,” an account of her six-week stint as a volun- teer in a houseful of Karen refugees. (The Karen are one of Burma’s embattled eth- nic minorities living in the delta and east- ern hills bordering Thailand.) Subtitled “A Story From Burma’s Never-Ending War,” the book is shot through with so many ac- counts of mind-numbing ordeals and atrocities that after a while, the repetition seems never-ending, too. But here at least, between the horror stories, we learn what young Burmese dissidents do when they’re not out in the field: They sleep in late, get hooked on Facebook, talk to their girlfriends on their cellphones, do squats while watching Eminem, drink a lot of beer — the usual frat-house routine. McClelland, a young editor at Mother
Jones, writes like a seasoned 20-some- thing blogger. A footnote explaining why the Burmese junta changed the country’s name to Myanmar concludes, “The junta sucks.” She resists the temptation to put her name on her food in the shared refrig- erator of the group house because that would be “way too douchey.” Still, she has done her homework where Burma is con- cerned — and anyone who doubts it can be roundly reassured by a separate chapter
on her sourcing. As McClelland’s reporting shows, sto- ries of Karen villagers in ceaseless flight from rabid Burmese soldiers dominate the literature of human-rights violations in Burma. But it takes a book like Zoya Phan’s “Undaunted” to bring home the gut- wrenching particularities of such stories —what it means to experience terror, hun- ger, dispossession and debasement as a way of life. The daughter of a senior Karen leader who was recently assassinated, Zoya had an idyllic childhood — until her tranquil, verdant Burmese village went up in smoke when she was 14. For the next 10 years, she and her family, along with thou- sands of others, were constantly on the run — from the savagery of the Burmese army to the cruelty of the jungle, and on to the inhumanity of refugee camps. Zoya’s simple but affecting coming-of-
age tale, told with the help of British jour- nalist Damien Lewis, is one of both surviv- al and triumph. Today Zoya, a University of East Anglia graduate based in London, is a prominent campaigner and eloquent speaker whose counsel on Burma-related issues has been sought by members of Par- liament and former prime minister Gor- don Brown. Whatever their strengths and weak- nesses, these books are at least evidence that news about Burma is no longer as scarce as it once was — just implacably, resolutely disheartening.
bookworld@washpost.com
Wendy Law-Yone is a Burmese American writer living in London. Her novel “The Road to Wanting” has just been published in Britain.
MEMOIR REVIEW BY MICHELLE BOORSTEIN
A father, a son and big questions about God T
alk about a moment of truth. An- drew Park had a habit of avoiding the messy, conflicted aspects of his
BETWEEN A CHURCH AND A HARD PLACE One Faith-Free Dad’s Struggle to Understand What It Means to Be Religious (or Not) By Andrew Park Avery
210 pp. $26
religious identity (or lack of one) until his 3-year-old son began blurting out pas- sionate comments about God — picked up, apparently, at a church-run pre- school. Park’s response: to set off on a journey through his family history and contemporary American religion in hopes of learning how to communicate to his children what he sees as true and real. In essence, how to be a good dad. But the problem is that he doesn’t know what he believes. This confusion, which fuels his sweet memoir, “Between a Church and a Hard Place,” will no doubt resonate with legions of parents (including this one). In his self-deprecat- ing voice, Park makes an undeniable point: Having children makes you con- front your ambivalences. After all, who wants to pass on squishy nothingness? His wife and he had a plan to preface all comments to their kids about religion with “Well, some people believe . . .,” but his son’s God talk called that plan into question. “He didn’t care about ‘some
people.’ ” Park writes. “He wanted to know what we, his parents, believed.” While Park isn’t really a believer and says early in the book that he has a bias against religion, he makes little com- ments that suggest the opposite. He wor- ries that his faith-free attitude is the re- sult of laziness, describes his childhood in a secular home as “spiritual exile” and says that as someone unchurched, he feels “alone.” Park’s trip through his colorful family enlivens him. He explores his living rela- tives’ rejection of his prominent great- grandfather, who was a leader in the Pen- tecostal Holiness movement in the late 1800s. He writes with a boy’s-eye viewof the time his older brother stunned the family by becoming born-again, prompt- ing his parents to plot a secret retreat with a cult deprogrammer. Park always seems to have been on the sidelines, not sure where his sympathies lay. Park puts on his journalist’s hat to ex- plore the sociological backdrop of periods in America when religion experienced growth and upheaval. He examines his in- constant feelings and discovers he has
pragmatic reasons to be drawn to faith, in- cluding the community it provides. He travels to the tabernacle named after his great-grandfather, interviews his late mother’s friends about her faith and tries to imagine his father’s misery while trudg- ing to church on Sundays as a child in Scotland. Ultimately his investigations bring
Park back where he started, but with new insight. He attends a seminar about how to raise ethical children without religion and seems to have found his own holy grail: It’s okay to be a doubting dad. “I had forgotten what my job was,” he writes. “I was responsible for helping them learn how to make it on their own.” In the end, Park doesn’t resolve one issue he raises repeatedly, which is that crises of life and death and morality can radi- cally shift one’s view on God. After read- ing the book, it’s hard to know where Park’s faith will lead.
boorsteinm@washpost.com
Michelle Boorstein covers religion for The Washington Post.
Book World A special Summer Reading issue.
In today’s paper
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