Pyin Oo Lwin

Michelle Aung Thin

The air is warm as blood the first time I visit the Christian cemetery. Tender saplings quiver from the soil while vines snake in tangled skeins of green across lumps of stone. As I wheel my way along the path, I smell chlorophyll and the iron tang of earth. This afternoon I will make good on a promise I made, but never thought I’d keep.

It is 2013 and Burma is the world’s hottest travel destination, a forbidden state now open; a land lost in time, impossibly romantic, deliciously tragic. My Anglo friends had arranged for a family bicycle tour to see the place before it changed. When they discovered that I was born in Rangoon, they invited me and my family to join them.

I didn’t want to go. I had never been back to Burma. I had never been allowed. I didn't know if I could get a visa. If I did get a visa, I didn’t know if I’d be fined or punished or even arrested when I arrived. I voiced the fears to Warren, my husband, but he brushed them aside. ‘It will be organized; you will have people around you. It will be easy. It will be safe.’ 

I had other fears that I dared not voice. I have longed to go to Burma since I was a child. I grew up in snowy white Canada and always wanted to feel what it was like to belong somewhere without having to explain who I was or by what right I got there. I fantasised that my birthplace, my origin point, would feel this way. Like ‘home’. Yet Burma was also a former pariah state; it was painful just to tell people I was Burmese, how could it possibly feel like ‘home’.

So, I continued to resist. I put conditions on going, announcing these to our friends via email: I would go only if I could visit the Christian Cemetery in Maymyo where my grandfather and great-grandmother were buried. No one in my immediate family had been allowed to travel back to Burma since we’d left in 1963. None of us had stood in front of their graves or put flowers on them. My condition required a detour and therefore, a change to the carefully planned itinerary. Our guides would have to do more work. We would all – six adults, six children – have an extra day's stop in an out-of-the-way place. To my surprise, they not only agreed, but embraced the detour as if this side trip turned us from tourists into something more legitimate.

So here I was, cycling along the dirt road through the cemetery in Pyin Oo Lwin, a place I knew as Maymyo. Behind me rose Sacred Heart, the once Anglican now Catholic Church. I am a non-believer, but I lit candles there for my grandparents, Val, George and my great-grandmother, Josephine, supervised by the verger, JDS Josephs, a handsome man in a pristine white t-shirt and plastic Rolex, his skin glossy against his white hair and a wide grin. To the east is a Buddhist monastery, gold and red against the green. Beyond is the old, colonial-era railway line leading north to the Gokteik viaduct, the Shan plateau, Lashio and China. My grandfather spent his life working on this railway. Around me are familiar people. My husband, Warren. My son Julian, our friends, two Burmese guides, one of whom has brought flowers for me to lay on the graves at the behest of Adam, our Australian tour company operator, who is in the sag wagon, and similarly curious about this detour. Somewhere nearby are the graves of George Brady, my grandfather, and Josephine May Nasse, my great-grandmother.

I was fifteen when my mother heard about George. The news came by telegram, like something out of an old movie. George was dying. He had months to live. Maybe weeks. If my mother wanted to see him, she needed to get to Burma right away.

The telegram arrived in the morning and by the time I was home from school, my mother had already bought a new suitcase — tan pleather, it took up almost the whole of my parents’ double bed when open — and had begun packing, a box of summer clothes brought up from the basement on the bed beside her.

I sat on the edge of the bed, intending to help. Mum chose blouses, skirts, dresses for a tropical climate as if I wasn’t there, resuming an earlier and perhaps truer identity. Pamela Brady again rather than Pam Aung Thin. George and Val Brady's only surviving daughter whose identical twin, Yvonne died of whooping cough at three months making Val so sad, she had to give Pam up to her mother, Josephine May, until she recovered. Pam-eh-la Br-a-d-y el-bows-off-the-ta-ble. Up for climbing over the schoolyard walls and sneaking into downtown Rangoon to buy fried noodles. A student of Chinese history. University tutor. Avid reader. Ace tennis player. 

These were details she told me about her life in Burma. Stories that made me feel I knew who she had been then, that added to our closeness. But the woman in front of me was strange and unknowable. When she had filled the suitcase and was called from the room by another urgent task, I drew shamrocks and hearts inside the lid, symbols of good luck and love. It was only after I'd started that it occurred to me, I was using a permanent marker on a brand-new suitcase. A bad idea that would probably make my mother feel worse, possibly even angry at me for ruining her bag, a serious transgression given the drama of this dash to Thailand, where she would start the process of pleading for a visa. I could see my own jealousy in it; my drawings were a visual reminder pulling her back to me. I closed the case. Zipped it up. Buckled the straps. She didn’t open it again until she got to her hotel in Bangkok.

We lean our bikes in the shade of tall mango trees and then fan out across the cemetery, so attractively lush that it feels more like a garden. Each of us wandering, reading the headstones with their brief life stories.

I walk through the cemetery, chrysanthemums bunched under my arm. Up close, what seemed lush is ruin; those snaking vines, those tender saplings grown over, around, even through the memorials. In the oldest part of the cemetery, which is filled with English soldiers (Private Hicks, Private Short) thick marble headstones are snapped in two or submerged so deep in greenery they can barely be seen. It’s no better in the newer part of the cemetery; on a raised white marble slab, there are the remains of a take-away meal, rice bursting from a torn plastic bag. Another tomb has a jagged hole punched right through its centre, the darkness visible below. A few of the larger tombs have been prised open so that they gape at one end, looking like entrances to the underworld, the bodies they contained long gone. Worst are the pink markers, made of local laterite, cracked, broken, most of them no more than gravel.

I turn back to our bikes in the shade. The others are watching me, waiting, but trying to look like they’re not. Finding the graves looks impossible. They know I’ve waited 30 years to do this, that I’ve come all this way. As I draw near, Adam is talking to our guide, Neh Thway, who races off in the direction of Sacred Heart. I see the children, including my son, are getting into the sag wagon, presumably to head back to the hotel. The adults are clamping on their bike helmets, ready to ride out somewhere along the dirt road. Warren is drawing squares in the air with his fingers, dividing the cemetery, planning how to search it efficiently.

I can’t face them. Instead, I plunge into the overgrowth, bending saplings, yanking branches, untangling vines so that I can read dates, names on the monuments hidden beneath. My t-shirt is soon streaked with green and my skin, sticky with sap. I tell myself, ‘Don’t be disappointed, this is farther than you ever expected to come.’ Yet, every time I peer at a stone, I am hopeful it will be George or Josephine. The sun burns through the clouds, heat steams up through the vegetation and suddenly, dozens of black, yellow, orange butterflies rise around me, each one the size of my palm, their flight as haphazard as the graves. One white butterfly, the only white butterfly, lands close by on a broad green leaf and opens its wings to the heat, revealing a faintly purple patch amid the downy white.

Some believe that the spirit leaves the body in the form of a white butterfly. I won’t take this as a sign. I have hardened my heart against false feelings and emotional performances. Still, I dare not move. Just then, there's a shout from the path as Neh Thway arrives with JDS Joseph beside him.

JDS Joseph's grin has evaporated, and his white eyebrows are furrowed. I spell the names and give the dates to him: George Brady, 1979; Josephine Nasse, 1972. Neh Thway writes them down on the page of a pad from JDS’s pocket, tearing off the sheet before moving out into the cemetery to search. I fall into step with him. He is still in verger mode, as if he’s giving me another tour, explaining to me how one side of the cemetery is Catholic and the other, where the shade is, is Anglican. The division is this path. That Catholics now outnumber Anglicans and have done for decades, thanks to the Karen Christians. He talks as if the old colonial fault-lines between Catholic and Anglican, French and English still exist, and the Catholic takeover of the cemetery will impress me. But as we walk, JDS cannot deny what he sees around him, and my presence — a foreigner and a descendant of his congregation — sharpens his view. It is useless pretending. He stops. ‘All broken, all broken.’ And then, sardonically, ‘this is Burma.’

This is Burma. As if he is washing his hands of the place. As if he is in no way responsible. As if he is not Burma (and wasn’t that part of my own fear, that I would prefer not to be Burma either?). Yet, all I can think is, how dare he? His past is my past. JDS, my family, many of the others around us, we are Anglo-Burmese, children of British and Burmese and Indians and Europeans. My fantasy place, where I feel like I belong without explaining, is not Burma per se. It is here: old Christian churches, defunct railway networks, derelict graveyards. All the remnants of a shameful and painful colonial past. Also, my past. A hidden history that seems to be disintegrating before my eyes. I want to shake JDS by his fat, stupid shoulders. He should have done better, him with his preoccupation with the appearance of things – the triumph of the Catholics over Anglicans, even his dumb plastic Rolex.

I am being unfair. My grandmother Val left Burma after George died and came to live in North America. I remember her panic in an Ottawa shopping mall because she’d forgotten her id card. Her voice shook with terror as she asked what to do if the police stopped her. JDS would have lived with that all his life. But I cannot forgive those shattered graves. I quicken my step and stalk away from JDS, refusing to listen any longer.  

I was about half a section away when Neh Thway caught me up. He pointed out a white blob clattering off into the distance on a black bicycle. JDS was going to fetch his brother, Lewis, who would know where the graves were.  

Lewis arrives about twenty minutes later. He is smaller than his brother, older too. He wears a baseball cap, a plaid buttoned shirt and track pants held up with a bit of rope. I shake his slim, callused hand. His eyes are blue-grey and like his brother, he is also handsome. He smiles, shyly. I fall in behind him as he picks his way through the long grass and into the shade.

I tell Lewis that we are looking for George Brady who died in 1979. And Josephine Nasse who died in 1972. He knows exactly where George is. Not on the Catholic side of the dividing path, but close to a cluster of houses I hadn’t noticed near the railway line, where he himself had come in. He knew the Brady’s as a young man. George is buried near a boy who died of meningitis. Lewis helped make both graves.

I pull a few blooms from the bunch of chrysanthemums and put them on the boy’s grave, then place the rest on George's. I take photographs, turning in a circle so as not to miss an angle or a detail. My gesture feels rehearsed, empty. I had expected to feel something when we found George’s grave, but I don’t. Maybe my heart, which I have guarded so carefully and for so long against Burma, is now dead to such connections. What is my connection anyway to someone absent, unknown, unknowable?

My mother never got her visa. She went daily to the embassy in Bangkok, she made several applications. When she realised it might take months rather than weeks to get over the border, she moved from her hotel to the much cheaper YWCA, where she met other women and took classes in fruit and vegetable carving, paper flower making and Thai cookery. I remember her coming home almost two months after she'd left. She'd missed my birthday but was in time for Christmas. We were relieved to see her, and she too seemed relieved to be back home in Ottawa, even though she'd failed. I supposed it was easier to live with a decision, any decision, rather than having to wait in hope or despair, both equally painful. I suppose it was also better to know she would not be going in at all rather than knowing she could go but may not be able to come out again.

I turn to Lewis. ‘I am also looking for Josephine May. Her surname was Nasse. She died in 1972.’

Lewis is stumped. He doesn’t remember her (perhaps I am asking too much) but as she is related to George, he thinks she must be nearby under one of the pink memorials. ‘This one, maybe.’ He points to a patch diagonally across from George’s grave, a once-neat square, now a mess of pink rubble.

Neh Thway, Warren and I gather around the laterite shards. I cannot make out any words or dates among the fragments. Lewis watches us, his expression uncertain. Is it because he’s not sure this is the right one? Then he retreats to the shady trees, where JDS is already waiting.

My mother was raised by Josephine May, until she was four. When her twin Yvonne died, Val fell into a depression. It was the constant comparison between the heaviness of one twin’s corpse with her writhing, demanding, thriving other. Soon Val was unable to hold Pam at all.  

‘I cannot send a picture of this grave to my mother. Not like this.’

I drop to my knees and start to pick through the wreckage, looking for a letter, a number, anything. Neh Thway and Warren drop down beside me. We comb our fingers through the weeds, feeling for chunks of laterite, looking for grooves, which would have been filled with lead that picked out the name, the dates, and epitaph and sealed the stone against the weather. The lead has been prised out because it is of value and can be traded for things like food and clothes.

I set out a few of the larger pieces:

D (or O) and
19 and below this
AGE (or AGF or AG3 or 403) and
9 or
4 and maybe
6R.

Could it be that these remnants once read something like ‘Died 19 something, Age, 46. Or, Age 96. Josephine was neither 46 nor 96 when she died.

‘Look,’ I show Warren and Neh Thway what I have reconstructed, ‘46 and 96 are the wrong numbers.’

It is not just the numbers. This grave doesn't feel right. It is too small, especially compared to George's long marble lined memorial. This modest pink square isn't fancy enough. We must be in the wrong place. I glance over at Lewis, but he is still pacing. We must have been here for over three hours by now.

I turn to Neh Thway. ‘If we don’t find her this afternoon, can I come back early in the morning?’ I ask Neh Thway who nods, non-committal. It’s not up to him. It’s up to Adam and our friends. Just like that, I see this moment for what it is. Non-repeatable, like every other moment; my only chance to trace the ineffable connections between me and those who lived before, to start to find our connection.

‘Okay,’ Warren says calmly, ‘let’s spread out and check the rows again.’

‘Okay,’ I repeat. Neh Thway nods and checks the details again on his slip of paper.

Once more we trudge out to the farthest corners of the graveyard. From where I am standing, I can see Neh Thway with the little piece of paper in his hands, his face tight with concentration. Warren too, walking with folded arms, his slip of paper clasped between the thumb and forefinger of one hand, bright white in the light. Behind them, a boy from the monastery cycles past on a too big bicycle, pedalling hard against the long grass. A few minutes later, two novitiates with shaved heads, no more than ten, spurt past, robes gathered in one hand, tiffin tins swinging from the other. School is out. Under the trees, Lewis paces.

I return to the row where I saw the white butterfly. I pick my way along the stones, bending to read the inscriptions, but I am ready to give up. It is up to me to put an end to this. I trudge towards Neh Thway, who is nearest. ‘We can stop now.’  The words are barely across my lips before there is a sudden shout from across the cemetery.  Lewis is waving his arms wildly. Neh Thway turns to me. ‘Run,’ he commands. We sprint across the grass.

Lewis turns his gaze to me, grey eyes gleaming with triumph, his finger raised at me. ‘Mary. Josephine. Nasse. NOT 1972, but 1974.’ Then, he is off, stalking as fast as he can across the cemetery, back to the old part, beyond where we'd been searching. Near the wall he plunges into scrub as high as our heads. Lewis tears at the weeds, Neh Thway, Warren and I behind him, JDS too, yanking and tugging until the air is sticky, until we see that Lewis is standing on a tomb. One just like George’s. He bends down to show us the words and date.  Josephine. And Nasse. And, as Lewis said, 27.8.74.

‘Lucky,’ clucks Neh Thway. ‘So, so lucky.’

Now comes that charged feeling I’d been waiting for. But instead of sadness, I feel elation. Instead of loss, I feel triumph. Beneath my feet are two generations whose blood, my blood, mingles with soil, whose blood is soil. I have never felt anything quite like it. Not when I return to Ottawa, where I grew up. Or London, where I first lived as an adult. Or Melbourne, where my son was born and where I live now.

We clear the last of the growth from the stone. Lewis picks up a sharp stone, something splintered from another gave nearby perhaps, and uses it to scrape the words on the cross until they are sharp and clear and easy to read. Mary Josephine Nasse. Born 24 Jan 1886. Died 27.8.74. I thought she was called May. The last thing I do is pull a tendril of vine from the upper edge of the cross. The pale stem comes away easily but one tiny, dark root snags, bringing away a flake of rock, marring the smoothness of the stone and leaving a fissure, ready for the next curling root.

I photograph the grave, the three of us standing around it: me, Warren, Neh Thwe. Then JDS and his brother Lewis side by side. I shoot in fast bursts taking many photos so later, I can watch as JDS touches his brother’s arm, pulls his gaze to the camera, perhaps away from some tasks that Lewis can see needs doing in the graveyard, until both stand square to the camera, allowing this moment to be recorded. In the next photograph, Lewis’s cap is in his hands, as a mark of respect, and his blue-grey gaze directly into the lens as if he is looking not into the camera, but at me, into my eyes.

The next morning, we take the famous Lashio train that crosses the Gokteik gorge. George Brady worked on this line. After the war, my mother remembers watching him ride the first test train across the viaduct, his body cantilevered out into space as he checked for bulges in the structure. All of us, including Adam, are excited—this is one of those ‘must do’ train journeys, immortalised in Paul Theroux’s Great Railway Bazaar and on a thousand train-spotting websites. We’re back on tour.

About a kilometre out of Pyin Oo Lwin station, we pass a thick hedge and then enter what feels like a wild, green tunnel of hedge, almost exactly the size of the train, carved out on this weekly journey. The tunnel is alive with vines and creepers, and suckers and pliant stems spring in the windows, scenting the air and whipping across our arms and faces, leaving long welts of sap. Suddenly, a blue gap opens in the green and there once more is the Christian Cemetery, but from the reverse angle of the day before. The dark red Sacred Heart Church wedged onto the horizon, the dirt track we’d rode in on, George’s grave, Mark’s below. At the far end, near a red wall, a mother, and her young daughter hold hands before the trampled patch where Josephine lies. Perhaps they are wondering why that one grave has been cleared amongst all the others. Or maybe they are there for another reason. All of this I take in again as if in a single, complete impression before it is gone.