Burma Travelogue (Jet Lag Edition)
Photo: Library of Congress. We travel north to arrive in the East. Over Greenland, Norilsk, Ulaanbaatar. The ice of Siberia outside the window: this is the first surprise. On to Hong Kong. And finally Yangon, which was then Rangoon, which is now Yangon.
We are met by three men standing behind a camera on a tripod. They photograph each person arriving in the terminal. We are met by an ad for a Samsung refrigerator, which I instantly register as an aspiration for any middle class person. The “foreigner” line at immigration is much longer than the line for “citizens.” We are met by the humid air. We see a man outside holding a sign with a large ampersand printed on it and mistakenly think he is there to meet us.
The once-exiled Burmese man who has worked to make our project in Yangon possible is waiting to greet us when we arrive at the hotel at 1 a.m. Something about him and about this gesture makes me feel familiar and tender towards him. I want to call him Uncle. Later I find out that this man’s father spoke my native language and came to Rangoon from Madras as an orphan at age fifteen, when Burma was part of British India.
Though it’s my first time here, there’s much that’s immediately comfortable and familiar to me. The warm, mineral air, the foliage, the street dogs, the men wearing longyis (in India, lunghis), the rounded Burmese script, the Burmese alphabet (like my native language it begins: ka, kha, ga, gha…), the temples and mosques, the Indian faces, the South Indian eateries.
When I announced my trip, I was unaware of how many people in my extended family and in my Telugu community had some distant connection to Burma. Indians had been brought to work in the country under British rule, and in the early 1900s they became the majority population in Yangon, outnumbering the ethnic Burmese. They fled in successive waves
