Parami- (Pali) the perfection of virtues

Nations

During English class for the teachers Monday afternoon, I had the teachers write three questions, then we sat in a circle and talked.

Saw Day Day's question to Eh Wah was, "What is your nationality? Do you love your nation?"

To which she replied, "My nation is Karen, and yes, I love my nation."

When the question bounced to me, I told them that I am an American of the United States (yes, I love the USA), but my ethnicity is Chinese. I told them the distinction came from the fact that my passport comes from the USA, but my ancestors came from China.

One may point out that I should have corrected Eh Wah and told her that her nationality was "Burmese", but let me assure you that the situation is much more complicated than that.


I have been slowly learning more about the situation in Burma, and here is a short crash course for your information.

Like India, Burma is something of a false country, a conglomeration of many different nations that all got lumped together as the result of English colonization, which took foot in 1886.

The Burmese, the majority ethnic group of the region, finally achieved independence after World War II. This was January 1948.

Before the British relinquished governance, many of the smaller ethnic nations asked for their own states and right to govern; this was not put into the new Burmese constitution, and to this day is one of the main factors leading to the slough of human rights violations and persecutions led by Burma's SPDC military junta.

The Karen people are from the mountainous Karen state, and have been struggling for self-governance for the last 31 years (one year after the British handover to Burma), as compared to other nations in their quest for independence. The Karen National Union (KNU) and its military, the Karen National Liberation Army, tried to live peacefully alongside the Burmese government, but the SPDC's aggression (rape, pillage, forced portering, bombing of villages and placement of landmines)following the rise of the Burmese official Ne Win in 1949 made this impossible.

According to wiki (of course, where else would I find this info..) 400,000 of the 7,400,000 Karen people live in Thailand today.

_____________________________

Ethnicities

As previously stated, I am Chinese-American. I am of the ABC variety, and unlike the "old Chinese" in America, who immigrated between 1848 and 1880ish (first for the California Gold Rush, then to build the transcontinental railway), my family history is speckled with war-induced fleeing to foreign countries which just so happened to be Vietnam, then America.

My grandparents on my father’s side moved to Vietnam after getting married, as they heard there was “a lot of rice” there, and pickings were slim in Quingyuan, Guangdong. My grandfather was a teacher at the time; after moving to Vietnam, he worked as an herbalist and did well enough to support the family. My dad is the eighth out of nine. Grandfather died when dad was around 14 years old.

Grandma never received a formal education, as she was a girl in an unfortunately sexist era, and did not want to marry Grandfather on account of him being a bit chubby. There was a “rich, handsome other guy” who was interested in Grandma at the time of her engagement, and she had no interest in settling for a poor schoolteacher who could stand to lose the round edges. But Grandfather was a nice guy, and even though she was reluctant (perhaps indignant) at the time of their wedding, Grandma finally reciprocated his love with time and a nasty bout of some illness that caused

Grandfather to tend to Grandma for an extended period with a great deal of affection. Anyway, she is one of the main reasons I vaguely cling onto schooling in the midst of exam period.

Mom’s parents are a bit younger than Dad’s, and I never really got her mom’s story; Grandmother died when Mom was 12. Grandpa ran to Vietnam after serving the Chinese in the Sino-Japanese War (which was a lead-in to WWII on the Asian front); he was 19 at the time of the war. He and Grandmother must have met and wed in Vietnam, and they had 7 kids; Mom is number 5.

Life was tough in Vietnam for Mom’s family, owing to Grandpa’s gambling addiction and Grandma’s early passing, caused by long hours at the textile factory to make up the difference. I don’t know what Grandpa did with his time other than gamble more than he should have, and I don’t think I care to know. I am not a believer in the whole “ignorance is bliss” theory, and I assure you that this hole in my knowledge of the family history is rather disconcerting to my logical scientific side, but the Confucian “filial piety” and “respect your elders” precept must override any desires for further explanation. You see, when I think about my family members, my brain automatically starts using Chinese logic, and there is not very much that can be done after that.

Anyway, both parents ended up only attending school until Grade 6, and then started to work. Mom worked at a textile factory, and Dad somehow managed to open a rather successful Chinese medicine shop with a partner by the time he was 19. In between, the Vietnam War broke out; luckily, Dad was too young to get enlisted for Vietnam, though one of his brothers never returned. His other two older brothers avoided enlistment, with “fees” and some tactful evasion. Dad and Mom got married when he was 23, and she was just shy of 20 (“Close enough! We count one more year in Vietnam,” she told me, when I was old enough to do the subtraction between her birthday and their anniversary).

Dad’s oldest brother and Mom’s oldest brother both stowed away to America. Mom’s brother flew to New York, through Grandmother’s careful planning and the help of an aunt and uncle after her passing. Dad’s brother got to San Francisco by boat, with his wife and their daughter. His boat was granted amnesty at Angel Island, as America had to accept refugees for the war in which they had partaken.

My parents were sponsored over to the states by Dad’s brother. They had a relatively small, hurried wedding + banquet no more than two days before heading off to the temporary refugee camp in the Philippines. They were in America 6 months later.

“My ethnicity is Chinese, but I love the United States,” I told my students. “Even though it is where my ancestors are from, I do not want to live in China.”
_____________________________________________

Mice

My friend Alan Chiu is a director of the Chinatown ESL program through the Philips Brooks House Association at Harvard. I direct for the Chinatown Citizenship program. The two have traditionally been run separately, but we’ve been working to bridge the gaps and be more effective for our target community during the past semester (my first term as director).

He is from Hong Kong, so his Cantonese makes my Cantonese feel like crawling into a corner and cowering like a small mouse. Mice, coincidentally, happen to be exactly what he is working on this summer, in addition to directing the summer ESL/Citizenship joint summer term.

I don’t want to ruin his experiment or hand out his project idea without his prior consent, but he is working on something related mouse motivational methods.
I figured loss of motivation was probably due to the fact that the mouse was lonely. S/He wasn’t where s/he belonged. Maybe a friend to cheer its spirits?
“Can’t do that,” Alan gchats back, “The model I’m comparing it to only involved one mouse per case.”

Which brings me back to the idea of home (which, in my mind, is tied back to nationality, ethnicity, friends, lonely mice, motivation, etc.) and my foreign presence. The students and the teachers are (just about) all directly from Burma, thus they feel the gaping emptiness that is the displacement from their villages and hometowns. I was born in America, therefore I felt quite the transient visitor in China (granted, I was in Beijing, not Canton) because I am used to the affluence and comfort of Western surroundings.

Here in Thailand, unable to speak more than three simple statements in Thai, I feel comfortable and welcomed by my Burmese hosts, and I fret not about the Diasporas that led me halfway around the world and back again. I am not home, but perhaps, because I know and love where mine is, and because it is accessible to me given the need to return, I feel as if I can be at home at any place I like. Spoiled by my nationality, my heart breaks that I lack the capacity to understand what it is like to miss a home fraught with war and violence, to feel displaced in a boarding house in a country in which I have no right of residency.

“We are homeless because we have no country.” was one of the sentences written by Alice/Aye Chan Aung for her homework, which I proofread for her. She was right. I died a little inside as I nodded the sentence correct to her.

The idea of home is, as you know, so much more than where you sleep at night or store your things. It is not merely where your ancestors were from, and not necessarily the same as where you were born.

So how can the little mouse feel motivated if s/he is not where s/he belongs? Does s/he sleep in a bed of sawdust, with a sterile floor of metal bars, a water lick poking through one wall of iron stripes and a bowl of assorted seeds/grains somewhere near it? Where is the expansive field, the grass and the wild, the danger and discomfort of battling other beasts of nature, the smell and taste and other little mice of country? Where is his/her cruiseliner, his/her plane ticket, his/her ready and waiting taxi cab to drive him back?

The mouse is homeless.