by U Myat Thein

As Mother was the only child in her adopted parents' powerful and wealthy family, she was excessively loved and cared by everyone, both inside and outside the family. Daw Mi Mi Lay even suspected that the teachers in her school were showing favoritism towards Mother. Daw Mi Mi Lay began to fear that the child would be growing up haughty and arrogant. She abruptly dropped my mother out of school even though Mom was brilliant and nowhere near those whimsical characters that Daw Mi Mi Lay despised. But Daw Mi Mi Lay was not someone who liked to take chances. A firm believer in old-fashioned rules, Daw Mi Mi Lay took all the troubles of coaching Mom to be endowed with the qualities which a good woman should possess, and also trained her to be a good Buddhist. In order to develop a charitable character in my mother, she made Mom aware of the teaching that the cardinal virtues of Buddhism enjoin on the practice of generosity and cultivation of benevolence. Mom learned whatever she was taught and copied Daw Mi Mi Lay's manners and modesty so closely that Mom was like Daw Mi Mi Lay's double in many respects. When she was 18, her adopted parents married her to Maung Toke Ga-le (means a stout little boy in Burmese), who was to become my father later. A distant relative of my Mom, my father was an educated man.

Education was not the only qualification required of an individual to become an official. One's family background was viewed as an important factor in one's career. British colonial administrators wooed the offspring of late monarchs and those of their courtiers, giving them jobs in such areas as tax collection, courthouses and on police force. Ordinary citizens hardly got promoted to officers. My Dad had a nice going as a son-in-law of the senior Gazette Officer. He applied for and became a police officer after getting trained. This new status of my father also earned my mother a prestigious social position, called Minkadaw, which meant, in Burmese, a dignified wife of an officer. Mom later gave birth to three children - my two younger sisters and me.

Hater Grant, my classmate, lived at a place not very far from our home near the Mandalay Hill. His mother Aunt Betty often sent him to our place to play with me on days that we didn't have school. Near my home, there was a muddy pond, where, much to our envy, teenage boys a few years older than we were frolicked. One day Hater and I sneaked out of the house and went over to the pond to watch other kids swim in the water. We thought that we could swim like them, so we took our shoes off and jumped into the pond. At that time, we were only six years old and three and a half feet tall. Not knowing how to swim, we were about to be drowned. The other boys didn't bother to look at us, not to mention doing something to save our lives. Luckily there was an uprooted banana tree floating around nearby, and we were able to grab it. We managed to float a little while, hoping to bring ourselves to the edge of the pond. No luck! It took us even further away from the edge. We kept clinging to it. Suddenly I felt being pulled out of the pond by someone. I looked up and saw Mother's stern face. She saved our lives. But I froze, seeing a cane in her hand. Screaming, "You thought you are smart. I'll let you learn a lesson from this," she slashed out with the cane at us. At this time, the boys who didn't pay us a slightest attention a minute ago, got out of the pond, and came huddling together to watch us take the beating. We felt terribly embarrassed, so we blushed as red as a Shan girl. Covered with muddy water from head to toe, we stank. We ran quickly to my house. Upon seeing us entering the door, the maids laughed at first, then washed and changed us into clean shirts and longyis. The pink lines on our butts gave us a prickly pain, prompting the maids to apply some traditional medicine to the affected area to reduce pain. Mother then sent Hater back to his home.

Dad wasn't home that day. For the rest of the day, Mom ignored me. After what had happened, she was probably not in the mood to feed me, help me with my homework or lull me to sleep, etc. Noticing my falling into disgrace with my mom, the maids took care of me in my mother's stead. However, I preferred my mother to take care of me. That night I pretended to be in deep sleep moments after I was put to bed. The maids left me alone. I was so sad about the whole affair that I couldn't sleep. The image of Mother with stern looks and the deadly cane that put me in great pain lingered on in my mind. I started to hate my mother, and then I thought of running away from home. My mind drifted to imaginary places, hopping from place to place. I recalled having indulged myself in an awful lot of stupid things. Like other kids, I had an inclination to know how certain mechanical toys and small household appliances were assembled or glued together. I often pulled them apart and tried to put them back in the right places. In the process, I cut myself every now and then. When I bled, Mother would bring a rag or a little bit of cotton soaked with tincture of iodine. Then saying, "To be kind, I had to be cruel," she pressed on the injured area with it. When I winced because of the pressure, she would embrace me trying to calm me down. She looked pained whenever I got hurt. As a child, I was always amazed at this strange phenomenon in my mother.

While I was still roaming about in my imagination, I heard someone walk toward me. That's Mother! I could feel it. She sat down by my side and passed her hands caressingly over my hair. I felt great to have my mother's affection again. All my desire to run away from home vanished into thin air. I was curious of what Mother would do next, so I kept my eyes closed. Mother came closer and bent down trying to kiss me on my forehead. Tears from her eyes dripped down into my hair. I felt that her heart was beating hard, and my heart pounded as intensely as Mother's. No longer could I pretend sleeping like a log. I hugged her, crying, "I love you May May" and promised her that I would never do anything to make her angry or worried. From that day on I treated her with great respect and always did my utmost to make her happy until the last day of her life.

For all the things that she did for the good of others and her motherly love for my sisters and me, I greatly admire my mother to this day. I owe her an immeasurable amount of gratitude, yet I couldn't find enough words to thank her. Here I would like to say, "Thank you, May May" in honor of my mom, Daw Thein Nyunt. Although the word "May May" simply means mother in Burmese, it gives us a sense of intimacy and affection far stronger than what words like Dearest Mother, Beloved Mother, or Most Loving Mother could possibly convey.

Tricity Tour of the Mon State

Henry Lim

Thaton was described in the Burmese history as the capital of the Mon Kingdom, from which Theravada Buddhism spread to the rest of Burma. Here, in my hometown, I visited with my childhood friends - Ko Aung Hla Myint and Ko Tin Win. We stayed late into the night reminiscing about the good old days. In the late 1950s, we were enrolled in a boarding school in Rangoon, our ages ranging from 8 to 11. Every year, in March and December, the school would close for two months, and the three of us would take a train ride home to spend summer and Christmas holidays with our families. The night before the journey, we would go to a late-night movie, and camp afterwards on the lawn in front of the Rangoon Train Station in order to secure seats on the Thaton-bound train when the station opened its doors early in the morning. However we were never sure whether we could make it home alive. In those days, an ethnic rebellion was at its height; a train you were traveling in could hit one of the mines planted the night before by the insurgents or it could fall into an ambush. Also, from time to time, rebels, pretending as monks, would sneak into our city at night and kidnap people. Far in the back of the houses, among tall trees, there were deep, wide trenches where residents, men and women, young and old, would crouch in the dark, hiding themselves from the infiltrators during nights when the city came under attacks by the rebels. Fortunately today's Thaton is in a peace time though its residents are not financially better off than they were during those turbulent years. In parting, Ko Tin Win gave me a special gift. It was a photograph of me, taken 35 years earlier! As a popular custom in those days, we exchanged photographs with each other upon leaving school. He had kept my photograph nicely for three and a half decades, probably never giving it a thought that he would return it to me someday. It's one of the best gifts I've ever received in my life.

Moulmein (Mawlamyine) is a beautiful city (Burma's third largest) by the Salween River. It was a bustling seaport under former British and Burmese administrations. In those days, huge ships sailed and docked here, loaded teak logs and rice and transported them to markets all over the world. I was happy to be in Moulmein again, for I had attended the city's Amherst Elementary School as a child. My school's namesake, Lord Amherst, was Governor of British-occupied 18th-century Lower Burma, of which Moulmein was the capital. This was also the city that made Nobel laureate Rudyard Kipling famous. His verse "Road to Mandalay" which was set in this city, rather than in Mandalay, brought him fame as a poet and writer. Another great writer George Orwell once stationed here as a police officer. His popular essay "Shooting an Elephant" was about his personal experience in Moulmein. Moreover, every year lots of people from other parts of Burma flocked to this city to have fun in its Thingyan festival. It's also known for its doorians. Our friends graciously took us to a fruit garden near the Moulmein Airport, where we gorged on doorians freshly picked from the trees in the garden. If I ever go back and retire in Burma, I will take up residence in this city, not in Rangoon.

When we arrived in my birthplace Kyaikhto, it was raining. We immediately sped off to the foot of the Kyaikhtiyo Mountain, and transferred to a truck filled with pilgrims. One of my cousins stayed here with our borrowed car. My brother and I each occupied a seat beside the driver by paying higher fares than those who each paid Kyat 8 to ride in the back of the truck. Seats were not provided in the open back of the truck. Passengers squatted on the wet metal floor, with one hand holding umbrellas over their heads. It wasn't a comfortable ride. Unfortunately my Burma-based cousin and his son were among the thirty or so passengers riding in the back of the truck. At the end of the trip, I was scared to ask my cousin and his son how they liked riding in the back. As it was the beginning of a monsoon season, a few days of incessant rain had caused the unpaved road extremely slippery. We were traveling on a roadway winding around mountains from bottom to top. Approximately every twenty feet, the truck's wheels spun helplessly in the mud, unable to climb the steep mountain slopes. For every few feet of an upward distance the truck had struggled to make, the truck would roll an equal distance backward, striking an intense fear in our mind. We were afraid that the truck could skid off the mountain road and plunge into the ravine down below. Similarly when we were at the spots where the truck had to make turns, we feared that the truck would lose control and fall off a cliff around the corner. Quite often, the driver's assistant had to jump off the truck, pulled out a pickaxe, made longitudinal cuts into the roadbed, deep down to the hard clayey base of the ground. The idea was for the wheels to secure a foothold necessary to move forward with a least amount of slipping. The truck stopped and went in that manner for two hours until we reached a parking lot, from which one can see at a far distance, up on a mountain top, the Kyaiktiyo pagoda shrouded in mist. This was as far as the truck could go. So we got off the truck and started walking up along a trail. As we hiked along, we encountered a man and a little boy holding a plastic bag with a dark object inside it. They made a sales pitch to us on a rather unusual commodity. Pointing at the plastic bag, the man asked if we would like to buy a gall bladder of a certain animal. We simply gave them a "no" for an answer and continued our trek until we reached, after 45 minutes later, the top of the mountain where the venerable Kyaikhtiyo Pagoda was precariously perched on a boulder off a cliff. We prayed and marveled at the Pagoda for half an hour. With our tummies growling, we walked up and down hoping to find a clean food stall with a smallest number of flies hovering over pots, tables and chairs. We saw tons of flies swooping over mango seeds on the wet ground. We settled ourselves at a food stall run by two young women. While we were eating, the younger of the two women, using a semi-circular hand-held paper fan, helped drive away flies as much as she could. After taking enough photographs of the pagoda, we decided to make a safe descent by walking down the mountains. It was a much steeper route on wide stairs. At one point during the walk, we saw a snake wade across the path before us. One of my cousins remarked that because of the power of the Buddha, the snake could not harm us. I saw no point in arguing with him on this explanation. We walked approximately five hours to get back down to the spot where our cousin was anxiously waiting with our beloved car. A minute ago, he was not quite sure whether we could come down alive, given the bad weather conditions on the mountains. Here in the city of Kyaikhto, I revisited my childhood house, located by a river. A cousin of mine is the current owner of the house and lives in it with his family, so I had no trouble going into and looking all over the house. A pang of nostalgia hit me there, but I managed it well. It was a simple two-story wood house. Since very little sunlight came into the house, it was dark inside. And it seemed that no improvement had ever been made to the house since we moved out and resettled in Thaton over 40 years ago. Despite its shortcomings, the house has an important place in my heart. And our seemingly short three-day-two-night whirlwind tour of the Mon State came to an end. Yet my wanderlust was still burning with desires to travel more.

• 7/25/99 Sunday, BAPS Web Seminar

BAPS New Year's Party '99