On the road to Mandalay
My sister Aileen and I are eight and five, respectively, in the black and white photograph. We are posing on a sidewalk in Humboldt, Sask., wearing traditional Burmese outfits: silk aingyi (blouse) and embroidered longyi (sarong). The picture is for our maternal grandparents, who live in Rangoon now referred to as Yangon. Gran is Scottish; Granddad is Burmese, a doctor, a politician, a founder of Burma’s Democracy movement and a Buddhist who obeys the stars. His letters advise me not to eat mangoes in February, but he needn’t worry. I’ve never seen a mango.
Fast-forward 50 years.
Our driver is cautious and the road is bumpy. My sister and I are touring the Shan State, taking in the incredible landscape — boys on water buffalo, golden pagodas, teak nurseries — when Aileen turns to me.
We are both delirious from lack of sleep.
"We’re on the road to Mandalay,” she says.
Yes, Mr. Kipling. So we are. It’s a long way from Saskatchewan.
Although I’ve been to Burma (now named Myanmar) several times — once when my grandparents were alive — I’ve always wanted to make the ancestral trip with my sister, who lives in Prince Albert. We talked about it forever. Fifty years later, it’s happening.
Sites to see, memories to make
Our goals were: to find our grandfather’s property on Kokine Road (the old colonial street names are gone and it may not be easy); to meet a few current heroes of democracy; and to recreate our childhood photograph for our mother, who left Burma at age 11 and has not been back.
We went with apologies to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who has asked tourists to boycott her country. The democratically elected leader of Burma and daughter of martyred hero Aung San, Suu Kyi has been under military house arrest for the better part of 16 years. It seemed a betrayal to go against her wishes but, I have reasoned, in the case of Burma, isolated and off the world’s radar, more silence is not golden.
I planned our itinerary to allow for serendipity. We would spend a few days in Rangoon (Yangon), fly to Heho, and visit Nyaung Shwe and Inle Lake, home of the one-legged rowers (they actually own two). Then we would drive to Maymyo (now known as Pyin-U-Lwih), a hill station where our mother attended school; Mandalay and the nearby ancient city of Mingun, where our Aunt Margie and Uncle George were evacuated to during World War II. From Mandalay we would fly back to Rangoon.
I visited Rangoon and my grandparents’ home briefly in the 1960s, on a transit visa, a 24-hour stay. I was the only member of my family ever to do so and it was heartbreakingly brief (I had applied for a longer visa but was turned down). I remember the steamy heat, a stately home — missing its second storey, which had been bombed during the war — a faded-glory verandah, a shrine full of Buddhas, my grandmother in her Edinburgh dress, my grandfather’s tears, a bed with mosquito netting and fresh violets placed on my pillow in the morning. The property included a valley, where servants and their families lived, and a newer, smaller house built for family who never arrived.
