From Rangoon to Damascus

Photo from UNICEF USA Facebook Page

What business do I have talking about Syria? I grew up in Rangoon, Burma—6,200 miles away from Damascus—in the land of coconut noodle soup and glittering Buddhist temples. My water came from the Irrawaddy, not the Euphrates. It smelled of catfish and the brown-skinned boatmen’s sweat, not of dried apricots and camel feet.

I have never set foot in the City of Jasmine. The jasmines I knew were the ones that littered the broken sidewalks of my hometown, scattered over teashops and school yards. They were the white stars in my high-school crush's long black hair, snowflakes for a population that lived along way from the Alps. They covered the stench of fear and made life under military rule a little more bearable.

In 1988, Hafez Al-Hussein from Syria flew to Asia, to throw a javelin in the Summer Olympics in Seoul, Korea. In the same year, Burma’s struggle for its soul turned into a one-sided blood sport, with the UN Security Council watching from the best seat in the house.

In major cities across Burma, people spilled onto the streets in mass protests. In Rangoon, a sea of humanity flooded downtown. Saffron-robbed monks, university students, school kids in their white-and-green uniforms, nurses in white caps, fruit sellers and office clerks—they all spoke with one voice: Give us freedom! Give us Democracy!

I added my voice—the same timid voice I’d used to serenade girls with songs and poetry. Under the muggy August sky, as we marched toward Shwedagon Pagoda—Rangoon’s Umayyad for the Buddhist—the dark clouds overhead teased us with the promise of rain.

The rain never came. The government answered. They spoke in the only language they knew—in rifles, bayonets, and batons. Years later, when I talked about these times to my Westerner friends, I explained to them that, when eyewitnesses and survivors talked about Rangoon’s sewers flowing red with blood on that day, they weren’t being poetic.

Win Maw Oo, a Burmese student, 16 at the time, once dreamt of becoming a pop singer. She helped supplement her mom and dad’s income by selling snacks in the streets. In September, as she lay dying with gunshot wounds from the protest, she spoke to her father in her last breath: Don’t say a prayer in my name until Burma gets Democracy.

In the Burmese Buddhist tradition, if you don’t say a prayer in your loved one’s name after her death, she lives on as a ghost. It’s as if Win Maw Oo wanted to continue the struggle in her spirit, to continue to say, "I'm here, I'm still alive, still fighting for my country. Don't release my soul until my homeland is released."

Twenty-five years and thousands of death later, Burma finally started on the road to Parliamentary Democracy. From 8,000 miles away in San Francisco, my new home, I’m watching my jubilant Burmese countrymen taking one small step at a time—a giant leap for the country itself. And I started to clap and cheer.

Then I saw the footage from Syria, punctuated with the familiar sound of gunfire, against a backdrop of the innocents’ cry for help. In one footage of chemical attack survivors, a dark-eyed girl in frizzy hair screamed from a hospital bed: I’m here! I’m alive! Help me!

It sounded to me like Win Maw Oo’s ghost, reminding us about the people who are still fighting tyranny and injustice, fighting for the simple chance to drink a cup of tea or eat a piece of baklava without fear.

Burma’s democratic icon Aung San Suu Kyi, the Lady who stood up to the military regime with nothing but her determination, personality, and a few flowers in her hair, said, “Use your freedom to promote ours.” I’m using my freedom—the same one I could have used to sit home and watch a Netflix movie—to promote the average Syrians' dream of freedom.

I’m using my freedom—the same one hundreds of my classmates died for and many are now lucky enough to taste—to say, "We are never truly free unless we are all free. We are never truly free until the World’s children can play in the school yards wearing jasmines in their hair—not bullet wounds in their heads."

Why is a Burmese talking about Syria?

Because, when Genghis Khan’s tartar warriors ruled the land, the Silk Route wove through Burmese rice fields and the Syrian Desert, and today our mutual struggle against authoritarian regimes joins us.

Because the Indian Ocean is not wide enough to divide the people who have tasted bitter oppression.

Because Win Maw Oo’s ghost and the Syrian children are both saying “Keep us alive until our country is free.”

Lawrence of Arabia never set foot in my homeland, but Rudyard Kipling did. Traveling on a steamboat to Mandalay, with an odd sense of geography that would later confound many poetry scholars and biographers, he claimed he saw, “Dawn comes up like Thunder outta China 'crost the Bay.”

Why is a Burmese talking about Syria?

Because I want to see Dawn comes up like Thunder outta Syria 'cross the Ocean.

Because, if we can understand the loss of a parent or the hopelessness of an orphan, we are all Syrians.

Notes: 

On September 22, I read a slightly different version of this essay at a fundraiser for UNICEF Syria, organized by San Francisco poet and writer Heather Bourbeau. The reading was followed by my recital of an English translation of "I am a Syrian," a poem by Youssef Bou Yihea. For this event, I'm grateful to:

• Heather Bourbeau for including me in her distinguished lineup;
• Raman Osman, a talented Saz (Kurdish string instrument) player, for delivering a superb Arabic version of Youssef's poem following my recital. Osman managed to read the poem from a page showing Arabic scripts printed backward (an unfortunate printing artifact that I didn't spot); and
• Ghada Alatrash, a Syrian-Canadian writer and poet, who graciously gave me permission to recite her English translation of Youssef's poem.

For more information on UNICEF's campaign for Syrian children, visit the microsite.
For Ghada Alatrash's bilingual recital of the poem "I am a Syrian," watch this Youtube clip. 

Now that I've made public my feelings about the plight of the Syrian children and civilians, I'm sure I'll be asked to tackle the thorny question of U.S. intervention--specifically, how do I feel about it? In fact, while I was making small talk in the audience before the fundraiser, a young man cornered me with that very question. I gave him the only honest answer I could: I don't know. 

When I sought clarity from the Syrian-American community on the issue, I discovered that not everyone felt the same way about justification for a U.S. intervention, let alone the nature of the intervention. That left me in a position where I couldn't advocate a decisive course of action with full conviction and a clear conscience.

However, that moral quandary shouldn't handicap us from speaking out for the innocent victims and from doing what we can to support the relief efforts directed at the refugees. After all, if these were our children, our brothers and sisters, we would do everything we could to keep them out of harm's way and help rebuild their lives.

They are somebody's sons and daughters, somebody's brothers and sisters.