"The History of the Empty Chairs," a Memorial Poem for the '88 Student Uprising of Burma

Illustration for "The History of the Empty Chairs" by Kenneth Wong

In the weeks leading up to the 1988 uprising, I always found it difficult to look at empty chairs in classrooms. Late at night, we could hear army trucks thundering across the deserted city under a curfew. Every once in a while, one of those trucks would pull up before a home to pick up a suspected protest organizer or student leader. A crash of heavy military boots, aggressive shouts and poundings on the door, followed by muffled protests and haphazard goodbyes. Then the commotion was over and silence, even more indifferent than before, returned to rule over the fear-stung neighborhood. This was how General Ne Win's government dealt with dissidents--round them up and make them disappear.

The next morning, when we returned to our lecture halls in Rangoon University, there would be a few more empty chairs, leaving us to wonder about the fate of our classmates who once sat there. Let the absentee be sick at home with typhoid or whooping cough, we prayed. Because that was more preferable than the unfortunate reality that some of them had been shuttled off to the notorious Insein Jail, queued to be interrogated by the Army's Special Branch.

Even though I understood the country's government, The Burmese Socialist Programme Party, to be quite sinister, I'd believed, perhaps naively, that there was a threshold for what it was willing to do to hold on to power, that some measure of human decency would prevent it from stooping to a certain level of cruelty. Clandestine arrests and torture, sure. Trumped up charges in kangaroo courts against democracy activists and political opponents, sure. But would the Army dare unleash its riffles against a sea of unarmed protesters? After all, many of the soldiers had younger brothers and sisters who were also students. Dressed in the same white-and-green uniforms, they were virtually indistinguishable from the demonstrating crowd. In the fateful month of August 1988, I found out the Burmese Army would shoot at its own kind if ordered.

In the words of Ne Win, broadcasted in the evening following the first day of bloodshed, "The Army shoots straight; it shoots to hit. It doesn't shoot across the bow." Years later, when I heard comedian Yakov Smirnoff say, "In Russia, there's no warning shot. They shoot you, and that's warning for the next guy," the punchline proved a bit too close to history for my comfort.

Today, Burma is taking faltered steps toward democracy, under the guidance of a quasi-civilian government with questionable commitment. But the 1988 general uprising--an event that people had to remember in secret in the past--can now be openly commemorated. In the 25th anniversary of the event last year, the public memorial was attended by even a handful of ministers who were once members of the military regime responsible for suppressing the uprising.

The poem below was conceived first in Burmese and translated into English. It's my humble tribute to the brave souls who once faced a deadly army with no protection. They did so, in part, to test the resolve and humanity of an authoritarian regime. In doing so, many lost their lives, but they also strengthened the rest of their countrymen's resolve and stirred the world to take up Burma's fight.

I like to think the empty chairs are now occupied by a new generation of students who, if summoned by circumstances, would vigorously defend the foothold the country has gained in freedom and democracy.

The History of the Empty Chairs

Before you sit in these chairs,

Please hear their history,

A broken record sung in the raspy voices

Of the old school bell, the broken bits of chalk,

And the cuckoo-less summers.

Forgive their misspellings and poor word choices.

They’re only civilians.

When they talk, they shoot straight,

They don’t shoot across the bow.

Look how Time flies!

Their prelude has gone on

For twenty-six full years.

Before you disturb the cobwebs under the chairs,

Patch up the gunshot wounds in their satchels,

Go find the exercise books

Lost by the school uniforms

That had to take their exam in the morgue,

With gunpowder burns and dog bites;

Retrieve the corpse of the uprising

Drinking tea at the bottom of Inya Lake.

Look how Time flies!

The pledges of the young peacocks

Are in full bloom once more.

Before you dust off and paint anew

The termite-ravaged, ink-stained chairs

For another debut,

Give them back the slipper

That fell into the sewer and drifted away,

Worn once by a young boy

Who never came home from his class.

Hand over the report card

Of the high school student

Who coughed up blood

Instead of newly learned words;

Put some flowers in a shrine

For the chairs’ former owners

Playing hide and seek in the white clouds.

Look how Time flies!

Even the butterflies

Have sprouted white hair.

If you’d like to site in these chairs,

Copy in your own neat hands

The dreams they scratched on the wood

With the sharp ends of their pens;

For the love notes that would never be delivered,

The poems that would never be written,

The lunchboxes that didn’t flee in time,

The hearts that missed the chance to break,

The lips that missed the chance to kiss,

And the yellow leaves that missed the chance to graduate—

For all of them,

Wherever they may be,

Say a prayer, give a blessing.

May the records of the empty chairs

Live to the end of Time!

In memory of the 88 student uprising in Burma

August 9, 2014

Note: You'll need Zawgyi font to view the Burmese version correctly. I'm grateful to Burmese poet Thi Mar for her help with spell-checking the Burmese version.

ပိုင္ရွင္မဲ႕ထိုင္ခံုမ်ားရဲ႕ရာဇဝင္

ဒီထိုင္ခံုေလးေတြြေပၚမွာမထိုင္ခင္

သူတို႕ရဲ႕ရာဇဝင္ကို တဆိတ္ေလာက္နားဆင္ပါ၊

ေခါင္းေလာင္းအို ေျမျဖဴက်ိဳးနဲ႕ ဥဩမဲ႕ေႏြတို႕က

အသံဝါဝါနဲ႕ အဖန္ဖန္အခါခါ ေမတၱာရပ္ခံပါတယ္၊

စာလံုးေပါင္းမွားရင္ခြင္႕လြတ္ပါ၊ အေျပာမွားရင္သည္းခံပါ၊

သူတို႕က အရပ္သားဆိုေတာ႕

တည္႕တည္႕ေျပာတယ္၊ မွန္ေအာင္ေျပာတယ္၊

မုိးေပၚေထာင္မေျပာဘူး။

ဪ ... ဘာလိုလိုနဲ႕

သူတို႕ရဲ႕ နိဒါန္း ေတာင္

၂၆ ႏွစ္ျပည္႕ခဲ႕ပါေရာ႕လား။

ဒီခုံေအာက္က ပင္႕ကူမွ်င္ေတြကို လက္ဖ်ားနဲ႕မတို႕ခင္

သူတို႕လြယ္အိပ္ေပၚက ဒဏ္ရာေတြကိုျပန္ဖာပါ၊

ယမ္းေငြ႕႐ိုက္လို႕ စစ္ေခြးကိုက္လို႕

ရင္ခြဲ႐ံုမွာ စာေမးပြဲေျဖခဲ႔ရတဲ႕

လံုခ်ည္စိမ္းနဲ႕ အက်ႌျဖဴတို႕ရဲ႕

ဗလာစာအုပ္ေတြကိုျပန္ရွာပါ၊

အင္းလ်ားကန္ေအာက္မွာ လက္ဖက္ရည္ေသာက္ေနတဲ႕

အေရးေတာ္ပံုရဲ႕ အေလာင္းေကာင္ကို

ျပန္ဆယ္ပါ၊

ဪ ... ဘာလိုလိုနဲ႕

ေဒါင္းငယ္တို႕ရဲ႕သစၥာေတာင္

ငုဝါနဲ႕ခေရလို ေဝျပန္ပါေရာ႕လား။

ျခအိမ္ေဟာက္ပက္ မွင္စက္မြဲေတ

ဒီခံုေတြရဲ႕ မ်က္ႏွာစာကို

ဖံုခါေဆးသုတ္လို႕ ပြဲထုတ္ခ်င္တယ္ဆိုရင္

ေက်ာင္းဆင္းခ်ိန္မွာ အိမ္ျပန္မေရာက္ဘဲ

ေျမာင္းေရထဲ ေမွ်ာပါသြားတဲ႕ ေက်ာင္းသားေလးရဲ႕

ဖိနပ္ျပတ္ကို ျပန္ေပးပါ၊

စာအံခ်ိန္မွာ ေသြးအန္ခဲ႕ရတဲ႕ အထက္တန္းေက်ာင္းသူေလးရဲ႕

report card ကိုျပန္ရွာပါ၊

တိမ္လႊာျဖဴၾကားမွာ တူတူပုန္းတန္းကစားေနတဲ႕

ထိုင္ခံုတို႕ရဲ႕ပိုင္႐ွင္ေဟာင္းမ်ားအတြက္

စေနေထာင္႕မွာပန္းလႈပါ။

ဪ ... ဘာလိုလိုနဲ႕

သူူတို႕ရဲ႕လိပ္ျပာေတြေတာင္

ဆံပင္ျဖဴ ေပါက္ကုန္ပါေရာ႕လား။

ဒီထိုင္ခံုေပၚမွာ ထိုင္ခ်င္ရင္

သူတို႕ပိုင္ရွင္ေဟာင္းေတြ ကြန္ပါခြၽန္နဲ႕ ျခစ္ေရးထားတဲ႕

အနာဂတ္အိပ္မက္ေလးမ်ားကို

အေခ်ာသတ္ ကူးယူပါ၊

ေပးခြင္႕မရခဲ႕တဲ႕ ရည္းစားစာေဟာင္းေလးမ်ား၊

ေရးခြင္႕မရခဲ႕တဲ႕ ကဗ်ာစာေၾကာင္းေလးမ်ား၊

ေျပးခြင္႕မရခဲ႕တဲ႕ ထမင္းဘူးေလးမ်ား၊

ေဆြးခြင္႕မရခဲ႕တဲ႕ အသဲေလးမ်ား၊

နမ္းခြင္႕မရခဲ႕တဲ႕ ႏႈတ္ခမ္းေလးမ်ား၊

ဘြဲ႕ႏွင္းသဘင္မတက္ခဲ႕ရတဲ႕ ရြက္ဝါေလးမ်ား၊

ၾကားၾကားသမွ် ... အမွ် ... အမွ်။

ထိုင္ခံုေဟာင္းတို႕ရဲ႕ ေမာ္ကြန္း

ကမၻာမေၾက တည္ၿမဲေစ။

Kenneth Wong

San Francisco

August 9, 2014