I Am Burmese — I Am A Wanderer

This interviewee is the grandmother of one of my friends, who lives in Los Angeles, California.

I am Burmese. My name is Daw Ayea Kyu. I lived in the Southern part of Burma: Myeik. I grew up in the WWII era, I was born in 1940 right when it was happening. We played baseball as children. We liked running a lot, and I liked to swim, so I used to sneak out of the house to go swim with my friends. When I came back, I used to get spanked a lot because my parents were worried about me! I got spanked the most out of my younger siblings and me, and I was responsible for taking care of them. We also lived in the capital city, Yangon.

I used to go with my father to the forest to collect firewood every weekend or so, because we could not afford to buy it. I graduated from high school and got into a schoolteacher internship job. I was a middle school teacher in Burma, teaching math and English. We did live a very simple life because we did not have that much money, we depended on things from nature.

Burma is the English name for Myanmar; when the English ruled the country, they named it Burma. And that’s why we had to learn the English language. Our accent is more like an English accent, we never learned pronunciation in the United States. We came here in 1980, and 37 years later we are here in California.

I got married at the age of 26 and had four children. I immigrated to the United States because one of my relatives sponsored our trip. He took care of us when we first arrived. My children overcame, they tried so hard to learn English. My oldest daughter is a professor on Oahu, teaching students from the Southeast Asia Countries Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies. After five years or so we became citizens.

I worked my first job at a credit card company, they made Visa cards! We had to count them into boxes, tens of millions of Visa cards! 500 per box. That was my job. Every day hundreds of boxes. We had to check to see if there were any damages or scratches on sides. Then we had to count them; all that for $3 an hour.

It’s a lot different living here than in Burma. Most are farmers, planting rice in the paddies. Lots of villages. We also have a lot of mining, we produce a lot of iron. We produce a lot of oil, too. They drill offshore with Thailand people. It’s not like that anymore. Oh, and we get over 200 inches of rain a year during rainy season, it’s really hot!

When I was young, the main job in Burma was farming. Right now they are advanced! Nothing like Vietnam, but they are doing a lot of business/commerce right now. Still a lot of fishing and farming. There are a lot cities in Burma, and they name the states too! I don’t know how many there are now…Our country has a dictator, ruled by an army-general for fifty years. Not long ago, only 2 years ago, did it turn into a democracy. Aung San Suu Kyi. Behind the scenes, the government is still controlling Aung San Suu Kyi, they let her do the lighter, less important jobs.

Under a dictatorship, you cannot speak openly! They ration everything, everything is owned by the government. They confiscate all the private owners’ businesses. They take it away from them! They gave us a certain number of boxes of rices, each family got a certain amount. How many cans of condensed milk per family, how many gallons of oil and gasoline, all of that was determined by the government. The businesspeople might price a little higher, so the government took it all away and had lower prices. They want to equalize, poor and rich people, and give everyone the same amount. It depends on the size of the family for the rations. They had government-owned stores where you could get lots of stuff from, household things like food and clothes. Every village had a government store. But we did not have a lot of money to buy things, even with the cheap prices!

The country was not free at all. You had to keep quiet, you could not complain. If you did, you would be arrested; you cannot speak up. That’s the way we lived for 40 years.