Dr. Salai and the Grief of Leaving
"In the US, I would be a drop; in Burma, I would be a bucket of water in a desert."
First, an explanation: right after announcing that I would be launching a new series on Myanmar, Winter Storm Uri hit Austin. My first planned Instagram Live with activist and agronomist Dr. Salai Tun Thawn was delayed because our family was sitting in the dark with candles. We’d spent the afternoon listening to the crack and thwack of thick branches, weighed down by the ice, peeling off our backyard twisty cedars. That night, I heated a kettle over the fireplace to fill hot water bottles under piles of blankets so all of us could stay warm in the subfreezing temperatures with no electricity in the house.
The toll of the last couple of weeks took me by surprise. I’ve spent years now learning about and researching trauma and I’ve come to recognize the symptoms of collective trauma in communities. Each of us in my family have different ways it comes out—some of us are angry and short-tempered, others easily frustrated or unusually whiny. I become frozen like the ground was outside, unable to move with my customary energy. I have a mind that’s rarely still and my best days are ones in which I’m happily engaged with projects I love. Rest is good for me—I’ve gotten very good over the years at knowing when and how to rest—but this frozen state is not healing and recharging. It’s my body and brain on overload, overly aware of the dangers and threats and stressors around us. The last week ended up not being that bad for us, compared to so many others—I am a whiz with a hair dryer and pipes, apparently, and when the electricity was back we kept everything running fairly smoothly—but I was still unable to do more than the basics.
Eleven days after schools closed suddenly, our girls went back to what counts as school for now last Wednesday. It’s taken most of this week for me to get on top of things again. I’m just now returning to this project I was so eager to start.
The last two weeks were not at all comparable to the stress most refugees endure, but there were several moments in which I felt empathy for what I’ve heard over the years in my interviews with displaced people.
The nature of the chaos and stressors really matter—ours was a weather event that disrupted our normal lives further than they had already been interrupted by the pandemic. The layers of stress made the trauma response for me come more quickly this time than it normally does, but they were still very different from the chaos and stressors most displaced people face. Extreme weather and pandemics are horrifying—death is death—but also, no one has ever targeted me for persecution or torture or killing because of my race or ethnicity, my gender or my religious beliefs.
In those ways, what we endured cannot ever, ever be compared to refugees’ experience.
But I noticed some moments of connection: my neighborhood Facebook page became the most reliable source of news. I found out that what was happening hyper-locally—on my street, in our neighborhood—mattered more than the larger issues for awhile. Did we have power? Were the roads safe? Whose trees had collapsed on their houses? Whose pipes burst and ruined their walls? Was there food at the local restaurants or grocery stores? Who needed water on my street? Who had firewood? Whose chickens had eggs?
I have often heard displaced people talk about how they knew danger was coming and how their communities responded and the importance of those hyper-local connections. I thought of those stories as my neighbors rallied, chatted, texted, and messaged for those few frozen days.
For my family, after the storm, all that’s left is to clean out our branch-strewn yard. For displaced people, those community connections that once sustained and saved them are often scattered chaotically, and suddenly. Most might not ever go back to the places where they knew what to do and who to contact as emergencies arose.
This neighborhood is dear to me after that week in ways it was not before; I had the tiniest twinge of understanding how hard it might be to flee.
I do not understand what displaced people endure, but I can reach my imagination toward understanding.
This week, when we were finally able to have our Instagram Live, Dr. Salai Tun Thawn talked about the unexpected way he had to leave Burma (he still says Burma and, when I asked him to explain why, said that the people who changed the name were doing it only so they would not be convicted of crimes. When writing about Dr. Salai, I’ll use the country name he prefers; when writing about others, I’ll switch to Myanmar).
Dr. Salai is now 93 and when he was 75, he was convicted to seven years in prison for protesting the government in Yangon. He went alone in his academic robes and handed out pamphlets; the junta had burned down fields that his agricultural institute had helped farmers in rural Burma cultivate. They destroyed burial sites that were precious to his Chin community. He didn’t tell his wife, he just went to Yangon because it was right, and he was imprisoned for it.
The part that struck me anew this time in hearing his story was when he had to leave Burma (I’ve heard it many times before—Dr. Salai is one of my lifelong heroes). After being released from prison, he finally got a visa to come see his daughter here in the US. He wanted to visit her and then return to Burma. But while he was back in Thailand, trying to cross the border, the Burmese government started posting his picture and threatening to kill him. Soldiers intimidated his wife in their home. After several days and a lot of counsel from advocates in Northern Thailand, he decided not to return to his beloved country. It would be years before he saw his wife again, when she came to the US as a refugee. They’d been married for decades, but by then her mind—affected by age but also by stress—had slipped into dementia, and she barely recognized him.
I was at the airport when she arrived; I will never forget the tender way he stroked her hair while she gazed up at him after years of being apart.
Dr. Salai never wanted to leave Burma. His heart is there still. His argument for staying was that he could do good. As he put it, in the fight for democracy in Burma, “in the US, I would be a drop, but in Burma, I would be a bucket of water in the desert.”
Yes, he is safe now. Yes, he has lived for years he might not have had in Burma. But also, his heart will forever be in his home where the struggle for democracy has gone on for generations—almost Dr. Salai’s entire life has been spent under British colonial or tatmadaw rule in a country he loves with every fiber of himself.
Whenever people act as if refugees must be so glad to have left their homes, think of Dr. Salai and others—the grief of leaving will never subside. As violence erupts in Myanmar again, as the protestors react to further oppressions, he and his family are in constant contact with people there. He will do anything to tell others what is happening.
Help make his story more than a drop that is lost outside of his country. Go listen to his interview, the first installment of my Instagram Live interviews accompanying this newsletter series; he gives some ideas at the end about what we can do to help the people of Myanmar. And then tell others. We cannot allow this coup and the decades’ worth of persecution in Myanmar to continue unabated again.
***
If you like this newsletter, feel free to share it with others. For now, all subscriptions are free. You can find out more about my work at jessicagoudeau.com, and on my Twitter and Instagram. And if you ever want to be in touch, I’d love to hear from you.