Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

Benny reached for Khin’s hand, and, by the grace of the moment, she took his fingers in hers.

Then Louisa was drawn into the shadows upstage, to be replaced by another contestant whose strained smile and panicked glances cried, Look at me! Like me! Admire me!

And Benny, casting around for some sort of respite from the agony of his feeling for the poor girl, turned from the stage and saw him. Saw Hatchet. One row up and across the narrow aisle — but could it be? There was the same nest of hair, the same perspiring pink skin, the same glasses, hiding the same intent, guardedly embarrassed gaze — a gaze now directed, it seemed in profile, past the poor girl in question, toward the shadows in which Louisa stood futilely trying to hide her light.

From the moment Louisa first posed as Miss Burma, with the crown on her head and the sash around her shoulder and the red roses in her fists — already, even then, as the cameras began to flash, it had begun: her long engagement with pretense.

Pretending not to be hurt by Mama’s pinched look of defeat in the stands. Not to be troubled by Daddy’s haunted smile of reassurance. Not to be desperate to apologize in the face of the losing contestants’ shamed, strained felicitations. Not to be appalled by the clichés soon spewing from her own lips (“I’m so surprised! So honored!”).

Pretending to want this.

And then pretending, as she took her victory walk, not to wonder who or what (other than her own compliance) was really to blame for her participation in the pageant (she had been told by her mother only that it, like the preceding Miss Karen State, was “important to the Karens”). And also pretending not to wonder who or what was really to blame for her “success.” (“Image of unity” aside, how could a Karen prevail in a contest presided over by a panel of mostly Burman judges? How, really, could a Jewish Karen win, whose “foreign” father was an enemy of the state and under house arrest? How during this time of continued civil war, in a country bent on weakening “the influence of outsiders” and denying anyone’s difference? How, unless Daddy had managed to fix the results, or unless her success had actually been part of some official plan to prove that if the minorities played by the rules, they, too, could be championed?)

And then, after the pageant, pretending not to notice how her change in status seemed to change everything else — how the fights that sometimes exploded between Mama and Daddy became more frequent, more violent, with plates (and even knives!) clattering against walls that harbored an even more stifling silence; how Johnny wouldn’t meet her eye and cowered in his room studying for the Cambridge exams because he had to place first in order to secure the scholarship that would get him “the bloody hell out”; how Molly cried with more abandon and Gracie hid in the trees for longer stretches and Hta Hta and Effie made themselves scarce and even Louisa’s best school friends had a need now to tease her, batting their eyes and flashing her coy smiles (“You went just like this!”) and clipping her pictures from the papers and pinning them to the bulletin board (in playful support or jeering indignation?).

Pretending to smile through it all, and pretending to herself that she accepted her new life, her new lot. And then making light of that lot, of the press soon penetrating the most private corners of her existence — a press that seemed to collude with her pretense: not one of the reporters interviewing her acknowledged the hurtfulness of the labels they slung around her (“minority,” “product of assimilation”), labels that narrowed her personhood; not one of them raised the subject of her father’s former incarceration, or of his involvement in the ongoing revolution, or of the indefinite term of his current house arrest. And, in response to their avoidance, she smiled and posed for the photographers (in Burman dress, of course), and she calmly spoke about everything other than what most concerned her: the reality that at any moment Daddy could be taken away, thrown back into Insein Prison or hanged, and for no better reason than that she, Louisa, had not succeeded in pretending convincingly enough that all was harmonious, that Burma was harmonious, free of injustice and ethnic discord.

And when the falsely bright reports about her began to appear (about her “picture-perfect life,” and her “dreams of stardom,” and her position as a “top student at Methodist English, the same elite school that Ne Win’s children attend”), she hid her embarrassment, which was almost as intense as if the reports had abased her. And she became accustomed to the garish colors with which her likeness was painted on billboards and reproduced in advertisements. Wasn’t she to blame, in part, for their tasteless lack of shadow or depth, a lack that her own pretense had mirrored? But what choice did she have? she argued with herself in rare moments of self-confession.

She could feel it, at those moments, the small flame of her older self, the self she had become acquainted with in the absence of her parents during the early years of the revolution, after Mama had left her and the other children in Kyowaing, and the Forest Governor’s wife had begun to beat them. Their crime was their existence, Louisa had obliquely understood, and she had heeded Mama’s plea that they must not make a noise, taking each blow soundlessly, keeping her tears on the inside, until the lake of her grief had become so wide it had seemed almost inviting, a thing into which she could escape. Johnny and Gracie, too, had kept their anguish stopped up behind their features, which had grown composed and vacant as the beatings persisted. Only Hta Hta had wept unabashedly with baby Molly, saying privately to Louisa that the elder son was a scoundrel and that she couldn’t endure another day. But gradually Louisa had begun to find strength in the nature that surrounded them. Sometimes she would catch a glimpse of a far-off mountain between the mists, and it would speak to her of forces beyond their control. Then, just as suddenly, something about the mountain’s power and permanence would strike her like a bolt of insight, and she would know — in a flash — that the physical world was a kind of curtain before another world in which none of them were separated. The Forest Governor kept a herd of elephants to haul felled logs, and often after the completion of her morning chores, Louisa would crouch behind the house and watch the great lumbering beings traverse the fields along the valley floor, towing their burdens with their expressive trunks. Now and again, one of the elephant riders would prod a creature with a glinting metal hook driven into its head or the secret folds behind its ears. What sadness the elephants’ heavy, assuaging steps spoke of; what modest willingness to submit, as though they had forgotten the fact of their great physical power. Louisa had hurt over the elephants’ suffering, over what she knew was their silent yearning, and in her thoughts she had addressed them, just as she addressed Mama and Daddy. Those conversations had transported her from her private corner of anguish, giving her the feeling of being part of a great process of conferring silent and invisible love.

Until one night she had comprehended, suddenly, that there was no more need to keep silent, to cringe. A storm had been coming, wind thrashing against the Forest Governor’s house as though to attack or possess it, and Gracie had been so frightened she’d dropped a soup bowl, prompting the wife to lock her outside. Soon Gracie’s small cries had begun to flay against the front door. “My sister is scared,” Louisa had found herself saying to the wife, who was disciplining the startled fire in the hearth with a poker. “Get back to work,” the woman had told her, yet something like worry blighted her voice. That worry was enough to allow Louisa to start for the door, and soon her hand was on the latch, and another blast of wind was knocking against the door, which opened almost of its own accord. Then she had Gracie in her arms, and she was leading her back inside, all but daring the woman to try to strike them with the poker.