Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

She shuddered now, remembering what had become her routine boldness there in Kyowaing and then later, on the plains of the tigers, after the plague had blown through Bilin and they’d been separated from Mama for most of a year. The agonizing waiting. The wondering if they would ever see Mama or Daddy again. The looking to nature day after day for lessons and comfort. The sheer, animal, honest grace of finding a dignified way to endure and to protect themselves and even to grow while parentless. Then the invasion of Bilin, only a few weeks after Mama had left them there and gone in search of Daddy. They had been sitting in a circle around Gracie, who was shaking with fever, when two soldiers with bloody knives had burst in on the house they were squatting in. “What’s this?” one said. “Saw Bension’s children?” “My sister is sick,” Louisa told them. “She needs medicine.” The men seemed almost surprised by themselves as they led her down the road to their medic.

Would Gracie have lived — would any of them have lived — if Louisa had stayed silent? Would they be here , tucked into the same ruined house as Daddy, if Mama hadn’t gone on to enter Louisa into that child pageant in Insein, and if Louisa hadn’t subsequently had the gall to head to the pageant organizer’s house and very sincerely describe to the woman and her district commissioner husband how much they missed Daddy, how they loved him, how they needed him, how they yearned to kiss and hug him and talk to him. How they missed his face, his voice, his eyes, his afflicted smile, his funny ears, and his breath. Daddy. Daddy. She wanted her daddy. Could she have her daddy again? The tears she spilled had been an offering of truth; the tears elicited a cup of trembling from which she drank.

It taunted her now — that older, braver self — telling her that Miss Burma was an empty coward.

“A father knows things,” Daddy said to her one evening, when they were alone in the dining room together. His eyes took her in, as though not wanting to see the change that had come over her, and yet compelling him to confront the hell she was in. “Are you—” he tried. “Should I be doing something to help?”

But to stop herself from dropping the pretense — a pretense she was suddenly desperate to confess — she broke into a mocking laugh, kissed him apologetically on the cheek, and left.

And to stop her own inner voice from tormenting her further, she began to take a little sip of her mother’s palm wine, her “tonic,” every so often before bed. And then occasionally before public appearances. It was easier that way to laugh with her friends, and to bend over in her bathing suit and touch her toes when she was asked to demonstrate exercises at bodybuilding conventions. It was easier to relax when she was told to sing on the radio. And she really did love the Penguins and the Platters and Johnny Mathis, though sometimes, as she sang one of their tunes ( “Oh, yes, I’m the great pretender. pretending that I’m doing well. My need is such I pretend too much. I’m lonely but no one can tell. ” ), it occurred to her that perhaps those American singers were famous, not in spite of their minority status in their country, but because there was something acceptable and even reassuring about a minority playing the part of a happy clown ( “Yes, I’m the great pretender . . just laughin’ and gay like a clown . . I seem to be what I’m not, you see . .” ).

And to suppress this thought, she began to look at the articles about her that she’d thought she was above reading (and to convince herself that their occasional depictions of her bearing as “dignified” and “artless” proved her greatest concerns wrong). And when that didn’t help, she took a bit more tonic, just enough to smile more loosely at the ribbon cuttings, to speak more unself-consciously at galas. Just enough not to fret whenever Ne Win’s wife, Katie, stopped her in the schoolyard (“I’m having a little party this Sunday at the old Government House — there’ll be tennis and swimming and cards. Come!”). It became almost easy to pretend to be unflustered — to pretend that this woman’s husband, who led the army that some said had become “a state within the state,” wasn’t her father’s jailor. Almost easy to find the words and lightness to graciously, gaily (clowningly) turn down Katie Ne Win again and again.

But in 1957, Johnny placed second in the nationwide exams and practically fell apart (“Tell me it’s really true that a state official’s son won first!”), and the movie offers coming in became impossible for her to refuse (“Think of how just one of these films would help — Johnny so desperately wants to attend university abroad”). And soon she was pretending not to hear the hissing protestations of her most religious friends, who wouldn’t even attend a movie, or any other kind of “entertainment” (“When you do God’s work you do it with your whole heart, and when you do the devil’s work you do it with your whole heart, too”). And she was conceding to her brightest friends that, yes, in the past, “nice girls,” “educated girls,” didn’t make movies, but now ?

And, to her surprise, she found that acting — the pretense of it — relieved her of the pretense of not pretending. Or more simply: it allowed her deeper hidden self to seep out through the cracks between her pretend self and whatever part that pretend self was playing in a film (a governess who fell in love with a member of parliament and died before that love could be discovered; a Burman soldier’s wife who searched for him only to discover him dead). Mama came with her to every shoot (“to be sure there is no funny business”), and even in the face of Mama’s quiet, startled scrutiny, she felt freer to let go — to weep and laugh openly under the cover of the roles she assumed.

But there were consequences. As the movies began to play around the country, her fame swelled, as did the crowds increasingly surging in her path when she left the house. She pretended at normalcy, graduating from Methodist English and enrolling in an English honors program at Rangoon University (“Pursuing English wouldn’t be a bad idea, Louisa,” Daddy told her. “I’m gratified to have learned it so well in India, and you already speak beautifully”). But as though to sabotage that attempt, she agreed, in 1958, to make a bid at Miss Burma all over again. Now, though everyone from her fans to the pageant’s coordinators had pressed her to run, she couldn’t pretend to blame her participation on anyone or anything but her own weakness and self-deception. Oh, yes, the thought of going through it all sickened her, but it seemed easier to submit — especially given her family’s chronic need of more money — and she convinced herself that she couldn’t possibly win again. Oddly, the relief she felt upon winning was as acute as her sense of doom. Somewhere along the line, she had become more afraid of public failure than of false success.

With her attainment of still greater fame, Katie Ne Win’s invitations came by telephone with cheerful menace (“So you don’t want to associate with us?”), and were met by Mama’s panicky admonitions (“You’re giving her a reason to turn against us!”) and by Daddy’s remorseful opportunism (“Tell Mrs. Ne Win there’s a Burman medical student named Rita Mya, a dear family friend, who’s been held for over a decade in Insein Prison for no other reason. ”). Then U Nu — who was being blamed for the ongoing insurgent problem and for running the economy into the ground — stepped aside so that Ne Win could helm a “caretaker government.” To refuse Katie now was to refuse the interim prime minister’s wife, and though something in Louisa understood that to accept Katie was to agree to a sentence whose terms she couldn’t fathom, she focused on how flattered (rather than frightened) she was by the woman’s invitations, and allowed Katie to send a car to pick her up.