Someone Else is Living Your Parisian Dream

Generation gap, cultural gap, age gap and language barriers. My mother’s stereotypical, third world, domestic expectations of me bled all over my first world life as I made sense of a cultural buffet as a Burmese-Chinese-American. The uphill battle toward womanhood was extremely volatile as she tried her hardest to instill traditional third world insights and domesticity. At the same time, my 3 older brothers and American society did their best to raise an independent young lady.

The Independent in me was reinforced in school as I moved naturally to catch, kick and throw balls, run across the tops of monkey bars and jump off roofs of Argonne Alternative School bungalows. Always holding Office in classes since the third grade, I was outspoken. My “boyish” qualities contrasted starkly with the “be seen, not heard” behavior that was expected of me when I was told that I couldn’t go out past nine p.m “because you’re a girl” or why my brother could “because he’s a boy.” My mother and I clashed like lightning on a tree, neither able to find the words to express our frustration or talk through fights, not because we wouldn’t spit the venom if we could, but because of the inevitable gaps in our relationship that are borne of our differing cultures.

After far too many years of pain, hyper-independance and frigid emotions related to family disasters, I embarked on a long, overdue trip to Burma feel the stories of my roots. I had grown up with threats that often began with, “If you were in Burma now…..” and “The kids in Burma don’t talk back…..” While these empty words made my eyeballs roll, I was conscious of the stories of a different time and world, but they were just that. A long ago time, and a world that I couldn’t connect with.

Years later, I did travel back in time to the world that my family often spoke of to see for myself. After many trips there, I recall a conversation with my mother one time in the car.

“You should do something in your spare time…find a hobby or something, Mom.”
“I don’t know what I would do.”
“What do you mean you don’t know what to do? How’s that possible? What do you like to do?”

The American girl in me - the one who has been given the luxury of life choices with minimal discrimination, freedom of speech, Title IX, suffrage, women’s movements, the ability to catch, throw, jump off of rooftops like a boy, read, learn to fix my own computer, as well as dress myself up like a girl - just plain could not fathom what it meant that she “didn’t know what to do.” I hesitated for a moment as I tried to understand what that really meant. Recalling my many trips to third world countries, I connected the vignettes of her life in Burma with the realities that I witnessed and finally-FINALLY “got it.”

As an eldest child, my mother had no free time. She helped to hold the house together and also helped to raise her three younger siblings. She ironed a family’s worth of clothes by heating the iron on the stove - no electric irons, cooked, cleaned, babysat and worked. Women rarely left the house alone and certainly never traveled by themselves. And people don’t socialize 1-on-1 with members of the opposite sex.

On a trip to a small town in Burma in 2002, the owner of the guest house asked his eldest son to take me to through the back fields to the carnival. As we walked there to meet his friends, he was careful to keep his distance from me fearful that I would be mistaken for his girlfriend, and he would be mistaken by the local girls as “taken”, I'm sure. We met friends there whom I had met earlier and he was visibly relieved. We got on a ferris wheel, sitting on very small benches two by two. When I turned to say something to him, he had moved as far as he could to his side of the seat, basically hugging the handrail. In Burma and many traditional countries, onlookers would’ve thought that we were planning to be married.

I realize now, much later and perhaps too late, that I was the epitome of the “girl gone wrong” in my mother’s eyes. In my American life, my 3 older brothers basically taught me to do all the things that typical girls generally can’t do. I grew up with disdain for these girls whom I perceived as “weak” and “boring.” Girls who were more similar to my mother when she was young, than to me. Partially because of this, all of my friends were guys and I was everything that she was taught not to be. I played sports. I wore shorts while I did it. I ran around with male friends. I Laughed heartily. I talked back. I wouldn’t cook.

These differences are just what they are, I’ve come to realize. The effects of my how my family has evolved into the world and a different culture. Ironically enough, it was my doggedness and refusal to succumb to what my mother and other women of her generation and culture that lead me right back to the country - as a lone female - to discover and see for myself that we are a product of our differences.