Sagaing: My Return to an Illusion of Home in Myanmar

When Thomas brought the news that the house I was born no longer / exists, / Neither the lane nor the park sloping to the river, nothing, / I had a dream of return.

                                          Czesław Miłosz, translated by Renata Gorczyńska & Robert Haas 

I returned to Myanmar in February 2017, after twenty years of itinerary life abroad. Following weeks of a sweltering house hunt on a scooter in Mandalay, my partner and I ended up renting a garden in Sagaing, a laid-back and leafy town twelve miles southwest of Mandalay on the opposite bank of the river Irrawaddy.  

We didn’t expect how close I would become to nature in that garden. On the sandy soil of the garden, a short walk from the Irrawaddy, thrived dozens of fruit-bearing trees, such as longans and mangoes, and a bewildering assortment of flowering plants. For a land whose ecosystem had been subject to decades of mismanagement under the military rule the fauna was diverse too. We shared the garden with some mildly venomous vine snakes and spiders as well as scorpions. In the trees, there was an array of bird species, crickets, numerous other insects and reptiles. House geckos, chasing after the moths on the ceiling of the bungalow, were a permanent fixture day and night.  

On a pleasant afternoon in November 2017, I witnessed one of the most tragic scenes in my entire life. I walked out into my garden in Sagaing and saw a chameleon on her daily forage home. Our chameleon, whom I will name Sandar — was running up an erstwhile tree, utterly unaware that the canopy of the tree where her nest would have been, was gone. She was stopped in her tracks. Sandar was frozen on what was left of the mango tree, a stub a few feet tall. She was there for a long time, staring at what would have been the canopy, now replaced by a cobalt sky. Sandar would have never imagined that her home, her world, would be demolished in a snap. Utterly shell-shocked, her skin colours were changing rapidly. 

That morning, with some labourers’ help, the landlady had pollarded the tree. Our neighbour had complained that the sap from the mango branches kept dropping on his car across the fence. A tree had to be sacrificed so a car would look good? There was more to that. Our neighbour was a Buddhist man who did not like Muslims, which he would make clear to us every time he had a chance. Our landlady happened to be a wealthy Muslim matriarch.

Chameleons have several layers of skins; the outermost is protective and transparent, while the inner layers can turn into different colours to suit the colour of their surroundings in nature. Chameleons change their skin colour for a number of reasons, mainly to cope with their emotions, to deal with imminent threat or with tropical heat.

Chameleons would turn dark when they were in danger or sorrow. In displaying dark skin, Sandar first poured out her grief, associated with loss of home, by displaying dark skin, as if she were saying “What happened to my home. What happened to my world?” She may have also been saying, “What happened to my eggs, what happened to my babies?’ ‘If I turned green would my home return? Now let me try blue, now brown.’ Her grief was inconsolable and endless. “How does one begin to drink the sky? / By tasting its tears, of course, / the crow realised. Yet why / does it remain so full— / a pitcher of blue / without end.”  the lines by Singaporean poet Cyril Wong came to mind.  

In my story, the crow is the chameleon. Sandar’s tragedy was a scenario where her agency played no role in the destruction of her home. She had done nothing to deserve her plight. She could have done nothing to prevent it. She could do nothing about it either. Hers was a case of total destruction wrought by factors that were simply beyond her powers. She was someone who was not able to fight back. Unable to fight back, she was a victim proper. 

In Sagaing, I saw thousands of people in a situation similar to Sandar’s, even though humans always had agency and were able to get help, or fight back. The monsoon was the flood season. In the flood season, hundreds of climate refugees moved into temporary bamboo huts that lined up the Mandalay-Sagaing road. The refugees, and the people who represented them, set up charity marquees along the road, where amateur dance troupes, usually of local girls, performed to deafening Burmese folk music to get attention from vehicles roaring by. In a country where the state was of little or no help, people had to be creative. The upbeat music and rousing dance were a far cry from the grim reality the refugees were in, but the people still displayed cheery spirit even in distress. Perhaps, like Sandar, people were confounded by the loss of their homes, and displaying a range of emotions in the hope that their circumstances would improve?

There was another wildlife incident in Sagaing. After a gusty rainy night in July 2018, I found a bulbul hatchling hopping around in our front garden. It must have fallen off from its nest in the fruit-laden longan tree, one of whose branches came undone on the bungalow roof during the night. Bulbuls are songbirds commonly found throughout Southeast Asia. They are not an endangered species. In Australia, they are in fact considered invasive.

It was heartbreaking to see the mother bulbul circling around over the garden, frantically hopping from branch to branch, calling out to her missing child, the child lost to the tempest. The hatchling responded with baby cries. The mother bird was there all day, then came back the next, looking for her baby. But how to return a hatchling to a nestless mother? My wife and I became her parents.

It was speciesist of us, but we named our baby Bulbul—like having a pet dog and calling it Dog. As we had decided to be child-free and resisted the temptation to breed, we knew next to nothing about parenting, not to mention passerine parenting. We were unable to determine if Bulbul was a girl, a boy or something else. As it would be with any infant, Bulbul was hungry all the time. In the beginning Bulbul kept us up all night. We had to get up before the crack of dawn every day to feed our baby with a tweezer, usually egg yolk, in lieu of a baby bird’s usual diet of minced worms from their mother’s beak. What a delight to see the hatchling grow into a fledgling, beginning to look, more or less, like a bird.

Bulbul came into our life in a time of distress. The previous summer, my partner did not get the job we thought she deserved, a tutorship at an English department at a university in Mandalay or Sagaing. To land oneself a highly coveted job in the academia or elsewhere in Myanmar, one had to be not just well-connected, but also well-endowed so one could grease the palm of a relevant authority. Even had we had the guts for graft, we had no idea whom we should approach and how.

Two months before Bulbul’s arrival, in late May 2018, my partner woke up early in the morning and found that there was an incessant buzzing in her right ear. After several specialist consultations and treatment sessions in Sagaing and Yangon, we came to accept that she had permanently lost hearing in her right ear to a rare condition called, Sudden Sensory Neural Hearing Loss (SSNHL). Loss of hearing in one ear translates into loss of balance. She began to suffer vertigo and got easily stressed and agitated. Bulbul lit up our spirit, vindicating Emily Dickinson; Hope is the thing with feathers.

Bulbul hopped around the bungalow, following us. When we came back from outside Bulbul would cry and come for us, demanding to be fed. Bulbul had no inkling that its parents belong to the most destructive species on the planet. As far as Bulbul was concerned, we were its parents. We were not sure if Bulbul could read us, but we were convinced we were able to read Bulbul’s expressions. Whenever Bulbul was fed something disagreeable, its face would look utterly disgusted and retch up whatever was fed to her. We could tell from Bulbul’s body language when she was anxious or joyous. A fledgling, Bulbul wasn’t ready to fly yet. We took upon ourselves to be our baby’s flight instructors.

According to Douglas Adams, the author of The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time, the art of flight is very simple. You can describe it in four words: jump, miss the earth. That was exactly what we taught Bulbul. We perched the chick on lower branches of trees in our garden and beckoned to it with outstretched arms, simulating the wings of a bird taking off. In the beginning, Bulbul looked extremely nervous. We at least had understood that a child would always jump into the embrace of their parents. Bulbul would hop and try to land on our shoulders. More often than not, she would miss our shoulders and got entangled in our hair, hanging heads-down, like a bat. What a delight it was to teach a bird how to fly! 

It took a few days until Bulbul began to enjoy flying. In the morning, Bulbul’s feeding time, she would fly into our mosquito net to wake us up. And it was around that time we heard the good news that my partner was accepted as a Prospect Burma scholar in the MA in Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia in the UK. We would have to depart for the UK by September 2018.  

We did not know what to do with Bulbul. In Sagaing, there was a beer garden with an aviary but Bulbul would be out of place in the midst of canaries and parrots. We could leave Bulbul with our in-laws but we would not want to burden them with our baby, who needed as much attention as a human baby. At my wit’s end, I started whining about how I wished I could find a foster home for Bulbul.  

A week of two prior to our departure to the UK, as we came home from Mandalay, Bulbul didn’t come flying to perch on our shoulders to welcome us. Bulbul was not in the bungalow, nor in the garden. Was our baby swallowed by the ratsnake, the six-footer sighted in our kitchen a few days before Bulbul arrived? It was unlikely that the ratsnake would visit our kitchen again just for Bulbul. 

It took a while until it dawned on us that Bulbul must have flown out through the bedroom window, which was usually shut. We were desolate with grief. Bulbul was just a baby and not yet ready to leave home. Bulbul might have fallen prey to the neighbour’s cat — but we could not find any remnant of the chick in the neighbourhood. My partner now sounded like Bulbul’s biological mother on the day we found her. She wept for days, calling out into the mango and longan trees. She reproached me for carelessly leaving the bedroom window open. She insisted that Bulbul must have heard my whining and decided to leave.  

Perhaps it is in the nature of a wild bird to grow wings and fly away. Perhaps the untimely return to nature endangered Bulbul. Perhaps Bulbul continues to live. We will never know. What we know is that, apart from the void Bulbul left in our lives with her sudden but timely departure, the fledgling had provided us with love, joy and hope of the kind we’d never expected from a creature of that size. 

What of my own return to Sagaing? I was just following my heart — the pull factors were nostalgia and romance. I even came up with a to-do list to justify my way back to Myanmar— write in Burmese again, find my own voice, haggle with hawkers and paddlers, farm on the silted land, sow new season seeds, patch up the Ozone layer, dig a pit latrine, tail at a jade mine dump, become an astrological consultant as to what day you should hang your business shingle, become a copywriter for thanaka, pluck duck feathers at charitable houses handing out duck curry to the whole town, do things in earnest because I feel obliged to, because I love you, because you are pretty, because I like you, because you are my benefactor, because you are my aunt’s cow so I have to herd you, rise as soon as I hear ‘pebyoke!’ for steamed chickpeas for breakfast at the break of dawn, take a shower thrice a day so I can sweat cleanly, learn to say again ‘‘How are you, have you eaten?’’, and learn to flash a toothy smiles again even when I am not into toothy smiles.

My own attachment to home as a specific location or culture was uncertain. I was born in Rangoon, the former capital of what was then Burma, but had spent my adolescent years in the ethnic Shan state in the northeastern part of Myanmar. I was a Bama in Shan state, and a Shan in Bama regions. My parents, both of whom have settled in Singapore since the 1990s, say they are partly of ethnic Mon and Karen stock from the Irrawaddy delta, but I am unable to claim those ethnicities. 

Sagaing belongs to Anyar, the heartland of Myanmar. It is said that one will never become anyarthar or a son of Anyar unless one was born and raised there. In Anyar, impoverished locals build temporary sand stupas on the riverbanks for seasonal worship during the dry season. Rich people build proper brick-and-mortar structures. Sand stupas, usually four to six feet high, would collapse back into the river in the monsoon. Sagaing is also the place where dredging vessels mine thousands of tons of fine river sand from the Irrawaddy and Chindwin riverbeds for construction projects day and night. 

The Sagaing hills are dotted with numerous white and gold stupas, meditation retreats and monasteries. There are two magnificent bridges across the Irrawaddy connecting Sagaing and Mandalay — one was built by the British in 1934 in colonial Burma and the other by a Chinese company in 2008, in transitional Myanmar. The official name of the 1934 bridge is the Ava Bridge, honouring Ava, the imperial capital of Konbaung Dynasty across the river from Sagaing, but everyone calls it Sagaing Bridge. While the golden spires of the Ava palace have been reduced to ruins and Ava itself reduced to an agrarian community, Sagaing remains a thriving town, and it’s there to stay despite the ominously-named Sagaing Fault, a gigantic tectonic line that runs through Myanmar and is responsible for almost all earthquakes the country has endured in its history.

The bridges and the ethnoreligious diversity made me think of Sagaing as the Brooklyn of Myanmar, but Mandalay was no Manhattan. The town’s sorry sights are ubiquitous plastic waste along the riverbank and impoverished locals bathing at numerous bathing beaches in the polluted Irrawaddy, an area where the renowned Irrawaddy dolphins once thrived and lived in a harmonious relationship with local fishermen.

Sagaing has a curious history. It was the seat of a minor Burmese kingdom for merely fifty years in the fourteenth century. Then just for three years in the eighteenth century (1760-1763), it was the royal capital of the Konbaung Dynasty, Burma’s final dynasty that lasted 133 years until the British occupation in 1885. It was the capital of the Sagaing Region in colonial and post-colonial Burma. Since 2000, however, to the dismay of many Sagaing people, Monywa, a bigger town on the bank of the river Chindiwn, has been the capital of Sagaing Region.

The soundscape at central Sagaing was a mix of calls from hawkers and a lot of motorcycles honking horns. If one lived in Sagaing long enough one would hear Buddhist and Muslim prayers on loudspeakers, students learning things by rote at private boarding schools, as well as cicadas and songbirds. Around midnight, from time to time, when the whole town was dark and quiet, one could hear the competing howls of packs of street dogs in the backdrop of the Irrawaddy wind piping through the leafy gardens of Sagaing.

Catering to monks and pilgrims, Sagaing has a sizeable religious economy. Most visitors to Sagaing are domestic tourists. There are no Western restaurants and no shopping malls in Sagaing. Sagaing also has traditional silverware, wickerware, and pottery industries. The Sagaing market by and large remained a farmers’ market. When the market is closed on Buddhist sabbath days once a week, a street market appeared outside it. Not far from the main market, there is a jade market in Sagaing that had existed since the late 1990s. Since the authorities turned it into an ‘official’ jade market in 2005, the town has seen a slump in jade business. Sagaing also boasted the highest number of luthiers, or guitar makers, per population in Myanmar. There were at least fifteen luthiers in town, and some of their handmade guitars were brilliant. Otherwise, Sagaing is a town for retirees, many of whom were Sagaing natives who had left Sagaing for work elsewhere and come back to live the rest of their lives there.

Locals are flower-eaters. One might try red silk-cotton flower soup, usually cooked with tamarind juice and watercress. On the Sagaing promenade, along the Irrawaddy, there stood the biggest and tallest red silk-cotton tree I had ever seen. The tree, probably more than a hundred years old, sheds all its leaves and turns red in bloom in the spring. The tree itself should be designated as a heritage tree. There are also flower-salads. Frangipani, mangrove trumpet, and Indian trumpet (aka midnight horror) blossoms are pickled for salads. The other ingredients in pickled flower-salads are fried garlic, raw garlic, crushed peanuts, fish sauce, green chilli, lime or lemon, and peanut oil, served with coarse tea. At the famed Soon Oo Ponya Shin pagoda on top of the Sagaing Hill, there is a number of flower-salad restaurants all year-round.

Locals, who feel the need to make Sagaing great again, argue that Sagaing should be the capital of the Sagaing Region, and that the regional parliament in Monywa should be moved to Sagaing. In my opinion Sagaing is already great where it is—away from the hurly-burly of politics-- but following the 2021 coup in Myanmar Sagaing region put up a widespread resistance against the regime and consequently, the rural Sagaing today is devastated by armed conflict.

In Myanmar I take issue with the fact that powerful locals by and large are unkind to animals and nature, though I am not able to help a single street dog or save a single tree in Sagaing. I despise ubiquitous child labour at restaurants and beer joints in Myanmar, but can’t live without them. I hate racist Buddhism, but don’t bother to confront my nationalist Buddhist neighbour in Sagaing. In 1997, my resistance against the military tyranny urged me to leave home. Twenty years later, I have probably lost the fight in me in my great haste home, in my attempt to be reintegrated at home. Perhaps I have become more of a chameleon than Sandar the chameleon. The home I knew is gone for good.   

Given my circumstances, Robert Pinsky’s suggestion of motion as home appeals to me. I suggest the diaspora as home to climate refugees whose homes no longer exist. I suggest exile as home to exiles. There always will be people who are cut out for violence. Why hang on to home when home gets hostile?  “And when / I die, which is a fate no mammal can escape, / it will be far from home in a nest underground.”: one can appreciate Tishani Doshi.  

Home as a territory, property or land, home as the place where one’s placenta was buried, home within the parameters of religion, identity or sovereignty, home as a space where one is not only comfortable but visible, home as a place of family and friends, home for one’s favourite food and flavours, home as terra firma or a body of water in which one wants to be buried in, and most importantly, home as a nation — no matter how I define home, I realised, after an absence far too long, home remains elusive and illusory for me. I am no longer able to call home ‘အိမ် [eain]’, Burmese for home. There is only one home left for me. My home language, heart language or မြန်မာစကား [myanmar sagar or Burmese], in which I continue to write about home and homesickness. No tyranny can exile a poet from their home language, their language of home.

ko ko thett is a bilingual poet and author of several collections of poetry and poetry translations, in Burmese and English. He has been featured at literary events from Sharjah to Shanghai, and his poems and translations have appeared in journals and anthologies worldwide. He was poetry editor for Mekong Review from 2017 to 2022. His most recent poetry collection is Bamboophobia (2022). He lives in Norwich, UK.

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