Yangon, you have the elegant pride and glistening cleanliness of European cities without the pristine edges. You sag in places and peel in others and you have a weary look about you, like you want to spend your days knitting for grandchildren instead of trudging, trudging, trudging through minutes and hours, afraid to exhale. You, Yangon, are swollen with air, swollen with silence, swollen with a tension so thick that I'm afraid of treading off of the sidewalk for fear of you bursting. And Yangon, your people look at me with curiosity and a strange pride and an inexplicable warmth, but most of them are afraid to ask me. They're afraid to talk, to touch, to know. But you do not move in your quiet dignity, your weary tolerance, and a slight grin tugs at the corners of your lips somehow. It's been there so long that it has caused a wrinkle all the way across your entire expanse. You are just waiting. Just waiting and hoping. I wanted to scream. I wanted to scream and tear my hair out and gather everyone together and start marching and hitting and clawing and fighting. You just shook your head at me. No, no, no. That is not how this is going to work. So I took this picture instead. I took this picture while your people walked around me, greeting me, asking, "Where you from?," and telling me, "America is greatest country in the world." Yangon, your quiet hope, your warm patience, your unspectacular suffering, your weathered beauty rest at the very root of me like lead seeping into groundwater.
I won't forget you.
2 comments:
I sense you only wrote a glimmer of all you felt in Myanmar. And of course all you felt is a fraction of a fraction of what people there feel.
YES, exactly!! As I've mentioned before, I've actually been quite hesitant to write about Myanmar, because I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to do justice to the experience of being there through my writing. I'm glad you were able to pick up on the enormity of all I felt :) Thanks for such a thoughtful comment!
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