Unnamed Parts of Myingyan 

Myingyan | 2,249 words

A random stranger I bumped into on the Ringstrasse on a sunny afternoon during the Pride Parade asked me a common enough question: “Where are you from?” I usually respond to this kind of question with banter: “From Mars. And you?” He introduced himself and said that he’d come to Vienna from Wiener Neustadt for the Pride Parade. I could sense pure curiosity in his tone. 

“I am from Burma,” I answered. 

“Bahamas?” 

“Ah, it’s Myanmar.” 

“Okay, I think I heard of it before, but I don’t know where it is exactly. Can you show it to me on Google Maps?”

I took out my mobile phone and fed his curiosity. 

“Aha, it’s a big country.” 

“Yes, it’s about the size of Germany and France combined.” 

He did not stop there. “Can you locate your hometown?” 

I was a bit taken aback, but he seemed harmless. I took him for someone with a genuine interest in how big my hometown was. So, I typed it in. “M-Y-I-N-G-Y-A-N.” 

“Hmm, it is as big as Wiener Neustadt.” 

I zoomed in on Myingyan on Google Maps for the first time in my life and that was when I discovered that some of the streets in my hometown actually have names. I cannot recall if Myingyan has put up street signs. I have not visited there for a decade already. Not every street has a name anyway, only those in the uptown area. The street I grew up on does not have a name. I could not even locate my mother’s slipper shop on the main road, let alone my childhood home. The total stranger stopped asking me questions for a while, but a string of thoughts began to linger with me.

Like in any other small town, we in Myingyan think in terms of landmarks: the Veterans Affairs Office (which was replaced by a Chinese restaurant long ago), a monastery, a mosque, a grocery store (which was a relevant landmark in the 1990s and 2000s), a small bridge at the town’s edge. And we use cardinal directions. My aunt and her family (on my mother’s side) lived to the south of my childhood home, so we called it “House of the South”. Along this line, my childhood home was “House of the North”. But my paternal grandma’s house was east of us so her house was logically named “House of the East”. For my grandma, my home was “House of the West”. In this sense, my childhood home had two designated names. Luckily, relatives from both my mother’s and father’s sides didn’t interact much, so their houses each had just one name.

The streets’ lack of names hardly matters; they’re memorable for something far more meaningful. As spaces for “street performances,” they were vibrant sites of collective joy and celebration. Nearly every ward in town had its own pagoda festival, though each celebrated it differently. In some wards, residents prepared food and snacks to share with friends, while others organized traditional Burmese zat pwe operas, raising funds to then invite popular dance troupes from nearby towns.

In my ward—the largest in town—our festival was known for its mobile music shows, drawing crowds from across Myingyan. Each year, three local bands, two playing traditional folk music and one playing pop, paraded from our neighborhood toward the wealthier “named streets” downtown, where they received cash donations along the way. Wealthy sponsors, often cheroot or vegetable oil business owners, funded these performances, sometimes inviting a national pop star to join the band. While those larger shows and pop stars typically appeared on decorated trucks in the named streets, amateur street performers filled the unmarked neighborhoods with their own forms of celebration.

You did not need a painted parade truck to stage street performances. You only needed a trishaw, a cassette, a loudspeaker, a fully-charged battery, and a microphone. A host introduced the performers and the song. If the host was witty, they would crack jokes or sing karaoke during breaks. But the main performance was between two actors, one playing a male character, the other in a woman’s role. The male performer did not dress up much, in fact was often scruffy and ragged. He was just a side character, a love interest of the lady-alike performer. All the attention went to the lady-alike performer who wore makeup, lipstick and a wig. They performed female pop hits that had been popular during the year. Two songs I recall are “Ma Yae Maunglay” (“My Little Darling”) by Htun Eaindra Bo and Nayyar-tagar (“Everywhere, Every Time”) by Thiri Ko Ko. 

The first song expresses a woman’s affection toward a younger man, with lyrics like “My little darling, your eyes pierced through me, can you hear my heartbeat? Come hug me, baby! I could go faint, I want your love.” Then the lady-alike performer made sexual moves. The second song is more playful around concepts of femininity. It is an informal complaint to a controlling boyfriend:

Desiring to appear beautiful is natural, a woman’s nature,
Don’t be mad when I put on lipstick,
I am a girl and, of course, I want to look beautiful,
You are controlling, everywhere and every time,
Have empathy, my love,
Untie your strings wrapped around me, at least one knot, with mercy,
Please let me cut my hair short, don’t force me (to keep it long),
I intend to have male genuine friends (without any love-interest),
I confide to you my innocence.

The lady-alike performer would spin around and unknot unseen strings when the chorus came.

I am drawn to these street performances not just out of nostalgia, but because they offer a trace of queerness. Let me recount another performance, this time with a performer I will name. His name was Ko Thae Aye, which translates to “making hearts/souls cool.” He ran a juice stand in summer. His name itself could cool down the summer heat in Myanmar’s dry region. His performance mesmerized me as a child. He painted one half of his face as a woman, the other as a man. His body followed this divide as well, half masculine, half feminine. He even had a poetic name for this performance, Nha-ko-ta-zeit (two-bodied, yet one-souled). I only discovered the existence of the American performer Josephine Joseph, who had a similar act, when I was a teenager. In retrospect, Ko Thae Aye must have seen her on television or read about her in newspapers and adapted it for the Burmese audience.

I wonder how Ko Thae Aye and the lady-alike performers viewed themselves. Were the performances merely silly impersonations for them? Did society see queerness (or queer people) as no more than “entertainment”? Did these street performances create “spaces” for queer people—if not the performers, then queer members of the audience? I do not dare answer these questions based on my childhood memories alone. If only I were a lady-alike performer, I could spin around and untangle these questions—layer by layer, string by string.

Where did my childhood memories about “queer-friendly” street performances in Myingyan hide away when the stranger I met at the Pride Parade asked me how queer people were treated in my home country? Peoples’ first question, of course, is usually “Where are you from?”, out of sheer curiosity for some, with a (dis)taste of orientalism for some others. Often, I suspect, this second question comes with the presumption that my home country is a “hellhole” for queer people while positioning Austria as a “queer haven”—even though same-sex marriage, a superficial yet visible marker of queer acceptance, was legalized here only five years ago, and some Austrian therapists until recently continued to declare homosexuality an intrinsic cause of depression.

I am aware that I cannot argue that the lady-alike street performers were on par with Sasha Velour lip-syncing “Emotional”. Nor that Thiri Ko Ko’s song was a feminist anthem as much as Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me”. But I would like to draw a parallel between performances in the metropole and the periphery, the performances I have seen in my childhood and in my adulthood.

Not every street performance was filled with laughter and joy. Don’t worry, I will not sweep the tragic street performances under the carpet. One stands out in my memory. A queer woman in my neighborhood had committed suicide by drinking insecticide after a row with her lover. Her mother’s excruciating cries shook up the whole neighborhood on a hot summer afternoon. I peeked through the wooden door of House of the East. She staged a raw and heartbreaking performance. She placed her daughter’s body on a trishaw and paraded through the streets, wailing, “She murdered my daughter! You murdered my daughter!” Trust me, this is not my addition of poetic license to the story. This “death parade” was a grief-stricken attempt to place shame onto her daughter’s lover who was responsible for the death. The mother turned her grief into a spectacle. But it was not clear what kind of row they had. I think even the mother did not know what exactly happened between these two lovers.

I was too young to fully understand the situation, but as I grew older, I pieced together more about the tragedy. The lover was a middle-class woman who worked for the government (geodetic survey department, if I remember correctly). She was outgoing or, in my neighborhood’s eyes, “too sociable”. She might have been bisexual or lesbian, the village did not give explicit labels. The daughter, on the other hand, came from a poor family whose livelihood depended on making solid fuel from cow dung. I saw the rounded pieces of dried cow dung, which looked much like burger patties, and the stains all over the bamboo fence around their house whenever I passed by. Their tragedy fit well with the popular Burmese movie trope back then where the poor guy and the rich girl could not be together because of the class divide. However, such a story of love obstructed by both class and queerness would never make it into Burmese cinema—censorship would ensure that their bodies were made correct.

“My dear daughter loved you so much. How could you do this to her?” Perhaps the lover broke up with the daughter leaving her heartbroken, which drove her to suicide. Maybe she was not brave enough to be seen with the boyish daughter. Maybe she chose a man over her. Maybe she did have a cruel heart, as the mother accused. The details are unclear, but it was a sad love story regardless.

Why am I choosing to recount these past street performances—some joyful, some tragic—when I could have written about present-day-street protests by Burmese queer people, which I studied for a Masters thesis last year? Burmese queer people, along with other groups, marched on both named and unnamed streets across the country to express their contempt for the military coup three years ago. Some of my interview subjects, who joined the People’s Defence Forces (PDFs), battled with the military junta forces, mostly on the unnamed streets of small villages. Yet queerphobia remains rampant, contrary to the expectations of naïve urban middle-class people who believe that the anti-military resistance movement will bring people together regardless of ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. In my defense, these queer street performance stories and tragedies are not just memoirs—not for me, at least. They are deeply connected to the “queer present” of Myanmar.

I’m reminded of a quote by one of my favorite queer theorists, Jasbir Puar, which I memorized for a presentation at a conference: “As opposed to an inter­sectional model of identity, which presumes components—race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, age, religion—are separable analytics and can be thus disassembled, an assemblage is more attuned to interwoven forces that merge and dissipate time, space, and body against linearity, coherency, and permanency.”

At the Pride Parade I was surrounded by colorful voices, from “Queer Palestinian Lives Matter” to “No PRIDE in deportation”, alongside kink-positive groups in puppy masks or latex clothing. Over three million queer individuals and allies celebrated the Viennese Pride Parade. Yet in a poll conducted by a gay dating app named Planet Romeo, almost a third (29.3%) of its users voted for the FPÖ, a far-right party, in the latest Austrian election. I am living in diaspora against the backdrop of the rise of the far-right in Austria and Europe (and beyond). 

Sometimes I experience virtually, through Facebook, the catastrophes caused by the military coup. At the same time, I live in Vienna without any fear of bombs over my roof or a knock on my door that might take me to the interrogation centre. I do live with a resilience and humor pollinated by Burmese queer people and their street performances on both named and unnamed streets. 

What could a named street, Ringstrasse in Vienna, and a Pride Parade on it, a celebration of queerness, offer me in (re)creating a Little Myingyan here in Austria? If Little Myingyan was my named quest, what would be my unnamed quest? A sense of belonging?

No-one can predict the future and I cannot foresee what will become of Little Myingyan and Real Myingyan after they battle far-right extremism and militaristic oppression respectively. However, I will indulge myself by imagining both Myingyans dancing in the very near future like an unapologetic street performer, with unrestrained queer joy.

© Aungg

Commissioning editor: Aye Lei Tun