Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

AMY TAN
fumes and pastiches of the exotic and languid life: Victorian para­
sols, stern pith helmets, and fever dreams of sex with the natives.
As for the more recent stories about Burma, how they pale. They
are mostly distressing reports. The stories go more or less like this:
Miss Burma is now married to a lunatic despot who has changed her
name to Mrs. Myanmar. She has gone to live in Oblivion, so no one
knows where she is. The husband is vile and beats his wife. The chil­
dren have been abused as well, and now they bear scars and are
hiding in corners. Poor Miss Burma, the former beauty queen, she
would be gorgeous still if it weren’t for the gaunt limbs, the missing
eye, the lips mumbling the same babble.
Naturally, we all have great sympathy, but who wants to read sto­
ries like that? Memoirs of sacrilege, torture, and abuse, one after
another—they are so difficult to read, without a speck of hope to lift
you, no redeeming denouements, only the inevitable descent into the
bottomless pits of humanity. When you reach the end of such stories,
you can’t sigh deeply and say to yourself, “Oh my, how glad am I to
have read that.” Don’t tut-tut me. I know it’s an utterly ugly senti­
ment, and I would never have admitted it in public while I was alive.
Nobody would, if they had any common sense. But tell me honestly,
who does read political books on horror-ridden regimes except
scholars of history and those studying that particular part of the
world? Others may claim they have, but more likely they skim the de­
scriptions in The New York Review of Books, and then say that they
are informed, qualified to make judgments. How do I know? I’ve
done it. I just never saw the point in spending days and days reading
stories only to disturb myself with problems I was powerless to fix.
The truth is, I’ve always preferred the old fictions about any an­
cient land. I read to escape to a more interesting world, not to be
locked up in a sweltering prison and find myself vicariously standing
among people who are tortured beyond the limits of sanity. I have
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