Commentary
It’s curious how the places we love—even briefly—leave their mark. When they suffer, something in us stirs.
When I heard about the earthquake that struck Burma, it felt less like a news event and more like a terrible tremor through memory itself. For me, it was not merely a natural disaster, but a kind of metaphor.
Burma has been trembling for years, since the
military coup of February 2021, when generals seized power from a fragile, imperfect democracy and plunged the country into terror and silence. Thousands have been imprisoned, tortured, or killed. Entire villages have been torched; over 2 million people have been displaced. And yet the generals continue to speak of “order” and “unity,” as if their rule were not written in blood.
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
So begins “Rebecca,” Daphne du Maurier’s ghostly novel, and one of the most haunting opening lines in English literature. That sentence has always lingered with me. I, too, have dreamt of a Manderley—not the crumbling, haunted Cornish estate, but a very real place: the storied Burmese city of
Mandalay.
There is no connection between the two, save for a phonetic echo. But
Mandalay—the word itself—is a kind of incantation. For Canadians raised in the twilight of the British Empire, it conjures romance and reverie, owing no small debt to
Kipling’s famous lines: “On the road to Mandalay, / Where the old Flotilla lay...”
Kipling never visited the city, but his verse embedded it deep in the imaginations of schoolboys like me. I memorized those lines without understanding them. Years later, I would find myself standing on the banks of the Irrawaddy River, and suddenly they returned—clear, familiar, ghostlike.
I came to Mandalay not as a tourist, but as a guest. My Burmese host is a poet, journalist, and filmmaker. She opened the city to me, not as a series of guidebook entries, but as something more intimate: a place of quiet endurance, beating beneath the layers of history, hardship, and human resilience.
In Mandalay, as across Burma, teashops abound. These are not mere cafés, but informal forums—spaces where conversation unfolds. We sat with monks in saffron robes, drank tea, and swapped stories. A petite teenager, with a voice like a foghorn, announced orders to the kitchen behind her.
Just around the corner from the teashop stood a modest café, where my friend hosted film festivals, using cinema as a tool to nurture democratic ideals and stir the public conscience. At the time, electricity was unreliable, so screenings were powered by generators—at least until the military arrived and shut them down, as they always did. But even that was part of the pattern: light, briefly cast, before the darkness returned.
The selections were modest—short documentaries, smuggled footage, the occasional feature with subversive undertones—but the impact was real. These gatherings were part salon, part classroom, and part act of defiance.
Today, many of those same filmmakers and curators have found their way across the border, into exile. In
Chiang Mai, Thailand, the Democratic Voice of Burma hosts
an annual film festival—a gathering place for exiled artists and dissidents who continue to tell the truth with their cameras.
We wandered markets pungent with spice and sweat. We visited the humble restaurant once favoured by
Aung San Suu Kyi, the imprisoned leader of the
National League for Democracy—the party that stood, however tenuously, for democratic reform.
Even then, Burma—officially
Myanmar—lived under the long shadow of military rule. The people did not speak openly about politics. They had learned, through bitter experience, that words could be dangerous. Informers were everywhere. Even a careless remark in a teashop could lead to a knock on the door at midnight. And yet, they carried themselves with quiet dignity, with a kind of moral poise born of long endurance.
I recall an old bookseller near
Zegyo Market. His shop was little more than a plank balanced between crates, shaded by a fraying tarp. Like most booksellers in Burma, he kept a dog-eared copy of Orwell’s “
Burmese Days,” tucked between faded schoolbooks and mildewed novels. Orwell remains a revered figure among the Burmese, not because he was British, but because he understood something essential about the psychology of oppression. In that moment, as I handed him a few crumpled kyat, we shared a silent understanding. The book, like the man, had survived.
Mandalay, like Burma itself, felt suspended between past and present, between memory and erasure. Once a royal capital, it was home to
Burma’s last king before the British exiled him. The palace, now rebuilt, stands as a poignant reminder of vanished grandeur. The monks still chant before dawn; temple bells still ring through the haze. But the city has changed. So have we all.
I hadn’t thought of Mandalay in some time. Life carries us forward with such haste that we seldom pause to look back. But then came the news: an earthquake had shaken the region. Buildings collapsed. Lives were lost. A city already bowed under poverty and repression had been struck again—this time by nature.
The earthquake became a metaphor for me. Burma has been quaking for years now, under boots and bullets. The fault lines are political, not geological. And yet, amid the rubble, the people endure. Monks march in protest, unarmed and unafraid. Teachers run underground schools for children barred from the classroom. Artists and writers—many now exiled in border towns like
Mae Sot—persist with quiet defiance. Their resistance is not with guns, but with truth and beauty.
I think of the old bookseller again. George Orwell, who served as a colonial policeman in Burma, came to loathe the British Empire, writing that it “corrupts both the colonizer and the colonized.” He would later speak with prophetic clarity about tyranny and truth: “The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world,” he warned. “Lies will pass into history.”
The people of Mandalay, and of Burma more broadly, have learned to resist that erasure. Their witness reminds us that freedom is not merely a Western luxury—it is a human necessity.
Last night, I dreamt I went to Mandalay again. My friend, the poet, was beside me. We walked the dusty streets at twilight. The bells of the
Mahamuni Pagoda rang through smoke and stillness. We did not speak of despair. We spoke of hope.
Because hope—fragile, flickering, yet resilient—is the one thing the generals cannot crush. It lives in the hearts of the Burmese people, as it lives in Mandalay.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
