A Tale of Catastrophe in Burma

In my preparations to visit Southeast Asia soon, including Myanmar, I’m trying to read what few books I can find on the history, culture, and politics of the place. Cultures of the World: Myanmar (2022) was a helpful way to begin my amateur research, and while that book was fairly honest about the current political situation (i.e. “Travel Tip”: don’t go there), it didn’t go very deep into the details. This book by Emma Larkin goes deeper.

Although only 13 years old, Everything Is Broken is slightly outdated already, ignorant as it is of the recent coup. Still, it offers an excellent glimpse of a nation under the charge of a military regime. This same regime has taken charge of the nation once more, of course, so things actually seem quite familiar, yet still it’s a book about a different time.

Larkin is not Burmese and (from what I can tell) hasn’t lived for decades in the country. She has, however, spent a considerable amount of time as a tourist and researcher (i.e. for her book Finding George Orwell in Burma) and has contacts across the country that view her as more than that. They view her as a friend with an open heart and (more importantly) as a journalist with open ears whose hands are the megaphone that give their otherwise silenced voices a chance to be heard. And that’s what this book is all about.

The book covers two key events in Burma/Myanmar’s recent history: The monk’s revolt in 2007 and the deadly cyclone in 2008, though both are more about the government’s inhuman responses to these deadly events than about the events themselves. Larkin organizes her book into three parts, sandwiching the revolt between carefully researched sections about the cyclone, and the reader gets a sense that the turmoil the Burmese have endured (even before the coup!) is among the worst on the planet.

Larkin interviews many villagers about these events, going to the very edges of the short leash her tourist visa allowed her. With limited access to the destroyed Delta area, she had to meet them in the cities she could visit. She had access to countless images of the dead and the destroyed—images secreted to her on digital cameras and pirated CD-ROM discs—so much so that she eventually felt desensitized to it all. With over 200,000 people dead or missing (a.k.a. definitely dead) from the cyclone, it’s the only possible response from someone who’s there. And yet the people certainly don’t want to be desensitized: they want to mourn, and they want the world to mourn with them.

In the beginning, we did mourn with the Burmese, sending immediate aid and following the news as best we could. But with the regime confiscating that aid, the story quickly became one of corruption, a story that held the world’s attention for a while…until we got distracted with other things. Isn’t that the way? What have you heard recently of the concentration camps in NW China? They still exist, you know. People are still kidnapped and forced into sleep-deprivation and the torture of standing up for 48+ hours. The Muslims are still force-fed pork and propaganda. It’s still going on, and yet we’re past all that, caught up instead in whatever the news of the day is (currently: White House Cocaine and Republican pre-Primaries).

Imagine yourself as a rice-farmer in the Myanmar Delta south of Rangoon, the sole survivor of the 2008 cyclone, a survivor only because your body didn’t fall into the flood when you lost consciousness in the tree. How quickly would you forget? Obviously, it’s not a fair challenge, to put yourself into the shoes of a foreigner enduring every natural disaster and dispute the world over, but the question isn’t one of empathy or even sympathy: it’s a question of acknowledgment. Do we even know what’s happening in the world around us? Civil war in Myanmar, in South Sudan. Famine in Kenya. Refugees fleeing their homelands to live in tent-cities across the world.

Human beings are suffering through this right now, families, parents, spouses, and children. I’m not saying that we need to get ourselves depressed by reading about the suffering world, but sheesh, we at least need to remove the blinders and know it’s happening, instead of binging on Netflix or caring what vacation our second-cousins posted on Facebook yesterday. Spiritually speaking, we Christians also need to acknowledge that death and suffering around the world means that countless millions are entering a Christless eternity, and we apparently couldn’t care less. I’m not saying “their blood’s on our hands” (because that ain’t biblical), but that we need to wake up from our self-indulged stupor and pay attention to the world a bit more. Matthew 25:31-46 ought to help you with that.

This was a hard book to read, but necessary for my upcoming trip. It’s a keen look at the people’s suffering, and although I wouldn’t carry it with me into Rangoon, I’m glad I’ve got it locked inside my recent memory. Look it up if a trip to this area’s in your future as well.

©2023 E.T.