Burma at the Turn of the 21st Century

–12–The Future of Burma: Children Are Like Jewels

249 Discard only bad baskets and punnets, not bad sons and daughters. —Burmese proverb The Lokaniti states “aputtakam gharam sunnam” (“a home without children is desolate” [Pe Tin Thein 1992:2]). The home, the domain of children , is the space least invaded by the surveillance apparatus of the military government. In the parenting of children we gain a viewpoint from which to see the impact of militarism and modernization on the national private imagination . Such a viewpoint is fraught with conflicting tensions and representations of parents and of the kinds of adults produced during the child-rearing process. Parents were portrayed as virtual monsters by many Western theorists of the last century, and as hagiographical icons in uncensored contemporary Burmese writings, and children were depicted as reincarnated wise elders in Buddhism and Burmese folk traditions, and increasingly as pudgy little emperors and empresses by transnational Asian marketing companies. These images of the Burmese family are reconcilable within a historical framework that takes into account British colonization, the brief moment of culture and personality theory ascendancy among Western academics, the continued suppression of publishing of serious social concerns in Burma, the increasing recourse to religion under authoritarianism, and the partial liberalization of the Burmese economy in the 1990s that led to a conscious pan-Asian cosmopolitan model –12– The Future of Burma Children Are Like Jewels Monique Skidmore Part 4: The Domestic Domain for parenting (Anagnost 2002) being espoused by transnational marketing companies in Burmese urban media. In this chapter I privilege the voices of Burmese parents in order to create another depiction of Burmese children: as the embodiment both of all that is valuable on the earth, and of an alternate genetic history of Burma, where value is made manifest through generational links. The Past One could be forgiven for thinking that the Burmese act like monsters. The English literature regarding the results of studies of Burmese parents, children, and child socialization contains pejorative labels, Orientalist constructions of “difference,” and a pathological view of Burmese child rearing that contrasts sharply with the“normalcy”of Western forms of parenting. These studies were conducted by American and British psychologists and anthropologists from the 1940s through the 1960s and, for the most part, involved survey materials and interviews conducted in English or with the aid of Burmese translators. Quite often the theorists, such as Geoffrey Gorer, had never conducted research in Burma and instead reviewed the existing English-language studies. They were informed by popular theories of the day and were not limited to Burma, but can be found in the literature on other Southeast Asian nations, especially Thailand (for example, Foster [1976]; Phillips [1965]; Piker [1975]). This particular cluster of child-related research in Burma represents the second wave of such interest by Western scholars and medical personnel. As early as 1866 Westerners were interested in why Burma was sparsely populated in comparison with India and other South and East Asian nations (see Figure 12.1 for a visual depiction of Burmese children during colonialism). Beginning their enquiry on the western fringes of Burma, doctors, scientists, and scholars such as L. H. Lees argued that in Arakan in particular, the most likely reason was “a general want of care and management” of children and a “lack of parental solicitude.” Lees’s concluding recommendation was that Burma required the encouragement of immigration, presumably from societies in which parents knew how to look after children (Lees 1866).1 The words of Lees were hardly modified over the next century, with the same sentiments pervading the literature of the twentieth century. In 1945 L. M. Hanks, Jr. served for over five months as a civilian appointed to the Office of Strategic Services on the coast of Arakan, and he later earned a PhD in psychology. He believed that in Burma there was“a connection between the unpredictability of love for a child, the negatively phrased discipline that he later receives at home and in school, and the loose, evadable authority of adult social life” (1949:285). 250 Monique Skidmore Hanks perceived a lack of constant tending by the mother. He wrote that it “is strange that a six-months-old child is passed from one adult to another and is only in his mother’s arms for feedings or in an emergency. . . . At any moment they may hand him over to someone and depart as if he were a doll...