Law-Yone

I recently finished two short novels by a Burmese-American woman named Wendy Law-Yone. One called The Coffin Tree and one called Irawaddy Tango. I think I read them because I liked the name Irawaddy Tango, and then realized I also owned the other one.

The books are similar, and written well enough. Both are written in the first person, and deal with a woman from Burma who winds up in the U.S.A. (one of them returns to Burma, which in that book is not called Burma, but rather Daya). In one, the young woman is the daughter of a rebel, sent to this country with her brother, who has terrible emotional problmes and gets sick an dies and who herself tries to commit suicide as she tries to figure out who she is, but is saved, spends several months in a public mental institution in New York City, and then announces she will live happily ever after (or, if not happily, she will at least live ever after). That is The Coffin Tree.

In the other one, our heroine is a young poor woman whose cousin becomes a tango maven, and introduces her to the art form. She wins a contest, and the eye of a military figure, who becomes dictator of the country. She is captured by rebels (rather than being the daughter of rebels), becomes the darling of the rebels, is deemed a traitor and exiled. She winds up in the United States, until the politics in Daya is turned upside down and she is allowed to return.

The books were written ten and twenty years ago. I looked up Wendy Law-Yone on Google, but before I got too deep into her (which I never did), I discovered Hubert Law-Yone who is apparently a professor emeritus at the Technion in Israel.

Oh, I said, they must be Jewish. Perhaps Wendy Law-Yone's husband is Jewish.

But no, it turns out that Hubert Law-Yone is also Burmese and wound up in Israel about 30 years ago, having been favorably impressed with certain aspects of the country living in Burma.

When he got to Israel, he discovered that things are seldom what they seem, and learned that the life of a Burmese emigrant (he both went to school and took a position at the Technion) was not what it was cracked up to be in this highly ethno-centric part of the world. Nevertheless, kicking, screaming and complaining, he stayed at the Technion 40 years before retiring to a life of kicking, screaming and complaining. He complains that the Technion is a mere tool of the state, and does not teach its students to think. He complains that its intellectual status is below sub-par.

While complaining and fighting with the Technion administration, he married an Israeli woman and considers himself 100% Israeli. Apparently, his Hebrew has no trace of an accent.

Both of the Law-Yones were involved in radical activity in Burma before the mid-60s, and both are Catholic. Both have Chinese and English in their ancestral background, so I assume they are related.

Wendy Law-Yone revisited Burma (she does not call is Myanmar) for the first time in 33 years a few years ago, and felt it depressing and repressive. I do not know if Hubert Law-Yone has gone back or not.

Both though give reality to the characters Wendy L-Y put into her two novels. Coming from a dreadful place for anyone with political or intellectual ambition, they struggled with a new society which was in some ways unmeasurably better than their native society, and in some ways equally problemmatic.