“What Are You, and Where is Burma?” by Juliet Way-Henthorne

“What are you?”

A question, posed by strangers, that has followed me for as long as I can remember. On subways, in classrooms, on the street. People only mean to ask about my ethnic makeup, but to use those words—what are you—leaves a sting that mixed-race people know well. “What am I?” I want to say. “I am American, just like you. I am also human, though your question makes me feel like some kind of alien. I am a mix of many ethnicities, just as you surely are.”

Instead of erupting from years of gently boiling beneath my yellow-tan-cream skin, I reply with the answer I think they are seeking. This wound won’t heal because almost no one knows what Burma is. Burma or Myanmar—as it was renamed in 1989—they know neither. Very rarely does the asker lean in closer. They are satisfied in their confusion, as if all they suspected was that I was something beyond the usual scope of “the other.” They’re happy to be right. 

I once worked with a geographer. After explaining what I was, even this person, an expert on the shape of this world, asked, “Where is Burma?” I gave up halfway between the usual mumbling: “It borders China and India and Thailand and slivers slightly along Laos and Bangladesh…”

When I started to write about Burma and my family there, a place I’ve only dreamed of, I felt like a fraud. I’ve always wanted to write about its golden Buddhas, its ancient stone pagodas, the way the Burmese people wear brown thanaka powder—a natural sunscreen made from the bark of a native tree—in thick layers on their cheeks. I have a jar of this powder, ordered off the internet, sitting in my bathroom cabinet collecting dust. I reach past it for pretty glass vials of serum and jars of green mud, betraying a country that bore me even in my smallest moments. Am I as inauthentic as this knock-off thanaka powder? The Americanized, half-as-good-as-the-real-deal version?

Growing up, I watched my grandmother grind her own thanaka with a mortar and pestle made from the thanaka tree itself. Her hands moved rapidly back and forth, grinding bark into a fine powder that she mixed with water and gently applied to my face. That memory is alive. The bark sits somewhere in my garage with the other treasures I’ve inherited: an arched Burmese harp called a saung, black velvet purses strung with red beads, embroidered elephants dancing on pillow cushions. Even with little pieces of Burma, the question haunts me: what right do I have to write these stories, to share this history, when I seem to belong to no one?

Yet the question itself is where my story begins.

I need to talk about Burma—the country where my grandfather, Po Po, kissed the red earth before leaving it forever. Where monks wear robes the color of old blood. Where the Irrawaddy River winds like a vein through the body of the country, holding its past and present. I want to write about the smell of turmeric and fried garlic in our family kitchens, the stacks of mooncakes beside British cream crackers. The way we bore our imperialism. 

I want to write about what we carry before I stop remembering or breathing. I’m holding our memories in me like a trapped scream. In my impatience and anger, I’ve lost the docility I faked because it was expected of me as a “generally” Asian woman. 

I saw a photo of a dead monk lying face-down in a puddle of his own blood and rainwater during the 2007 Saffron Revolution. Do you remember it? His robe bloomed out around him like a dark flower. No one dared move him. They would’ve been shot, too. Searching now, I find the photo is gone. Taken, because those who have stolen Burma want no witnessing.

Can I publicly express the kinship I feel for a place I half belong to but that no one remembers exists? If I am only half of a place that has grown invisible, then maybe I don’t exist at all, either. Maybe I am careful to say I long for Burma because I am not sure if what I am reaching for is even there. Maybe that is why people ask what I am. Maybe the unbelonging shows, like I am half air. 

Being biracial means being both seen and unseen—too Asian for white people, too white for Asians. Once, in an Asian American Studies class, a girl turned to me and asked, “You’re a half-blood, aren’t you?” as if she were naming my defect. When I said my mom was Burmese, she wrinkled her nose. “Oh,” she said. “I thought maybe Thai.”

The hierarchy was implicit. Burma is too dark, too poor, too far. Its red earth makes jewels and sprouts opium. Burma doesn’t make sleek cars or computers. It doesn’t produce dewy sunblock that disappears into the skin like its wealthy neighbors; thanaka circles leave the face muddy all day, like the banks of the Irrawaddy kiss its people every morning. I want to think this means we are a sturdy people, mythical even to be beloved by a river.  

This is the thing most people don’t understand. It’s not the question itself that injures. It’s the weight of being someone else’s approximation. Of being used as a mirror but never being seen clearly. Of being told what you are. My childhood best friend’s father once told her, “She’s probably Chinese. All those people interbreed.” She beamed when she told me, like it was a secret only she knew. Like she thought I would be happy to hear she had figured me out. 

There’s a loneliness to being asked where you’re from by people who don’t want your answer. Or being told by people who love you that they don’t believe it, or to secretly have wished yourself that it were something else just so someone would see you. There’s an ache of being looked at like a human puzzle. Of feeling like you owe your ancestors an apology for the parts of them that the world finds unsavory. Or worse, feeling like your ancestors might not want you because of your halfness. 

But if I am split, I am also doubled. My father, an eccentric professor who we buried 10 years ago, wrote a book about The Hunger Games. I was his research assistant, exploring another world, feeling my way around. I think of the three-fingered salute from that book, the one now adopted by protestors in Burma. A silent act of resistance. I see photos of protestors holding their fingers to their mouths and then raising them skyward. “It means thanks,” Katniss says. “It means admiration. It means goodbye to someone you love.”

I press my fingers against my lips and press them to the screen of my phone, my only window in. I want to believe that it’s fate and not coincidence that a book that meant so much to me, the story of a girl who will kill rather than kneel, found its way to Burma. A land where the military government cuts the internet so that no news comes in or out somehow found this book of rebellion, of lost fathers and haunted mothers and brave girls and boys.

On March 28th, I watched a golden pagoda crumble into itself, like it was being swallowed from the inside out. Shriveling almost, as if a hand holding the pagoda’s strings suddenly clenched into a hard fist. I watched stone temples split in two. I keep thinking it doesn’t look real—it looks like the gods are angry, like they’re commanding the world to look at Burma. When I look at Burma split, I start to think that no amount of mending will do. This history is draining as I write, with every building that breaks and body that sinks. We need a witnessing that won’t end. Bombs rain on rebel Burmese forces, and no one hears a sound. Why must the earth split open in two, a scream so loud that no one can catch its echo—to be heard?

Sometimes I think Pwa Pwa, my grandmother, is lucky to not know. Dementia means she still lives in the Burma of her youth, all jasmine flowers and water festivals and monks who walk barefoot for their alms. She doesn’t know its fall—not the military crackdowns, not the burned villages, not the children hiding in forests, their faces caked with soot and fear. She still thinks Aung San Suu Kyi is a hero, the Lady of the people, even while the rest of the world has written her off as a traitor, a genocide apologist, a pawn of the junta she once defied. 

I thought about showing Pwa Pwa photos of the crumbled temples, the shattered schools. I imagined her lighting candles, her whispered prayers rising like smoke. I thought maybe her prayers could help. But when I sat behind her, watching her murmur over her prayer beads, the photos felt too cruel. What good would it do to show her what has become of the place she still believes pristine? Let her, let someone, imagine a Burma that hasn’t existed for decades. Let someone believe in it still. Auntie Lei Lei once told me she has boxes of photographs from Burma. She said that when Po Po, my grandfather, was in college, he stayed with her parents. He’d come home late and sleep on the living room floor so he wouldn’t wake anyone with the creak of the stairs. Auntie Lei Lei recalls the exact moment Po Po fell in love with Pwa Pwa. “Those eyes,” she told me, shaking her head. “You wouldn’t believe those eyes of hers.” 

Now Pwa Pwa’s eyes are creased. Her eyebrows, once striking, arch less and furrow more. But maybe in her mind’s eye, Burma is evergreen. Maybe she sees herself as a child crossing the river with her grandmother, or as a young mother being lifted off a British oil company boat to the hospital, her daughter Ruby already crowning. Maybe she sees her own grandfather, a teacher, prepping boys for college and prepping her too, until she went off to Rangoon University to study medicine. Maybe in memory loss, time collapses, and she gets it all back. 

Burma is always trembling, always shifting—cracking open at the seams without making a sound. When the military junta seized control in 2021, the world gave a passing nod and then turned away. Another tragedy in a far-off place. When villages were burnt to the ground, when children disappeared into jungles, when rebel women picked up rifles in secret—it was just shadows in the dark. Even now, when an earthquake crumples pagodas like paper fans, there is no siren, no sustained gaze. Burma is breaking, and somehow already gone.

The world gasps once, maybe twice, and moves on. But my ache is an inheritance. It lingers in the marrow. I carry the blood, the rupture, the river. I am still listening. I am still burning.

“What are you?”

I am a Burmese-American woman choking on the bitterness of erasure. Vomiting up my homeland’s rubies and sapphires, a white opium poppy flowering out of my eye socket. I am someone holding on to the lives forgotten, the buildings that will never be remade, the red-earthed land that is propped up on sticks by richer countries that may repair only to keep draining and sucking until there is nothing left. I am a person disappearing because disappointment isn’t a strong enough word. Resentment holds too little weight. I am a person filled with rage directed at common injustice, the practice of colonialism and the way it never truly leaves a place. 

The earth groaned in Burma and split, wrapping into herself. Cloaked in rubble. And still, beneath the soot, I need to believe she breathes.

Juliet Way-Henthorne‘s work has been featured in Hobart and AAWW’s The Margins and is forthcoming with Slant’d and Pine Hills Review. Juliet serves as Senior Creative Nonfiction Editor for jmww and works with Hunger Mountain Review as a Social Media Coordinator.

23 October 2025