PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I never met any of my grandparents. They passed away long before I was born. Or so I was told growing up. As it turned out, my maternal grandfather, Albert Maitland Hood, was alive and well when I was born. I even met him in the summer of 1984, when I visited Burma for the first time. To this day, it takes a photo of my grandfather sitting with my brother, taken at a restaurant in Rangoon that year, to assuage my incredulity. Did we really meet our grandfather? No one—not our mother, our father, nor our aunts, uncles, and cousins in Burma—had told us that he was our grandfather. He died before we returned to Burma in 1987. Only many years later would we find out the truth.

My grandfather left my grandmother, Daw Thein Yin, for another woman while she was pregnant with my mother. My mother’s four older siblings had known their father growing up and lived a relatively comfortable life. My mother’s experience of childhood, in contrast, had been both materially and emotionally austere. Abandoned by her husband and deprived of his financial support, my grandmother raised my mother all on her own, selling off all the land and jewelry that she possessed, piece by piece, over the next eighteen or so years. When she was hospitalized for complications due to diabetes, her eldest daughter, Phyllis, sold her own jewelry to pay for the hospital bills.

My grandfather would not even grant his first wife her dying wish. Though he had been cruel to her, she still had affections for him. She had forgiven him and, before she died, wanted to see him. He never came, my mother recalls bitterly.

My mother was nineteen years old and a student at Rangoon University when my grandmother died in her arms. I imagine that it broke my mother. And when she landed in the clinic of the renowned cardiologist Dr. Mohan in the early 1970s for heart palpitations, she turned to him and his wife, Dr. Hnin Yee, for emotional as much as physical healing. In them, she found a pair of surrogate parents. And when my family moved to Burma in 1987, they became my surrogate grandparents.

We would spend almost every weekend in the home of “Uncle Mohan” and “Auntie Rosie,” as we called them. Whenever possible, I would cajole my parents into letting me spend the night with my favorite “elder sister,” Ma Mona. Ma Mona standing in the kitchen and preparing my breakfast in the morning—it is one of my clearest and fondest childhood memories. I have another memory of my sleepovers at the Mohans’: the entire family kneeling on the floor of Uncle Mohan and Aunt Rosie’s bedroom, their hands clasped on the bed in prayer. This is how I often found them when I awoke in the morning and walked down the hallway in search of Ma Mona.

I had assumed at the time, and long after, that Auntie Rosie was the source of the family’s Christian faith. It had not occurred to me that she was a Christian convert. It certainly never crossed my mind that she became Christian only after she married Uncle Mohan. In my childish mind, Christianity was the religion of the bo (“Europeans” or “Anglos” in Burmese), not of Indian people like Uncle Mohan, just as Buddhism was the religion of the Burmese. I knew that Auntie Rosie, like my mother, was of bo descent and presumed that she had been raised Christian.

My assumptions about Auntie Rosie’s family genealogy and my conflation of religion, race, and nationality were upended when, in my late teens, I asked her for the first time about her bo heritage. She vaguely remembered that her ancestors went by the name of “De Vries.” She thought that they might have been Dutch. But she did not become Christian until relatively recently. Her parents were Muslim, as were her siblings, except for those who had, like her, become Buddhist or Christian as adults. She had not only bo ancestors and Burmese ancestors but also Arab ones, she explained. I was utterly confused. And intrigued.

I was not the first to be so intrigued. Ma Mona recalls that she and her sister Ma May Htwe tried to learn about their lineage. “Don’t be nosy” (sat su de), responded their maternal grandmother Daw Helen May, or Mummy Gyi (“Great Mummy”), as she was affectionately known. We will never know why she rebuffed her granddaughters’ inquiry. Perhaps she thought her granddaughters had an overly inquisitive mind. Or perhaps it was the nature of the query that troubled Mummy Gyi. Were there personal memories or family secrets that she was unwilling to expose? Or was she discomfited by a query to which she had no straightforward answer?

Even the great matriarch could not have offered a straightforward answer to the deceptively simple question. For theirs was a dizzyingly heterogeneous family, at once ordinary and extraordinary in colonial and postcolonial Burma, as I discovered.

I cannot express in words how profoundly indebted I am—and this book is—to Auntie Rosie, Ma Mona, Ko Timmy, Ko Maung, and Ma Htwe. Their openness and generosity in sharing their memories, as well as their family library of photographs and memorabilia, have sustained my writing over many years. As only they know, they have been my refuge for as long as I can remember. I thank them for entrusting me to tell their family history and encouraging me to come to terms with my own messy family/history.

Teresa Hood, alias Daw Mya Kay Thee, and Ikeya Osamu, alias U San Min, have gifted me a lifetime of support and storytelling. Their stories—so lively, painful, and riotous—have taught me to recognize how remarkable are ordinary people and lives that make history but do not make entry into History. Suzy Lyon has inspired and sustained me in times of normalcy and crisis. Ikeya Hitoshi and Mayako did the heavy lifting of caring for our father when he was diagnosed with cancer in 2021 and then for our mother when she managed to leave Myanmar, ravaged by the military coup and the pandemic. I admire and appreciate the loving compassion and understanding of these family members.

Christian and Mio are my most constant critics and champions. Gokurō samadesu. Thank you for your indulgence and wonderfully abundant affection.

Daw Htay cared for Mio as though she was her own grandchild at a critical moment that made possible this book’s birth. My dear friends and interlocutors—Wendy Fu, Asher Ghertner, Suzy Kim, Rick Lee, Preetha Mani, Aleena Pitisant, Wan Kiatkanid Pongpanich, Isaac Trapkus, and Wai Sann Thi—provided much needed wisdom, humor, and support while this book gestated. I could not have pulled this off without you.

Thank you to the many students, faculty, and staff who invited me to share my progress on the book, as well as colleagues and friends who participated in panels, symposia, workshops, and conversations. Special thanks to Christoph Emmrich, Chiara Formichi, Niklas Foxeus, Erik Harms, Seth Koven, Shobna Nijhawan, Thomas Patton, and Guo-Quan Seng. Parts of this book have been presented at Brown University, City University of Hong Kong, Columbia University, Cornell University, KITLV / Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, Kyoto University, MOMA, National University of Singapore, Northern Illinois University, Rutgers University–New Brunswick, University of Michigan, University of Toronto, Yale University, Stockholm University, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters. Various sections of chapters 2, 3, and 4 were published in earlier versions in the following journal and books and are reworked and reprinted with permission here: “Belonging across Religion, Race, and Nation in Burma-Myanmar,” in The Palgrave International Handbook of Mixed Racial and Ethnic Classification, edited by Zarine L. Rocha and Peter J. Aspinall (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 757–778; “Transcultural Intimacies in British Burma and the Straits Settlements: A History of Belonging, Difference, and Empire,” in Belonging Across the Bay of Bengal: Religious Rites, Colonial Migrations, National Rights, edited by Michael Laffan (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 117–138; “Colonial Intimacies in Comparative Perspective: Intermarriage, Law, and Cultural Difference in British Burma,” special issue, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 14, no. 1 (Spring 2013). The feedback I received in these different contexts has been and remains invaluable.

Barbara Andaya, Temma Kaplan, Tamara Loos, and Bonnie Smith read iterations of this work at various stages. I thank them for their limitless generosity, unfaltering encouragement, and much more.

Dr. Hlaing Hlaing Gyi, the late Dr. Myo Myint, Daw San San May, Dr. Than Yin Mar, and U Thaw Kaung provided assistance with archival research in Myanmar and the United Kingdom, for which I am deeply grateful.

I owe thanks to many others, including students, colleagues, and friends from my days at the National University of Singapore, Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University, and Rutgers University–New Brunswick, my institutional home since 2012: Jeremy Arnold, Shaun Armstead, Tuna Artun, Maitrii Aung-Thwin, Mia Bay, the late Rudy Bell, Allastair Bellany, Tiffany Berg, Dale M. Booth, Aurore Candier, Shikha Chakraborty, Sylvia Chan-Malik, Indrani Chatterjee, Betul Cihan, Paul Clemens, Barbara Cooper, Belinda Davis, Kayo Denda, Leah DeVun, Melissa Feinberg, Annie Isabel Fukushima, Nadia Guessous, Sumit Guha, Douglas Kammen, Paul Hanebrink, Hayami Yoko, Jackie and Masao Imamura, Allan Isaac, Jennifer Jones, Toby Jones, Vishal Kamath, Samantha Kelly, Eri Kitada, Kojima Takahiro, Kyozuka Maiko, Bo Bo Lansin, Matthew Leonaggeo, Oiyan Liu, Johan Mathew, Jim Masschaele, Matt Matsuda, Jennifer Mittlestadt, Maznah Binti Mohamad, Nakanishi Yoshi, Anjali Nerlekar, Nyi Nyi Kyaw, Juno Salazar Parreñas, Sara Perryman, John Phan, Catherine Raymond, Joanna Regulska, Anuja Rivera, Dawn Ruskai, Johan Saravanamuttu, Meheli Sen, Tansen Sen, Arlene Stein, Michelle Stephens, Julie Stephens, Suriani Suratman, Judith Surkis, Michelle Tan, Sarah Tobias, Cami Townsend, Mika Toyota, Alicia Turner, Peter Vail, Candace Walcott-Shepherd, Thongchai Winitchakul, Mabel Wong, Xun Liu, Reiko Yamagishi, Carla Yanni, and Faizah Zakaria. I cherish their wit, camaraderie, and mentorship. I am especially thankful to the faculty and students in the field of women’s and gender history/studies at Rutgers University who have enriched this book in innumerable ways.

At Cornell University Press, Sarah E. M. Grossman has been an exemplary editor. Jacqulyn Teoh, Jennifer Savran Kelly, Michelle Scott, and the marketing team deserve special thanks for moving the production process forward. I deeply appreciated the engaged and generous comments by the two anonymous readers. They pushed me to both refine and amplify my arguments.

Finally, I thank the institutions that supported the research for this book in the form of grants and fellowships: the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University, Japan Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, National University of Singapore, and Rutgers University.

The imperfections of this book are all mine.