Last week’s DC featured Nemoto’s complication of the Do-Bama (see here). We complement that article this week with a book from the same era, Pu Kalay’s Kabya Pyetthana (Mixed-Race Problems), which identifies the risk to the nation of miscegenation. While the title implies the perils of all racial intermixing, this book only zeroes in on the unions between Burmese and South Asians (the introduction by U Hla encourages a broader treatment in the future). Even with this narrow remit, when read deconstructively, kabya acts as a kind of diagnostic, throwing into relief the way that racial systems are understood by those who live in them (or at least write about them).

As long as we are on the theme of kabya, we might re-examine Deep Cuts #14, which featured the entire Burmese Lives volume. In there Ma Thida (Sanchaung) has an essay entitled “A Mixed Identity, a Mixed Career,” in which she discusses her own Shan / Chinese background and the way it becomes irrelevant for her as she thinks of herself “as a citizen of Burma, not as any ethnic nationality” (206). We might compare this with Sai Kheunsai (DC #12) who had a very different experience with his Shan-ness.

See here for PDFs.