Interview with writer Wendy Law-Yone

Wendy Law-Yone, author of Golden Parasol: A Daughter’s Memoir or Burma, will appear at the Irrawaddy Literary Festival at Kuthodaw Pagoda in Mandalay from February 14 to 16. I had the chance to interview her in Yangon last week for a story for The Myanmar Times, posted below. (Full disclosure: I also have a personal interest in the book, as I appear in the “Prologue” as the “English-language editor” whom Wendy meets during her first visit to the Myanmar Times office back in 2011.)

Wendy Law-Yone in Yangon

The years immediately following a dramatic change in government are dangerous and confusing times for any country.

In Myanmar, the 2010 election was a hopeful step toward democracy and away from the decades-long nightmare of military rule.

But there are also many new uncertainties, including questions about the extent to which the government should exercise control over the lives of its citizens; about the ability – or willingness – of authorities to quell sectarian violence; and about the sincerity and motives of some elected politicians, from ex-military officers to figureheads of the pro-democracy movement. 

This is, of course, not the first time the country has faced a major democratic transition: In January 1948, Burma gained independence from autocratic British rule, kicking off an exciting but chaotic period of attempted nation-building and democratization.

As writer Wendy Law-Yone points out in her book Golden Parasol: A Daughter’s Memoir of Burma (2013), such times are also exhilarating for journalists. During the post-independence period, “news-gathering … was an exciting, free-wheeling no-hold-barred business” that also had its downside: “[J]ournalists were often perceived as troublemaking scum or bad-news messengers that deserved to be snuffed out.”

Wendy’s father, Ed Law-Yone, knew about these hazards firsthand: In July 1948 he launched an English-language newspaper in Yangon called The Nation. He printed 2000 copies of the first issue but sold only 20. Despite these modest beginnings, the paper was destined to become the most influential English-language daily in Burma at the time.

Golden Parasol tells the story of Ed’s life, which was in turns fascinating and frustrating. He was acquainted with U Ne Win through the 1950s – he was sometimes invited over to the general’s house to play chess and Scrabble – but ended up in jail soon after U Ne Win took power in a military coup in 1962.

Released five years later, Ed moved to Thailand to help form the People’s Democratic Party, whose aim was to organize a revolt against U Ne Win and restore democracy in Burma. A widespread revolution failed to materialize, and Ed eventually moved to the United States to spend his remaining years with his family.   

His daughter Wendy had been born in 1947 and grew up spending evenings in the office of The Nation while her father worked at his desk. She was arrested in 1967 while trying to leave Burma illegally but was released after 10 days and allowed to move to Thailand, where she started working as a newspaper journalist.

Toward the end of his life, Ed entrusted Wendy with the manuscript containing his own written account of his life. For more than 20 years after her father’s death, Wendy couldn’t bring herself to read her father’s papers. When she finally did, she wasn’t certain how to approach the writing of his memoirs.

“In the beginning I was asked to write a book of my father’s memoirs, but I knew instinctively that this was something I couldn’t do and probably didn’t want to do,” she said in an interview in Yangon last week.

“It was such a big story and his voice was very forceful, but it was a book that was written in kind of a white heat toward the end of his life. Most memoirs are self-serving. He had a different agenda. This last spurt of journalistic urge came out, like, ‘I’ve got to get down this story that I lived through.’”

Wendy finally came up with the idea to write her own memoir based on her father’s written account, and thus the seeds of Golden Parasol were sown.  

“[My father’s manuscript] would be the foundation, but I would tell what I remembered. The editors also said the book needed to be my story but about my father, and that was a very big hurdle,” she said.

“Even though I was resolved to do it that way, I hadn’t realized how daunting and intimidating my father’s voice was. My older brother read the first draft and said, ‘When it’s your voice it’s fine and interesting, but when you start to channel dad’s voice the effect is grotesque.’ It was a bit harsh but I realized it was true.”

By the time Wendy started working on Golden Parasol, she had already published three novels – The Coffin Tree (1983), Irrawaddy Tango (1993) and The Road to Wanting (2010) – and she expected writing nonfiction to be easier.

“My novels always covered difficult subjects to confront. I thought, ‘Nonfiction is factual. It’s all there. All I have to do is write it,’” she said, quickly adding that this turned out not to be the case.

“I realized the subject matter didn’t matter. It all had to do with an intrinsic problem I had, which I related to the influence of my father: Somehow I got infected with the idea that I needed to be able to stand by every word and defend it, either grammatically or factually or politically,” she said.

“I always thought that maybe this was because it was fiction, but when I started to write nonfiction I thought, ‘Now it’s about the country, politics and history, and how much more so.’ There was a fundamental fear of needing to get it right.”

What helped Wendy get beyond this impasse was the understanding that she could not possibly write the definitive book about the politics of her father’s era.

“I realized that it had to be just about things my father saw and things related to him,” she said.

Nevertheless, the resulting book has been criticized in some quarters for not containing enough material about Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and the current pro-democracy movement.

“The book does deal with what’s happening now. I touch on the changes that I myself had been a part of, but many, many people have asked why I haven’t talked more about Aung San Suu Kyi,” she said. 

“But Aung San Suu Kyi simply wasn’t a part of the history. General Aung San was, and so I wrote about him.

“I was trying to show that many people think Aung San Suu Kyi’s was the first project to restore democracy, but it’s not true. There was already one such project back in my father’s time, which is now forgotten.”