Port of No Return

Port of No Return

Episode #589: The AAS Conference in Vancouver brought together thousands of scholars and practitioners focused on Asia, with Burma emerging as a key topic amid its ongoing crisis. Insight Myanmar Podcast was invited to record on site, capturing a series of short, real-time conversations with participants and sharing these perspectives with a wider global audience. This is the second of a four part series, and features two guests. First up is Ponpavi Sangsurasdej, a Thai historian of modern Burma. She studies the years around independence not as the inevitable birth of a nation, but as a struggle among rival political futures, where communists, socialists, and ethnic minority leaders were all attempting to shape what a free Burma might become. The problem, she argues, is that later nationalist history flattened that contested moment into a far cleaner story than it was, since “we only focused decolonizing movement that were successful,” pushing other anti-colonial visions to the margins. In her telling, Burma’s history cannot be reduced to a single Burman-centered trajectory, especially given Rangoon’s role as a transnational hub of ideas, ideologies, and political networks, where categories like communism or decolonization carried unstable meanings across different actors and contexts. Rather than replacing one dominant narrative with another, she returns to sidelined figures and failed negotiations, asking who was excluded and how labels like collaborator or nationalist concealed deeper fractures. Those omissions, she suggests, continue to shape the distrust and fragmentation that define Burma today, where “there’s no easy, simple answer to it,” only the ongoing work of tracing how these narratives were formed and what was lost when one version prevailed. Next up is Wenxu Zhang, a historian of the Indian Ocean world. He examines Rangoon in the interwar period as a cosmopolitan port caught between global connection and social fracture, focusing on the 1930–31 riots to understand how Chinese diaspora communities experienced that instability. What began as labor conflict during the Great Depression escalated into broader violence, where anti-colonial sentiment, economic distress, and opportunistic attacks blurred together, leaving Chinese merchants increasingly vulnerable despite their partial cultural integration. Zhang resists reducing the events to a single narrative, showing how British, Burmese, and Chinese perspectives framed the same violence as revolution, nationalism, or banditry depending on position, while for those on the ground, the sense that society was becoming unstable remained the dominant reality. He situates this moment within a larger shift toward a more inward Burmese nationalism, where identity hardened and cosmopolitan fluidity receded, leaving behind traces still visible in Yangon today—a city that retains the physical remnants of its global past, even as the networks and vitality that sustained it have largely disappeared.

Missing, Presumed Extinct

Episode #588: Historian Douglas Ober began questioning the standard history of Indian Buddhism while traveling to Bodh Gaya, Sarnath, and other sacred sites in his twenties. The dates he found on buildings and inscriptions did not fit the familiar sequence in which Buddhism vanished, European scholars rediscovered it, Anagarika Dharmapala revived it, and B.R. Ambedkar restored it in 1956. His research led him to argue that “this idea around Buddhism’s disappearance from India is kind of a modern myth, and I call it a kind of useful fiction.” Ober does not deny the collapse of monasteries, patronage, and literary production after the thirteenth century. He instead recovers evidence that extinction language excludes: Buddhist images produced into the seventeenth century, manuscripts copied by devotees near Bodh Gaya, and continuing pilgrimage networks linking India with Nepal, Tibet, Sri Lanka, Chittagong, Arakan, and Burma. Colonial scholarship further narrowed the record by recognizing textual, monastic forms while treating yogis, borderland communities, and mixed traditions as doubtful or irrelevant. The Bay of Bengal becomes central to this longer history. Rakhine monks and patrons moved through Bengal and northern India; U Chandramani studied with Mahavir, helped establish a Buddhist rest house at Kushinagar, and later officiated Ambedkar’s mass conversion of Dalits at Nagpur. Ambedkar’s movement therefore emerged from a century of anti-caste Buddhist organizing and transregional monastic connections, even as his rationalist Navayana Buddhism transformed inherited doctrines around karma and rebirth. After independence, Nehru placed Buddhist symbols at the center of Indian statecraft through the dharma wheel on the flag, the Ashokan lion capital, and relic missions across Asia, including Burma. These objects carried genuine devotion and political purpose at once. Ober’s history leaves both forces intact: Buddhism survives not outside politics, but through people and institutions repeatedly deciding what it means, who may claim it, and what power can do in its name.

Abandoning the Barracks

Episode #587: Su Thit, the founder of Spouses of People’s Soldiers, frames military defection in Myanmar less as a single brave act than as an extended struggle against survival math. Leaving the institution means losing salary, housing, rank, and the thin protection that comes with uniform. Staying can mean remaining inside a system that demands obedience to violence. She describes the decision to defect as the hardest part of her own life—everything afterward is hardship with consequences: exile, scarcity, psychological strain, and the persistent ache of being unable to return home. In her account, the main barrier for those considering defection is not ideology but logistics—how to eat, how to earn, where to live once the military salary and accommodation vanish. Fear is reinforced by internal punishments: prison terms for running from the compound and even harsher consequences for fleeing a frontline battalion. Against that pressure, motivations vary. Some refused the illegality of coup initially. Some run because they do not want to die. Some remain inside for years because a parent’s illness or family needs make departure feel impossible, even while quietly feeding information outward. Su Thit’s organization operates as a set of practical supports meant to turn defection from a leap into hunger into a survivable transition. She describes arranging accommodation and food, supporting families with children in forest conditions, and providing monthly basic assistance from the Thai border—growing from dozens of families to now over 200. She argues spouses are a crucial leverage point inside the military household, and she invests heavily in testimony-driven media meant to weaken indoctrination. “If we can remove their brainwashing, at least they will not kill the civilians,” she says, treating reduced violence as a minimum gain even when full transformation is slow. The work expands into conscription cases as well, with families pleading for help to retrieve young men sent to the front line. Success depends on reach—knowing the area, having resistance links, being close enough to act. What remains, for her, is endurance under constraint and the insistence that defectors and their families—often undocumented, underpaid, and exhausted—still do not go back.

Tales of the Tape

Episode #586: This is the sixth installment of our ongoing discussions with Friedgard Lottermoser. Drawing on decades of firsthand experience with Sayagyi U Ba Khin and other teachers, she offers a different account—one that sits alongside the established narrative and quietly complicates it, grounded in her own lived experience rather than directly opposing what came later. Friedgard begins with a historical episode during the 1948 Karen insurgency, recounting how, in hopes of keeping Rangoon safe, U Ba Khin undertook a rigorous vow—living on rice and salt while continuously reciting protective Pāḷi texts—for seven days, after which the threat to the city subsided. While she stops short of claiming causation, she emphasizes this as an example of the power of strong determination (adhiṭṭhāna) in Burmese Buddhist practice. This theme was reinforced in her own life, where she herself made three such vows—to fully learn from her teacher, to avoid any marriage that would obstruct practice, and ultimately to ordain as a bhikkhuni. A central tension in this discussion is the contrast between lived experience and later narratives about lineage and the technique’s “pristine purity.” Friedgard notes that U Ba Khin rarely emphasized lineage; in Burma, claiming descent from Ledi Sayadaw would have been unnecessary, even absurd, since he influenced so many modern Burmese Vipassanā traditions. Instead, U Ba Khin presented himself simply as an experienced teacher whose authority rested on results, not pedigree. She further challenges the idea of an unbroken, exclusive lineage by pointing to historical evidence. Ledi Sayadaw, for example, appears to have developed his meditation practice largely through study and experimentation rather than direct transmission from a single teacher. This undermines the claim of a singular, preserved technique passed unchanged from the Buddha. Friedgard suggests that Goenka’s emphasis on lineage and purity emerged partly from the exigencies of context—adapting teachings mainly for Indian and Western audiences and in order toestablish legitimacy. While she acknowledges Goenka’s success in spreading meditation globally, she raises concerns about inaccuracies, institutional rigidity, and the use of tapes, which she feels limited teacher autonomy. Ultimately, she returns to a pragmatic view: the effectiveness of practice—not claims of lineage—is the only meaningful proof of a tradition.

An Umbrella Policy

Episode #585: “We can’t go back to the normal life, because our country is not even normal,” says Tone Tone, a former psychology student from Yangon, describing how Myanmar’s 2021 military coup shattered any hope of remaining apolitical. In this conversation she is joined by Liberia, a civil engineering graduate who became a strike organizer, and together they recount how violence transformed them from ordinary students into underground activists willing to risk prison and death. Before February 1, 2021, neither had political ambitions. Tone Tone was finishing university and helping with her family’s silk-screen printing business, and Liberia had completed an engineering degree and was pursuing further vocational training. When the military detained elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi and seized power, both joined peaceful street protests in Yangon, believing public resistance might restore democracy. That belief eroded as soldiers began shooting demonstrators. In December 2021, Tone Tone witnessed troops ram a vehicle into protesters, killing and injuring friends. Liberia shifted from humanitarian COVID relief work to organizing flash mobs through the Yangon People’s Strike, using small, cell-based groups to avoid detection. On August 8, 2022—the anniversary of the 8-8-88 uprising—they staged their most iconic act: four black umbrellas printed with the Burmese numeral eight, photographed near Sule Pagoda under heavy security. Days later, Liberia was arrested, interrogated, and sentenced to three years of hard labor in Insein Prison. Tone Tone narrowly avoided arrest but endured psychological torture when soldiers beat her parents in the background while they called her on a phone. Both eventually fled Myanmar. From exile, they continue supporting underground actions and fundraising through the umbrella symbol. Acknowledging fatigue but rejecting compromise with the military, they insist resistance continues. Their message remains urgent: “Please help to save Myanmar!”