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San Lin Tun, Yangon Days: A Collection of Urban Short Stories, Penguin Random House SEA, 2024. 240 pgs.

If the Yangon you used to think of as so full of life and hope you could no longer touch, you can at least look for its flickering shadows and lights in San Lin Tun’s Yangon Days.

Yangon Days is an ode to normal people dwelling in the eternal peculiarity of time and metropolitan life. It is also a fountain of kaleidoscopic fragments of Yangon’s less remembered past and perhaps intentionally forgotten present, with rich recountings of history, anecdotes, traditions, and folklore. For those wanting to read more about Myanmar as much as others who want to read from Myanmar, it is a rare find. Readers might be tempted to too easily compare San Lin Tun’s Yangon stories to those of Orwell or Maugham’s Rangoon, but the writer sounds the reminding bell in between the current and colonial names of the city’s landmarks. Scott Market is now Bogyoke market, Fraser Road now Anawrahta Road, and Yangon writers can write their own Yangon.

A collection of 26 short stories, with the shortest only 3-4 pages long, the book exhibits incredible range and versatility, resembling the palimpsest that is Yangon life. San Lin Tun approaches the many aspects of urbanites’ lives with details and exquisite language but largely uncomplicated plots. Not every story in his book comes with a conflict or twist; some of them unfold in the space of a room or during the span of moments, or they are stretched to sooth and flow, through the temporal and spatial oscillation and lovely trivia and mysteries. For example, in “Acting Contre-coeur”, the protagonist decides to find a well called Rebecca in downtown Yangon on an uneventful afternoon. En route, he passes by Yangon’s City Hall—a building with a contested construction history intended to “make it more Myanmar” with Myanmar craftsmanship—bumps into an annoying friend who plagues him about his recent break-up—“what happened? Did she not love you?”—and then casts his mind back to the synagogues and Jewish community in Yangon who built Rebecca. Without giving any clue of the whereabouts or appearance of the well, the story nonetheless piques the interest of readers to go on a (virtual) scout and find out for themselves.

In his acknowledgements, San Lin Tun professes his long-standing interest in writing about small people’s simple lives. In parallel, an emphasis on traditions and identity as Burmese visibly lodges in his writing. “The Confession of a Bridegroom as a Wedding Planner” thus comes as a good surprise that despite clearly favouring traditional values, the author sees the value of engaging emerging social discussions about, for example, romantic choices. Six college friends gather in a cafe catching up on how their lives have turned out. The unmarried friends are curious about the protagonist Myo’s married life, which is seemingly lumbered with duties. Among them, there are grooms-to-be, one who does not believe in marriage, a wilfully celibate bachelor, and a romantic who says he would elope with his girlfriend if her parents don’t approve because “all is fair in love and war”. While firm about the beauty of family life in other stories, San Lin Tun doesn’t try to paint a rosy picture about the conventional nuclear family life or pass judgement on different life choices. This prevents a possible societal disconnect from other voices beyond the remit of literary writing. It is then equally refreshing to see, in “The Liberated Hairdresser”, the kind and friendly hairdresser finally breaking free from hierarchy as well as the long-time exploitation and physical insults from his obnoxious pot-bellied boss, despite it taking years of wringing and one last smash on the nose. These are intimate insights into personal but highly relatable events to leave readers savour.

San Lin Tun writes about the grander themes too: economic migration, evolving family values, urban poverty, and climate change, among others, grounded in their tangible, everyday impacts. What does climate change feel like in a room with no air-conditioning in a particular suburban street of Yangon? The author leaves it to people living in collective dormitories who commute to their job in heat or rain to tell, like in “A Day on Which the Happiest Mind Rains”:

“Yangon is situated beside Yangon River, which causes a gentle breeze to blow through the town. The gridline pattern of Yangon streets allows an easy airflow and helps cool the urbanites. However, with global warming, Yangon’s weather has become erratic–sunny one moment and raining the next. Rain here, but not there. Rain there, but not here…Who could have even predicted that the rain would suddenly come bucketing down in the middle of a scorching afternoon? People leave their umbrellas behind at home and end up getting soaked to the skin.

Freelancer Tun Mying is one among the city folk who experiences Yangon’s volatile weather. He loathes the debilitating heatwaves…because of his meagre income, he cannot afford the luxury of air conditioning at home. Whenever he feels hot, he fans himself with a rattan fan and lies down on the veranda on a thinphyun (a rattan mattress).

One thing that might seem missing in Yangon Days is woman as protagonist. The 26 stories portray different Burmese women. They are of all ages, probably working in a small shop or taking care of their children and domestic chores, and they are mothers, sisters, daughters, wives, girlfriends or a love interest. These women are of different tempers and virtues—some frivolous, shallow, moody or scheming while others are obedient, nurturing, sincere and charming. Yet none of them is a protagonist, the teller of a story, which might risk rendering them mere objects of gaze and interpretation. An example—in “The Sapient Shopper”, the protagonist whose style is more “blue t-shirt with blue jeans” surrenders to his beautiful pink blouse and glammed-up girlfriend Thinzar, who is depicted as a shopaholic hypnotised by every sales offer because he adores her and her beautiful smile endlessly. Sure, that seems to give her the femme fatale upper hand in their relationship but tapping into who she is beyond “the sapient shopper” could sprinkle some layered nuance to the story.

However, this small complaint will not offset the most weight Yangon Days carries with its stories on impermanence, grief and loss, a leitmotif in Myanmar at present in different ways. In writing about these themes, San Lin Tun presents some with delicate refrains like leaves whimpering silently for the ruffling breeze they cannot clench. At the very least, he does not try to give a necessary sunny ending to a rainy day. “Under the Bright Sunlight”and“A Father’s Sincere Wish”are two stories of this category. Seemingly very different structurally, the two stories, one about a hardworking trishaw driver in Dala (a suburb of Yangon across the river) struggling with acute poverty, and the other about a husband who decides to send his bed-ridden wife to a care centre and himself to a monastery after their young daughter dies, piece together a shared defeat in the face of unbearable adversity, be it death or absolute destitution. All the flamboyant joys of metropolitan life are real, but don’t forget that underneath the surface there are also people brought to their knees by its misfortune. Out of action.

My personal favourite of all stories, “When You Talk About How You Feel”, cuts open the ostensibly healing but possibly never-reparable wound of grieving over a loved one. When the friend who introduced the young protagonist to the fascinating world of arthouse cinema, literature, and downtown soirées in rooftop lounges—formative things, which later ground his life pursuits—dies, the protagonist tries to keep the friend alive in his mind by revisiting  the places and memories:

One, therefore, loved to return to the old haunts to dwell on the past and immerse oneself in the lonely sadness of nostalgia. You sat at the same table and ordered the same coffee or listened to the same music to recapture the conversations you have shared to relieve the moment.

These visits probably mirror what many in Myanmar do in an unspoken way nowadays, even just in their mind, even though things don’t stay quite the same. San Lin Tun wrote these stories between 2010 and 2020. When the collection was completed, the sweeping change in 2021 had yet to descend on the country and its people. The devil in this case is in the timing. It effectively makes the book a precious archive of some then told now suppressed history and of things no longer possible.

In San Lin Tun’s Yangon, major bottlenecks always choke the traffic at Bahan junction near Pearl Condo and Kabar Aye Road on rainy days, but one can look out of the window at the trees to ease their anxiety. I was in a taxi at the junction on such a day going north, looking at the trees indeed, but thinking about the arrest of two youths at Kabar Aye bus stop the previous night. Excited and bubbly in “Three Days at Inya Lake Hotel”, San Lin Tun was taking the same route from downtown to attend the three-day Irrawaddy Literary Festival by the famous Inya Lake where international and local writers talk about literature and creation at length. Sometimes strolling around the lake and stealing a glimpse of Aung San Suu Kyi’s old family house at dusk, I kept wondering, perhaps like many others, when would Yangon’s next literature festival come.

Yangon’s alluring night scenes as written by San Lin Tun look not too different, from the gentle flow of moonlit Yangon river at Pasondan jetty to the neon lights of rooftop places shining through the night sky, but only to a certain point when the curtains of the military-imposed curfew slowly fall, and places start clearing out. Some trendy neighbourhoods used to burgeon with cosy, quaint bars and cafes are now simply advised as unsafe because of the heightened risk of bombings. The mass of Yangon falls quiet before the 1am-3am official curfew where security forces are liable to shoot and arrest. Gone also are the city’s chanting pans and pots that signified defiance and disobedience, but the uninhabited houses of those who left stand still in darkened silence. A silence that pierces harder than shrills.

In this vein, Yangon Days is not just a literary work but also a comforting archive of the city’s now-gone period of democratic transition. And just because things have been put on hold does not mean they are not here anymore, unthought of, or truly spoken for. Children of the new womb might only know how to smile, but there are people who still take their night strolls, in Sanchaung in Lanmadaw with memories and ears of their own. That, to me, is the most resounding chord San Lin Tun’s book pulls for Yangon, for those who see it as a home.

How to cite: Xie, Peixuan. “Our Yangon: San Lin Tun’s Yangon Days.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 27 Aug. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/08/27/yangon-days/.

Peixuan Xie‘s research focuses on peace and conflict and she occasionally writes about other things. [Read all entries by Peixuan Xie.]

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