“I’m an outsider,” Kyi May Kaung said defiantly.  A political scientist by training, the Burmese poet, playwright, fiction writer, painter, ceramicist, and textile artist began her artistic career at a relatively old age and with little formal training.  Despite the numerous awards she has received since – twice finalist for the Pew Prize for her plays, William Carlos Williams awards from American Society of Poets for her poetry, just to name a few – she still seems self-conscious about not being part of the literary establishment.

In her mid-sixties, with gray hair, Kaung has the earnest demeanor of a college professor, which she was at one point.  But once she started speaking about the patchwork jackets she made – “clothes to read poetry in” – and her childhood memories in Burma, she laughed like a very young girl.

Having lived in England as a child, grown up in a westernized family in Burma, and lived in the United States in the past 25 years, she remains as an outsider to Burma, and the issue of identity continues to interest her.

“One of my former mentors [in Burma] used to tease me, ‘Kyi, she isn’t really Burmese.  She’s just obsessed with things Burmese, like a foreign expert on Burma.’”  Kaung laughed.

Kaung came to the U.S. from Burma in 1982 on a Fulbright scholarship.  As the military junta began to clamp down on the pro-democracy movement in Burma in 1988, she applied for political asylum and never set foot on Burma since.  She went on to receive her PhD in political science at University of Pennsylvania, hosted a poetry program at Radio Free Asia in Washington, DC, advised the Burmese government in exile, and currently write and paints full-time.

As a Burmese who writes in English, she is not considered as part of the Burmese literary circle, and her subject matter, such as domestic abuse and criticism on the Burmese government, has not exactly endeared her to the exile community. 

“It’s mostly a male culture of writers,” she said of the Burmese literary community, who sometimes found her outspokenness on social and political issues offensive.  “I can’t always write good things, especially the political things.  I can’t write the mainstream views.”

On the other hand, the political nature of her writing and the Asian subject matter do not sit well with the American audience, either.

“Sometimes when I’m in a writer’s group, my peers […] don’t really know anything about an oppressive society,” she said.  “They say, ‘your character is so passive.’  I can’t help it if they’re passive.  It’s a passive culture. […] They think they’re critiquing your piece, but they’re critiquing your culture or the way you think, and that’s what gets my back up.”

She began writing fiction while she was working on her doctoral dissertation in the early nineties.  She was writing about Burmese economy, but the stories she had heard while she was in Burma and in the years since kept coming back to her. 

“As I was writing my dissertation, I had all these anecdotes, [which] mostly related with economics – the scarcity of things… the factory wasn’t working,” Kaung said.  “There’s this terrible metaphorical thing about it.”

The story of a glass factory told to her by regional engineers and projects managers stuck to her mind especially.  The factory’s layout was planned by the army officers, who knew nothing about the glass industry.  In order to make the government’s quota, the factory made the easiest product possible – glass plate, despite the fact that there was no demand for glass plate, since few construction were taking place at the time.  However, the furnace had to be kept burning at all time.  The workers “had nothing to stoke the furnace with and nothing to make,” so they just put the newly produced glass plates back in the furnace and then kept recycling finished product.

“I thought, somewhere I had to use these stories.  They deserve a story space of their own,” she said.

Just as her personal biography, even childhood memories, is played out against the background of political turmoil in Burma, her writing is often about individual destinies influence by the time.  “The Lovers,” a short story recently published in Wild River Review, is a heartrending tale of a young woman’s ill fated journey from an upper middle class family in Chile to a sex club in Philadelphia.  The setting moves away from Asia, but there is still a deep political undertone.

In 2001, she began painting and soon opened exhibitions in the DC area.  She has just opened a new show at Kefa Café’s gallery in Silver Spring, called “Mostly Burmese Mugs.”  It is a series of portraits of Burmese public figures and family and friends that in the process of painting “developed personalities of their own and selected the objects they wished to be surrounded by.” 

“I’m making an iconography,” Kaung said.  “I’m making those iconic, heroic figures.  I hang them up in my own home when they’re not on exhibition.  They kind of watch over me.”

She remembers the Burma of her childhood with fondness.  The fifties was Burma’s golden era.  The country had just become independent from the British, and a diverse cultural scene thrived in Rangoon.  That was the time when Kaung learned to sew and spent all her scholarship money on beautiful Burmese fabrics.  That was the time when she would go to art exhibitions with her father, a respected educator.

“I was lucky to grow up in the fifties [in Burma] when the Chinese culture troop came, Helen Keller came, and Martha graham came twice.  I still remember the time when she danced.  I think it was Medea.  She was all tangled up in this green dress,” Kaung reminisced. 

Perhaps like her portraits that ended up having lives of their own, Kaung’s Burma also received a life of its own in her writing. 

Kyi May Kaung’s exhibition, “Mostly Burmese Mugs,” opened in Kefa Café in Silver Spring on March 13 through April 7.  On April 6, from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., she will host Dr. Kaung’s Salon at Kefa Café with historian Bijan C. Bayne and videographer Tomiko Anders. 

Kefa Café

963 Bonifant St., Silver Spring, MD 20910

Tel: 301 589 9337