Miss Burma is the story of a family: a man, woman, and children. It is the story of their loves, pain, betrayals, secrets, but their stage is Burma from the 1940s to the 1960s, a country in upheaval, a country with a mix of ethnic minorities and the cruelties and hatred that seem to always come with such a mix. The best historical fiction gives us a view into the effects of history on ordinary people, and, in this case, shows us that people who survive the devious machinations of governments are anything but ordinary. Beautifully written, with characters you will dwell with for a long time, Miss Burma is one of my favorite books of the year. - Linda

Through the Cellar Door with Charmaine Craig

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Charmaine Craig is a faculty member in the Department of Creative Writing at UC Riverside, where she particularly enjoys teaching literature, the art of the paragraph, and forms of narration. A former actor in film and television, and a Burma activist privy to negotiations at the highest level in the current conflict, she studied literature at Harvard University and received her MFA from UC Irvine. Her first novel, The Good Men, was a national bestseller translated into six languages. Her second novel, Miss Burma, is based on the lives of her mother and grandparents, all born in Burma. 

The interweaving of politics and the individuals so deeply affected by those policies are beautifully done in Miss Burma. For Benny and Louisa in particular, hope for the Karen people rises and falls with events beyond their power to change, yet they continue to try. Would you briefly speak to the current plight of ethnic minorities in Myanmar?

In the last few months, over 600,000 Rohingya people, a predominately Muslim minority group of Burma (Myanmar), have streamed into Bangladesh because of violent attacks by the Myanmar Army. When I say violent attacks, I mean Rohingya villages being burned to the ground, their people shot in the backs as they flee, babies torn out of their mothers' arms and tossed into the flames, girls - many, many girls aged ten and younger - raped by soldiers of the Myanmar Army. The situation is often described as a result of extreme religious intolerance in the country; and, indeed, the ethnic majority group in Burma is Buddhist, and Islamaphobia is absolutely on the rise among this majority group. But the targeting of the Rohingya in the country is nothing new and has its roots in the ethnic majority nationalism that exploded in the country back in the 1930s. And the Rohingya are not unique in having been and continuing to be persecuted because of their ethnic minority status. Right now, for example, Shan and Kachin people are being attacked inside the country, and the Karen are facing the likelihood of imminent and unprovoked attack by the Myanmar Army, which tends to strike under the shadow of other horrors. The world's eyes are on the Rohingya, thus, if history is any barometer of future action, it is the perfect time for the Myanmar Army to attempt to take out another group (something Karen leaders see evidence of happening to them imminently). 

Khin, on the other hand, puts her enormous efforts into protecting her family. In many ways, she is far more successful, but as Benny says near the end, "If she were to leave me - now that would be a revolution! But she stays, and she endures a loveless, trapped life, and she hates herself and life all the more." Khin is a complete enigma for me as a reader, both the character who I like the least and the one with whom the majority of my sympathy lies. Might you give us some insight into this wonderfully complex character?

It's important to me as a literary writer to dignify my characters with depth of being. We're such sensitive creatures, taking in all the signals that others put out around us, and feeling so many ways about the things we experience. Often those feelings of ours are in contention with one another; we might be utterly devoted to our children, for example, and begrudge them all the effort they cause us; we might be immensely proud of them and secretly disappointed by their limitations; we might do everything we can to have them surpass us, yet wish we'd had the opportunities we've given them. Or that was the kind of brew of feelings that I tried to endow the character Khin with. She is based on my maternal grandmother, a person whom I never met, but whom my mother routinely described as someone who said, "My children are my whole life," and someone who was a natural healer and assisted others everywhere they went, and someone who was jealous when her daughter surpassed her in beauty and celebrity. Fiction calls on us to empathize with people in spite of their deep flaws, and that act - of compassion - is essential to our humanity.

Louisa's paradox, both that "Burma's most beautiful feature is its multiplicity of peoples," and that this merging of different peoples in one place creates never-ending tension, is an ongoing dilemma in what was then Burma as well as elsewhere. Almost 60 years later, the same issues continue to plague the world. Do you see any avenues of hope?

Ah, this is the toughest question you've asked me! My answer goes back to empathy, to compassion, to the gift that books can give us when they ask us to leave our perspectives and imagine our way into other viewpoints and circumstances. The best books often ask us to refuse to think in simplistic or reductive ways about issues such as the relationship between nationalism and genocide. And they can teach us how we got here, something we often forget to consider when we think of solutions. In the case of Burma, I fear that the media's lack of understanding of Burma's history has led to a partial representation of what is happening there, and, more perilously, to a deepening of the ethnic divisions in the country. If you look to Burma's history, what you clearly see is a pattern of majority group - and, particularly, of a majority group's government and army - endlessly attempting to extinguish minority ethnic groups. That would suggest that Burma's solution lies in disempowering its ethnic majority army and establishing a federal democracy wherein different groups have a voice nationally. Circling back to your question, books are certainly one avenue of hope, for in them we can discover a fuller view, not to mention lessons about our shared humanity. 

Your dedication is, in part, to your mother, Louisa, and grandparents, Ben and Khin. How much of the family story in Miss Burma is based on the family stories you have heard? What happened to your mother, grandfather, and grandmother after the time the novel ends?

I was fortunate to have nearly two years spent interviewing my mother before she passed away, and nearly all of the events in the book are based on my family members' experiences in Burma. Here and there, I had to consolidate characters in order to simplify the narrative and create propulsion, but, again, the story cleaves very closely to what really happened. What my mother didn't provide me with was the inner lives of my characters. The way she represented her story was as though fate had pushed her and her family members from point to point, but novels don't work like that. Literary novels need the engine of human desire and fear and agency to serve as the engine of the plot. What I invented was that engine, the characters' collision of motivations and feelings, everything they dare not speak of, and the intersections between their inner lives and the particular external circumstances they faced.