Inked Over, Ripped Out

"These are short stories that have been censored, written by Burmese authors but have never appeared in Burmese magazines. Many of the authors of these stories ended up in jail. There is a very good introduction by Anna Allott, who used to teach at SOAS, she speaks fluent Burmese and is very well known in Burma. When they print a magazine they have to submit it to the censors. If they say: ‘No we don’t like it, rip it out’, then they have to rip the piece out physically from every copy of the magazine printed. Sometimes they apply silver ink to an offending term or a sentence. Yes, and the translations are excellent. Just looking at this book, one of the stories is called ‘The children who play in the back alleyways’. This one was written in 1989 for a literary magazine and it is about children who always have to play in the dark. Another of the stories is called ‘The Python’, about the Chinese takeover of Mandalay, economically, commercially. It is about how Mandalay, the heartland of Burmese culture, has become a Chinatown. The newly arrived Chinese are very different from the Chinese who have been living in Burma for generations. This older community of Chinese Burmese are also worried about this influx too. They have had a hard time being accepted as Burmese and suddenly there are all these carpetbaggers coming in from China and behaving in a way that is upsetting this whole equilibrium. Other stories are obliquely critical of the military of the present order but told as fiction. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Absolutely. There still is. Represented mainly in Mandalay by various literary circles, like that of the late Daw Amah, and also the Moustache Brothers. They are famous comedians in the Shway Yoe tradition. They look funny and jump up and down and tell jokes. The Moustache Brothers are tolerated because they only entertain foreigners and everything is in English. They have been arrested off and on, they are always under surveillance but they have become an institution in Mandalay. One of their best-known jokes is sort of short dialogue: ‘I have just been to India to see the dentist,’ says one man to his friend. ‘Why did you go all the way to India, don’t we have dentists here in Burma?’ his friend asks. ‘Yes, but I had to go to India because here in Burma you are not allowed to open your mouth.’"