Inspired by a remarkable mother
In its opening paragraph, the lights of Charmaine Craig’s epic new novel, “Miss Burma,” come up on Louisa, who is based on the author’s mother, taking the pageant stage. Louisa Benson Craig, a woman who after being crowned went on to become a political revolutionary, is one of many fictionalized characters whose lives are so full of loss and perseverance and incident that to follow their story is to follow the history of the country itself. The sweeping, multi-generational story of a family belonging to the Karen ethnic minority, “Miss Burma” charts both a political history and a deeply personal one — and of those incendiary moments when private and public motivations overlap.
Craig, a former actress who lives in Los Angeles and teaches at UC Riverside, met me at a cafe to talk about “Miss Burma.” We discussed her relationship with her mother, who died of ovarian cancer in 2010, type-casting in Hollywood and why the near decade that Craig spent working on a book about her family became less about excising the story from herself than excising herself from the story. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. When did you first discover that your mother had been both Miss Burma and a revolutionary?
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know. My American dad was a dreamer, and he painted my mother in these oversized terms — she was Miss Burma, she was the most famous actress in Burma for a time, she was a woman warrior. So I knew all of that. But as I was writing the book, I would put pieces together in an almost journalistic way and figure out how her story fit into a bigger political picture. It was almost like having a conversation with the dead. “Miss Burma” is based on the lives of your mother and grandparents; it is, in some sense, a real part of you. What was it like to get it onto the page?
The first version of the book was much more about myself and my mother. It was first person, it was much more of the expected immigrant story. I wrote an entire version as my mother became sick, and it was cathartic to write about the traumas she had lived through and how I inherited some of that; about her conflict over giving herself over to motherhood in the United States when I think she felt, to some extent, that she had abandoned the call of a whole people back in Burma, what’s now Myanmar. What became clear to me after I finished was that I was writing for a Western readership I had been too solipsistic in my approach. The book needed to be about a country and a people and a family, and I needed to exist in the margins of the story and get myself out of the way. Why a novel and not nonfiction?
I am more called to write fiction, period. My literary interest is in the experience of consciousness. Even though I would consider myself someone who takes plotting more seriously than perhaps many of my peers, what I’m most interested in is capturing the experience of being. When I received the story from my mother — an epic, dramatic story that we spent two years talking about before she died — absent from that was the internal, the motivations. There were times when I could feel that she was talking around the heart of the matter. It just made sense to take the novelistic leap. How did you braid the political and familial stories?
The political history became a kind of backbone of the plot, and it was made easier for me by the fact that my family was very involved in that history and politics. Part of my process was about finding the intersections between family members and history itself. One of the tensions of the book is how much are we helpless before the crushing and impersonal forces of history, and how much history can be made to succumb to the personal stubbornness of any individual who wants to stand up to it. Can you tell me about the transition from acting to writing? I was drawn to acting — and to writing — at a young age because in both of them you’re called to empathically embody another. The reason that I’m not acting now is not that I stopped loving the craft but that I came up in the profession at a time when there was more overt typecasting and racism than even now, and there’s still a lot of typecasting going on. I was really tired of the kinds of roles that were open to me as a person of mixed race. It was always, “Well what are you? You’re not this, you’re not that. Maybe you’re a sexy girlfriend.” It just felt rather demeaning, and I wanted to be able to hold the reins a little more in terms of the stories that I was telling and the characters I was portraying. You grew up in Los Angeles; how much time have you spent in Myanmar?
I’ve only gone twice. (My mother had a price on her head — it wasn’t safe.) The first time I went I was in my early 20s. It was an important trip because I learned much more about my mother’s legend and about the Karen people, and I also learned more about my own — I hate to use the word “identity” because it’s such shorthand — but growing up here I never felt that I really fit in. I was encouraged as a child to call myself Karen because I got the question “What are you?” a lot from other kids. (When I said Karen, they said, “You mean Korean?”) When I went to Burma a bunch of children came up to my sister and me and said to us in Karen, “Good evening, white people.” It was a homecoming and a kind of underscoring of my difference. In the book you write, “The world of the dead now was something he could reach out and touch; he had only to give it the slightest attention and it reached back out and met him.” Was that your experience writing “Miss Burma”?
It’s funny, I’m glad you brought that up. My husband’s a writer too, and he suggested I cut that line. I was like, “I can’t cut that line” because that’s so much of my experience. After my mother died I went through a period where I was desperate to make contact and was coming up with nothing. But there have been moments since then that I felt I was in her presence in some way I can’t explain. There’s another passage that’s stuck with me. “One man’s wife and child … could be worth sacrificing a war for.”
A few years ago I had the opportunity to meet with Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, who is the de facto leader now of Burma, here in Los Angeles. I had talked with some Karen leaders and had come armed, if you will, with a pan-ethnic message from persecuted minorities. I told her who I was and I started to relay the message and she stopped me and said, “You’re Louisa’s daughter.” She knew my mother had died. She wanted to reminiscence. Tears came to her eyes, and it was a lesson to me in that tension: There are the wars, the almost unimaginable hundreds of thousands of lives lost or the displacement right now of over a million people in and around Burma, but then there’s the equally unimaginable loss of a single person.