MYANMAR REFUGEES GAIN A FOOTHOLD IN NORTH CAROLINA
It has been 20 years since Lupu last saw his hometown, a small village in the hills of eastern Myanmar. One day in 1997, he and his family fled after the military arrived on an operation against ethnic rebels from the Karen National Union, torching homes, killing livestock and destroying paddy fields.
“If you ran, they caught you,” the 42-year-old recalled. “If the police thought you belonged to the KNU, they killed you immediately.”
Two decades on, Lupu finds reminders of his homeland at Transplanting Traditions, a community farm outside the college town of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, that has become a centre for a large and growing community of refugees from Myanmar.
Amid the rows of beans and strawberries, there are hints of the country Lupu left behind. Children play on shaded bamboo platforms; signs are written in Burmese script; and there is even the occasional sour smell of betel nut, Myanmar’s national stimulant of choice.
Since its establishment in 2010, the farm has also given Myanmar migrants the space to grow crops from the old country, including snake gourds, roselle leaf, pennywort, lemongrass and fiery chilies. “I feel like I’m back in Burma when I come here,” Lupu said. “In my mind I can see the country that I come from.”
Flicka Bateman, director of the Refugee Support Center in nearby Carrboro, which aids recent arrivals, said the first Myanmar refugees came to the area in the early 2000s to take up housekeeping jobs at the University of North Carolina, which required no English and provided good benefits. Since then, the presence of community and family networks has attracted more arrivals. “It’s just snowballed,” she said.
North Carolina’s Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill “triangle” is now home to one of the largest Karen communities in the US, alongside St Paul, Minnesota, and Omaha, Nebraska. There are some 3,000 Karen in the area, in addition to smaller numbers of Chin, Burman, Rohingya and other ethnic groups, said Eh Tha Pwee, 46, who heads the Karen Community of North Carolina.
Despite being far from their homeland, they still follow political developments in Myanmar with great interest, particularly since the election victory of Aung San Suu Kyi in November 2015. Many refugees expressed disappointment that the Nobel laureate had failed to end Myanmar’s wars and heal its deep ethnic divisions.
Eh Tha Pwee said that Suu Kyi’s main aim was to “lure” Western governments back to the country with promises of reform, but that she cared little about ethnic minority people. “They want to make Burma as a Burmese country — a pure Burmese country,” he said.
People admit that a lot has changed since political reforms began in 2011, including the possibility of returning home. Myanmar’s recent opening even prompts comparisons with Vietnam, where former refugees from the war four decades ago are now returning to fuel an economic resurgence.
According to census data, some 4.25 million people born in Myanmar live abroad, a source of human potential that could one day play an important role in the country’s development. Eh Tha Pwee said many refugees in North Carolina expressed a desire to contribute in some way to their homeland’s development. After earning a degree in business administration in India, he said his own goal was “to go back to Karen State and establish a business to help Karen people”.
Khin Shwe Aye, a 22-year-old Karen woman who came to the country with her parents as a child in 2001, said she was aware of how lucky she was to reach the US, but “definitely” wanted to do something to benefit her homeland.
“I know I have to get more education, experience and money to go back, to find a way to help them,” she said over coffee in Carrboro, where her mother and stepfather run a small grocery store selling Myanmar specialties including betel nut and pickled tea leaves.
But while Vietnam’s political divisions have faded, Myanmar’s ethnic divisions remain entrenched — even in the US Khin Shwe Aye recalled how in middle school, refugee students would form themselves into separate cliques: Karen, Burman and Chin.
This mistrust continues to be fuelled by reports from back home, including allegations that the military is building Burman Buddhist temples and statues of Gen Aung San — the architect of independence and father of Suu Kyi — throughout Karen State, in a bid to dilute local identity. Several times in
interviews around Chapel Hill I heard a quotation attributed to Gen Ket Sein, who reportedly said in 1992: “In 10 years all the Karen will be dead. If you want to see a Karen, you will have to go to a museum in Rangoon.”
Jimmy Shwe, a pastor at the Karen Chapel Hill Seventh Day Adventist Church, who came to the US after 20 years in a refugee camp, said that while many refugees wished to return, it would not be easy — and not just because of the conflict. “We’d have to start a new life again, the same as we started a new life in the US,” he said at his home in Chapel Hill.
For now, the Myanmar community in North Carolina is doing its best to put down new roots. Maung Paung is an ethnic Chin farmer who arrived in the US in 2008, after fleeing forced porter duty in the
military. Shortly after arriving he underwent surgery to remove a piece of shrapnel from his leg. When asked what first struck him about life in America, he answered with a single Burmese word, lokelatye — “freedom”.
As his wife Cing Neam dished out a picnic lunch from a cooler painted with the blue logo of the Tarheels, the local university football team, Maung Paung spoke about his son, 23, currently at community college.
He hopes his son might one day return to Myanmar to help his people. “We have many, many steps to go if you compare Burma and America, Burma and many other countries,” he said. “But I feel there’s been a little bit of change.”